I realized I kept repeating the same mistakes

This took me way longer to realize than I'd like to admit.

I've been training for about three years now. Three times a week. I show up, I drill, I roll, I go home tired.

And for most of that time, I genuinely thought I was getting better.

But then I'd get caught in the same guillotine. Again. By the same person. Using the same setup I swore I'd learned to defend six months ago.

Or I'd try to pass someone's guard and just... stall. Same position. Same problem. No idea why it wasn't working.

The frustrating part wasn't that I was making mistakes.

It was that I kept making the same ones without noticing.

I'd leave class feeling like I learned something. My coach would show a technique, I'd drill it, maybe hit it once in a roll. Felt good.

But two weeks later, I'd be in the exact same bad position, reacting the exact same wrong way.

It's like my brain just... reset between sessions.

I tried a few things to fix this.

I asked my coach for feedback. He'd tell me what I did wrong, I'd nod, and then forget it by the next month or so.

I watched instructionals. Took notes on my notebook. Never looked at them again.

I even tried writing things down after class. That lasted about a year, but any time I wanted to find anything it was a real mess.

The problem wasn't effort. I was putting in the time. I was showing up.

The problem was I had no way to see the patterns, reflect on mistakes and act with intention.

What finally helped was to build my own system to track what actually happened in my rolls.

Not what I wanted to happen. Not what the technique of the day was. Just what actually went down.

Got guillotined? Write it down. Stalled in someone's closed guard? Write it down. Hit a sweep that worked? Write that down too.

After a few weeks of this, I started seeing things I couldn't unsee.

I got guillotined seven times in two weeks. All from the same position.

I wasn't randomly bad at guillotine defense. I was just consistently making the same mistake on my takedown entry. I didn't train with intention and wasn't reflecting on my mistakes. The random and unstructured notes didn't help at all.

Once I saw that, I could actually fix it.

I'm not saying I'm suddenly amazing now. I still make plenty of mistakes, I'm currently submitting a lot of people with heel hooks now, but I'm also getting submitted in heel hooks and toe holds. I need to fix this.

But at least now I know what they are.

And I'm not repeating the same ones for months without realizing it.

Apparently a lot of people deal with this. I wasn't the only one stuck in that loop.

I ended up building an app for myself to track this stuff because I wanted an easy way to do that. If this sounds familiar, this is what I use.

Just sharing what worked for me.