I was traveling for work this past week and was not able to complete all the reading I wanted to do on Deliberate Practice. I went back and pulled an old piece and spruced it up instead. So now… I have a confession:
I'm not really sure what Bad Habits are
A common reason why a coach may give specific prescriptive feedback or instruction in BJJ is to prevent the formation of a “bad habit”. What exactly is a coach looking for when trying to identify a bad habit forming? Is the bad habit something that could have a limited function when we are grappling? Or is it an aesthetic to a movement a coach thinks is important? If the future function is of concern, how does the coach know what specifically will or wont work in the future? When referring to it as an aesthetic, how important is the look of a movement compared to what the movement is for?
If we are trying to avoid building bad habits we need to be clear what we mean before we can design a way to "fix" them. Something could be a bad habit that we cannot recognize. We may also find that these "bad habits" don't exist in the way we think they do.
I want to look at a few ways I have seen "Bad Habit" used in the grappling space. There are no correct answers here, only a lot of questions. I want to go through a few notions of “bad habits” that I see as common in grappling/BJJ.
The Bad Habit as an Aesthetic
It's often that a coach will make some sort of correction on how a particular movement looks. A stereotypical "bad habit" I have heard being corrected is posture in the closed guard. New students tend to want to try and hug the guard player when they are on top, which is typically called a bad habit. A coach will yell to the athlete to "get their posture back". What they want is for the athlete to sit up straight. So the top of their head is pointed at the ceiling and there is no longer chest to chest contact.
What is the bad habit here? Competitors often succeed in closed guard with varying degrees of chest-to-chest connection. If posture (as defined as distance between the shoulders) is so important, what is the line?
Mark Latash, Professor of Kinesiology at Pennsylvania State, shares a similar view on the idea of posture as a general concept in his paper "Misnomers in Motor Control". While the article is extremely technical, this short passage is relevant:
"When a standing or walking person experiences an unexpected strong external perturbation (stumbling, slipping on ice, standing in an accelerating bus, etc.) and manages not to fall down with the help of fast, quick movements of multiple body parts, it seems fair to say that the person shows excellent control of vertical posture. A figure skater or a gymnast maintaining a body configuration while moving in space is an example of great postural control. A waiter navigating the complex, crowded environment with a tray loaded with dishes and glasses may also be classified as excellent postural control of the hand supporting the tray. What unites these examples is that a certain salient task-specific geometrical variable is kept within a relatively small error margin despite major changes in the external force field and other geometrical variables"[1]
As Latash suggests, posture is:
task-specific: What we are trying to do will determine the "correct" posture
and depends on maintaining critical geometrical variables under dynamic conditions: The sport environment is constantly changing, so what we are trying to do moment to moment will change.
In grappling, posture must be evaluated based on its functional role. Not solely how the posture looks.
If the coach is referencing an aesthetic quality of the alignment. They might be missing what the function is. If we look closer at match footage we may see that even the best players who are chest to chest have good posture (their spine is mostly straight). What is really being managed is who has a stronger connection to the shoulders. The connection and control of center mass is really what we are trying to manage in the guard. Referring to how the posture looks may not help us when speaking about the function.
When the coach is making an aesthetic judgement, they may be missing what the function is. In this instance the coach is telling the athlete about grappling and not teaching them to grapple.
While correcting bad habits is often focused on appearances. Often the rationale behind those appearances will be a concern for the future. A movement must look a certain way because in some future state that will be the difference between success and failure. However this only serves to make things even more unclear.
The Bad Habit as vague notion
Sometimes coaches identify bad habits based on that behavior having limited function in the future. It can become unclear how a coach understands this. When does something become a bad habit?
How often does the athlete need to display the action for it to be considered a "bad habit"?
Does a single instance of an action form a bad habit? Or does it require repeated behavior over weeks, months, or years?
Why is the "bad habit" bad in the first place? Bad Habits can be fixed. Every new athlete comes into the gym with nothing but bad habits, yet they adapt and learn over time to become skilled. Are there different kinds of bad habits for different people?
Is the coach calling it a bad habit because they objectively know it is one? Or are they setting the measurements to be convenient so they can feel like they have something to correct the athlete on?
When these issues are brought up, usually a coach will make an appeal to common sense, or that they can objectively tell something is a bad habit. Basing this judgement on experience can be useful, but it provides a whole new set of issues. When do these so called objective qualities of bad habits count?
The "Objective" Bad Habit
A common one we hear about in BJJ is that it is a bad habit to turn your back because someone will be able to take it. If our opponent can get to our back, they can start to immobilize us and isolate our neck or limbs for attack. However we are missing a piece. What is causing the back exposure to happen? There is a big difference between having back exposure imposed versus doing it on purpose. We may have a specific reason for exposing our back. Calling it objective implies that it is always bad to rotate and create back exposure.
However, this is clearly not always true.
Matches like Tainan Dalpra vs Oliver Taza and Gianni Grippo vs Fabian Pereira show us that even when the bottom player uses rotation to regain mobility, exposing their back, the top player still must work to solidify control. That rotation and back exposure might have been used intentionally to create movement to escape a pin. A calculated risk is not necessarily a bad habit. These are highly skilled athletes, but they had to have learned how to effectively do this somehow.
Which leads us to some questions that can guide us in how we design training. What sorts of activities help athletes understand:
When is it bad to turn my back?
In what situations, and for what reasons, may I need to show my back when grappling?
To what degree is it bad to turn my back?
How much of my back can be exposed and for how long before it becomes a serious issue? Are there other factors like arm or leg position that can affect this?
When should I turn my back if I feel like it is my only option?
Can I make a calculated decision and have the skill set to back it up if my back is exposed? What types of situations can help to explore this?
As a coach, you should be designing practice activities that help your athletes learn how to manage those kinds of questions. These are the types of things athletes need to experience for themselves.
The Not so Objective Bad Habit
This interpretation of bad habit being objective gets even more complicated. For example, let's say in your gym you can pass everyone's guard with ease with a knee cut. No one can stop you, and every round you can flawlessly slice through the guard like butter. One day a visitor comes who can perfectly counter your knee cut. No matter how hard you try, they can perfectly stop you from performing your knee cut and knock you down. Is the knee cut you perform now a bad habit since it is objectively unsuccessful?
Was the bad habit your knee cut technique specifically, was there some detail missing? Or was the bad habit an inability to change tactics and not necessarily a technical detail? In this case where exactly does the bad habit begin and end. How do you isolate what the bad habit is to design training?
Could there be things you are successful with now that are bad habits? How do you account for and watch for these types of things?
Coach Greg Souders relates an event like this in a story about his athlete Deandre Corbe and his guard passing skills.
He shares that:
"Deandre corbe... ...He was doing this thing when he was clearing hooks. He was pressing one leg to the center to get behind the knees. He was killing everybody with it, no one could entangle him. And then David Stoilescu heel hooked him, cause he (Deandre) did that to him and Dave inverted and heel hooked him! We didn't know that was a problem! We found out that it was, and we had to change his training"
Greg's story highlights how bad habits often emerge under specific conditions. He had no way of knowing it was a bad habit until it was exploited. After he realized the issue, he designed training activities to correct it. Well-informed practice design exposes athletes to a wide range of scenarios rather than focusing on prescriptive corrections.
Bad Habits in Conclusion
To me, bad habits should focus on functional outcomes over longer time scales (months to years). While being ready to acknowledge that the long time scale may have started earlier than you realized (like Deandre).
Can an athlete consistently reach an outcome? Can they do this over a long period of time? Can they do it using specific or different tactics? Can they do it in the face of novelty? A bad habit can only be realized when we see a tendency of an athlete to not be able to reach a functional outcome. Or until a specific tactic is punished by an opponent.
It is challenging to identify where bad habits are for your athletes. If a coach sees a tendency in an athlete that they want to change, they should be clear about outcomes. With a well designed practice athletes can explore the limits of certain movements. This will help them understand when something becomes nonfunctional. Create practices that present problems for athletes to solve. Instead of telling them about problems they haven't experienced yet.
Coaching is not about eliminating every perceived bad habit. Fostering athletes who can adapt, experiment, and problem-solve under resistance is our goal. We can help our athletes grow by considering how and when we provide technical feedback.
Latash, M. L. (2025). Useful and Useless Misnomers in Motor Control. Motor Control, 29(1), 69-98. from https://doi.org/10.1123/mc.2024-0082↩︎