Learning jiujitsu is like learning a language. You don’t do it all at once. You learn the smallest, most base elements of a new tongue (an alphabet, words) before you dive in to the whole grand structure.

As you get more building blocks — more movements, a larger vocabulary of techniques — your understanding of the physical grammar expands. This is an exciting, albeit frustrating, process. I still remember the first time I hit the basic rear naked choke, and I also remember the months it took me to get there.

But you can’t say the same words forever unless you’re Hodor. You also can’t rear naked choke everyone either. If you want to become fluent, you have to acknowledge that what you’re aiming for is a long process.

That’s where transitions come in. Learning a technique well is powerful, but learning to flow between the techniques amplifies that power manifold. It’s the difference between knowing words and being able to have a conversation.

In this analogy, drilling complete transitions — chaining moves together — represents sentences and phrases, the core components of dialogue. When someone defends our attack, we want to be able to understand the language of that defense — and have our responsive phrase flow from us immediately and effortlessly.

We’ve talked about the power of drilling before. It helps us solidify our core of knowledge. Other people have knowledge, too, though. To stay ahead of them, we have to drill, and to drill chains of moves. I had a great response to my earlier post about how I drill and learn moves, so I thought it might be helpful to do a follow-up on my method for drilling transitions.

I divide the types of chain drills I do into two categories in my mind: static (or simple) and dynamic (or active). These aren’t cut-and-dried distinctions, but it’s how I think about them. We’ll start with the most simplistic versions of these and advance to the most complex.

SIMPLE CHAIN DRILLING

When you learn new moves or new details, it’s helpful to just move through the positions. I think of drilling basic transitions as cementing the work I’ve done (learning that, when my opponent responds a certain way, I should react appropriately) and keeping my timing sharp.

I’m going to offer a couple of examples for each of the drilling methods I describe, just so you get an idea of what I’m talking about. Certainly, the moves you choose to drill more regularly may differ from mine. The concepts remain the same, though.

Examples: 
Collar Choke to Scissor sweep, when your opponent defends the choke with one hand, resulting in a chance to sweep them to one side.
Hip bump to kimura, when your opponent defends the hip bump my posting an arm, which you attack with a kimura.
Bridge and roll escape from mount (“Upa”) to elbow escape (“shrimp escape”) from mount, when your opponent pulls their arm back after you try to trap it.

You’ve probably already done at least a few drills of this nature, where you transition between these moves. If you haven’t, great! No time like the present to start. If you have, even better! Here are a few simple tips that may enhance your sessions.

• Identify these simple transition chains in every position — I’ll bet you have at least one for every common situation.
• Make time for drilling rounds where you do a minute or two of each of these transitions. I teach a class where this is basically all we do!
• Try to prioritize the moves you use most, especially those that you don’t have an option to not do (e.g., escapes from bad spots — if you’re getting mounted all the time, make sure to put those escapes at the top of the list).
• As your instructor teaches you moves you haven’t seen before, or you go to seminars, try to drill the transitions you learn the next day, and make the ones you like part of your regular rotation.

You already know I’m a fan of spreadsheets. I keep notes on my transitions in every position in mine, and that’s helpful. Maybe that’ll work for you, too.

DYNAMIC CHAIN DRILLING

After you’ve trained a while and simple transitions are fairly well ingrained, you can take it to the next level. Dynamic chain drilling is a little more fast-paced, and assumes you’re practicing techniques that you already know well — you don’t want to practice bad habits. Another key ingredient for this is a good drilling partner. Seph Smith and I talked about the art of being a valuable drilling partner on the podcast:

 

One component that helps me identify a drilling sequence as “dynamic” is this: at a certain point I will have more than one option during the sequence, so I’ll have to make a decision on the fly. This improves my ability to recognize patterns and my body’s reaction time in responding to them.

To explain one way I do dynamic drilling, let me offer a generic framework and then a few specific examples.

Generally, I will drill in three minute rounds. For the first minute, I will drill the moves in a predetermined order. For the second minute, I will offer my partner instruction on one or two specific reactions that will change the way I implement the sequence — “hey, please move your hips out this way until I ask you to stop.” I usually do two or three different options during this time. For the third minute, I say “surprise me.” My partner can do any of the motions I’ve asked for. My partner isn’t trying to defeat the move, but to feed me the proper move with just enough resistance to make the transition realistic. This is why there’s an art to being a good drilling partner, finding this sweet spot.

Here’s a specific, simple example that I use regularly. I do guard passing sequence where I do four different passes: I start going for the double under pass. I transition to either a knee cut pass, a single under stack pass, or what’s sometimes called the “leg staple” or “smash pass.” For the first minute or so, I’m just manipulating my partner’s body into the positions for each pass. Then, usually a minute in, I’ll start with double unders and ask my partner to defend by making their legs heavy. Then I pop up into combat base for the knee cut pass. After doing that a few times, I’ll ask my partner to move their hips away from my knee — facilitating a transition to the stack pass — or toward my knee, facilitating a transition to the smash pass.

For the final minute, I ask my partner to give me one of the reactions, but surprise me. This allows me to flow easily between the techniques, sometimes moving back and forth between them. Reading reactions in real time approximates the way we actually pass guard, and allows us high-rep, low-impact work to get better on it.

I can list a few other examples of the common chains I drill if that’s helpful, but you get the idea of how it works.

I do want to list two more specific examples, because I think they demonstrates the possibilities of going down the drilling rabbit hole.

Open guard has gotten incredibly complex, especially in the competitive tournament world. That means transitions are more important — and more numerous — than ever. I sometimes analogize the guard to a universe, and each subset of the guard — butterfly, spider, deep half, etc. — is a galaxy all its own. You can spend a lot of time exploring just one galaxy. When you put together the transitions between those galaxies, you have almost limitless possibilities.

Take De La Riva guard, one of my favorite positions. A common comment I get from people who are learning it is that grips are confusing — what do I do if I get this sleeve, other than hold on for dear life? De La Riva and the related guards can be complicated, and we don’t want to take the time to think “OK, he kneels, and I have this sleeve … what now?” We want it to be ingrained, and drilling the various permutations of grips and posture — then doing our highest-percentage move — increases your success rate, I believe.

To help myself bake in the transitions to my favorite moves from each position, I do this drill:

De La Riva Sweep Series
My partner kneels. I get the far sleeve. I do a De La Riva-X sweep.
My partner kneels. I get the far sleeve. My partner stands. I do a tripod sweep.
My partner kneels. My partner hides the far sleeve. I get the near sleeve. I do a back take.
My partner kneels. My partner hides the far sleeve. I get the near sleeve. My partner stands. I do a back take.
My partner kneels and hides both sleeves. I get the belt and berimbolo.
My partner stands. I get the far sleeve. I do a tripod sweep.
My partner stands. I get the near sleeve. I do a tripod sweep.
My partner stands. My partner hides the near sleeve by pulling back. I get the belt and berimbolo.

Two points about this: first, you don’t have to run through every possibility every time. Don’t sell yourself short if you have only a little time and you want to get a little drilling in — just do the standing sequences, or the kneeling sequences, or whatever makes sense. Second, again, we don’t want our minds to have to run through a checklist in the moment of sparring or competing, so drilling can help build those patterns. To learn new stuff, do the simple, static drills. When doing dynamic drilling, do the high-percentage moves you’re confident you know well, so you’re preparing your body to do your highest-percentage stuff right away.

It might not be De La Riva for you, of course. What I’m trying to suggest here is to identify the galaxies of guard and guard passing that make the most sense to you, and explore your best moves within those galaxies in this way.

It might even be more important to transition between guards, to go from galaxy to galaxy. If your opponent successfully clears your De La Riva hook, for example, you no longer have a functional guard. You need to transition. I regularly do some version of the following transition drill:

De La Riva Transition Series
I start in De La Riva guard with my partner standing. He clears my hook and stuffs my other foot between his legs.
I transition to Reverse De La Riva guard.
My partner moves forward. I pull myself under into X-Guard.
My partner puts his lead knee on the ground. I pull myself into the waiter sweep position.
I transition to X-Guard on the far side.

These transitions allow me to maintain a functional guard even if my partner defeats my guard structures. The idea is to stay one step ahead.

One final, critical point: what makes dynamic drilling effective is that it can change in midstream. If I decide I want to sweep my partner at any point during the sequence — say, if I choose to do a sweep from X-Guard — I can do that. If I have a willing partner, I’ll give that person an idea of what I’m doing and just ask them to react naturally to what I’m doing. That way my partner gives me real-time feedback, and I can give myself a lot of different “looks” during a regular jiujitsu sequence for me.

Exploration is fun. It’s part of what makes jiujitsu continually interesting. I find drilling my way (in non-extractive fashion) through various galaxies and universes to enhance both my understanding — and enjoyment — of playing with those positions. Try this out: I hope you find the same thing.