Anyone else forget most of the BJJ class?

Genuine question.

I used to leave class feeling like I learned something. My coach would show a technique, I'd drill it maybe ten times, try it in a roll.

Felt good in the moment.

But then I'd come back next week and could barely remember what we worked on.

Not just the details. Sometimes I couldn't even remember the position we were drilling from.

It was frustrating because I was showing up. I was paying attention. I was drilling the moves.

But a week later, it was like my brain just wiped the session.

I thought maybe I was just bad at learning. Or maybe I needed to train more often.

But I trained three times a week. That should have been enough to remember something, right?

I tried watching the technique on YouTube after class. That helped a little, but only if I could find the exact variation we drilled.

I tried taking mental notes during class. That lasted until I started rolling and forgot everything.

The problem wasn't that I wasn't trying. The problem was I had no system.

I was just hoping my brain would hold onto something. And most of the time, it didn't.

What finally helped was writing things down right after class.

Not everything. Just the main technique we drilled. What position it started from. One or two key details.

Takes maybe two minutes.

Now when I come back the next week, I can look back and remember. Oh yeah, we worked on that sweep from closed guard. The one where you break their posture first.

It sounds simple. But it made a huge difference.

I'm not forgetting entire classes anymore. I can actually build on what I learned last week instead of starting from scratch every time.

Turns out a lot of people deal with this. I wasn't the only one leaving class and forgetting everything by next week.

I ended up building my own system to track this because I kept losing my notes, and because it was hard to find anything in the notes after a while, and it was hard to see the big picture. If this sounds familiar, this is what I use now.

Just sharing what worked for me.