About In this episode of Tapped In, David Figueroa-Martinez breaks down the crucial yet often overlooked distinction between a Jiu-Jitsu instructor and a Jiu-Jitsu coach. Reflecting on his own progression across different academy environments—from high-touch mentorship to navigating larger, generalized class structures—David explains why group technique instruction only takes you so far. This episode details how targeted coaching, game-planning, and individualized feedback help white to purple belts bypass years of trial-and-error to build a cohesive, personalized A-game.

Key Takeaways

• Instructors Teach the Room, Coaches Build the Player: Instructors provide broad technical mechanics and curricula to large groups, whereas coaches focus on individual body types, attributes, and tailored game plans.
• The Danger of the "General Practitioner" Gap: Relying solely on group instruction leaves students to navigate troubleshooting alone; direct feedback and video review accelerate growth and prevent technical stagnation.
• Mentorship and Remote Coaching Save Years: Whether finding a senior mentor in your gym or utilizing remote coaching services, personalized one-on-one analysis provides the mental and strategic check-ins needed to break through plateaus.

Chapters

• 00:00 – Introduction: Discovering the Shift Between Instructor and Coach
• 00:46 – Foundations at First Academy: Mentorship and Cornering with Will and Jeff
• 02:22 – The Role of an Instructor: Technical Know-How and Broad Mechanics
• 04:14 – The Role of a Coach: Individual Tendencies, Attributes, and A-Game Design
• 05:07 – Transitioning to Larger Gyms: The Loss of Individualized Attention
• 07:05 – Why Missing the Coaching Element Leads to Trial-and-Error Waste
• 09:30 – The Power of Remote Coaching and Video Analysis
• 11:34 – Accelerating Past the Plateau: Finding a Mentor
• 13:08 – Final Thoughts and Connecting with DFM Coaching

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David Figueroa-Martinez

Founder, DFM Coaching Bjj

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Full Transcript

**** Welcome to Tapped In, my name is David Figueroa-Martinez of DFM Coaching, and today we're going to be discussing instructor versus coach. When I came up, I did not understand that there was a shift or a difference between the two. It wasn't until I made my way to my second home where I started to realize, oh, things are actually done a little differently between gyms. I thought it was a normal thing to have one person that sort of did both.

**** At my first Jiu-Jitsu home, I was under two brothers, for the most part: one was the owner, and one was like my mentor. And Jeff owned the gym, and Will kind of became—not kind of, but for the most part, he became my mentor and my main training partner and instructor. They both had different approaches when it came to coaching, but they had an overall viewpoint of: you coached and you instructed. Again, to me, this was one—one job. I did not understand that it was actually two until much later.

**** So they both instilled ideas of understanding the technique itself, formulating game plans, formulating paths for yourself in terms of success—what that meant for you, what techniques you're going to add to your own game, what competing would look like, what is your game plan when you compete, setting yourself up for success before you competed, competition prep. They took care of all that in, in essence, one role.

**** And I never went to a competition—pretty sure I never went to a competition without one of them, specifically Will. Will was there for, I think, every competition I had at that point. And again, looking back at it, I thought that was normal. And I'm glad that I had that—that first encounter, or that foundational piece for my own training and my own view of what a coaching is supposed to look like. Because, again, it was—there were some great things that were instilled in me from those two that I was able to take with me even to this day.

**** So I didn't understand the difference. An instructor will show you techniques in a broad sense. They'll show you why the technique works. They'll show you what you should be worried about. They are the guardians of the technical know-how of what that looks like: the verbage, how to make things more available to you when it comes to setting things up, the process or the why behind the technique. They are great at that.

**** So when you go to a gym, and you will have—if you have a great instructor, they will be able to make what's complicated simpler. They'll be able to break down techniques and let you understand how to make them work in that sense. Now, the issue being: an instructor is usually teaching multiple people at once. So if you're at a smaller school, maybe it's 10, 12, 15. If you're at a bigger school, maybe you got 50, 60 people on the mats. If you're a mega-school, maybe you got 100, hypothetically.

**** So they're really effective at teaching a room of multiple people. They spend a little bit of time with each, or as many people as they can. They allow you to figure out, "Oh, you're missing this step. You're glossing over this step. You're not adhering to weight distribution." And they can break down the mechanics of it all. It's like almost being a general practitioner of medicine. Like, you go to your doctor, and they have a general knowledge of most things, or a good portion of things. They give you some feedback, they tell you what you should do, but there's more in-depth knowledge that they don't go into.

**** So if I can put this in a technical term, they will allow you to understand the broad strokes of Jiu-Jitsu. And, of course, the details of a technique, but they're more broad. A coach, on the other hand, they will develop specific tendencies for you. They will help you develop specific tendencies for your A-game. They'll point out specific tendencies for why you're doing things because of your height, because of your body type, because of the way your temperament is. They are more geared towards one-on-one or one-on-few relationships.

**** They can correct moves, they can correct technique—that's part of it—but it is more specific to correcting the player opposed to the entire class. And that's a nuance that, again, was lost on me when I was coming up, because to me it was the same thing. Then I came to a Jiu-Jitsu academy that was slightly bigger than the one that I came from, had a lot more students in it, had more structures in it, had more belts. Like, where I came from, we had a lot of white, blue, couple of purples, maybe two browns and a black belt. And then towards the end, I think we had another black belt.

**** The gym that I went to second had a bunch of everything—a ton of everything. And a lot more students to play with and to spar against and to learn from. In that setting, it's a little bit more difficult to be a coach to everyone, because you just have so many more bodies, and there's only one of you and 30 or 40, 50 of the others. So you can't spread yourself equally to everyone, and it becomes a lot harder. Completely get it.

**** But it doesn't mean that that shouldn't happen, or that there shouldn't be a system in place that there aren't coaches available to do that. So if you're at a gym that does not have any coaches available that kind of like set you aside and be like, "Hey, I want you to work on this," or, "I'm noticing that you do this a lot. You're making the same mistake. Why don't we correct this with this?" Or, "I notice that you're struggling with this armbar, and I think it's because your body type. I'm going to suggest such-and-such."

**** The coaching goes such a long way. We can learn technique from a lot of different sources: your instructor, you can learn it online, you can learn it from YouTube, you can learn it from a remote coach or a remote instructor, from an instructional. There's a lot of different ways we can learn technique. And I'm not knocking technique or the importance of an instructor to supply that. But if I am going to put a little bit more weight on which I personally think most people need more of, it's going to be more of a coach.

**** We need people who are going to dive in and spend time investing in people specifically. And if you're at a gym that has that, consider yourself lucky. I did not have that at the second place I went, for the most part. I had certain people that I can go to. I had certain people that I can get feedback on or ask questions, and that was a blessing. But I didn't necessarily get that from my coach—my instructor.

**** So I had to take on more of a role in kind of dictating what my game was going to look like and be more of an active participant in it. And I was able to do that because my first instructors had kind of already set that foundation. They had set that: you're supposed to have a game, you're supposed to develop a game that's unique to you, you're supposed to spend time developing certain techniques, you're supposed to add things that connect to those techniques. So they had already given me that foundation, so it wasn't new to me. I just had to do it for myself, in a sense. I never got that at the second location.

**** And I think that it's a—it's a misgiving right now, because I'm looking at a lot of different gyms, and I'm looking at a lot of students, and that's not always happening. The coaching aspect is kind of missed often times. And students are getting a very broad sense of Jiu-Jitsu that isn't always necessarily specific to them. So they have a broad sense or relationship with it where their game doesn't quite develop. And that's a whole conversation for another day.

**** But because it doesn't develop, they don't understand how creative they're allowed to be. They don't understand how creative they're allowed to take their game and how you can become the driver of what that's going to look like, because everything's so generalized. And yes, the techniques are beautiful and they're in there and they should be, but they're different and they're not specific to you. And some of them plug really well, and some of them don't.

**** And without a coaching relationship, you spend a lot of time wasted on trial-and-error things that maybe you could have shored up a little bit more if you had someone that just said, "Hey, I think this is going to be really good for you," or, "I've noticed that you're going down this path; I don't recommend it." And then having a back-and-forth in the conversation of why that is, and why they think that you should do this, and why you think that you shouldn't. That is where the growth of your game and your Jiu-Jitsu is going to happen. It will not happen with just purely instruction. It won't.

**** So you need to have these conversations and these relationships in place so that you don't spend as much time as some students are going to. And again, part of that is a conversation from the other day, specifically the building the game aspect. But yeah, coaching—it's a different beast. And I think that not everyone has it in them, not everyone understands that there's a different relationship, and some people are just great general practitioners of Jiu-Jitsu. They know the technique, they can have a conversation with an entire class about the intricacies of that technique.

**** But then when you are struggling with specifics, you need to get that tutor. And the tutor is really going to—they're going to spend time with you, and they're really going to get a little bit more granular and specific to you. That's what we're after. I think that it's—I get it. When you're at a big gym, you're not going to have the time, but you really need to put in place other coaches to kind of fill that gap.

**** And if you're at a gym that just does not have that, it doesn't mean that the gym is bad, it doesn't mean that the gym is not worth your time or your investment financially, because you could probably get a whole lot of stuff that maybe a smaller gym may not be getting. But at the same time, smaller gym, we get a little bit more one-on-one time with our coaches. And that alone is a benefit that sometimes gets ignored other places.

**** If you're at a stage where you're like, "Hey, I genuinely do need a coach," I highly recommend going out and finding one on the side. I think that remote coaching, as the sport grows, is going to become more and more of a cornerstone of Jiu-Jitsu—both for the competitors and the quote-unquote hobbyists. It's a filler for the moments or the areas of the game or the instructor relationship that maybe get missed. It doesn't mean that you're insulting your instructor, insulting the owner of the gym or your main teacher; it just means there's certain aspects that maybe they can't give you because of time, which is fine. It's perfectly fine. There's nothing wrong with it.

**** And so as we start to grow as a group, I think we're going to find more and more remote coaching services out there, kind of like the one I provide, the one that BJJ Mental Models provides, where you get more one-on-one time specific to you. Where you get to ask the questions that maybe you don't get to ask during class because there's too many students asking and vying for that attention. Where you get genuine feedback, both short-term and long-term. Where you get check-ins, and people communicate with you, "Okay, what are you doing? How are you doing? How's your body feeling? What are your mental hurdles right now?"

**** Like, those conversations don't happen very often. Those conversations never happened at the gym that I was at the second time. That was not a focal point; it was not. So when you have this coaching relationship with someone, whether it's someone in the gym or remotely, you're going to get a lot of that. And it is well worth the time and money that you're going to get, because you're going to advance faster than the other people in your gym. You're going to advance faster than your other peers.

**** And that relationship can be as in-depth as you'd like, and it can be tailored down and be specific to: "Hey, I just need someone to—I'm going to record my rounds once or twice a week, I'm going to send them to you, can you review these for me?" It can be as simple as that. And maybe we follow up with some questions, we discuss some tendencies that you have, some things that maybe you should shore up or work on, and then you go right back at it. In a week or two, you send more videos.

**** So these are things that I do, these are things that BJJ Mental Models does, there's plenty of people out there who will do them as well. And so I'm not pushing that you sign up with me, but if it's something you're looking for, I can do that for you. And if you want to go the Mental Models route, we have a link for that as well. But I highly recommend getting a mentor at a gym if you can get one, or getting a remote coach on the side. It is going to save you so much time—so much time.

**** I wish it was something that I had coming up, but it just wasn't an issue. Now, I did have those kinds of coaches the first time around, but the second, it really was so much about me trying to figure stuff off on my own. And I did have, again, some people who I can bounce ideas off of, but that just wasn't my coach's strong point. And I'm not trying to shit on him for it, it just wasn't something that he really did. And I had to do for my own, and I want to be able to do that for other people.