Optimise your Learning
Optimise Your Learning
Part of the unwritten agreement when joining Gracie Barra Gloucester is that you take on a big slice of the responsibility for your learning and development yourself. I’ve blogged previously about maintaining commitment and overcoming injury to help with some of the most common external factors that life can throw at us and which can often stop us getting to class. You also have, however, a responsibility in every class you can attend, to do things that assist your progress and of course not do things that will hinder your progress.
As a starting point then, it’s probably a good idea to understand how our classes are constructed and how to make the best of them, like I said, primarily so that you don’t hinder your own progress by your own actions!
Gracie Barra is well known in the BJJ community/sport for its approach using a structured curriculum. It’s not the only approach to BJJ training of course, and it’s not everyone’s cup of tea either, but it is undeniably a proven one! Gracie Barra is a global organisation of 1000+ schools worldwide, it’s not a one club small town set up, so running it takes a lot of organising to maintain the integrity of it’s methodology, allow easy transition of students between schools, reinforce the GB brand and maintain it’s ethical standards such that whether you are in New York, Brazil ,Tokyo or Gloucester, as a student you are still learning BJJ the GB way! It has also, however, brought (and continues to bring) many athletes through the system to achieve world honours over the years!
Gives each Class a focus
Curriculum wise we use a 16 week rotating cycle, with each week focussing on a specific theme/topic/subject, which, over the 16 weeks covers all of the key positions of the sport. On top of this there are also three layers or training levels, so, depending on the level you are studying at (GB1, GB2, GB3 which in turn could be described as beginner, intermediate and advanced) each class in any one week will have a different focus but will be centred on the same subject!
Put another way, for any class you attend in any given week the “theme/topic/subject” is determined for the instructor by the curriculum week number, and the depth and variation of the study of that “theme/topic/subject” is determined by the skill level of the class (GB1, GB2, GB3).
Essentially your instructor is guided by the week number, but has the increasing freedom and creativity to explore the weeks theme/topic/subject as the skill level of the students attending the class increase!
Gives you focus in each class
Now that we have established that the class content is dictated by the combination of the rotating curriculum cycle + your training level, the next question must be “where do you fit into all this?” Well, put simply, you are attending the class in order to learn/develop/train to get better at jiu-jitsu, so it’s really about how you can best approach the class content in order for you to maximise your learning from it? For me this is about answering two questions:
What learning stage is the class is at right now ?
What am I learning/practicing/training right now?
To answer the first question we now need to take a quick look at the class structure.
Each class itself, regardless of the subject being studied, is split into 3 distinct sections (technically speaking it’s 5 but for brevity lets use 3) - Warm up & Warm down, Technical Section (Takedowns & Sport Jiu Jitsu Techniques) & Positional Sparring.
At GBGlos, I don’t see the warm up as a “warm up” per se, the star jumps, squats and press ups routine at the beginning of the class is more a pre-warm up if you like. It’s purpose is to just get the blood flowing, the joints, muscles and tendons kickstarted or at least activated for the second part of the class which in some sense is the real warm up! At the start of any class, students have come in from all walks of life, they have rocked up to class having sat in an office chair all day or stood up in a workshop all day, then sat in a car seat or on a bus or train and walked, possibly in the cold, to get to the Academy etc… so getting the blood and synovial fluid moving again makes good sense.
However, there is a huge amount of scientific data around sports performance that informs that best practice for “warm ups” means they should be functional i.e. warm ups should mirror the anticipated movement patterns, muscle groups and neuro muscular demands of the sport to maximise readiness, prime the nervous system for sport specific demands and match the demands of the sport so as to reinforce skill mechanics and reduce injury risk. When you look at it this way, the Gracie Barra class design fits the bill perfectly, 5-7 mins pre-warm up & 38-40mins (technical) warm-up leading up to 10-15 mins contested sport specific game time!
My point is, the technical part of the class is where the functional movements of BJJ are learned and practiced repetitively, and in this part of the class you and your training partners should be chilled, communicative and encouraging whilst you both learn or bed in the movement/skill/technique being practiced. The focus of your learning in this part of the class should first and foremost be the accuracy of your movements, building accurate “muscle memory” so to speak (not the best terminology but most people get the gist) and then working on increasing the speed of execution without losing accuracy. This is also where you will really get a “sweat” going (cos you’re warming up), as you are working your body ever harder and faster trying to execute what is being asked in the class by your instructor, but the critical point here is that nothing about this situation is real, it’s a staged learning scenario! You are simply learning, by repetition, body movements in order to develop/build/strengthen the neuro pathways in your brain that co-ordinate your muscles to fire in the correct sequence…. you are practicing, through deliberate repetition what you can’t do, until you can do it, or what you can do until you can’t do it wrong!
The single biggest mistake you or your training partner can make in this stage of the session is to introduce resistance. That is, if you (or they) try to block or counter your movements, add pressure or tension or escape or defend during your execution of the technique. When I ask guys why they are doing this they usually reply with something like “to make it more real” but in actual fact all they are doing is hindering their own learning. It makes no sense to add resistance at this stage, because what you are working on is learning how to do a prescribed movement, then how to do it quickly, both of which need to be embedded and strengthened as new or existing neural pathways in your brain! It’s a completely false ruse to add resistance in such a static situation because the instructor told you both at the same time what is to be practiced, so it’s dead easy to resist, and the resistance isn’t real because you know what to resist and when! This is so far removed from the realism you are trying to introduce because when you know what is being attempted you can obviously focus solely on stopping your training partner from doing it, and that’s not how it happens in reality!
In the real world, with a genuinely free willed opponent, in any one position he has a multitude of options available to him, which means you are always waiting to see what he is going to do, then reacting to resist it. Once you’ve worked out what they are doing you can execute your response, but you are still reacting, and so, importantly, you are behind the play in real time! You will no doubt hear me or your instructor consistently shout “don’t fight in the drill, drill in the drill, fight in the fight”. The reason I mention this is because it is a behaviour so easily slipped into. Don’t get me wrong, absolutely there is a need for resistance in our training and the good news is, every class is structured to ensure that it is included in every session, it’s just not in the technical part of the class!
Put another way, I like to talk about what I call the three stages of learning physical skills like BJJ regardless of the topic of the day.
Developing accuracy - when initially learning how to execute a technique/position/transition, that is, through your deliberate, sequenced actions and repetitions, to create the new or adapt/strengthen the existing neural pathways in your brain that coordinate the desired movements. (Technical drills/block drills).
Once the accuracy is sufficient, we focus on developing speed of execution; deliberately improving neural efficiency through repetitive practice whilst in motion, stitching/chaining individual techniques together into longer passages (think of individual words forming sentences and paragraphs) and where ever faster yet still accurate completion of the desired movements is the goal. (Flow drills/series drills).
One you have accuracy and speed, the next stage is to add resistance. That is practicing the movement against a training partner that is offering resistance. This stage is about developing your ability to problem solve on the hoof, because, in reality, no execution circumstances will ever be the same as the learning circumstances, so developing your ability to bridge this gap is where real BJJ development lies! If your movement solutions are accurate, fast, hardwired, automatic and fluid, the reduced mental load (your “freed up” cognitive attention space as it were ) is available as extra capacity for the problem solving that a resisting training partner demands! and IF, and its a big IF, those hardwired movement solutions are actually valid, your brains plasticity will use and adapt them into new movements solutions that produce successful outcomes contextually appropriate to that, and only that, particular situation, in that moment, in that exchange! (positional sparring/random drills).
In my opinion, the positional/specific training as we refer to it (mini fights, competitively contested scenarios constrained within narrow boundaries) section at the end of every class is the best BJJ development tool in the box! Its certainly what sets BJJ apart from the traditional Martial Arts. It’s the most valuable part of the class, and the part you have been warming up for! Of course everyone loves to roll/live training/free sparring but positional/specific training is more fast track development wise without a doubt.
To use a rugby analogy, this week we are learning about lineout plays. We learn and practice certain lineout moves for accuracy, then work on speed, then finally test various plays against free willed opponents (resistance), but only in lineout scenarios! We don’t play the full game of rugby where lineouts may (or may not) occur sporadically amongst the many other facets of a match, instead we repeatedly compete in lineouts, against a multitude of different opponents. The following week we do scrums, the week after mauls etc etc until all of the different facets of the game have been tested against resistance i.e in competitive scenarios against multiple opponents of different stature, weight, skill level, age etc (this variability is in-fact very important).
Finally then, when it comes to playing an actual match we have learned techniques in every facet the game, developed speed of execution, adapted and hard wired these movements, tested with competitive intensity against unpredictable oppositions and adapted accordingly through our ever improving problem recognition and solving capabilities. Rolling/live training/free sparring (playing the actual match) is less topic specific of course, indeed, and to use the Rugby analogy again, it is entirely possible to go a whole game and never have a lineout, but it does expose us to a whole lot of other facets of playing a full game, like when to switch gears, read our opponents strategy, recover from mistakes, recognise changes in weight distribution, timing, rhythm, tempo, decision making under duress, fatigue etc.
Answering the second question - What am I learning/practicing/training right now? is not quite as simple as it initially might seem either. The fact is, when we are drilling/learning, positional sparring or rolling there are always two people in the mix and each of them have a role to play in the process.
To help with this I often refer to the four sided coin of Jiu-Jitsu …. meaning, whatever position you are in, it will be either Top or Bottom and from which you will either be attacking or defending i.e. if you are in Top Position and attacking, your training partner is in Bottom position and defending etc. The thing is, when we are in the learning/practicing/training mode of the technical stage of the class, only one of us can be actively practicing what the instructor has tasked us to learn (albeit we switch positions regularly so that both of us have our “go” so to speak) but it’s important we don’t just switch off whilst we wait for our go again!!
I said in an earlier blog (Injury is the Enemy)
Another important aspect of being a good training partner is to ensure that you are not passive during the technical drilling part of the movement learning/bedding in process. When your partner is practicing/bedding in a particular move for instance, don’t just switch off whilst they execute it (and certainly don’t have the muscle tonus of a wet lettuce whilst they do). You should be practicing during the process too, I don’t mean by physically resisting, but by analysing their movements, identifying the critical pathway (sequence of steps) looking to identify weaknesses/opportunities to counter, working out how you might defend, spotting when mistakes have been made etc - you may not be the UKE in the traditional martial arts sense of the word (the one who receives the technique) and you may not be resisting during the technical or flow drill phase, but you should be active cognitively and working on aspects of your game relative to the position being worked on.
I see this a lot and to a degree its quite a natural behaviour to fall into, after all the technique being practiced is the main focus, but it is wasting valuable time to “switch off” until it’s your “go” again, especially when that time could be filled with engaged learning in respect of the other 2 sides of the 4 sided coin
Murray