3.5 Ideas from Josh Vogel — A Black Belt’s Guide to Strategic Training

2 min readDec 19, 2024

“Don’t try to get good at all of Jiu Jitsu. Get good at your own Jiu Jitsu.” — Josh Vogel

Josh Vogel is a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt and co-owner of The Jiu-Jitsu Company in Old City, Philadelphia.

Josh is known for his systematic approach to teaching and his ability to help students develop organized, effective game plans.

His latest BJJ Fanatics instructional “90 Day Project-Based Jiu-Jitsu” showcases his unique methodology for rapid skill development.

3.5 Ideas from BJJ Black Belt Josh Vogel:

“If you’re trying to learn all of jiu-jitsu and you’re thinking, ‘I got to learn this move, that move, that move, that move,’ what ends up happening is you get overwhelmed.”
“Instead of spending 10 years trying to figure out and accidentally stumbling upon being good at triangles, my thought is if you can start off having one thing from every major position, then you have a basic game plan.”

“If you have four days a week of training, it makes sense to do like a 70/30 split of your training time where you might spend 30 percent of your time doing your project and then 70 percent of your training time keeping the rest of your jiu-jitsu in maintenance mode.
“When you’re doing open mat, if you’re training your jiu-jitsu in maintenance mode, you have to go through as many parts of your game plan as possible.”

“I try to limit my training time with people who are going to put my ribs in positions where they’re going to get hurt.”
“It’s the same thought process as self-defense — I’m thinking about the situations that I’m most likely to run into, and then the problems that are going to come with that… You want to spend most of your time training techniques with people that are somewhere from a three to seven out of ten on the spectrum of training partner compatibility].”

“When you’re doing a project… your training partners are all going to catch on. Just like the first couple times you try to rob a bank, maybe the security is a little bit lax… But then after the bank gets robbed a few times, they hire more security guards.”
“That ends up being a good time to either rob a different bank or go into a different line of work… You either need to move on to a new project or figure out how to solve the higher-level problems.”