A BJJ Curriculum Isn’t a Development Model

I've spent a lot of years building martial arts curricula. My first real attempt was back in 2007, and since then I've written, rewritten, expanded, condensed, reorganized and completely rebuilt programs more times than I can remember.

For a long time, I thought the hardest part was figuring out what people needed to learn and putting it in the right order. What techniques should come first? What positions should follow? When should we introduce submissions? How much should we repeat? How much material is enough?

Those questions are important, but after doing this for long enough, I've come to think there is a bigger question that is much easier to overlook:

What exactly are we trying to develop?

A curriculum can give us a very good answer to what we want an athlete to learn. It can organize techniques, positions, concepts and problems into a logical progression. But that doesn't automatically tell us how the athlete should change as a result of going through it.

That distinction sounds simple, but I think it has some pretty significant consequences for the way we teach BJJ.

Imagine two students who walk into a gym on the same day. They attend the same classes, learn the same techniques, drill with the same partners and are exposed to essentially the same material for the next two years.

On paper, they have had the same education. But after two years, they may be very different grapplers.

One student may have developed a good understanding of distance, pressure, frames and timing. They recognize what their opponent is trying to do and can make adjustments when their first attack doesn't work. They have developed a reliable passing system and a few positions where they are particularly dangerous.

The other student may know just as many techniques but still react to everything. They wait for familiar situations, change techniques randomly and depend heavily on their coach to explain what they should have done after the roll.

Both students were exposed to the same material. Something very different happened to them. That's the part of coaching I find interesting.

What Should Change?

A useful way to think about development is to ask what has changed about the way the athlete grapples, not simply what they've learned.

Early on, students need to recognize positions and learn reliable solutions to common problems. As they develop, they should become better at recognizing when those solutions apply, understanding how their opponent's reactions change the situation and connecting one solution to another. Eventually, they should be able to encounter something unfamiliar and work toward a solution without needing the coach to provide the answer.

That's the progression I'm interested in: from knowing techniques, to recognizing problems, to making decisions, to solving problems independently.

But there's a complication. As athletes develop, they also accumulate more techniques and therefore more possible decisions. And if that knowledge isn't organized into a coherent game, getting better at BJJ can actually make BJJ feel more complicated.

That's where I think analysis paralysis starts to become a problem.

From Techniques to Decisions

This is one of the reasons BJJ can produce a strange form of "analysis paralysis".

The more techniques you learn, the more possible choices you have. If those choices aren't organized into a functional understanding of the game, additional knowledge can actually make decision-making harder.

I've seen students who consume enormous amounts of instructional material. They know what a technique is. They know the counter to that technique. They know another variation and another counter. But when they roll, they still don't know what they're trying to accomplish. The problem isn't necessarily that they need more information. They may need to become better at recognizing situations.

A good grappler gradually becomes better at seeing what is happening before it becomes obvious. They recognize that a particular frame is preventing a pass. They recognize that an opponent's elbow has moved too far away from their body. They feel that their opponent has committed too much weight in one direction. They recognize that a failed attack has created another opportunity.

It's less about remembering an answer and more about understanding the problem.

Eventually, the athlete should be able to encounter a situation they haven't specifically practiced and still work toward a solution. They may not immediately know the perfect technique, but they have enough understanding of leverage, balance, pressure, movement and position to experiment, make adjustments and find something that works.

That's a major developmental milestone.

The Athlete Changes, So Training Has to Change

This also means that students at different stages shouldn't necessarily spend their training time solving problems in the same way. A beginner needs instruction, repetition and relatively simple problems. They are still building the vocabulary they need to participate. As the athlete becomes more competent, the problems should become less predictable. They should make more decisions, encounter different reactions and work with increasingly difficult training partners. At some point, the coach should deliberately create situations where there isn't an obvious answer.

That doesn't mean making training unnecessarily complicated. It means giving the athlete opportunities to develop the ability to figure things out.

This is also where individual differences become important.

Two students can have completely different needs even when they are at roughly the same level. One might have excellent guard retention but almost no offensive development from the guard. Another might have a strong passing game but repeatedly give up their back during transitions. One may need more technical instruction, while another needs to stop collecting techniques and spend more time solving problems with the ones they already have. If we give both students exactly the same training simply because they're the same rank, we're ignoring some pretty important information.

The athlete has to influence the development process.

Eventually, You Have to Develop a Game

There is another change that happens as a grappler becomes more experienced.

At first, they're learning BJJ. Eventually, they're developing their BJJ.

That doesn't mean they should specialize too early or ignore areas where they're weak. A good grappler still needs broad competence. But eventually they should begin discovering where their particular strengths lie and building those strengths into a coherent game. Maybe they become an excellent half-guard player. Maybe they develop an unusually effective passing system. Maybe they prefer wrestling into top position. Maybe they build a dangerous submission sequence that starts from several different positions. Those things emerge from the interaction between the athlete, their physical attributes, their experience and the problems they've encountered in training.

The goal isn't to make every student grapple exactly the same way. The goal is to give them enough understanding and experience that they can eventually develop an effective way of grappling that belongs to them.

So How Do We Know They're Developing?

This is where assessment becomes important, because development has to be observable. We can't simply assume that an athlete is improving because they've been training for another six months or because they've learned the material in the next section of the curriculum.

For example, if I want to know whether someone has actually developed their mount escape, I don't need to ask them to demonstrate the technique for me. I can put them underneath a competent training partner in mount and give them a problem to solve. Can they recognize the position before it becomes completely compromised? Can they establish the frames and movement they need? Can they choose an appropriate escape based on what their partner is doing? If the first escape is stopped, can they adjust rather than simply repeat the same attempt? That's a much more useful assessment of their ability than watching them demonstrate a perfectly cooperative mount escape.

The same thing can be done throughout BJJ. If we're developing guard passing, we can give the athlete a specific guard and an opponent whose job is to retain it. If we're developing guard retention, we can start from a compromised position and see whether the athlete can recover. If we're developing submissions, we can create positional situations where the athlete has to recognize the opportunity rather than being handed the submission during a drill. If we're developing decision-making, we can give them a problem with several possible solutions and see whether they can recognize and respond to the opponent's actions.

The important part is that we're assessing what the athlete can do, not simply what they can demonstrate when we tell them exactly what to do.

And assessment shouldn't only happen at the end of a program. If we test an athlete at the beginning of a developmental period and then put them through the program without looking at them again until the end, we've missed a lot of useful information. Regular observation gives us the opportunity to see whether the athlete is progressing, where they are getting stuck and whether the training we're providing is actually producing the changes we want.

It also gives us a way to evaluate the program itself. If ten students consistently struggle with the same transition, that may not be ten individual student problems. It may be a problem with how we introduced the skill, how we practice it, how we sequence it or how much experience we give them before asking them to perform it. If students can demonstrate a technique perfectly but consistently fail to recognize when to use it during live training, we've learned something important about the gap between our teaching and their development.

That's what I want assessment to do. It shouldn't simply be a test that tells us whether the student passed or failed. It should give the coach information about what the athlete can do, what they can't do yet and what needs to change next.

That makes assessment part of the development process rather than something we do after the development process is supposedly finished.

The Curriculum Is Still Important

None of this means I think curriculum is unimportant. Quite the opposite.

A well-designed curriculum gives a coach structure. It prevents us from randomly teaching whatever technique happens to come to mind that day. It allows us to organize material, revisit important concepts, create appropriate progressions and make sure students aren't simply left to wander through an enormous library of BJJ techniques.

I've become much more convinced of the value of structured curriculum over the years.

But I've also become more convinced that the curriculum is only one part of the job.

The real question isn't whether we taught the student everything we intended to teach.

It's whether the student became more capable because of what we taught them. That requires us to pay attention to the athlete, not just the lesson plan. We have to observe where they struggle, look for patterns in their mistakes, assess what they can actually do and continually adjust the environment around them. That's development.

When I started building programs, I was primarily focused on creating the best possible curriculum. Now I'm more interested in creating the best possible system for developing grapplers.

The difference is subtle, but it changes how you think about almost everything.

• You start asking less about how many techniques someone knows and more about whether they can recognize a problem.

• You ask less about whether they can demonstrate a technique and more about whether they can use it at the right time.

• You ask less about whether they've been taught a particular position and more about whether they understand the relationships between positions.

• And eventually, you stop trying to make the athlete dependent on the coach for every answer.

You want them to become increasingly capable of seeing the problem, making a decision, trying a solution, learning from the result and adapting. That's what I think it means to develop a grappler.

The goal isn't simply to give someone more BJJ. It's to progressively give them more ability.

That's a much harder thing to build than a list of techniques. And it's the part of coaching I'm much more interested in now.