Brazilian Jiu-jitsu Teaching Experiment II

Recently, I taught a class at Evolve Academy. I had a simple vision. I wanted to create a focused lesson that reinforced the technique in different ways.

What we’re going to do here is go back and try to highlight what was good and bad about that approach.

Class Structure

  • Free Form Drilling – 10 minutes
  • Technical Instruction and Practice – 25 minutes
  • Situational Rolling – 25 Minutes

Free Form Drilling

The warm up for the class was just drilling. There were no conditions set on it. They just grabbed partners and worked on whatever they wanted back and forth.

There is a reason that I do that in this particular class. The main one is that at least a good five minutes after class starts there will still be students trickling in. One factor behind that is that there is another class right before this one, but there is a parking lot that separates the two classes.

They could all do better on rushing over though.

Anyway, there’s clear benefit to drilling but in this case it didn’t help reinforce the lesson. That is something that can be addressed.

Technical Instruction and Practice

There was one technique taught. It was split up into two parts. In addition, there was also a drill shown. It focused on maintaining the dominant position that the technique required.

The first part of the technical instruction focused on establishing the grip and details about applying pressure. Then the second part was all about execution and finishing.

Situational Rolling

Let’s set the stage.

There was a set position, and we were doing one minute rounds with 15 seconds in between for resets. Also the initial form of rotation was top-bottom-out.

Basically, someone would come in on top. Then they would have another round on bottom. Then they would be out.

The key advantage of this format is that there were many opportunities to work the technique against resistance.

Overview

In hindsight, I think it would have been a good idea to show the drill first and use that as the warmup. Then progress from there.

Overall though, it was a good class structure that really focused on teaching a small subset of Brazilian Jiu-jitsu.