"HOW LONG UNTIL I'M GOOD AT JIU JITSU?"

It’s a question I get asked frequently — more often than not by relatively new students with an unrealistic expectation of their ability to absorb and integrate new motor learning. And while it’s a well-meaning question, it’s nearly impossible to answer. What do you mean by good? How often are you training? How quickly are you able to acquire new motor skills?

Even in cases where I know the student well enough that I could give them a rough, if not satisfactory, answer to their question, I often try to reframe the question. And, as a result, hopefully, reframe the mindset to help them regain a bit of the control they feel like they may have lost. We change “how long until I’m good” to “what are things I can do to accelerate my learning in jiu-jitsu?” This question is much easier to answer and gives athletes a more active role in their learning.

Learn to be safe

Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is a combat sport, so injuries do occur. But, they do not have to occur at the rate or severity that is currently the norm. An interesting fact about injuries in BJJ is that they are generally front-loaded in your BJJ journey; that is to say that most of your injuries happen early as a BJJ athlete. This is likely an indicator of two things: athletes training harder than they are capable of doing safely, and not tapping or submitting to their opponents at appropriate times.

It is often said that BJJ is one combat sport that you can train at nearly 100% and not get injured. This is nonsense; especially for less-experienced practitioners. While proficient athletes can train at a high level of intensity, safely, that skill must be earned and acquired. An inexperienced BJJ athlete is the most dangerous athlete on the mat, and until they can learn enough body and ego control to protect themselves and their training partners, their training intensity should never approach anything close to resembling 100%.

At Rough Hands, we have adopted the approach to tapping espoused by Rob Biernacki at Island Top Team — as soon as an athlete reaches a point where they are uncertain of their safety, they should tap. That is a very different approach to the one often taught (if one is taught at all). Generally, students learn — either implicitly or explicitly — to not tap until they feel pain or they start to lose consciousness.

Waiting until pain occurs every single time someone put you in a joint lock starts to cause cumulative damage. This damage may not rear its ugly head for years, or it may start to weaken connective tissue and result in catastrophic damage early in your journey. Similar to waiting too long to tap to joint locks, athletes also often wait too long to tap to chokes. Over time this can start causing vascular damage; and while it is rare, as BJJ continues to grow in popularity, we are seeing more and more cases of BJJ athletes having strokes due to this type of damage.

Your goal early on should be to recognize the danger early and tap — especially when you’re not experienced enough to escape the danger you are in. You learn nothing by waiting until the last moment to tap.

Why is safety so essential to accelerate your learning? Simple, if you are hurt and not training, motor learning cannot occur. Stay healthy. Learn faster.

Learn to be conceptual

The sport of BJJ is massive when you look at the totality of the potential curriculum there is to learn. The good news is that it is impossible to learn everything, so there’s no need to try. If, up until now, you have tried to treat your brain like a Rolodex of BJJ techniques, let me propose a new approach.

Spend the crux of your time early on trying to understand and retain concepts and principles. What makes these two sweeps similar? What aspects do all guards have in common? What does it mean to have a good base? Instead of trying to learn 15 different techniques to help with guard retention, pay attention to aspects that need to be manipulated or controlled to maintain to regain a lost guard.

If you can learn the core concepts and principles early, it is much easier to then understand new techniques in the context of those concepts and easier to apply those new techniques as new expressions of principles you already understand. Spend your time on the big-picture stuff, the details will come later — and may be very personal to you and your BJJ style.

Learn how to learn

While it’s covered in more detail in another article, spending time optimizing your approach to learning is well worth the time you invest in it. Simply put, you have to practice the things you want to improve in isolation first, and slowly and progressively move them back into a live environment. Most athletes try to acquire, develop, and hone new skills in the context of a “full game” environment during live roles, which is the slowest and least reliable path to skill acquisition. A quarterback doesn’t get better with his passing by playing full games against another team. He gets better with his passing by stepping outside of the context of the game and deliberately practicing the skills he needs, and then slowly adds that stuff back into the full game environment. BJJ should be no different.

So really, how long until I’m good at Jiu-Jitsu?

Like everything, it depends, but if you focus on accelerating your learning, you will get to “good” much faster. Focus on safety, the big picture, and learning methods. to get yourself there as fast as possible. But BJJ is a big, complex sport with lots of nuance and intricacies, so be patient with yourself, your training partners, and your coaches. Everyone wants you to get better as fast as possible, so everyone is working on the same goal, you just have to make sure and do your part.