Opening Phase

Setting Intentions

Before it begins, the coach should set the intentions for the rest of the session. There should be a small, tight explanation of what the focus will be and why it's important. For example, if the coach has noticed the majority of students struggling with a certain position, they should state "We're going to focus on (position) and some related principles today because I've noticed many of you are getting stuck there."

If the session has new students or students who have never experienced the FCS before, it's worth taking a very brief (1-2 minutes) period of time to explain the overall ideas behind the structure. This is to ensure there isn't any confusion during the session that leads to wasted training time. The coach should also ask about experience levels and anything students have been struggling with recently, as they can incorporate that feedback into the session.

Although this is not a mandatory step, coaches can also structure the session so that it's a series of related situations. For example, you may start with guard passing games, then half-guard, then side control. This mimics each step of the process of passing the guard and gives students a chance to develop solutions along the way.

However, randomizing the structure also substantial value. One set of situations should not be focused on for too long, and there should be periodic interruptions to the expected structure in order to keep learning fresh and interesting for both students and coaches.

Although it may feel wrong to coaches schooled in the Traditional Method, much of effective coaching involves keeping students engaged through variation and randomization. Human brains only care about novelty, so students will lose interest if training stops feeling new and interesting.

Traditional Warmups

The Traditional Method puts an emphasis on specific, individual movements as a way to open up a training session, which often includes strenuous amounts of calisthenics. Some gyms go as far as to make this a key component of their training, with the "warm up" acting as a form of exercise class that takes up substantial amounts of time.

There are two problems with this approach:

1. There's only so much time a coach or a student can dedicate to skill development, and using any of that time for pure exercise or to drill a static movement is time not spent getting better.

2. Exhausting students ahead of time means their brains and bodies have less energy that can be dedicated to learning. If a coach does insist on conditioning as part of their training routine, it should be at the end of a session to ensure that students can focus as much as possible during time for skill development.

A coach should view skill development in binary phases that are best left separated: conditioning and skill work. If you want to get your athletes in better shape, then do conditioning sessions with them. But if your goal is to get them better at the sport, skill development should be the exclusive focus. A certain amount of conditioning will always come with the territory, but it's a mistake to try to blend it with skill acquisition or favor it entirely.

Another common Traditional Method practice is to open with "flow rolling/sparring," where players drill with just above zero resistance. Although it's an improvement over pure drilling or conditioning, it still doesn't accomplish much given the lack of live resistance.

Warmup Games

Rather than drilling or flowing, coaches should open the session with games that are simple, somewhat physically taxing, and in line with the intentions of the day.

For example, if the intention is to focus on wrestling, then the opening game should be related in some way to wrestling. A warmup game that works in this context is the "knee tap game," where students have to maintain a wrestling stance at all times, then tap or grab the knee of their opponent. This develops leg awareness and lets them explore setups in a relatively safe, constrained way.

You could then follow that up with live arm pummeling, which is also constrained, safe and a good introduction to an important wrestling concept.

Generally speaking, in FCS sessions there are two warmup games played. There are times when there are either no warmup games (the session goes straight to other games), or the warmup games are unrelated. Both types of deviations exist to randomize the training environment and keep students engaged.