A BJJ training journal is the catalogue your art never wrote for you. I started keeping one around blue belt, and years later it is still the most useful thing I own from those years on the mat.
Why jiu-jitsu needs one more than judo
I train both, and I have never kept a journal for judo. Judo is standardised. There is a clear core set of throws, the Gokyo, and a whole library of books describes each one. If I forget a detail, the detail is written down somewhere.
Jiu-jitsu has no single catalogue. Every academy, every professor, every game has its own versions, and there are a lot of them — more than 600 techniques, by my rough count. The details you learn on a Tuesday night exist in one place: your professor's head. If you do not write them down, they are gone.
How it started
I started when I moved from Texas to Fort Lauderdale and changed gyms. I arrived as a white belt with four stripes, began training under Professor Alexandre "Café" Dantas, and got my blue belt from him. I loved the technique, I found every class interesting, and I was afraid of losing the small details that make a move work. So after every class I wrote them down.
I went digital from day one, straight into a Google Sheet. I wanted the information in a form I could sort and search later.
The sheet: four columns
Mine had these columns:
Date. Technique name. A detailed description of the technique. Position the technique starts from.
I added the position column later — side control top, side control bottom, and so on. That turned out to be the most useful column of all.
About 97% of what I wrote was technique. The other 3% was the odd memorable moment: a funny exchange, or the first time a technique actually worked on someone.
Write it before it fades
Timing matters more than format. I wrote after every class, as soon as possible. Morning class, then straight after the morning class. Evening class, straight after the evening class. An hour later the grip detail or the angle of the knee is already blurry.
Re-read, clean up, sort
Every so often I re-read the whole thing, filtered it and removed duplicates, because techniques come round again and again. Over time the entries started to line up into a system.
It paid off in a way I did not plan. Later I filmed techniques at training, and the written descriptions made it easy to describe those videos properly.
What the position column showed me
Once I could filter by position, I could see my game on one screen, and I could see the holes. The biggest one: I had no techniques at all for passing the Z-guard, the knee shield, from the top.
So I went looking. I found videos of my professor, because all my other techniques came from him and I wanted this piece to fit the same game. Then I came to one class and asked him directly to show me how he passes the Z-guard, and I filmed it.
A journal that only records what you learned is a diary. Sorted by position, it becomes a map of what you have not learned yet.
The mistake I made: left and right
This is the one thing I would fix if I started again. I did not describe sides clearly. Years later I read my own entries and could not tell which hand, which leg, or which side the move was on.
Pick a system of reference points before you write your first entry, and use it every time. For example, describe everything from your own point of view, and always name the hand and the side. It feels pedantic after class. It is the difference between a description you can use in five years and one you cannot.
Start tonight
Open a sheet, or a notebook, and make four columns: date, technique, details, position. Write tonight's class before you go to bed. Decide how you will write left and right before you start.
I used a spreadsheet. The ideal tool is simpler: a paper journal in your gym bag, so you can write the technique down the moment class ends, before you even get to the car. That is exactly what our Grappler Progress Journal is for.
