White Belt - How To Survive Brazilian Jiu Jitsu: Part4, Avoid Overwhelm & Focus On One Technique/position at a time

White Belt - How To Survive Brazilian Jiu Jitsu: Part4, Avoid Overwhelm & Focus On One Technique/position at a time

There are a lot of positions, a lot of moves from each position and a lot of submissions within what is allowed in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Without a clear and structured syllabus for the level you are at from the system or from your instructor, the opportunity is for you to focus on what you want to focus on. But DO focus, pick something and get really good at it. I started by working on escapes and not being submitted from the weakest positions i.e. while my opponent is mounted on me or has my back. Then when I felt like I progressed there I started to build on my ‘closed guard’ game where I proactively dragged my opponent into my closed guard (with me lying on my back, legs wrapped around my opponent).

The joy and the intrigue of the Brazilian Jiu Jitsu system is the sheer scale of it, but the human brain is very easily overloaded.

As Bruce Lee said:

“I fear not the man who has practised 10,000 kicks once. But I fear the man who has practised one kick 10,000 times.”

You have to give yourself time to level up on a particular position, move or skill by focusing on it. In my case, being a heavier and stronger guy, I found that I could naturally succeed with hip bridge reversals on my opponent to take me from top to bottom, and I also found myself in side control on top quite a lot. So I chose not to work further on the hip bridge moves as I naturally had an advantage there, but instead focused on getting more agile to move from being fully mounted to half guard or to getting back into closed guard from bad positions. I also have not yet spent much time on trying to execute any submissions outside of those I can perform from side control – so for me setting up an Americana and then switching to an Ezekiel or collar choke is quite productive from side control as I feint for one while really wanting the other.

Being heavier I also quite often end up with my head and chest weighing down on a sprawled opponent, so naturally the guillotine choke or D’arce chokes would be good options if I could actually execute them – but I’m happy to come back to those techniques when I am ready to focus on them for the next stage in my development.

If you just chase everything everywhere, you can easily end up knowing not enough of anything to  be a threat to your opponent, but if you focus on some go to defensive and offensive moves you can make it hard for an opponent to submit you and give yourself a chance of actively winning, even though you still have massive holes in your game you will need to fill later.

Author: Jimmy Rose, lifelong martial artist, BJJ enthusiast committed to helping white belt beginners progress in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu