#57 Better Learning For BJJ: Tips, Techniques and Tactics to speed up your progress on the mat.

On-line Instructional videos? Drill more? Keep a BJJ Journal? What do you do to improve your ability to absorb BJJ information. This is such huge topic to tackle but JT & Joey share with you exactly what has worked for them and a couple of things that you should avoid.
The sooner you can develop a good learning cycle of practice and reflection will make a huge leap in your Jiu-jitsu development.

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Better listen. Very careful.

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A good martial artist does not become tense, but ready,

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Essentially at this point, the fight is over.

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So you pretty much flow with the goal

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Who is worthy to be trusted with the secret to limit this power.

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I’m ready,

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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another Bulletproof for BJJ podcast. I am JT. What’s up guys. I’m Joey. And today we are talking about tips for better learning in B J J . Now everybody learns differently. Some people like to watch instructional. Some people like to do endless drills. Some people just show up to class and seem to be able to get better. That way I don’t with instructional. I do. I mean, we , we’re all different. That’s all good. Uh , but what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna just give a , a pretty quick summation, you know , how both Joe and I are very different, how we find ways to learn jujitsu a bit quicker, and maybe that can help you. I’m gonna actually throw to Joe first. Is there something that you particularly like to do? That’s helped you in your jujitsu journey ? Joe , I am a low information diet kind of guy. Cool. Took that terminology from Tim Ferris. When I read, I think it was a four hour work week where he was talking about out low information diet. Don’t distract yourself with consuming all this extra information that you’re potentially not making use of . Anyhow. Sure. Wasn’t necessarily a deliberate thing in reference to jujitsu, but I just have always felt that what’s going on in class is enough for me. I have a hard enough time assimilating that. So I’ve never really gone be beyond that. Right. That said in recent years, I have seen more benefit to being a little bit proactive outside of whatever’s being taught in class. Cause obviously whatever’s being taught in class isn’t necessarily relevant to your game. Yeah . Seeking the advice of people, such as yourself as you know, my coach Adam being like, Hey man, I’m having this specific problem. What do you reckon? Sure. That is pretty much how I do it. Mm . Um , I like the idea of instructional. I think I bought one. Yeah . When we first put our DVD on fanatics and I was like, oh , I should test this out and see how it works. And I bought a , a lucky Giles front headlock series. Yeah, definitely. Still haven’t opened it. No , it’s good. And I mean, look, I trained with Lockey for, you know, many to Locky . Yeah. Yeah. I , I also have that instructional, but I possibly watch more of it than you. The problem I find with instructionals, I get a bit bored. And especially if, if you guys are out there hearing this and you own a Danaher or even, even, you know, any of those guys, I think the only guy Craig Jones is probably the only one who puts jokes in. Right. He’s kind of fun. And does it on. And sometimes you’re like, is this a technique or is he just make , is he just making fun? He’s controlling me right now, right now. And I’m paying for the glory of it. Me personally, the thing I found helped me get a lot better around blue and purple belt was we had a group of friends, four or five people. And if we could we’d get together either like a Saturday ARVO or a Sunday. And we just, it was partly group therapy of like, man, I got smashed with this this week. And then we’d all kind of talk about it, but we would, those purple belts suck don’t they? Yeah . Hate purple belt . Hate them. But it was like, yeah, it , it was the collective brains trust . Some of us trained together and some of us didn’t, but we had an opportunity like, oh , I do this in this situation. Oh yeah. And then we’d kind of work through it. And it , it was almost like a , a study group slash brainstorming. And I actually found just doing that one day a week, that answered more of my questions then going to class. Cause I actually don’t get me wrong. You gotta go to class. You gotta train. But oftentimes what was being done in class didn’t necessarily answer my questions. And sometimes when I to ask questions, the answers, I got almost rather like a little bit cryptic or just don’t get there book or private bra . Yeah. Just pay for it, pay extra for it. So, so that for me has always been a thing. And then I guess I’ve simmered that down to having someone reliable, maybe not unlike yourself, Joe , to , um , be able to say, Hey man, what are you doing here? What am I doing here? And then talk through that and then say, oh, maybe there’s a problem with this. And just going back and forth just someone’s D perspective helped me understand jujitsu better, faster. I think that’s a really cool thing to do. I wish I had have done that actually. And it just was never, I don’t know . It just didn’t eventuate with the guys that I was coming up with and yeah, I see guys that do it. Now you can see there’s a group of guys at Alliance that are doing it and you can see guys here at jungle brothers and they come in and they’re like, oh , Hey , that thing were working on last week. And you’re like, oh , these guys are like working on some they’re working it . Yeah . And you really do see an acceleration of development. Definitely. I used to be kind of staunch in this idea of like this culture of instructional that I thought it was pretty stupid. Yep . People don’t need more information. Like there’s already too much information. Get better . Yeah. They need to like enact like or practice the basic. Yeah . Um , which some of that might come through on instructional or whatever, but I’ve changed my mind on that. Based on where your mind space is at, in a class versus a relaxed Sunday, hanging out with a few other jujitsu friends. There’s no time pressure. Yeah . You’re thrown around some ideas. You’re in a different head space to reflect on your game and what you need. And maybe what you’re struggling with often when you’re in class. Cause things are moving. It’s like on a schedule. Coach has their own ideas. You’re not in that head space . Yes. Agreed . So I do see actually a huge benefit to using instructionals or YouTube videos or whatever when you feel inspired. Yeah. Because that’s when you’ve got like the capacity to start to think a bit differently and maybe be a little bit more analytical about how your game is going. Yeah. You’re more like mentally receptive in a way. Yeah, exactly. Yeah . Rather than like, yeah. Let’s just get through the three minute technique round and let’s roll . Yeah . Let’s go . Which is really, I think what training is for a lot of people. Yeah. For the best part. And most people don’t even wanna do that. They’re like, can we just roll? Yeah. You know, like I’m just, I’m here for the, I’m here for the glory. Like soccer training back in the day I’m coach like guys, we’re just gonna play a game tonight. Let’s skip the four play . Let’s start . I’m the bang . I think cuz everybody does learn differently. There’s a bunch of people out there who love to watch an instructional drill on their drilling dummy or they’ve got their drilling dummy. The drilling dummy, I think is a waste of time. People like I’ll be a hundred percent honest. It’s over there next to my iron neck and my uh , the gun massager brand. New’s still in the box. All of no. Well like , look, you know, a tool is only as good as you have used for it. Right. And some people learn differently. I honestly believe the benefit in having a good training partner or a group of friends who you trust and you can work with is you can say to them , I’m gonna try this, give me, you know, 30% resistance and they know what that is. And then gradually over time you can say right , gimme a bit more like don’t, don’t let me do what I want. But also don’t don’t crush me. Don’t smash me. Yeah . And then you just gradually ramp that up. And if we can just draw a parallel or analogy to lifting, that’s really good. Like if you’re doing a dead lift , it’s good for you to do some warmup sets or like build yourself up so that when you’re ready to apply your technique under maximum tension, the body’s prepared. You’re not just going all right . I showed up, you know, move the body around. Okay. Max lift. Yeah . Which is what a lot of people do when they just come, they skip warm up . They don’t really do the technique and they just roll. Yeah. And this isn’t even about injur . This is just about, there’s so many complicated things going on to get your brain to work in coordination with your body to do this crazy thing, which is jujitsu. So absolutely for me, even I have found that when I was doing jujitsu as much as possible , uh , doing light drilling before class helped my rolling and movement like infinitely. Yeah. I don’t do that as much anymore. I don’t have as much time to dedicate, but just spending some time working on the thing that I’m focused on that has helped me a lot. And the second thing that I want to add here, which I know this is just my strong nerd side coming out is just writing down what I’m gonna do today. Like geek . Oh mate. Yeah. You say that . See how much you’re writing down. I mean NA before training, mate. Yeah. You wait till you get that cross choke of justice. Yeah. Squeeze . I got for belly . I’m good. Yeah. That I say is gonna come out your nostrils mate off my knee rights son, cuz I’ve been writing down my transitions knee . Right ? Joey, Joey, all in capitals, Joey , extra times , times 10,000. I will write it down and I’ll set an intention. Now we talked about this relevant and you don’t have to write it down. I actually strongly support this. If you’re someone who doesn’t write stuff down. Cool. You know, don’t worry about that. It’s more about right today. I’m going for takedowns I’m not gonna pull guard . Yeah . I’m just really setting that and doing that is like a form of discipline because it might be really easy. Especially if you’re going up against someone who’s a judo brown belt, but they’re blue belt and jujitsu and you’re like, oh , this guy’s gonna foot sweep me into the floor. You know, you you’re just like, now I gotta fight. I got , I gotta make myself do this thing I suck at because really that’s where you learn a lot from just trying to stick at something, you know, you’ve told yourself you’re gonna do it. You’ve gotta put it into application so we can talk all this crap about instructional, hanging out with your mates, talking . But in the moment it’s kind of sticking to your guns at working your game. Yeah . And that, I think that is one of the hardest things to do. Not just falling back on like old habits or whatever. Yeah. Pen to paper is powerful. I personally don’t do it for , I do it for many other things, but I do it just in my head on the way to training where I’m like, oh , what am I working on at the moment? What do I want to get out of tonight’s roles ? And sometimes I stray away from that, you know? And then you just realize you’re just scrapping and then you , you leave class and you’re like, I totally went off track. Yeah. I mean, that’s fun though. Right? Like that’s totally there’s value in just like, ah , I just want to get out . But I do think that trying to have some sort of process around keeping it intentional will ultimately help you get a lot more out of it because it will just allay to address things. Like in case in point, I feel like my guard sucks at the moment . My guard sucks at the moment. So I really have to work harder on it. And I was talking to Adam about it and he’s like, man, I want you just to, I want you just to play your guard. Like he goes, even though when we roll, he will pull guard because that’s just our dynamic. Yeah . He goes, I want you to play guard . So he goes, I’m gonna make you play it. And you’re , you know , and I’m like, that’s great. That’s a great intention. Yes. You know, and if I stick to that for a couple of months, you would hope my guard will improve. No , it will. But it’s sometimes it’s hard to know when you’re doing something very difficult, especially in jujitsu, you could on the surface, fail hundreds of times at a thing, but doing something wrong hundreds of times doesn’t mean you’re not better at it . Maybe it’s a new mistake, but ultimately it proves out, but it takes ages. Yeah. Because you think how many times in a given session do you actually get to do that thing? Maybe it’s only 20 times and you need to do it a thousand times. Maybe it’s only once maybe. Yeah. You know , that’s tough. So in terms of accelerating your learning guys, I think not just spending some extra time on the stuff that you do in class, however you do that. Drilling instructional, practicing with mates, however you do it, bringing that learning and those ideas to class. That application that is really what is going to, I dunno about you guys out there, but typically week to week, the stress like what’s being taught in the class will change. So if you’re like, hang on, I’m still could be some random still working on this thing. I , I , but this isn’t what I’m doing. You’ve gotta keep it in your mind that no, me personally, when it comes to rolling, I’m working that thing even though the technique might be different. Love it. Awesome guys, if you want some help, join the Bulletproof community. People getting strong mobile, learn to look out for themselves. Bulletproof of bjj.com . We’ll see you there .