Definitely not my best work but it was a fun match. The Chicago tournament was a little rougher than usual. I won some and lost some, but all in all the day was pretty fun. I’ll post some of the wins I had later on after I post them on the mat. 🙂
Alright, now that the Pans are over and I am ready to continue on in this series. In this post we will talk about training with a less skilled partner and how to make the most of it in regards to further developing our technique. When rolling with a person who is less skilled than you, what should you do? Should you beat them mercilessly over and over again or play around with different techniques you’re improving? Well. . . both. There is always going to be a need for the people under you to feel the pressure and to be pushed by a more experienced BJJ player. This helps shed light on weaknesses in their game that you are able to exploit. During hard competition training sessions where the environment has to be tough to prepare someone for a match this is also helpful. However, it is also beneficial to work on specific techniques and in essence use your less experienced partners as active drilling partners. This is the style of training we will focus on for this post since this series is about developing new techniques for your game. We will call this Restrictive Rolling. Again I will stress, I am not writing about anything that is ground breaking. Instead this series is just reminding you of ways that you can train deliberately and with a purpose.
Restrictive rolling against lesser skilled training partners
When trying to develop techniques and build them up, every bit of exposure with the moves and position is huge. Each successful or failed use of a technique inches you closer to mastering it. With this in mind I find it valuable to use people that I exceed in experience as active drilling partners, a sort of testing ground for new techniques.
I’ll explain what I mean.
I am a black belt and if I roll with . . . let’s say. . . a blue belt. I can certainly put the “brakes” on their movements and grind them with pressure till I submit them. Over and over and over again. Now like I said previously, this is sometimes necessary but certainly not always. I find it mutually beneficial when I work towards very specific movements and techniques and at the same time giving my partner a chance to attempt something. For example, if I am working on getting to back mount. I will fight furiously to find a way to my partners back. I will avoid finishing them in any other position even if the opportunity is there to get to the back. Once I get to the back I will let them escape so that I can find a way to regain the back position again. This allows for my lower belted training partner chances to attack and practice their escapes. Another example is I will let my partner pass my guard and get to a dominant position. I will make them fight for it but eventually (as long as their technique is good) I will let them pass my guard. Once they have secured a good position I will them work my way out of it. These are just two examples but obviously you can do with this almost any situation or technique.
The difference of restrictive rolling opposed to situational rolling which we talked about earlier, is that you do this during full rolls where everything is fair game. This has the potential to make it more difficult to get to the desired positions and use the techniques. Since during a full roll, your partner may not give you the necessary openings you need for your techniques. While this is more difficult it has the ability to make you better at finding your way to the positions. Essentially as the name implies, you are restricting yourself to a very specific group of techniques or positions regardless of what your opponent does.
Benefits of Restrictive Rolling with people less skilled than yourself
So the next time you are rolling with someone whom you know you can beat. Give them a break and help yourself improve. Throw your “A game” and ego to the side for a bit and try and play with techniques that you are either not as experienced with or still perfecting. The partners will appreciate the ability to work on things and you will gain valuable experience with the moves you’re implementing into your game.
Back to passive drilling!
So now that you have been doing reps of your techniques and you’ve also been doing some situational rolling you have probably become much more comfortable with the position and techniques you are trying to use. Along with being more comfortable you have also probably hit some snags during training. When I say snags I mean that you’ve experienced someone countering or defending your techniques. Maybe you go for a pass and your opponent brings his legs in to counter, or maybe you go for a triangle and the person shoots their head and body up to deny you the lock. Whatever it is, these situations can prove aggravating and unless you address them your techniques will be somewhat ineffective.
A solution
Once you encounter problems and the moves stop working by themselves, its time to move onto chain drilling. Wrestlers would be familiar with this as chain wrestling. This is where you do repetitions, much as we talked about in part 1, but instead of drilling them as standalone movements you will combine them with other techniques. Thus creating a sequence that will prepare you for possible obstacles you may face when executing your moves.
Here’s how to do it
This is pretty much just a modified version of part 1. I consider the first post to be about introducing a move into your repertoire. This post is more about refining the techniques or adding to them after you’ve used them. Lets face it, you have to use a technique before you can be sure about the kind of problems you will run into. Consider this type of drilling as the next stage of a moves progression.
Benefits to chain drilling
Thanks for reading!
So I personally categorize drilling into two different types, active and passive. I consider practicing any sort of drilling where my partner offers no resistance as passive style drilling. In my last post I talked about performing repetitions of a new move to get introduced to them. Now, let’s move on to our first method of active drilling which will help make new moves usable against resisting opponents.
Fear
It can be hard to break a new move out into a full rolling session. Sometimes you don’t get into the proper positions to use it and sometimes personal fear can prevent you from using it. For example, if you are too worried about being trapped under a tough guy’s side mount after a pass, then using a new guard technique can be difficult mentally. You’ll be too worried about using the new technique for fear of having your guard passed and being squashed under the person’s top pressure.
Remove the fear with Situational Rolling
This is where we will get into Situational Rolling. Now I am sure you have done this before in class with your team mates, but I’ll explain my idea of it so that there isn’t any confusion.
I consider situational rolling to be where you put yourself into a position that you are working on and having clear ideas of what you plan to accomplish. Then roll somewhere between 50-100% and actively attempting to achieve your goal in the position. For instance if you are trying to add a new half guard sweep, then start in half guard. From there do pass/defend and sweep/submit. Meaning if you sweep from half guard then you restart back in the same position. Meanwhile your partner will try to defend against your attacks and try to pass your guard. If they pass, restart back into the half guard.
I know it has personally helped me a lot over the years. One example is that I used to be very susceptible to triangle chokes. To fix this I would passively drill triangle escapes and I would also drill prevention techniques to stop the triangle before it starts. After the drilling I would do situational rolling. Starting in a loose triangle I would try to escape using the techniques I had been drilling and my partner would try to lock it up and finish me. If I escaped the triangle we would restart back in the same position. If my partner finished me then we would restart again. This was brutal but it really paid off. Within a few weeks of doing this I was able to relax a bit in the bad situation of being caught in a triangle and I became much better at escaping the submission.
Tip: When doing situational drilling, make the rounds short. Shorter rounds will make you and your partner push the pace and go after the techniques you are practicing.
So give it a try. The next time you are at an open mat or have some free mat time with a partner. Try and do some rounds of situational rolling from a position you are working on. Again the idea that I am trying to get you to think about in these posts is not just training hard, but training with focus and purpose, and situational rolling is a fantastic way of doing this.
I hope this post proves helpful to you. To recap I put a list of benefits below.
Thanks for reading!
Benefits of situational rolling
Being a beginner at something new can be pretty terrifying. I think many instructors and experienced BJJ players forget this. Many people in teaching positions of all sorts sometimes forget this. Nothing makes you feel quite as out of place as being in a room with people who “seem” to know what they are doing. Meanwhile you’re struggling to grasp the most basic movements or concept. The problem is that many experts are so disconnected with how it felt to be new on the mats that they cannot empathize with new comers.
I write this post because one thing that really gets under my skin is a teacher who gets short with a new person because they don’t pick something up right off the bat. I’ve seen it happen plenty of times in situations over the years. I look at it like this. . . Here you have an excited man or woman who is so pumped up about training. They’ve done their research on the sport and can’t wait to learn the art. Then once they step on the mat, that enthusiasm is blasted by an assault of negativity by their instructor. Small expressions like sighs of disdain or word usage like “no, you’re doing it wrong” go a long way in derailing the positive momentum this prospective student walked in with. This is unfortunate and robs the would-be practitioner of the amazing benefits of BJJ because of a poor instructor. Why on earth would you treat a person this way??? New or old, there is no excuse for this if you’re an instructor. Remember being a good instructor is not about the medals and accolades you’ve won, it’s about your ability to convey a message or ability to your students.
A light bulb went off
There was an experience that I had which made that cartoon light bulb to flicker on above my head. I went salsa dancing with my girlfriend (just dating at the time). Now, she had been dancing for months and months by this time and knew what she was doing. I on the other hand . . . well. . . this was my first time and I was never the most adventurous person on the dance floor to begin with. Honestly I was nervous about the whole situation. EVERYTHING! I mean I was even searching for a guide on the correct attire to wear when Salsa dancing! It’s miraculous that I even made it there for the class, but I was fueled by attraction to this new beautiful young woman I met so I threw my nervousness aside.
When I arrived at the dance club and started moving around in the class, I did fine. I picked up the beginner moves rather easily and I have some rhythm so I wasn’t a lost cause. The eye opening moment occurred when we were switching partners during the class. There ended up being an uneven number of men and women for the class and during one of the switches I was left partner-less. There I was . . . moving my body in an awkward fashion to the latin music. I kept trying to do the movements we were practicing as if I still had a partner. I felt like I was trying to dance with some imaginary woman who was not too thrilled to be my partner. It’s hard to express how strange and out of place I felt. I must have given off some sort of warning signal like the red light that goes off in a submarine. Because after 20 seconds or so my girlfriend came rushing over to save. . . I mean dance with me. She calmly pushed aside my imaginary partner and we began dancing together. I was back into the safe harbor of the known and the proverbial red alarm ceased.
Now during that 20 second period of partner-less dancing is when the light bulb went off. I thought to myself, “this is how new people must feel when they come to BJJ class for the first time”. Awkward, nervous, unsure of what exactly they are doing, etc. Not that I was ever short with people when I taught but I realized how important it is to make a new student feel at ease and how important it is to be as understanding as possible. The experienced also caused me to get very protective over new comers who must feel the same way I felt when I was dancing with my imaginary woman during my salsa lesson.
I started quizzing some of my students about how they felt when they came to their first lesson. Many of them had similar feelings. Fear and anxiety but that it looked really fun and they wanted to learn. One of my students was so nervous in fact, that he couldn’t even walk through the doors of the gym for 6 months. He would drive by and want to stop in but was just too nervous to come in. He said once he came in he was so excited and everyone was so inviting and patient with him. Heck, I remember my first time on the mats and I was incredibly nervous as well.
So whether you’re an instructor or just a higher belt on the mats, help build a helpful and positive atmosphere in your gym. If you are on the mats and you see a fresh new face, try and help them feel comfortable. Remind them that it’s ok to mess things up at first, just as its ok for all of us to mess things up from time to time. Remember, experts in BJJ are simply beginners that never quit.
If you enjoyed reading this then please take these 5 things away from the post.
Thanks for reading!