The Theory of Game Plans
This article began as a response to readers asking me about how I prepared for tournament.
Then it was to offer insight into how I got my purple belt.
Most recently, it’s how I’m filling a request that I discuss the theory of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu more, not just the application.
Let’s see if I can’t hit all those targets.
During the weeks leading up to the tournament, I was training without any direction in mind. I was still trying out new moves, playing with open guards, switching focus every couple days, some x-guard here, taking the back there, all sorts of chokes and sweeps. This is what I call “The Fun Game”.
The Saturday before the tournament, my instructor Eduardo grabbed me for a round of sparring.
I kept trying to pull all of the funky fresh moves, and he just kept crushing them with controlled pressure and weight.
After Eduardo drove through my guard and tapped me for the fifth or sixth time, I decided I had to change what I was doing. I don’t know how yet, I just knew I had to do something different.
The next time we started, I just did what came naturally and immediately jumped to the tightest triangle possible and started aggressively attacking the trapped arm.
From inside the choke, Eduardo wheezed “Yes! That’s it!”
At the end of the round, Eduardo told me “I’m giving you pressure where you need it.” I didn’t appreciate what this meant until a week later, after the tournament.
The rest of the week leading up to the competition, all I did was drill and train my high guard. This is what I call “The Game Plan”.
Suddenly, none of the other blue belts could touch me. I even started regularly catching purple belts who I’d never thought I had a chance with before.
Going into the tournament, I was calm and confident. Having a game plan eliminated all of the “But what if he…?” thoughts that run through most people’s minds.
I won 3 of my matches by submission, exactly as I had practiced. Even in the matches that were won differently, I was always able to keep myself on track by working towards my goals, as ingrained by drilling my game plan.
I would like to share the theory behind this mindset, using the two extreme ends of my personal games to illustrate it.
The Fun Game
Open, loose, flowing, experimental.
In everyday training, I’ll play around with new positions, like the one above, which comes from Roleta’s upside down guard and helicopter sweeps. I’ll see how far I can go with a new grip or hook.
When I’m playing like this, I’m not overly concerned with maintaining position or getting my guard passed, which is fine for sparring, but will get me smashed if they’re serious, like in tournament.
The Game Plan
Closed, tight, constrictive, conventional.
If I’m serious, I’m going to snap on the tightest closed guard ever, relentlessly break posture and climb up as high as possible. From there I’m going to lock my guard over one shoulder and attack the neck and arms and look for triangles and omoplatas.
I know exactly what I want and I’m going to go straight for it—they know what I want, but they are going to go through hell to escape.
You will develop your own style, so I’m not saying you must have a tight closed guard like this. You could apply this line of thinking to any position, and in fact, all positions as a whole. I’m simply using my personal style of guard to illustrate the more important point of finding your ideal game plan.
The take-away lesson here is the different mindsets of these two games, and knowing when to use them.
In my fun game, I’m playing with possibilities:
“Can I? Can he? What if? Let’s see.”
In my game plan, I’m working towards inevitabilities:
“If I… If he… I will. He will.”
Don’t mistake imposing your game with muscling moves. You should be as technical as you can be and not force a square peg into a round hole. But you should be working towards definite goals.
Don’t confuse being technical with being lazy.
Building a comprehensive game plan is intermediate theory, and requires intermediate skill, so I don’t recommend all of you run out and make one. Beginners shouldn’t worry about this too much.
Especially as a white belt and for much of blue belt, you just won’t yet know enough to put together a comprehensive game plan. Nor do I think you really need one at that point.
At that time, you’re still learning and collecting basic techniques, working on defenses and escapes, developing gross motor skills like bridging and shrimping hip movement.
These are more important than a game plan, since they are the foundation that the rest of your training (game plan included) will be built on.
The one exception to this is when you’re preparing for a tournament, but then the depth and level of detail in the game plan should match your skill level.
For example, my white belt game plan was simply “Close the bamboos. Climb the bamboos. Turn turn turn”, which is to say “Close guard. Climb. Turn your hips.”
Anything more complicated than that would have been lost on me then.
With all this talk about the importance of a solid game plan, I don’t want you to think that the fun game isn’t also important. You could also call it the “learning game”, since it is where you have a chance to try new moves.
The danger of a game plan is stagnating by never gaining skill outside of it. When someone comes along who has an answer to your A-game, you need a plan B to fall back on.
The fun game is a needed balance to the game plan because it takes you outside of your comfort zone, which is important to expanding and improving your overall game.
In this article I have only just described the concept of game plans in a general sense. In later ones, I will go deeper into the specifics of how to choose the specific positions and techniques.
I’ve never seen anyone write a piece on strategy like this before. I know when I was telling people about this article, they were overjoyed since they’d always wished someone would lay this topic out clearly, so they could have learned these lessons before they went into a tournament with no game plan and got smashed.
I’m happy to help fill the void, and if you’d like to see more, please consider supporting the journal so I can continue to share.
January 3rd, 2007 at 5:58 pm
You cheated. You didn’t talk about the purple thingy. You seem to be a bit of a phenom – the blue was fast, but the hallowed purple, which most instructors seem a LOT more reticent to hand out, also came fast, right? It would be nice to hear how things clicked for you – whether it came from massive amounts of mat hours, natural talent, extra conditioning or a history of athletics, study on the side, etc. We have to assume luck didn’t play much of a part. :-)
It would also be fun to hear about training, conditioning, diet, the foundations on which a long, sustained, and demanding practice rest, and which don’t get discussed much at the academy (but get discussed too much, in a disorganized fashion, on the internet).
For example:
1. How many days of group classes per week do you take? How many do you recommend for others, and does skill level/experience make a difference?
2. How frequent are your injuries, how serious, what is your strategy – grin and bear it, work around them, triage and only take time off for injuries that won’t heal if you throw more rolling at them….
3. How do you balance the demands of work (school), social life, etc. (One guy at our academy admitted that he is happy his gf lives out of state since it gives him more time to practice!)
4. Do you exercise with weights, kettlebells, bodyweight exercises? After class? On days alternating with classes?
5. Do you do any extra drilling, beyond shrimps etc. in class? Do you see benefits from doing extra conditioning drills that are jits specific?
In short, there seems to be a need for a concise beginner’s guide to jiu jitsu. Not a book, but a syllabus for the semester ahead. Not a road map, but a checklist. Not the peripheral items, but the essentials. Cliff Notes for the first year of life on the mat. (And not a guide to being another Aeso; just a guide for the “average student” who wants to end the year “better than average.)
January 3rd, 2007 at 8:08 pm
Nice write-up. Something most of us probably do implicitly but rarely explicitly.
One of the problems I have is imposing my game on others (three blues in particular, my main competition at this rank). The difficulty lies in their imposing their game (which seems to mainly be crushing me from top) on me. I end up playing catch-up the entire time. Obviously that is partly due to holes in my execution.
January 4th, 2007 at 1:14 am
And this my friends is what Llyod Irvin charges bajillions of dollars for…
I think everyone needs to work on a gameplan, it was the one huge thing I took away from watching “the Twister” a few years ago and it made me realise that all of the top guys only really use five or six moves in competition. They are great not because they know more moves but because they know them better than you do. My biggest problem now is being motivated to train the “A-Game” as I find it boring and repetetive.
I guess I need to get back into competing, once my knee is repaired…
Nice post btw.
January 4th, 2007 at 1:29 am
Olddog, I think he progressed so quickly by being so clearly obsessed and technical. But I want the answers to your questions too. :)
January 4th, 2007 at 2:00 am
I don’t have any broad reaching advice on all of those points to offer at the moment but I can answer your specific questions.
1. I usually go to group classes at least once per day Monday through Saturday. Sometimes twice. I’ll sometimes take a day off if I’m feeling beat up or have other important things to do, but usually only if I’ve already got in 3-4 classes already.
I recommend training as much as you can (balanced against injuries and burn out). Three times per week is probably the ideal for most people, since it gives you time to rest but is still enough to improve. Two classes may be okay for maintenance but difficult to make gains in. One class is not enough for anyone.
2. I usually have some kind of injury, ranging from annoying to serious. I’ll often train through less serious stuff like cauliflower ear, jammed fingers, sore joints, a generally beat up feeling, etc. I will take time off to heal if I have a serious and acute injury like a popped elbow, twisted knee, bizarre hip injury (that only I seem to get).
Right now, for example, I have a pulled back muscle from yesterday which I expect to heal by tomorrow with some stretching. Nothing serious.
But I also tore something in my abdominal muscles three weeks which has yet to heal, and it may be a hernia. It has gotten progressively worse so I am planning on seeing a doctor, though I’ll probably keep training too and just trying to baby the spot.
You need to know your own body and be able to tell which injuries to ignore, which need a little rest and ice to heal, and which should stop training and require a doctor.
3. I don’t have a day job any more and I don’t go to school. My social life is after class and on the weekends.
4. I don’t do any conditioning like that. Unless you count stretching.
5. I do a lot of extra drilling and functional exercises after class and on Sunday open mats. I think this is extremely valuable. This is where most of my extra conditioning comes from.
January 4th, 2007 at 9:41 am
I love that you mentioned “climb the bamboos”. Though some of the effect is lost when you can’t hear Eduardo’s voice as he yells that across the mat… or see the other guy’s face when he realizes he doesn’t know how to defend it, because he doesn’t know what “bamboos” are.
January 4th, 2007 at 12:52 pm
Thanks Aeso. Your point by point reply to my longish post is very helpful. In particular, this advice is golden for me:
“I recommend training as much as you can (balanced against injuries and burn out). Three times per week is probably the ideal for most people, since it gives you time to rest but is still enough to improve. Two classes may be okay for maintenance but difficult to make gains in. One class is not enough for anyone.”
It’s great to hear that three classes a week is the tipping point where you can make real progress. I haven’t hit that magic number yet, but I’m getting there.
I originally started with a single class a week – I am in my 50’s so it was pretty daunting to take ANY class that was a lot like competing in a tournament every week (the rolling is pretty intense at our academy since it is located near a major university and we get a lot of younger, athletic students, often with a wrestling or judo background, who are really balls to the wall – think several merciles AJ’s). Increasing to two classes a week was the first major step for me – plenty of time to heal (although at the time I thought my bruises were getting bruises and my injuries were getting injuries).
Then I found that two classes a week still weren’t enough to make tangible gains – at least not when my classmates were doing three or more.
Trying to improve my general fitness level in between classes with weights, conditioning drills, and stretches was helpful, but no subsitute for more training.
Without consciously planning it, my first step to getting in more mat time, even before I upped to twice a week at the academy, was to take some private lessons from one of 10th Planet’s brown belts. I thought I was just learning a little about no-gi vs. gi, but in fact I was learning general jiu jitsu principles and applications, and after a while started rolling with the instructor, as well as being shown movements. At first I was apprehensive about rolling at all with someone who’d been a wrestler and a bjj tournament competitor, but unlike the over-the-top group rolling at the academy, he eased me into rolling gradually and progressively moderated his resistance and counters, turning rolling into an instructional, as opposed to a purely competitive experience. Of course at the end of a session he’d tell me he wasn’t going to hold back, so I could get a full feel for things, and that was also eye opening.
I’ve now finally bitten the bullet and signed up for private lessons at my own academy, lessons that will carry me through the summer, from my own instructor. I was very happy to find out that, unlike the two instructionals I had observed earlier at the academy, where the instructor called out solo drills to the student or the student worked out with another student while the instructor guided them, in my series of lessons the instructor will actually be rolling with me, no training dummy. I think that rolling with a Brazilian black belt is going to really teach (my body) something about the game. I only hope he does the progressive thing, instead of just crashing me into an immediate wall of frustration and helplessness.
So while I haven’t hit the magic number of three classes (rolls) per week, I have hit a consistent twice a week schedule, with private lessons here and there so that most weeks I am on some sort of mat three times a week. This doesn’t leave much time to watch my hallowed DVD instructionals (and I’ve never been able to get Gustavo Machado’s Great Escapes to work for me consistently), but I still pull out Mastering Rubber Guard when I’m – ahem – in the el bano and review a section or two (that’s probably my most valuable book, it’s laid out so buffet style).
This is my sixth month of practice. The most important lesson I’ve learned at this point is that no matter how much I dance around the issue, or look for substitute ways to advance (private lessons, DVDs, conditioning) there is simply, at the end of the day, no substitute for rolling. Unfortunately rolling is daunting at times (although I don’t dread rolling with some particularly tough class mates the way I used to), and I literally get/feel “beat up” after each such session. So I’m glad to hear that 3 classes, and not 5 classes, a week is the “magic number!”
I am also happy to hear that the Aeso has made progress at Eduardo de Lima’s – even against the athletic onslaughts of the Darth Vader-ish, athletic AJ – primarily through dedication and technique rather than extreme weight lifting etc. But please expand on your point #5 at some future date – for example what kinds of extra functional exercises do you do. I have now purchased Kesting’s Drills DVD (grin of shame) so if you have pulled some favorite drills out of there, please let me know.
January 5th, 2007 at 11:07 pm
Aesopian is no cheater! He’s also not a phenom but just an average guy with a big work ethic. Much like anything really worthwhile, there are no secret shortcuts. BJJ is one of the most honest martial arts out there and you will get you back exactly what you put into it—no more or less. Aesopian not only works his butt off on this website, he’s no keyboard warrior and is on the mat more than most (sometimes even when the academy is closed).
If he’s training 6-7 times a week sometimes twice a day and the average bear gets 2-3 classes a week in… I’m not mathematically inclined but I think most others can figure it out.
I’m with you OldDog53! It helps to be young with time to burn. I think Aesopian mentioned a back injury in a post and explained some stretching he did to recover in a day or so. I once saw him get his elbow popped in a sparring session and he used his youthful powers to heal it between matches. Since you can’t rewind time, just quit working to train more and start AesopianII.com to become independently wealthy ;-).
In all seriousness, I think a decent recipe for anyone to achieve some kind of personal success in BJJ would be: Train all you can, spend any of your daydreaming time on BJJ and always come to class with at least one question in mind, always spar with different people, and (injuries permitting) spar a minimum of 3 matches every class. I think this what our instructor has communicated to me over the years without actually verbalizing it. It works.
Rank is nice, but what’s nicer is what it really represents—the knowledge to back it up. Congrats on all your accumulated knowledge in such a “short time” Aesopian. I’m happy for you buddy.
December 14th, 2007 at 10:40 pm
Sorry to be commenting on this topic nearly a year late but I just found this journal a week or two ago from sherdog.
I have been thinking ALOT about this topic lately, game plan vs. no game plan. i think there are great benefits to both; no plan lets me see more options whether they work out or not, lets me see more, but i’m not sure if my technique is getting much better and I’m finding myself to have no stong part of my game.but if i roll with a game plan i feel like i am getting better at what i am already good at and mmy weak positions are still weak because i’m avoiding them, hopefully. I use to be particularly good on top and slow on bottom but now i think i’m middle of the road at both top and bottom.
when i focus on my weaker positions i feel like my better game is not developing and is slipping away because i am not working it as much. or shuold i be okay with having a rounded game with not being much better in a certain position?