Teach Skills, Not Techniques

This week’s article is for coaches that want to get better at teaching and students with aspirations of teaching one day. We’re going to explore some of my takeaways from reading Skill Acquisition for Judo: Principles into Practice. And because the book is focused on teaching judo, we’re analyzing one of the best judoka to ever fight in MMA in the Premium Notebook.

Now let’s get into it.

If you want to be a good coach you need to be good at capturing multiple minds’ attention at once. So how do you do that? By focusing on what you’re teaching? Or the athletes listening to the instruction?

If you’re using teacher-centric methods of instruction, you’re using what’s known as a linear pedagogy. They emphasize prescriptive instructions and drills so athletes can focus on acquiring specific movement patterns.

Generally, linear pedagogies look at teaching like it’s a one-size fits all approach where the teacher teaches what they learned because that’s the way they imagine the platonic ideal of the movement pattern they’re teaching.

Non-linear pedagogies are the opposite.

Non-linear pedagogies encourage learners to discover and develop their own movement solutions through exploration and experimentation. This means lessons are organized in a way where individuals can develop unique skills and movement patterns.

If your teacher subscribes to a linear pedagogy they are having you drill the “right way”. If they subscribe to a non-linear pedagogy, they don’t necessarily think right ways exist. And when you break teaching methods into these categories, linear and non-linear pedagogies, I don’t think many people would argue against adopting a non-linear pedagogy.

Persons are unique. Aside from their personalities being different, the very structures that support their bodies are not the same.

Sure, generally humans have two arms, two legs, and a spine, but that says nothing about the length of those limbs, thickness of the bones within them, strength of the muscles moving said bones, nor the range of motion they create. And because the literal physical structures are not identical, why would we think teaching physical skills should be uniform?

The trick is to give everyone the same goals, suggest technical ways to achieve those goals, and let them develop their own distinct skillset along the way.

We’re in the middle of an eye-rollingly long debate. Should we even teach techniques in jiujitsu? This debate is largely between jiujitsu coach Greg Souders and everyone else.

Souders is arguing against an old method of teaching centered around static drilling between willing participants. He claims that drilling with willing participants teaches you how to drill, but it doesn’t teach you how to do the technique against unwilling participants. To do that, you need to train techniques with resistance. To really learn a skill you need to add progressive resistance until your practice approaches the field you’ll perform on.

And I don’t really think there is anything wrong that with this claim.

Sure, you can learn how to shoot a basketball in isolation alone on a court, but if you want to be a good basketball player you need to shoot while someone defends you. And then you practice shooting on a court filled with opposing defenders.

Back to jiujitsu. And where Souders loses me along with the rest of the jiujitsu community.

Souders and his sycophants make headlines by proudly proclaiming they don’t drill. Proponents occasionally goes as far as saying they don’t teach techniques. Instead, they push people to play tightly constrained games with specific tasks so they can self educate. But, and this is a big but, regardless of how you decide to educate students, with linear or non-linear pedagogies, the education setting needs to be grounded in developing defined skills.

In a previous article we discussed a major shortfall in jiujitsu instruction. The sport’s coaches are notorious for teaching techniques without explaining the tactics and strategies for competition. This means their students learn how to do moves but they miss the context for why they’re doing said moves, how they work, and what makes a good practitioner.

Similarly, coaches teach techniques without explaining them in terms of what the move is broadly supposed to accomplish. And by doing that they don’t teach their students what skills they actually need to be an effective jiujitsu practitioner.

This forces us to ask an important question. What’s the difference between a skill and a technique?

Let’s back up and look at jiujitsu competition. The sport was born from a self defense system that uses physical restraint techniques that allow you to subdue opposition while exposing yourself to minimal risk.

So, ignoring technical terms, what are the skills you need to successfully physically restrain an opponent while limiting your own risk of injury?

You need to be able to go to the ground safely. This can mean ending up on top of your opponent or beneath them. What matters is not getting hurt in the process of going from standing to the ground.

When you’re on the floor you need to get around your opponent’s legs so you can pin them and they can’t use their legs to kick you, or get back up. You also need to be able to isolate limbs for submission holds. If you end up on the bottom you need to use your legs to off balance your opponent so you can get on top, get back to your feet, or isolate a limb for a submission.

That’s it. That’s all jiujitsu is.

But knowing the primary skills of jiujitsu doesn’t immediately mean we can design the best way to teach the sport. To do that, we need to subdivide these broad, non-specific skills into smaller and smaller skills.

If you want to get better at using your guard you need to get better at the skills of controlling posture and distance. And if you want to get good at controlling posture, you can work on the skill of using an over hook to hold your opponent down.

By analyzing and subdividing the skills needed for jiujitsu you can also create situations and games for sparring to keep practice fun and interesting. And you can use this line of thinking as a system for building an entire flexible jiujitsu curriculum.

To effectively teach skills and transfer knowledge you’ll need something to teach. A curriculum. But creating a curriculum doesn’t mean writing out everything you can do in jiujitsu. No, that would be too big, if you could ever actually do it.

Jiujitsu is the red headed step child of grappling. Especially no gi. It’s basically doing everything under the sun without striking until someone quits. That means you can pretty much teach whatever you want.

What you really want is a system for designing classes that is flexible and helpful for transmitting the skills that the sport necessitates. So, what does this look like?

Assume you’re teaching a 60 minute class about triangle chokes.

You can warm-up by putting athletes in full guard. You instruct the person playing guard to keep their opponent down. The person on top only has to stand-up to win this small warm-up game. If they do, reset in full guard. Call out the fact that your students are working on the skills of standing out of closed guard and controlling opponents posture in full guard.

Do this for a few minutes and then switch offense and defense. Then your athletes should be warmed up.

After warming up you can spend ~ 20 minutes on the technical elements of a triangle choke. You can show 2-3 methods of getting a triangle choke along with the finishing mechanics. After that block of practice open the session up for questions. Now you’re halfway done.

Now that you’ve warmed up practiced the finer details of the techniques as you see them you can start training with resistance. Set up 2-3 games that reinforce the skills you’re learning and skills for the overall sport for jiujitsu.

You might do a round where one partner starts with a triangle choke and their job is to finish it while their opponent only needs to escape the starting position. Reinforce the idea that you’re working on the skill of controlling posture.

You can start the next round in side control. The bottom player’s goal is to get back to closed guard, sweep, or stand-up and the top player has to get a submission. The bottom player is training their skills of escaping and re-guarding. The top player is working on their own skills of pinning and isolating a limb for a submission.

And for the third round you can have one athlete start with a single leg and try to finish it while the defender only has to free their leg. The offensive athlete is working on their takedown skills while the defensive athlete is working on the skill of freeing a leg.

If there is an outcome in any of the rounds, switch who is on offense and defense. Keep switching until the round ends. Then switch partners. Lastly, leave the class with time for open, live training.

Specific warm-up. Study the finer details of the what you’re working on. Questions. Games to reinforce what you’ve learned and sharpen specific skills. Then open training for generalized development.

This simple setup allows athletes to learn their instructors’ best practices and explore movement patterns that work best for their own body. It combines the best elements of linear and non-linear pedagogies while keeping instruction fun and refreshing for both students and athletes. It works because it gives athletes both broad and specific goals to work towards so they’re forced to develop the skills of the sport.

So, how can you as a student use these ideas to learn faster?

Study techniques only to learn why they work so you can broadly understand the skills the sport requires. Study specifics deeply only so you can generalize.

I got inspired to write this after reading a book on teaching judo so I want to end by analyzing what made Karo Parisyan so special. If you’re not familiar with him, Parisyan is arguably the most successful judoka to ever fight in the UFC.

I’m not saying he was the most credentialed judoka ever. Far from it. Several Olympic gold medalists have fought before.

What I’m saying is, I can’t think of any fighter that successfully used such a wide variety of judo techniques in MMA.