Why Jozef Chen Thinks Reels Would Have Cooked His BJJ
Jozef Chen has spent the last couple of years collecting trophies, but in a new interview he credits something far quieter for his rise in BJJ: the simple accident of growing up before Instagram…
Jozef Chen has spent the last couple of years collecting trophies, but in a new interview he credits something far quieter for his rise in BJJ: the simple accident of growing up before Instagram Reels existed. The 21-year-old phenom told BJJEE that long, screen-free commutes and the absence of short-form scrolling gave his Jiu Jitsu room to breathe — and that if those distractions had been around when he was 14, he'd have been "cooked."
It's a striking thing for one of the brightest young athletes in the sport to say, and it deserves more than a "kids these days" reading. Chen isn't moralising about phones. He's describing how he learned — and what he thinks an entire generation behind him is about to lose.
What Chen actually said
In comments highlighted by BJJEE, Chen pointed to the hours he spent commuting to training as the place his game quietly grew. He watched instructionals on his phone, paused them, replayed them, and — crucially — had nowhere else to scroll to. There were no Reels to flick into, no algorithmic for-you page waiting underneath. Just the technique, and his own head working through it.
> "I feel like if there were Instagram Reels back then, I would be cooked," he said. See the full interview on YouTube.
The quote that did the rounds online was the punchy one, but the more interesting line came later in the conversation. Because he couldn't ask the instructor on the screen what he was doing wrong, Chen explained, he had to figure it out himself — rewatch his rolls, troubleshoot the gap, then test the fix the next session. He thinks that habit of solitary problem-solving is one of the biggest reasons he keeps improving now.
The cost of the scroll, for grapplers
Most of us instinctively know that ninety minutes of Reels doesn't make us better at Jiu Jitsu. What's easy to miss is that it doesn't just not help — it actively burns the kind of mental time that does.
Skill in BJJ is mostly built in the quiet seam between sessions. The drive home where you replay the round you lost. The shower where the answer to last week's guard pass finally clicks. The five minutes in bed before sleep where you imagine yourself executing the kimura from bottom side control. That seam used to be enforced by boredom — there was nothing to do in a queue, on a train, in a waiting room, except think. Short-form video has eaten almost all of it. Open the app, look up twenty minutes later, and the in-between has been spent watching strangers fall off things.
Chen, to his credit, doesn't pretend he's immune. He told BJJEE he "dislikes this with a passion" and still gets sucked in himself: "What just happened? I wish I could just delete this." That honesty is the right note. The point isn't that he's morally above the scroll. It's that he caught the back end of an era in which boredom did some of his thinking for him, and he's noticed the difference.
What this means for the rest of us
You don't need to throw your phone in a drawer to apply Chen's lesson. The useful read is more practical.
First, instructionals only work if you actually wrestle with them. Watching three matches of a Mikael Galvão back-take montage at 1.5x speed is closer to entertainment than study. Pause, draw the position in your head, ask what you'd do if the opponent did the obvious counter. That's the work.
Second, protect a piece of in-between time for Jiu Jitsu. The walk back to the car after class. The fifteen minutes before bed. Don't fill it. Let your brain replay the round, identify the moment your grip broke, decide what you'll try next time. That habit is free, and it is most of what separates the people who improve from the people who only attend.
Third, treat your phone like Chen does — usefully. He talked about screen-recording clips of instructionals to pull up during open mat, an entirely sensible use of the device. The tool isn't the problem. The default behaviour the tool ships with is.
The deeper point Chen is making is one the sport has always quietly known: BJJ improves fastest in the quiet hours nobody films. Long commutes. Solo drills. The minutes you turn a problem over in your head until it cracks. Defend those, and the rest of the training takes care of itself.
See you on the mats.
Original report via BJJEE.