Everyone has different ideas about what exactly drilling means. Most people understand it as doing loads of reps of a given move, with varying degrees of resistance from your training partner. It’s different from positional sparring, where you start in a set position (mount, side control or back control, say) and to improve your position, escape or submit your opponent, resetting once somebody ‘wins.’ But there’s a halfway point between the two that can really work for your grappling – it’s used in judo a lot, but BJJ not so much. I think of it as ‘micro-drilling.’

Think of it like extreme positional sparring. If you want to, you can break normal positional sparring into smaller units – say, starting in deep-half guard, or De La Riva, and only going until you change position. Micro-drilling just takes this concept further, by severely limiting when you win/lose/reset.

By way of an example, I recently did micro-drilling for Ryan Hall’s take on the triangle from broken posture. Ryan suggests that as you break someone down, you angle off to one side, keep them away with a hand on the head and a foot on their hip, then work towards either a kick-over triangle, a tap-through triangle, or a combination of both. So a friend and I started from the broken-down, foot-on-hip position and worked. The rules?

1. Get to the ‘threatened triangle’ position – one arm locked in, posture broken down – and you win. Reset.

2. End up anywhere else, and you lose. Reset.

It really works. Firstly, each ‘rep’ only takes about 15 seconds. With reset time plus a keen partner, you could do 10 reps in five minutes, which means you’d work the position live more than you probably would in an entire night of full rolling. Secondly, because you aren’t fighting the choke – you’re stopping at the ‘threatened’ position – winning and losing isn’t too painful. Of course, you could always change the victory conditions to ‘finish’ instead of ‘threaten the triangle’ if you think it’s more useful.

With a bit of thought, it’s easy to come up with countless micro-drilling positions. A good rule of thumb is to start with a movement instead of the usual fist-bump handslap – in the example above, the top guy ‘allows’ the posture break, then you go. You might want to start with a leg-drag, then have the guy on the bottom try to escape while the guy on top goes to finish or choke. Or you could start from a locked-in omoplata and have one partner trying to escape. The important thing is, you make the victory conditions narrow, and the ‘reps’ short. It’s like fighting – just more specific. Give it a try, and see if it works for you.