Coaching in Real Time
Listen First
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Ep. 145: The Coach's Guide to Teaching, feat. Doug Lemov (BJJ Mental Models)
Less is more, coaching language, and teaching principles. This is arguably the most important podcast linked in this entire document.
Ep. 145: The Coach's Guide to Teaching, feat. Doug Lemov
Listen on Apple Podcasts
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Ep. 299: Student Assessment, feat. Adam Medlock (BJJ Mental Models)
Assessing student understanding in real time. He uses a more technique-based approach than ours, but the assessment principles are useful.
Ep. 299: Student Assessment, feat. Adam Medlock
Listen on Apple Podcasts
Preparing for a Class
Disclaimer: there is more information in each week of the curriculum than you could possibly get through in a single class. That will always be the case. The expectation is not to cover everything.
The curriculum is a guideline of vetted information for skill acquisition on each topic. It exists to give students resources for independent study and to give coaches a reference for what concepts, movement pathways, and information could be useful during class.
There are also more games listed than you could play in a week. The goal isn't to play all of them.
My expectation: when you walk in the room, you've read that week's curriculum and some game library options, and you have at least one game already picked out for each topic being covered.
You don't need notes for exactly what you'll say between games. You should have a sense of concepts and movement pathways from reading the curriculum, but you can't plan it all out. Too much depends on what you see in the room.
Actually Coaching Class
When starting a portion of class, minimize talking. Your main goal is to get students into a game you've picked. Once they're playing, watch them and figure out what information to focus on before the next round.
One exception: brand-new students need more up front. The "minimize talking" rule works for students who have played games before and understand the format. A student on their first or second class doesn't have that context. If you drop them into a game with minimal explanation, they'll encode random behaviors rather than useful ones, and unlearning bad habits is harder than learning better ones in the first place. For true beginners, give clearer instructions on what to look for and what their goal is before the game starts. As students become more experienced, fade that guidance and let the game teach. This is Lemov's "guidance fading effect": novices benefit from explicit instruction; intermediates benefit from discovery.
Between games, convey information that will help them in the next round.
While they're actively moving, watch the room. What are the weak points? How are students "breaking" the game and arriving at outcomes you don't want? If you see something critically bad, don't interrupt the game to change it.
If you can add a rule to prevent a bad strategy, tell them without pausing play. A quick "if you're not touching your training partner for more than 2 seconds, you lose" works better than stopping the timer, bringing everyone in, and explaining why disconnecting is bad. It saves time, and telling someone they lose for a bad strategy gets them to stop faster than trying to convince them it's a bad strategy. Often it's actually a good strategy for winning that particular game. Not being connected does prevent being swept.
Side note on voice: If you talk loudly over the music with downward inflection, students are less likely to pause what they're doing. If you speak at normal volume, they'll stop to hear you. If you use upward inflection, they'll interpret it as a question and stop. Speak loudly, speak down, keep them moving.
What you can say mid-round is limited to what students already know. Volume and inflection determine whether students pause. But whether they can actually process what you're saying depends on whether the language is already familiar. If you introduced "ratchet levers" during a stoppage earlier in class and students practiced it, you can shout "ratchet levers" mid-round and it works as a recall trigger. If you shout a concept they've never heard before, it won't land. Their working memory is fully occupied by the game. This is Lemov's concept of encoded language: build short phrases into your coaching vocabulary during stoppages so you can trigger them during live play without overloading students.
Less Is More
If you chase five rabbits, you will catch none.
If we're working guard retention, there are many concepts you could cover: keeping feet pointed at your opponent, self-framing, inverting when your leg gets pinned, knee-elbow connection, preemptive framing, foot frames vs shin frames, Gongorra movements, guard-pass-specific retention patterns. This isn't even exhaustive.
If you try to cover all of them in a single class, students will retain nothing.
When you're coaching, aim for a single concept or point per break. You can cover a few facets of the same point, but don't talk about pointing feet at your opponent, knee-elbow connection, and under-the-legs retention all at the same time. Especially for beginners.
Name what you want to see, not what went wrong. When you give that one concept, frame it as the desired outcome. "Keep your feet pointed at your opponent" is better than "stop turning away." "Keep them in between your heels" is better than "don't let them put one of your legs in between theirs." The first version gives a concrete action the student can execute. The second version names a symptom and leaves the student to figure out the fix on their own while also processing the game. This is a consistent finding in coaching research (Lemov cites Pete Carroll as an example): solution-oriented language outperforms problem-narrating language because it reduces the cognitive steps between hearing the cue and doing the thing.
While walking the room, give individual feedback. But as a group, streamline their goals and perception cues to make them as simple as possible.
Student Assessment
One of the biggest factors in the quality of your class is understanding where students are at in the learning process for a given topic.
Your two biggest tools:
Asking questions. This is underutilized in grappling classes. I ask questions to work through problems with students, to tie perceptions to actions, and to assess whether they're understanding what we're working on. That assessment information can change the current class and the curriculum as a whole.
Watching them. Most of the time when we play a game, I give limited information before the first run and start as quickly as possible. I keep the first run short, normally 2x2 minute rounds, to watch and identify common themes.
Here's an example of using assessment in real time:
Yesterday in fundamentals, one of our topics was guard retention. We were using guard retention FYJJ to develop this skill live. I planned on talking about concepts for the guard passer only. But while watching the first few rounds, I noticed passers were only attempting loose passing around the legs.
Between rounds, I addressed this. I told students there are four main ways to pass: around the legs, under the legs, through the legs same-side knee, and through the legs cross knee. I mentioned that having one leg high and one leg low as a guard player helps deal with all four.
In the next round, I immediately saw a huge uptick in under-the-legs passing. Both players were making new connections. I didn't see an increase in through-the-legs passing, but we're not looking for perfection in a single class, just improvement.
Changing the Game Based on Assessment
You can talk a student blue in the face about why their strategy wouldn't work in a live roll, but it's rarely useful or quick. Instead, when you see students gaming the game with bad strategies, change the rules so the strategy is no longer viable.
Example 1: I found a standup game online and used the win condition of connecting your hands around your partner's torso. But students were "winning" with terrible shots: hands connected but hips a mile away. Instead of explaining why it was bad, I changed the rules: now you win by connecting your hands and connecting your hip to their hip. Shot quality improved immediately.
Example 2 (kids class): We were playing 2-for-2 takedowns. Some kids started falling to their backs instead of shooting, claiming they were "taking their opponent to the ground." Instead of arguing, I added a rule: if your butt touches the mat, you lose. Then they started falling to their shoulders while keeping their butt up. So I iterated again: if your shoulders, back, or butt touch the mat, you lose.
Kids will break every game you design. That's actually a great feature. It forces you to iterate.
If you have notes about how students broke a game, share them. We want to continually improve our games and make them as bulletproof as possible.
Deciding What to Cover Between Games
While students play, watch for weak points and prepare for the next break. Your options:
- Change to a completely different game
- Change the variation of the current game
- Ask pointed questions to assess understanding
- Share a concept about their objectives or win conditions
- Show a few movement pathways
- Give position-specific information (grip names, pros and cons of options)
If you have time, walk the room and give specific individual feedback. I try to do this at least once per student per class, ideally twice: one positive ("that was good movement") and one nugget ("he got that because you were standing too tall and he could reach your knees").
Give every person in the room something so they know we care about their development. Don't just focus on the best performers.
Meeting Students Where They're At
Most students want to get a sweat in, make some neural connections, and play. Meet them where they are, give them the most important concepts, and prevent cognitive overload.
I have a plan before every class, but I pivot most of them based on what I see in the room. Sometimes big pivots, sometimes small, but almost every class I'm making changes to games based on how students are performing.
Being Engaged in Class
When you're coaching, the expectation from me, other coaches, and our students is that you are engaged during class. Not 100% every second, but present and active. Not just when students are grouped up, but while they're playing games.
That time should be spent:
- Assessing the room: What are students struggling with? Are they perceiving cues and acting on them? What strategies are they leaving unexplored?
- Preparing for the next break: What will you change about the game? What concepts will you share?
- Checking the clock: Are you on track to cover all topics in your allotted time?
- Giving individual feedback: Both positive reinforcement and constructive nudges.
Coaching is hard and requires significant mental bandwidth. Sometimes you need a minute staring at a blank wall to recoup. That's fine. Sitting in a corner on your phone is not.
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