If you haven’t read it yet, please first read our pedagogy article here:
This article is the main article to go through when you first go through the coaching program.
This article here is a reference guide if you just want to review periodically while you’re going through the in person sessions:
Coaching jiu jitsu is arguably a lot harder than coaching in other sports. If you coached soccer, wrestling, tennis, baseball, football, or pretty much any other sport you can think of, you’d have several HUGE advantages that we don’t have:
Both of these drastically impact how we are able to coach our sport effectively. In any given class, you’re likely to have a wide range of skill levels. It’s not uncommon to have white belts that have been to 4 grappling classes in their life in the same class as black belts with ten years of mat time.
You also will never have the luxury of having the same people in day after day to build a structured schedule over time. You can’t work on something Monday, then have something on Tuesday that rely’s on Monday’s content, then something on Wednesday that rely’s on Tuesdays content, etc..
Lastly, there’s a huge disparity in goals for BJJ practitioners. Some people just want a social club to go to. Some want to obsessively study and get as good as possible in a short amount of time. Some students just want to destress and get a sweat in. You can’t rely on students studying the curriculum in their free time in order to understand class content.
All of this makes coaching jiu jitsu HARD.
The goal of a good coach is to ensure safety as much as possible, foster a playful environment, and maximize skill development in our students. The best tool we have for these goals is grappling games. We want to maximize the time that students spend playing these games, and minimize the time they spend watching us talk.
They do need a break in between games to rest - they can’t grapple for an hour straight, so while they’re recovering we have a natural pause in order to communicate information to them that can hopefully improve their performance and skill acquisition rate. However, at the end of the day we still want to maximize the time that students spend playing these games, and minimize the time they spend watching us talk.
This is something that I struggle with at times because I’m so excited about jiu jitsu and just want to share all of the neat things I know about a position or concept, but 99% of the time it’s not actually very helpful to students.
You don’t want to be the “sage on a stage”. Most grapplers that have been playing the sport for several years can show you 10+ variations on any random move, but that not only doesn’t help students, it actively hurts their skill acquisition rates & retention.
95% of their learning will come from playing games (including just sparring). We want to prioritize their time spent playing games above all else.