A coaching guide, not a product page

How to plan a month of BJJ classes

It is Sunday night, you have a blank week ahead of you, and no idea what you are teaching Tuesday. Here is a way to plan a whole month at once so that stops happening.

Start here

Plan by position, not by technique

The single biggest change you can make to how you plan is to stop picking one technique per class and start picking one position per block of classes. A block is usually a week, sometimes two. Inside that block, every class works some part of the same position: closed guard, back control, half guard passing, whatever it is.

The reason this works is simple. A student who sees the same position from three different angles across a week actually starts to understand it, the way it moves, where the escapes are, what breaks it. A student who sees three unrelated techniques across the same week remembers almost none of them by Friday. Repetition across a block, not repetition within a single class, is what builds real skill.

A simple month template

Four weeks, four positions

You do not need anything more complicated than this to start. Rotate the four position blocks below across your training year so students eventually see the whole game, not just whatever the coach felt like that week.

Week 1

Standing entries and takedowns

How the round actually starts. This is the week that gets skipped most often, and it is the one that determines who controls where the fight goes.
Week 2

Guard passing

Pick one family of passes (pressure passing, or standing passing) rather than teaching every pass you know. Depth in one family beats a sampler of five.
Week 3

Guard retention and sweeps

The other half of Week 2's problem. Students who only ever learn to pass never learn to defend the pass, and it shows the moment they roll with someone bigger.
Week 4

Submissions and finishing

Tie it back to wherever the month started. If Week 1 was about getting to back control, Week 4 can finish from there, so the month reads as one connected story instead of four disconnected topics.

Over a full year, rotating through standing, top position, bottom position and finishing, again and again, does more for a student's actual game than any single "advanced" class ever will. The value is in the rotation, not in any one week being especially clever.

Inside the week

Give the block a rhythm, don't just repeat it

A position block is not the same class taught three times. It should build across the week, the same way a good class builds across a round. A simple rhythm that works for most gyms:

  1. Monday: introduce the mechanicSlow, drilled, cooperative reps. The goal is that everyone in the room understands the shape of the position by the end of class.

  2. Wednesday: build a decision into itSame position, but now the partner gets a choice, and the student has to react correctly. This is where Monday's mechanic turns into an actual skill.

  3. Friday: test it liveLive rounds that start from the position, with a scoring rule that rewards using it. If someone never gets to try the thing they drilled on Monday, the week did not actually land.

A common mistake

Don't re-teach the same armbar every time

Coaches settle into a handful of go-to techniques, and it is easy to end up teaching the exact same armbar from the exact same entry every few months, because it is comfortable and it works. Students notice, and the room's engagement drops even if nobody says anything about it.

The fix is not to avoid the position, it is to vary the entry. If armbar from mount is a recurring theme in your gym, teach it from mount one month, from the back the next, from a guard sweep the month after that. Same finishing position, genuinely different problem to solve on the way there. Students reinforce the position they already know while still learning something new, instead of watching the same three minute demo for the fourth time this year.

You do not have to teach every class yourself

Letting a senior student run a session, properly

Handing a class to a senior student or an assistant coach is one of the fastest ways to get your own time back, and also one of the easiest ways to quietly lower the standard of the room if it is done badly. The difference is almost always preparation, not talent.

  • Give them the position and the specific job for each side, not just a topic. "Teach guard passing" is not a lesson plan. "Teach pressure passing from half guard, top player is trying to flatten, bottom player is trying to recover guard" is one.
  • Give them two or three teaching points to hit, not everything you know about the position. A senior student trying to cover everything you would cover usually runs long and loses the room.
  • Have them run the live round with a clear rule, so the class still ends with everyone testing what they just learned, not just drilling and rolling free.
  • Debrief with them after, briefly. What worked, what you would have done differently. This is what actually develops a future coach, rather than just covering a night off your own schedule.

Before you close the laptop

A short Sunday checklist

  • Every class this month sits inside one of four position blocks.
  • Each block has a real Monday to Wednesday to Friday build, not three copies of the same class.
  • At least one technique this month is taught from a new entry, even if the finish is familiar.
  • Anyone else teaching this month has a specific position and job, in writing, not just a topic in a group chat.
  • You know, right now, what next month's block is, so you are never doing this from scratch again in four weeks.

A few more questions

Frequently asked

How many techniques should one class actually cover?

One, in real depth, taught from two or three related entries, is almost always better than three unrelated techniques taught once each. Students remember what they got real reps on, not what they saw.

Should beginners and advanced students train the same curriculum?

They can train the same position block in the same month and still get different jobs inside the same round. A beginner works the basic mechanic; an advanced student works the same position against real resistance with a specific constraint. Same block, different depth.

How far in advance should a coach plan?

A month at a time is the sweet spot for most gyms: far enough ahead that you are never planning the night before, short enough that you can still react to what you actually saw on the mat last week.

One honest note before you go

This is the same thing GrapplingU does for you

We make GrapplingU. Everything above works whether or not you ever use it, on a whiteboard, a spreadsheet, whatever you already have. If you would rather not build the month yourself, GrapplingU's Plan My Week does exactly this: a real curriculum, built by Greg Souders of Standard Jiu Jitsu, already organized into position blocks with the progression built in, put on the calendar for your real class schedule.

If you coach 20 classes a week and currently plan 10 of them yourself, at roughly two hours of real prep each, that is a real number of hours a month you could get back. We are not going to hand you a made up figure for your gym specifically; work that out from your own week.

See a real month built this way

Walk through an actual week from Greg's curriculum, no sign up needed, or book a conversation about your own gym's schedule.

See How The Method Works

Or Book A Demo · How This Compares To Other BJJ Curriculum Tools