Drill your way to success in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu

You have to drill your way to success in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. The biggest error most jiu-jitsu practitioners make is that they abandon repetitive drilling when they start live training.

Beginners make a lot of progress through solely drilling techniques over and over. Practicing an individual technique allows your body to develop muscle memory to be able to repeat them. When many people finally start to train live, they often push the repetitive drilling to the side. Students start to focus more on trying to tap their training partners. Live training is vital to progression in Jiu-Jitsu. However, you cannot abandon drilling your techniques to perfect the movements. Trying a technique a couple of times, and then trying to hit it in live training, will cause you to fail more often than not. Bodies aren’t conditioned yet to react to the angles or grips of the technique. Many practitioners will get frustrated and feel like the technique “doesn’t work for themâ€. You cannot get frustrated, this is common. In Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outliers”, the Outliers Theory states that in order to master something you must perform 10,000 hours or repetitions.

Keeping track of your repetitions:

A great way to keep track of just how many you do is to start a notebook. Write down every class you attend and keep a record of how many times you have practiced that technique. Some classes you may be so tired you can only do it 20 times, whereas others you might have a bit more energy and accomplish a higher number. If you tell yourself you will do it a minimum of 20 times a class you should easily add the technique to your “game†in no time.

Drilling what is being taught, how it is taught:

This is one of the more important aspects of drilling. Your instructor spends a lot of time working on the curriculum of your academy. They do this in order to help the entire school progress.  When you are learning something in class, that is what you should be working on, especially at the lower ranks. When you get to be a brown or black belt, you will have the opportunity to start venturing into other techniques. By doing your own thing, you are not just hurting your own progress but that of your training partners as well. There is no reason to try and re-invent the wheel, do it the way your instructor is advising you to.

Books to read on the subject

In Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outliers”, the Outliers Theory states that in order to master something you must perform 10,000 hours or repetitions. Another good book on drilling is Andre Galvao’s “Drill To Win”