How Should Wrestling for BJJ Be Taught?

I don't know how wrestling for BJJ should be taught. I can tell you how I teach it.

I'm a former Division I collegiate wrestler and a judo black belt, so it probably isn't surprising that I teach a lot of takedowns. In fact, nearly half of what I teach in grappling is takedown-oriented, and I teach both gi and no-gi.

But the longer I've coached, the more I've changed how I teach wrestling to BJJ students. The biggest change has been realizing that teaching takedowns to a new adult BJJ student probably shouldn't look much like the way I learned wrestling as a kid.

That seems obvious when you say it out loud, but I think it's something that gets overlooked. A lot of coaches, particularly experienced wrestlers, take the techniques and training methods that worked for them as young athletes and simply transplant them into an adult BJJ class. Then they wonder why the adults don't respond the same way.

I don't think the problem is necessarily the wrestling.

I think the learner is different.

Adults Aren't Just Big Kids

There is another reason I teach wrestling to adults differently than I would teach it to children, and it has less to do with physical ability than it does with the experience of failure. A nine-year-old can try a double leg for six weeks, get stuffed over and over again, get up and try it again without necessarily attaching much meaning to the failure. He's learning a new game, and failure is simply part of the game.

Adults can certainly learn the same way, but takedowns present a particular challenge because the failure is often more obvious and more physical than what happens in other parts of BJJ. If you miss an armbar or get your guard passed, you're already on the ground and the exchange continues. A failed takedown can be much more abrupt. You shoot, your partner sprawls, you lose your balance, and suddenly you're underneath someone or exposed to a position you didn't intend to be in. For someone who is new to wrestling, that can make the cost of trying feel much higher than it actually is.

There is also the simple fact that learning a takedown requires you to become comfortable with losing your balance. You're deliberately putting yourself into a position where you might be thrown or end up underneath your opponent. That's why I put so much emphasis on learning how to fall. Ukemi changes the experience of failure. If I know how to fall safely, getting thrown isn't a disaster. It's simply the consequence of trying something that didn't work.

This is important because learning to wrestle requires a willingness to fail repeatedly. I don't need an adult beginner to hit every takedown. I need him to be willing to attempt the takedown, find out what happened, get back up and try again. The goal isn't to eliminate failure. The goal is to make failure safe enough, normal enough and useful enough that the student is willing to keep learning.

That's one of the responsibilities of the coach. We can choose lower-risk techniques, control the intensity, teach people how to fall and create situations where students get many opportunities to try. We can make it clear that getting taken down isn't embarrassing and that a failed attempt isn't a bad training session. The student still has to be willing to put himself in that position, but the coach can create an environment where doing so makes sense.

And that principle extends well beyond wrestling. People don't learn new skills by avoiding failure. They learn by getting enough useful failures that they can figure out what works. Our job as coaches is to make those failures productive rather than simply painful.

I Want Them to Try

Because of that, I tend to approach takedown development differently with a new adult student.

I want to give them a series of takedowns that carry relatively little consequence when they fail. If the attack doesn't work, I don't want the student to immediately end up in a position where they are giving up their back, getting choked or spending the next thirty seconds trying to survive.

I want failure to be relatively cheap.

That doesn't mean I want to protect them from resistance. Quite the opposite. I want them wrestling. I want them experiencing the difficulty of trying to take down someone who doesn't want to be taken down. But I want the environment to communicate something important:

Trying is the goal.

If you get the takedown, great. If you don't, try again. You didn't lose anything simply because the first attempt didn't work.

That changes the culture of the room. Instead of learning that takedowns are something you attempt only when you're reasonably certain they'll succeed, the student starts learning that attacking is normal. You take your shot, you see what happens, you learn from it and you go again.

Eventually we'll make the problems harder. We'll add more counters. We'll introduce more sophisticated attacks. We'll put the student into situations where a failed attack has real consequences. That's part of becoming a good grappler.

But I don't think we have to start there.

Before I can teach someone to be good at wrestling, I need to make them willing to wrestle.

Teach People How to Fall

The other thing I care a lot about is ukemi - breakfalls. Ukemi is part of my warmup. Every time.

I don't think teaching breakfalls should be something you check off once in an introductory class and never revisit. I want falling to become a normal part of training.

Every time I teach a takedown or throw, I'm also thinking about the person receiving it.

• How is my partner going to land?

• What should they do with their head?

• Where should their hands go?

• How can I execute this technique in a way that allows my partner to land safely?

While one person is practicing the offensive technique, the other person is practicing how to receive it.

That creates a different culture around takedowns. You're not trying to throw your partner onto the mat as hard as possible. You're trying to develop the skill of throwing someone while they develop the skill of being thrown. I think that matters enormously for adults.

If you're afraid of hitting the mat, you're going to be hesitant to wrestle. If you know how to fall, getting taken down becomes much less intimidating. And once you aren't afraid of the consequences of falling, you can start taking more risks. That's exactly what I want.

Randori Isn't a Competition

The third part is how I want people to approach Randori (sparring).

I don't want every takedown round to turn into a miniature wrestling tournament.

This is one of the things I've always appreciated about the traditional concept of judo randori. Takayuki Ishikawa and Donn Draeger wrote about it very clearly in Judo Training Methods:

“Randori (sparring) must not develop into contest type of judo. True, randori should be a hard practice, but it is a period of training, not a determination as to who is a winner or loser.”

That idea has always resonated with me.

Randori should be hard. There should be resistance. You should be trying to throw your partner, and your partner should be trying to stop you. But the purpose is still training. It's not a referendum on who is better.

There should be a lot of failed attacks. There should be successful attacks. There should be counters and combinations and people getting thrown and immediately getting back up and trying again. If nobody is getting thrown because everyone is terrified of losing, something has gone wrong.

I've seen this happen plenty of times. One person gets taken down and decides they aren't going to let it happen again. Their partner realizes that the resistance has increased, so they start attacking harder. The first person responds by defending even harder. Pretty soon neither person is experimenting anymore. They're fighting.

There is absolutely a place for that kind of training. If you're preparing someone for competition, eventually they need to experience very hard, realistic resistance.

But not every training round needs to be a fight. If every round becomes a contest, people start protecting their egos instead of developing their skills.

The Coach Has to Protect the Purpose of the Practice

This is where the coach has a responsibility. It's very easy for a room to drift from practice into competition. If I let that happen every time we spar, the strongest or most experienced people will naturally begin to dominate the training environment.

The newer students learn that the safest thing to do is not attack. That's the exact opposite of what I want. I want the room to become a place where you can attempt something, fail, get thrown, learn why it failed and immediately try again.

That's what Ishikawa and Draeger were getting at when they talked about combination throws, evasion and counterattacking being practiced freely. The point of randori is not to protect yourself from every possible loss. It's to create opportunities to study what happens when you attack another person who is actively resisting.

That requires a certain amount of generosity from training partners. It also requires a coach who is willing to enforce the culture. Sometimes I have to remind people that the goal of the round isn't to prove that they're better than their partner.

The goal is to make both people better wrestlers.

Wrestling for BJJ Isn't Just Wrestling

This is probably the biggest lesson I've learned from teaching wrestling to BJJ students.

I don't think you can simply take a folkstyle wrestling practice, put a bunch of adults in rash guards, and call it wrestling for BJJ.

The techniques matter. Wrestling fundamentals matter. Hard training matters. Resistance matters. But the context changes the problem. A BJJ student isn't necessarily trying to become a folkstyle wrestler. They're learning how to use takedowns as part of a larger grappling game.

That means the questions eventually become different.

• What happens when the takedown fails?

• What happens when your opponent pulls guard?

• What happens when they attack a guillotine?

• What happens when you land on top?

• What happens when you don't land cleanly?

• How does the gi change the problem?

• How does the cage change it?

• How does the threat of submissions change the way you wrestle?

Those are BJJ wrestling questions. And I think the best way to teach them is to create an environment where the student is willing to experiment long enough to discover the answers.

That's why I've changed the way I teach takedowns. I'm not trying to make every adult BJJ student into the wrestler I was. I'm trying to make them comfortable wrestling.

I want them to understand that getting thrown isn't failure. Missing a takedown isn't failure. Getting countered isn't failure. Those things are information.

Eventually, I want the student to develop enough confidence that they stop worrying about whether the takedown is going to work and start worrying about what happens next.

That's when wrestling starts becoming part of their BJJ. And that's ultimately what I'm trying to create. Not a room full of people who are afraid to shoot unless they know they're going to score. A room full of grapplers who are willing to attack, willing to get taken down, willing to learn from what happened and willing to attack again.

That's how I want wrestling to feel in a BJJ room. Not a test of who is the better wrestler. Practice for becoming a better grappler.