Games and Drilling
Why games are the core of every class and where drilling fits.
Games as the Core
Most grappling gyms prioritize fine-detail instruction on random techniques, often with little connection between classes. A coach demonstrates a move, students drill it at zero resistance, then everyone rolls live. The assumption is that "the game teaches the game."
Live rolling is better than zero-resistance drilling. But unstructured live rounds without specific goals leave a lot of learning on the table. And the disconnect between instruction and practice means the only people who benefit from the technique demonstration are those who happen to land in that exact position during sparring.
Our approach is different. We design games with specific constraints that force students to solve problems using the concepts we've introduced. Games are the core of every class because that's where the real learning happens: perceiving, deciding, and acting against a resisting opponent in real time.
Where Drilling Fits
Drilling isn't useless. It has a specific, limited role: introducing movement pathways that students need before they can play a game productively.
Think of it this way. If you invented a game called backflip tag where you have to backflip and then tag someone within three seconds for the tag to count, nobody is going to learn a backflip by playing the game. They need blocked practice first. But as soon as they can reliably execute a not-too-sloppy backflip, there are diminishing returns on drilling more backflips. Playing the game is what develops the skill from that point forward.
Grappling works the same way. If the game starts from a single leg and a student has never shot a single leg, they won't learn much by getting stuffed every round. A few minutes of drilling the entrance gives them a movement pathway they can connect to the game. Once they have that pathway, more drilling doesn't help. Playing does.
This is the drill-to-game pattern: brief isolated practice of an entrance or movement, then immediately into a game where that movement is the starting point. The drill gives students a stable waypoint. The game develops everything else.
Progressing From Stable to Unstable
Drilling also serves another purpose: controlling how much chaos students face. You can start a game from a later, more stable position (the single leg is already secured, now finish the takedown) and then progressively move the starting point earlier and less stable as students improve (now you have to shoot the single leg first, now you have to get a grip before you shoot, now you start disconnected).
This progression from stable to unstable is how we move students from blocked practice to serial practice to randomized practice within a single class or across a multi-week topic. With relatively athletic students, you can often skip the drilling and drop them straight into a game. With less athletic students or complex movements, the drill-to-game bridge matters more. Read the room and adjust.
Entropy Always Increases
Within any segment of class, chaos should only go up, never down. The progression is always: drill → constrained game → less constrained game → open positional sparring. Each step adds unpredictability, resistance, and decision-making complexity. You never reverse direction.
This is a hard rule because the reverse (game → drill) actively damages the learning environment. When students are playing a game at real intensity and you pull them back to drill a movement, they don't maintain their game intensity and add the movement on top of it. They downshift. They lower their intensity across the board to accommodate the new, harder thing you've introduced. The game degrades into something that looks more like drilling at half speed. You've lost the energy, the perception-action coupling, and the engagement you built.
Rob Gray's concept of satisficing explains the mechanism: when a task conflicts with a performer's current motivation (in this case, playing at intensity), they'll find the easiest shortcut that's "just good enough" rather than doing the harder thing you intended. Introducing a drill mid-game gives students an easy shortcut: just go slower at everything.
Going drill-to-game avoids this because students start at low intensity, build the movement pathway, and then the game gives them a reason to ramp up. They're adding intensity to something they can already do, not trying to bolt a new skill onto existing intensity.
If you find yourself wanting to stop a game to show a technique, resist the urge. Either address it between rounds with a quick concept (without demonstrating), change the game constraints so the desired movement becomes more likely to emerge, or save the demonstration for the start of the next round as a drill-to-game entry point.
The Research
Rob Gray's work on motor learning shows that skill lives in the relationship between the athlete and their environment, not just in the athlete's head. You can't separate perception from action and train them independently. Pulling apart "see the position," "decide what to do," and "execute the technique" into separate drills doesn't transfer to live performance. Students need to perceive and act simultaneously, in real time, against a resisting opponent. This is why games are the core, not drilling.
Doug Lemov's framework for game-based activities reinforces this. Well-designed games multiply two types of learning events: "mental touches" (reading and adapting to what's happening) and specific high-value situations (which constraints make occur more frequently but unpredictably). Standing around during extended drilling is counterproductive because students aren't getting reps AND aren't reading the game.