The 5 Mistakes Every BJJ Beginner Makes (And How I Spot Them on Day One)

Why most Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu beginners burn themselves out in the first months, and what to do differently

By: Professor Itay Leibovich | Black Belt | Gracie Jiu Jitsu | May 2026 | ~14 min read

Monday evening at the jiu-jitsu academy in Tel Aviv. Beginners' class. A new guy walks in, thirty-something, looks fit, glances around the mat, trying to look relaxed and not show that this is his first ever session in a contact sport. He sits down at the side, watches the group warming up, and I watch him. Within ten seconds I know exactly what kind of beginner he is going to be, and I know which mistakes he is going to make over the next four months. I know whether he will still be on the mat in a year, or whether he will disappear in the third month like so many before him.

How do I know? Because everyone makes the same mistakes. I have been on the mat for 36 years, 20 of them in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and I have been teaching jiu-jitsu in Tel Aviv for 16 years. I went the whole way from white belt to black belt in Gracie Jiu Jitsu, opened the Israeli Academy, and learned one thing that never changes. Beginners' mistakes in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu are identical in Tel Aviv, in Rio de Janeiro, in California and in Tokyo. I made them myself as a white belt, my students are making them now, and the new guy from Monday will make them over the coming weeks.

So instead of waiting quietly and watching him leave the academy after three months, I decided to write this article. If you are thinking about starting to train BJJ, or if you are new to jiu-jitsu and already halfway through your second month with things starting to feel too hard, read these five mistakes before your next session. They will save you injuries, despair, and in all likelihood the odds of quitting before you even reach blue belt.

Mistake 1: ego. Refusing to tap.

This is the most dangerous of the five, and I do not mean that as a metaphor. This is the mistake that can break your arm, tear a ligament in your elbow, or end your jiu-jitsu career before it has even started. I am not exaggerating. Any jiu-jitsu coach in the world can tell you ten stories without breaking a sweat about beginners who ended up with a serious injury just in the past month, simply because they would not tap in time.

It always looks the same. New guy, third or fourth session, starts sparring with a more experienced student. The experienced student gets an armbar but does not apply full pressure, because he knows he is facing a beginner. He gives the beginner time to tap. But the beginner does not tap. He feels the pressure building in his elbow, understands he is in a bad position, and instead of tapping he thinks to himself that in one more second he will get out of it. And then another second. And then something breaks, tears, or simply overstretches.

There is no point telling you about one specific case, both because I did exactly that recently in the injuries article, and because these stories are not counted in ones. They are counted in tens, hundreds and thousands, depending how long you have been on the mat. In twenty years on the mat I have seen it so many times that if I wrote them all down I would be writing the third volume of War and Peace. The average recovery time from a torn elbow ligament is six months off the mat, and I know students for whom it took a year. All of it because they would not make one small gesture. A small gesture that is actually enormous: the tap. Because what is a small movement of the hand compared with a deep wound to the ego?

The root cause of this mistake is simple. The beginner treats every spar as if it were a world championship final, as if tapping means he lost something real, as if somebody is standing at the side with a clipboard recording the results. Nobody is recording. There is no referee, no audience, and no meaning to the result of a single round in training. But the beginner does not know that, because he lives in a world where competition means life or death. Every difficulty is existential. That is the instinct in most of us. It is just that in jiu-jitsu, if you take that competitiveness to the extreme, the one who pays the price is you.

The solution is simple and it runs against every instinct you have. Tapping is not a loss, it is a chance to learn. The rule at the Israeli Academy is sharp and clear. You tap, you get out of the position, you go back to a starting position with your partner (partner. Not opponent. Not enemy. A training partner who wants to improve exactly like you), and you try to work out what did not work. That is the only way to improve. Every time you tap you learn something you did not know. Every time you do not tap you only get closer to an injury.

If you want to understand in depth how injuries happen in jiu-jitsu training, and why the right approach to risk is the foundation of healthy long-term training, I wrote a separate article about it that I recommend reading before your next session. You will find it here: Injury prevention in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, the complete guide.

Mistake 2: not asking questions

There is something that happens to almost every man in his thirties at his first jiu-jitsu session. Actually, at any age. He walks into the academy, watches the coach demonstrate a complex technique, does not entirely understand it, and goes back to the mat in complete silence. I know he did not understand. I see it in his eyes, in the attempt to copy the more experienced student next to him, in the hesitation in his body language. But he will not ask a question, because he thinks asking will make him look stupid in front of people he barely knows.

And then a month goes by, and three months go by, and suddenly he wonders why he is not improving at the pace he expected. Why he keeps repeating the same mistakes. Why the student who started the same week as him is already far better. There can be several reasons for that, but one of the most common is simply this. He did not ask questions. He built a foundation of misunderstandings that now has to be dismantled and rebuilt, and that takes far longer.

I have a line I say to every beginner at their first session at the academy. The only stupid question at the Israeli Academy is the one you did not ask. I mean that in complete seriousness. If you do not understand why the arm needs to be under the chin in side control, ask. If you do not know what a frame is, ask. If you are not sure whether you are meant to press with the shoulder or the chest, ask. If you cannot remember which leg goes before which in an armbar from mount or guard, ask in the first fifteen seconds instead of frustrating yourself for ten minutes afterwards.

Actually, there is one stupid question, and it is "what if?". But I will write about that another time.

The solution is not in the coach's hands, it is in yours. After every technique demonstration I ask whether there are questions. I know there are questions, there are always questions, I even know what the questions are. If nobody asks, I ask something myself, like who is not sure where the left hand goes on the defence. And then three hands go up. The next time that happens in your session, be the first hand up. I promise you that at least two people around you will be thinking they are glad somebody asked, because they did not understand either. And the ones who are not thinking that? They simply have not yet reached the stage where they take their training seriously enough. Or they are embarrassed, and as the old saying goes, the bashful do not learn.

Mistake 3: comparing yourself to others

This is the moment to talk about Roman. Roman came to me a little over three years ago. Aged 44, an accountant, father of three, had never done a contact sport in his life. He came to me because his eldest son had started training jiu-jitsu at another academy in the city and it drew him in, and he decided it was time to get himself out of the office and do something physical after years behind a desk.

Roman's start was a good one. He came three times a week consistently, drilled quietly with his partners, improved at a completely reasonable pace for someone who started in his mid-forties. And then, after about four months, he came to me at the end of a Thursday evening session and asked me something I have heard in exactly that form every week since I opened the academy. Itay, there's a guy here who started the same month as me. He's already submitting me easily. Why am I not progressing like him?

I looked at Roman. I looked at the guy he was talking about, who was now at the other end of the mat drilling with a senior student. And then I told Roman what I tell everyone who asks me that question. Look at him. He is 24, he had a wrestling background before the army, he trains four times a week, he is single with no children, he has the time and the energy to train as much as he wants. You are 44, you have never done a contact sport, you train three times a week, you come straight from the office after a long working day, you go home to help your wife with the children. Why are you even comparing those two paths?

Roman stopped, thought, and gave the obvious answer: because he is the one who started with me and is standing right next to me. He is my reference point. How simple, and how unproductive. That gave me a good opening to hold forth on one of the most important principles of Gracie Jiu Jitsu. Jiu-jitsu is an entirely personal journey, and it is measured against yourself, not against anybody else. Somebody else's progress is not the reference point for your progress. For your successes. For your failures. Somebody else's progress is not part of the equation at all.

There is one single question you need to ask yourself at the end of every month of training. Am I better this week than I was a month ago? If the answer is yes, you are going the right way, even if the young guy next to you is overtaking you at the speed of a train. If the answer is no, you need to sit down with your coach and work out what is not working in your training, what you need to fix, where you are stuck. The young guy next to you is not your standard. You are your standard. Roman still trains at my academy. He is a blue belt today and heading towards purple. The young guy who was better than him? Disappeared two and a half years ago and has not been back since.

Mistake 4: going full throttle at the start

Eviatar came to me in 2018, and I remember him well because his story has repeated itself so many times that I already knew from the start how it was going to end. A young guy, mid-twenties, energetic, enthusiastic from the first second he walked into the academy. After two weeks he was already coming to five sessions a week. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Evenings, and sometimes mornings too. He was the first to arrive and the last to leave. He filmed everything, wrote everything down, asked everything. He sent me emails after every session (people used to send emails).

I knew exactly what was going to happen. I told him so directly after his third or fourth session, in those words. Eviatar, drop the pace to three sessions a week. You are going to burn out. He laughed and told me he loved it, that he was in good shape, that he knew what he was doing and that I did not need to worry. I told him again at his tenth session. Again at his twentieth. Every time he smiled, told me everything was fine, and carried on coming five times a week.

After exactly five months, Eviatar disappeared. He did not come to Monday's session. I sent him a WhatsApp, he did not reply. I sent again a week later, still no reply. To this day, as far as I know, he has not gone back to jiu-jitsu at any other academy. A guy who trained five times a week and looked like my next star student simply vanished off the map.

It is a pattern I see so often that I can predict it in a beginner's first month. Statistically, around 70% of those who start at a pace of five sessions a week disappear between the second and fourth month, and the vast majority never come back, not to me and not to another academy. They simply end their BJJ career before it has even started. Why? Because Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is a burning sport, physically and mentally. Every session you lose dozens of times to people more experienced than you. Every session you learn a new technique that runs completely against your natural intuition. Every session your body takes knocks, squeezes and a load it is not used to and not built to absorb every day.

Five sessions a week means the body does not have time to recover between sessions, your muscles ache constantly, your sleep suffers. The brain does not have time to process all the information thrown at it, so the understanding does not settle deeply. The small losses accumulate too fast without a chance to digest them. All of it together creates a burnout that ends in quitting, and it is always a sudden, sharp departure, with a feeling of failure.

The solution is simple. Three times a week. That is the pace. That is the pace at which you improve fastest in the long run, even if it looks slow in the short run. That is the pace that lets your body recover between sessions, lets your brain process the techniques you learned, and lets you finish a session without dreading the next day. Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is not a sprint. It is a decade-long marathon. And anyone who starts with a sprint simply does not finish the marathon.

Mistake 5: trying to learn from Instagram and TikTok

Once upon a time, when there was only YouTube, people found it hard to find content online. Hard is not quite accurate, there simply was not much content. Today more content goes up in a day on social media than there are practitioners in the world. This happened to me only yesterday. I was running a women's self-defence workshop at the academy, one of the series of women's self-defence workshops we run regularly. During the workshop, while I was teaching a technique, Alex, a woman of 39 (40 in two months), an artist with a background in security work, told me she had seen something on Instagram. She showed me the movement. I looked at it for a few seconds. It was not just wrong, it was genuinely dangerous. If a woman tried to perform it in a real assault, she would be more injured than if she had simply done nothing. Best case she breaks her own arm. Worst case she gives her attacker better access to her.

I asked Alex a few questions. Who was in the video. A woman on Instagram with a lot of followers. She explained why the technique was supposed to work. It will not work. She showed me scenarios in which it would work. No, it will not work in those scenarios either. A long silence. In the end Alex told me she did not know who the woman was, she had only seen that the video had thousands of likes, so she assumed that meant it worked.

That is exactly the problem with learning women's self-defence techniques from Instagram, or learning jiu-jitsu from TikTok, or even learning from YouTube alone. The first reason it does not work is that you do not see the full context of the technique. A 30-second video shows you a technique in ideal conditions, on the ground, with a cooperative partner, without real pressure. It does not show you what happens when your opponent is twenty kilos bigger than you. What happens when you are tired after a minute of struggle. What happens when you are under the real psychological pressure of an assault. You need a partner. You need contact. You need resistance.

The second reason is that in BJJ the small details are everything. Where exactly your hand is, at what angle, at what height. Where your knee is, at what pressure, on which part of your opponent. At what angle your back is, where you are looking, which fingers are gripping what. In an Instagram video you see the big picture but not the details that decide whether the technique works or fails. The third reason is that you do not know who the teacher is. On Instagram and TikTok there are thousands of people teaching self-defence or BJJ or anything else. The vast majority are not black belts with real certification. Some are not coaches at all, they simply film content. But they have a lot of followers, so our brains assume they know what they are doing.

The fourth reason is the most important. You are training without immediate feedback. In jiu-jitsu, immediate feedback is critical. If you are performing a movement incorrectly, you need somebody standing next to you, watching you, telling you within ten seconds that your arm is at the wrong angle. An Instagram video does not have that. You watch, think you understood, train at home against a wall, and every time you embed the faulty execution a little deeper. After a month of training against a wall, it will be far harder to correct the mistake than if you had learned it correctly from the start.

The solution is basic. Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is learned on the mat, with a coach, with real partners. Full stop. Videos can complement training. Watching a technique again that you learned in class yesterday, reading theory on the principles of Gracie Jiu Jitsu. All of that is legitimate and even recommended. But it cannot replace training, ever, in any form. And if you are a woman looking to genuinely learn self-defence, do not learn women's self-defence from Instagram. Come to a workshop. Come to a regular class. Learn from a person who has seen you physically, who knows how your body moves, who can correct you in real time.

The hidden mistake: thinking the goal is a belt

There is one more mistake I have not mentioned, and I call it the hidden mistake because it does not look like a mistake at all. It looks like healthy motivation. The typical beginner comes to me at the academy at his first or second session and asks how long until blue belt. I answer that it depends on him. A year and a half, two years. He nods, marks the date in his head, and starts counting the months.

That is a mistake, and it is a mistake almost every beginner makes. Your goal in BJJ is not a blue belt. It is not purple and it is not brown. It is not black either. The goal is to be better today than you were yesterday. Technically, physically, mentally. The belt will come, I promise you. But if you train only for the belt, you will quit before you get it, because the road to blue belt is long, exhausting, and frustrating at many points. And if you do not enjoy the road itself, the sessions, the partners, the learning, the improvement, then eventually you will ask yourself why you are here at all. And in all likelihood, the answer will be that you do not have to be.

And if you do want to understand what really happens on the journey from white belt to blue belt, what you are supposed to know, what real progress looks like, and why that road is not what you thought it would be, I wrote a detailed article that helps you see the bigger picture: From white belt to blue belt, the real journey.

Summary: what you do in the next four months will decide the rest

A year from now, most of the people who start training jiu-jitsu this week will not be on the mat. They will have quit. Some will quit because of an injury, because they would not tap in time. Some will quit from burnout, because they came five times a week. Some will quit because they compared themselves to the young guy next to them and lost hope. Some will quit because they were afraid to ask questions and never cracked the fundamentals. And some will quit because they tried to learn from TikTok, discovered they were not improving, and concluded they had no talent. None of them is right. Every one of them could still be on the mat now.

You do not have to be one of them. The five mistakes I have described are entirely avoidable. Every one of them is known in advance to every BJJ coach at every serious academy in the world. Every one of them is identical in Tel Aviv, in Rio, in Los Angeles. Now you know them too. The decision whether to avoid them or to repeat Eviatar's story is in your hands alone. Choose well.

Frequently asked questions about starting BJJ

How many times a week should a BJJ beginner train?

Three times a week. That is the pace at which you improve fastest in the long run. Five sessions a week looks like dedication, but around 70% of the people who start at that pace disappear between the second and fourth month. Three sessions let your body recover, let your brain process the techniques, and let you arrive at the next session without dread.

Is it normal to feel that everyone is better than me?

Completely normal, and it is also the third mistake. Somebody else's progress is not your reference point. The young guy next to you may be training four times a week with no children and a wrestling background. The only question that matters is: am I better than I was a month ago?

Should a beginner tap quickly?

Yes, and this is the most dangerous of all five mistakes. Tapping is not a loss, it is a chance to learn. The average recovery time from a torn elbow ligament is six months off the mat, all because somebody refused to give three taps.

Can you learn jiu-jitsu from YouTube, Instagram or TikTok?

No. A 30-second video shows a technique in ideal conditions with a cooperative partner and no real pressure. You do not see the small details that decide whether it works, you do not know who the teacher is, and you get no immediate feedback. Videos are a complement to training, never a replacement.

How long does it take to get a blue belt?

A year and a half to two years on average, but that is the wrong question. Your goal is not the belt, it is to be better today than you were yesterday. People who train only for the belt usually quit before they get it.

Why do most BJJ beginners quit in the first months?

For five reasons: injury from refusing to tap, burnout from training too often, comparing themselves to others, fear of asking questions, and trying to learn from social media instead of on the mat. Every one of them is entirely avoidable.

Should a beginner ask questions in class?

Yes. The only stupid question is the one you did not ask. A beginner who stays silent builds a foundation of misunderstandings that later has to be dismantled and rebuilt, and that takes far longer.

Want to start properly? Come and visit us.

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Website: www.bjj.org.il

At the Israeli Academy we do not only teach jiu-jitsu in Tel Aviv. We build practitioners who stay on the mat for the long haul. A family atmosphere, patient coaches who took the time to teach the fundamentals properly, and no judgement of beginners. Classes are taught in Hebrew, but our instructors speak fluent English and a large part of our members are English speakers. On Saturday nights we run a class taught in English by Philip Paul.

For details on BJJ classes for beginners in Tel Aviv at the academy, head to the training page.