The BJJ Guide

All about Brazilian Jiu Jitsu

Learn BJJ at Home

How to learn BJJ at home? Learning Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu requires a training partner, but there are ways to learn BJJ at home to complement your training at a school or with a training partner.

The most important part of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is the live sparring and drilling with a partner, which is hard to get when training at home alone or reading a book about BJJ. But there are things you can work on at home to speed up your progress and strength.

This guide has devised several ways to train at home: study instructionals, solo drills, Maddox training, and strength training for BJJ.

Learn at Home from BJJ Videos

  • Study piece by piece to slowly build up your game
  • Take notes (bring them to the next training session)
  • Make sure to try to incorporate it into the next sparring
  • Do not try to learn too much at once

Studying by watching videos is a popular way, but having a plan is important as it can quickly overload information. How often have we not watched motivational videos and thought this is great? But without a plan and actively trying to incorporate it into our lives, nothing will change. Like watching BJJ videos, we need to find a way to remember it and incorporate it into our training; otherwise, it’s just unuseful information.

A big problem today is that so much information is out there that we overload our brains with information. We need to limit the information and have a learning plan to learn BJJ from videos. Building up our Jiu Jitsu like blocks or a puzzle, we can add new things little by little and incorporate them into our training.

The best way to learn from videos and instructionals is to have a plan for what you need to learn. Watch videos about certain parts of your game, take notes, and then use them in your training session. The key point here is to not add too much at the time because once on the mats training, it’s hard to remember it, and you must constantly remind yourself to work on the new things you have studied. This is often hard, as we will always struggle a bit when incorporating new techniques. But as we can often hear coaches like John Danaher say, the students who seem to progress faster are the students who try to incorporate what they learned during a class into the sparring.

If you are thinking of learning BJJ at home by watching videos, please visit our BJJ Instructional page, where we have picked the best BJJFanatics.com videos to learn from.

Solo Drills

This can be a great way to improve the basic movements and transitions you find in BJJ. One of my favorite sources for Brazilian Jiu Jitsu solo drills is the YouTube Channel – Budokon University or visit their home page, Budokononline.com. Here, you can learn movements from the BJJ black belt Cameron Shayne. He incorporates moving patterns for BJJ with animal movements.

The video below shows him and his coach, Lovato Jr., teaching the Shadow Jiu Jitsy program.

Training with a Maddox Grappling Doll

The Maddox doll from Fairtex.com is a great way to practice your BJJ at home. It’s also a great way to try new techniques you have learned from a video. If you don’t have a partner to drill on, this is a great way to put in those repetitions of new techniques. Once you get the mechanics and transitions down, you move on to try them on a live drilling partner. I found it especially useful in the early stages of learning a new technique or sequence. This is because, on a Maddox, you can get as many repetitions as you want without your partner getting bored.

Another useful way to use the Maddox is to practice to apply pressure. With the Maddox, you can experiment with how to apply pressure from various positions and angles. This can sometimes be hard to do on live partners and very uncomfortable. With Maddox not complaining about the pressure, you can spend hours experimenting with generating the most pressure.

Strength Traning for BJJ

A great source of strength training for BJJ is the Bulletproof Your BJJ YouTube Channel. In the videos above, you will learn five different strength exercises involving the body, which means you don’t need any equipment. Strength training for BJJ is an important part of avoiding injuries by having a strong fundamental strength.

Planning Your Traning

This is an important part that many forget or skip to do. Most coaches agree that you need to plan your training to improve faster and not just show up and do whatever happens. Identify parts of your game where you feel less confident and build up your knowledge and skills for those positions, submissions, or transitions.

If you are new to BJJ training, it’s important to understand escapes and how to defend from the bottom. By improving this part of the game, you will start to enjoy live sparring faster. In the beginning, you will almost always end up on the bottom, and the most important skill is to learn how to escape and reverse the position.

Another thing you can do when it comes to planning your training is always to write down what you learned in a class, and then at home, read the notes and throw the moves in your mind. This is a great way to help you remember what you have learned.

Related Reading