One of the biggest blind spots for lots of people in BJJ isn’t the technique itself – it’s memory.
According to John Danaher, most practitioners finish a sparring round without truly understanding what just happened:
When you’ve completed a sparring round – how much of the action can you recall?
Can you recall winning and losing sequences? Can you remember the fail points of moves that you couldn’t complete?
Can you recall the steps that lead to a successful completion of a move?
For many, the honest answer is – not much:
It’s quite surprising how often we are unable to recount what transpired in a sparring round even when it just finished and it’s fresh on our minds.
Very often the only thing we can recount is the result.
But if you can’t recall what happened, you can’t improve it:
Nonetheless, it’s hard to try to make improvements for the next round or the next day when we cant recall any of the pivotal moments and events of the preceding one.
The goal isn’t perfect memory – it’s useful memory:
You need need to be able to monitor and recall everything, in fact that would probably be undesirable even if you could do it…
But you should be able to recount and identify the salient aspects of a recent sparring session so that you can interpret success and failure in ways that allow you to make improvements for your next session.
Test yourself in this regard often.
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