Sure Do Love My Privates!

Classes attended: 4 regular, 1 private lesson, and 1 open mat

 

I had my first private lesson this past week and it was amazing. I think I learned in about 30 minutes what would normally take me a week worth of regular classes to learn (assuming I made it to class at least three times during that week), maybe even more. The thing that made it so easy to learn wasn’t so much that I was with a black belt instructor (though that certainly doesn’t hurt) but because it was a private lesson it was so much easier to focus. I wish I’d taken one of these lessons years ago.

If there is anywhere in my life I’m doing all I can to pay attention, it’s when I’m at a bjj class. Unfortunately, it’s easy for me to be distracted and it doesn’t take much distraction for me to forget everything the instructor may have just said regarding a technique. One moment I’m watching the instructor go over details about breaking my opponent’s guard and then I see movement out of the corner of my eye and before I know it it’s time to drill the new technique and all I remember is keep my posture while in the guard. OK, that’s a bit of an over simplification, but there’s a lot of detail that slips my mind and has me hoping my training partner was paying more attention that I was. Not so with the private lessons. Sure, there’s still some distractions like the ding that goes every time someone walks through the front door, but it’s not nearly as bad.

Even better than that though is the chance to ask a lot of questions with the instructor that I feel would take up too much time during a regular class. During class, I don’t like to ask what if questions when doing the technique, like “what if I do this instead of what you’re showing me?” I feel it’s a waste of time to ask hypotheticals when there’s a whole lot of people trying to learn a technique and get the most out of the same 60-90 minutes as I am. (I do however think it’s fine to ask why we do something a certain way in a technique to help understand it). When it’s a private lesson though, it feels like my time and I can ask all the hypotheticals I want and in fact I do. I also ask a lot of why questions. If nothing else, it helps me commit what I’m learning to memory (and as I get older I find anything that can help me memorize something is a good thing).

The one thing I didn’t think to do for the private was bring a camera to record what we went over; as much as I learned, there was just as much I forgot shortly after. However, I have a few more private sessions and while I’d love to jump around on techniques, I’ll probably go over much of the same stuff next session so I can record it.

And for those wondering, what I asked to go over was techniques to use from half-guard. I find myself going to half-guard quite often, but I have no idea what to do from there. And as I learned this last private, I’ve been doing things wrong from there the whole time anyways. Can’t wait to find out what else I’ve been doing wrong for years when I move onto learning something else.