Kyuzo Jiu Jitsu — The Next Play Mentality in Jiu Jitsu

Adopting a Next Play mentality in Jiu Jitsu.

It’s interesting to me how many things in Sports Psychology get called “Tips” or “Tricks”. It’s the same in Jiu Jitsu actually. You get a lot of people looking for a trick to get out of mount or so on.

A better name for this one I’m going to describe today is a Mental Skill, and like all other skills, this one has to be practiced over and over so that you can get good at using it when the time is right.

Next Play means that once you make a mistake, you don’t dwell on it even for a second. You just move on to the next play- the next challenge, the next position, or the next movement. You’re not ignoring that you made an error, instead, you’re leaving the analysis of the error until after the round.

The first good thing about this is that when you make a mistake, you won’t waste valuable time in the match. Those few seconds after your error are really valuable. You need to adjust to compensate for the error. One breath where you sigh or curse yourself might mean you don’t get to reverse the error or defend well.

The second thing is that it can help to reduce the effect of the error. For example, let’s say I make a mistake and allow my opponent to get behind me. If I curse myself and spend a few seconds cursing myself, my opponent can use those seconds to get his hooks in to take my back, or even get a choke on.

The mistake happened. There’s no point in dwelling on it. If I focus on the next play (the next right thing to do, like the back escape or ensuring that he can’t put his hooks in), I can stop the error from compounding.

Here’s what I teach.

When you make an error, do the next 3 very simple things right. In the case of someone getting behind me this might be-

Stop him from getting an arm around my neck. Stop him from connecting his hands. Stop him from getting his hooks in.

Once I’ve done that, I can arrest the slide. And perhaps I can start working on reversing the error. If I get desperate, the error will likely compound as my opponent takes advantage or my panic move or the second I take to berate myself.

What a great life lesson too. It happened. Don’t dwell on it. Just start to fix it or move on. Although it’s a bit harder in real life. For example, I once called my Primary school teacher, Mr. Buckley, “Dad”. That one was really hard to move on from.