How to Improve at BJJ Faster: 10 Things That Actually Work
Most BJJ practitioners improve slower than they should.
Not because they lack talent — talent plays a smaller role in BJJ development than most beginners assume. Not because they do not train hard enough — effort is usually present. They improve slowly because they focus on the wrong things, train with the wrong mindset, or have developed habits that actively slow their progress without being aware of it.
These are the ten things that actually make the difference. They are drawn from nearly 17 years of training and teaching — watching hundreds of students at different stages of development and observing consistently what accelerates progress and what inhibits it.
Consistency over intensity — the Knots & Collar training community, Defence Colony, New Delhi. The students who improve fastest are the ones who show up.
1. Show Up More Consistently, Not More Intensely
The single most reliable predictor of BJJ development is mat time — not the quality of individual sessions but the total accumulated hours over months and years.
Practitioners who train three times per week for two years develop more comprehensively than practitioners who train five times per week for six months and then take extended breaks. The brain encodes physical skills through spaced repetition over time. Consistency allows this encoding to happen; interruption breaks it.
This means that protecting your ability to show up — avoiding injury through intelligent training, managing fatigue through adequate recovery, not burning out through excessive intensity in the early stages — is a more important development strategy than training harder.
2. Develop Your A-Game Before Your B-Game
An A-game is the small set of positions and techniques that you execute reliably under pressure. A B-game is everything else — techniques you have drilled but cannot yet execute against resistance.
The most common mistake at the intermediate level is expanding the B-game before the A-game is solid. Practitioners who try to use competition pressure or hard rolling to develop new techniques typically find that under real pressure they revert to whatever they know best. Developing depth in three reliable techniques produces better results than developing surface-level familiarity with thirty.
Identify the positions you play consistently. Drill them more. Roll from them more. Make them automatic before adding new complexity.
Tap early, learn faster. Live rolling at Knots & Collar — where every submission is a lesson, not a loss.
3. Tap Early, Always
This is the most underrated development principle in BJJ and the one most consistently ignored by ego-driven practitioners.
Tapping early — before the submission is fully locked in — serves two functions. The obvious one: it prevents injury. The less obvious one: it is more honest feedback. If you tap when you feel the position is lost rather than when the joint is about to break, you get accurate data about your defensive gaps. If you wait until the submission is unavoidably tight, you have already missed the information about where the technical breakdown occurred.
Practitioners who tap freely accumulate more accurate feedback about their weaknesses and develop more robust defences than those who muscle out of submissions or refuse to tap until the last moment.
4. Work Your Worst Positions
The comfortable pattern in BJJ rolling is to fight toward your strongest positions and avoid your weakest ones. This produces technically lopsided development — a strong A-game covering extensive defensive gaps.
The fastest developers deliberately spend time in their worst positions. If you are weak from mount bottom, start rolls in mount bottom. If your guard retention is poor, start with an experienced practitioner passing your guard and defend. If leg locks consistently catch you, ask a training partner to drill leg lock entries against you until you understand what you are missing.
Working your worst positions is uncomfortable. It is also the fastest path to eliminating them.
The best students ask the most questions. Curiosity is a skill — and it compounds on the mat just like everything else.
5. Ask More Questions
Most beginners ask too few questions and most experienced practitioners answer more fully when asked specifically.
"How did you set that up?" and "What were you looking for when I did that?" and "Why does this position give you the choke?" are questions that produce the technical explanation behind the technique rather than just the technique itself. Understanding the why — the mechanical principle, the timing, the setup — produces retention and adaptability that drilling alone does not.
We welcome these questions during and after class at Knots & Collar. The instructors who teach the fastest are the ones whose students ask the most questions.
6. Drill With Intent, Not Just Repetition
Drilling is only as useful as the quality of attention brought to it. Mindless repetition of a technique — going through the motions while thinking about something else — produces muscle memory of an imprecise movement pattern. Deliberate practice — focusing on one specific element of the technique with each repetition, seeking the feeling of correct execution — produces the kind of encoding that holds under pressure.
When drilling, pick one thing to focus on per repetition. The hip angle. The grip position. The timing of the sweep. Too many focal points produce none of them well.
7. Study Your Rolls
Rolling without reflection is training without feedback. The roll happens quickly and the specific moments of breakdown — the guard pass that you could not stop, the submission you saw coming but could not escape — pass without being understood.
After hard rolling sessions, take five minutes to mentally review the round. Where did the significant exchanges happen? What happened when they did? What technical response did you attempt and why did it fail? This reflection converts experience into learning in a way that simply accumulating more rounds does not.
If the rolling is being filmed — at competitions or in open mat sessions — watch the footage. Video is the most honest feedback available and consistently shows things you did not notice during the round.
8. Compete or Pressure-Test Regularly
Training partners accommodate each other over time. Experienced training partners adjust their intensity to suit the session. This is good for the training environment and good for developing certain qualities — but it produces a kind of comfortable competence that competition or hard open mat sessions with strangers disrupts productively.
Competing — or rolling with visiting practitioners, or attending open mats at other academies — regularly exposes the gaps that your regular training environment has accommodated. One competition tells you more about your actual game than months of regular training.
You do not need to compete formally to get this benefit. Rolling with visiting practitioners who do not know your game and have no reason to adjust their intensity produces the same quality of honest pressure.
Train with people better than you — and with people you can help. Both make you better. The full Knots & Collar Gi community, Defence Colony, New Delhi.
9. Train With People Better Than You, and With People Worse Than You
Both ends of the experience spectrum produce different and complementary development.
Rolling with more experienced practitioners is the most common recommendation and for good reason: being submitted by someone with more technical depth shows you what you are missing. Experiencing high-quality guard passing, tight submissions, and positional control from above your level is the fastest way to understand what your own game needs.
Rolling with less experienced practitioners is equally important and less often discussed. Teaching a technique — in the informal sense of demonstrating it slowly against a less experienced training partner — is one of the most effective ways to consolidate your own understanding. You discover what you actually understand versus what you think you understand.
10. Understand That Plateaus Are Development
The most discouraging period for most BJJ practitioners — the point at which many people quit — is the plateau. The period where the rapid improvement of the beginner stage flattens and progress becomes invisible.
These plateaus are not absence of development. They are the consolidation of what has been learned — the period in which the brain integrates multiple skills into a coherent whole rather than adding new individual techniques. They are not evidence that you have reached your ceiling. They are evidence that a significant acquisition phase has been completed and the next phase is beginning.
Practitioners who understand this continue through plateaus. Practitioners who interpret plateaus as failure quit. The blue belt, the purple belt, the brown belt — each follows a plateau that tested the practitioner's commitment. The ones who stayed found that the plateau was the preparation for the next level, not the end of the road.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Most practitioners notice meaningful improvement within three to six months of consistent training — two to three sessions per week. The improvement is not primarily in winning rolls but in understanding what is happening and beginning to apply technique intentionally rather than reactively.
Both are essential and neither replaces the other. Drilling encodes technique in the absence of resistance. Sparring tests that technique against genuine resistance. The most effective development uses both in balance — structured drilling in class followed by live rolling.
Consistency over intensity. Two sessions per week maintained consistently over two years produces better development than five sessions per week for six months. Make every session count through deliberate focus, and supplement with conceptual study — watching competition footage, reading about technique — between mat sessions.
The most common cause of plateau is training too narrowly — drilling and rolling the same positions against the same training partners repeatedly. Introducing pressure-testing (competition or open mats), working weak positions deliberately, and asking more questions during class typically restart development.
Written by Professor Binish Sukhija, BJJ black belt under the De La Riva lineage and founder of Knots & Collar, Defence Colony, New Delhi. Book your free trial class →
Knots & Collar is located at A-269, Second Floor, Defence Colony, New Delhi. Gi BJJ and No-Gi classes run 7 days a week. Call +91-9717956687.