Martial Arts

We compete all year at NEO Martial Arts. Every event still gets its own lead-up.

I co-own NEO, I compete, and I coach our competitors. My co-owner, Patrick, coached a junior national team. Between the two of us, a lot of our week is spent getting people ready for the same Saturday.

Most advice on how to prepare for a BJJ competition is written for the athlete: how to peak, what to drill the week before.

As a coach, I'm getting everyone who entered the same event ready at once, and almost nobody writes about that side of it for grappling.

So this is the coach's version. If you're still deciding whether competing is worth it for your gym, start with investing in a competition team and the benefits of competing. This post picks up after that decision.

There's No Off Switch: Comp Season vs Training Camp

For most local tournaments, the lead-up happens inside the classes we already run. We save the word "camp" for the majors. More on those in a minute.

What changes for a local event

That depends on who's competing.

Our four-to-six-year-olds treat a local tournament as a first experience, and nothing about their week changes. Some of our adult and masters competitors do it recreationally, trying one for fun.

Then there are the serious competitors, the ones who set goals around these events. For that group, the minimum we ask is that they come to our weekly competition class (more on that below).

What I do notice is that the more competitive an athlete is, the more they put in on their own. The ones who care about winning change a lot in the two weeks before an event. They focus on their sleep, their mindset, and their nutrition, and they train hard while making sure they don't get injured.

You're thinking of it as a full-time job. None of that needs us to build them a separate camp.

Our international competitors take it the furthest. Even for a local event, they follow the same routine. When that focus is there, you see it in their reps, their movements, and their intent to win.

What Changes When the Event Gets Bigger

Local tournaments happen often, and the stakes aren't as high. Entry doesn't cost much, you're probably going against a recreational competitor, and if you lose, it's still a really good experience.

A major is a much larger investment of money and time, and there's a lot more at stake. You're usually going against very high-level people, sometimes the best in the world, so you have to show up at your absolute best.

We know within the year exactly which majors we're doing. The ones we focus on are IBJJF Euros in the winter, Pans in March, Worlds around June, Pan Kids around July, and World Masters at the end of August or early September. Months ahead, we already know when we'll fly out and when each training camp needs to start.

That's when the training week looks much different. A lot of athletes run six, eight, or 12 weeks of camp.

We add sessions beyond the regular schedule: strength and conditioning, endurance, recovery sessions, and more intense rounds. We do a lot of drilling, to the point of beyond breaking, because that's what you need. We also get into match study and game planning: breaking down brackets, weight divisions, and opponents.

All of that sits on top of the schedule, and only the people going do it. Most of your members will never compete (Lakea Vargas at Combat Sports Academy calls them the 99 sheep), and they keep their classes while a handful of competitors ramp up.

If you want a very different model, the Gymdesk guide to preparing CrossFit athletes builds prep around full periodization by athlete level. Here's how the two tiers compare at NEO:

The Competition Class Is the Real Prep

Most of our prep happens in one weekly class. That's where the drills and the sparring are built for competition, whether the event is local or a major.

The one rule is no fooling around. People come to work and they come for hard rounds, and we expect your mindset and your effort to match that.

The bar for entry

Anyone can come to competition training. We used to run a touring team for our international competitors. Today the bar is simpler: if you want to compete, or you're willing to put in the work, you're welcome in the room.

We're transparent about the other side of that. If you sign up for a tournament, we expect you in competition class, and if you can't be there, there should be a reason. Some reasons are valid. Life happens, and for most people this isn't their full-time job.

We assess each athlete individually, including how they show up the rest of the week. If they aren't doing the work, we're straight up with them about how realistic their goals and expectations are.

Consistency in showing up is the first step. Everyone they'll face at a major is training at the best of their ability, and not showing up to competition class is not doing your job.

We set expectations realistically, and we never make anyone compete for us. Competing isn't required at our academy.

But if you sign up, putting in the work is.

Where Privates Fit

The peewee who looks sharp in privates? He gets smashed at tournaments.

I don't think that comes down to the privates themselves. It's nerves. Some kids take a lot longer to get over the imposter syndrome and the jitters of competition day, and once things start going sideways, a young competitor can spiral fast.

Privates are usually one-on-one. There isn't much sensory overload, there aren't many distractions, and practice doesn't bring out many nerves. A tournament has hundreds, if not thousands, of people and a lot of noise, and your mindset is usually everything.

Those kids tend to overload on the pressure. If they do well, they're happy, but they only connect it to the result. If they do badly, they usually get very emotional.

That's a mental-game problem, and plenty of adults have it too.

How we sell privates

We don't run "tournament privates" as their own category at NEO. That kid would be doing privates whether or not a tournament was on the calendar, because they help his confidence and his technique either way.

We frame privates around athlete development. Athlete development is what keeps members around, and you can put a number on that with our member retention calculator.

Reading Who's Ready

By the time we walk into a venue, we already know what most of our athletes want to do, because we know our roster. Patrick puts a number on it:

The 10% are the people who registered and then didn't show up to class.

What we read for

It starts with attendance. Then it's how they handle a bad position: do they fight to survive it, or give up?

Attitude matters just as much as either one.

Patrick also sorts every competitor by what they like to do and where they break:

Once you can say that about someone, you know what to work on. For Derek, that's guard retention and wrestling up.

Ready vs prepared

I'd push back a little on the word "ready," though. I don't think anyone ever really feels ready. You just do it.

When someone asks me whether they're ready to compete, I first want to find out why they want to. A lot of people who ask that are really asking whether they'll win everything.

That depends on how well prepared you are, how athletic you are, and your bracket. After a few months of training, I think most people can be ready to compete. What matters is whether you want to do it, whether you'll put in the work, and what your purpose is.

It also matters whether you'll come to competition class and see what it really takes.

Here's how I think about it:

I never tell someone to go compete when they feel ready, because if you lose while you "felt ready," you may never feel that way again. That kind of mental toughness has to come from inside.

The Meta: How We Read Each Age Group

Patrick calls it "the meta": the shared read our coaches carry on the roster. The way we build it comes down to age.

Four-to-six, we treat it like a game. That's the whole coaching lens for that group.

Seven-to-nine, they get more personable. You can negotiate with them, give them options, debate a little, and keep it fun.

Ten-to-twelve is where it shifts. That's the age a kid can really understand the rules, and the question gets real: do you want to win or not?

Thirteen-to-fifteen, if you want to be good at this, you're training to win, unless you're strictly recreational. It only gets harder from here.

Sixteen and up, you're not a student to us anymore when it comes to competition. You're a teammate.

How the read changes as an athlete grows

The age groups are where the read starts. With athletes who stay with us for years, Patrick keeps changing how he coaches them.

Early on, it's simple instructions and working with what the athlete is already good at.

Once an athlete stops losing locally, he gives them specific tasks at tournaments. That keeps them honest, opens up the possibility of losing, and lets them learn even through a win.

When they start running into tougher competition, the training changes again. For one of his athletes, that meant fast, submission-based work and signing up a level or a weight class up whenever he can. In his words, "I teach her how to hunt now."

The System Behind Knowing Your Roster

All of this works at our current size. At one recent event, we had around sixty competitors (that's just our gym's number).

The goal is to grow to about five hundred students, and I can already see the problem coming. Picture a hundred athletes at one tournament, each expecting the personal read Patrick described.

That's why we keep the read on our competitors written down, so it isn't only in Patrick's head or mine. Who pulls guard and folds when it's passed, which kid spirals when things go sideways: that goes on the record.

At a hundred athletes, or on a night a coach is out, whoever's covering needs that history before they step on the mat.

If you're building that record from scratch, start with what your gym software already tracks. In Gymdesk, when a class has skills assigned to it, each check-in logs those skills to the member's profile along with their attendance. A coach picking up an athlete cold can open that profile and see ten classes of double-leg takedowns and none of guard retention.

That coach still does the reading on the mat, with the history already on screen.

Attendance tracking is the most boring thing in the gym right up until the day the person who remembered everything isn't there.

Prep Is Roster Management

For us, how to prepare for a BJJ competition comes down to two things. There's the weekly competition class, and there's knowing our athletes well enough that we already know what 90% of them want to do before we get to the venue.

Wherever you keep that history, martial arts software that logs attendance and skills makes the handoff between coaches a lot easier.