Every significant journey will have its hiccups, its difficulties, and its frustrations.

BJJ is no different: it’s a potentially lifelong journey with many, many opportunities for getting super-frustrated when you hit a sticking point.

These sticking points can take any number of forms.

• Maybe your guard passing stops working…
• Or maybe you haven’t submitted anyone good in ages…
• Or maybe a bad elbow is making it hard to get your grips…
• Or maybe  your conditioning just isn’t good enough to hang with people in competition.

Anyway there’s no shortage of potential scenarios in which your continued progress can get blocked.

There are 3 main strategies you can use to deal with these inevitable sticking points…

1 – Ignore the Sticking Point

Sometimes it’s entirely possible to just ignore a sticking point.

Say that you just don’t have the time, energy or bandwidth to deal with a problem just at the moment. I don’t don’t generally advocate passivity but if you fight too many battles on too many fronts at the same time you’ll lose them all.

If you’re studying for your finals, caring for a sick relative, or buying a house then it’s OK to not be taking action on other fronts at that moment.

You might just have to make peace with the problem for now.  Set it aside and choose to do nothing about it, for now.

It’s not cowardice or lack of resolve to prioritise your goals, and sometimes that means putting unimportant things on the back burner for a while.

2 – Work Around the Sticking Point

You can also work around a sticking point.

For example, my friend Jess Munster has only one functional arm but still trains and competes in BJJ at a high level (click here for her episode on The Strenuous Life Podcast).

Jess’s arm was damaged at birth – the nerve to her arm is heavily damaged and no current treatment or surgery is going to fix that.

She’s had to adapt her game to work around the impediment. Some techniques just work better for her than others, and those are the ones she focusses on.
This has worked very well for her – she’s competed internationally and received her purple belt.

Here’s a video example of how she’s modified her jiu-jitsu…

Let’s take a less extreme example…

Let’s say that you want to compete but your takedowns suck.  You would go train judo but you’re aware that the odds of getting injured training throws and takedowns is much higher (sad but true) and you have a job where you just can’t take time off to recuperate from a potential injury.

If that’s the case it’s perfectly ok to become a bottom feeder for a while.  Concentrate on pulling guard and attacking immediately from there.

It’s true that not having a takedown game isn’t the best.  But you’re doing the best you can: something is better than nothing and some competition is better than no competition.

3 – Attack the Sticking Point

You may have heard the so-called Serenity Prayer…

Grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And wisdom to know the difference.

Option 1 (ignoring the sticking point) and to some extent option 2 (working around the sticking point) were about accepting the things you cannot change.

But now it’s time for courage.  And acting to change the things you CAN change.

In fact, most of the time, I advocate going for the jugular and ATTACKING the sticking point.

What does this look like? Fixing the problem!!  And you probably already know what you need to do…

• If you’re not strong enough then start lifting weights
• If your guard passing sucks then focus on it and figure out how to improve it
• If your fear of water is holding you back then take swimming lessons
• If you can’t escape the back position then start every round with someone on your back
• And so on…

Now it’s true that optimal learning doesn’t happen in a state of complete panic. That’s why I said if you’re afraid of water to take swimming lessons, NOT jump into the deep end of the pool.

You want to adjust the challenges you face so that the goals are mostly achievable, because small successes lead to big successes!

Let’s say that you’re having a huge problem with a specific guard pass.

Start by focussing on that guard pass in your training.  Make it the ONLY guard pass you can use, and start deploying it on the lightest, whitest white belts in the class and work your way up from there (click here for a breakdown of that training methodology).

If that doesn’t work then maybe you just need a few more technical tweaks.  Start by gathering more information using the internet!  Maybe the missing details are in a Youtube video, online instructional, or DVD set somewhere.

Then use your words and actually talk to your training partners, coaches and teachers.  See if they can tell you why it’s not working and what you should be doing that you’re not.

Finally call in the specialists. No matter what the problem is there is someone out there who knows how to solve it.  You just need to find them!

In the past I’ve driven for 4 hours each way to spend a couple of hours with a BJJ black belt thought could help me with a sticking point. And I continued to use that information I got from them for decades.

Like they said on X Files, the truth is out there!

Good luck on smashing your sticking points,

Stephan

This Rant about Sticking Points in Audio Form

I’ve talked about breaking through sticking points at length in episode 249 of my podcast (The Strenuous Life Podcast).

Here are the links to find the podcast on various players – today’s tip is episode 249…

• Apple Podcasts (the purple app on your iPhone)
• Google Podcasts (the new google podcast app)
• Spotify (it’s free)
• Stitcher,
• Soundcloud,
• Google Play

Or you can just stream the audio for today’s episode in the player below

If you enjoy the podcast then a rating or a review would be super-useful!

You can listen to it to using the podcast player that you already have on your phone!

For example, if you have an iPhone then it’s the purple app with the antenna-like thing in it; just click the Apple Podcasts link below to go to the right place and hit ‘subscribe’.

Here are the links to find the podcast on various players – today’s tip is episode 244…

• Apple Podcasts (the purple app on your iPhone)
• Google Podcasts (the new google podcast app)
• Spotify (it’s free)
• Stitcher,
• Soundcloud,
• Google Play

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