MMA and BJJ veteran Gabriel Gonzaga recently shared his top 3 tips for Jiu-Jitsu white belts to help them progress in the sport faster. It’s one of the biggest concerns that every new practitioner has, as the desire to improve as quick as possible is huge. Everyone seeks to improve at stages of their Jiu-Jitsu journey of course, but that is never easier than right at the beginning. The first challenge for everyone is learning how to tie your belt but as soon as that’s been mastered, there’s a mountain of concepts and techniques that need to be developed to a competent standard.
There are many important things to keep in mind when you’re a BJJ white belt, but Gonzaga focused on how best to improve instead. His first major tip was probably the most obvious, but it’s definitely worth remembering:
“If you really wanna be good at Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, you need to put time on the mat. Time is everything. You need to put (in) like hours of training, not ‘oh, I trained for three years, two times a week, one hour.’ It’s not the same, like one guy can go every single day, two hours a day. So the hours accumulate. In anything you’re gonna get better (at), hours are gonna make the difference.”
Obviously time isn’t the only determining factor in someone’s progress and the way that someone spends their time on the mat is much more important. Gonzaga touches in this too by explaining that white belts should be careful what they focus on:
“You need to go for the base positions first. To run, first you need to walk. If you’re trying to run and you don’t know how to walk, you’re gonna fall… If you’re a white belt, you should go with the basics first. Really basic; passing guard, armbar from the mount, armbar from the guard, kimura… Really basic positions, (it) doesn’t need to be too fancy.”
The final one of his three tips for white belts is something that you’ll likely here every BJJ coach say, not just Gabriel Gonzaga:
“Try to focus. Our brain learns by focusing. So when everybody is having fun, having conversations on the mat, if you put focus on the position you’re gonna learn faster. One thing that I always did when my coach, Wander Braga, used to show a position; that day I would try to do the position. I would fail the majority of the time but my brain was focused on trying to hold the information, to learn the position.”
Gabriel Gonzaga shared his 3 biggest tips for BJJ white belts in a recent post to his official Instagram account:
