BJJ Pressure - Page 2 of 6 - Concepts and principles for creating an effective Brazilian Jiu-jitsu game

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.

Slow down when practicing technique

How to develop a personal BJJ game plan

Tips for teaching BJJ

Tips for teaching BJJ

So you’ve started teaching Brazilian Jiu-jitsu. Congratulations! You’ll find that having to teach will help you get a much deeper understanding of jiu-jitsu, since you have to explain it to someone else.

Below are some tips for beginning teachers.

Time management

Be flexible with your time management.

e.g. you might prepare a certain amount of material that’s enough to fill the time if everyone catches on to the material pretty fast. If during teaching, you notice people are having lots of problems, then you should probably cut some of the material and take enough time to make sure at least everyone has the first part down properly.

The worst thing would be to be stubborn and go through all the material too fast and then they can’t do anything properly.

Balancing the amount of details

Let’s say you wanted to teach the armbar from the guard and you have too many details for anyone to remember in one go. It would be a bad idea to go through all the details and have the students forget most of them and feel overwhelmed. Instead, first teach how to get the right arm positioning and hip movement, and then have them practice that. Only once everybody is good with that, then show putting the leg over the face, preventing the stack, and finishing.

As a general rule, three is a good number of techniques to show and a good number of major details to show for each technique before letting the students try it. There’s something about that number that seems to work well for retention in the human brain. See these links for more:

How to Use the ‘Rule of Three’ to Create Engaging Content

Teaching Tip- Gimme Three Steps

Balancing praise and criticism

You should have a 2:1 or more ratio of compliments to criticisms for each student. If students get too many criticisms, they get discouraged. So even if a student is terrible and is messing up a lot, try to find something that he’s doing right and mention that too. Don’t try to fix everything he’s doing wrong in one session. Just fix the one or two most important things. If you try to fix too much, he may fix problem 1 and 2, but then when he’s trying to fix problem 3, he starts exhibiting problem 1 again.

Viewing angle

Pay attention to the angle of the students when you’re demonstrating the move. Make sure you and your demo partner are positioned such that most people can see the right stuff. Don’t be afraid to tell the students that are on the wrong side to move around to the right side so they can see the important stuff. This is one of the most common problems for beginning teachers.

Class structure

There are many ways to structure a class that are valid. Just make sure you think over how the techniques you show interrelate, and how best to get the students to absorb them. Some ideas are to have the students practice each technique in order, to mix in positional drills with increasing resistance, or to have the partner feed the student a random trigger action so the student can choose the correct response. It also is beneficial to explain the ‘why’ of each movement that you do. If a student understands why you put your hand in a particular place, it helps them remember to do it, and it may also help them understand what to do in other situations. I would recommend always doing some kind of isolation drill that forces the students to try to do the moves that they just learned, but against a resisting partner. When you try to do the move against a resisting opponent, you retain it much better.

Setup / preconditions

Many techniques are predicated upon a certain body positioning by the opponent. A particular move may only work if the opponent has their head up, or down, or is putting their weight more to one side or another. Make sure to explain very clearly and reiterate the preconditions for doing the move. If one training partner isn’t putting their body in the right position, his or her partner will be unable to do the technique properly. Make sure to correct people who aren’t putting their body in the right position. If a technique isn’t working for a person, try doing the move yourself on their partner, and you may realize that the partner isn’t setting them up for success.

Imagery / analogy

In boxing, ‘answering the phone’ is a common term used to describe keeping one’s hand up by the ear to defend the head. In the image below, the fighter on the right is using this technique. Analogies like these greatly help retention of key concepts.

Flexibility

There are many ways to do a technique. For a given technique, Marcelo Garcia, Buchecha, Jacare, and Roger Gracie may all do it different ways, but none of them are wrong. If a student chooses to do a slight variation, with a different grip or arm positioning, I would explain to them why I do it my way, and the pros and cons vs doing it their way, but if they choose to keep doing it their way, I don’t have a problem with that. Forcing them to do it your way is problematic because it kills their sense of creativity and ownership over their own jiu-jitsu.

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.

Finish single leg takedown from half guard inspired by wrestler Cary Kolat

Learning how to finish the half guard takedown from wrestler Cary Kolat

What can half guard BJJ players learn from wrestlers? A lot, it turns out.

This is a new clip that Cary Kolat just posted:

‘Wrestling Moves KOLAT.COM Sweep Single Elbow Down’

Notice how Kolat uses his elbow on the mat to reap the opponent’s foot outward, which prevents him from turning to face Kolat.

This is very similar to how Lucas Leite and others use their outside foot from half guard to reap the opponent’s foot outward, to prevent the opponent from turning to face them, as seen here by Leite:

or here by Demian Maia:

That’s why you usually want your outside foot to be on the inside between your opponent’s feet, as opposed to on the outside as seen here:

Another more subtle thing that most BJJ guys might miss: when Kolat does his takedown, he drops his right side(the side getting whizzered) really hard down to the mat, as though he’s actually falling to his side. This is on purpose. The whizzer rounds the shoulder forward and left. By dropping his weight to the right and back, he negates the power of the whizzer.

This is explained in more depth here at about 1:48:
‘Single Leg Sweep to Whizzer Counter’ by West Ottawa Wrestling

For more on half guard, I recommend GambleDub’s excellent Lucas Leite breakdowns:

Leg lasso guard omoplata

The omoplata from lasso guard is a favorite of mine. When you get it right, it feels very effortless. The riskiest moment is when you let go of the sleeve grip to switch to gripping behind the elbow. In that moment, it’s possible for the opponent to weave their arm out. Some keys for keeping it tight in that moment:

Pull forward and down with the collar grip. When their head is down, it’s hard for the opponent to weave their arm out.
Before switching your grip, insert your lasso leg pretty deep forward, so that the opponent’s arm is trapped in the crook of your knee, as opposed to higher up on your leg. Do a leg curl with your lasso leg, to pinch their arm between your hamstring and calf
BAD(lassoed arm near ankle/calf):
Good(lassoed arm stuck in crook of knee):
This clip by Clark Gracie explains the proper positioning: