White to Blue Belt: What to focus on and how to learn jiu-jitsu

If I were starting again, these are the things I’d focus on from day one to blue belt.

When you start jiu-jitsu, it feels like you’ve been dropped into a game without being told the rules.

Even worse, the rules seem to change every time you play. There’s no real instruction manual. The closest you get is the rough, mental rule book you slowly assemble through training, and you’ll end up rewriting it many times.

The only real resource you have is time. And in an age where techniques are infinite but your hours on the mat aren’t, the real question becomes: what’s worth focusing on?

The answer to that question will change depending on where you’re up to in your jiu-jitsu development. Those who progress fastest don’t have an unlimited memory bank for techniques. Their skill is finding the right techniques at the right time.

This piece is my answer to that question. If I could rewind twelve years of training and start again, here’s how I’d learn - and what I’d focus on most - from white to blue belt.

The two core problems of jiu-jitsu learning

1. Right technique, wrong time

When you’re deciding what to focus on in training, you’re really asking a deeper question:

“What is the best technique or skill for me right now?”

The challenge isn’t just learning moves. It’s matching what you learn to the stage you’re at. Jiu-jitsu is full of people trying to build advanced skills on top of a shaky foundation.

I did the same. As a white belt, I became obsessed with Roberto ‘Cyborg’ Abreu’s Tornado Guard. It was an inverted half-guard variation where the sweep allowed you to launch your opponent over your head.

It was, and still is, and extremely cool sweep. But, no matter how much I drilled it, I never landed it once in sparring. The problem wasn’t the technique. It was that I’d skipped the skill layer it had to be built upon: half guard.

Five years later, after building a solid half-guard game and getting some competition experience, I revisited Tornado Guard. Suddenly, it clicked. The technique hadn’t changed. I had. My frame of reference was different, and that changed everything.

If you can’t make a technique work, it’s rarely because the technique is bad. More often, it’s the right technique at the wrong time.

2. Learning happens in thresholds

Learning in jiu-jitsu is strange because you go through periods of plateau (where it feels like nothing is happening) to sudden leaps in skill level (where it feels like progression happens all at once).

What’s really happening is slow, invisible compounding. You make tiny 1% improvements each day, and eventually they add up to something big enough that you cross a threshold. A threshold is a point where your understanding shifts just enough that whole new parts of the game become learnable.

It’s why you can go through periods where progress feels slow and incremental and others where it feels like you’re making game-changing improvements session by session.

Paul Graham describes this well:

“Knowledge grows exponentially, but there are also thresholds in it …Some of these thresholds are akin to machine tools: once you learn to read, you’re able to learn anything else much faster.”

Paul Graham, Superlinear Returns

When Graham describes these thresholds as ‘machine tools’, he’s referring to tools which make other tools or parts. You don’t just use them. They increase your ability to build more things.

It’s the same when you cross a learning threshold. You learn a group of skills, but when combined, they help you build the base that lets you learn the next things.

Note: the belt colours are added here for visual purposes, not to indicate that each threshold happens as soon as you get graded. While that would be cool, the moments you pass these thresholds are more unpredictable.

If learning happens in thresholds, two things follow:

1. Once you clear a threshold, the skills above it come faster.

2. If you stay below it, those same skills feel slow, confusing, and out of reach.

So when you’re choosing skills to focus on, you’re not just thinking of what you want to learn right now, but the future learning it will help you unlock.

So here’s what I think you should focus on from white to blue belt, and the order to do it in, if you want to climb the thresholds faster.

Threshold one: Starting

The hardest part of jiu-jitsu is simply showing up to your first session.

White belt is technically the lowest rank, but that ignores the much larger group: everyone who never steps on the mat at all. Walking into a gym, tying that belt for the first time. That’s a bigger threshold than most people realise.

It might seem trivial once you’ve been training for years, but think back. Every person in jiu-jitsu began with a small decision. And small decisions can change the trajectory of your life more than the big ones.

I’ve been in this sport for 12 years. It’s changed my outlook on life and saved my mental health countless times. When I ‘found’ BJJ, I wasn’t even looking for jiu-jitsu. I didn’t even know what it was. It was just a minor choice I made on an ordinary day to stumble into a combat sports gym, but it knocked over a line of dominoes I couldn’t have predicted.

Threshold 1 → Start.

The skill you’re building: Commitment. The ability to take the first step despite uncertainty or discomfort. You’ll need to build this muscle to continue through jiu-jitsu anyway.

How it enables the next skill: Once you build the habit of showing up, everything else in jiu-jitsu becomes learnable. Without this threshold, nothing above it is even accessible.

Threshold two: Create a map of positions

I remember one of my first real wins as a white belt. I was getting completely smushed by a training partner: passed, pinned, and submitted. But, in the middle of the chaos, I noticed something: there was a pattern to how my training partner was moving through positions.

And by “positions,” I mean the simplest possible version of jiu-jitsu you can imagine:

Guard → Side Control → North-South → Mount → Back

That was the first time I saw the game in broad strokes instead of as a stack of individual techniques. What it gave me was a basic map, a sense of the general jiu-jitsu landscape and how people tended to move through it.

I use the word map deliberately. As a beginner, you can’t absorb the full complexity of jiu-jitsu. And the whole point of maps is to simplify complexity. They’re not supposed to capture every detail. In the beginning, that’s exactly why they’re useful.

There’s a great mental model that explains this: the map is not the territory.

“The map of reality is not reality. Even the best maps are imperfect. That’s because maps are reductions of what they represent. If a map were to represent the territory with perfect fidelity, it would no longer be useful to us.”

Great Mental Models - The Simple Tools which Explain the World, Shane Parrish

Trying to understand the territory of jiu-jitsu directly means opening a Pandora’s box of moves, variations, and strange technique names. Most beginners try to memorise everything, without understanding how the techniques connect or what they’re actually for.

What you need early on is the opposite: an extremely simple map. A rough outline you can fill in later. It might feel two-dimensional, but that’s what makes it usable.

That rough map changed everything for me. Once I understood the basic flow of positions, the whole game became less overwhelming. And it gave me a foundation I could build on.

The skill you’re building: Seeing jiu-jitsu as a sequence of major positions instead of a pile of disconnected techniques. You’ll need to move to a more detailed, ‘system’ view of jiu-jitsu later, but a sequence is a good starting point.

How it enables the next skill: A map lets you orient yourself during rolls. You know where you are, where you’re likely to go next, and what your priorities should be. That sets the stage for learning escapes, guard retention, and eventually building your own game.

Threshold three: Skew early training toward defensive skills

Most beginners start with offence. I get it. You want to learn the cool stuff. But there’s a problem: you won’t spend much time in offensive positions as a beginner. For your first 3–6 months (at least), you’ll mostly be defending. You might as well make the time count.

It sounds backwards, but spending your energy on defence is actually one of the fastest ways to improve your offence. Two reasons explain why:

1. Confidence:

At every level, strong defence creates offensive confidence. If you know you can survive, you’re far more willing to take risks. But if you avoid bad positions, you stay gun-shy. You attack less because you fear the consequences.

2. Inversion (the Munger kind)

I’m not talking about upside-down guard. I mean Charlie Munger’s idea of solving problems by flipping them. His point was simple: you understand where you’re vulnerable by running a thought experiment in which you imagine how you’d destroy yourself. In doing that, you reveal your own weaknesses.

Studying defence is the inverse, but it runs on the same logic. The best way to learn how to control or break something is to understand the escapes and movements which prevent those things.

That’s why learning defence first makes you a better attacker later. You learn the escape routes, the weak points, the moments when people are most vulnerable.

So treat your time defending as a blessing. Most people rush past this threshold without realising they’ll eventually have to circle back and rebuild their defence (and offence) from the ground up. Better to lay the right foundation the first time.

Defences to focus on:

Mount:

When I started, I hated being stuck in mount. It triggered a kind of claustrophobia I didn’t expect.

The fix was simple, but not easy: I started rolls from that position on purpose. I spent whole rounds there until the panic faded. I focused on the basics: breathing, staying calm, understanding what was actually happening instead

Once you’re comfortable there, I recommend learning two core escapes:

• Knee and elbow escapes: This escape has served me for a decade, and you can learn it on day one. It’s the art of going from being fully trapped under mount to recovering half guard. Later on, it also teaches you which angles and frames matter when you are the one attacking from mount.

• Kipping escapes: These are more advanced, but they solve a limitation of the knee-elbow escape: you escape, but you stay in a defensive cycle. Kipping escapes are strange at first, but once you learn them, you can go from one of the worst positions in jiu-jitsu to immediate offensive opportunities: entries to the legs and submissions that let you attack rather than just survive.

Back control

I’ve personally found the most competitive benefit from focusing on turtle and back defence. I’m not entirely sure why, except that these positions offe more direct routes back to top position than I did escaping mount or side control.

Here’s where I’d start:

• Choke prevention: Nothing else matters if you can’t stay safe from chokes. Learn the basics of protecting your neck on both sides - how to keep the underhook side safe, and how to hand-fight on the choking side. If your neck survives, everything else becomes an option.

• Learn the difference between the underhook side and the choking side
  This is confusing at first, but essential. Your defensive reactions change depending on which side your opponent falls to. Early on, don’t obsess over perfect technique; focus on consistently freeing your shoulders. Even if you escape and land in another bad position, that’s still progress.

• Find paths back to offence: Once you’re comfortable surviving and escaping, start looking for transitions that return you to an attacking cycle. That might mean scrambling back to top position, or finding leg entries during the escape. The goal isn’t just to get out, it’s to turn defence into opportunity.

Side control

From side control, I’d start with one thing:

• Re-guarding by rebuilding your knee–elbow connection: Your knee–elbow frame is the lifeline you lose when someone passes. Re-attaching it is the foundation of almost every re-guard.

Once you can reliably rebuild that frame, move one step earlier in the chain:

• Preventing the disconnect in the first place: After a while, you want to swim a little further upstream. Instead of always escaping from side control, learn the guard-retention concepts that stop the pass before it happens. It means you spend less time under someone’s “shoulder of justice,” and more time in positions where you have options.

The skill you’re building: Defence.

How it enables the next skill: It lets you attack without fear, and in the long term, it sharpens your offence because you’ve studied the positions from the inside and know precisely how they fail.

Threshold four: Start with a control-based game

Broadly, jiu-jitsu players end up with one of two styles: movement-based or control-based.

Movement-based players avoid attachment and try to win by out-moving their opponent. It’s fast, dynamic, and usually suited to younger, explosive athletes: think the Ruotolo brothers or Dorian Alvarez.

Control-based players do the opposite. They slow things down, restrict movement, and apply pressure on their terms. Think Murillo Santana or Vagner Rocha.

Why beginners should start with control-based

At this point, you begin to learn the universal principles: the physics of jiu-jitsu. They apply everywhere, they’re almost impossible to violate, and there aren’t many of them.

For beginners, learning a basic control-based system is the best way to learn about these laws. It teaches the backbone of jiu-jitsu:

How to control someone, and how not to be controlled.

It lets you begin with the underlying principles of jiu-jitsu, which are far easier to notice when everything is moving slowly.

Once you understand that foundation, movement-based styles stop looking chaotic. They follow the same rules; they just play out faster. A solid control game makes everything else easier to learn.

You’ll also be able to take the defensive lessons you learnt earlier and apply them to your control game. You’ve learnt how to escape. The next question is how you mitigate the escapes of others.

When some people hear ‘control-based’ they immediately think of top position and guard passing. It’s just as, if not more important, to learn how to control your opponent from bottom position.

• Bottom position: Start with learning how to manage distance, grip-fight, and use frames so you have tools to slow the movement of standing passers and deflect pressure from pressure passers

• Top position: Work on passing from close range - chest-to-chest half guard, inside positions like headquarters, and basic knee-slice mechanics. These teach you how to shut down movement, apply pressure, and progress with purpose rather than improvisation.

• End game: Over time, you can start to use your controls to go for finishes, both from guard, and while your passing and progressing position.

At this point, you’re likely starting to bridge the gap between white and blue belt. You’re not just doing things, but thinking ‘why’ you’re doing it and learning the base principles which govern multiple positions.

The skill you’re building: Learning the basics of a control-based system from top and bottom position.

What it unlocks next: The freedom to explore movement-based styles build on rock-solid fundamentals.

Threshold five: The start of experimentation

For me, this is where you move into the deeper end of blue belt. It’s the point where you can start experimenting, trying different moves, testing ideas, and workshopping your strengths and weaknesses.

Note that while we’ve called these thresholds, they aren’t something you just pass through and leave behind. You’ll constantly return to tweak and re-assess fundamentals, and improve things like defence. 1-4 just get you off the ground.

Now, you’re no longer guessing. You’re building on a game based on rock-solid defensive and offensive principles, which means it’s time to move to the next stage: experimentation.

I always say that the job of a good coach is the following:

To be prescriptive about principles and open about execution.

Once you have a rough sense of the overarching jiu-jitsu system. From blue belt onward, the work shifts to fleshing out the sub-systems.

At that point, the training becomes more personal. You’re no longer studying the universal “physics of jiu-jitsu,” but figuring out how you - with your preferences, body type, and personality - operate inside that system. You start exploring the positions you naturally gravitate toward and go deeper into them, turning broad principles into something tailored and specific.

That phase deserves its own article, a blue-to-purple version of this one, where you take each major position and walk through the stages of turning a rough outline into an actual game.

When you start directing your own jiu-jitsu journey, the real shift isn’t just what you learn but how you break down raw information. You learn to zoom in, analyse, deconstruct, and systematise parts of the game. That’s where the next layers appear:

1. Details: The individual ‘parts’ that make a position work. The little adjustments that make something succeed or fail.

2. Principles: When you start noticing the details that matter most and see how they apply across multiple positions, those details turn into principles.

3. Systems: Once you know the key components and the principles behind them, the next step is connecting them. That’s how systems emerge.

For me, these are the steps and processes you go through as you start to break through the learning thresholds of blue belt and above. But this is an article for another day.

Thanks for reading!

I appreciate you being here for another edition of The Lost Creonte. I hope it’s been a useful way of looking at how to break down what you should focus on from white to blue belt.

Anything else you’ve found useful at this stage of jiu-jitsu? Or maybe a question if you’re still passing through this level. Drop me a comment below.