![]() A great coach demonstrates, corrects and motivates. Teaching jiu jitsu is an active endeavour. Your coach may be an amazing competitor, but if his idea of teaching is to show a couple of moves and then sit against the wall playing on his phone while the students bumble through them, then he’s a lousy instructor. ![]() But in a few rare cases a crappy instructor could be what's slowing your development. ![]() Most jiu jitsu coaches are committed and passionate teachers, and your lack of progress is something you should take personal responsibility for. Your Coach Sucksįor the vast majority of the people reading this is not an issue. Again, it’s entirely up to you to figure out where the line between too much and too little training is, and how to walk that line. Doing some light drilling with a buddy is not the same as attending your academy’s competition sparring class. And it’s not just the number of training sessions you have per week, it’s also the intensity of those sessions. You have a limited ability to recover and if you exceed that ability, becoming overtrained is a very likely outcome. We tend to think things like ‘Well if training 4 times per week is good, then training 8 times per week will be twice as good!’. As is the case with many aspects of western society, our community often suffers from the ‘more is better’ mentality. Ok so it’s pretty unlikely that this is an issue for you, but it does happen. It’s up to you to figure this out by feeling what works for you. A 50 year old with a stressful job and family might find even 4 tough classes too much for him. ![]() A 20 year old professional jiu jitsu athlete with his own 'pharmacist' and who does nothing else but train and sleep might be able to push that to 12 sessions. It’s my current perspective that three times per week is the absolute minimum for decent progress, and I have found that four sessions per week is the sweet spot between too little and too much. Twice per week is enough (barely) for maintenance of your current skills but it will be hard to get much better. Sure, you may be taught (or discover) something great in class, but by the time the next lesson rolls around, if you haven’t had at least one chance to revise and reinforce it in your memory, you’ll most likely forget it. A seven day gap between sessions is way too long. It’s my belief that training once per week is almost a complete waste of time. It may sound obvious, but you’d be amazed how many jiu jitsu guys train 1-2 times per week and then wonder why they’re not getting any better. Here are several things that could be slowing down your BJJ development: 1. Eventually, I broke through that plateau, but I definitely could have done it faster if I'd been aware of some of the pitfalls on this list. I felt like no matter what I did, I just wasn't getting any better. I experienced this often during the first few years following my black belt promotion. That feeling of desperately wanting your BJJ to improve but it seeming like your progress is slow or non-existent. Nic is an instructor at Subconscious Jiu Jitsu. This article was written by Nicolas Gregoriades, who is a 3rd degree Jiu-Jitsu black Belt under Roger Gracie.
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