The Best Way to Learn How to Apply New Techniques in Jiu jitsu

We’ve often been in that position in class when you’re trying to try something new on someone, but the amount of resistance they are exerting against you amongst other things or just generally spazzy movements. It completely denies you from being able to try the cool new thing you want to do.

In some ways, I believe learning Jiu jitsu is really simple and comparable - as cliche as it sounds - to building a house. Let’s start with our foundation. Our foundation starts with understanding what a move or sequence is made up of. For example, in a dance class you will commonly learn a choreography of set moves. Understanding what a technique move or sequence is made up of is our first big step.

This is our first task of memorisation and trying to embed this with a overarching concept that will act as the glue to understanding how the move works systematically as opposed to trying to really ‘memorise’ the entire sequence. It should make sense why one move strings together well with another, and why another move might make less sense in a given situation.

Being able to perform the move with a partner without resistance is our next step. This is our drilling stage! We are trying to make our brain understand that this is the pathway we are trying to learn and this process will help us recall the move effortlessly without having to pause or hesitate. It’s like studying or revising for a test! To recall the answers quickly, you have to study the content over and over.

Any human body as long as they are breathing, alive and well…should not be completely floppy. They should emulate a neutral body position that doesn’t add pressure to you, but they also shouldn’t fall over if you breathe on them. (I’ve seen this far too often) It’s easier said than done, I know many beginners are overly tense because at the end of the day, this is a fighting art and many think that being more tense or rigid = more hard = grr I’m a badass, but no. Everything is about intention and when do you need tension at a given moment. We will talk more about this later in another post.

Once we are able to perform the move on a partner that is not resisting, we can slowly start to build the amount of resistance from 0 upwards. If our scale is from 0-100, we have to work out by building a personal understanding and body awareness of how these increments work.

What do I mean by this?

My 10% of resistance may feel very different from yours because this is just a generic number and we each have our own interpretation of what 10 is. So now the task of building healthy communication and honest dialogue with your partner begins. If my 10 is different from yours, that is totally ok. What we need to understand is actually what our partner wants in order to improve their understanding of how to apply the desired technique. ‘Can you try 20?’ Is this too much, too little, just right?

By asking questions back and forth, we can slowly better understand what our partner wants from us and deliver exactly what they want. Eventually by doing this until you reach a higher resistance, this will build better understanding of how to execute the move. Defining resistance will become a bit more sophisticated when we are trying to better understand how to emulate the actual sparring environment as closely as possible, but this is definitely a great start.

Resistance can be also thought of in terms of how many moves do I delay my partner by? Do I try to stop them for 3 moves (as in they try 3 different things, or you can also think of this as delaying by a certain duration of time so they learn what sort of counters or alternatives may be effective but again this is another layer of sophistication which leads more into a specific training practice)

My recommendation after you have demonstrated proficiency in the drilling stage is to encourage specific training for the technique/moves you want to work on. Usually I recommend specific training a position for 3 minutes and you can evaluate or modify the length of time after the first or second round. Certain positions may be better with shorter or longer durations of time. After 3 rounds, sit with your partner and evaluate what went well and what could have been better. Repeat the cycle. I refer to every 3 rounds as a set. (so 1 set = 3 rounds)

After each round, whoever is the active participant in the specific (it could be both of you but depending on the objective it often is one person or the other) should receive some feedback, but only in the form of a maximum one liner. I usually give one word or up to 3 words to keep it concise so we can get back into the round, and I give a more comprehensive evaluation/feedback after the set.

Giving honest feedback and wanting to help one another grow is my top tip here. If you are worried about hurting your partner’s feelings or you fail to give feedback that actually allows your partner to build on what they need to work on, you will limit overall progression. Of course, progression is not limited to the feedback of your training partners, this is only one part of it. Learning has an independent component to it and you should be able to develop your own evaluation process and be able to reflect on your performance through each round.

I highly recommend filming your specific training rounds and/or rolls whenever possible to give you the most honest recollection of what happened (seriously, our brains often distort what happened in a roll to make us seem more badass) - this will also give you a better ability to re-evaluate what you did post roll. In the long run, this will also help you build your ability to give better detailed evaluations and identify the critical thing(s) that will improve your ability to execute.

If you’re looking for content to drill, all of my current instructionals and webinars give a well rounded and detailed step by step delivery of techniques and underlying concepts that will help you drill in the most constructive fashion possible.

Beyond that, I can mainly only give you the methodology of how to train in a more constructive manner and to share my insight into how I would specific train certain guards/passes/positions etc - these are things that I cover in the weekly classes, online classroom courses and online privates.

If you’d like more instructional content on how to train specific positions and how to get better at learning certain guards/ways of passing - make sure to comment or send me a message at mars@thenomadicid.com or @thenomadicmars on Instagram.