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How We Train: Play, Invest in Loss, and Learn Faster

This is the most important page on this entire hub. If you only read one thing, make it this.

Resources

Section titled “Resources”

Listen to these first. They cover everything on this page in more depth than we can in writing.

Ep. 221: Getting Better Faster, feat. Jozef Chen (BJJ Mental Models)

Growth vs. performance, learning methods, and why investing in loss accelerates learning.

Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Buzzsprout

Ep. 246: Keep It Playful, feat. Alexander Darwin (BJJ Mental Models)

Why playfulness is the key to long-term development.

Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Buzzsprout

Ep. 185: F Your Jiu Jitsu, feat. Rob Biernacki (BJJ Mental Models)

A deep dive into the FYJJ game and why self-handicapping is the best way to train across skill levels.

Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Buzzsprout

Play

Section titled “Play”

All mammals play fight, especially when they’re young. If you have (or have had) pets, you’ve probably seen a lot of this. This behavior exists for a reason and is healthy for not just dogs, cats, and meerkats, but also humans.

Most of us have also seen animals that escalate playful exchanges into more serious fights, and it ruins the fun for everyone involved and immediately stops the game. Likewise we’ve seen animals that refuse to engage in the first place, or only half engage so that no play really happens.

If you are new to grappling, it is normal to find it difficult to play. There’s nothing wrong with you if it doesn’t come naturally or feels hard to get out of the “fight or flight” mentality at first. Some people are playful on their first day, but others take a long time to get there. Being playful is a skill. If you haven’t already developed it, you will need to work on it. There is no shame in developing a new skill.

Our number one goal for people that join our gym is to get them to embody playfulness in class. We have seen black belts that are not playful, and it feels similar to a dog’s experience when another animal doesn’t want to play but just wants to bite them aggressively. It’s not fun. It makes people not want to train with them.

Play Involves Losing

Section titled “Play Involves Losing”

Play is give and take, not complete domination. When you see dogs wrestle, the ones that are having fun will often give up position, fall to their sides, and let another dog push them around even if they’re much bigger. The same is true for jiu jitsu.

If you are trying to win every part of every exchange, you’re not playing. If you’re not playing, you’re not going to have fun for very long and will burn out.

When coaches spar with students, they’re generally very playful. They intentionally lose exchanges all the time and see how students react to dominant positions. Students catch coaches regularly. That doesn’t mean they’d catch us in competition. It doesn’t mean we’re bad at grappling, or that we don’t deserve our belts. It means we’re investing in our students’ development and working on areas of our own game at the same time.

Being playful also doesn’t mean disengaging. You can be un-playful by being hyper-aggressive, but you can also be un-playful by refusing to engage in the first place. If you disengage from rounds, pull away from your training partner so that no grips, movement, or transition happens, you’re still not truly playing. Play is give and take. You must do both.

Lastly, being playful doesn’t inherently mean rolling super light, nor does it mean just letting someone tap you. The better you get, the more you’re able to dial up the intensity and resistance while still keeping it playful. You can give and take while actively trying to win, but there’s a limit on how much you try to win. Winning at the cost of potential injury to a training partner is not playful. Using all of your strength and weight against a person you outweigh by 30 pounds is not playful. The important thing is to keep it fun for both training partners.

The Tennis Analogy

Section titled “The Tennis Analogy”

If two tennis players are hitting a ball back and forth, they’re rallying. One person hits the ball, then the other, so on and so forth.

When we’re learning jiu jitsu, one of the best things we can possibly do is to rally as much as possible. You attempt a sweep, your partner rallies by adjusting their weight and grips. You attempt a second sweep, they rally by adjusting again and moving into a passing position. You respond with a retention movement, they respond with a new guard passing attempt. Back and forth.

Being able to shut someone’s game down completely and never let them get near the ball is a useful skill. However, it’s not a good way to develop new skills. It’s not how we learn to play the game.

When some beginners come into the gym, they hit the ball as hard as possible with poor direction and knock it into the bleachers. This repeats several times until the timer goes off with no noticeable improvement. They’re so worried about trying to win the exchange that they never manage to have an exchange in the first place.

For a good while when you start grappling, your goal is just to keep the rally going as long as possible.

If you focus on winning above learning, you might have 20 exchanges in a five-minute round. This is common when we watch beginners focused on winning. If you focus on keeping the rally going, you might have 200 exchanges in the same round. You will learn 10x faster if you do 10x as much jiu jitsu in a given block of time.

Taking the Ball and Going Home

Section titled “Taking the Ball and Going Home”

Grabbing the tennis ball and walking off the court is a sure fire way to make sure you don’t lose the point. However, it also ensures you don’t play the game.

When you’re in a bad position, like being on the bottom end of a pin, it’s hard to get submitted if you curl up into a fetal position and don’t try to get out. If someone is only focused on defense, they tend to be hard to submit. That said, they’re also not going to learn much from that encounter that will help them in the long run.

You won’t learn how to escape safely, you won’t learn how to attack. You’ll just learn how to shell up on the bottom of side control to not get tapped. This is akin to taking the ball and going home.

Your goal should be to rally as long as possible to increase learning, not to try and win every exchange. If you’re new, the more you play, the more you will lose. However, without playing the game you’re just going to prevent learning. Invest in this loss.

Growth vs. Performance

Section titled “Growth vs. Performance”

When you’re in the gym, 99% of the time your goal should be growth, not performance. These are opposing goals.

When you’re looking to improve performance, you should be trying to polish existing skills rather than investing in new skill development. If you’re interested in improving your performance results, come to a comp class and play in those environments.

If you’re looking to grow as an athlete, you should be spending time working on new skills. Working on new skills inherently involves decreased performance. You will lose more.

If you invest in this loss and invest in your growth, you will learn 10x as fast. Over time, your performance will improve much faster, but in the short term it will decrease.

This is a difficult conundrum that most beginners struggle with. The number one goal for our coaches is to get students to invest in loss and playfulness, and prioritize that over their performance in class.

FYJJ (F Your Jiu Jitsu)

Section titled “FYJJ (F Your Jiu Jitsu)”

We play a game called FYJJ a lot. There are several goals for these games, but one of the biggest is to get players in the mindset of playing instead of competing. The idea: the more skilled player deliberately self-handicaps to make the game competitive and interesting for both people.

If you’ve been training for less than a year and a coach doesn’t want you to sweep them, you’re not going to. If we play a game where the coach is trying to pass your guard and you’re trying to sweep, and we play 100 times, they’re going to pass 100 times and you’re going to sweep zero times. That’s not helpful for either person.

When we play FYJJ, the more experienced player can self-handicap so that even a brand new white belt has a real chance. They can give up sleeve grips, let you break their posture, make it difficult for themselves to prevent your sweep. This gives you real practice attempting sweeps against a resisting opponent without the threat of having your guard passed, and it gives the experienced player the opportunity to work very late-stage resistance.

As you progress, the handicap decreases. The game stays interesting despite the skill gap. Both players still have the opportunity to learn. Both players do more jiu jitsu. Both players have more fun.

FYJJ also develops the ability to vary resistance levels for different training partners in a smooth, natural way. It helps everyone learn how to train effectively with people who are older, younger, bigger, or smaller.

Getting the Most Out of Class

Section titled “Getting the Most Out of Class”

Play the games fully. The games are designed to develop specific skills through constrained play. If you’re gaming the rules to win instead of engaging with the problem the game is designed to solve, you’re missing the point.

Take risks. Try things you’re not sure will work. Attempt sweeps when you might get passed. Go for submissions when you might lose position. The training room is where you experiment. If you only do things you’re already good at, you’ll stop growing.

Don’t pre-plan your rolls. “I’m going to try that armbar from mount” sounds productive, but it narrows your attention and makes you miss what’s actually happening. Instead, try setting a theme: “I’m going to focus on my frames today” or “I’m going to try to be more playful from bottom.”

Listen to the coaching, then let it go. The coach will give you one or two things to think about. Hold those loosely while you play. Don’t try to execute them perfectly. Let your body experiment with the idea through repetition and play.

What Style Should You Play?

Section titled “What Style Should You Play?”

If you’re a beginner, play with everything. Try every position, every guard, every passing style. Don’t specialize. If you try to focus on specific areas of the game early, you’ll get better at those positions at the cost of getting better at everything else.

Try everything with an open mind. Until you’re probably around purple belt, you really won’t have a good idea of what style you like to play, and even then it will change over time. Explore the whole game as much as possible and just try to be a sponge learning a little bit about everything.

Plateaus

Section titled “Plateaus”

At some point, you’ll feel like you’re not getting better. You might even feel like you’re getting worse. This is normal, and it’s actually a sign of progress.

What’s happening: your awareness has expanded faster than your skills. You can see opportunities you couldn’t see before, but you can’t capitalize on them yet. You notice your mistakes more because you finally understand what you should be doing. That gap between awareness and ability feels like regression, but it’s growth.

What to do: keep showing up. The skills catch up to the awareness. Every experienced grappler has been through this cycle multiple times.

Jiu jitsu improvement isn’t linear. It looks more like a staircase with long flat sections and sudden jumps. The flat sections are where the work happens. The jumps are when it clicks.

Focus on process, not outcomes. “I want to get better at guard retention” is more useful than “I want to tap out more people.” Process goals guide your attention during training. Outcome goals just make you anxious.

Compare yourself to your past self, not to other people. Everyone’s path is different. Someone who trains five days a week will progress faster than someone who trains twice a week. That’s fine. The question is: are you better than you were a month ago?

Injury Management

Section titled “Injury Management”

Grappling is a contact sport. Minor bumps, bruises, and soreness are part of training. Here’s how to think about injuries:

Train through: General soreness, minor bruises, stiff muscles. Warm up carefully and modify if needed.

Train modified: Sore joints, mild strains, minor tweaks. Tell your training partners what’s going on. Skip positions that aggravate it. Play lighter than usual.

See a professional: Pain that lasts more than a week without improvement. Recurring injuries in the same area. Any head or neck injury.

When in doubt, rest. Missing a few days of training is nothing compared to missing months because you pushed through something you shouldn’t have.

Competition

Section titled “Competition”

If you want to. Competition is a great way to test your skills under pressure, and it will accelerate your development. It’s also completely optional. Plenty of people train their entire lives without competing and get tremendous value from grappling.

When to consider it: When you’re comfortable with the class format, know the basic positions, and can spar at moderate intensity without panicking. For most people, that’s somewhere between 6 months and a year of consistent training.

How to prepare: Train more consistently in the weeks leading up. Do more positional sparring in the positions you’re likely to encounter. Talk to your coaches about a game plan. Don’t try to learn new techniques right before competing.

What to expect: You’ll be nervous. Your first match will be a blur. Win or lose, you’ll learn more in 5 minutes of competition than in a month of regular training. The result matters less than the experience.

Studying Jiu Jitsu Outside the Gym

Section titled “Studying Jiu Jitsu Outside the Gym”

Watch your own rolls if you have the chance. You’ll see things you didn’t feel during the roll. Don’t judge yourself harshly. Look for patterns: what positions do you end up in? Where do you get stuck? What works better than you thought?

Watch high-level grappling with a focus, not passively. Pick one person and follow their guard retention for an entire match. Watch how they use their legs. Don’t try to copy specific moves. Instead, look for the concepts you’re learning in class showing up at the highest level.

Submeta and the BJJ Mental Models podcast are our primary recommended resources. See the content recommendations page for specifics.

Be careful with YouTube tutorials. Most jiu jitsu content online teaches a “3 moves of the day” format that doesn’t build real skill. We do teach specific techniques as entrances to games, but the game-based learning is where development happens. If you watch tutorials, focus on the “why” behind the techniques, not the specific steps. Bring questions to class, not choreographed sequences to try.

See Also

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