5 Important Note MAKING Tips
"What’s the point of taking notes? Just train, that’s how you get better at Jiu Jitsu!"
Of course you should never replace physical training with academic training, unless you're forced to via injury or some other reason why you can't get to the gym. I'm only suggesting supplemental study to your vitally important physical training.
Learning Jiu Jitsu is a monumental task, full of ever changing terminology and an endless encyclopedia of techniques!
You need to be making notes!
I’ve been training for around 10 years and I’ve been making sub-optimal notes for BJJ for around 9 years. Only in the last year have I really focused in on better note taking as an extra tool to help my understanding.
Firstly I want to make a distinction between note taking and note making. If you video your coach teaching and demonstrating a technique, or you write notes in a notebook or on your phone while your coach is teaching, you are note taking. You’re trying to capture the content in real time, before it’s gone. It’s likely to be a word for word copy of as much as you’re able to capture, whether that’s keywords, points or phrases, etc. This is really just information capture and it has a place but it’s not a great method for recall or for your understanding or creation of any new ideas and should not be your only or even primary method of noting.
Note making is going to happen when you think back on an event, review a class you just had, read a book, article, paper or website, watch a tutorial or interview or listen to a podcast or audiobook, something you can pause any time, so you have time to digest, internalise, think through with your own unique perspective and apply your own experience, understand it more fully or question it, and then note in your own words. Note making works better because it uses The Generation Effect - information is better remembered and more useful when it’s generated from our own minds rather than passively captured.
Secondly I want to make it clear what I mean by note taking AND note making. I’m not just talking about writing notes in a notebook, though I definitely am also talking about that! I’m talking about anything you do to log or record any part of your Jiu Jitsu, including video, voice notes, digital notes, spreadsheets and written notes, the compiling of any information.
The 4 types of student!
- Maybe you’re already taking notes and maybe you’re already doing a great job with it. If that’s the case then I’d love to hear from you because I really want to explore different methods and find the most effective ways
- Maybe you’re taking notes but you feel you could be doing a better job and just don’t know how. This was me until about a year or two ago
- Maybe you’re not taking notes at all but you wish you were, or you feel it’s too early or late to start. It’s never too early or late, I promise
- Maybe you’re not taking notes and have no intention of ever doing so but if you're still reading this then I guess something about it must have resonated or piqued your interest
The 5 Top Tips
No.5: You should revisit and reread your previously made notes. Block time in your calendar, even if it’s only once every 6 months but ideally once a month or even once a week. Reading over your notes should not be a long process but should be done when you can focus and concentrate so you're actually taking it in and not wasting your own time.
No.4: Don’t try to write down techniques, video them instead. Find willing classmates after class who can demo the techniques shown and allow you to film them. Be sure to label them and file them in folders so you can easily find them again when you need/want to.
No.3: Write about EVERYTHING ELSE! Discoveries, epiphanies, concepts and principles, minute details, analogies and metaphors, stories and feelings. Also try drawing out some decision trees, mind maps and flow charts, if you like that kind of visual noting.
No.2: Don’t forget about simply logging your journey. In years to come you'll be so grateful to your past self if you have a log of all the seminars and camps you took, who they were with, where they were, what you worked on, who your partner was, etc. And same for competitions if you do them, open mats, and other gym visits, essentially your grappling journal/diary.
No.1: If you want your notes to be of any use to you in the future, you must digitise and keyword your notes for future retrieval and cross reference. This is the second brain principal or Zettelkasten method of note making and it's where deeper understanding resides and new ideas form.
It's simple...
We all want to be better at Jiu Jitsu tomorrow, than we were yesterday, and as long as you’re turning up to train that will inevitably happen at some rate, regardless of what you do to help yourself, but every time you practice, every time you think about Jiu Jitsu, every video you watch, every book or article you read, conversations you listen to and every note you take, speeds that progress up and steepens your learning curve.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good, any kind of note taking and making is better than none.
Happy training!
