Position before submission. It is the first real thing anyone tells you once you stop trying to win and start trying to learn, and it holds for the rest of your time on the mat. Get the position. The rest follows. Here it is set the way it deserves: heavy condensed poster type stacked in tiered bands, plain double rules, a single laurel.
THE GENTLE ART sits at the top, because arte suave is what the art has called itself far longer than any of us have trained. POSITION BEFORE / SUBMISSION holds the middle. TECHNIQUE OVER STRENGTH runs beneath it, the sentence that brought most people through the door, and the reason the smallest person in the room is still dangerous. The bottom tier is just the work: DRILL · ROLL · REPEAT.
No belt, no rank, no academy, no lineage year. It claims nothing about you except that you train and you have been paying attention.
Thick and warm, built for the walk to the academy in January and for the hour after class when you have stopped sweating and started freezing, set in two flat inks across a range of deep, dark colours.
