What Is Drilling?

Drilling gets more heated debate in the jiu-jitsu community than it deserves — because almost nobody defines the term before they argue about it. Someone says "I don't believe in drilling," someone else says "you have to drill," and neither one has actually said what they mean by the word. That's how you end up in a pointless argument. Before you take a side on drilling, ask the person across from you: what do you mean by drilling?

So let me give you mine. This isn't the dictionary definition — there isn't one, really — this is how I define it after years of coaching and thinking about how skill actually gets built. Once you hear it, I think you'll agree drilling is non-negotiable for your progression.

Here's my definition: drilling is any repeatable pattern done in a controlled environment.

That's it. It's intentionally broad, because if I broke it down into ten sub-categories it would get complicated fast, and complicated definitions don't get used. I keep it simple by splitting drilling into two buckets: passive and active. The difference between the two comes down to what your training partner is doing.

Passive drilling is static — no real resistance of any kind. Your partner is fully cooperative. You're repeating the pattern over and over with nothing pushing back. That's passive drilling, full stop.

Active drilling is exactly what it sounds like — you're moving, you're active, there's real motion involved. But remember, my definition is still broad here: any repeatable movement in a controlled environment still applies. One version of active drilling is what I call S-drilling (I used to call it S-training) — cooperative, flowing, back-and-forth movement with a partner. It's a great skill to build with someone, but it's genuinely hard to sustain, because you both know the pattern: you start slow and cooperative, it starts feeling good, and then it escalates out of nowhere because nobody wants to be the one who gets swept. Before you know it you're rolling hard and wondering how you got there.

In my opinion, the best way to do active drilling is with training partners who are less experienced than you — because that's what lets you actually control the environment. There are all kinds of parameters and tools for this. Positional training is one: for you, it's active drilling; for your partner, they might be going flat-out, fighting for their life. You can segment it however you need.

Here's why that matters: when you're working with someone technical enough to give you a legitimate look — a real, live response — but who you have enough experience over to control the outcome, you can repeat the skill against a moving, resisting person. Say you're drilling escapes from back control. If you can consistently get to the strangle side against a lesser-experienced partner, you can drill that side escape and the follow-up over and over, because the result isn't really up to them. That's what "controlling the environment" means in practice — it lets you repeat a skill under live conditions instead of just theoretical ones.

Passive and active drilling are both non-negotiable if you actually want to master jiu-jitsu — not just get by, but train for fun, forever, with a body and skill set that lets you roll for an hour straight and enjoy every minute of it.

How they fit together: passive drilling comes first. It's how you learn the technique — the actual movement, the sequencing, your body getting where it needs to be with the time and precision to get it right. That doesn't mean mastery. I'm not a fan of drilling something a thousand times right out of the gate. What I'd recommend instead is passive drilling until the movement is smooth and your mechanics feel set — that might take a session, might take a week — and then moving into active drilling for the last 10-15% of refinement.

Sometimes you'll need to go back to passive drilling on something you already "know" — after time off, after an injury, or just because a specific piece doesn't feel the way it used to. That's normal. It usually comes back fast. That's what passive drilling is for: mechanical precision, done slow and smooth and controlled (more on why that specific approach matters in the link below).

Active drilling is where the majority of your training life actually happens. It's where you sharpen submissions and escapes, where your timing improves, where you get more efficient with your mechanics because your body's in the right place at the right time — no wasted movement, no flared elbow you didn't need.

If you take one thing from this: next time someone tells you "I don't believe in drilling," be a detective. Ask them what they mean. Nine times out of ten, once you define it, they'll realize they already do it — they just never called it that.

See you on the mats.

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