Achieving your peak athletic ability in BJJ or any sport for that matter requires more than training. Look at any truly elite athlete from Khabib Nurmagomedov to Tom Brady. They all build regiments that cover every aspect of their lives from diet to injury prevention. 

Even if you’re not working to become one of the best Jiu Jitsu practitioners in the world you can easily give yourself an edge in training and competition from the simple act of breaking down your lifestyle and schedule into 5 simple steps.

1. Create and Visualize Goals – Writing down and visualizing your goals as well as a timeline to achieve them is scientifically proven to drastically improve your chances of accomplishing them. Think of all of the professional athletes you have heard say in interviews that they visualized victory thousands of times before fulfilling it. By writing down your goals you are holding yourself accountable and forcing your mind to map out the steps needed to obtain them. By visualizing the achievement of your goals you are rewiring your brain to expect and be prepared for success.

1. Training schedule – The simplest aspect of your BJJ career you can optimize is your training schedule. In order to see consistent improvement it’s extremely important to maintain some kind of consistency. Those week to two week hiatuses are what kill promising Jiu Jitsu careers. Even if you only train once or twice a week, pick days that you know you can almost certainly go on and stick to them. This will ensure you build the habits needed to consistently improve. Moreover, it’s proven that slacking off makes future slacking even easier. By holding yourself accountable to a predictable and easy to follow schedule you will be setting yourself up for success.

1. Take notes after each training session – BJJ, or any athletic pursuit requires by necessity the ability to retain the information you learned in training. The simple act of writing things down by hand is scientifically proven to dramatically improve your brain’s ability to retain information. You don’t need to write out pages upon pages after each class, just a few sentences overviewing what you covered will be more than enough to greatly increase your odds of taking what you learned to heart. 

1. Meal Prep – Food is fuel and your body is nothing more than a complicated machine. If you fill yourself up with sugar, carbs and other garbage your body will break down and not perform anywhere near its full potential. The best way to ensure you are fueling yourself properly and giving your body the energy it needs to function maximally is to map out your meals for the week in advance. This will help you avoid the pitfalls of rushing to find yourself food and settling for the fastest cheapest option. A proper diet primarily consisting of meat and vegetables will make your muscles bigger, your stamina higher and your ability to strangle opponents even greater. 

• Keep Track of Injuries – Minor tweaks and injuries are a part of Jiu Jitsu but they don’t have to hold you back. Keeping track of any body parts that are messing with you and taking care of them as needed will pay massive dividends to your overall longevity in the sport.

Keeping these 5 aspects of your athletic career in mind will help you stay healthy, happy and most importantly, on the mat. If you need an efficient way to keep track of your goals, training schedule, training notes, meals and more, The Jiu-Jitsu Planner is specifically designed to help manage every aspect of your Jiu Jitsu career. 

By following the simple steps outlined above you’ll have the basics of well rounded athletes routine in the works. Failing to plan is planning to get strangled so start planning and see your success skyrocket.