What if I told you there was an absolutely guaranteed way to make your jiu-jitsu performance noticeably better in a short time? Sometimes as short as immediately? Would you be interested?

Okay, here is where I show that I have no ability to do fancy money making internet marketing stunts, and am doomed to never be the next Social Media Marketing Guru. I am about to tell you, free of charge and with no caveats, how to increase your BJJ ability possibly overnight.  Are you ready?

Work the upa!

Yes, I know it is one of the two most fundamental moves in jiu-jitsu. I know everyone learns it in their first couple of lessons. And I know that everyone probably does them regularly. Here’s the thing though. Most people don’t do them correctly, or do them at the correct time. I see it time after time, at gyms and training groups all over the world. People think they are doing them, and they are actually far from the ideal.

A few years ago, I taught at a school in the UK. The head coach at the time was a solid purple. And when I watched the attendees warm up, they all had terrific hip escapes, but no one could do even close to a decent upa. When I pointed that out, there was some indignation until I demonstrated it under pressure how poorly they were at it.They thought they could do it, but didn’t realize how far from the ideal they actually were.

I recently did a seminar where a number of attendees were experienced BJJ players. There were even a couple of purple belts there. When they did positional sparring, I saw over and over again failures at performing an upa correctly, or not performing it when they should, or failing to chaining it together with other things. All I had to do to turbo boost their success rate at escaping was to simply say “do an upa”. Suddenly, where before they were stuck futilely trying to escape, now they immediately were doing it left and right! Of course, this was after about 30 minutes of actively working the move with correct details. This is absolutely not an isolated instance, but rather the most recent example of how simple it is to achieve this goal.

I know it sounds simple, but it is true.

In the next two parts of this article, we will look at the two issues (technical failure, tactical failure) and how to fix them.