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Early Specialisation for Jiu Jitsu Kids
We train kids 3 times per week. I’ll tell you the facts as a professional coach of 20+ years- Kids should train twice per week, maximum until the age of 10/11. After that they can train an extra session if they want to. And at about 14 or 15 (or whenever they choose) they can up it. The 3rd session we put on is for scheduling flexibility for parents.
No under 12 should be training one sport more than twice per week. They need variety in their athletic pursuits, time to be creative in other avenues of life, and crucially, time to themselves to play, get bored, and relax.
“But then they’ll fall behind the other kids! They won’t maximise their potential!”
Well, potential in terms of physical and emotional development is a long game that takes place over childhood and adolescence, so let’s not rush to judgement on what's effective here.
Something interesting is happening in Youth Soccer. Many teams are dropping their Academy teams at the under 10 level. They’ve finally seen the light and perhaps realised that it takes 100s of kids to make 1 professional footballer, who probably would have made it anyway.
They’ve also begun to respect the dangers of early specialisation in sport. When a kid specialises too early, he runs the risk of repetitive strain injuries, burnout, and even mental health and social challenges when released. And the failure rate is so high, being released is close to an inevitability.
Now here’s the funny thing. Anyone who works with even a small class of kids knows about early specialisation. It’s probably on page 1 of google when you search for youth athlete development. These academies with multi billion euro clubs backing them know it too. They’ve got the best sports scientists there. But they persisted because they were in an arms race against the rest of the clubs who sold parents a dream that their son would be a millionaire footballer in 10 years.
So what about Jiu Jitsu? Well, these academies do exist and have done for quite a while. In Brazil, they used to be known as social projects. Here, academies would take vulnerable kids and use Jiu Jitsu to avoid street life and the dangers of growing up in the favellas. It’s long been a force for good in Brazil, and while the social projects have produced world champions, they’ve had a far better record in keeping kids off the street and in something positive.
But more recently, we’re seeing a different kind of academy, with kids training daily in more affluent areas, and parents paying top dollar to have them there. A friend told me of a parent who moved his entire family from East to West Coast USA so that his son could train Jiu Jitsu with him. The child was 10. This is pretty extraordinary stuff, but becoming more common. It’s not unusual to hear of parents home-schooling to maximise their child’s Jiu Jitsu “career”.
It’s hard to get your head around what the end game is here. There are 2 paths to being a millionaire Jiu Jitsu competitor. One is to be one of the top professional fighters on shows such as Polaris or WNO, but even at that, the real money there is with Instagram tie-ins, sponsorship, and the instructional videos you can sell afterwards. Most don’t make much. The second is to transition to MMA and take a run at UFC glory. Neither of these could be described as anything like the riches involved in football, tennis, or basketball.
The difficulty is that it works so well in the short term. You could take a talented 8 year old and bring him to Jiu Jitsu 5 times a week, and within a few months he would be wiping the floor with his peers in competition. Then, more than likely, he would be out of Jiu Jitsu by the time he was 16. You have no idea how many times I’ve seen this as a tournament official. The superstar kid on the top of the podium at 11 is rarely the kid at the top of the podium at 21.
It’s a race we refuse to join at Kyuzo, even if it means our youth tournament results are effected in the short term. We just won’t push them that hard. It has to come from them at an age where it can come from them. That age is at least 14.
I’ll finish with a quick story. We had a 9 year old at a recent tournament. She had brought her lucky unicorn. She was showing it to her opponent in the bullpen beforehand. The third 9 year old was warming up, not speaking, with headphones on like a pro. Very diligent and impressive. She won the category. The two chatters came second and third.
Every time I reflect on that, if I was forced to choose, I would take either of the two unicorn admirers.
See you on the mat,
Barry
Here's two journal articles on the effects of the football Academy system and their dropouts.
Supporting transition- https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21520704.2024.2385955?af=R
From everything to nothing-