Jozef Chen's 3 BJJ Habits Behind His Rapid Rise

Jozef Chen is 22 years old and has been training Brazilian Jiu Jitsu for eight of those years, having started at 14. In grappling terms, that's not a long runway to becoming one of the sport's most talked-about young competitors — which is exactly why, when Chen recently explained what actually drove that rise, BJJ fans paid attention. According to BJJEE, none of the three habits he named were technical at all.

The three habits: film it, talk about it, write it down

The first habit is recording training sessions. Chen put it plainly: filming rolls "does a great job of making it so that you're able to actually see what's happening, as opposed to only just trying to remember what happened." Anyone who has tried to reconstruct a scramble from memory an hour after class knows how much gets lost — footage turns a fuzzy impression into something you can actually study, pause, and fix.

The second is talking to training partners after rolling. Chen's reasoning is simple but easy to skip in a busy gym: "there are a lot of things that you might not necessarily notice that your partner may be trying to do or they might have noticed on you." A two-minute conversation after the round closes a blind spot no amount of solo film review can reach, because your partner felt things — grips loosening, weight shifting, hesitation — that never show up clearly on camera.

The third is deliberate reflection. Chen keeps notes on his phone, writing down anything genuinely new the moment it clicks: "when I learned something very new that I'm quite unfamiliar with... I'll usually write it down in my notes on the phone." His point is that verbalizing an insight is what makes it stick. Without that step, even a real breakthrough on the mats can evaporate by the next session. See a moment from Chen's training on Instagram.

Why this matters more than another new sweep

It would be easy to read this as a nice-to-know footnote from a talented young athlete and move on. But the habits Chen describes point at something the sport doesn't talk about nearly enough: the gap between drilling technique and actually retaining it. Most practitioners, at every level, treat the technical class as the whole job — learn the move, drill the move, roll, repeat. Chen's routine suggests the learning doesn't happen in the drilling at all. It happens afterward, in the review.

This isn't a new idea outside Jiu Jitsu. Athletes in wrestling, judo, and combat sports generally have leaned on film study for decades, and the current era of BJJ — where a phone with a camera sits in every gym bag and instructional apps have normalized frame-by-frame breakdown — has made that kind of review radically more accessible than it was even ten years ago. What Chen has done is apply that infrastructure consistently and early, at an age when most competitors are still just trying to survive rounds with the older blue and purple belts.

There's also something worth sitting with in the fact that a competitor rising this fast credits none of it to a secret technique. No hidden guard pass, no new leg entanglement, no revolutionary system. Just watching himself honestly, listening to the people he trains with, and writing down what actually landed. That's available to literally every person reading this, regardless of belt color, gym budget, or how many high-level partners are on the mat with them on a given Tuesday.

The takeaway for the rest of us

If you train BJJ and have never filmed a round, that's the easiest habit on this list to steal — and probably the one with the fastest payoff. Debriefing with your partner costs nothing but two minutes and a bit of humility. And the notes app most of us already open forty times a day is sitting right there, unused for the one thing that might actually move the needle on your Jiu Jitsu.

None of this replaces mat time. Chen still put in eight years of hard training to get where he is. But his habits are a reminder that how you process that training matters as much as how much of it you do. The technique will come from your instructors and your instructionals. The retention has to come from you.

See you on the mats.

Original report via BJJEE.