One Technique One Thousand Times

Don't fear the person who has practiced a thousand techniques once. Fear the person who has practiced one technique a thousand times.

I learned this the slow way, which is the only way anyone actually learns it.

When I started training in Calgary in 2007, I was a collector. Every seminar, every DVD set, every technique a higher belt showed me after class went into the pile. I had answers for positions I'd never been in. I had counters to attacks nobody at my academy even used. What I didn't have was a single thing I could hit on a good blue belt who knew it was coming.

The guys who were beating me weren't doing that. They had a guard pass. One. Maybe a backup. And they had hit it so many times that knowing it was coming didn't help you. That's a strange feeling the first time you experience it from the bottom. You see the pass start, you know exactly where it ends, and you get passed anyway. There's no trick to defend against. Just reps you don't have.

Years later, training in New Jersey, I watched the best people in the world operate the same way. The rooms I was lucky enough to train in were not full of people learning new techniques. They were full of people drilling the same handful of movements past the point where most of us would call it boring. Boring is where the technique actually gets built. Everything before that is just learning the choreography.

It changed how I train, and honestly it changed how I do everything else. I stopped looking for new answers and started repeating the ones that worked. Same warmup. Same drilling structure. Same routine after class, down to the bottle I pull out of my gym bag. I built a soap company around that last one, which tells you how seriously I take the routine.

If you're a year or two into BJJ and frustrated, this is probably why. You're not short on techniques. Nobody is. There are more instructionals available right now than anyone could drill in ten lifetimes. You're short on repetitions of the two or three movements that fit your body and your game.

Pick one. Drill it until your training partners groan when they see it coming. Then drill it until the groan stops mattering.

That's the whole sport. Most of life, too.

Clean body. Clear mind.