Gianni Grippo Explains His Method Of Drilling for Jiu-Jitsu
Alliance-Marcelo Garcia black belt competitor Gianni Grippo believes that repetitive drilling is his key to success in jiu-jitsu. Grippo credits the focussed style of training as having refined his game to make him the technician he’s known to be.
With appearances on the podium at major tournaments including the Worlds, Pans and European championships, the New Jersey-based black belt is one of the most vocal supporters of this training methodology. We traveled to the Marcelo Garcia academy in New York city to find out how Grippo structures his drilling sessions and how he chooses what he works on.
Gianni Grippo on Drilling for Jiu-Jitsu
“I’d say I drill about anywhere from two to three hours a day. I always try to surround the classes I do with Marcelo with my drilling. I feel like it helps give me a good goal on what to be working on.
“As long as I can find a partner I like to drill before and after the class in the afternoon, and at night it’s a little late, I kind of just want to get home at that point, so definitely before and after for the first training, and before the second training.
“I try to really stick with the same thing in a drill session, I don’t like to go from doing something on bottom to something on top, or switching from one guard to another. If I know I’m going to be working reverse da la riva for an hour, that’s all I’m going to be doing. With two or three little variations at the end, or maybe if the guy’s standing to on one knee, maybe just that, but I really like to keep it all connected.
“If I go from one thing to another, something completely different, I feel like I’m not really serving the purpose of drilling, getting a certain number of reps. I’m getting good at a few things but not great at one specific thing.
“Sometimes it depends on how I feel, kind of what I want to be working on, but there’s times I see mistakes I’m making in training, positions I’m not feeling so comfortable with. Like say for example my spider guard, it’s not feeling strong, so maybe I’ll practice some more positions from there one week over the other. Sometimes it’ll be something I learn, I’m like ‘oh that’s nice I want to try that out’. It’ll vary.
“I normally like to write down going into the week what I want to work on. It’ll change here and there, normally I’ll adjust. I normally stick to a schedule, if I say I’m going to do something during the week I’ll really try to stick to that unless something comes up otherwise.
“I like drilling where it’s a full sequence. I don’t like to do small stuff, I like to do where it leads to something else, like the backtake, or a certain submission. I don’t like to do one small thing over and over again, I like to connect stuff, so maybe it will be a small thing in the beginning, but then as I start drilling more and more it’ll expand into a sequence. That’s what I seem to like more – putting things together more than anything else.
“I feel like it gives me goals. I feel like if I don’t drill, I don’t have a certain thing I should be working on. Then when I train and I don’t have something that I’m working on, I kind of train just to train. But drilling gives me that goal of, ‘OK, I’m going to stick with just one thing’.
“What I do before training is – say the hour before afternoon class I’ll drill just guard – my goal is ‘man, I want to get what I worked on in drilling’.
“And that helps me focus not just on the result of training, just trying to submit my guy. I’m trying to do something that I’m working on, that’s good goal-orientated stuff. And I feel it helps improve my game overall instead of just being the competitive type who wants to do better than my partner in training.
“I feel like it gives me a direction, and it helps me imporove a lot. I feel like my game has come really far from the days where I didn’t drill, I just trained just to train. Now when I go into training I know exactly what I want to do that day."
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