Muscle memory in BJJ

Muscle memory in BJJ

Muscle memory in BJJ is extremely important. Here at Savarese BJJ (www.njbjj.com), we find this to be a key to success at higher levels of BJJ. Doings things over and over creates that muscle memory (this is why warmups are so important, the constant drilling of basic movement makes them simple in the long run). We like to call this the Outliers theory after the book by Malcom Gladwell that preaches the philosophy of 10,000 repetitions of anything to master it. Want to make faster decisions? Limit your options. One of the most important factors in who wins and who loses in a Jiu-Jitsu match is speed and quality of decision making. Athletes who make good decisions quickly generally beat athletes who make good decisions slowly. One simple and effective way to increase your speed of decision making is to limit the options you have per scenario. If you have a thousand options, you will inevitably slow down as you decide between competing options. Heed the advice of the great Jean Jacques Machado “”The more you know, the less you use. To use less, you need to know more.””  Have one or two strong attacks per scenario and the decision making process becomes very easy and very fast. Of course it’s no good to make BAD decisions quickly, they have to be good ones. To accomplish this, I suggest researching the most high percentage moves in modern competition in a range of scenarios. If you have a small set of well trained high percentage moves in each of the main scenarios we regularly find ourselves in daily sparring, you will immediately notice decision making is faster and more decisive. And that will result in the fast and decisive action, a key element of winning in Jiu-Jitsu.