Zen Jiu Jitsu - White to Blue

I am a 30 year practitioner of martial arts with high level of rank and experience in several arts including karate, Japanese Jujutsu, and FMA, and now, in my 50s, embarking on a white belt in BJJ. The insights offered in this book by Mr. Staark are universal and essential to progress in any art. I am grateful for the clarity, guidance and perspective offered specific to BJJ training at this early stage. A great read, which I will be adding in hard copy to my library and revisiting often. Thank you for writing this!

This is a nicely written book. It gives you some perspective and background of jiujitsu. Not a technical book.

I liked the simplicity and found guidance here. One of the problems I run into in BJJ is that Day 1 is not a fundamentals class, its just a class like any other. You learn fundamentals along the way, mainly through trial and error. Yes, the coach or instructor will point out not to cross your feet in an armbar or how to trap the foot, trap the arm and bridge, but you learn the hard way that getting cross faced is bad. This fuels the terminator, and I really like how this book touches on how to deal with that terminator as well as fundamental mentalities. Jocko Willink says that guidelines take you further than directions. This book is how to THINK Jiu Jitsu. Everyone should read this and then follow up with Jiu Jitsu University, and I will be coming back to both frequently for sure. Great read!

I enjoyed this read and I am looking into getting more of his books.The book is quick and to the point!

This book was a quick read. The author is not going to be winning any awards for his writing style, nor did the editor invest much time into fixing the sentence structure and grammar in the book. I found that I had to reread some sentences multiple times in order to understand what the author was trying to say. Once you get past his writing style you will find useful nuggets spread throughout the book. After reading the book I am now seriously contemplating purchasing a training dummy to supplement my in-class drilling sessions. The book is not structured in a standard way. It has something of a table of contents but no pages for each topic/chapter and then each chapter's title font does not differ from the sub-chapters of that chapter, leading me to be confused as to which section I am currently reading. Beware that he also copy/pasted some content from his other Zen series book, including the aforementioned training dummies section and gradient learning sections to name a few. This is not a techniques book as he states in the introduction but it provides some inspiration and war stories from an experienced BJJ player for a white belt who is starting out or has been training for some time.

Really difficult to get into everything without losing people. I really think this book did a good job covering the principals off BJJ. Thinking back, not what I thought it was going to be, but it turned out to be an interesting read.

Great core foundations book. Highly recommend. As I move up in my white belt journey, the concepts highlighted in this book make more sense as time passes. Sometimes when I’m rolling, pages of the book pop up in my head, which says a lot. Thank you, Staark, for putting this together.

This book teaches the mindset you should have when you first start learning jiu-jitsu. It's a great tool for keeping you on the road to your blue belt. There are tons of useful information to get out of. One of the ones that really stuck with me is keeping a training journal. Whenever I get stuck on a technique, i review my journal and work through it. This book teaches more than just keeping a journal, but that's what really stuck with me. I definitely recommend this book for anyone new to BJJ or still a white belt in the combat sport.