How to train smarter, not harder

by Wayne Tomsett, author of Cheat Codes: The Secret Guide to Winning on the Mats

www.cheatcodesbjj.co.uk

There’s a saying I use a lot in class just before we start sparring: “look after each other.”

Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu can be, and frankly often is, an exhausting and painful sport. And the older you get, the bigger toll it takes on your body. It’s therefore critical that you learn to manage how you train, because if your only training strategy is to roll until your lungs collapse, then congratulations, you’ve won a trip to A&E! Or at the very least, a wonderful dose of extended fatigue. Hooray. 

If you want to make sustainable progress in this sport, you need to understand how to train smarter, not harder.

The “Go Hard or Go Home” Trap

For something as critical and interwoven in the sport as free sparring, it’s always amazed me how little advice is given on how to spar intelligently.

You might get vague advice like:   “Stay calm.”      “Try not to use strength.”         “Work from bad positions.”Fine ideas, and in many cases correct, but almost useless if you’re a new grappler with no context.

So what tends to happen is you slap hands, bump fists, and go to war. You burn through your gas tank in 6 minutes and stagger off the mat feeling heroic… and then you spend the next five minutes staring in the abyss as your heart feels like it’s going to burst from your chest. 

Adrenaline courses through you. You are knackered, your forearms hurt. But despite all the effort, did you actually learn anything?

Why Training Smarter Beats Training Harder

The problem with going 100% every round is that it is not sustainable, nor is it educational.

The more exhausted you get, the worse your technique becomes. Your reactions slow down, your timing goes, the worse your decision making becomes. And when your partner is just as tired, that combination turns into sloppy, dangerous play of a kind that gets people injured.

Training hard isn’t bad. But training hard all the time is.

If you want longevity, and better still, continuous improvement in Jiu-Jitsu, you need balance. You have to approach each round with purpose.

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