John Danaher's Simple Framework for Setting BJJ Goals

"Get better at Jiu Jitsu." It's the goal every one of us has written down at some point, and according to John Danaher, it's also close to worthless. In a post this week, the coach behind some of the most dominant competitors in the sport laid out a plain, almost anti-climactic framework for how to actually set goals on the mats — and it's worth sitting with, because most of us are doing it wrong in the same way.

The problem with "get better"

Danaher's starting point is that a goal only earns the name if it changes your behavior. "Get better at Jiu Jitsu" doesn't survive that test — it's too broad to point you toward anything specific on a Tuesday night. His example is the fix: "get better in top positions" immediately suggests a concrete adjustment, like spending more of your live rounds starting from the top instead of pulling guard out of habit. Watch the original post on Instagram for Danaher's full breakdown in his own words.

That distinction matters more than it looks like on the surface. Vague goals feel productive because they're aspirational, but they never force a decision. A specific goal does — it tells you what to drill, what to ask your coach about, what to say yes and no to in live rolling. If a goal doesn't change what you do this week, it isn't really a goal. It's a wish.

Timelines that match the size of the gap

The more interesting part of Danaher's advice is how he ties timelines to distance from your existing skill set. Skills adjacent to something you already do well develop fast; skills built from nothing take much longer. His example: a grappler already strong at outside heel hooks might reasonably expect real progress on inside heel hooks in three months, because the surrounding mechanics — entries, off-balancing, the general leg-lock chess game — are already wired in. Someone starting leg locks from zero is looking at a year just to get competent in one or two entries, and three years to be dangerous across the whole system.

That's a useful gut check for anyone who's ever felt discouraged watching a new skill refuse to click after a few weeks. The timeline was never going to be three months if you were starting from nothing — the frustration was coming from measuring yourself against the wrong clock, not from a lack of talent.

Four timeframes, running in parallel

Danaher recommends structuring goals across four windows at once — three months, six months, one year, and three years — sized to how far each target sits from your current game. Run them in parallel rather than picking one and waiting. A three-month goal might be tightening up a guard pass you already have most of; a three-year goal might be an entirely new system you're building from scratch. According to BJJEE, which first reported the framework, working this way lets a practitioner "work profitably on several projects at the same time with a good chance of really changing your game for the better over time."

Why this fits Danaher's whole approach

None of this is really new territory for Danaher — it's the same instinct for systemization that made his instructional catalog so influential in the first place, applied to the practitioner's own development instead of a technique tree. Jiu Jitsu has always attracted people who like this kind of structure, because the art rewards patience in a way few other pursuits do. A white belt can't rush a black belt's timeline, but they can absolutely rush a bad goal into looking productive when it isn't.

The practical takeaway is almost embarrassingly simple: before your next training cycle, write down one goal at each of Danaher's four horizons, and for each one, ask whether it actually changes anything you'd do in class this week. If the answer is no, the goal isn't specific enough yet. That's the whole test. BJJ doesn't reward good intentions — it rewards the accumulation of small, honest adjustments, made consistently, over a timeline that respects how far you actually have to go.

See you on the mats.

Original report via BJJEE.