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Fixing Your Leaky Bucket: A Guide to Strengthening Your Jiu-Jitsu Game

Fixing the leaky bucket — strengthening your BJJ game

Everyone has holes in their game. The question isn’t whether you have weaknesses — you do. The question is whether you know where they are and what you’re actually doing about them.

The leaky bucket metaphor: imagine your BJJ game is a bucket you’re trying to fill with water. Every new technique you learn, every drill you put in, is water going in. But if the bucket has holes — predictable losses, positions you always get stuck in, transitions that always fail — you’re losing as fast as you’re gaining.

Patching the holes is less exciting than adding new water. Nobody wants to go back to basics. Nobody wants to spend a month drilling escapes from mount when they could be learning a new leg lock entry.

But the bucket metaphor holds. A game with no holes in it — even a simple game — is more durable than a technically rich game full of predictable losses.

How to identify your holes: roll with intention and keep a mental note of where you keep ending up. Not where you get submitted — where you consistently find yourself in bad positions you didn’t choose. That’s usually one step upstream from the actual submission. That’s where the hole is.

How to patch them: deliberate drilling of the specific transition you keep losing. Not the escape from the final position — the prevention of getting there in the first place.

Simple game, no holes. That’s the goal.

— Vince

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