BJJ Blog #5 Importance of Positional Drilling

Training and living up in Northern Canada, we do not have access to Black Belt at our Academy. Our club, Ares Training Centre, is overseen by a Black Belt, Marco Decosta based out his club Body of Four in Toronto, which is about 3.5 hour drive away. Occasionally a group of us has made the road trip down on weekends to be a part of their Sunday open mats or he has come up to teach a seminar.

This means that for almost all of our classes our taught by our more experienced blue belts at our club. We will warm-up for about 20 minutes or so, and then they will review few techniques or videos for us to practice and drill for that class for about 40 minutes, followed by 30 minutes or so of rolling.

As I mentioned in my previous post, there is a competition coming up the first weekend in November, down in Toronto that some of us will be making the road trip down for. Because we aren’t able to compete as frequently as other grapplers in more urban areas, we tend to take our competitions very seriously and ramp up our training and focus come competition time.

Our primary training focus in class over the next 2 months has switched from learning and drilling techniques to positional drilling of basic positioning. What this involves is taking your basic Jiu-Jitsu positions; Guard, Side Control, Mount, Back, etc. And work on holding your partner in that position as long as you can, while they focus on escape said position. Should your partner escape the position reset and go again.

Attempting to break guard

We are only 2 weeks in to this positional drilling and I am really enjoying it. A lot of times I find I that I am too concerned about learning a new sweep or submission to use against my opponent, when really this close to a competition I am not going to be able to get the reps in to get comfortable enough with a new move in the 2 months I have before the competition. So why not work on and perfect the basics.

Another reason I think this type of practice is important is because you are going to spend majority of your match in one of these basic positions that you know. So sharpen that tool and have it perfected for when the time comes to execute and it is second nature to you then you will not have to worry about holding Side Control and can focus on going for the submission instead.

The lastly my main reason for this is that sometimes I find that my positioning can be weak and my opponent will have no trouble escape my position, so any work and energy I used that I put in to get there was for nothing. In Jiu-Jitsu, gaining proper Position should always come before executing the Submission. As much as I want to go for that Kamura, it is not going work if my set-up is not done properly, having a strong and steady side control or mount is going to make that Kamura a 100x easier if I am positioned correctly.