How To Prepare For a Jiu Jitsu Competition

A mega-guide to getting the most out of your BJJ tournament experience.

by Chris Wojcik

“Ironically, the picture that I’ve chosen for this article is from a match that I lost.

However, I think that the possibility of failure is important to remember when preparing for grappling matches on any level. You can do all the right things, put in all the work, have a perfect weight cut, optimize every single little detail, and still go out there and just lose. Losing is a part of competition that is never going away.

When you sign up to compete, only 2 things are certain:

1. At the end of the competition experience, you will have a result.
2. At the end of the competition experience, you will have the possibility to learn important lessons.

Everything else is pretty much up in the air. Competition can be chaotic and even scary.

With that being said, here are some of the biggest lessons that I have learned from my years of competing and gathering all kinds of different results.

Here is, in my opinion, the best way to prepare for a BJJ competition.

Losing comes down to 4 main “gaps”.

This applies to a lot more in life than just Jiu-Jitsu.

In competitive endeavors, every failure comes down to 1 of 4 “gaps” that cause failing. It can also be a mixture of a few of the gaps.

I’ve talked about these “gaps” a few times in the past on Twitter and The Grappler’s Diary on Instagram, but we’re going to talk about them in more detail here.

Understanding these gaps is the key to alleviating them. (See gap #2.)

Skill gaps.

These first 2 points are the most common causes of performance variance in BJJ, even though most people tend to blame points 3 or 4 for their losses.

The truth is that the main reason that you are losing is because you are not good enough.

It’s not steroids (unless your opponent is actually on a bunch of steroids), it’s probably not fitness (unless you’ve not trained hard), and it’s also not because you froze up (unless you actually froze up).

The most common reason why BJJ athletes lose is because they don’t have the skills to win.

This is different from the reason why most BJJ athletes say that they lose.

If you want to win, you need to build relevant skills.

Knowledge gaps.

But how do you know which skills are “relevant skills”?

This is the hard part because it requires self-awareness, ego-reduction, and a commitment to studying. It requires discipline that most people, despite being “martial artists”, don’t have.

It requires you to forgo the cheap dopamine from training and working on your “A game” and to force yourself to work on the relevant skills in becoming a dangerous grappler who wins.

You need to study because you can’t get better at what you don’t know you suck at.

This is why it’s important to have a coach whose opinion you trust and teammates who aren’t afraid to tell you your weaknesses.

We could do a whole article on “closing knowledge gaps”, but for today I just need you to understand that knowledge gaps exist and how they work in relation to skill gaps.

Closing knowledge gaps allows you to close skill gaps.

Talent gaps.

The other day, a few people in my DMs refuted all of my claims on the subject of competitive variance and said that the reason they’re bad at Jiu-Jitsu is that “they’re old”.

When I talk about talent, I’m talking about causes of variance that are out of your control.

Size. Speed. Flexibility. Things that cause performance variance in athletics exist. Some athletes have attributes that allow them to learn faster. Things that allow them to maybe train more or harder than you.

Age is one of those things. Part of the reason why competitive no-gi Jiu-Jitsu is becoming a young man’s game (the list of young BJJ “prodigies” who are competing at the highest level seems to be growing every year) is because youth is an advantage.

Sure, it’s not really a talent, but it’s a factor for performance variance you can’t control.

When I train B-Team with someone like Haisam Rida or Nicky Rod, I run into to different talent gaps. I’m not as athletic as these giant people who can also do flips and lift more than I might ever be able to.

That’s okay though — I just need to try to close the gaps that I can. That’s what this is all about.

Mental gaps.

Mindset issues are the most tragic thing that can happen to an athlete.

I’ve had dozens of experiences with my own anxiety during competition, and I promise you, a happy athlete is always better than an anxious one, a sad one, or an angry one. Finding a way to perform under pressure is imperative to developing as a Jiu-Jitsu athlete (or any athlete, for that matter).

I feel so strongly about this idea that a couple of years ago (even before some of my best competition results in the ADCC Trials), I wrote a whole ebook on my strategy and principles for dealing with performance anxiety.

I revisited the ebook recently, and nearly all of the strategies and principles that I used in that ebook are still true to this day for me.

Things like:

• Inducing flow states
• Mindfulness, journaling, and other mental training routines
• And more.

Anyway, if that’s something you struggle with, check out the ebook here. I promise you won’t regret it.

Now that we know why we’re losing, let’s talk about the best ways to prepare for Jiu-Jitsu.

There are only 2 ways to prepare correctly.

Before we get into a basic plan for preparing for a BJJ competition (below), we’re going to talk about the 2 main philosophies for building a training camp.

Every effective training camp is either run by a coach or is self-guided with a great deal of self-awareness. It’s kind of both, but we’ll separate these 2 ideas for the case of simplicity.

You have to train hard no matter what. What you work on is either determined by the rules of your competition, the guidance of your coach, or both.

The point is that you cannot train mindlessly and expect to beat someone who’s been training carefully. At many points in my BJJ career, I’ve beaten athletes who are more athletic and sometimes even better at Jiu-Jitsu than me simply because I’ve been more prepared than them.

You either need to test different ways of training and see which ones lead to the best performances for you, or you need to pay a premium and work with a coach. Preferably, someone who has experience in competing at a high level.

Most BJJ coaches are not good at coaching their athletes toward specific goals, so that’s why it’s important to develop your own approach or seek coaching elsewhere.

I’ve been lucky, I’ve always had a good coach.

However, I also struggled to find training partners to compete at the highest level when I lived in Chicago. Because of that, I basically ended up taking my coach and I’s training methods that we worked on for Trials, EBI events, and more, and then using them in some of the training rooms I’ve been in that have higher level athletes but maybe not as much direction as I used to have in my old training room in Chicago.

So, here’s how I train when I have competitive success in mind.

How I would train for a competition that is 4 weeks away:

We’re going to use the upcoming ADCC European Trials in Croatia as our goal here, but it could be any competition with any ruleset.

You don’t really need a “training camp” to compete in grappling, but if you want to compete at a high level, I now think you do.

The better the people that you are competing against are, the more important it is for you to have several week periods of uninterrupted training. Periods of focused work towards a goal.

My weekly routine when not traveling:

• 6-8 BJJ training sessions per week (remember, I do this full-time)
• 3 lifting sessions per week
• 1 rest day (I’ve been using Sunday recently, which is ideal for me)

When trying to get ready for a competition, I want at least 4 weeks where I’m following as close to this routine as possible. Also, when the competition is 4 weeks out, I like to add 1 weekly sprint session. Pick your poison, but I like the Airdyne bike.

This is what I do, and I get that for the average hobbyist, this is a lot of volume. Even in a gym of professional grapplers, my training volume is higher than most.

That’s why I think instead of trying to match my volume, you should look at ratios. In the next section, I’m also going to do a breakdown of how I train when I’m at the gym and a competition is in mind.

I do twice as many BJJ sessions as strength and conditioning sessions. I am a grappler, not a fitness influencer or a bodybuilder.

I train every day during the week. If you cannot train every day because BJJ is not your job, you have a few options, but all of them require you to do the most you can. Remember, this isn’t going to become your life, but you are going to push yourself for the next weeks to try and peak for a competition. You need to get in shape if you want to perform well competitively.

Peaking for BJJ is not a hard science. We can compare it to things like powerlifting, bodybuilding, or running, but it’s different. BJJ is very complex.

Last year, my competitive mindset followed something a bit more like how I lived when I wrestled in high school. I competed every few weeks, I didn’t have many “camps”, and as a result, I dealt with a lot of burnout, injuries, and in some cases, a lack of preparation for major tournaments.

However, when I reviewed the year, I realized that all of my best competitive performances came when I had “camps”. When I was prepared.

Crazy, right?

Going into the European Trials, for example, I had 5 weeks between competitions. I performed very well, despite having a severe injury and going up in weight.

Going into the East Coast Trials, on the other hand, I performed much worse. There were 4 weeks between the 2 Trials, but I was on vacation in Italy for one and sick for the other. Then, I went to Chicago for 8 days to teach seminars and go to a friend’s wedding.

It was too much travel, not enough training, and I wasn’t “peaking” at the right time.

You can read about what I learned from that here:

How to optimize your mat time:

This could be a separate article in itself, but I’ll add a few concepts that I like in this last section.

When I do 6 to 8 sessions per week, only a handful of the sessions are really “hard”.

When I say “hard”, I mean going full speed and challenging myself against the toughest guys in the training room.

I’m not on steroids, I am not the biggest guy in the room, and I’m not the best guy. If I did “everyday porrada” or for me “6-8x per week porrada”, I’d break down. Because of that, I only really do 2 hard rounds every session.

To preface, here’s how a typical training session at B-Team is structured:

• 30-40 minutes of technique/drilling
• 5-7 10-minute rounds
• NOTE: sometimes we do shorter rounds, but most days the noon session is all 10-minute rounds

Sometimes I only do 1 if I’m feeling worn down. I’m feeling great, I do 3 or even 4, but it averages out to about 2 hard 10-minute rounds per session. I still roll for the other 5 rounds or so, but those are either done with a lower belt to practice building new skills (sorry), or they are specific rounds where I’m doing one position with very few objectives for the entirety of the round. I like to do these rounds with the highest-level partner I can to get the most technical development in the shortest time.

Here are the main positions I do nowadays for “specific rounds”, just to give you some ideas:

• turtle
• EBI back escapes/EBI armbar escapes
• leg locks (either 50/50, outside ashi, or saddle)

In open rounds, especially if my body is feeling good, I try to place a heavier focus on wrestling because that’s what I’m trying to get good at right now and it’s super important for ADCC rules. It’s pretty easy to do that at B-Team, luckily.

Are you talking to your partners?

Here’s the last point I’ll make on optimizing mat time.

The conversation that you have with your partner after rolling is very important for skill development.

It also shouldn’t be this weird, ego-protection thing where one of you tries to justify what happened.

It should be a tool for learning, reviewing, and reflecting. The post-rolling conversation should be objective and analytical.

• What happened that you didn’t understand?
• What was your partner thinking?
• What were you thinking?
• What factors contributed to the different things that happened in the training round?
• Was that points?

Don’t roll without a conscious. Roll hard, but roll to learn. Otherwise, you’re just working out.

Closing Thoughts

We’ve covered a lot today. This article is almost 2600 words long.

Here are the cliff notes for people who are trying to train better for competition:

• Failure to get desired results comes down to 4 main “gaps” — skill, knowledge, talent, and mindset
• The 2 ways to prepare for BJJ competition are either self-guided camps with a great deal of trial and error or with a trusted coach who removes the guesswork for you.
• Think about ratios more than volume — I do 2x the amount of BJJ as I do strength and conditioning. Also, remember to rest. I also do 1 sprint session per week when I am 4 weeks out.
• Optimize mat time by balancing specific training and rolling of varying intensities
• Have conversations with your training partners after rounds

Training is challenging, but I really think that this covers most of the preparation for competition. I don’t need to write a giant book for you on the art of training. Training is also something that is deeply personal — my optimal training routine doesn’t look how it did a few years ago, and it doesn’t look the exact same as yours probably will after you tinker with it.

Your life is different from my life.

This article was designed to give you some frameworks, habits, and things to look out for as you train for a competition.”

Check out more from Chris on his Substack!

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14009 Midland Rd. Poway, CA 92064

(858) 848-6444

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