Last Tuesday during our Fundamentals of BJJ class at Crossroads Brazilian Jiu-jitsu we continued working off of the basic rolling drill. In BJJ or Brazilian Jiu-jitsu it is always important to place more importance on position than submission. If you have excellent control, submissions will come. The Rolling Drill takes you through several of the major positions in bjj, the mount, the guard and side control, and because this drill is performed with no resistance and is noncompetitive the sole focus can be on making sure you are executing the right details at the right time.
New Jiu-jitsu students often confuse the idea of faster and sooner. In jiu-jtisu a late reaction causes you to have to move faster in order to perform the move, this essentially translates to, if you are late, you have to use speed. However Speed requires you to use more strength and cardio and over time overuse of these attributes can cause you to fatigue. So in BJJ it is better to move sooner, this means you are reacting more in sync with your training partners movements and techniques. The benefit of reacting sooner is that you use less energy to perform the same techniques, this prevents fatigue which allows you to maintain a higher level of awareness throughout the roll and this higher level of awareness allows you to capitalize on your partners mistakes much easier.
In this class we added 3 submissions onto the rolling drill which allowed us to work a triangle and two armbar variations while in transition. Each of these submissions have simple mistakes that make them possible, and working them in transition creates the opportunity to work on them while you are moving through positions, much more like an actual sparring session than simply performing the technique by itself.