How to improve your BJJ training with lower belts
By Leonardo Correa
Oct 04, 2019 - (3 min read)
Everybody thinks you need many higher belts in your gym to become better in BJJ. While it may be great to have many purple, brown, and black belts in your gym, not everyone would have this luxury. If this is your case, read on.
This was also the case of Rafael Lovato Jr. Here are some of his best tricks to improve your jiu-jitsu training with lower belts. Here is what he has to say:
- You are only allowed to submit lower belts from mount or back position. This makes you learn control while lower belts learn to escape and survive.
- Take notes from a training session, ask someone questions if you couldn’t deal with a guard situation. Look back in the future to compare to what you are currently doing.
- Have goals for the week, month. Plan sweeps or submissions you are going to do this week.
- Look back for reasons you lose a position in the competition. Analyze videos and try to figure it out yourself.
Here is his full video from Rafael Lovato Jr:
My additional tricks to improve with lower belts:
- Don’t tap them out too fast. Why? You will have to start the sparring again. I know is it tempting but don’t do it.
- Catch them on second or third chained submission. Even if you have an armbar, allow them to defend, switch to omoplata, allow them to lift their head a bit, then finish with a triangle. Take the same approach to any other sequence.
- Spend a lot of time with only one sub or position. When I was preparing for the worlds, I trained triangle from the guard for months. I started with white belts. Get the triangle, cross the legs, control the posture but NO squeeze at all. I used to spend almost a full 5 minutes rolling session just doing that. I experienced several types of reactions people could have. This made me learn multiple counters as well as being comfortable getting stacked. It will feel like drilling but with a live person reacting. This is in my opinion the best way to learn combined with specific training.
- Repetitions. See how Judo people train. They repeat thousands of times one move. See what you can learn from other martial arts and sports. Repeat with no resistance just for muscle memory but you really need live sparing with minimal resistance. That’s why late white belts and early blue belts are very important for learning.
Summary
You can improve the quality of your training sessions in a way that you and the lower belts learn together. Sometimes is not about training more but training smarter. I’ll be writing more about improving the quality of your training session. Stay tuned!
Osssssss!
Leonardo Correa
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