Wolves Beginner Guide

Welcome to Wolves Academy of Jiu-Jitsu!

Welcome to the mats. Starting Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ) is like learning a new language with your body and it is often compared to chess in it’s complexities and strategy. It is challenging, humbling, and incredibly rewarding. Here we aim to build strong students with well rounded games and a social club atmosphere backed by support and positivity. This guide is designed to help you navigate your first few weeks so you can train safely and effectively. Remember on average it takes 8-10 years to earn a blackbelt, it is very common to feel lost after your first few classes, and there is nothing as a coach that I can say or demonstrate, in a limited amount of time, that will make you have a complete sense of the art. With consistency you’ll find things quickly begin to make sense and patterns emerge.

Stay with it! I’ve been doing Jiu-Jitsu and martial arts for over 17 years, however in my first 3 months, I really didn’t enjoy it. One day it clicked and I saw it for the game of chess it is, with strategy, tactics, and the added joy one feels after a tough workout with friends. I’m glad I stuck around past those initial 3 months, because my life improved in so many ways because of jiu-jitsu. I got healthier, I visited places throughout the world to train and compete, I’ve met hundreds of people whom I would of never met, learned an amazing art, I’ve won and lost competitive matches in BJJ and MMA, I’ve used what I learn to defend myself in real life, and discovered the joy of teaching, all because of jiu-jitsu. Jiu-jitsu is tough in the beginning, I won’t lie to you, but if you stick with it, you will progress quickly. Find joy in the little accomplishments like the first time you escape a bad position. I hope you discover your own rewards as well from consistent training.

What is Jiu-Jitsu? Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ) is a grappling-based martial art focused on controlling and submitting an opponent using leverage, technique, and positioning rather than strength. It emphasizes ground fighting, joint locks, and chokeholds, allowing a smaller person to effectively defend against and overcome a larger opponent through skill and strategy. You can also think of it as wrestling with submissons. The philosophy of Jiu-Jitsu centers on efficiency and problem-solving under pressure. It values control over force, steady improvement over ego, and using smart technique and concepts to manage difficult situations. It is full of different styles and strategies to choose from to compliment your personality and physical build. It is a corner stone of MMA and many self-defense systems, with it’s own unique subculture and tournaments.

1. The Golden Rule: Tap Early, Tap Often

Safety is our #1 priority. If you are caught in a submission or feel uncomfortable pressure:

The Tap: Physically tap your partner’s body 2-3 times with your hand and/or say tap. If your hands are pinned, tap your feet on the mat or yell “TAP!”
The Response: The moment you feel a tap, release immediately.
Ego Check: Tapping is not losing; it is a “reset” button that allows you to keep training without getting injured. Every tap is an opportunity to review what went wrong and find ways to fix it.

2. Hygiene: Respect the Mats & Your Partners

BJJ is a close-contact sport. Following these rules keeps everyone healthy:

Trim Your Nails: Long finger and toe nails act like claws. Keep them short and smooth to avoid scratching your partners.
Wash Your Gear: Your Gi (uniform) and rash guard must be washed after every single class. Never wear a dirty Gi to the mats. Trust me. We smell it.
No Shoes/Socks on Mat. Mandatory Footwear Off Mat: Never step on the mats with shoes. Conversely, never walk into the bathroom or non matted area barefoot—always wear flip-flops. No street shoes in the gym, please remove them in the hallway at the base of the stairs and put on your indoor footwear. No socks on mats, only bare feet. We wash the mats after every class to ensure they stay safe as possible. With this policy we are trying to reduce slippery floors, dirt in the gym, and anything harmful that can lead to infections on the mat.
Shower ASAP & Wash hands: Shower as soon as possible after class to prevent skin infections. Also always wash your hands after bathroom use. We have hand sanitizer here for you as well. Please make sure you are wearing deodorant.

3. The Positional Hierarchy

In BJJ once on the ground, we follow a “ladder” of positions. Your goal is to move from a bad position to a better one. Getting to a better position is essentially like removing your opponents chess pieces off a board. They will have less available options and they are closer to being checkmated. Some people start on the ground, others like start standing and try to takedown their partner into ground work. You may also find yourself in someones guard, and you’re goal will be to pass their guard ( move around or through the legs to get to mount, back control, etc). In a actual fight the more advantageous positions would put you in a position where you could strike an opponent with lesser risk of getting hit yourself. In tournaments we do not strike, we can score based on getting to more dominant positions or win by getting a submisson. Not everyone competes, but we still want to train with this hierarchy in mind.

Position	Status	Your Goal
Back Control	Most Dominant	You are behind them with legs hooked inside their legs or locked across their waist. Look for the attacking option.
Mount	Dominant	You are sitting on their chest. Maintain heavy pressure and look for attacks. You can also transition to the back.
Side Control	Advantage	You are on top chest-to-chest, perpendicular. Keep them pinned and improve position or look for attack.
The Guard	Neutral	You are on your back using your legs to control them and keep the person on top in front of you. The guard allows you to make connections on your partner to destabalize them for the purpose of knocking them over, taking the back, standing to feet, or looking for submisson.
Bottom Mount, back control, bottom side control	Disadvantage	You are pinned. Stay calm, frame, and look to escape.

4. Learning to Fall / Breakfalls ( Very Important! )

Before you learn to throw someone, you must learn to land. Please take the time to watch the video below. Even pros can forget to do this, so it is important to build this habit early.

Tuck Your Chin: Never let the back of your head hit the mat. Keep your chin glued to your chest.
Disperse Energy: When falling backward or sideways, slap the mat with your palms and forearms at a 45-degree angle. This absorbs the impact so your spine doesn’t have to. Make noise with your hands and stayed relaxed throughout the process.
Don’t Reach: Never, ever, try to “catch” yourself with a straight arm; this is how wrists and elbows break.

5. The “White Belt Fog”

Jiu-Jitsu can take a while to grasp. For the first few months, you will likely feel like you are lost in certain areas or that you don’t know what to do with your limbs. This is normal.

Consistency and balance is Key: Showing up 2-3 times a week is better than training 6 days a week for one month and quitting. It is common to think you aren’t making progress early on, but if you are consistent, I promise that you are making progress, it’s just hard to see the forest from the trees in the beginning.
Focus on Survival: Your only goal for the first 6 months is to learn how to breathe, stay calm, and escape bad positions while learning how to avoid bad positions.
Belts : Adult belt system goes- White, blue, purple, brown, black. With consistent training you can expect to earn a blue belt in 1 to 2 years, determined by consistency, skill development, and attitude.

6. Relaxing and what not to do..

Everyone wants to help the beginner out. It’s an investment in their own development by helping to develop skillful training partners. When starting out with live games and sparring, let your partner know that you are new. If someone has played the game of chess for 5 years and you are on your first week of playing, would you honestly expect to “win?”. Jiu-Jitsu is no different, it takes time to develop good habits, tactics, strategies, and techniques. You are more than welcome to ask your training partner or coach anything and they will be happy to help. I do not recommend, as a brand new student, to go after your training partner too hard without any method behind the madness. Also you are under no obligation to spar. It is recommended, but we respect your comfort levels and you may always say no to a roll without judgement.

We play jiu-jitsu as a sort of game, to fine tune our own individual game. As you progress through the months, you will see how efficient you will become and how easy it will be to control a brand new student, giving you confidence that you can defend yourself in a real altercation. We do a lot of live mini games in this academy. This is to develop the skills needed to work against resistance which is what you’ll be dealing with in an actual altercation or while competing.

It can be tense for a lot of people when they begin live work. Try to stay loose. Try to catch yourself if you’re clenching muscles or holding your breath and remind yourself to relax. Being overly stiff can actually lead to injuries for you and your partner. Good jiu-jitsu is relaxed jiu-jitsu and allows you read the situation and shifts in energy and weight more easily to use in your favor . In the beginning try to focus on stuff you learned in class and don’t try to brute force your way through positions. Again, feel free to ask when stuck.

We call it spazzing when someone is just trying to use pure strength, speed, and force to move in and out of positions. This can lead to injuries and training partners are less likely to want to train with you. It is also not scalable to higher skill levels and will lead to you gassing out early. We try our best to help people get over spazzing quickly. Rolling methodically and with control, tells your new training partner that “I can trust this person”.
Focus on Survival: Your only goal for the first 6 months is to learn how to breathe, stay calm, and escape bad positions, and focus on not ending up in bad positions. In guard practice keeping your connections on your partner and keeping them in front of you.
Do not Slam your partner. If doing takedowns you always want to safely return your partner to the mat.

Cranking and Illegal Academy Techniques. Do not crank submissons, the goal is to always give your partner time to tap. Likewise always be willing to tap. Trust me, this stuff works, and it will injure if you let your ego get the best of you. We’ve all tapped countless times throughout our journey. It is simply part of the process while you’re developing your skills. We do not allow moves such as neck cranks, flying leg scissor takedowns, bending fingers,slams, hands to the inside of the face (eyes/nose/mouth) and white belts unless having permission from a training partner may only finish straight ankle locks for their option of leg locks. We have a very low injury rate here, but it continues to be everyone’s responsibility to keep one another safe.

Always be aware of your surroundings. Look around and try to never crash into another group or fall outside the matted area. Wrestling into a grounded group can be very dangerous. Always find a new spot to reset if your about to run into another group.

Respect the gym and your training partners. We welcome all walks of life into our gym as long as they respect their team and academy and want to get better at jiu-jitsu. We do not tolerate discrimination of any kind and we have no problem removing members who threaten our gym’s positive atmosphere and culture. Help keep the gym clean, by throwing out or recycling your trash.

Learn to adapt to different partners over time. Some members are older with full time jobs and families and do this for fun and exercise once a week. Other members are competitors with less obligations and dreams of winning medals. Just remember to let everyone know you are new and they will help you out. At the end of the day we all want to go home healthy and continue growing a positive academy.

Your “White Belt” Vocabulary

You’ll hear these words a lot. There is more as jiu-jitsu language will use a mix of English, Brazilian-Portuguese, and Japanese, sometimes with the same word have multiple names . Here is some of the definitions.

“Rolling/ Rounds”: This is our word for sparring.
“Shrimping/ hip escape”: A fundamental hip movement used to create space .
Upa/ Bridge: Using your hips to off-balance your partner by first driving your feet in the mat when fighting off your back. Used to reverse or escape.
“Guard Passing”: The act of getting past your opponent’s legs ( the guard player fighting off their back) to reach a dominant position such as side control, mount, or the back control.
“Frames”: Getting your arms back in front of your training partner to try to keep them at a distance so you can recover to a stronger position.
“Sweep”: When you are on the bottom of guard and use your legs/hips to flip your opponent so you end up on top.
“Gi vs. No-Gi”: Gi is the traditional kimono (jacket, belt and pants). No-Gi is training in shorts and a “rash guard” (compression shirt). It is the same game, with different nuances. The gripping in gi can be more complex with a variety of extra styles of guard you can play. The rulesets can differ slightly between gi and no-gi at different tournaments. Both styles compliment each other and I recommend training both.
- The Slap Bump: Before every live round (sparring), you slap palms and bump fists with your partner. It is a mutual agreement to train safely and with respect.
Grips & Connections: There are Collar grips, sleeve grips, hooks ( using your “shoelaces” to control or “hook” an arm or leg), posts ( using palm or sole of your foot to control distance). Basically anyway we can attach yourself to someone to control.
Recompose : To put yourself back in front of your partner with your feet attached to them in someway while playing guard. This is a good thing , because if our feet are not in attached it usually means they have a strong position on us like side control.
Spaz: Someone that recklessly spars . They try to brute force and race their way though the round without much technique in order to win. They lack knowledge and try to compensate by being overly athletic, but while doing so puts them self and others at risk. They gas out quickly as well and while they might do well against other smaller beginners, this style is not scalable against experienced people and is quickly defeated. Try not to be a spaz.
Oss: A versatile term derived from Japanese, used to mean “okay,” “understand,” ,”acknowledgement”, or “respect”.

I will try to make a video series in time, but feel free to Youtube BJJ beginner basics ( I like Lachlan Giles and John Danaher’s free videos ) and how to tie a BJJ belt if your itching for more information.

We have a Facebook Messenger Group Chat that we encourage you to join for either the adults or parents of kids class. It’s a good way to get to know the team, talk shop, and keep up to date with academy news. Please reach out to Brandon for an invite.

Membership & Pause Policy

At Wolves Academy of Jiu-Jitsu, we keep things simple:

No long-term contracts
No sign-up fees
No cancellation fees
You may cancel anytime

Membership Pauses and Cancellation

To keep the academy running sustainably, all membership pauses must include a specific return date so we can schedule billing to resume accordingly.

Indefinite or open-ended pauses are not permitted.
If your situation changes (injury, life events, etc.), just reach out — we’re happy to do a 1 time per pause adjustment your return date in most cases.
We do not pause accounts or credit for injuries/travel/sick days for anything less than a month.

Pausing without a return date effectively reserves a training spot without contributing to operating costs. Because mat space and class capacity are limited, we cannot hold spots indefinitely. The reason for the pause may be taken into consideration when determining whether the requested duration is reasonable. As a small business, we know it is not possible for everyone, but it is always greatly appreciated and remembered anytime you continue paying tuition rather than pausing.

If You Cancel

You may cancel anytime prior to 3 days of your next billing. Simply send us a message at wolvesjiujitsu@gmail.com. If you choose to cancel instead of pausing:

Re-enrollment is subject to current availability
You may be placed on a waitlist if classes are full
Membership will be subject to current pricing

We’re committed to keeping jiu-jitsu affordable and stress-free, while also making responsible decisions to keep Wolves strong long term.

If you have any questions, just talk to us.

I wanted to keep this beginner guide as simple as possible so I will end it here before it turns into a novel, but there is more guidelines for students/parents/instructors on our website at https://wolvesjiujitsu.com/guidelines/ we recommend reading it when you have time. It’s a lot of information, but found it very important to have these online so we can set a standard of expectations.

In closing, stick with it! Even after a year of training, I trust most students to be able to handle themselves against an attacker. It is tough at first, no doubt about it, but incredibly rewarding and a fun healthy addiction once it clicks for you.