Has BJJ overcorrected from tradition into gimmicky coaching?

For years, the complaint was obvious: too much tradition, too much dogma, too much “because that’s how it’s done.” Warm-ups nobody needed. Techniques taught with zero resistance. Endless reverence for old habits just because an older belt said so.

That needed challenging.

But I’m starting to wonder whether parts of BJJ have now swung too far the other way and disappeared up their own arse.

Now it’s constraints, games, task-based learning, anti-technique, anti-drill, anti-warm-up, anti-structure, anti-anything that looks too normal. Some coaches seem so desperate not to look “old school” that they’ll dress up the most basic bit of teaching in layers of trendy language and act like they’ve reinvented learning itself. And let’s be honest: some of it is better.

• More live work? Better.

• More representative training? Better.

• Less robotic dead drilling? Better.

But not every class needs to feel like a university dissertation. I've just got back from a BJJ retreat where there was a lot of games based teaching and much of it personally fell flat, where technique was shown in the "old fashioned" way, the time spent landed much better. I feel that a hybrid of the coaching techniques is the sweet spot whereby learning is geared towards the goal rather than trying to copy-paste a teaching style into content that doesn't suit it.

Sometimes a clean explanation, a few useful details, a bit of guided repetition, then live rounds just works. Calling something a “game” doesn’t magically make it superior and sometimes coaches are rebranding their own lack of clarity as innovation.

That’s the bit I think is worth discussing. Have we reached the point where some coaches are so determined to reject tradition that they’ve become gimmicky in a different direction? I’m not asking whether BJJ should go backwards. I don’t think it should. A lot of the newer coaching ideas have clearly improved things. I’m asking whether some people are now confusing sounding clever with teaching well, novelty with progress, and less structure with better learning.

I feel the pendulum kept swinging until “different” became the goal, rather than bucking the traditions that were holding the sport back in order to improve upon it.