The power of planning in your jiu-jitsu journey

THE POWER OF PLANNING IN YOUR JIU-JITSU JOURNEY

By making and sticking to a plan, you can see satisfying, continual progress in your jiu-jitsu!

I want to talk this week about the power of planning. I want to be straight with you upfront. Training jiu-jitsu will be one of the most continually challenging endeavors you ever take on in your life. With that great challenge, comes a massive host of amazing benefits that you won't find in almost any other activity. It will make you the best version of yourself, without a doubt. This is my way of saying it's worth the struggle, but you need to have a plan if you're going to succeed, and you have to learn to love the process.

One phase of that plan needs to be scheduling your regular training hours. Routines make large undertakings digestible. By making your training hours a part of your permanent schedule, you can clear out distractions and reserve time exclusively for focusing on your jiu-jitsu. You can let friends and family know that time is reserved for your training, so they do not inadvertently distract you from it with life's endless series of tasks and events that need attending to.

 Just as you would not miss a meeting you have scheduled at work, it helps to give your training times that same priority. So if you train on Tuesdays from 6-8:30 pm, then you don't schedule other activities in that time slot.  If it's 7:30 on a Tuesday, you're at class, pursuing your jiu-jitsu goals, investing in yourself. 

A plan I recommend for beginners is to choose two or three days per week. Come to Fundamentals, and stay for Core Focus in each of those sessions. 

Fundamentals are basic jiu-jitsu, at times jiu-jitsu focused on a real altercation, but an altercation with an inexperienced opponent. Fundamentals covers all the basic positions and basic attacks of jiu-jitsu,  but involve very little in the way of setups. 

Core Focus is jiu-jitsu designed to beat jiu-jitsu and includes lots of setups, attack series, strategies, and opportunities to develop sophisticated jiu-jitsu. 

You need a healthy diet of both to succeed early on in the training room, so don't fill up on one at the expense of the other. Eventually, you can move out of Fundamentals and focus mainly on Core Focus, only hitting Fundamentals classes as a way to refresh your basics. Or you may want to just keep them as a part of your schedule long-term, depending on your training goals.

That said, as you become more comfortable with Fundamentals, I believe it is time to make room for takedowns and wrestling in your training schedule, sacrificing some of that Fundamentals time for these classes. Wrestling and Judo have many, many skills to add to your jiu-jitsu. Many conflicts go to the ground, but nearly all conflicts start on the feet. You need takedowns. Many rounds in the training room will start from the feet, and all competition matches will start from the feet.

Once you've got your training schedule and approach lined out, now it's time to start coming to class with a specific plan. Perhaps there is a guard sweep series you want to be proficient at. Come to training planning to try and work that series in your rolling. Focus on developing the skills involved in that series in your drilling. Over the course of a few weeks or months, you can become incredibly proficient at that set of moves by zeroing in on them and focusing. 

That doesn't mean you're skipping the techniques that we focus on in Core Focus, you'll always get a chance to work on those in our positional sparring during class.  But in your live rolling having a plan and working on specific skills is the best way to get better faster. 

But an important thing to take from this is, once you're cleared for full live rolling, you need to stay for live rolling every class you attend. Live training is crucial for your development, and it's the actual fun part of training as well. When you skip the live rolling session on a training night, you're not only depriving yourself of advancement, you're also denying your training partners additional opponents to roll with, hindering their progress as well.  Together we rise, so show up for your training partners. The extra half hour likely won't make or break whatever you're doing outside of class, but it will make or break your jiu-jitsu progress for sure. If you're not cleared for live rolling yet, grab a partner and use the time to get some extra drilling in, or to do some supervised positional sparring. 

Follow the advice above and I can guarantee you will advance at a satisfying, reasonable pace in your jiu-jitsu training. Mat time is crucial, but what you do with that mat time is equally crucial. So have a plan and follow the plan for success! I'm proud of all of your progress, keep working hard. I hope you find this advice helpful, it was gleaned from almost seventeen years of my own mat time and experience!

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