Being a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu coach is no easy task – especially if you want to be a great one. And, while making mistakes along the way is a given, there are still some things you should take care of as soon as possible…
Such as something that Kit Dale terms as the biggest mistake BJJ coaches make.
He revealed what this mistake is in a recent interview with BJJEE:
The biggest mistake I see most coaches make is teaching the HOW instead of the WHY.
They try to teach by showing their students a technique, then get them to drill, drill, drill until it becomes muscle memory, expecting their students to be able to apply it in live rolling.Unfortunately, this is very unrealistic and it’s a bad way of learning.
Dale continued to explain why this is such a grave mistake:
It teaches their students to wait for the answer, and it also confuses their muscle memory since half the practice they spend rehearsing things with a cooperating partner and the other half (or less) they spend trying to perform on a partner that is actively trying to stop them.
So, they get stuck in this area of both forgetting techniques, but also relying on an instructor to show them the moves.
This prevents them from developing the ability to problem solve themselves.
And what’s the countermeasure? Dale elaborates:
The first thing I would do is I would make every single aspect of training LIVE, to have them develop their problem solving skills.
I would structure the training with task based games that allow them (depending on their level) to solve problems that are suitable for each student, developing skill and knowledge that way.
As they get better I would make the problems more difficult, or add more and more variables to the problems at hand. Then get them to solve them over and over again.That’s the way I would teach them, so that everything they do encourages critical thinking and coming up with solutions.
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