Following your Academy’s curriculum

Today’s topic is Following your Academy’s curriculum. You must follow the program!

One of the biggest keys to anyone’s personal success will be the beginner program your instructor set for. This is going to be the foundation that your jiu-jitsu game is going to be build upon in the future. If your school doesn’t have a detailed and outlined beginner program for you to follow in the first 6 months of your training, that is a red flag. Systems should be in place and when they are adhered to, there is an even flow of progression for all of those who follow it.

Watching you tube can be your friend….or set you back months!

Unfortunately, today our biggest tool is also one of our biggest enemies… YOUTUBE. It seems like lower belt in the world wants to have their own you tube channel showing techniques that have 12 steps and require multiple grip switches and rolls all to do the same thing that a technique with 3 steps would accomplish. Watching you tube videos and then trying to work on that stuff instead of what is being taught is like trying to teach yourself, and any good instructor will tell you ” The student who teaches himself has a fool for an instructor.”  Now I am not saying to never study, by all means do so but many older blackbelts will tell to watch matches instead of instructional videos. I promise you very few times will you actually see that 12 step technique used. There are many greats in BJJ to watch on social media like Marcelo Garcia, Saulo Ribeiro, Rafael Lovato Jr and Henry Akins. Even John Danaher has taken to social media. I highly recommend them if you are to watch you tube.

Back to the main topic. Your instructor should have systems to help guide you through your journey. I highly recommend staying with your instructors teachings through the 1st year and a half, straying from what they are teaching many times ends up hurting your progress. They know you better than any video, see your movements every day, know what your strengths and weaknesses are. The time to go off program will come.

Let the instructor do his job

This for parents as well. You placed your child in a program to learn Jiu-Jitsu. The instructors your are paying are experts in their field. If you do not train yourself, please let the instructor do their job and keep your child on course. Trying to train your child yourself from video is not the right thing to do. No instructor worth his salt would never watch a video and then try to teach a technique without having drilled that technique at least a couple hundred times and live. This goes for tournaments too. It can be confusing for a child whether to listen to his mom/dad or his instructor. Unless you have drilled a technique on a live opponent, you will never know what the instructor knows.
I hope this helps.