BJJ Training Journal - Template

Over the past 9 years and 2,000+ hours of training I’ve tried dozens of spreadsheets, apps, and paper templates for tracking progress in grappling and fitness. I’ve finally settled on what I think are the most important variables to monitor and how to record them in an efficient and effective manner.

Photo by Jan Kahánek on Unsplash

I’ve tried many different “hacks”, journals, and apps to try to quantify and monitor “progress in jiu jitsu.” To their credit, none of them were detrimental. Some were more helpful than others, but unfortunately, I think their best function was to serve as an outlet for the obsessive compulsion to “do more off the mat.”

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I will admit that I don’t love the digital format. I mean, I do love digital tools because of their ease of access; though that ironically also makes them easier to forget. I’ll own that I created a digital journal, but I’ve tried to hone it to still be effective and productive. That is, not another chore, and not something that gets written and forgotten about.

That’s been the problem I’ve had with written paper journals; I never go back and read them. Even if I did, logging things like technique descriptions wouldn’t make sense years from now — that’s why we have phone cameras and YouTube people!

Sometimes historical records like promotions and PRs are nice to have a track record of. Those kinds of things are nice to record-and-forget, until the next time you want to look back for nostalgia’s sake.

On the other hand, we can get mired, as I have certainly done before, in reflecting day to day which ironically gets us more lost in the weeds. That is, there’s too much noise and not enough signal. However, taking a little time each week to reflect on your training gives some data, without being subject to the whims of any one particularly good or bad day.

Just like on-the-mat we want to “build skills rather than belts”, we want to develop day-to-day habits that will contribute to what we’re focusing on which is hopefully an avenue towards the objectives that comprise our longer-arching goals.

Big Goal » Specific Staged Objective(s) » Tangible Focus » Enabling Habits

If you’re curious about my exact training methods, focus, and programming, check out the premium section of this site!

Monograph Note Template: https://monogr.ph/6679b0a8a88d5c7d335671f3

If you’re not using NotesNook — which I highly recommend — you can apply a similar template to your note-taking app or paper journal of choice.

I’ve found that a weekly template works best for me as there are lots of other apps that work well for day-to-day training (links below); and trying to look at a month’s or a lifetime’s worth of data at a time can be more distracting than helpful.

Weekly Journal Template:

• Overview:

  • 6-Month Goal:
  • 8-Week Objective:
  • Weekly Intention:

Instructions:

Here we want to remind ourselves what our long-term goal is as well as the current objective that’s building towards that goal, and what our weekly intention is to help achieve that objective. It doesn’t help us to “write your goals down” or post them to social media only to forget about them.

• Training Log:

  • Training Sessions
  • Habit Tracker

Instructions:

This training log is just an overview of what you did on what days in terms of style (energy system) and hours. It’s also a good idea to add links to YouTube videos, or photo albums. If you’re really ambitious, you can even add #tags to your note for specific lifts or grappling / fighting positions.

The habit tracker is a simple checklist, though there are a lot of apps (below) that can help with this and again, our weekly journal may just be an accountability reminder — if we’re actually doing the things we say we want to do (e.g. compliance percent).

Recovery is a huge factor in performance, so I’d recommend one sport / skill habit, and one for each sleep, stress / mood / relationships, and nutrition. Examples might be a protein goal, bed time, screen curfew, or prayer / meditation.

• Assessment:

  • Training Distribution
  • Performance Metrics

Instructions:

This is the down and dirty review. How many hours did I spend training each energy system / sport? What percentage of my training time was occupied by my goal? Remember it’s hard to justify 60% of your training time being spent on strength training if you’re saying that BJJ (or any other sport / facet) is your current goal.

Simply evaluating the quality of our sleep, stress, and mood are good indicators of recovery. Likewise, simply noting if we’re actually following our training plan (habit compliance) is important. Lastly, a simple evaluation of our technical, tactical, and fitness performances this week can be insightful.

All of these areas can help guide the following week’s intention, or even the following 8-week objective. For example, if my fitness is lacking, that tells me where to go next. If technically I was dull, that may be something I can clean up in a week. If I’m not complying with my own habits, maybe it’s too dramatic of a change at once. Not sleeping well? More stressed than last week? You get the idea.

• Reflection:

  • What worked well?
  • Where do I need to improve?
  • Lessons learned?
  • Injuries, illness, and PRs:

Instructions:

This is subjective space to process the assessment information. Maybe it was a hairball week and you actually did well given odd life circumstances. Maybe you saw a lot of progress in a technical area, but struggle with application (tactics).

Further, trying to extrapolate a theme, or lesson from those things is what we really need. “What I learned” should directly inform “what I’m going to do next.”

Lastly, noting anything peculiar about the week; PRs, but also a flexed work schedule, cold/flu, or anything that may have unusually skewed that above assessment.

• External tools for day-to-day training:

  • Garmin Connect: sleep, stress, cardio
  • Strong app: strength and grappling
  • Cronometer: nutrition and biometrics
  • Loop: habit tracking
  • NotesNook: open-source, encrypted notes and journaling

Monthly and Lifetime Tracking:

This is where digital platforms (i.e. spreadsheets) really excel (pun intended!). Simply collecting, and processing data is what computers are really good at. Interpreting that information… that’s on you.

In other words, a spreadsheet of how many hours or years it took you to reach each belt, and who promoted you, and at what academy, is great for archival story telling purposes. It’s not very helpful in guiding your training, particularly because those intervals are relatively far apart.

However, being able to spot trends and correlations in our training data may be helpful. For example, maybe I notice that as my fitness level improves, o does my stress. Or perhaps endurance training improves my sleep, but takes too much time away from my BJJ training or corresponds to my tactics or on-the-mat conditioning to erode.

Most importantly if my “habits” are or are not translating to improvements in technical, tactical, or fitness ability; nor improving stress, mood, or sleep; I need to shift that focus in order to meet my goals and objectives.

In the example above I’ve left stress, mood, and sleep blank because I’ll input data from my Garmin watch, but you could simply use a 1-5 subjective scale as with technical, tactical, and fitness abilities.

Google Sheet Monthly Log: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1i5Kppxha1QvU5kBJoCcoa5lBBpYybE59fkr8lhrVgbg/edit?usp=sharing

The above Google Sheet template is set up for long term belt promotion, and weekly training summaries that you can obviously export and manipulate the data in any way you’re curious about.

The pre-filled data is just an example to show that the gray cells are automatically calculated — such as training percentages and total training times as well as lifetime PRs for the fitness elements.

The training style and fitness tests have comments / notes describing each energy system and a simple test for each attribute.

#keeprolling