Practice Design
How we structure classes and progression across skill levels.
Skill Progression
Lemov identifies three types of training activities:
Skill-acquisition activities. Build automaticity in specific actions. Blocked drilling of entries, movements, and transitions. The goal is fluency: reducing working memory load so students can perceive and decide rather than just execute.
Game-based activities. Develop decision-making through perception-rich environments. This is the bulk of our class time. Small-sided, constrained games that multiply decision-making reps and create high-value situations.
Tactical activities. Recreate specific match conditions. Competition prep, specific scenarios from upcoming opponents. Not a regular part of fundamentals training.
The progression is: blocked practice → serial practice (connecting moves into chains) → random practice (full variability). We move through this progression within a single class: a drilled entry feeds into a serial game which feeds into positional sparring.
Creating Variability
Variability is not noise. It's the raw material for adaptability. Rob Gray's research shows that there is no single "correct" technique. Every performance context is unique, and skilled performance requires multiple overlapping solutions to the same problem.
Practical implications for class design:
- Vary training partners (size, style, skill level)
- Vary starting positions within the same topic
- Vary rule constraints across rounds
- Avoid drilling the same technique with the same partner for extended periods
The "variability-overuse hypothesis" also applies to injury prevention: repetitive stress on the same tissues causes breakdown. Encouraging varied movement patterns distributes stress and reduces injury risk.
Cognitive Load Management
Students have limited working memory. The more they know about a topic, the more new information they can absorb. Beginners have almost no scaffolding and get overwhelmed fast.
For fundamentals: Pare it down to core concepts. Give them one or two ideas, then let them play. Layer information gradually: play a round with no instruction, introduce one concept, play another round.
For Intermediate: Students have enough scaffolding to absorb more per session. Deep-dive into single topics over multiple weeks. Start with concepts and movement pathways, progressively add detail and systems.
How We Teach Fundamentals
Fundamentals classes prioritize breadth: building a wide, well-labeled mental map so students feel comfortable everywhere even if they're not yet skilled anywhere.
Every class follows the same four-segment format (see Curriculum Design Report for full details):
- Warmup (~2 min): light movement
- Evergreen game (~8 min): constant game covering a broad positional category
- Retrieval (~10-15 min): revisiting a topic from 2-6 weeks ago
- Main topic (~35-40 min): the week's primary instructional content
The default main topic block follows a three-stage progression within each class:
- Blocked drilling of the entry to the position
- Serial game: drill the transition into the game position, then play
- Less constrained rounds with increasing chaos and complexity
This progression moves students from isolated technique to increasingly game-like application within a single class.
Multiple positional engagement types appear in a single session through the evergreen and retrieval segments. Before a student touches the main topic, they've already engaged with several different positions, building the breadth that fundamentals prioritizes.
Why the retrieval segment works
The retrieval segment isn't just review. The act of retrieving a memory strengthens it more than re-studying the same material. And the harder the retrieval (meaning some forgetting has occurred), the stronger the resulting memory. This is called the "desirable difficulty" effect (Lemov, Chapter 2).
The practical implication: the retrieval segment should feel slightly effortful for students. If they remember everything immediately, the retrieval is too soon and provides minimal benefit. The ideal spacing is when students have partially forgotten, which is why we use the 2-6 week window.
This changes how you should run the segment. Expect some forgetting. Don't be alarmed by it. The struggle to remember is precisely what makes it valuable. If you see coaches cutting the retrieval segment because "they already got it last time," that's removing the most valuable learning moment in the class.
What we're developing in fundamentals students
In priority order:
- Playfulness and training culture. Can they invest in loss, self-handicap, keep the rally going?
- Awareness. Can they read alignment in real time? Can they perceive threats and opportunities?
- Problem-solving through play. Can they use the conceptual framework to solve novel problems?
- Concrete skills. Do they have a baseline of practical ability across all major areas?
We list concrete skills last because they're the output of the first three, not the input. A student with strong awareness and good problem-solving habits develops concrete skills faster than a student who memorizes techniques but can't read a live situation.
How We Teach Intermediate
Intermediate classes assume students have decent movement quality and a large enough mental map to absorb more per session.
Where fundamentals covers multiple engagements per class, Intermediate deep-dives into a single positional engagement for several weeks. We're building deep pathways rather than wide and shallow ones.
The progression across a multi-week block:
- Concepts and movement pathways (orient to the engagement)
- Key controls and battles (what are both players fighting over?)
- Progressively add detail, systems, and fine-tuning
- Full positional sparring with increasing complexity
There are differences in how we'd run an Intermediate series on arm bars (more linear, more detail-friendly) versus guard passing (less linear, more concept-driven). We adjust based on who's there and how everyone is progressing.