How to Practice Jiu Jitsu Alone

In this video, Professor Mike Martin, a third-degree black belt under Caio Terra, shares his insights on training in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ) on your own.

He explains that BJJ is more challenging to train for on your own than striking martial arts, which can be practiced on a bag or in a mirror.

BJJ requires an opponent, but there are many drills that you can do on your own, including movement drills, warm-ups, and workouts.

Professor Martin recommends using bjj2go.com, where you can find a range of drills and resources that you can use to improve your skills in BJJ.

In the video, he also discusses the importance of hip escape warm-up drills, hip thruster drills, mobility drills for balance on the ground, and neon belly drills.

Video Transcription

Hi, I'm professor Mike Martin. I'm a third degree black belt under Caio Terra. I own and operate strong heart academy in Phoenix, Arizona.

We are at 32 street in Union Hills and today I want to talk about how to train on your own.

Done With an Opponent

One of the things about Jiu Jitsu that sets it apart from a lot of martial arts is it is more difficult to train on your own.

Okay. Many things you can do in striking martial arts. In the mirror or on bags, there's less options in Jiu Jitsu.

Now, because things are done on an opponent. So in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, your goal is to submit your opponent or control your opponent to a point where they're ready to give up.

And there's no strikes, no punches, no kicks, nothing like that, no knees. Now you could obviously add those for some defense purposes, but they're not in sports Jiu Jitsu.

And generally not taught during most Jiu Jitsu classes. Now you need a partner to work on because I'm going to do a move on the partner.

Many times again, striking, you can practice your jab, crosses, hooks, your boxing in a mirror, and you don't have to hit anything.

And if you have a bag, you can practice hitting an actual bag. Now when you spar, that's when you need a, another person that's still very useful to learn how to spar for distance and things like that.

Practice on Your Own

Same thing with Jiu Jitsu. But in order to practice on your own, there's many drills you can do. We can do movement drills.

On my online platform, for strong heart, we use our curriculum, goes through it. It's bjj2go.com. And on there, I have plenty of things you can do on your own.

We also have like workouts and warmups. So learning how to warm up on your own is very helpful, especially if the old or you get, you want your body to be loose before the class starts.

Or if you're going to compete, how to get your body tuned up and ready to go versus just go straight out there.

Even when I was young, I, I like to warm up versus just go straight out there. But now that I'm older, it's even more important that I learn these movements to kind of, it's like greasing the bearings is the way I kind of think about it.

Get my joints ready to be used. It blood flowing through my muscles mobility work, things of that nature. Now there's a whole set of drills in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu that we can do that are movement specific to jiu jitsu, not just warm up drills.

So we can practice various, hip escapes, almost every jiu jitsu class you go to will have some form of hip escape warm up drills that they do.

The Value of Movement Drills

Now I've had, I've seen many people start to say recently like, you know, those are useless but I don't, I don't believe they are.

I think learning how to hit escape and continually not being lazy with your hip escape keeps you sharp in your ability to move your hips in and out of position.

So when you're attacking, you may need to move your hips. When you're escaping, you definitely need to move your hips.

So it's a valuable tool that you can use that's a movement that it's not always needed with another partner. You can do this by yourself.

Drill at Home

Now if you're at home, this is something that can be done on a rug, something like that. It's not as hard on the ground.

You're not going to have to move as much. If you have mats, I have plenty of students that have mats at their house like a five by five by five by ten, five by eight.

Those are great. You don't need much more space than that. You can put it in the garage. People have dedicated rooms in their house, which is awesome.

You can drill by yourself and you don't need a partner. There's also drills, movement drills. People call them egg beaters, where you're moving your legs and directionally.

It kind of warms up your knees, but also if someone's trying to grab a hole with your legs, how to circle your legs out of the grip.

It's hard to grip. I'm grabbing your circling your legs one direction and other direction. This also helps moving your hips and moving your knees, getting those knees warmed up.

You're ready to have good guard retention, which would say is make sure someone stays in front of you and not getting around your legs.

That's your guard retention, retention, keeping them in your guard. Your guard is anytime you're using your legs between you and your opponent.

This is a great drill. You don't need another opponent to do. You can do it with or without another person.

We do other hip warm-up drills, hip thruster drills, mobility drills for balance on the ground. You can also take a medicine ball and do neon belly drills, warm-up drills off of putting your neon a belly and then windshield-wipe your legs side to side.

There's plenty of these drills online too. If you go to bgj2go.com it has them all, but you can find them on YouTube for free.

There's many of them out there. They're not going to be listed in a row like bjj2go. It's not going to be as convenient.

But you can search them and you've got to find good ones of people that know how to teach properly. Unfortunately there's a lot of people that aren't great teachers, but they have a ton of content out there.

It might take you a little bit longer, but it's out there for free if you'd like. I also like to use a punching bag.

If you have a punching bag, maybe the rings broke on it. You can't hang anymore. Or you just don't really want to hang anymore.

You're not striking anymore. You can put it on the ground and you can do so many drills on a punching bag, learning how to mount off of it, how to change sides from the side control position.

There are plenty of those drills out there as well. Learning how to fall properly, dropfalls, which is done almost every judo class.

Falling and Standing for Self-Defense

We like to do them in at Strongheart too and technical stand-up. How to fall, how to stand back up. To me is one of the most important things for self-defense that you can do.

So many people don't know how to fall properly. If you fall improperly and you hit your head, you're going to knock yourself out.

Then there's no defending yourself at that point. Or you're going to post an arm and hurt your arm. You can't defend using your arm because it might be broken, dislocated, wrist hurt, fingers hurt, all these things.

And learning how to stand back up even just so you can run away is really important. A lot of times when people stand up, they lean forward, which exposes your head to a kick or a punch, like a soccer kick, like a real street fight.

And learning how to lean out of it to stand up and not turn your back, turn away to get up.

If you turn your back, someone can kick you from behind. Jiu Jitsu they will take your back and choke you.

But just for self-defense purposes, it's so helpful. When I teach my self-defense classes, I really emphasize falling and standing up just as much as like striking and covering your face, defending strikes and striking back.

Where You Can Practice?

I think falling and standing up is huge. And important to prevent injuries too. But those could all be done at your own.

You could do it in the grass, you could go to a park, you could do it on mats, like I said before if you had them at your house.

If you have a rug, I would go very slowly with these. Again, we have those on bjj2go.com also. We'll help you show you how to drop fall properly, starting on the ground and working way up and then back down.

More Training to Learn

Now there's back fall, side falls and front falls. All those are very valuable and helpful to get you learning how to fall properly, reduce any kind of injuries or take injuries out of the equation altogether.

You don't need any partners for those type of drills. Check it out. You guys can see all these drills and workouts that you can do too.

Workouts by yourself that are jiu jitsu centric, I would say. We have those on there too, even foam rolling, how to stretch properly and foam roll to get your muscles ready to go.

I like to do that after training or before training both. Check that out. It's a short one today. I just want to talk about how you can actually train by yourself.

Obviously, at the end of the day, you will need to join a class with others. I don't believe training, garage training is a great way to do jiu jitsu is better than zero training.

But if you want to supplement your training, you can do it on your own and there are plenty of drills that you can do on your own just to get a little bit better, more comfortable when you're in class.

When you go to an actual class, these things are a little bit faster, a little bit more warmed up and you'll understand them a lot better.

Your body movement is a lot better. One thing I like to also say is when you first start jj2, one of the things you learn in the beginning is just how to move correctly on the ground.

I'll tell people all the time, once you're past one year's old, there's really no other sports on the ground other than grappling.

If you play any sports, basketball, baseball, hockey, even, it's all on your feet and we are used to the movement and the balance on our feet.

Learning your balance on the ground is a great way to understand how to move properly for jj2 class. When you actually do lose live sparring, you're not falling over and losing a position because your balance is very good on the ground.

All these kind of solo drills that we call them are great for that great balance understanding of how your body works on the ground and how others do to break someone else's balance.

When you're trying to do a sweep, learning how to break someone's balance is to sweep them off their base and come on on top.

Very helpful just understanding your own balance and how your body works and with posts.

Conclusion

That's it for today. Just want to go over those solo drills.

You can check them out at bjj2go.com. Then we also have these warmups on our curriculum that everyone on my students have access to if you're a member of Strong Heart.

You can check us out at StrongHeartAcademy.com. If you want to try a free trial, just hit the free trial button.

I'm going to start putting up all our prices up soon just to get that out of the way so everyone knows what our value is.

When you come in you understand the value of what you're getting and check us out. Thanks. Peace.