At just 22, Jozef Chen has built one of the more remarkable rises in the world of grappling, having started training Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu only eight years ago at age 14.

That fast progression raises an obvious question: what drove it?
Chen recently broke down three habits that shaped his development, none of them technical.

The first is recording training sessions:

I think this really does a great job of making it so that you’re able to actually see what’s happening, as opposed to only just trying to remember (what happened).

I mean, (you get a) recording of what happened so you can actually see, okay this was the problem that was the problem and then you can try find ways to solve it.

The second habit is talking to training partners after rolling:

There are a lot of things that you might not necessarily notice that your partner may be trying to do or they might have noticed on you.

So I think having a good conversation with your partner post round a lot of times can be very useful, especially if they’re doing something that’s giving you a lot of trouble.

The third is deliberate reflection:

Any type of reflection I think is very important, because that kind of attempt to recall what happened can make things a lot clearer than they may be.
If you just engage in a round and you spar and you just leave it be, a lot of times there’s going to be a lot of things that you’re going to miss and some things that are just going to be left behind.

When I learned something very new that I’m quite unfamiliar with, and I’m like wow I never thought of it this way or I’ve never seen that, I’ll usually write it down in my notes on the phone.

I feel like that is a really good job of just trying to verbalize and really try to organize the information that I consumed in a way that I can later recall more effectively.

Because maybe you’re like, wow, that was super cool.
But if you don’t try to articulate it, sometimes you lose a lot of it.

 

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