Jozef Chen Taught Me to Train with Intention
Most of what gets said about improving at BJJ is not wrong, it is just scattered. I am currently going through the Nomadic Grappling content on Jozef Chen's site and trying to sharpen my game, and I am basing this on the first course I went through. It is essentially something I am writing so I can remember it myself. What I got from it was a reframe of how I think about training altogether. A lot of what Jozef covers I had heard in pieces before, the usual advice about drilling more, watching footage, asking your coach for feedback. But he organizes it in a way that made me realize I had been doing most of it without intention, which is almost the same as not doing it at all.
Growth and Performance Are Not the Same Session
One of the first things Jozef draws a clear line around is the difference between innovation and honing. Innovation is the growth phase, trying new positions, experimenting with entries, being willing to look lost for a while. Honing is the performance phase, sharpening what you already have until it works under pressure without you having to think about it.
The mistake he identifies, and that I recognized immediately in myself, is mixing the two without realizing it. You are never fully innovating because you keep defaulting to your A-game when things get tight. You are never fully honing because you keep tinkering. Jozef's suggestion is to alternate between these phases deliberately, even something as simple as a month of each, so that you are actually doing one of them at a time instead of a diluted version of both.
Knowing What You Are Actually Bad At
Jozef spends real time on self-assessment, and the core point is that vague problem identification produces vague results. Telling yourself your guard passing needs work is not actionable. Identifying that you consistently get stuck when someone knee-shields you and you cannot figure out how to flatten them is something you can actually address.
His recommended tools for this are straightforward. Film your rounds if your gym allows it. Your subjective experience of a roll and what actually happened are frequently different things. Ask your training partners specific questions, not what should I work on but how exactly did you pass my guard just there, what were you seeing when you decided to take my back. The people who beat you consistently have information about your game that you do not. Most will share it if you ask precisely. And ask your coach where they see your biggest gaps, because they are watching you from an angle you cannot access yourself.
Research as Part of the Process
Jozef makes the case that learning does not stop when you leave the gym, and he lays out a practical framework for studying outside of it. The three areas he focuses on are athletes, techniques, and competitions.
For athletes, his point is to find practitioners who share your body type or stylistic tendencies and study how they move through the positions that give you trouble. One person's approach to a technique might not fit how you move. Another's does. You do not know which until you have looked at a few. For techniques, he recommends going deep on whatever specific problem you have identified rather than watching BJJ broadly. YouTube covers most of what you need, and he mentions that AI tools can help you find who is known for specific techniques and where to find their footage. Paid platforms like OutlierDB offer more detailed breakdowns with timestamps when you need to go further.
For competition footage, his point is that understanding how a technique performs under tournament pressure, in the specific ruleset you compete in, is different from understanding the mechanics in isolation. ADCC, IBJJF, and EBI each reward different things. If you compete in one of those formats, the footage from those events is your most relevant reference material.
How You Use Open Mat
Jozef is direct about the difference between showing up to open mat and actually using it. Rolling continuously for an hour is enjoyable. It is also a fairly lazy learning environment if you do not have a specific intention going in.
The drilling advice he gives is worth taking seriously. Drilling with a completely passive partner does not prepare you for what happens when someone actually defends. The drilling that transfers is the kind where your partner is reacting, where you are making decisions based on what they give you, where the exchange starts to resemble a real round. Dead drilling, as he calls it, is generally not productive. The resistance is the point.
He also makes a point about reciprocity that stuck with me. Ask your training partners what they are working on. Offer to help them with it. Do not just use people as tools for your own development and expect them to keep showing up for you.
Becoming Someone Who Can Solve Their Own Problems
The part of the course I found most useful was the section on becoming what Jozef calls an independent BJJ thinker. The idea is that relying on your coach to diagnose every problem for you has a ceiling. The practitioners who keep developing past the early belts are usually the ones who have built the ability to identify what is wrong, isolate the specific obstacle, generate possible solutions, test them, and assess honestly whether they worked.
Jozef's framework for this is simple even if it takes time to internalize. Define the problem precisely. Not I cannot pass guard, but I keep getting my posture broken when I try to drive through the knee shield. Identify what exactly is stopping you. Brainstorm solutions, including the unintuitive ones. Test them in rounds. Repeat.
It is the same process good problem-solvers use in any domain. Jozef just applies it cleanly to the mat, and seeing it laid out that way made me realize how rarely I had been doing it deliberately.
The course is worth going through if you train seriously. Not because the individual ideas are all new, but because of how Jozef connects them into a way of thinking about training that you can actually apply the next time you walk into the gym.