Absolute MMA’s Lachlan Giles has launched a new game plan feature on the Submeta platform, designed to give grapplers a fully personalized roadmap for developing their BJJ game from the ground up.
The feature moves away from the traditional belt curriculum model, which Giles believes becomes less useful once practitioners progress past the foundational stages.
“When you get into the colored belts, people start developing their own games that are unique,” he explained. “I think it’s just the wrong mindset to think there’s a set amount of techniques, and then every blue belt should learn the same thing, every purple belt or brown. It starts to vary. It depends on your goals, your attributes, what you’re currently good at.”
Rather than prescribing a fixed syllabus, the game plan feature functions as a recommendation system, suggesting what to study next based on a user’s completed courses, physical attributes, and training goals.
Users input details such as their height, weight, flexibility, and whether they compete in gi, no-gi, or both, and the system tailors its suggestions accordingly.
Giles walked through a live demonstration using two contrasting profiles. For a tall, light, and flexible athlete, the system recommended De La Riva and collar sleeve guards as a starting point.
For a short, stocky, heavyweight grappler with limited flexibility whose focus is grappling competition, the recommendations shifted to half guard, deep half guard, and butterfly guard. “This to me is pretty logical choices to work on as a first guard,” Giles said.
From there, the system guides users through progressive levels of development. At each stage, practitioners can choose to add depth to their guard through advanced courses, expand their breadth with intermediate options to capture opponents into their game, or focus on guard retention. The recommendations stay consistent with the path already chosen, so a half guard player might next be pointed toward deep half guard, underhook half guard, or half guard retention.
As the game plan builds out further, the feature begins incorporating initiators, submissions suited to the user’s body type and curriculum, and even leg entanglements.
“Pretty much everyone who develops a really good guard, people get hard to sweep, and getting into something like an X guard or a single X can be a really good addition,” Giles noted, though he acknowledged those recommendations carry more weight for butterfly and open guard players than for pure half guard specialists.
The same framework extends beyond guard work, covering passing, controls and submissions, escapes, and takedowns through an equivalent process.
