Training your worst skill in BJJ

Training your worst skill in BJJ is something that must be done more often. What is your worst skill? Every BJJ practitioner, you, me, everybody, has a worst skill. Some part of the game that falls far behind their other skills. We all carry it around as a burden and hope it does not show up in sparring or competition. A great project for allJiu-Jitsu students is to identify the worst element of your game. It can be a move, say for example, the deadly triangle choke or a position, say, weak side bottom half guard. Whatever it is, identify it, then study it. Ask your instructor about it and also study great athletes/competitors who have a reputation for excellence in that area/position. Then set a very manageable goal for yourself. For three weeks, start every sparring session in that position or move and spend basically all of your training times for those 3 weeks in that specific area of technique. Initially you will feel awful and mentally defeated. Don’t get discouraged. Understand this, in learning activities, the greatest jump in skill level occurs every in training and then decreases over time. I promise you that after a rough start you will make astounding progress in that area in a relatively short time. Will you be a world beater? No, but you will be considerably better and put yourself in a position to improve over time. Most importantly, you will not see that area as an area of weakness as longer, but as an area of growth in the future.  one of the biggest things we teach here at Savarese BJJ academy (www.bergencountybjj.com) is ‘in order to succeed, often times we must fail first”.  Once you see it in that light, then you can move forward with that move/position as part of your overall progress, rather than make progress in some areas and just leave that one behind and hope it never gets exposed.