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The One Secret to Improve Your Jiu-Jitsu Game
Friday, May 17, 2024
First, let's start with some common sense: to improve your Jiu-Jitsu, you need to show up consistently. And while showing up regularly is crucial, there's more you can do to accelerate your progress.
"Learning through practice is like pushing a cart uphill, if you slack off, it will slip backwards."
- Japanese Proverb
Unfortunately, this proverb is right—we can't bypass that. But once you're consistently showing up, what else can you do to accelerate your progress?
One surprising technique I use to boost my improvement is to focus intently on my mistakes.
Let me explain.
When we train Jiu-Jitsu, things rarely go exactly as planned. In fact, if everything went our way, our matches would only last a few seconds. We make plenty of mistakes and must fight hard and practice even harder to get just a few techniques to succeed against our opponents. But when they do work, it feels incredibly rewarding, and we know we're making progress in the right direction.
But why give attention to all the things that failed?
Most people see their mistakes as failures, but we should view them as an eye-opening moments and golden opportunities to grow and improve.
- We can keep working on the techniques we already do well and improve them.
- We can learn new techniques.
- We can focus on our mistakes and try to figure out a way to correct them.
I believe the latter will improve our game faster and more substantially. What we are already doing well can be improved, but the improvement is not as substantial as correcting our mistakes.
Learning a new technique is also important. But, because it will take years to master them, we have to be careful about how many new skills we want to learn in a period of time.
Often, learning from our mistakes will lead us to learn a new way of reacting to a situation we are consistently in, which will take less time to learn than starting from scratch.
Personal Approach to Improvement
I always review my matches mentally, analyzing what I've done right and wrong. Then, I turn my focus towards what failed and how I am going to make adjustments to succeed next time.
- You can make adjustments while training - When you notice that some things you're doing are not working, adjust them in the middle of your match.
- You can make the adjustments in between matches - After you finish your prior match, review the fight in your head and try to find what went wrong you can also ask your instructor for help), then try to make your adjustments for the next match.
- You can make the adjustments for the next class - Go home and think about it, or go over it with your instructor at the end of the class, and come back with a different plan of action for your next class.
Using all three methods ensures a comprehensive approach to improvement. Ignoring mistakes and failing to make adjustments hinders progress.
Remember, the key to improvement is not just practice, but thoughtful practice. By consistently focusing on and correcting your mistakes, you can significantly enhance your Jiu-Jitsu game.
