BJJ GPS
Your map of the gentle art. Log what you learn, watch the map light up, and ask it for the shortest road from where you are to where you want to be.
Every Brazilian jiu-jitsu student knows the feeling. You leave class with a new sweep in your hands, and three weeks later you cannot remember how it fits with anything else. You know dozens of techniques. You cannot see the shape of what you know, or the gaps around it.
Jiu-jitsu is not a list. It is a network. Every position leads somewhere, and every technique is a road from one position to another. A scissor sweep takes you from closed guard on the bottom to mount on top. A knee cut takes you from half guard to side control. A rear naked choke ends the road entirely.
BJJ GPS draws that network and puts you on it.
The map
The map holds 35 positions and 230 techniques, linked as from position → technique → to position. Positions are the places. Techniques are the roads between them: sweeps, passes, escapes, takedowns, transitions, guard retention, and submissions that end the fight. Concepts and movements, the hip escape, the frames, the principles that make everything else work, attach to the positions where they matter.
Each position exists from both sides. Closed guard is a different place depending on whether you are on top or underneath, and the map treats it that way. Everything is grouped into standing, guard, pins, back and leg entanglements, and every node carries a level, from Fundamentals to Expert, so the map reads like a curriculum as well as a chart.
Four things you can do with it
Log. Type what you learned in plain words: “scissor sweep”, “rnc”, “knee cut”. The search understands common names and abbreviations. Mark it Learned, Drilled, or Hit it live, and add a note in your own words. The node lights up and the map flies to it. If your coach taught something that is not on the map, add it as a custom technique.
Progress. See your overall share of the map, then break it down by belt tier, Fundamentals to Expert, and by category. It answers the question every student quietly asks: where do I actually stand in the bigger picture of jiu-jitsu?
GPS. Pick where you are and where you want to go: a position, any submission, or one specific finish. BJJ GPS finds the shortest chain of techniques to get there, and it prefers the roads you already know. Stuck in bottom half guard and want the back? It gives you a route that leans on moves you already know, and you can restrict it to known techniques only.
Journal. Every log, dated, with your notes. A training diary that is also a map of your growth.
Why I built it
I wanted to track my own progress in jiu-jitsu, not as a checklist of moves but in the grand scheme of the art. I wanted to see each new thing I learned land somewhere on a larger map, and to see the map slowly fill in over months and years.
Early on, I sent a summary of the idea to my coach for feedback. The simplest way I found to explain it was this: it shows you where you are in jiu-jitsu, and how to get where you want to go. That is why it is called a GPS.
Design choices
- The graph is the interface. A live force-directed graph, not a table. Positions cluster naturally by group, learned techniques glow, and clicking any node opens what it is, where it comes from and where it leads.
- Plain language first. Every position and technique has a short description written for a student, not a referee. Aliases mean you can search the way people actually talk on the mat.
- Tiers that map to belts. Each tier lines up with a belt stage, starting with Fundamentals at white belt, and the progress view tells you which tier to focus on next, based on how much of each one you already know. It is a compass, not a grading.
- The route-finder rewards what you know. Shortest path is weighted toward techniques you have logged, so the answer is useful tonight, not just theoretically correct.
Privacy by default
There is no account and no server-side profile. Your progress is saved in your own browser. You can export it to a file and import it on another device whenever you want. Nobody else can see what you have logged, and there is nothing to sign up for.
How it is built
BJJ GPS is a single-page React and TypeScript app built with Vite and deployed on Vercel. The graph is rendered with react-force-graph on a 2D canvas so hundreds of nodes stay smooth on a phone. All positions and techniques live as typed data in the repository, and a validation script checks every reference in the graph, so a technique can never point to a position that does not exist. Route-finding is a weighted shortest-path search over the same graph: known techniques cost less, harder ones cost more.
Where it stands
BJJ GPS is live and free at bjj-gps.vercel.app. It is a personal tool first, built for my own training, and open to anyone who wants to see their jiu-jitsu as a map instead of a list.