This is a subject I’ve wanted to write about for a while now. It is a very interesting thing to me, and I think it’s fairly universal in most sports. Anyone who has trained for any sport for a long time has experienced one or several I am pretty sure. For me personally training in jiu jitsu I have hit a few plateaus, and they can be frustrating. Why they are frustrating is because of several reasons though. For starters, and the most obvious, you don’t feel like you are progressing. That is a pain when you are putting in hours, and hours on the mat, spending not only time, but energy and money, and seemingly gaining little benefit. I try to remind myself that the exercise alone is worth it, because it is.
The other thing that frustrating about a plateau is that I’m never really sure of the cause. Is it just a natural part of learning anything? Is there a limiting factor such as my cardio, body type, flexibility, mindset, instructor, or 100 other things? Is it even real, or am I just imagining it? Sometimes I wonder how much of it is real, or possibly exaggerated. When you have a group of training partners that is steadily getting better as well, sometimes it feels like you aren’t improving because relative to them, you aren’t really, but to anyone else you might be. Its easier to judge when someone new comes into the gym, because you can see how well you do versus how well you did against the last guy who joined the team.
Outside of that I also have a theory that in learning anything there is a diminishing returns issue. Which makes me think that a plateau is a natural phenomenon. I think of a plateau on a graph. When you start, your learning takes off like a rocket, learning all the techniques in a broad sense. But after time, you don’t learn anything new in a general sense, but what you start learning is more subtle things. Such as how to link together techniques, or set ups, or little tweaks to certain techniques that are tough to quantify. So you are learning things at a high level that seem “small” in a sense, even though they aren’t small at all. Trying to express this diminishing returns concept visually can be tough, so I think of it in percentages. Lets say I’ve been training for 5 years, and I’m at a 45% skill level lets say. Someone new joins and trains for 3 months. After 3 months, I’ve progressed to 50%, but the new student is now at a skill level of 15%. So the new student got 3 times better than I did in those 3 months. If we continue this trend however, he will never catch up to me so long as I keep practicing. Now this is a very simplified version of it, I know. There are lots of things that can increase or decrease the rate at which you learn, such as athletic ability, previous experience in a related sport such as wrestling, or just plain being a fast/slow learner. But in general that’s the way I see it, but I’m open to the fact that I’m completely wrong, as one should be. I’ll come back and edit this when I think of a better way to get the point across I’m trying to make.
So now the million dollar question, how to break out of a plateau? That’s a tough question and many sports psychologists make their living off of the secret. Now me just being a regular guy, I can’t say with any confidence that I know the answer, but I have noticed a couple of things that have worked for me. Whether or not they work for the next person, who knows?
The first time I experienced a plateau was probably about 1.5 years into training. I remember certain guys joining the gym and in a matter of 6 months or so would surpass me in skill. I couldn’t figure out what they were doing that I wasn’t. So I completely scrapped everything. I went back to drilling and relearning the basics. I focused on bad habits I had learned from the beginning, and started to learn to tweak the basics again. Shrimping, guillotine chokes, armbars, etc. What I realized was that there was so many little things I had missed. When you are new there is just so much to take in, a different set of techniques every day. Now was I able to get someone in an armbar? Sure. But my finishing percentage was lower than I realized. Once I went back to the drawing board, I started to shift away from the basic movement, and focus in on the details. The angle of my body, the squeeze in my legs, the timing, the counters to my opponents counters. From then on I started to get markedly better, and broke out of the plateau I feel. What it took was not much more than changing the way I looked at the game. I learned that I was never really done with any technique and that there are a thousand little things you can improve upon. Anyone who tells me they have mastered a technique, I think is foolish. Someone like Ronda Rousey comes to mind. Despite your opinion of her, you can’t deny her level of skill with armbars. With so many first round finishes by armbar against elite level opponents, you can’t help but come to the realization of just how far you can go with a technique. I mean, the level of skill it takes to pull off a submission on somebody who knows its coming, over and over again is impressive. I might get a guy in an armbar rolling, because he is worried about 100 other things. But if I told him that the only submission I was going to attempt was an armbar? Well it probably wouldn’t happen. And whats even more impressive is that you know her opponents are drilling armbar escapes and defenses constantly, and it still doesn’t stop her from doing it.
The second time I experienced a plateau was about 4 years or so into training. I was fine in most areas, but my guard was just sucky. I was still rocking a closed guard, and I could slow people down but eventually they would pass. I even remember at some point we were doing guard passing drills and I heard someone mocking my opponent after being in my guard for about 30 seconds saying “Whats taking you so long to pass? Passing his guard is easy!” This really bugged me because the guard is such a fundamental position for grappling. It wasn’t that they said it, we make fun of each other all the time, it keeps it light, and to be honest I couldn’t even remember who said it because it didn’t matter. What mattered was that they were right, and that’s what really bugged me. If I was bad at side control or half guard that’s one thing, but to be bad at guard? So bad that people mock it? That’s unacceptable. So I found a renewed purpose to make my guard 10x better. I focused on pretty much nothing else unless I had to.
What I did was I started watching the people in the gym very closely who I felt had really good guards. What I noticed hit me like a truck. It was the closed guard. All of the best guards in the gym weren’t closed guards, but open or butterfly. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t made the connection before, it was right in front of me. Now let me throw in a disclaimer right now before I tick anyone off. The closed guard isn’t bad, there are tons of people who excel with it. But I cant help but feel that its better for beginners because of how good it is at slowing people down. The control of that guard is top-notch. It’s also much better in the Gi I feel, but that’s just my opinion. The collar chokes are there, which make it even more deadly. I also feel that it is better for longer legged people. With my short hobbit legs, its tough to even get my feet around my opponent sometimes. The problem for me in nogi is that to do almost anything from closed guard you have to unlock your ankles. So I figure why not just start with my feet uncrossed? So whether I was right or wrong, I decided to scrap the closed guard. I started playing butterfly a bit, and open guards. With anything, starting from scratch sucks and I was getting passed even faster than before. But I was determined to get better and I thought, at least it couldn’t get any worse? I wont bore anyone with the details but what ended up happening is that I formed this weird sort of guard on my own that I’ve been using ever since. People call it the scissor guard at my gym, so that’s what I call it. It’s basically sitting in a scissor sweep position, on my hip. I’ve always liked the scissor sweep and get it more than others, so it started to feel natural to sit in the sweep position. I also enjoy the knee on my opponent’s chest because I cant get smothered or stacked anymore, I pretty much control the distance exclusively which is a nice perk. If they pressure me, pushing them back with my knee is easy, and so is hitting the sweep at will. Once I started to switch up my guard style, I feel like my game again broke free and started to develop once more. At the very least I haven’t heard anyone mock my guard since outside of it being just plain weird.
The last plateau I overcame was probably a year and a half ago. And it came from curiosity and boredom. I am fairly strong as far as grapplers go, so I naturally was highly successful with kimuras and americanas. Any 2 vs 1 arm situation was pretty much a lock. I got really bored of hitting the same submissions all the time, and I got predictable. It bothered me, I wanted to feel technical, not brutish. If I wanted to muscle people I would have stuck with weightlifting. I also have always been curious about leglocks. After watching UFC 1-10 as a kid, I’d see Shamrock hit these weird leg holds, but thus far in my training we had only briefly touched on them, but nobody really did them in practice. However being a nogi school I had the green light to do them if I wished. So I started to get intrigued by the idea of getting good at something nobody else in the gym was good at. Lots of people seemed to have this 1 thing they were great at, but not me. I was pretty run of the mill, I had no specialty. So I thought, leglocks would be perfect. They are a new challenge, they are highly technical, and nobody else does them.
So I went at it. Over the course of the next year or two, I studied anything leglock related I could get my hands on. Instructional DVD’s from Reilly Bodycomb, Ryan Hall’s 50/50 DVD, youtube videos of sambo leg lock masters, etc. I have completely fallen down the rabbit hole at this point and love leglocks above all other submissions. Much to my teammates chagrin I hunt for them relentlessly. One of the reasons I was so unhappy when I trained at a Gi school for 6 months was that there were no leglocks allowed sadly. That alone bothered me to end. Now I am fairly proficient with leglocks and have won several tournament matches with them, and even have been able to submit some people who I would normally never be able to beat. Its been a great thing for me that I have discovered them. So I guess the way I broke this plateau was that I changed my game yet again. Just like the guard problem, changing up to leglocks brought me to the next level of skill.
With all that being said I am now stuck in what I feel is another plateau. I have a feeling it could be solved with better conditioning and flexibility. I’d like to hear from other people out there who have defeated plateaus in their sport, and see if I couldn’t apply them.
bjjmindset 