Is explosiveness significant to improve your sparring? Do you think it is helpful for your devlopmemt in jiujitsu?
I have modest cardio. My game is nothing explosive but rather slow and clinical. recently i realised that my guard is easily jump passed by younger/more explosive athletes. otherwise, if i am attached to them by hooks/frames/lapel, making them unable to jump pass me, my skills are usually more superior then these fellows. when i am on top, i seldomly pass explosively but rather more slow and more pressure.
Should I implement explosiveness into my training? If so, any advice on how?
IMO it is a double edged sword. It can really help you and obviously it looks cool. On the other hand, that is one of the first things that will disappear with age. Also it will most likely increase injuries for you and your partners.
If you have it you should use it sometimes, but IMO like strength it is addictive. Once you start beating people by exploding into passes, submissions, etc you'll want to keep doing it. You might find that in the future, without your explosiveness you don't have good BJJ.
Explosive movements like speed passing, wrestling, and single leg finishes should be an integral part of high level BJJ. At some point in time, almost everyone will find it necessary to invest the time and effort it takes to learn these.
That being said, the actual utility of these movements varies greatly depending on the individual. In my opinion, for the average BJJ black belt competitor:
- Wrestling (ie, setting up and taking shots) is not a big part of everyone's IBJJF game, but it's pretty important for ADCC competitors.
- Speed and distance passing are used opportunistically in specific situations by almost all competitors, but are not the core of most competitors' games. Most black belts base their passing around a few stabilized positions where they can exert a lot of pressure on the opponent's legs and arms and hopefully tire them out over time
- Single leg finishes are very important for many athletes, since a lot of the best sweeps (including those from 50/50, X-guard, deep half guard, etc) often end up with a single leg finish.
As for how to improve your explosiveness, I think drilling chains is very effective at the beginning. After you have the footwork down, you can work on positional sparring, where you commit to just doing the moves in your set combination and they put on progressive resistance. You can set up different endpoints; for example, if you're working on speed passing, perhaps half guard or the front headlock is an endpoint (in addition to a stabilized pass).
Finally, you mentioned you see guys jumping past your guard. Defending this effectively is a skill that you can earmark for yourself to work on at some point in time. The modern supine defensive guard involves some concepts that might be unintuitive for many people; for example, you need to learn how to use your core and your elbows to balance on your "turtle shell" back (absolutely essential for efficient guard work), you don't want to shrimp (except in specific scenarios) because planting a foot on the mat makes you lose that "turtle shell", you don't actually want to be making grips when you're focusing on defense since it is so much faster to frame with V-blocks (aka, thumb blocks, C-grips, etc), stiff-arms, and forearm frames (you make your grips when you're ready start your offense, which inevitably involves more risk of getting passed), etc. After you have mastered the defensive guard, most people should have a VERY hard time passing your guard with speed or power unless they too have mastered guard passing (which is rare for people with less than say 8-10 years of experience). Although it is not intuitive, I think it is a lot easier to teach or master the defensive supine guard than it is to teach or master the passing skills necessary to circumvent it.
Let me start by saying Jeiteki's post above is right on the money. I agree with pretty much everything he said, and I won't rehash it here.
Let me just add this, training explosively constantly, will hamper your progress in learning Jiu Jitsu. It is better to practice flowing and chain wrestling for the most part. That said, there is most definitely a place for explosive movement in competition. For that reason, I would recommend training "competition style" rounds in some training sessions, occasionally when focusing on adding technique, and increasing the number of such workouts as competition approaches.