THE SECRET TO GETTING BETTER, FASTER, IN BJJ
Most people rely on the brute force method of improving in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ). “Just keep showing up” is the refrain that echoes through the halls of most BJJ academies, and that brute force methodology is reinforced by similar approaches in coaching. With no real structure or methodology to learning, it’s really no surprise that it takes so long to become proficient at BJJ.
The good news is that there is massive room for improvement in the approaches of both students and coaches.
Shift of Mindset
A vast majority of your training time needs to be dedicated to learning. This seems like an obvious statement, but when you look at how most BJJ classes are structured, many do a less-than-desirable job of creating an environment for learning. That means, if you’re truly committed to getting better at BJJ, you may also have to spend time outside the confines of a traditional class. Open mats and the like are perfect supplemental learning opportunities.
Stephan Kesting had a terrific framing for this: train often, test rarely. Spend your time learning; even when you’re rolling. It’s ok to go hard and roll competitively, periodically, but in general — your time needs to be spent integrating, improving, and making permanent the thing(s) you are working on, not seeing how many people you can tap while you’re rolling at the end of class.
From Mindless to Mindful
“Just keep showing up.”: encouragement of the bare minimum. If you keep coming to class, you’ll eventually improve in spite of the absence of good training methodologies. The advice elicits a picture of mindless attendance and rilling being the preferred path to black belt, when in fact, it’s terrible advice. However, it does hint at some aspects of frequent attendance that will catapult you to higher levels of learning.
Repetition and frequent training is a key aspects of success in BJJ, but without a few more ingredients, you risk taking the long way around to your goal.
Deliberate Practice
We all have the capacity to improve our own performance in an activity or task, given that we are willing to train the correct way. One must approach their training with ownership, intent, focus and commitment. This may look different sports, tasks, or activities, but we quickly want to get the most defining aspect of deliberate practice: feedback. But we have a couple steps before we get to a place where we can handle and address the feedback.
Movement patterns
Before you can enter a meaningful feedback loop, you need to have some understanding of what it is you’re trying to make your body do. This is where going through a move or technique a number of times is valuable. You are looking to understand the outline and the contours of the moves, while also paying heed to specific details that the instructors is providing.
Understanding goals
The next step on the road to true learning is beginning to understand “why.” It’s not at all unusual for instructors to give specific details about a move without conveying the “why” of the movement. Most of the time, the minimal details given were given specifically because it either worked for them or worked for someone that taught them the technique.
If you don’t understand why you are doing the things you are doing in a movement pattern, you will have great difficulty in troubleshooting a particular technique when it comes time to do it against a resisting training partner.
Training cannot just be rote memorization of a movement pattern in a sterile environment. Understanding the “why” — while important — also won’t get us there. . The crucial aspect of deliberate practice is the feedback loop.
Feedback Loop & Chunking
The idea of just “getting reps in” is not enough. Getting reps in an environment where errors can be identified and addressed is the key to rapid improvement. If a quarterback wants to get better at passing the ball, they don’t go out and play an entire football game to improve their passing skills. This idea is laughable; half the time his team isn’t even playing offense, so his opportunity for improvement and learning are minimal. But, that is exactly what most academies do as it relates to BJJ; you work on a couple moves in class and scrimmage at the end. You could be wanting to work on getting better at a particular guard pass, yet spend the entire round stuck under someone’s side control. This is an entirely innefficent way to train BJJ.
The appropriate strategy is to set up a “sandbox” in which to improve this particular technique. And even within the sandbox, you’ll likely want to setup a system of progressive resistance. Trying a new technique against a skilled and resisting opponent is probably going to lead to failure so quickly that your ability to discover the error will be severely diminished. To continue the guard pass example: start on top, restrict the defender’s ability to attack, sweep, or retreat. If/when you succeed, reset, start again, and add more elements of resistance, while staying firmly in the sandbox
That may also mean staying focused on the particular element of the movement pattern and building until you can build automaticity into that smaller pattern. You may need a particular grip to be successful in the guard pass. Temporarily shrink the sandbox and work on that, until you can reliably get it. Now return to the larger movement pattern until you find your next snag.
Learning to problem solve
We can assume that the movement pattern we learned is never going to be executed the same way twice, it’s also a good idea that we start to attempt to problem-solve when difficulties arise. We can work on that grip forever and still run into someone that we can’t reliably get that grip on. Now is the time to bring the “why” back into the equation. if we can understand the higher-level goals of what we need to achieve, we may be able to come up with novel solutions that will achieve the same ends. In fact, you may end up coming up with a movement pattern that is better suited for you than the one that was originally taught.
Time to Test
Once we’ve reached a point where we’re pretty good at a particular technique (in the sandbox), it’s time to scale it back up to the larger game. Can you still pass that ball to the receiver in the context of a full game? That might take a few steps. Maybe you start with a roll where that is the only technique of that type available to you. That’s the only way you’re allowed to pass guard, for instance.
Learning Achieved?
Motor learning is hard. Especially when we are talking about integrating complex movement patterns against resistance. Imagine trying to tie your shoes while someone is trying to prevent you from doing so — No easy task. So, patience and persistence is the key.
Taking a deliberative approach to your practice, isolating the thing you are trying to learn, and building it up until you are ready to integrate it back into the larger game is an extremely effective method of learning. You will truly learn, improve, and incorporate techniques into your game much more quickly with this approach.
But you have to come into each training session with a learning mindset; even when your classmates come into battle. You will quickly notice that you zoom ahead of the people who come in and mindlessly train in the hopes of slowly picking things up, eventually.
