Listen, we all love to win. I know the feeling (and the opposite feeling all too well), but trust me when I tell you that your join isn’t to win in training. In a competitive scenario, the mats are a battlefield. But when it comes to your every day training, the mats are instead a laboratory for development.

While the primal urge to "win the round" is strong, and natural, indulging it often leads to stagnation, plateaus, and, ironically, a slower path to your holistic Jiu-Jitsu development. I’m going to illustrate how prioritising winning sabotages your own development using three common scenarios.

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.

When you start Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, it feels like being dropped into a foreign country where everyone speaks fluent violence and you don’t even know how to say “hello.” I remember those early months extremely vividly. The constant sense of drowning, sometimes literally in sweat. Looking back, there are a few things I wish I’d known at the start. They would’ve saved me a ton of frustration, helped put my training in to context, and accelerated my development if I took them seriously.

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