An open-source reference for Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu — positions, techniques, and the chains that connect them — built from what people actually learn on the mat.
Everyone who trains jiu-jitsu is carrying around a version of the same book, and almost none of it is written down. Your coach's detail on the knee slice. The guillotine grip a visiting black belt showed you once. The half guard sweep that finally clicked on the fiftieth try. It lives in notebooks, phone memos, and memory, and most of it evaporates. Then the next white belt walks in and starts from zero.
Software solved this a long time ago: put the knowledge somewhere shared, let anyone correct it, keep the history, and it gets more useful day by day. BJJ Commons is that for jiu-jitsu. A written, versioned, forkable reference that anyone can read, fix, and add to. Detail from one gym sits next to detail from another. Disagreements between lineages are recorded, not flattened. Mistakes get fixed by whoever spots them. The collective learning of a lot of people, in one place, getting better over time.
Right now it is no-gi, because that is what has been contributed so far. Gi is very welcome — the structure is the same, and the pages are waiting for it.
- Beginners — white and blue belts — who want to look up a position after class, see the options from there, and understand how one technique leads to the next. That is who the reference is written for first.
- Anyone organizing what they know into a system. The chains and the position map are the fastest way in.
- Experienced grapplers and instructors who see something incomplete or wrong and can make it better. The reference is only as good as the people correcting it.
positions/ |
One page per position, each opening with a map of where it leads: foundations, closed guard, half guard bottom, half guard top, open guards, side control, mount, back control, front headlock, turtle |
chains/ |
Technique chains as decision trees — each branch is the opponent's reaction, each leaf is what you do about it. |
position-map.md |
"I'm in position X — where can I go from here?" |
submissions.md |
Every submission and where it is set up. |
Start with Foundations. Every other page assumes that vocabulary — positional hierarchy, the underhook, the crossface, framing, weight distribution, action and reaction. Then go to whichever position you were drilling last.
- Sides. Techniques are described from one side; the mirror image is implied. Each position page states its default side near the top.
- Gi and no-gi. The current material is no-gi. Gi-specific techniques are marked as such so a no-gi reader can skip them and a gi reader can find them.
- Position before submission. Pages are organized around positions; submissions are indexed separately.
- Chains over techniques. Wherever possible, a technique comes with the most likely defense and the answer to that defense.
- Attribution over authority. Every addition is credited to its contributor, and contributors can say where they learned it. See CONTRIBUTORS.md.
Whatever belt, whatever lineage, gi or no-gi: if you know something these pages do not, or know they have something wrong, see CONTRIBUTING.md. It explains how this was built, how to add to it, and how credit works.
CC BY-SA 4.0. Use it, remix it, print it for your gym — credit the project and share alike.