How to Learn Jiu Jitsu Faster

Learning Jiu Jitsu can be a frustrating business. You turn up to class, pay attention to the instruction, practise the techniques and spend a few rounds trying to put everything together. Yet sometimes, despite all that effort, you leave feeling as though you've made very little progress.

Meanwhile, the person who started six months after you seems to be improving at an alarming rate. They're picking up techniques more quickly, making fewer mistakes and occasionally catching you with something you thought you understood rather well.

It's tempting to put this down to natural ability. Perhaps they're younger, fitter or simply more talented. And there may be some truth in that. But I think we sometimes overlook a more interesting possibility.

Maybe they're just learning more effectively.

One of the things that fascinates me about Jiu Jitsu is how differently people approach learning it. Some students seem to absorb techniques simply by watching. Others need plenty of repetition before a movement begins to make sense. Some ask endless questions, while others prefer to work things out through trial and error.

There isn't necessarily one perfect way to learn Jiu Jitsu. But there are certainly ways to make better use of the time we spend on the mats.

The Problem with Just Showing Up

We're often told that the secret to getting better at Jiu Jitsu is consistency. Keep turning up, put in the hours and eventually things will start to click.

It's good advice, up to a point.

You certainly won't improve much if you rarely train. But there's a difference between spending time on the mats and using that time productively.

Consider two students who both train three times a week.

The first attends class, drills whatever technique is being taught and then rolls with whoever happens to be available. Some rounds go well, others don't. They enjoy themselves, get a good workout and head home.

The second follows exactly the same class structure but approaches it differently. They've identified a weakness in their game and are actively looking for opportunities to improve it. During drilling, they ask questions about the details they find difficult. When sparring, they try to create situations where they can practise what they've been working on.

Both students are training consistently. But over several months, I'd expect the second to make more noticeable progress in that particular area.

The difference isn't necessarily effort. It's intention.

Learn from Different Partners

One of the most useful ideas I've encountered in Jiu Jitsu is the Plus, Minus, Equals approach, discussed by Liam Resnekov in an earlier Jiu Jitsu Brotherhood article.

The principle is straightforward. To develop your skills, you need three different types of training partner: people who are better than you, people who are less experienced than you and people who are roughly at your level.

Each provides a different learning opportunity.

1. Training with Better Grapplers

Rolling with someone considerably more experienced can be uncomfortable. They anticipate your movements, shut down your attacks and exploit mistakes you didn't even realise you were making.

Occasionally, you might spend an entire round defending without managing a single meaningful attack.

It's not always enjoyable, but it can be enormously instructive.

Better grapplers expose the weaknesses in your game. They show you which techniques hold up against skilled resistance and which ones still need work.

The important thing is to approach these rounds with realistic expectations.

If you're a blue belt rolling with an experienced black belt, measuring success by whether you can submit them is probably going to be discouraging. Instead, perhaps your goal is to maintain your guard a little longer, defend a particular pass or recognise an escape opportunity you previously missed.

Those are meaningful improvements, even if you still spend most of the round on the defensive.

2. Training with Less Experienced Grapplers

When you roll with someone less experienced, you generally have more freedom to experiment. You can attempt techniques that aren't yet reliable, explore unfamiliar positions and make adjustments without immediately being punished for every mistake.

Suppose you've been working on a particular sweep from half guard.

Against a more experienced opponent, you might struggle to establish the position, let alone complete the sweep. But against someone newer, you may have enough control to work through the mechanics, recognise where you're going wrong and try again.

Over time, those repetitions begin to build confidence.

There's an important distinction here, though. Your less experienced partners aren't simply there for you to practise submissions on. They have their own training needs, and good training should benefit both people.

You can give them opportunities to work, allow them to establish positions and provide appropriate resistance. Learning to adjust your intensity to suit your partner is a valuable skill in itself.

3. Training with Your Equals

Then there are the people who are roughly as good as you.

Most of us have one or two training partners who fall into this category. You know each other's games reasonably well. You've developed counters to their favourite techniques, and they've done exactly the same to yours.

Some weeks you seem to have the upper hand. Other weeks, nothing you try appears to work.

These relationships can be particularly valuable because they encourage constant adaptation.

You develop a new guard pass. Your partner figures out how to stop it. You make an adjustment, which works for a while, until they find another answer.

It's a rather enjoyable little arms race.

Because neither person has an overwhelming advantage, you're often working at the edge of your current ability. The resistance is challenging enough to expose mistakes but not so overwhelming that you never get to practise anything.

Ideally, you want all three types of partner in your training week.

Give Yourself Something to Work On

Another useful habit is to approach training with a specific objective.

Not a grand ambition such as becoming better at guard passing. Something smaller and more manageable.

Perhaps you're struggling to retain your knee shield when someone pressures forward. Or you keep losing the underhook when escaping side control. Maybe you can establish closed guard comfortably but rarely manage to create an effective attack.

Pick one of these problems and spend some time investigating it.

Ask your instructor for advice. Watch how more experienced students handle the position. Try a few different solutions and see which ones suit your body type and style.

Then give yourself opportunities to practise them.

This is where positional sparring becomes particularly useful. Rather than waiting for a situation to arise during a normal round, you can start directly in the position you're trying to improve.

If you're working on escaping mount, begin underneath mount. If you're developing your half guard, start there with your partner applying realistic pressure.

You might spend five minutes repeating the same exchange, resetting whenever someone escapes, sweeps or establishes a dominant position.

It isn't always as exciting as an open sparring round, but the amount of relevant practice you accumulate can be considerable.

Understand What Went Wrong

Something I've noticed about experienced grapplers is that they often seem more interested in understanding why a technique failed than celebrating when one succeeds.

I think there's something worth borrowing from that approach.

When a sweep doesn't work, our natural response is often to try harder. We pull more aggressively, push with greater force or attempt the same movement at a different angle.

Sometimes that works. But often the problem lies somewhere earlier in the sequence.

Perhaps you didn't establish the correct grip. Maybe your opponent's weight was positioned differently from what you expected. Or you attempted the sweep before creating the necessary imbalance.

One useful approach is to revisit the position with a cooperative partner afterwards. Recreate the situation and examine what happened.

You don't need to turn every round into a lengthy technical discussion. But asking a simple question such as "What stopped that sweep working?" can sometimes teach you more than another ten minutes of aimless rolling.

I've also found that explaining a technique to someone else is an excellent way of discovering whether you really understand it. You quickly discover which details you understand and which ones you've been taking for granted.

Don't Confuse Winning with Learning

There's a slightly awkward truth about Jiu Jitsu training.

Sometimes the easiest way to win more rounds is to stop trying anything new.

If you've developed a reliable guard pass and a couple of favourite submissions, you can probably spend most of your sparring time repeating them. You'll catch plenty of people and finish class feeling rather pleased with yourself.

But are you actually improving?

Possibly. You're certainly refining the techniques you already know. Yet there's a risk that the rest of your game remains underdeveloped.

Learning something new generally involves a period of being rather bad at it.

Your first attempts at a new guard might be easily passed. Your unfamiliar submissions may fail. You might even find yourself getting caught by people you normally handle comfortably.

That can be difficult to accept, especially if you've become accustomed to a certain level of success.

But training isn't a competition, even if it sometimes feels like one.

There's a time to test your strongest game against determined resistance, and there's a time to experiment with techniques that are still very much a work in progress.

Both are important.

Be Patient with the Process

All this talk of learning faster comes with an important qualification.

Jiu Jitsu is difficult, and some aspects of it simply take a long time to develop.

You can understand the mechanics of a technique perfectly well and still struggle to apply it against a resisting opponent. Knowing what to do isn't quite the same as being able to do it.

There's also the inconvenient fact that your training partners are improving at the same time as you.

You might become considerably better at escaping side control over six months, only to discover that the people you regularly train with have become equally good at maintaining it.

From your perspective, very little seems to have changed.

This is why I think it's useful to occasionally train with people you haven't rolled with for a while. You may discover that techniques which previously felt unreliable have become surprisingly effective.

Progress isn't always obvious when you're measuring yourself against the same people every week.

A Better Way to Learn

If there's one thing I'd encourage students to do, it's to take a little more responsibility for their own learning.

Your instructor has an important role, of course. Good coaching provides structure, technical guidance and feedback that would be difficult to obtain on your own.

But ultimately, you're the person who has to make sense of the information and turn it into something you can use.

Think about the partners you train with. Identify the areas of your game that need attention. Ask questions when something doesn't make sense, and give yourself permission to experiment without worrying too much about the outcome.

Most importantly, try to understand what you're learning rather than simply collecting techniques.

I don't think there's a secret formula that suddenly makes Jiu Jitsu easy. Nor am I convinced that the students who improve fastest are necessarily the ones who train the hardest.

Often, they're the ones who have developed a better understanding of what they need to work on, and how to go about it.

That's a skill worth developing in its own right.

This article was written by Tom Renshaw. Tom is a brown belt and sometime competitor with a background in education, who writes about Jiu Jitsu, mindset, and learning, always with a coffee in hand and curiosity to spare.