Your Drills Should Be Uglier

When Trevor Ragan, motor learning advocate and founder of Championship Basketball School, talks to coaches or athletes about how they train and about how they learn, he often starts with a story about two tigers. One tiger is a zoo tiger. This tiger grew up in an enclosure, fenced off from the outside world. Every day, his food is brought to him. If it rains, he can walk into the warmth of a pre-built shelter. If it’s hot, he can bathe in the meticulously cared for pool. Life is easy because he is taken care of. The other tiger is a jungle tiger. This tiger grew up in the wilderness, hunting and tracking for each meal, walking long distances to find food and shelter. Each day brings something new and he must always be on guard lest he fall into a trap or become the prey of a hunter himself.

After Ragan finishes this story, he poses a question: Which tiger is best equipped for survival?  The answer is consistent—from high school basketball coaches to second-graders—the jungle tiger. In fact, if the zoo tiger was released into the jungle, he would probably die.

Pick Your Tiger: The Basics of Motor Learning

According to Ragan, how we approach learning determines what kind of tiger we become. If you want to become a jungle tiger, you need motor learning, which studies how people acquire skills and in that study has exposed a number of shortcomings in “traditional” approaches to skill development. In motor learning, you need random, game-like drills, not block drills.

To help you understand our terms, an example of block drilling would be a golfer practicing a putt from the same spot 30 times in a row. In a random drill, the balls would be scattered around the hole, forcing the golfer to take a putt from a different point on the green for each of the 30 repetitions. Ragan is not a jiu-jiteiro. His sport of choice is basketball, but his obsession with understanding how players learn and what can be done to maximize their performance has taken him through a winding and twisting journey. Currently, Ragan runs camps across the U.S. through his company Championship Basketball School. In his off-time, he shares his latest insights into coaching and learning via TrainUgly.com.

Even though Ragan’s focus is on basketball, his lessons are aimed at all coaches and athletes. In fact, he first learned about motor learning from John Kessel, the Director of Player Development for USA Volleyball. As Ragan describes it, Kessel’s job is to find the best way to prepare athletes for elite-level performance. USA Volleyball, with its extensive resources and access to top talent both on and off the court, ultimately chose motor learning as its coaching methodology because it produces higher rates of improvement and retention than other approaches.

Ragan met Kessel through his mother, who coached volleyball for some time. Kessel came in to run a camp for her team and Ragan was soon fascinated by the approach that Kessel took to training volleyball players. From the outside, it looked chaotic. The drills seemed random and players seemed to struggle to perform. At the end of the week, though, Ragan and his mother both saw visible improvements in how the players performed in scrimmages.

The Value of Game-Like Reps

When Ragan talked with Kessel about his approach, the coaching process suddenly made sense and it gave him clarity on a challenge he faced in his own sports career. As a high school basketball player, Ragan was a master of the gun, which is a ball-return device that helps players practice 3-point shots. The ball goes in the net; the gun shoots it back out. “I spent three years on the gun,” Ragan says. “On the gun, I could make 80 to 90 percent of my shots, but in a game, I could only make 40 percent of my shots. What was I missing?”

You might already be answering Ragan’s question. With the gun, Ragan shot from the same spot over and over. In a game, Ragan might be at a different place on the court. A defender might be in his face. He may have to decide between passing or shooting. He might be tired and sweaty. His girlfriend might be in the stands looking on with great expectations the way that teenage girls in sports movies do. The gun did not give Ragan practice with any of these things, so the gains that he saw in practice did not carryover to practice. “One of the most important things that motor learning science has come up with isn’t about how you look in practice but how you perform later,” Kessel says in one of Ragan’s video essays. “Performance, which is always after practice by a day or a week or whatever, is best because you do things that have higher levels of retention.”

The gun did not promote retention because it addressed only one facet of performance when in reality athletes need to be proficient in three areas. Those areas, according to Ragan and his interpretations of motor learning research, are:

• Reading – The athlete critically assesses the situation and picks the right response for that scenario.
• Planning – The athlete plots out the steps necessary for executing the response, taking into account factors like timing and power.
• Doing – The athlete executes the chosen technique with proper form and with the intended timing.

The gun taught Ragan to do a 3-point shot but gave him no practice with reading the opportunity for a 3-pointer or planning a shot in the tumult of a live game.

From the Court to the Mat

At this point, I hope that you can see how the work of a basketball coach might apply to jiu-jitsu. When we do a traditional armbar drill from guard, we limit ourselves to the doing end of the equation. Having technical proficiency is essential to our success to be sure, but if we fail to get repetitions with reading and planning, our armbars are likely to miss their mark in live rolling or in competition.
Just as Ragan was unlikely to end up in the exact spot of the gun-return with no coverage in a game, you are unlikely to end up with your opponent’s arm in the exact position, with no resistance, as when you drilled. This is what makes you a zoo tiger. Your armbar looks smooth and fluid behind the curated walls of a block drill, but when things get ugly, when you are in the wilderness of a live match, you fail to retain the gains that you saw in training. “When nothing changes from rep to rep, you only get to read and plan on the first rep. Everything after that is autopilot,” Ragan says. “The technique is important, but you have to read and plan for it to work in a game.” After sifting through the science and working with dozens of athletes, Ragan’s recommendation to coaches and players is simple: Have a growth mindset and get as many game-like reps as possible.

These two recommendations are intertwined. A growth mindset—which Ragan pulls from the research of Carol Dweck, a Stanford professor—is the understanding and acceptance that real learning and true growth occur at the edge of our comfort zones. If we are not challenged or are unwilling to face challenges, we are unlikely to improve. This mindset is critical in motor learning because accumulating game-like reps means failing, a lot. If you are not making mistakes, you are not challenging yourself enough to experience measurable improvements in your performance as an athlete. Block drills limit the likelihood of failure. Random drills force you to face and learn from failure, so you need the right mindset to reap the benefits.

Incorporating Motor Learning into Your Training

According to Ragan’s reasoning (an interpretation from a humble purple belt instructor)having jiu-jitsu students do a block drill of 40 armbars in a row will have relatively low retention. To make it more game-like, we would need to randomize the practice. We might have students:

• Vary the position of the target arm so that it is never in the same place twice.
• Ask the uke* (or partner) to alternate right and left arms at random.
• Randomize the pressure and posture angles that the uke gives.
• Periodically swap partners to give students exposures to different body-types.
• Incorporate the armbar training into a larger trigger drill where the student must choose between attacking an armbar, a triangle, or a Kimura based on specific variations in position.
• Isolate the guard position during live rolling and encourage students to focus on setting up an armbar.

It’s important to note that Ragan advocates simplified block drilling for introducing new techniques, especially in the case of less experienced athletes, but he advocates spending 20 repetitions or less in block mode before introducing randomization. The random variables do not need to be extreme, especially at the beginning of skill acquisition, but they do need to give the athlete practice with reading and planning as well as doing. Even though motor learning research has been growing for decades, relatively few coaches employ it in practice. Motor learning looks messy, so it takes some faith in the research to believe that athletes will come out the other end better for the challenge. Motor learning also requires more creativity on the part of coaches. Block drills are easy to set up and manage. Random drills that isolate the right skills are more difficult to design. “It’s really easy to coach the way you were coached,” Ragan warns. “Just because a team or athlete won a championship with traditional methods does not mean that better ways to learn and train do not exist.”

Glossary
UKE – A Japanese martial arts term for the person who “receives” the technique or in Judo for instance is being thrown.

According to the principles of motor learning, we should reconsider a few trademark jiu-jitsu drills in an effort to incorporate more reading and planning into classes.

• Solo-shrimping up and down the mat is a great way to introduce the basic skill of shrimping, but in the long-term it is not very game-like.
• Guard passing drills where the winner stays and the loser returns to wait in line gives the best grapplers more reps against less challenging competition and forces the least experienced students—who arguable need to improve the most—more practice waiting in line than actually training.
• Large batches of block drills like swinging armbar drills and side-to-side Kimura drills might be great for fitness but most often send grapplers into “auto-pilot” mentally, requiring little to no reading or planning.
• Classes composed primarily of students alternating drilling the same technique back and forth at the same tempo and on the same unresisting partners.

Wrap it Up
To learn more about motor learning, Ragan’s work, and becoming a jungle tiger, visit TrainUgly.com. As more sports adopt this approach to coaching and training, we are likely to see a new evolution in the jiu-jitsu community as well.