TFS#35: Improve Your Routine

For today’s issue, I’m going to share 3 very simple steps that you can incorporate into your daily routine to grow a more dynamic game in 2023.

Showing up to class isn’t enough if you want to make faster progress.

Whether you want to get ahead or not fall behind, you’ll have to dedicate quality efforts to your craft.

But make sure that when you show up everyday, you’re building on the days, weeks, months, and years of who you’ve been improving to become.

Step 1: Reflect on your roll

Most people aren’t very good at this.

But it takes time and conscious effort to get better at recalling the exact sequence of events.

Luckily, the effort is quite simple.

Set aside 5 minutes after class to remember what happened in your rolls. Start off with who you remember rolling with.

The more you try to recall, the stronger your brain gets.

You’ll be able to identify where exactly in your rolls went wrong.

Most people will remember getting stuck in bottom side control because that’s where they’ve felt the most helpless and probably spent a lot of time there.

When you ask “how do I get out of this position,” people will give you the generic “don’t get there to begin with.”

But if you can recall your rolls into greater depths, you’ll be able to identify how you ended up in bottom side control, and you can work on preventing it.

For this particular example, it’s probably your guard retention that needs work.

The exercise of remembering is a powerful tool and will have compounding effects on your training for years to come.

Step 2: Study resources

Instructionals, guides, podcasts, this newsletter (I’m biased) are amongst the popular ways to study resources.

Consuming productive Jiu-Jitsu material will keep your mind engaged while exposing you to new ideas.

One of the easier ways to approach this is to pick a professional athlete that has the same body type as yours and study their matches.

You can learn a lot about various topics that aren’t typically covered in classes, such as grip fighting.

But one of the most important effective ways to improve is to study your own footage of actual rolls—both competitive and normal class sparring.

If you’re having a hard time reflecting on your rolls, watching it on video will help with that.

Having raw data instead of “I think I did this” is a huge advantage.

You can pinpoint what you need to to work on. And if you don’t know how to dissect your own footage, ask your coach.

You’ll now have specific questions for your instructors instead of general broad questions.

This is also helpful for instructors since their attention is typically spread thin during a class.

By taking the initiative to study your own footage and coming up with specific questions, you are putting your instructors in a better position to help you.

Help them help you.

Step 3: Specific training

Now that you’ve identified your issues and have studying material, you can put it to the test.

This is the fun “laboratory time.”

Specific training is one of my favorite ways to train.

It’s somewhere between drilling and sparring

You really only need to focus on one task at hand.

Set the round to be short intervals, somewhere between 30s-60s so you can get as many repetitions in as much as possible.

This is the secret sauce, more exposure to your weakness means more time to be able to work out of it.

Some days, I don’t even spar. Every partner I link up with during sparring I ask if we can just do specific sparring and they’re always more than happy to work with me.

It helps with my overall recovery from training as well.

I personally can’t train hard 5x a week.

So switching off days to be specific sparring helps tremendously.

The efforts of taking the time off the mats to reflect and collect data so you can return to the mats to execute your own tests will stack up over time.

You can also set this as a personal output driven goal.

Resources You Might Like

→ Learning at a faster pace will help you stay motivated and show your commitment to the art, and it is a form of respect towards your instructors. Here are 5 steps to speed up your learning.

→ A new white belt can always feel lost. Start here to use these easy reminders to build a consistent habit of training.

→ Being willing to lose a position or a round helps your overall growth. And your competitive side can hold you back from growth.

Closing Thought

Remember, Jiu-Jitsu is a collection of positions.

You’re trying to improve your skills in an individual position in order to improve your overall Jiu-Jitsu.

And some times that means you’ll lose the position or even the round because you’re trying something new.

Always keep an open mind to losing.

That’s part of the learning process.

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