Inside Rickson Gracie’s Self.Defense.Unit
Last February, Gallerr launched a pre-sale of the first-ever video instructional series filmed by master Rickson Gracie.
The Self.Defense.Unit course is part of a project of the Jiu-Jitsu Global Federation to rescue the self-defense aspects of Jiu-Jitsu.
The Module 1 of the SDU was originally designed to include a set of 20 moves, along with theory about some concepts like Base, Connection, Timing, Leverage, and Strategy. And was target to beginners or even people who never trained before.
However, an online course taught by one of the most iconic martial artists of the history naturally brought a lot of buzz and anticipation, so that many advanced Jiu-Jitsu practitioners also enrolled into it.
It’s a tough job to deliver a course to an audience that varies from non-practitioners all the way to teachers, passing through beginners and advanced, and the first release caused a huge backlash.
Some of the most advanced practitioners were not happy with the basic content, and we’ve got our load of raving reviews on Reddit, the most active online forum there is nowadays.
Strategy — or how to react to an unexpected situation?
That was just the first of five planned modules for the SDU, so early days for the audacious course. We could just keep the ball rolling, or regroup and change plans.
Master Rickson chose the latter option. Therefore we gathered our best crew and went back to the set, to re-film everything.
We didn’t change the syllabus (or the mission), we simply filmed the same moves with an in-depth approach that would fulfill the expectations of the advanced practitioners.
Less than a month after the release of the course, we supplemented all students with 21 in-depth classes. And we got hundreds of messages thanking us for the extra effort.
Now we are regrouping again, but this time to think and improve even more the quality of the material for the Module 2. It’s not easy to carry a product signed by a legend, but now we feel confident we will deliver.
We took a gorilla out of our back already, now it’s time to perform.
The Module 1 of the Self.Defense.Unit is available here.
