End Phase

Once the training session reaches a certain time, around 45-50 minutes in, the coach starts to enter the End Phase. This is where most average students tend to be reach the tail end of their gas tanks and most of the prime learning time is behind them.

Some students, particularly those who put an emphasis on conditioning in their own time and/or regular competitors, will be fine at this stage. But if the coach is running a standard session with less conditioned students, it's a good idea to start thinking about how to wind the session down.

There are a variety of ways to handle this, but here are some baseline ideas:

• Open the mat up for regular rounds. This gives students a chance to experience the full game without any constraints involved. It's an enjoyable way to end the session, and it gives students an opportunity to both work on situations that weren't covered and train with different partners. Coaches should be open to doing this more often, if only because it gives students a chance to discover things on an entirely independent basis.

• Give them a more open-ended game to work with: For example, open the mat up but tell them they can't use their top 3 submissions. This is a good mix of giving them a constraint that forces them to work on weaknesses and an opportunity to explore beyond the games played in the Main Phase.

• Just play games until the end: Sometimes it makes sense to just keep going all the way until the end, especially if it appears students are responding well to the Main Phase and aren't fading too much. This gives them the maximum learning benefit, although you should expect the last games to drive less effort than what you saw in the Main Phase due to exhaustion.

• Do some light conditioning: Although training time should not focus on conditioning as a general principle, a coach can throw some in during the End Phase as a way to shock the system a bit. If you're coaching competitors, this can be useful for ensuring they don't go into the tournament with weak gas tanks.

The overall point here is to think about how you're going to ease them out of the training session when they are starting to hit their lowest energy levels. Once you're done with the session, coaches should use this time to answer any questions or address any feedback students have. The key here is that it's happening outside of training time—not while everyone is on the mat expecting to train.