The first thing the series builds is one page: the hour, carved on purpose, written so that a coach can run it and another coach could run it after him. Seven real plans, from seven different kinds of program, that look nothing alike and all work.
This is the first build. Ten pieces in, the series finally makes something, and the thing it makes is small on purpose: one page, for one hour, that says what happens on the mat and in what order and for how long. That page is a lesson plan. Most academies do not have one. They have a coach who knows what he is going to teach, which is a different thing, because it lives in his head, changes when his mood changes, and leaves the building when he does.
The hinge said why the build half starts here instead of at the top. A lesson plan is the piece a coach can finish in an evening and run the next day, which makes it the right place to learn the discipline of building before the discipline is applied to a system or a curriculum, where a mistake costs months instead of an hour. It also said the thing this piece has to show: a lesson plan's shape depends on the curriculum it serves. A plan inside a positional curriculum is not the same document as a plan inside a rotating one. So this piece does not hand you a template. It hands you the parts, the rules for assembling them, and then a gallery of seven real plans from seven different kinds of program, so you can see the parts assembled seven different ways and pull from whichever one is closest to the room you run.
One boundary before starting. This piece is about the container: how the hour is carved, how long each part runs, how the parts sequence, and how the hour fits the week and the curriculum above it. What happens inside each part, which of the nine methods you use in the technical block, which dials you set in the drilling, is the next piece, How to Deliver a Lesson. The two are separated for the same reason the whole series separates structure from delivery. You can run a well-built plan badly and a bad plan well, and you cannot fix either one until you can tell which is wrong.
What a plan has to answer
The Lesson, the last piece before the hinge, ended with four questions a coach should be able to answer about any hour he teaches. A lesson plan is those four questions, answered in advance, on paper. That is the whole definition, and it is worth holding onto, because it tells you what belongs on the page and what does not.
Why this, today. The plan names the job of the hour in one line, and the line connects to something above it: the position of the week, the next page in the rotation, the class that came before. If the only honest answer is "because I felt like it," the plan is a technique list, not a plan.
Where it sits. The plan says what it belongs to. Lesson nine of thirty-six. Week seven of thirty. Side mount block, week one, class two. A plan that cannot say this is an orphan, and a curriculum made of orphans is the thing the first article in this series said was not a curriculum.
How it is being delivered, and was that decided. The plan does not have to carry the full delivery decision; that is the next piece. But it has to leave room for it and it has to show that a decision was made. A technical block labeled "teach the armbar" has not decided anything. A technical block labeled "direct instruction, three details, then ten minutes drilling under a constraint" has.
Did it land, and how do you know. This one cannot be answered in advance, so the plan leaves a line for it. Notes. What went wrong, who got stuck where, what to change before this page comes around again. A plan without a notes line is a plan that will be run the same way forever, including the parts that did not work.
Hold a plan up against those four and you can see what is missing from most of the ones that exist. The usual lesson plan, where there is one, answers the second question and ignores the rest: here is what we teach on Tuesday. That is a schedule. A plan says why Tuesday, what Tuesday belongs to, how Tuesday is going to be taught, and what happened when it was.
The blocks, and what each one is for
One note on the word "hour" before going further. This piece uses it throughout, and the gallery is built on it, because sixty minutes is the most common class length and close to the average, so it is the easiest frame to show the parts in. It is not a rule. Kids classes run thirty, forty-five or sixty minutes depending on the age; the kids plan in the gallery is forty-five. Adult classes run forty-five, sixty, ninety, and we have seen two hours for an advanced or competition room; the competition plan here is ninety. The blocks and the rules below do not change with the length. The minutes inside them do, and the first thing a coach building a plan for a thirty-minute class or a two-hour one should do is rescale the strip, not drop blocks to make the hour fit.
An hour is carved into blocks. The names vary from academy to academy and the number varies from four to eight, but the jobs are stable, and a block earns its minutes by its job, not by habit. Here are the ones that show up, with the job each one does. Not all of them belong in every plan. Several of the plans in the gallery skip two or three of them deliberately.
Opening. A line-up, a bow, a sentence from the coach about what today is. Two minutes. Its job is the transition from the parking lot to the mat, and in a kids program it is also where the theme of the week gets named. Adults programs often drop it. The ones that keep it tend to have calmer rooms.
Warm-up. Movement tied to the day's technique. Shrimping lines before an elbow escape class, guard pulls from the knees before a guard pull class. Five to ten minutes. The job is to get bodies ready for the specific thing coming, and the recommendation here is to spend the block on movements that do that. A coach who prefers the traditional warm-up, laps around the mat, jumping jacks, a line of calisthenics, is not doing anything wrong, and if that is what he believes a class should open with, the plan should say so and give it its minutes. The reason this piece leans the other way is only that the minutes are scarce. A general warm-up gets the body warm for nothing in particular; a specific one gets it warm for the technique that is about to be taught, and hands a few extra reps to the technical block for free. That is a preference about the best use of time, not a rule about what a warm-up is. Some plans have no warm-up block at all, because the structure of the hour warms the room on its own. The positional plan in the gallery is one of those: it opens with a discovery round at half speed, and by the time the technical block arrives nobody is cold.
Review. Last class, in brief. Reps, not teaching. Five to ten minutes. The job is retention, and it is the block that does the most for the least, because it is the only place in the hour where a technique gets a second exposure a day or two after the first. The flow curriculum in the gallery reviews twice, once standing and once on the ground, which is why it can carry a thread across thirty weeks.
Character. Kids programs call it mat chat, or the word of the week, or bully-proofing when it takes that shape. Three to five minutes, usually after the warm-up and before the main block, when the room is settled and not yet tired. The job is the thing parents are paying for alongside the sport: the discipline, respect, courage and humility that Jiu-Jitsu is supposed to teach and that it only teaches if someone puts it on the page. A program that treats Jiu-Jitsu purely as a sport can skip this block. A program that sells character development and does not have this block is selling something it is not delivering, because character does not transmit by proximity to a mat. The block is small and it is not optional once the promise has been made. It runs best with one theme for the whole week, named at bow-in, talked about once in this block, and referred back to when a student shows it or fails to during the games. The plan carries the theme; the coach decides what to say about it.
Standing. A takedown, a clinch, a pull, a self-defense entry. Ten minutes. Whether this block exists depends on what the curriculum believes about standing, and that is a curriculum decision, not a lesson one. Fundamentals programs almost always have it; advanced positional blocks often do not, because the position of the week is on the ground and the standing work has its own block elsewhere.
Technical. The new material. Fifteen to twenty minutes in most plans, less in a kids class, sometimes none in a reflex or competition class where nothing new is introduced. The job is to put one thing into the room clearly enough that the drilling can work on it. How that is done is the delivery question; how long it runs and what it is followed by is the plan's question. The one rule that belongs here: the technical block is sized to what the drilling after it can absorb, not to how much the coach knows about the position.
Drilling. The reps. Ten to fifteen minutes, or folded into the technical block as teach-then-drill. This is where the dials from Practice Design live: blocked or random, constant or variable, how much resistance, how often the coach corrects. The plan decides the time and the resistance level; the delivery piece decides the rest.
Positional sparring. Live, from a fixed start, with a goal for each side and a reset when either side reaches it. Ten to fifteen minutes. The job is to make the day's material survive contact in the one position where it applies. A plan that skips straight from drilling to free rolling is asking students to find today's technique inside a whole match, and most of them will not.
Free rounds. Full sparring. Five to twenty minutes. The job is integration, and it is the only block where a student needs everything he has ever learned. That is why it is last, and it is why it is the block most often cut when the hour runs long, which is a mistake the kids program in the gallery addresses with a rule: the fun game is never cut, shorten sparring instead. The adult equivalent is to protect the live block and cut the technical one, because a coach will always find more to say than the hour has room for.
Close. Review the technique in one minute, assign one thing to practice, announce what is next. Two or three minutes. In a kids class, a fun game before it. The job is the transition back out, and the one-sentence review is a second retention pass most plans do not bother with.
Add the minutes up and you have the first real decision in building a plan, which is where the hour goes. Sixty minutes carved as warm-up five, review ten, standing ten, ground twenty, live fifteen is a teaching-heavy hour, and it is the carving most fundamentals programs run. The same sixty carved as organizer five, discovery ten, games fifteen, instruction fifteen, live fifteen puts forty minutes of the hour into the student's hands and twenty into the coach's, and it is the carving the positional plan in the gallery runs. Neither carving is better, and neither one belongs to a level. Each has to fit the curriculum it serves, the week it sits in, and the coach who is going to run it, which is the point this whole piece keeps returning to.
How the blocks sequence
There are two defensible orders for an hour, and most of the plans we see use one or the other, whether or not the coach could name it.
The first runs narrow to wide. Warm up, review, teach, drill, go live. The coach supplies the answer, the student repeats it, then tests it. It is the order a majority of academies run, it is the easiest to run well, and five of the seven plans in the gallery run some version of it.
The second runs wide to narrow, then reopens. Pose the problem, let the room explore it, narrow the exploration with constraints, then teach the one answer the exploration was pointing at, then go live. The student meets the problem before the solution, so when the solution arrives it attaches to something he has already felt. It is the order the positional plan in the gallery runs, and it is the harder of the two to run well, because the first twenty-five minutes depend on the coach staying quiet and watching instead of talking, and because the problem has to be posed at the right size. That last part is the whole skill. A discovery block fails when the coach poses the problem at the size of a match and the room does not have the material to explore it. It works at any level when the coach narrows the problem to the size the room can hold: a white belt cannot explore "pass the guard," and can explore "get your foot past the knee line" on his first night. The constraints-led piece in the first half made this argument in full. The point here is only that the order is not reserved for advanced rooms. It is reserved for coaches who know how to set the constraint, and a coach who does can run a beginner class this way from the first week.
Both orders end the same way. Live goes last. That is not a convention; it is the one sequencing rule that does not move. Every other block in the hour works on a piece of the game, and the live block is the only one that needs all of it, so it has to come after all of it. A plan that puts rounds first to "warm up" has spent the one block where today's material could have been tested before today's material existed.
Two smaller rules follow. Review goes early, before the new material, because its job is to clear yesterday out of the way so today has room, and because reps on a known technique are a better warm-up than most warm-ups. And the pattern repeats. The blending piece made this argument from the student's side: a room learns when its part of class is coming and settles in for it. A plan that moves the live block around from day to day loses that, and loses the students who were waiting for it.
Where the hour sits
Here is the claim the hinge promised this piece would carry. A lesson plan's shape depends on the curriculum above it, and a coach who builds the plan first and the curriculum later will build a plan that fits nothing. That is why the gallery below is organized by curriculum type rather than by level or by age, and why each plan carries a line saying where it sits.
A rotating curriculum is a set of self-contained pages, any one of which can be run on any day, and its lesson plan has to be built to that: it cannot assume the student was here last time, so its review block reviews whatever came last rather than a prerequisite, and it has to have a place for the new student to join. A flow curriculum is a thread, and its plan is built to carry the thread: review blocks that reach back to last week on purpose, a notes line that says how this week hands off to the next, specific sparring set to the position of the week so the sparring reinforces the thread instead of scattering it. A linear curriculum is a numbered sequence, and its plan can assume everything before its number, which is why the reflex class in the gallery teaches nothing new and spends the whole hour chaining what the numbers already covered. A positional curriculum is a block of weeks on one position, and its plan is one class inside that block, with a job assigned by where in the block it falls.
One position block in a positional curriculum. Four weeks, alternating sides, four jobs per week. The lesson plan in the gallery is class two of week one. A plan built without this grid has no way to know its own job.
The week is the layer most coaches skip, and it is where the plan gets its job from. The two fundamentals curricula in the gallery both run the same weekly rhythm: lesson A on Monday and Tuesday, lesson B on Wednesday and Thursday, a review that combines both on Friday and Saturday. A student training twice a week gets each lesson at least once. The kids program runs the same rhythm on a thirty-page cycle. The positional block runs four classes a week, each with one of four jobs, across four weeks that alternate top and bottom, with the second two weeks going back over the same four jobs at a deeper layer. Once the week is drawn, the plan for any single day is mostly already decided: it is week one, class two, top, transitions, and the only thing left to build is the hour.
This is also the reason the series will build the week properly later, inside the curriculum pieces, and not here. For now the rule is simpler: before you carve an hour, know which week it is in and what job that week gave it.
The gallery
Seven plans follow. Each is a real document from a real kind of program, redrawn in one format so the differences are in the plan and not the typography. Read the time strip first, because it is the fastest way to see what the plan believes. Then read the right-hand column, which is where each plan answers the four questions. The programs are not named. The point is the shapes.
1. A rotating fundamentals curriculum
The most common adult class in the country, planned. Thirty-six lessons that can run in any order, each pairing a standing technique with one or two ground techniques and their variations, so a student can join on any day and a mixed room can be split by level for the middle of the hour. This is the plan most coaches already have a version of in their heads. Seeing it on paper is what shows where the decisions are.
A rotating fundamentals curriculum, lesson nine of thirty-six. Narrow to wide: warm up, review, standing, ground, live. The review block reviews whatever came last, not a prerequisite, because nothing is a prerequisite. The new-student line is the tell: this plan is built for a room that changes every day.
What to notice: the hour is carved to protect the teaching, twenty minutes on the ground technique with its variations split by level. That is a reasonable carving for a rotating curriculum, where every page has to stand alone and the teaching is the product. It is also the carving most adult programs default to for every room and every curriculum without deciding to, which is the mistake. The carving is fine. Arriving at it by default is not.
2. A flow fundamentals curriculum
Same room, same length, same five blocks, different curriculum. A flow curriculum is a thread: thirty weeks in which each week's techniques are chosen to land in the position the next week starts from. The plan has to carry that thread, which it does with two review blocks instead of one, a specific-sparring block locked to the position of the week, and a notes line that says how this week hands off to the next.
A flow fundamentals curriculum, week seven of thirty, lesson one. The same five blocks as the rotating plan, but two of them are reviews, and the ground review carries a note saying how last week's sweep lands in this week's position. Specific sparring is set to the position of the week, with a goal for each side.
What to notice: the time strip looks almost identical to the rotating plan, and the two documents are not the same. The flow plan spends fifteen minutes on review to the rotating plan's ten, and it spends them on purpose, because the thread is the product. The notes line at the bottom right is the one thing that could not exist on the rotating page.
3. A game-based kids curriculum, ages four to six
Forty-five minutes for the youngest students a program takes. There is no technical instruction block; the technique lives inside a game with a start, a win condition and three levels of instructor resistance, and the corrections are delivered inside the game, one at a time. There is a character block, because this program sells character development and a plan that sells it has to carry it. And the fun game at the end is protected by rule, because a four-year-old who leaves class having had fun comes back.
A game-based kids curriculum, ages four to six, lesson eight of thirty. Forty-five minutes in eight blocks, none longer than thirteen. The ground game is the technical block, and it is a game with a start, a win condition, and three levels of instructor resistance. The fun game at the end is protected by rule.
What to notice: there is no technical instruction block, and the plan is not thinner for it. The technique is inside the game, stated as what any version has to do, and the corrections are delivered inside the game one at a time. The character block is the other thing this plan has that no adult plan in the gallery does: four minutes on the theme of the week, with the theme carried on the page and the words left to the coach. This is the clearest example in the gallery of a plan whose shape comes from who is in the room. Run the adult carving on this room and you would lose it by minute nine.
4. An advanced positional curriculum
One class inside a four-week block on side mount. The week is top, the class is transitions, and the hour runs wide to narrow then reopens: the problem is posed, the room explores it, constraints narrow the exploration, instruction arrives at minute thirty tied to what people already felt, and the last fifteen minutes are live from the position. There is no warm-up block; the structure warms the room. It is the most demanding plan in the gallery to run and the one that puts the most of the hour in the student's hands.
An advanced positional curriculum, side mount block, week one, class two: transitions. Wide to narrow, then reopen. Five minutes of context, ten of discovery, fifteen of constraint games, fifteen of instruction, fifteen live. No warm-up block; the structure warms the room. The newer-coach line says how to run it with three phases instead of five.
What to notice: the coach talks for about twenty minutes of the sixty and the first instruction arrives at minute thirty. Everything before it is the student meeting the problem. The instruction block is also the only one in the gallery that is described by what it attaches to, problems people already felt, rather than by what it covers. That is a delivery decision written into the container, which is what the third question asks for.
5. A linear self-defense curriculum
A reflex class inside a numbered course. Every technique on the page was taught at an earlier lesson number, so the plan teaches nothing new and spends the hour chaining known defenses under attack: two twenty-minute drills, ten minutes per partner, with minute marks to keep the pace and one rule that does the real work, no switching roles inside a drill. It is the plan that shows most clearly what a linear curriculum buys you: the right to assume.
A linear self-defense curriculum, reflex development class. Nothing new is taught. Two twenty-minute drills, each ten minutes per partner with no switching inside the drill, chaining techniques from the numbered lessons under attack. Minute marks on the page keep the pace.
What to notice: the plan can skip the technical block entirely because the curriculum above it is linear, and every technique on the page was taught at a known earlier number. The rule in the right-hand column, do not switch roles inside the drill, is the plan's one real decision, and it is there for a reason the plan states: the defender has to stay under attack long enough to stop thinking.
6. A competition practice
Ninety minutes, six weeks out from an event, for an invited team. It sits outside the member curriculum and says so. The drilling block is chosen from the positions the team lost in at the last event, the live blocks are run at competition pace with scoring called aloud, and results are recorded afterward so the next cycle can be built from them. It is the only plan in the gallery with a feedback loop written into it.
A competition practice, six weeks out. Ninety minutes, built backward from the event: positions the team is losing in first, competition pacing last. It sits outside the member curriculum and says so.
What to notice: this plan's "why this, today" line comes from results, not from a curriculum. The drilling block is chosen from where the team lost at the last event, and the next cycle is built from the records kept after this one. It is the only plan in the gallery with a feedback loop written into it, and it is a reasonable question why the other six do not have one.
7. A scored positional class
The last plan needs a longer introduction than the others, because the class it describes is new and most coaches have not seen one. Call it a scored positional class. It is an hour or more spent almost entirely live, in one position, with a scoreboard. Very little is taught. The coach briefs the room on what each side is trying to do from the position, runs three short constraint games so everyone has felt each job at half speed, and then runs scored rounds from a fixed start for the rest of the class, rotating pairs until everyone has played everyone. The score is simple: the top player wins the round by holding the position or finishing, the bottom player wins by escaping or finishing, and abandoning the position loses it. The students who are not on the mat referee, so nobody is idle.
Why would an academy run a class like this? Because a student needs a large number of live repetitions in one position before he owns it, and ordinary sparring hands him a handful a week scattered across every position in the game. A class built this way gives him a dozen live rounds in mount in one night, against a dozen different people, with a clear problem to solve in each. The scoreboard is not decoration, and it does four things at once. It gives the round a win condition, and most people try harder when there is something to win, which means they train harder without being asked to. Run with sides, it builds a team: students who were strangers on the mat are now rooting for each other, and that camaraderie is retention that does not show up on a KPI sheet until it is gone. It makes the class legible to a beginner, who can understand "keep him from escaping for two minutes" on his first night even if he cannot name a single technique. And for kids it does the thing good kids coaching always does, which is hide hard training inside a game. A child who would have treated another sparring round as something to get through will play a scored round as if it mattered, because to him it does. The same class, the same live reps, and the engagement is different because there are points. This is at least as useful in a kids program as in an adult one, and in our experience more. The class sits in its own weekly slot, usually on whatever position the curriculum is already working, and it does not replace the curriculum; it gives the curriculum a place to be tested.
A scored positional class, one position, seventy-five minutes. Ten minutes of briefing, fifteen of constraint games, forty-eight of scored rounds from a fixed start. The curriculum is not interrupted; this is where it gets tested.
What to notice: it is a lesson plan with a scoreboard, and its bones are the positional plan's bones. Context, constrained practice, live. The instruction block has shrunk to ten minutes because the room already has the material, and the live block has grown to forty-eight because the live block is the product. It is also the only plan in the gallery where the students who are not training have a job. If the class is new to you, the thing to take from it is not the format; it is that a plan can put nearly the whole hour into the live block on purpose, and that doing so is a decision about what the hour is for, not a shortcut.
Building yours
Here is the sequence. It runs top-down, because that is how a plan is actually built once you know the parts, and it should take about an evening the first time and about ten minutes once the week is drawn.
· Name the curriculum type and the week. Rotating, flow, linear, positional, game-based. Which week, which lesson number, which side, which job. If you cannot fill this line in, stop; the problem is above the plan and the plan cannot fix it.
· Write the job of the hour in one sentence. "Get the top player from side mount to mount against a resisting partner." "Introduce the elbow escape and its three variations." "Chain the front-attack defenses under pressure." One sentence. If it needs two, it is two classes.
· Pick the end. The live block is where the hour is going, so decide what it starts from, what each side is trying to do, and what resets it. Everything before it exists to make this block work.
· Carve backward from the end. The live block needs drilling before it; the drilling needs the technique before it; the technique needs the room warm and yesterday cleared. Give each block the minutes its job needs and no more. Add it up. If it is over the hour, cut the technical block first, not the live one.
· Choose the order. Narrow to wide is the default and the easiest to run clean. Wide to narrow then reopen works at any level if you can pose the problem at a size the room can hold and stay quiet for twenty-five minutes. The order follows the coach's skill with the methods, not the room's belt color. Keep it the same across the week.
· Mark the delivery decision in each block. Not the full decision, that is the next piece, but enough that a reader can see one was made: which method the technical block runs, what the drilling constraint is, what the resistance level is. A block with no delivery note is a block that will be taught however the coach feels that day.
· Write it so another coach could run it. Start time, block name, what happens, in that order, one line each. The test is whether you could hand it to your best blue belt and get the class you meant. If it only works with you reading it, it is notes, not a plan.
· Leave a notes line, and use it. After class, one or two sentences: what did not land, who got stuck where, what to change. The next time this page comes around, those sentences are the first thing you read.
The lesson plan template. One page, letter size, printable. The top line is the curriculum type and where the hour sits; the strip is the minutes; the rows are the hour; the right column is the three questions a plan answers in advance; the notes box is the fourth. Download it at the end of this piece.
The template above is the page this whole piece describes, with nothing filled in. It is deliberately plain. The top line forces the curriculum question before anything else is written; the strip forces the minutes to add up; the rows force a delivery note per block; the right column is the four questions, and the notes box at the bottom is the one most coaches skip. Print a stack. One page per class, filled in before and written on after. A binder of these, a year from now, is a curriculum you can see.
A newer coach should build the three-block version first: a short organizer, the technical block with its drilling, and positional sparring. That is a complete, defensible hour. The review, the constraint games and the discovery block get added once the three-block version runs clean, and not before, because each one adds a decision the coach has to make live, and a coach who is still learning to run the room does not have the attention to spare.
What a plan is not
Three things get mistaken for a lesson plan often enough to name.
A technique list is not a plan. "Tuesday: armbar from guard, triangle, omoplata" says what, and nothing else. It does not say why those three, what they belong to, how long each gets, what the live block starts from or how any of it is going to be taught. It is the schedule a plan gets written from.
A script is not a plan either, and it is the opposite mistake. A page that says what the coach will say, word for word, in each block, has decided the delivery so completely that the coach cannot respond to the room. The plan fixes the container and leaves the delivery as a decision with room in it. The positional plan's instruction block is the model: three to five details, tied to problems people already felt. Which details, and which problems, the coach decides at minute thirty, based on what he saw.
And the generic class structure that lives in an operations manual is not a plan. Most academies that have anything have this: opening ritual two minutes, warm-up five to ten, instruction fifteen to twenty, drilling ten to fifteen, sparring optional, close. It is useful, and it is the floor, and it is what a plan looks like before it knows what curriculum it serves. Every plan in the gallery could be squeezed into it, and every one of them is better than it, because every one of them knows where it sits.
What comes next
The container is built. The next piece opens it up. How to Deliver a Lesson takes the plan above, the positional one, and walks through what the coach actually does inside each block: which of the nine methods the technical block runs and why, how the constraint games are chosen, what the coach is writing down during discovery and how it gets spent during instruction, how the dials are set in the drilling and when they move. It is the payoff of the whole delivery thread in the first half, and it is the piece where a plan stops being a page and starts being a class.
Build the page first. It is the part you can finish tonight.