Table of Contents

• Why You Should Focus On Learning Less

  • Lessons About Less

  • Master What Matters

  • Focused Effort on Favorites

  • Plan With the End in Mind

Why You Should Focus On Learning Less

Lessons About Less

I teach private Brazilian jiu-jitsu lessons fairly regularly. It’s not my full time gig, but I’m usually good for a few every weekend. When I’m planning a lesson I always ask three questions ahead of time.

I ask the student, what do you want to work on and what problems are you having with that position?

Then I ask myself, what’s the most accessible submission from what we are training?

The point of Brazilian jiu-jitsu is to control your opponent and force them to submit while preventing their attempts to make you do the same. No matter how far back you start, every sequence you learn has to lead to a submission or another sequence that yields a submission eventually. Building that into your training as soon as possible can only benefit you in the long run.

When I start working with students one on one they all eventually ask a variation of one question during our lessons. They usually don’t ask it more than two times because the answer is always the same. I’m not trying to be dickish, it’s just the truth and it needs to be reinforced.

Eventually the student will ask, “What else can I do from here?” My answer is always, “Keep doing this until they can stop you”.

Master What Matters

There’s an idea floating around that says 10,000 hours of practice will make someone an expert. This idea popularized by Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers has been debated, refuted, and debunked several times. I’m not going to rehash the contrary arguments here, but, generally speaking, I will say that the 10,000 hour rule ignores individuals’ differences that impact what they can naturally excel at. Things like limb length, aerobic vs anaerobic capacity, and general disposition all change what someone can pick up more quickly relative to other skills.

What the 10,000 hour rule gets right is that you need focused, deliberate practice to excel at anything. You need to limit your scope to achieve excellence with any subject or activity.

If you spend more time on the mats you’ll get better, faster. If you spend more time drilling one specific technique you’ll probably get better at it than your peers are, faster. Just look at the most dominant no gi grappler today, Gordon Ryan.

Originally Ryan was known as a leg locker. Then, Ryan got attention as a back attack specialist. Eventually Ryan added passing and standing techniques to his arsenal and he became a force of nature with a fully developed game. Ryan’s path to excellence was expedited because he focused on one skill set that he had an affinity for, leg locking, and he worked that in practice and competition until he was world class at it. Over time he would add additional components of Brazilian jiu-jitsu to build the holistic game he has today. This process is simple but it’s not necessarily easy.

Training with a singular focus becomes hard because it forces you to stay disciplined and ignore almost everything else until you’ve improved one skill to a particular level of competency. Training like this only becomes boring in the short term before becoming extremely rewarding in the long run. As with Ryan, stacked singular focuses will yield excellence, world class skills, and a well developed game. You just need to be willing to wait years upon decades.

Oddly enough, practicing one position or technique will actually give you the answer to the earlier question.

Focused Effort on Favorites

Someone misattributed a quote to Aristotle once that says, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” The same can be said for becoming a dangerous submission grappler.

If you want to be a good at takedowns, start on the feet during every practice; if you want to be good at sweeping people, start on bottom during every round; and if you want to submit more people, focus on fewer submissions so you can invest more hours into them and make one or two nearly unstoppable.

In competition you get points for successfully completing techniques, you don’t get extra points for the total number of moves you can do, and the match only ends when time runs out or a submission is successfully executed. So, if you had one unstoppable submission that could win every match why would you do anything else? Why not simply win everything reliably?

Unstoppable submissions don’t exist. The margin of error varies from submission to submission and every technique has possible counters, escapes, and defensive maneuvers. As your skill increases with a particular submission your training partners and opponents will be forced to search for counters to your techniques and then we have the answer to our earlier question; what else should I do? Once your A game starts getting countered you need to focus on a few counters to your opponents’ counters. Repeat this process for the next five to ten years and you have rounded out your game. This is exactly why focusing on less quite literally yields more in the long run.

When I started Brazilian jiu-jitsu I was a six foot 150 pound rail. The only things I had success with were triangle chokes and guillotines because my skinny limbs could easily wrap up my opponents’ necks to secure submissions. Eventually people started standing out of my triangle chokes, so I used the opportunity to learn how to attack their newly exposed legs. When I had a hard time finding a path to the guillotine choke I learned how to play butterfly guard from bottom or snap people down from standing.

By focusing on the only ways I could win, my opponents countered my limited arsenal and showed me what I needed to work on next to continue to develop.

This leads us to one last question. Where should you start?

Plan With the End in Mind

One of Brazilian jiu-jitsu’s most pervasive clichés says, “position before submission”. While that might be true for training it’s terrible advice for people that want to understand the sport and excel quickly. If you don’t know where you’re trying to get to, learning where to start is not going to help you much.

When you’re learning how to play basketball, generally one of the first things you learn to do is shoot and prevent your opponents from getting off easy shots. Why? Because if you put zero points up you have literally zero shot at winning, and if you can never get any stops on defense you’ll exhaust yourself trying to keep up on offense. You can learn plays later and that’s true for the core of Brazilian jiu-jitsu as well.

You need to find one submission you gravitate towards and then find the simplest way to get there. Alternatively, find the one submission you get caught in most frequently and figure out how to escape to get back to your favorite submission as quickly as possible.

You need to be able to score submissions to stop your opponent and actually defend yourself effectively. Having a tight closed guard is awesome and pinning someone in mount is incredibly useful in competition and fighting. But if you’re unable to force your opponent to submit eventually you’ll run into someone who won’t get tired, will escape your positional control, and then threaten you with submissions, or worse.

While the point of Brazilian jiu-jitsu is to learn how to safely make your opponent quit and submit without striking them, the point of practice is learning the simplest way to get to those positions that make your opponent submit while preventing their attempts to do the same to you. Your role in this process is figuring out which submissions work best for you, starting there, and working backwards to the beginning of a match. Over time you learn new ways to get to your positions where you have the most success and counter your opponent’s counters.

The trick is that learning more quickly involves ignoring most.