Competition Preparations Blueprint

A blueprint for evaluating and optimizing time and efforts.

I hope this read helps you to take decisions that will make your experience the best on all level, that Jiu-jitsu is a source of good in your life, a tool for grouth, belonging and healthy relationships.

Chapter 1: The Decision

This is the most important step, if, when, how and why join a competition. 

Lets discuss a bit all reasons to join a competition and have a clearer picture what is in for you. How and when can you join this experience and make the most of it. I will mention a few times in this read so sticks in your head, Jiu-jitsu must be a source for good in your life.

1.1 Life Check

Before you sign up for a competition, take an honest look at your life—your time, energy, and emotional bandwidth. 

Competing isn’t cheap. It costs money, focus, consistency, and emotional weight. Most people tend to underestimate the emotional part.

I always tell my students: look 2–3 months ahead. Can you create space for this? That timeframe helps you spread your energy and avoid burnout. Improvement comes from consistency, not intensity, learning has a different timeframe than will power.

Plan for success:

Make sure you are sleeping well (7–8 hours) and managing stress daily.

Prepare your support system: let your family, friends, or partner know what you’re aiming for.

Understand the competition rules, weight class requirements, and registration deadlines in advance.

Your training should become a source of growth—not senseless pressure. Remember, a well-managed lifestyle outside the gym sets the foundation for consistent performance inside it. Will a potential loss kill your motivation, or fuel the hunger to learn even more moving forwards?

1.2 Positive Purpose

Jiu-Jitsu should make your life better. Competition is just an extension of that—it’s a challenge that should add something positive to your journey.

So ask yourself honestly: Why am I doing this?

Technical Growth

When you commit to a competition, your focus sharpens. You begin to care about details: What works? What fails? Why? You move from passively training to actively improving.

Regular classes can sometimes put you on autopilot. But when there’s a comp coming, your attention becomes razor sharp. Your drilling has purpose. Your rolls have goals. That shift in mindset can change everything.

Emotional Growth

The moment you sign up, the emotions hit. Excitement. Doubt. Fear. Curiosity. That emotional swing is not a side effect—it’s part of the process.

Competition shows you what triggers you, what shuts you down, and where your confidence lives. That emotional exposure helps you grow—not just as an athlete, but as a person.

Community Bonding

When you compete, you build tighter bonds with your teammates. You share focus, motivation, and a common goal.

You’re not doing this alone. You’ll be supported. The process creates trust, connection, and a deeper sense of belonging.

We are pack animals, there is so much benefits in belonging under a group of motivated people. When the group is motivated in a common goal, there is when the magic happens.

Chapter 2: Building the Plan

Competition is about performance—not just collecting techniques. You don’t need 100 moves. You need a handful you can trust under pressure.

Regular classes are designed for group learning. Competition training has to be more personal. You need to take ownership of your path.

Add at least two extra focused sessions per week ( could be short sessions from 30 mins to 90 mins). That can be drilling with a partner, taking a private lesson, or asking a higher belt to help. The key is to train with intention. Don’t just train hard—train smart.

2.1 Identifing Your Preferences

Let’s start by understanding the difference between situations and positions.

A situation is where you are: closed guard, top half, someone on your back.

A position is what you do there: armbar, sweep, back take, pass.

More important than knowing many positions is recognizing the situations where you feel confident and in control. That’s your foundation.

For most students, I recommend starting with closed guard as your bottom attack situation and top hub or loose toreando passing for your top game. These give you structure and space to work with intention.

2.2 Drill with Structure

We will develop our game in three levels. Each level builds on the one before it. Your job is to go through them step-by-step, honestly, and with focus.

• Level 1 (Weeks 1–2): Feel the Move

This phase is about choosing what to invest your time in.

Which situation to choose will be related to a number of factors... but it all sums up to which position you have some prior knowledge, and your body has some muscle memory.

 Remember it must be an attacking situation such as closed guard, half guard, spider… for the top would be passing entries like toreando, hub positions, leg drag… 

You’ll drill your key positions in these situations with zero internal dialogue—just movement. Let your body learn what your brain can’t fully explain yet. We are mostly visual learners, but Jiu-Jitsu is sensorial. It’s instinctive.

To master a move, you have to feel it:

• Where does the pressure go?

• Where is the balance?

• When is the opening?

These are things logic alone can’t understand. You have to sense them through repetition.

In this phase you are discovering and strengthen the foundation of your competition game. Select the positions that give you confidence and start drilling and internalizing these ones. 

• Level 2 (Weeks 2–4): Context and Reaction

Now that your movements are internalized, it’s time to add resistance and timing.

This is when Jiu-Jitsu starts getting smart. Ask your partner for natural reactions and mild resistance. Your job now is to find opportunities within those reactions.

We are now drilling with intent:

Situation → Position → Timing

This is the formula.

Good drilling should always involve some level of reaction. In real Jiu-Jitsu, we don’t move in a vacuum—we move with our opponent.

Example:

Start in closed guard. Feed your hand deep into the collar to threaten a cross collar choke. Your partner defends by posturing and extending their arm to manage distance.

Now, you switch to the armbar.

Next round, you do the same—but now you keep the collar and fake the armbar, and when they lower their head in fear of it, you go back to the choke.

You’ve now created an impasse. That’s key. Every impasse creates tension. Every tension leads to a reaction. And every reaction opens opportunities.

• Level 3 ( remaining time) : Retention and Control Under Fire

Now we bring more realism. Your partner can try to escape—not just defend but you always start in the desired situation.

Here you’ll focus on:

Maintaining pressure and keeping your opponent busy defending. If you give them time, they’ll undo your work.

Retention—the ability to regain control after losing it. This has to happen quickly and without panic.

This is where you start developing advantages: how to create them, how to keep them, and how to use distractions or setups to create space for them.

Now you’re no longer just performing techniques—you’re playing the game. But because we “rigged” the game by choosing the situation, we should be winning somewhat constantly and improve, that’s the key to build confidence (which will be extremely useful to perform at your best).

2.3 Two Solid Situations 

Your goal over this cycle is to develop at least two go-to areas:

One on top

One on bottom

Train them consistently over the weeks. Alternate them during your training week to stay motivated and avoid burnout. Repetition is key—but variety in how you approach it keeps the mind sharp.

Build the game that makes sense for you, and build it in layers.

Chapter 3: Mindset and Performance

3.1 Confidence as Trust in Preparation

Confidence is not arrogance or pretending to be fearless. It is the trust in your own preparation. It is built rep by rep, round by round.

In competition, you’re not just testing your technique; you’re testing your belief in your ability to perform under pressure. Every training session contributes to your foundation. That foundation becomes your anchor when doubt arises.

Confidence is the voice that says, “I’ve been here before,” even if it’s your first time on the stage—because you’ve visualized it, trained for it, and chosen it.

3.2 Stress as a Tool for Self-Development

Competition compresses stress into a short, intense window. This pressure is revealing. It exposes habits, emotional patterns, and assumptions about yourself.

Rather than resisting this discomfort, treat it as a mirror:

What do I fear losing?

What drives me forward?

How do I behave when under pressure?

This awareness leads to insight, and insight is the beginning of transformation.

By entering a controlled, safe environment where the stakes feel high, but the consequences are low, you get to practice managing stress consciously. This experience transfers to every area of your life.

The challenge isn’t to eliminate fear—it’s to meet it with presence, understand its roots and allow it to reveal what’s inside you.

All emotions are a natural part of the process. After more than 25 years of challenging myself, I still feel the same emotions I had as a kid stepping onto the mat. My reasons and motivations for competing have changed over time—but the emotions haven’t. They still show up, sometimes to scare me, sometimes to fuel me.

What I’ve learned isn’t to eliminate them, but to coexist with them. Some I’ve learned to embrace, others I’ve simply made peace with. But having an honest relationship with my emotions—understanding where they come from and why they’re there—has helped me see that they’re part of who I am. They don’t get in the way of performance when I have a clear connection to my purpose. That clarity makes space for the emotions to exist without derailing me.

And honestly, I don’t know if I’d still compete if the emotions were gone. Without the thrill, the fear, the pride, the relief—what’s left? Another medal? Another seminar? I could do something more useful with that time for my family or students. But I keep competing because it teaches me something about myself every time. Because it still, even now, makes me cry, terrifies me, makes me proud—and makes me feel alive.

Because I respect the preparation and invest in the occasion, I always come out “better” on the other side. I always learn something about myself, improve my Jiu-Jitsu, make better friends. I nurse pride and love—for myself, my training partners, my team, the sport, the community, and especially my family. Because I’ve come to understand that without them, I have no motivation. And without motivation, I am no one. So in the end, competition became something much deeper: a practice of self-discovery and gratitude.

3.3 Understanding Your Why´s

Your motivation is more than a reason—it’s your compass when things get hard. Knowing why you’re stepping into the arena gives meaning to the nerves, the setbacks, and the grind of preparation.

Take time to explore what’s really driving you:

Are you proving something to yourself?

Seeking transformation through adversity?

Honoring your training by testing your skills?

Reconnecting with the part of you that craves growth?

All reasons are valid—if they’re honest.

When you’re clear on your why, everything else begins to align:

Your goals become sharper.

Your preparation becomes personal.

Your emotions have a place—they don’t control you, they inform you.

Your “why” isn’t always loud. Sometimes it’s quiet: a conversation with yourself, a moment with your coach, a hug from your family. But when you find it and own it, you’re no longer just competing. You’re stepping into something deeper. Something that can change how you see yourself.

Let that clarity guide you. Let it ground you. And remember: when your purpose is rooted in self-awareness, the outcome becomes just one part of a much bigger gain.

We live in a world where the most valuable currency is attention and motivation. Everyone is trying to steal that from us—through ads, endless shows, and distractions. Suddenly, we’re staring at screens instead of at ourselves or the people we love. We buy things we don’t need, follow paths we didn’t choose, and lose sight of what actually matters. But experiences like this—ones that test you and demand presence—can reset your compass. They remind you of your priorities, your purpose, and what truly deserves your focus.

Chapter 4: What Matters Is Performance and Improvement

Focus on what you can control, that’s is what stays with you.

For me, satisfaction comes down to two things: improvement and performance. These are the metrics I measure myself by.

Winning makes me happy. But getting better, pushing past my own limits, and rising after a hard moment—that makes me proud. That pride lasts.

Happiness is momentary. Confidence built through effort and growth transforms who I am. Every rep, every round, every challenge is a chance to build the kind of self-belief that stays with me long after the scoreboard is cleared.

If I improved, and if I performed close to my potential—that’s a win.

Don’t get me wrong—when I win, I’m happy. When I lose, I get pissed off like you wouldn’t believe. I’m competitive. I have a big ego. I want to win every time. But those emotions, as strong as they are, don’t last. That’s satisfaction, and it fades. What stays with me—what really matters—is what I see when I look in the mirror after the match.

Deep down, I measure myself by the work I put in. I want to go home knowing I was the best version of myself that day. At the last Worlds, I was disqualified in my third fight. The result? Frustrating. I was furious—for 45 minutes straight. But even in the middle of that anger, I knew: my performance was impeccable. I knew I was the best that day. And that matters more than a medal.

I called home. My daughters had watched all my fights. They told me how proud they were of me. And that—that was one of the best feelings in the world. Because I knew I deserved it. I had worked hard, every single day. They saw that. I saw that. So no, I wasn’t happy with the outcome. But I was proud of the journey. And that pride runs deeper than any win.

Final Thought:

When preparation is structured, consistent, and intentional, the competition becomes the natural next step in your evolution.

Own your process. Respect your work. And go test your game.