How to Track Progress in Jiu Jitsu
Progress in jiu jitsu is hard to see. There's no time to beat, no weight to lift, no obvious scoreboard in training. You go to class, you roll, and some days you feel like you're improving and some days you feel like you're moving backward. Belt promotions happen infrequently, and the gaps between them can feel long and uncertain.
So how do you actually know if you're getting better?
Why BJJ progress is invisible (and why that's misleading)
Jiu jitsu improvement tends to be slow and nonlinear. You might spend weeks working on a position and feel like nothing is changing, then suddenly notice that people who used to pass your guard easily are having a harder time. The improvement was happening all along. You just couldn't see it day to day.
The other problem is that your training partners are improving too. If everyone around you is getting better at the same rate, it feels like you're standing still even when you're not. This is one of the most common reasons BJJ practitioners feel stuck.
What to actually track
Session ratings over time. After every class, rate how the session went (1-10). Not how hard it was, but how well it went. Over weeks, look at the trend. If your average is slowly climbing or staying stable even as you roll with tougher partners, that's progress.
Recurring positions and outcomes. Keep a brief note about what positions you ended up in during rolling and what happened. After a month, you'll notice patterns. Positions where you used to get stuck that are now less of a problem. Techniques that are starting to work more consistently. These shifts are invisible in any single session but obvious when you look at the data.
Your focus areas. Track what you're working on each week. When you can look back and see "three weeks ago my guard retention was my biggest problem, and this week I recovered guard multiple times against a tough partner," that's measurable progress even if it doesn't feel dramatic.
The trick is writing it down
Most of the information you need to track progress is already in your head after every class. The problem is you forget it. Writing down a few sentences after each session turns invisible progress into something you can actually see.
Make it easy on yourself
A notes app works for this. If you want something that tracks your session ratings, training load, and reflections over time and surfaces the trends for you, Sherpa is a free app designed for exactly this.