Category: Game plan

Advice for BJJ white belts

Advice for BJJ white belts

Here are some tips especially for beginners.

Consistency

When something has become a habit, like brushing your teeth, it doesn’t take much energy or willpower. Establishing good habits early on can pay big dividends. Make a commitment to show up to class on a regular basis. The number one reason that people don’t advance in jiu-jitsu is because they stop showing up.  Nothing will help you get better more than mat hours.  Firas Zahabi talks about the power of habits here:

Slow down when drilling:

Slow down when practicing technique

Focus on escapes

Having good escapes is the best thing you can do to make your guard better. We all know people who get the closed guard on someone, then just squeeze with their legs and arms for dear life and stall the top person out.  This is not the way to get better.

When you are confident in your positional escapes from side control, mount, etc, then you’re not afraid to attack aggressively from the guard, because even if you get your guard passed, you can handle it.

The same thing applies to submission escapes.  For example, when your submission escapes and prevention are good, you’re not afraid to take risks to open the guard and pass the guard when you’re on top.  A strong foundation in escapes is the rock on which everything else sits.

Focus on breathing / relaxing

Beginners typically hold their breath and keep too much tension in their bodies, especially when rolling, but sometimes even when practicing technique with no resistance.  Holding your breath and keeping your muscles unnecessarily tense burns a lot of energy, and once you’re tired, you won’t learn as much.

When practicing and when rolling, focus on breathing deep and slow into your belly, and relaxing every part of your body that doesn’t specifically need to be tense at the moment.  In the beginning, when you do this, you may perform worse in rolling.  Your guard may get passed or you may get tapped out when you could have prevented it by using a lot of energy.  But over time, you’ll become much more energy efficient in the long term.  And even the first time you ever try this, you’ll notice that if you roll for 5 rounds, you’re doing much better in the later rounds.  There is also an additional benefit that you’re less likely to spazz out and hurt your partner.

Positive mentality

As a beginner, usually you are learning and getting better very fast, like drinking from a firehose, so your overall expectations are high.  Of course, some days won’t go so well.  You may even hit a plateau, or a run of bad days.  It’s important to realize that this is normal and expected, and you just have to keep pressing on through it and enjoying the process.

Marcelo Garcia’s advice to white belts:

Related:

Tips for learning and getting better faster in BJJ

 

Tips for learning and getting better faster in BJJ

Learning BJJ faster

The biggest tip I would have for learning Brazilian Jiu-jitsu faster is to take ownership of your own progress.  Don’t just go to class and learn what your coach shows the group.  The reason this isn’t ideal is because at any given time, you have a few specific things that you need to work on.  The chance that what the coach decides to show everyone in a group class matches what you specifically need to work on is low.

You need to figure out what you need to work on.   No one else can do that for you. When you roll, be mindful of what happens.  What did you do well and what did you not do well?  Any time there’s a situation where you are consistently having problems, it’s your responsibility to notice that that situation is a problem and figure out how to fix it.  For example, if one person consistently gets you in the baseball choke from knee on belly, you need to figure out how to stop it.  This may involve asking your coach or asking the person who’s choking you.  It may also involve looking on the Internet or instructionals.

Once you have an idea for something to try, you have to try it.  If it doesn’t work, figure out why or figure out something else to try.  This is an iterative process that may take months.  As you adapt, your opponents also adapt, so it becomes harder.

The hardest part of this whole process is actually in the beginning, to be mindful enough when rolling to determine that you have a particular problem at all.  After you roll, do you remember what happened at a detailed level?  If not, start developing that ability now and it will pay off big over time.

Related:

Slow down when practicing technique

How to develop a personal BJJ game plan

Tips for teaching BJJ

How to develop a personal BJJ game plan

How to develop a personal BJJ game plan

First off, I would say at white and early blue belt, your best bet is to just attend group classes, learn about each position and moves from each position and just try to develop a total understanding of BJJ.  At this point, you don’t know enough to know what kinds of moves you like and that are right for your body. You also need to refine your technique more; there’s no point in developing complex combinations if you can’t do the first technique correctly.

Once you hit late blue/early purple belt, it’s time to start developing a personal style.  At this point, you know how to do a wide variety of moves correctly, but against same or higher level opponents, the first technique never works, because they also know how to do the defense correctly.  Now your goal should be to develop a variety of setups and combinations to catch your opponent off guard.  If they’re already off balance from defending the first technique, it makes it much harder to defend the second.

Creating combinations with minimal complexity

A naive approach to learning combinations would be to learn a whole bunch of setups and combinations for every different move.  This ends up with a very complex network.   For example; from mount on top, if I know 5 techniques, and there are 5 defenses to each of those techniques, then I need to know 25 counters, and be able to select the appropriate one very quickly, in order to always be ready to accomplish a 2-move combination.  This will take a lot of time and effort.

Here’s the alternative:

From any given position, choose a favorite move. Learn a few different setups for the move. When you roll, always try that move as your first move. Of course, it’s usually not going to work because people expect you’re going to do it, and they develop defenses. For each defense, analyze why/how it stops your move. Then devise a counter such that their defense to the first move helps you do the second move.

e.g. from half guard, I’m always going to try to get the underhook, bump him forward, get up and take him down. If he whizzers and drives really hard into me so I can’t get up, I’m going to go with his momentum and roll him over across me(Plan B). If he does a different defense, I come up with a different counter. Once you’ve been doing this for a while, you have a ready counter for every common defense to your first move.

The benefit of this is that in a relatively short time, you can get good enough that everything you do is at least a 2-move combo.

e.g. if there are 5 major defenses to your move, then you only need to learn your first move and then 5 counters.

Once you’re pretty decent, you can move on to adding more ‘first moves’.

This is a long-term training method; I’m not saying for competition or maximal short term success that it would necessarily be a good idea to always start with the same move, because in the beginning you will be very predictable.  But long term, this is a very fast way to learn to put together combinations in live rolling, and the puzzle-solving aspect of it keeps jiu-jitsu interesting.