Assess and Plan
Building grappling report cards and training camps.
It’s getting close to needing to solidify my training camp plans for ADCC Open Atlanta. The first part of any training program or intervention should be an assessment of where you’re at, and then developing a plan to get from there to where you want to be.
I’ve put together a “Jiu Jitsu Report Card” to rate myself on several subjects from 1 - 10. Obviously, this is relative to a person’s environment, peers, and level of competition. However, if your bathroom scale is off by 5 lbs. every time, you still know if the number is moving up or down.
That’s what we’re trying to do here.
I started with Danaher’s “3 Areas of Dominance”: pace, direction, and set-up. From there, I asked Google Gemini for some help and it expanded those three into 9 “subjects.” I added some sub-categories those 9 and ended with 16 total. The areas of need I identified for myself were:
Guard Passing (techniques)
Sweeps (techniques)
Transitions (tactics)
Mobility (physicality)
I haven’t competed in a long time, so I went digging around the internet and found a great piece by Chris Wojcik. The bullet points are:
Focus on grappling at a ratio of about 2:1, grappling : fitness.
Grappling sessions look like:
30 - 40 minutes technique / drilling
5 - 7 x 10 minute rounds
Limit yourself to 2 “hard” rounds
Make use of your training partners between rounds (ask questions, discuss tactics and techniques)
I have to resist the urge to do to myself what almost every other trainer does to their clients and write too prescriptive of a plan for the entire 8 weeks – as if nothing will change between now and then.
In recent years my limits is about 2 truly hard “development” days / week. When I stretch that to 3, it always seems like one of them gets ground down a bit.
Joel Jamieson’s recommended weekly split for recreational competitors is:
2 x Sparring (development)
2 x Stimulation (what I call cultivation)
1 x Rebound (active recovery)
1 x Passive Rest
If I feel like I absolutely have to train every day, then adding more active recovery days is possible if they’re actually contributing to recovery rather than hindering it – so I’ll have to use a HRM.
Now we need to get the grappling : fitness ratio right.
I’m getting ready for a grappling competition so development days should both be grappling. I teach class once / week so that’s a grappling-rebound day – though I’ll need to make sure I get some drilling rounds in because teaching and training aren’t the same.
Cultivation is typically where things go sideways, so I want to avoid “going medium.” If I error on the side of being “over recovered”, then I can always bump up the intensity later in camp.
Earlier this year I felt really good limiting myself to 3 days of grappling / week because the stoke stayed high and the extra fitness-rebound days kept me injury free and feeling like I was doing something productive. The adaptation I’d make to that now is if I can add a 4th chill-drill-and-mobility day, it’s effectively the same structure.
Finally, that leaves me with a weekly blueprint of:
Grappling x 4
Development x 2
Rebound x 2
Fitness x 3
Rebound x 3