Guide: Reviewing Your BJJ Progress 

As 2023 winds to a close, it’s the perfect time to look back upon the year and assess your progress in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. A lot can happen in a year – and did… hopefully – so it might be difficult to figure out where to start.

Don’t worry. We’ve got you.

We’ve created these four main categories of development, so you can easily gauge where you’ve grown, where you’ve stagnated, and where you need to focus a bit more in 2024…

Skills

This is probably the most important category of development as a Brazilian jiu-jitsu practitioner. Lucky for you, if you’ve simply been consistent with your training, this happens without much conscious thought. You come, you learn, and eventually you’ll be able to apply it during live rolls. However, it you can always ramp up the speed at which you’re acquiring and honing new skills by drilling and studying.

A good way to assess the level of your skills development is by asking yourself these questions:

• Am I familiar with most – if not all – of the jiu-jitsu terms being used during class?
• Is my go-to submission different or the same as last year?
• Am I playing more – and different guards?
• Am I using more – and different passes?
• Am I chaining techniques?
• During live rounds, am I successfully executing more techniques and submissions than I did last year?

Fitness

This category will always be very specific to YOU. So, try to avoid measuring your fitness level to others in your academy or rank. Others may have more or less available time to work on their fitness, they may be older or younger, may have a family or just themselves to worry about. There are many, many factors that can affect one’s personal fitness at any given time during their life. What’s important is the fitness of you this year, versus the you of last year. Of course, unexpected injuries, the flu and your grandma’s Thanksgiving pie can have dramatically impacted your current fitness level, so consider your general level of fitness over the course of the year, and not necessarily as it is right at this moment. 

Here are a few questions to help you identify where that level might be:

• Am I getting winded before the end of a 5 minute roll? A six minute roll? A 10 minute roll?
• How many rolls can I do before I need to take a break (or roll with a non-World Champion juvenile)?
• Am I able to easily and efficiently do certain moves that I found difficult before?
• How often am I waking up body sore?
• Have I been consistent with my cross training (assuming you’re doing any at all… which you should be)?

Mindset

Actually, I lied. THIS is the most important category of development as a jiu-jitsu practitioner… by far. This is – or should be – the primary reason anyone does a martial art. Jiu-jitsu is a fantastic way to get fit, to learn something new, to meet new friends and have fun, but the most valuable benefit of jiu-jitsu is its ability to serve as a vehicle for mental and emotional growth. The more aware you are of this aspect of jiu-jitsu – and the more consciously you exercise it – the more benefits you reap.

How can you assess the development of your mindset? Start by asking yourself these questions:  

• Am I finding myself getting less frustrated during rolls when things don’t go my way?
• Am I gracefully acknowledging when a lower belt, a younger grappler, or an older practitioner taps me?
• Am I focusing more on the small successes (being able to do something I couldn’t before) than I am the overall outcome of the roll or match?
• Am I able to better manage my stress, anxiety and ego both on and off the mat?

Mastery

Mastery is related to, but different, from your skills development. And you don’t have to be a black belt to have seen progress in your mastery of jiu-jitsu. Mastery is defined more by your ability to consciously apply the skills you are learning, to articulate concepts and techniques to others, to see the interconnections between techniques, and by your timing, among others.

Here are a few questions to help you assess your mastery, at any belt:

• Are you able to easily explain various techniques to others, especially beginners?
• Are you able to quickly grasp new and unfamiliar concepts?
• Are you able to see the subtle differences between similar techniques?
• Are you able to see how certain techniques flow into others, and what steps you might need to get from point A to point B?
• Is your timing improving as it relates to initiating a technique or submission, or reacting to those of your training partners? 

If you’ve spent any amount of time on the mat, you’ve experienced some growth in one or all of these categories, if even minutely. Sometimes it may feel like you aren’t growing – and it may even feel like you are getting worse at times. But that is because at certain points in your career you’re growing exponentially, which makes any other time “feel” like you’re stagnating, or even going backward. But you are growing. Just more slowly.

So, keep faith in the process, and keep on keeping on.