4 ways to improve your Jiujitsu
The first two goals when learning Jiujitsu — pin escapes and guard retention
Taking away the innate fear of bad outcomes is crucial to your psychological ability to take risks. Therefore, the first two goals when learning Jiujitsu are to know that nobody can pass your guard and nobody can hold you down.
Fearing a bad outcome makes us risk-averse. For instance, when you have the opportunity to perform an armbar, if you believe that losing the armbar will allow your opponent to pass your guard and pin you down then you are less likely to pull the trigger. You’ll back down because you’re afraid you’ll end up in a bad position. The key is to become confident in your belief that you cannot be passed or pinned. That way you won’t fear pulling the trigger because there’s no potential bad outcome.
Expanding on that, and taking a few steps back to when you start in the sport, as a beginner white belt you will discover that others will effortlessly pass your guard and pin you down. And even when you learn how to get yourself out of pins and back to guard, your opponents will again effortlessly be able to pass your guard and you’ll find yourself in the same bad positions you just escaped from. This can all be very dispiriting and frustrating but you need to develop these skills to improve.
To sum up. A: if you find yourself in a pin you need to be able to escape from it, and B: if you have your opponent in your guard you must be able to keep them there, i.e. have good guard retention. These skills may be the least sexy skills to learn but the reality is that when you start you’ll find yourself in bottom position a lot. Learning these skills will help you survive long enough to get you to a level where you can expand on them and learn some cool top position and submission skills.
Play with a variety of belt types
There is an idea in popular culture that you must always be pushing yourself to the limits. But Jiujitsu is all about skill development. As such John Danaher recommends playing with lower belt types the majority of the time, including players who are quite a bit lower than you. This way you will be able to develop skills by gradually increasing the resistance (by playing against more and more difficult opponents) as you either approach competition or as you progress along your learning journey.
This broadly defines a training cycle where you start training after a competition with lower-skilled opponents, developing new skills, and gradually increasing resistance by rolling with higher-level opponents as you approach a competition. During the training cycle, it’s important to see training for what it is — skill development — and not to get upset when you “lose” in training. Instead, learn from your mistakes and get better.
Handicapped training
Don’t take losses in training personally. We all have that “ape reflex” that makes us want to be dominant and not lose to people we consider inferior to us. But the top coaches push their students towards putting themselves in difficult/impossible situations that they must try to get out of. This methodology serves the purpose of training in the true sense of the word: getting athletes ready to face such situations when and if they arise when it matters the most — championship bouts.
There are countless white belts out there who have told all their friends and have written on online message boards that they have tapped out Garry Tonon, a person who has taken the idea of putting oneself in bad situations to the extreme. But it’s his attitude towards training that has made him a champion, prepared to face whatever is thrown at him when it matters the most. Whenever he does face ‘impossible’ situations in an important match, which is when it really counts, there’s no fear or panic because he’s been in those situations countless times and he knows what to do to get out of them. And as far as his psychology is concerned, he doesn’t give a damn what those thousands of white belts say. Because he uses his training to train — for skill development.
The unexceptional nature of competition
Some people are scared out of their minds before matches and win (and others like them who lose) and some people are relaxed and calm before matches and win (and others like them who lose). Find what works for you. When it comes to how one views competition itself, however, it’s best to look at competition matches as just ordinary matches, like the many tough ‘matches’ they’ve had in training during a hard rolling session. There are mental obstacles in the way for sure — cameras, lights, crowds, recordings, fireworks, reporters, noise, and potential damage to one’s reputation after a bad outcome. But essentially what is happening is a Jiujitsu match between two players, on a mat, with a referee enforcing a rule set. Everything else is superfluous.
