Eddie Bravo has said several times that the number of reps you need to master a technique differs from person to person, from move to move. One person may need only 5,000 reps, another may need 20,000.
The popularity of the 10,000 reps benchmark is due a large part, I believe, to Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers. Gladwell suggested that to become an expert at something, a person needs to put in a least 10,000 reps. He gives Michael Jordan, the Beetles, and Bill Gates, among others, as examples of people who put the reps in and became legends in their respective fields. The idea is essentially that everyone owes their success to the hard work they put in, with an additional boost to success that comes from being in the right place and time that allows a person to put those reps in. For instance, Gates was able to start working with the Internet when he was in high school because he was fortunate enough to be going to one of the only high schools in America that had access to the Internet back then. Clearly, that gave him an advantage moving forward.
To a large extent, the idea is weak. Gladwell was essentially rehashing the nature versus nurture argument without even mentioning that was what he was doing. Nature vs. nurture in this sense relates to talent versus skill. The nature side of the argument holds that some people are born with a gift to perform certain activities (thus, the validity of Eddie's statement that the number of moves a person needs varies from person to person. Some people have a knack for a move, some don't). The nurture side of the argument holds that we are all born equal and we develop according to how we have improved ourselves (our education, training - the reps we put in). Gladwell argues that if you put 10,000 hours into performing with your band like the Beetles did, you could become superstars musicians. Paul McCartney noted that the Beetles were hardly the only band the put 10,000 hours in - but most of the other bands faded away. So if the Beetles did not have talent (nature), the hard work (nurture) would not have paid off as well.
Now as the 10,000 mark applies to jiu-jitsu, more reps helps everything although I agree with Eddie about the number of reps it takes varying from person to person. Brent Littell used to concentrate on one move that he was working on all night, say guillotines. He'd even tell the people he was sparring with that it was going to be guillotines all night. Then he'd go for it. It didn't matter if he had another opportunity, he was only going for the guillotine.
I've followed Brent's example with guillotines and ankle locks. Those are my best moves needless to say. I estimate that I was easily attempting 60 ankle locks a week while rolling (two on each foot, per partner - after that their ankles are just sore and they tap to anything) and another 40 a week sharing my technique with others. At that rate, 10,000 reps take over two years. This is a very conservative estimate of how many ankle locks I attempted during that time. For one thing, it took me a while to realize that anything more than two ankle locks per leg per partner was just me being an asshole. However, those are also moves that I have a "knack" for; I tapped out more than one brown belt with my ankle lock while I was blue belt.
The popularity of the 10,000 reps benchmark is due a large part, I believe, to Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers. Gladwell suggested that to become an expert at something, a person needs to put in a least 10,000 reps. He gives Michael Jordan, the Beetles, and Bill Gates, among others, as examples of people who put the reps in and became legends in their respective fields. The idea is essentially that everyone owes their success to the hard work they put in, with an additional boost to success that comes from being in the right place and time that allows a person to put those reps in. For instance, Gates was able to start working with the Internet when he was in high school because he was fortunate enough to be going to one of the only high schools in America that had access to the Internet back then. Clearly, that gave him an advantage moving forward.
To a large extent, the idea is weak. Gladwell was essentially rehashing the nature versus nurture argument without even mentioning that was what he was doing. Nature vs. nurture in this sense relates to talent versus skill. The nature side of the argument holds that some people are born with a gift to perform certain activities (thus, the validity of Eddie's statement that the number of moves a person needs varies from person to person. Some people have a knack for a move, some don't). The nurture side of the argument holds that we are all born equal and we develop according to how we have improved ourselves (our education, training - the reps we put in). Gladwell argues that if you put 10,000 hours into performing with your band like the Beetles did, you could become superstars musicians. Paul McCartney noted that the Beetles were hardly the only band the put 10,000 hours in - but most of the other bands faded away. So if the Beetles did not have talent (nature), the hard work (nurture) would not have paid off as well.
Now as the 10,000 mark applies to jiu-jitsu, more reps helps everything although I agree with Eddie about the number of reps it takes varying from person to person. Brent Littell used to concentrate on one move that he was working on all night, say guillotines. He'd even tell the people he was sparring with that it was going to be guillotines all night. Then he'd go for it. It didn't matter if he had another opportunity, he was only going for the guillotine.
I've followed Brent's example with guillotines and ankle locks. Those are my best moves needless to say. I estimate that I was easily attempting 60 ankle locks a week while rolling (two on each foot, per partner - after that their ankles are just sore and they tap to anything) and another 40 a week sharing my technique with others. At that rate, 10,000 reps take over two years. This is a very conservative estimate of how many ankle locks I attempted during that time. For one thing, it took me a while to realize that anything more than two ankle locks per leg per partner was just me being an asshole. However, those are also moves that I have a "knack" for; I tapped out more than one brown belt with my ankle lock while I was blue belt.
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Originally Posted by Sam Davis
