Top Five BJJ Lessons for Beginners

By Jiu Jitsu Style

By starting BJJ, you've already taken a huge step towards self-progression and signed yourself up for a Jiu Jitsu journey that pays back richly over the years. First and foremost, training has to be fun — every time you step on the mat, remember why you took up Brazilian Jiu Jitsu in the first place. Here are a few pointers that will help you develop as a grappler and enjoy your training as much as possible.

Train With Everyone

We're not saying 50kg practitioners should be regularly rolling with 130kg equivalents, but diversifying your training is one of the fastest ways to keep progressing. If you only roll with your friends, or with a small handful of familiar partners at your academy, you're capping the number of styles and skill sets you ever get to test your game against. The richer your pool of training partners, the more games, body types, and levels of experience you'll learn to navigate — and the better you'll be when something unfamiliar lands in front of you at a competition or open mat.

Tap Quick, Tap Often

The simple fact is: if you're injured, you're not training. If someone catches you in a submission, you have to learn to tap — and tap quickly. What's the point of muscling your way out of a locked-in armbar only to come away with an elbow you can't straighten and a worse understanding of how the escape was actually supposed to work? Don't be scared to tap at your academy. If tapping becomes a difficult idea to wrestle with, you're going to struggle long term, because everyone — Mikey Musumeci, the Ruotolo brothers, your favourite black belt — has tapped countless times to get where they are. The point is to keep putting yourself in new situations and testing yourself in unknown territory. Enjoy taking risks in training and trying new things. If that means tapping more often, so what? You'll develop much faster by leaving your comfort zone.

Compete When You Can

Not everyone aspires to be the next IBJJF or ADCC champion, but most of us would agree that competition is an extremely constructive experience for any jiu jitsu practitioner. Win or lose, you always learn something valuable on the competition mat — it's a clean, honest opportunity to test your skills and spot the holes in your game. Competition also serves as perfect motivation to keep your training regular, since you really won't want to skip that late Friday session or sit out the last round of sparring once there's a date on the calendar. There are more entry points than ever now too, from your local tournament to in-house comps, so you don't need to fly across the country to get the benefit.

Stay Humble

This is, without question, one of the most valuable lessons you'll learn on the mat — and it carries straight into the rest of your life. Whenever you feel like you're having a great run in sparring, remember there's always someone better ready to bring you down a notch or two. Frank Shamrock put it well: "you need people in training that you can try new stuff with, people of your level you can have a war with, and people who will keep you completely humble." Stay open, stay coachable, and treat every roll as a chance to learn.

Don't Stop Training Jiu Jitsu

As with anything worth doing, there will be stretches where you feel stuck, or where it's a battle just to make it to class. Whatever happens, keep going. Even if you can only train once a week, keep jiu-jitsu in your life — the rewards become clearer the more mat time you accrue. Pull up a Gordon Ryan or Ffion Davies match on your phone, queue an instructional on a quiet evening, and stay close to the sport between sessions. The people who get the most out of BJJ are simply the ones who don't quit. See you on the mats.

Originally published in Jiu Jitsu Style. Refreshed for 2026.