#187 Rob Cole: Training with Intention, Framework for Building CLA Games, and More

In this episode, I chat with Rob Cole, we talk about CLA, his grappling style, the neutral top bottom framework that guides the intention for this CLA games, and much more. We also dive into guard, turtle and how he guides the intention for those positions. Hope you enjoy!

Download Sherpa, the free AI-powered journaling app for athletes. Join the convo with Josh on Discord here.

Use the code "BJJHELP" for 50% off your first month on Jake's Outlier Database to study match footage, get links to resources, and more.

Use code “BJJHELP” at submeta.io to try your first month for only $8!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:12

So yeah, just say hello and then I'll jump in. Yeah. Hello? Rob, it's Josh from one-eight hundred VJJ help. Welcome back to the show.

SPEAKER_01 0:22

Hey, what's up, Josh? How you doing?

SPEAKER_00 0:24

Good. I'm so excited to have you back on the show. Um, before we started recording, you had a book that you wanted to show us and uh how it may tie into CLA with people not even knowing. So did you want to talk a little bit about that, the the prop you brought?

SPEAKER_01 0:36

Yeah, um, so it's pretty pretty known book, uh, The Book of Five Rings, uh, written by uh Miyamatu Masashi, uh the Ronin or whatever. I don't know how much is fact, fidget, fiction, or legend. Uh he's considered probably the greatest samurai of all time. So he wrote like this book in the 1600s. And as I was reading through it, I thought there was an interesting thing about how he developed his uh, he calls it his two-sword style. So I guess it wasn't real prevalent back then, and you know, they had the big long sword and all this stuff. So he he came up with his own style because he had no, he's the masterless samurai and all that stuff. So uh just real quick, he's just talking about how um how he developed it, how he got people, beginners in his school to learn how to use this two-sword style. Because he said, uh, however, when you hold something with both hands, you cannot wield it freely both right and left. My purpose is to get you used to wielding the long sword with one hand. So what and it just depends on the translation you get. I've heard a couple different translations. So his issue was that people were not good at developing using the long sword with one hand. They didn't develop that cutting power. They'd always grab it with two hands, right? But what he did is he created a constraint. He put two swords, one in each hand. So he so he basically learned that you have to get good at using the one hand, and you learned how to, and he says uh eloquently, how to cut a man down, you know, with one sword. Like it shouldn't be an issue once you start developing this style. So that's like the hallmark on how he developed his two-sword style by guess what? Putting two swords in your hand. So you have to be getting good with using one hand for the sword. And then also in the book, you'll see it littered here and there. He always says, uh, the person who knows one thing knows 10,000 things. So these are very aligned with a lot of the constraint-led approach, the ecological dynamics framework of not having these. Obviously, he trained technique and he had his techniques that he liked. It is the 1600s, and he is developing a style based on his own. But if you look at that stuff and how he developed these things and the framework he was using, it kind of aligns with that constraint-led approach theory or that ecological dynamics theory of when you learn something, how to apply it in many situations. You know, he broke the body into the upper body and the lower body, how you defend. It wasn't this like hundreds and hundreds of technique and just adding, because you're talking life and death circumstances here, right? You uh and I had this thought when I was reading it. It's like if you look at like MMA, you see a lot of stuff go out the window, right? Because the stakes are so high. When the stakes are so high, you can't mess around with the super flashy stuff or the spinny, but then when you're in grappling, you know, you throw the ghee on, you throw this, and you're just training, like you can be more playful and try all these different things and get lost in the in the sauce of technique and all the beautiful this and that, where when it's on the line and or people are gonna punch you in the head, you're not gonna play guard. You're not gonna play, you know, these things that were strong in the beginning of MMA, where people actually learned how to defend. Once they learned how to defend the armbar from the guard, the triangle from guard, you basically got punched in the head from the guard. And then the guard kind of whittled away because the stakes were high and people actually learned how to defend this stuff. And you actually only used a couple type of tools or less. You know, it was more about your intention and what the focus of attention was. It's like I've kind of studied, you know, I've been in martial arts 35 years now, and I seen UFC one from the beginning, and I seen the whole evolution of it, and now I'm kind of drawing the parallels of submission grappling and the grappling gape, how you'll see things change over time and the meta changes, and now there's more wrestling focused, it's more, you know, staying on top, taking away this, and you don't see as much stuff anymore because the stakes have gotten higher. Now guys are actually fine, so they're actually understanding strength training and doing these things like that, which MMA, we're like 20 something years behind what MMA was. But as more money gets involved, you know, they have more coaches. Now you just kind of have here's my coach, and we plan for grapple. Now we have strength and conditioning coaches. You got the guy who handles this, they have the striking coaches, the grappling coaches. We're gonna get to that more as the game keeps developing. But I kind of went on a tangent already, but I wanted to talk about Musashi's using that constraints and how it's always been a part of this thing. It's not the we've always done it that way, but it's just showing how these things develop over time and then the constraints, the environment, how this factors into how we learn and how we train, you know. So I thought that'd be a nice starting point.

SPEAKER_00 5:26

No, that is awesome. And you started to go down the direction selfishly that I really wanted to talk about. And so before we started recording, I told Rob that after the eco camp last year, we got to see your role and the styles of game, like your specific intention that you brought to practice was such a dominant style. We were like, we just want Rob style, like never play bottom, never accept bottom. Like, you don't yeah, it's just like I remember you were in Turtle, like just immovable, and you could just get on top from anywhere, and those ankle games, like fighting, like all this like folk style wrestling stuff. So maybe we could start with this topic of like where did you develop that style, I guess, first for yourself, and then how do you now organize practice to help bring out that style? Uh, because I think it's not done in a lot of places.

SPEAKER_01 6:13

Yeah, it's you know, you'll see a lot of you know heavy pressure styles or stay on top and all this stuff, which is great, you know. It just but then what's what's the thing I always say in on an Instagram post or at the Discord? I'm always like, uh, you know, concepts and all that, all that stuff's all really cool. It's all great, it's great to talk about, but but how do you train it? That that's what I'm always about. But how do we train it? And if you're not, you know, for me, I I organize my class, my practice, and my students are training like that, but I still care about my game and how I develop. You know, I'm I'm I'm 51 now, and I'm still trying to develop my game and I'm still seeing improvements, maybe not when I was 20-something, but I've never been like, hey, I'm a black belt now. This is what I know, this is what I teach. I know a couple things, and that's all I teach. No, I'm never about that. I always want to keep evolving my game, you know. So it has to be wrestling heavy. You know, how are you gonna stay on top? You have to learn to wrestle. Like uh we talked about MMA. When what changed in MMA when wrestlers came in? They their wrestling was so strong you could not hold them down. So they dictated where the match was. So now when you take that to practice, if you're better at wrestling, you understand hand fighting, you understand how not to get taken down, I can dictate when I want to be on the bottom or not. I can dictate that unless, you know, a guy's 25-year-old college wrestler and he just blast doubles me, but he's still gonna try to have to hold me down because what I do is, you know, it's not that I never play bottom. I generally try not to play guard as much, but I because I run everything through the neutral top-bottom framework. You know, turtle, mount, side control, guard, they're just bottom. They're just the bottom position. So I have to have an intention in every state of grappling. I try to make it very simple. I go down to the base level of what's the beginning of when we started doing this thing called grappling since the beginning of time. There was, it was always the person on top holding the other person down. And then can that person get back up or could they become the top player? That's all if we if we took out submission just for now, let's bracket that off. Let's take submission out of submission grappling, and let's just focus on grappling. What's the guard, what's the guard's job when there's no submissions involved? It's either to sweep, get back on top, wrestle up, become the top player, or get back to a neutral position. That's all it is. If we took the submissions out of it, that's what you would do. So we have the three states. We have neutral, we have top, and we have bottom. And neutral, your job is always to grip fight. That could be with your hands, your feet, whatever you want to consider it. Grip fighting has to dictate everything. And that's the kind of interesting if you look at how the the traditional approach is, there's not a lot of grip fighting talk. You know, it's just kind of like thrown in there when you get to finally go sparred, right? Or so those have to be in every game, every design, because that's all we're ever doing. We're grip fighting for what? Inside position or a superior angle, right? So, say we're just staying stand-up wrestling. I'm either doing underhooks for inside position, or I'm doing a strong overhook where you get inside position. If I arm drag you, I'm getting a superior angle. If I get to your back, that's a superior angle. That's all the grip fighting is. So now we have that neutral position. Top position, or I put top and back as the same because the job's the same. Can I stay on top and hold you down? Can I stay behind you and stay and keep you there? That's all we're ever doing in those positions. And what do we do from the bottom position? Try to become the top player through sweeper reversal, whatever that is, or get back to neutral, just stand up, right? And now we can get back to what we're doing. So if you look at it at the base level of grappling, that's all we're ever doing. And now we can work from there. So I kind of did a, and when I started doing this stuff, you know, I I'm really into uh not to go, I'm really into philosophy. Like I read a lot of philosophy from the beginning, you know, talking Plato type stuff all the way up to, you know, Nietzsche and up to Newark and phenomenology. I just love I love seeing that. And what a lot of these philosophers do is um they try to go down, they try to go to the beginning and they reduce all the way and then they try to build back up their theory. So I'm like, okay, let me go till kind of the beginning of grappling. And that's kind of what I ended up at. And I'm like, okay, now I have something I could build off. I have intention in all three states. And now, depending on what your coach is or what my experience is, now I could give you focus of attention of what I want to do. So to develop like that style, you're saying like a that pressure style and this and that. And what I do is I develop games for the class itself, or you know, some one of my, you know, I like acronyms. So I have S-I-A-T, self-intention attention training. So that's for me when I'm grappling. I have my intention set up and I have my focus of attention. So when I start doing this passing, I call it clamp passing just for a fun name. Because I uh when I was at a globetrotter's camp and I was grappling with one of my buddies and I was doing this, and afterwards he goes, Man, that was like grappling a clamp. And I'm like, I'm like, oh, that sounds pretty good, you know. So I like that. So because we're what are you trying to do when you're top? You're trying to take away space, right? What is the bottom player trying to do? You're trying to create space. So if I'm on top and I'm clamped onto you, I am always pulling you towards me. So we have our uh features when we're on top. What do we have? We have gravity, okay? So we kind of use that. So now if I'm using gravity and I'm going towards you, that's the downward pressure. But I also need to be pulling you towards me. Like a lot of people go pressure passing and they just lay on top and they get on top and they just use their weight and use this. But let's multiply that by also always pulling something towards me. So I develop games where, say, if I'm, you know, in any type of passing situation, I always have to be pulling with one of my arms, clamps or something, pulling on the back of your head, pulling on your shoulder, pulling on your tricep, pulling on your thigh, pulling. So I'm always taking away space as I'm bringing space in. So that's how I kind of develop that pressure style. And it goes through passing all the way into pinning. And I'm doing the same thing. I'm looking for those spaces, those focus of attention. And I'm stuck on that intention of holding you down and staying on top because I can't pass you if I can't stay on top. What's the point? Right. If I constantly getting swept, so I'll actually just have people to say, you just have to stay on top. I don't even want you to pass. Pass is an afterthought. Can you stay on top for as long as you can while this bottom player is trying to get your hands to the mat, your hips to the mat, flip you overhead while you're clamped? And I'll give them stuff like, uh, I need your head lower than your hips. That is your focus of attention, also. That is one of your constraints. So if my head is always lower than my hips, I'm always driving down forward. Now, if my head is always lower than your hips and I keep my D's off the mat. So just think of this. So this uh when I sent out a um a post and I said, hey, send me uh a DM if you want uh the intention attention of this clamp passing. So a bunch of people messaged me and I wrote out the list and I basically said, uh, head lower than your hips, knees off the mat, and always be pulling something of their body towards you. And then I go, get back to me with these results. And a couple people started messaging me like, oh, people are saying that was brutal, that was rough, that was this. I'm like, good, that's what you want to hear, because that's what you're doing to that person. And it's not like I just said, stay on top, do this. I gave those focuses of attention, and that's how you kind of develop into what I call clamp passing, whatever you call it, it doesn't matter. But that's that's how we kind of multiply that pressure, you know, that kind of makes sense what you were kind of looking for. And it's just a couple simple focuses of attention to like amp it up, right?

SPEAKER_00 14:23

That does make a lot of sense. Um, I and I think there's a lot of jiu-jitsu people um that are probably similar to me. We did not wrestle in high school, no wrestling background, and I I pull guard, that's just what I do. But I love passing, and so a lot of times I just get stuck. So it's like, dang it, I can't connect these things. I'm like playing guard all the time, but I love passing, but I can't get there through wrestling. So how how would you help the guard players transform their game to a style where they can play on top a lot more? Like what would how would you organize their practice?

SPEAKER_01 14:55

So that's the thing. So I'm I'm uh I teach from a uh, you know, the in the strength and conditioning world, they call it uh GPP, uh general physical preparedness. I kind of changed that, another acronym, GGP, general grappling preparedness. Because I I I will in every clash, you will have some stand-up wrestling. You you just have to, because how are you gonna get better at it if you never do it? You know, it's kind of like in the classic jujitsu sense, you're like, well, I want to wrestle, but none of the techniques have anything to do with wrestling. And then you have to go spar, you get standard, you get tossed on your dome, your shoulder hurts, and you're like, all right, I guess I'm done wrestling. Now I'm gonna pull guard again. You so what you have to do is you have to scale it enough. I could have day one people come in and they start wrestling. That is always my warm-up, my start, and we're just hand fighting. And I just tell people, you're not even trying to take that person down. I I ran a class in Glow Trotters last year. The the YouTube's online, uh, the YouTube video's online. It's called uh wrestling, uh, wrestling made easy, no takedowns required. Because that is the scary part of wrestling. It's the takedowns. But that doesn't, everybody goes, oh, I like to wrestle. That doesn't just mean taking people down. Wrestling covers a very vast portion of grappling. That's all we're ever doing in grappling anyway. We're kind of wrestling each other. It's just a different word for saying it. So you have to get comfortable standing. You have to be get good defense, you have to hand fight, stop them from getting to the position. And then I tell people a little quick hack like if you want to become one of the better wrestlers in your jujitsu class, just don't pull guard and don't even try to take people down. Just try to keep it standing. And what happens is the other person usually gets bored after a minute and then they pull guard. And now you now I you count that as a takedown, and now you're on top, and now you can start focusing on that passing. Because if you love, you'll see this actually in uh in a lot of grappling. There's guys that are amazing guard players and they're amazing uh passers. So they sweep, and if that person doesn't accept that bottom position, now they can't pass. I believe I forgot who it was. Uh it was a real famous uh guy, and it was kind of weird. He was he kept sweeping somebody trying to get on top. The guy stood up and he actually said he actually got mad that the guy didn't stay down. So I'm like, Oh, wait, what you you need to be able to keep them down. That's the goal of the top player. So, how are you gonna pass if you can't stay on top? So we have to put you in those positions like that. You have to learn to wrestle, you have to learn to grapple going forward. If you notice a lot of um really good guard retention people, they play, I call it playing backwards. They're always playing backwards. So their feet are great, they're moving their hips, they're swerving, and they're always playing backwards. And then if they don't get a leg entry, they never come up. It's like they kind of they keep spamming that style, and then the guy goes a double, and then people double pull, and then that person doesn't stand up either. It's like they're just looking for their things, and it's like, no, you have to play forward. That's why if you watch, watch uh Joseph Chen, he plays seated, but he's always going forward. And then if he falls back and then the guy sits back and walks away, he gets up and moves forward, or he gets seated and he moves forward. So you have to have that intention of moving forward. If you want to be a passer, you're gonna have to move forward, you're gonna have to keep people down. It's just really hard not to. And then we talk about the MMA thing. If you can't wrestle, the wrestler can always dictate where the match is. Like if you watch uh Dorian Oliver's uh uh Oliveira's, he's one of the best in the world right now. Nobody could put him on their back. He is standing, you have to pull guard, and then he will just run you ragged on top, outside, inside, inside, because you never have the ability to dictate where the match is going. He's dictating the match. Now, the answer would be learn to wrestle better than him, which is really hard. So we people are gonna have to figure out what to do with that. They're gonna have to develop different ways to attack that style. They have to at least become competent enough on it. But it it's a really hard thing when we're talking about really good athletes uh in a highly competitive environment. But if we're talking about people in jujitsu, hobbyists, training, whatever, you can do a lot. You have so many, I I said you're leaving so many gains on the table by not wrestling, by not moving forward, but not holding people down and just specializing early. What did you start? You start playing guard early, right?

SPEAKER_00 19:29

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 19:31

So you're specializing and you're you're kind of holding yourself back by saying, Well, I can't really wrestle and this and that. I'm just gonna play guard. You're actually specializing. And specialization, you know, if you look at a lot of the literature, especially for kids, it kind of holds them back from their athletic potential. And then it's like, well, I'm not a kid, I'm you know, 20, 30, or 40 years old, and I, you know, whatever. Who cares? Still try it. Get in there, and you're gonna have to put yourself and not specialize. That's why I teach from that GG G GP framework, where I'm even if you're not gonna be a great lesser wrestler, you're gonna be competent wrestling. Even if you're not great on top, you're gonna learn to stay on top. And then vice versa, wrestlers are gonna learn to play from the bottom and and and whatever. So we you I always have to give my students that. I want to teach, I want to make grapplers, and then you're gonna self-organize to what you to your game or what you feel you want to work on. I but I need to give you everything, everything in that whole neutral top bottom, and then it's it's up to you to take control of your training and what you want to become better at, you know?

SPEAKER_00 20:36

Yeah. So um, what is your how do you uh do that self-intention attention training for when you get put in guard? Or like, yeah, do you ever how do you play guard these days? And how do you train your attention to like not play there anymore?

SPEAKER_01 20:54

Well, the thing is I kind of uh like I I jet I know what's an interesting thing about grappling and jujitsu, or what I call it submission grappling. I don't use the word jujitsu too much, only sometimes, because I think well the Brazilian jujitsu, I definitely don't use that's like a subset. That's IBJGF, whatever. Then there's jujitsu and the submission grappling. What's interesting is you generally never have to play guard if you don't want to. It's really hard to make somebody play guard if they don't want to. So I understand that. And I and here's the thing. And if people hear me say this stuff or on the Discord, they're like, oh, Rob hates guard and this and that. No, I I think it's great. I just think we we go to it too quickly when we're and it kind of holds us back from doing all the other stuff. I I I've I've always been a pretty decent guard player. Like I, you know, I was a leg locker guy and all this other stuff, and I could do that. I could play that, but then for me, for my personal development, what I'm working on and what I'm trying to get out of people is to see you can play different ways. And they don't have to play just like me, but I'd have to, but as long as they have an intention from that bottom, so what's my bottom intention? Turtle. Become the top player, uh, reverse, or get back to neutral. To just to think about this, and you could try this at your next training session. I want you to go in there and just not accept playing guard. Not accept being on your butt or being on your back. You can always move forward. You can always go belly down. Yeah, you might get choked out. You might actually get up to turtle, but you do not have to accept it until somebody really, really, really tries to make make you play guard, which is really hard to do. So I go in that mindset every training. Every, every Monday night, um, we have our comp, you know, our comp class. And it's like I train with a bunch of guys that I don't coach on the side. There, you know, there's MMA fighters, you know, 20, 30-year-olds, the people that compete. And I go in there and I have an intention of what I'm gonna work on that night. I'm gonna keep, I don't care who rolls up next to me, we're gonna start standing. And you're gonna have to take me down. And I'll either get the takedown or keep it standing. Or if I get taken down, now I'm always trying to get back up. So that naturally I'll get to turtle. I'll get to one uh leg off the mat. It they cannot make me play guard if I don't want to. Yeah, it might put me in a bad spot, but I know I have a way out because I I've trained in these positions, right? So I get there. So I just keep focusing that. And then if the guy pulls guard on me, I go right into uh to the clamp style passing. I attach myself, I pull, and I go forward and I do that. And then if a guy's really good and he triangles me, so be it. Now we reset. There's so that's the thing. You kind of have to, when you do this, like there's guys I go against where they would never be able to triangle at me or sweep me if I just played my A game. I don't even know what that means nowadays. But if I just didn't want it, I I just wouldn't allow it, you know, because I just have way more experience than a blue belt or somebody. But if I'm putting myself in a situation, my head's lower than my hips, I'm always grabbing onto something, I'll probably I might get triangled. I might get whatever. Or I'll just let them put me in the triangle and then I focus on my attention or attention of always having a shoulder down. This gets triangled, this much harder to get triangled. So I focus on that. And I'll be in somebody's triangle for two minutes, and then I fight my way through. And then I keep going, then it gets, then the next time maybe they don't get to that. But I have to accept those fails. You know, I I don't care that I'm the black belt that gets choked by a blue belt or a purple belt. I'm looking for good training. So I'm looking for good practice. So all my practices are intentional. I don't want to waste any more time when I go roll. Like people think, oh, you just spar. Sparring's great, but without intention behind it, you're kind of it's still fun. I'll do that every now and then, very rarely. But it's still fun, but you're not gonna get as much of that on training that you can get if you have that self-intention attention training. Like I uh like I was working on octopus, right? So, which is uh, I'm actually gonna teach that at the Globe Trotters, uh, the OLA, the octopus-led approach. That's the name of my class. But all it is is, and I didn't watch any DVDs on it. I didn't watch any technique videos on it. All I did is watch 15 minutes, 20 minutes of Craig rolling, right? And I'm like, okay, this is what he did. And guess what his intention was? It's still the neutral top-bottom framework from the bottom. And now I just have to see what were those focuses of attention, and now we're gonna work for there. So I developed some games from there, some constraints, and I and I would go train with my buddies, and I would say, Hey, I they wouldn't know what I was doing. I'm like, just beat me up. I don't care. Try to try to kill me. And then I would just do my job. Hey, I get an octopus sweep that I just came. I didn't really, it was just something like that. Then I got to the top, then I did that, then they choked me, then I get reversed, then I get, and then it just keeps building, building, building. And then that's how I kind of put that into my game for that time. And it works really good because I play a lot of bottom turtle or stand and get just stand up and all that type of stuff. So it kind of works in well. So I I did I do that for myself all the time, and that's what that's what I try to, especially people don't train at a CLA gym. You know, you those those open rounds, you know, maximize your training time. Like I I just think of all the rounds in 20 something years of grappling where I could have been so more focused, you know, and I could have taken it to another level, you know, like um, and it's never too late. Like, I become a bit the best wrestler I have ever been, and I'm 51 right now because I've been doing it for like two, three years now, or four, you know, just focusing on wrestling. And at first, man, it was rough. I would start wrestling with these guys, and I am gassed two minutes in, three minutes in. Yeah. Because, and it's not that you don't have cardio, it's just that you're not comfortable there. It's just now I could stay, I'll go a whole hour sometimes in our comp class, and I I may not hit the ground now like two, three times. And I just or stay on I either standing or I'm on top and I'm not even a turtle. I'll just try to keep it standing as long as I can. And then, you know, it's it's just fun, and that's like such valuable training. I get so much out of that for my own personal growth, you know.

SPEAKER_00 27:22

Yeah, I wrote it down. I think because uh we've we're starting to do more rounds now at the end of class, like two, three rounds or something like that. Before I think it used to be like one round, now it's like every now and then there's like two, three rounds. I think that's what it's been lately. But uh, I wrote it down like no more pulling guard in those open rounds, just just deal with it. Like it there, you have to get better at this. Uh and um when I do get my guard passed, I do go to turtle, but I don't have the intention often of standing up and disconnecting. Lately, I've just been like defending the back take, basically.

SPEAKER_01 27:54

Yeah, but that's that's a level of it. So, like uh when I taught my uh just stand up sessions on uh on the whatever, so that the thing is like people get to turtle like you do, like a lot of people get to turtle and they just stop and they just defend. You have to give them uh I I learned this kind of thing from Preek in the beginning when I first started watching a lot of his stuff. Those kind of those extremes. You always have to be going up, you know, because you need to see what's in between that. So if I'm going up, that'll make it easier for me to pull guard. If you're just constantly, or if you're just defending, all you're gonna be doing is defending. And then they know that. If all you're doing is always like from bottom side control, shrimping the play guard, they they know that. You always have to give them the up, or you always have to give them those extremes, those in-betweens. So for me, you have to stop me from standing. And then my guard pull might be easier, or maybe an uh an octopus might think start developing, or uh, or me, I love harassing the ankles. Like you're saying, if I start harassing those ankles from everywhere while standing, I'm gonna get takedowns without even being standing. I'm gonna do it just like if I can't take somebody down that's uh, you know, bigger, stronger, younger, just a better wrestler than me, I'll just shoot, I'll just shoot in and just grab and just hold a thigh. And now I'm in turtle, but I'm holding on something now, but I'm still, I'm not just staying there defending. I'm grabbing ankles. I'm still trying to rise. They're falling over. I they think they're putting me in a crucifix. Now I pull their ankle and their leg, and now I'm on top. So I got a takedown from that turtle position because I always had that intention of getting back to my feet. Even if I knew I couldn't get that takedown. That's what I'm saying. It's like we, we, like the double leg spam. I'm just my double leg stinks. This that it's it's really hard to just shoot in and blast double somebody who's trying to defend. So you just have to get in there. So you have to develop, I develop games around getting in there, and now we work from there, you know. And I take away the scary part of the big takedown because I I like to teach takedowns from the ground up. And never really hear people talk about that much. If you say, hey, takedown class, and then it's, you know, you're getting judo throws and you're doing all this stuff, and then we try a live and then people get hurt. No, from the ground up. So I'll start you on all fours wrestling, low wrestling, you're down low, or start you in a headlock game. The takedown mechanics from getting out of a headlock are the same. You know, then I'll keep bringing you up, and then we can start playing. But we're gonna put you in a spot where you can take somebody down and not get dumped on your head or dumped on your shoulder, you know. So takedowns from the ground up, that's a very good way to do it. And you could do it from Turtle and you could do it from these guard and all these sit-up and moving forward and kind of seated guard type things, you know?

SPEAKER_00 30:51

Yeah. Um, so what are some good, like maybe we can throw out some examples of some games from Turtle and from Guard if people wanted to work on this style of game of like having the intention of being a top player?

SPEAKER_01 31:03

So you do just uh I my favorite, my favorite game of all time is elbows away. Um, so basically I start people in turtle or straight on turtle, or at more advanced, I go to mount where you're flat. So I start you straight on turtle turtle and I give the top player the constraint of they're not allowed to lock their hands. That's my favorite constraint of all time. I stole that from folk style wrestling uh because that is actually a rule in folk style. When you're on the ground, you cannot lock their hands, right? Because it's such a strong grip, it kind of stalls action. I believe that's why they took it out. But what that did, it started developing claw rides, the Nelsons, all the cool ways to control somebody. So my personal contrainer, I use them myself, uh talking more about when I do my self-attention, is never lock my hands. I stay on top of people and I don't lock my hands. Like what and when I do a head and arm, when I do an uh my my best submission right now is an arm triangle, but I only use one arm. I yeah, just one arm. So what is it? I may stay on you for two, three minutes and not submit you, but think of all the data I get of being able to stay on top of you with one arm. And now I slowly learn how to get that done. If I was this, I would just, and then you get, oh, it's just a crank, bro, and you get that stuff, you know. So I constrain myself to never, you know, never lock my hands. So what I do is I I develop games like that. So I start turtle, straight arm, person behind you. They could start any grip. They just have to be under your elbows or behind or under. And now they have to learn, they're trying to pin you on the mat, either shoulders flat, three seconds pro wrestling. You have to get your shoulder 90 degrees, none of this. Oh, it's not, it's got to be full 90. Your intention is always get back up for the bottom player, top player, hold them down. And can I hold my so then people belly out like wrestling, which is bad. They they belly out because they don't want to get turned, and then that's how you get choked. So the other wing condition is can I keep your front of your hips flat for three seconds? So that person always has to get their butt up, they always have their intention. And I have multiple ways to work from this shell of the elbows away game. And then for both players, because everything is the same. If I'm teaching you submission uh conditions, you're learning submission escapes. If I'm teaching you pinning, you're learning how not to be pinned. If you're guard passing, you'll learn how not to get passed. It's always connected. You know, we're that's you know, we keep it coupled, as they say in the in the literature, you know? Yeah. We're always keeping it couple.

SPEAKER_00 33:38

How come you called it elbows away game? Is that the intention of the top player? It's like always keep their elbows away from the body.

SPEAKER_01 33:43

They're always have uh something underneath. So the for one of the first, when I first train it, the first wink condition for the bottom player is can I clear you out of that space and get both elbows to my ribs with nothing in between? Kind of like to that pre-turtle style. Because once this is here, all the stuff goes away. Like you can't armbar me, you can't komura me, you can't head and arch choke me if I could keep my elbows away. But I like people to play open at first so they see now I give you those free grips. The top player gets those free grips, the claw rides, the nelsons, so they can make your life miserable. As you hand fight, you have to grip fight. You can't clear anybody out without using their hands. So if I gave the top player and I allowed him to lock their hands, what's the bottom player gonna do? They're just gonna try to stand up and they're never gonna learn how to strip grips. They're never gonna learn how to do that. So it's always keeping those elbows away from the body. That's if you look at any pinning position. Like one of my pet peeves is get them out and then the person sits up, and then the bottom player does this, and then you gave up all that elbow space. So you're always trying to get those any submission, pretty much that's gonna happen. You're if with the arms or the head and arm is getting that elbow away. So once you get that elbow away, don't give it back. Don't give that elbow away. So if I give that top player that job, their job is to stay behind both elbows or under both, but they can get away with one. If there's one, they clear one out, they're still in the game. And they have to be the top or behind player. If they get rolled over and fall a guard, they lose. Automatic loss. So you have to stay on top or behind and be under at least one elbow without the ability to lock your hands. You could use your knee, you could use your leg, you could put your head in there. I don't care. You can self-organize any way you want. But that bottom player is learning how valuable that inside space is. That's pretty, I could teach, you know, teach 80%. This is a totally made up number. I could teach 85% and grappling just with that game. Because that's kind of what's always happening. Why does a crucifix work? Because your elbows away. Uh, why does a head and arm choke work? One of your elbows away. How do you get arm barred? Your elbows away. Besides naked chokes, you always are gonna have that elbow away. So the majority of my games are based off that premise of the elbows away or just staying under them or whatever you want to do. What's stronger? If I if I get your elbow all the way above your head, that's bad. So this must be good. Do the opposite, George Costanza style, Costanza-led approach, right? And that's what we're doing. So I could teach the majority of like that. Now I give that intention of getting back to your feet, getting to a neutral position, all the different variables and ways to build off that base level game. And now I could take that flip it, that turtle position, which is easier to get up from. Now I put you on your back and you give away both elbows. And now that top person has double unders, but they can't lock their hands either. They learn how different ways, and then I could give them this different task and goals. Two elbows to the head, one elbow to the head. You can then you could go for a submission, but you could only use one arm. Uh, that's how I teach a lot of chokes. I only let people use one arm, especially rare naked chokes. And but I don't allow the bottom player, the chokey, to use their hands to fight the choke. So the top player is constrained by only using one arm to choke, and the bottom player is only is constrained with not using their hands to fight the choke. So they have to use head position. They have to find different ways to do that. Because your hands always need to be free. You always need to be strip grips. Just think we start rear naked choke. Say we start with somebody behind and they throw the rear-naked choke on. What does everybody do? They do this and they just start pulling. You're not learning how to survive without the use of your hand. Yeah, you're gonna get choked. That's what practice is for. But if I can protect my neck without using my hands, what are my hands gonna be able to do now? Remove underhooks, remove hooks, all these ways to get back to a neutral position or get on top. So we have to build from there. We got to go through that, go through the fire of getting choked and learn what's being uncomfortable. That's what every session needs to be. We need to be able to do that. So that's that's how I develop games from.

SPEAKER_00 38:08

How about from Guard?

SPEAKER_01 38:11

Yep. So, so Guard, yeah, I think I made a reel on this. It's actually, it's funny, it's my most popular reel, and it was a clip of Craig Jones talking. And and it was uh talking about his just stand up of how uh you should always have the ability to get back to your feet and not accept bottom. So I take that and then I but I both I put that into my guard games. Every guard game I have, pretty much everyone, a win condition for the guard player is if they could stand up and get back to neutral. Because what does that make the top player do? It makes that top player honest and hold you down. So now that guard player is not just looking for a sweep to become the top player. What are they giving you that also? Hey, I could stand up also. And then when somebody could stand up also and you have to hold them down, now you could get under. Now you could get their hands to the mat. Now your sweeping become easier. Just like how I said, if I stand up, it's easier to pull guard because I'm giving you those extremes. If I could stand up from guard, my sweeps actually become easier. And then it makes that top player more honest, and they're actually becoming a better top player. So that's how we do it from guard, also, because I treat it as what? Bottom position. There is an intention behind it. And then whatever the game design is, that is my focus of attention I give you. And then it's not constrained enough. Uh, it's it's not overly constrained. I have another acronym, uh, the OCLA, the overly constrained led approach. That's where you kind of do this in the beginning of when you start learning about CLA, you try to make a move emerge. And it's so constrained that there's only one solution. There's only we need people to, if if we believe in ecological dynamics, if we believe in self-organization, we have to allow people to self-organize. So if I give you just one solution, I'm telling you how to self-organize, I self-organize. No, we need to give people enough room to play, but not enough where it just becomes free sparring or it just becomes positional sparring, which is still fine, but it's not the CLA and it's not focused more on skill acquisition or skill adaptation. I prefer adaptation to acquisition because it's not like I go, here's my guard passing skills, you have acquired it. Go on, young man. No, it's gonna always be adapting. Um, my and my skills are always adapting. Every week I go to train, something's happening. You know, and it's funny, before I even got into the ecological stuff and uh the train wet approach, I was learning, uh, I was teaching myself defensive jujitsu, uh, the preach style. And I and it was during COVID, and I was just training with my daughter at home. And then I started training in the basements with my buddy, and I basically said, I want you to attack me relentlessly for an hour. And it was funny. One week he wouldn't get a submission. Next week, he would choke me five, six, seven times because he adapted to what I was doing. Then the next week, I got it down to maybe one or two submissions because I adapted to that. Then he would choke me. We'd always do this back or forth. And he was he's so good at offense now. And then he would go with somebody else that wasn't doing this defensive stuff, and he was just choking people out like crazy. And I'm like, because it wasn't just my work, it was his work also. I was working on my defense, he was getting the offensive boost of his stats. So that that's that's like what we're always doing. We're adapting all the time, it never stops.

SPEAKER_00 41:46

I like this uh neutral top-bottom framework. I remember you mentioning on the last time we spoke, but for some reason it's clicking way more for me now because it seems like it's always uh it's a framework that all the games uh like fit under. Like if you're in bottom, you're always at least trying to get to neutral and get back on top. So I'm now I'm just thinking for myself for those open rounds. If I made the intention, like always start standing. If I get put on bottom, always just try to get back. Like even if I have to go neutral, like fully run away, disconnect, and then try to get back on top. And then we'll probably get taken down again. But at least the intention is now get back to neutral, get on top, don't just accept playing card. Um that seems like a pretty good like North Star intention for me for to develop this style. Or is there anything, or do you think there's anything else to add in there?

SPEAKER_01 42:35

Well, it's funny when I when I first started talking about this neutral top bottom framework, I started developing this early on with the at the you know, through the the ecological discord, we were talking about that. And you know, at the beginning, you know, you listen to Greg talk about stuff and all that stuff. So I give because Greg would talk about frameworks and this and that. And listen, I've been doing this a long time and I have a lot of different ways I would train, a lot of different things I would do. So I kind of took that to heart. Like, okay, if I want to develop something, I I need to do this on my own. So I kind of self-constrain. I kind of constrain myself a lot also, where I don't, I try not to look at other people's games. I try not to use what they do. I didn't want to become a plug-and-play king and just do all this. And I said, What do I know? I have 20-something years of grappling. I have MMA experience, I have ghee, no gi, all this stuff. What do I know about grappling? What do I know? So, what did I start doing? I started watching folk style wrestling. I started watching some different submission grappl go, folk style wrestling. And that's where I kind of they would always say, hey, they start a neutral position. That's what they call it. They call it neutral position. And then when the round starts, you get to pick top or bottom from that all fours. And I go, huh. This is just wrestling. This is what they're doing. It's been going since the beginning of time. That reductionist kind of like uh, you know, my my philosophy kick. You know, Renee Descartes, you know, when he kind of the think for the think therefore I am guy, he said he pretty much questioned everything and started from the beginning. So he started doubting everything and blah, blah, blah. And he did his whole thing, you know, sitting by the fire. I didn't go that far, uh, candlelight. But I just started thinking, what is grappling? What are we actually doing? And I tried and I ran it through so many different ways and I looked at every position. Even in leg entanglements, there is neutral top bottom. And once I said, once I realized that leg entanglements were neutral top bottom also, I'd like, all right, I have a framework that's going to work probably 99.99% of the time. If somebody comes out of nowhere and says some random position, whatever, okay, I could kind of push that off as some novelty. But if I look, so I started looking at everything that's happening, and I go, 50-50 from languents is neutral. What is your job in the neutral position? Grip fight to become the uh grip fight to become the superior inside position or a superior angle, right? Or get back to standing, right? So in 50-50, what is getting to if you watch Lachlan Giles from 50, he's the best that he was one of the best at 50-50. What did he do? He would upgrade to 80-20 and then 90-10. But when he did that, he can now raise his hips and you can't. He became the top player from that neutral position of 50-50. If you look at the inside position guys who play uh inside Sinkaku or inside Ashi or whatever you call it with the double, they still have the ability to get their hips up. They can become the top player. That's why it's powerful. Or the the bottom player, now what is he trying to do? He's trying to grip fight to get back to neutral, a 50-50 or something, or become get back to a top player disengage. So I go, okay, if this works, double seated, leg entanglements, it works from turtle, it works from guard, it works from mount, and it works from standing. That's all it is. That's all we're ever doing. That is the start. So now that I have a clear intention of everywhere, now it's just about the focuses of attention. And then that's where the coach comes into play. I can have attention of harassing ankles, I could have an intention of getting two on ones, I could have the intention of get capturing a head and arm, any type of thing. And it all kind of works from there. So I would tell people about the neutral top bottom and they go, yeah, yeah, yeah, that sounds cool. And then they're like, but what about the games? I'm like, okay, it's not about the games. It's about what is the so then you take it. What is the constraint-led approach? What are the four main principles of the constraint-led approach? Session intention. All right. I now have a default, default setting of intention for my game for both players. For both players, I have that. Now I have now we go constraint to afford. All that is, those are your focuses of attention. So now I have intention and attention. Then we have representative learning design. Very simple. Does it look like grappling? Is it whatever? Boom. And then we have the fourth repetition without repetition. So now it the neutral top broaden framework, the intention aligns with how I could develop every CLA game I do. So yes, at the end it's the game, but how did we get there? So that's why my I kind of push back against plug and play, which I think it has some value if you're new. And you know, I started, I took a cut, you know, I would do some great game, you know, I like the insight, but then but after like I started messing with it for a month or something, I'm like, I need to work out my own stuff. I need to kind of figure out what I'm doing. And then what's weird is then I at first, the first EcoCamp, uh Scott Seavright was there, you know, we have Pac Camp and all were, and they were doing their game standing, and they kind of look similar to what I was doing. And they should, because we're both we're all understanding what grappling is in that neutral position. We're all grip fighting, we're all hand fighting, we're all getting inside position, we're all getting a superior angle. That's all we're ever doing. So the game should kind of look the same with little different caveats of attention. And then where I started developing the scrambling stuff, I'm watching folk style wrestling. And and I I remember I did a podcast or I listened to Scott Seavright talk about in the beginning of this, and he would say that he goes, I always ask coaches, how would you teach a scrambler, a scramble? And coaches would be like, they just would show you it today. They don't know how to teach a scramble. So I kind of took that as a challenge, and I watched the best scramblers, folk style wrestlers, and I'm watching and I'm going, huh, how are they winning the majority of their scrambles? It's because they were looking at the ankle. Their focus of attention was controlling the ankles, one ankle or two ankles. And if you look, you'll watch folk style right from the start. A guy will shoot in even from a takedown, and the other guy will reach over the top and they'll grab the ankle. I'm watching Ben Askarin, the greatest funk style scrambler of all time. I can train you like Ben Askrin just with those scramble games. You can grapple off of your head up in the air while I'm just grabbing your ankles. That's all that they're kind of doing. Then they go ankle up to knee and then they get the hip. Obviously, you can still win some because everybody goes, Oh, you got to win the hip height, you got to win the hip height. Yeah, you can, but if I can control both your ankles, I'm pretty sure you can't stand and gain hip height. So if I could control your ankles, now my hip comes up. Now my head comes up. I'm gonna win that scramble. And then I go, huh, let's look at these scrambling games. How do we finish sweeps? And especially in no-gee. If you look at people's sweep, you pick that ankle. If you don't pick that ankle, you're not, they're gonna stand up. If that person has an intention of standing up, you're not gonna hold that person down unless you get those ankles. So, and then how do you do defense to sweeps? And I watched um it was uh DeAndre Corbey versus so I was I was doing all this and I'm all about ankles. And I'm watching DeAndre Corbe versus uh, I believe it was Dante Leon in uh Agia, I think that's how you say it. I A G A Aiga, something. And Deontay was getting under, getting to the X-guard. He would sweep DeAndre over, and DeAndre would grab Deontay uh uh ankle, and he would able to free himself up and get back to neutral position. And then uh, so it's like this is everywhere. It's not just about scrambling, it is literally everywhere. So then I would do stuff like play guard, do my passing, my crushing, and I would just put my head on the mat and just hold both your ankles from guard. And then people will wrap around my waist and try to roll me over. I'd roll over, but I have your ankles. I can always end up on top if I have your ankles.

SPEAKER_00 50:53

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 50:53

It's just it's really hard not to. So I start focusing on that. And I'm just I'm self-intention, attention training myself doing all these things. And it's not saying you have to go for ankles, but it's fun to do it and it has some value. Just the same guy who looks to control the hip line or control the head and arm or whatever. But they you have to focus on something. And that's why you need that intention to go around. So you could train yours, like, and I am my always thing is, you know, how, but how do you train it? And also everything's trainable. Literally, everything's trainable. That's it, there is no mysticism and all magic and whatever. It has to be trainable some way. And it doesn't mean you're gonna get it, but you're gonna work towards that. And this is how you can do it, in my opinion. And I and I haven't, so I was able to take that neutral top out of framework, use it everywhere. It's my baseline of intention. And now, what am I gonna be my focuses of attention? Because without that, without that focus of attention, it kind of breaks down. And now you're just picking games and choosing, and you think you're organizing your games based on this, but are they connected? Are they hooked together? Is there any intention behind it? And then you from there, and then you self-organize and you go. And I'm not saying my won't make you play guard. I have a lot of students that are awesome that play guard, but their intention is always to become the top player or whatever, and it just kind of makes it more valuable that way, you know?

SPEAKER_00 52:16

Right. Um, I see. So you have the overall intention, the neutral top bottom. That kind of is like one of the first principles that a lot of your games are based around. And then one of the an example of attention is harassing the ankles, using the ankles as a uh as a way to get from neutral to or bottom to neutral to top. Can you describe some of those scrambling ankle games? I remember at EcoCamp we played it uh a few times and it was so fun. I haven't played them since, and I really want to. I really want to play those more. Uh, what are your scramble games like these days?

SPEAKER_01 52:50

Uh so basically, so what I do is I I I start people in easy, easy situations. There'll be, you know, all fours and kind of you know, one head this way, one head that way, and you reach for the far ankle. So the intention is be cut so the only time you could get to your feet completely is if you have an ankle off the mat. But if they're still controlling your ankle, the game plays on and you go. No pinning, no back taking, no submissions. We take away all that because those are huge attractors, especially for jujitsu people. So I take away that, I dial down the representativeness of that. So it highlights other forms of attention. So you're just harassing knee down to ankles. That's all you're doing. You get one, that's great. You get two, congrats. And then if you could stand up and keep that ankle off their mat for two, three seconds before they get your ankle. So, what does that make that bottom player do? They might pull up to guard, you're gonna lose if you stay in guard. You're gonna have to play forward to get that ankle. Or you'll actually get some X guard, you'll get under the person because you're always pulling yourself. If you get that ankle and pull, now you're under. Now you're creating sweeps. And I had a great clip that um this by so uh uh our mutual friend Andres was at the camp and uh he was playing with uh another black belt from Canada, and he said I sent me a clip. It was him and Andres playing my baseline scramble game. It was like for four or five minutes. This is two black belts, well seasoned. They only had the intention and attention, and if people first look at it, you go, Oh, they're just kind of rolling. No, but if you watch, they're always going for those angles. And that game, and this is when people are always like, Oh, you have to scale each game for everybody of the new white belt of this, a black belt. No, you can there's a lot of base now. That self-organization takes over. Those two's games was amazing and it their rolling was beautiful, but they still stayed on task. And two white belts may do it, may look clunky, may look weird, may have an issue, but they're still playing the same game. And their intention and intention is still the same. So now you could play that from that baseline all fours. Then I turn them and you go back to back. Now, if your goal is to always get to a knee and ankle, what happens when you turn? Now you're shooting in. Now you're kind of getting to these turtle positions. That person's kind of playing over the top now, and you're getting these takedowns without getting dropped a head on the mat, and you're actually getting takedowns from the ground up. They're all connected. They're all connected to everything I do. And then now we could take that scramble game and I can make a guard player out of that. And I'm saying all I want you to do is attack those ankles. I'll give you maybe one free ankle, maybe I'll give you two. Who knows? It depends what I want. And then I'll put some constraints on the other person, and maybe I put some constraints on yourself, give you a different starting person uh uh position, and you could go from there. So you could take that shell game of that intention attention, and now you could dial up, dial in and out, you play with those dials of what we kind of see as grappling and what we don't, and I let people explore a little more. And as you get better, we may dial it in. Or if I see you attracting to a certain state and I see you always doing that, maybe I take that away from you. So, like uh, knees off the mat is great, like when passing. People love when they feel pressure passing, they have to put their knees on the mat. Now, what happens when you put your knees on the mat? You kind of take away one, your gravity, and you take your toes off the mat. So if your knees are off the mat and your head's lower than your hips, you're always pushing forward and your toes are always pushing into the mat. So it's it's forcing you to have that intention and attention of pushing in and creating that pressure. So I'll take knees off the mat. So you play with unlocking hand, not connecting your hands. Great constraint. I I don't even, when I get somebody's back now, I don't use the seatbelt. I think the seatbelt is great and it has its value. But for me, I like the claw grips, the wrist ride to this, because I kind of don't lock my hands, so I'm able to play with those different things. Because now when I take your back and I go with that claw grip or wrist ride, I'm I can just roll you over and now I'm set up for a head and arm triangle and I get to use my one arm arm triangle now because I'm already in that state. I playing between two ways. That's my personal constraint I'm putting on myself. I'm not saying you have to play like that or my students have to play like that, but that's what I kind of organize towards because my intention and attention is focused on that. You know, I think, and it kind of goes into that uh what I we were messaging before. And I'm like, uh, this is kind of scary for a lot of coaches, and it's actually scary for the students too, because they're like, it's it's empowering for the students. But what if if it's empowering to the students, it kind of puts it on them. Hey, you have to take ownership of your training. I am not gonna hand, I'm not gonna give you all this stuff and just tell you exactly what to do. Some students want that, but I kind of want to break you out of that. And then it kind of takes ways to the coach's power. And a lot of coaches don't like that. And that's why I kind of constrain myself where I don't correct people. I do not like correcting students when they're in the middle of the game. The tasks, stay on tasks, that should be the correction. Me yelling at you to not put your hand there. You could do that 10 times and the guy still might do it. But if he does it and then he gets choked, now think, oh, that was bad. So, but I'm like, are you staying on tasks? Are you going? So that that I kind of take away my power and I give it to you, empower you, and now you're gonna organize. Now you're gonna train, gonna take some ownership of your training. You know, students will come to me every now and then and they'll go, uh, hey, uh, how how do I do that? It's very rare. They're like, hey, I was looking at this. I'm like, well, let's let's think about what you're doing. They want an answer. And I'm like, let's look at it a different way. And then next session, somebody will come up to me and go, hey, I kind of figured out this really cool thing. And this and I'm like, awesome, man. You own that. Now that's yours. Now let's see what you could do with that. That sticks with a person way more than me telling you how to do it, and then you pull it off in a unscript, uh scripted dead drill. You know, those to me are false positives. You know, you got to arm bar your buddy, you you say you're brand new, you armbar your buddy a hundred times from mouth, and you're like, man, I got this armbar, then we do all that, then they throw you into live sparring and you don't hit it once. All those false positives became a really big negative because you never pulled it off and now it lowers it. But if I put you in a situation where all you got to do is maintain connection to that shoulder, and you could do that for 30 seconds, then you could do it for a minute, then you could do it for two minutes, that armbar is gonna be much easier, you know? And then I'll get you a real positive, you know, and that it doesn't, I I tell people it's okay to fail. We're gonna fail. That's that's the building the culture. That's all these things. It's not just about the games, it's how you coach it, how you deal, how you build that culture. A lot of coach uh coaches are talking about the culture and what we build, and that's where it is, and that's where taking away that power for me. That's how we get a lot of hierarchy nonsense in jujitsu because we look up to the things we're bowing at people, and we're, you know, we're bowing the pictures and we're bowing every line and we're we're turning around to tie our belts and we're you know, all this stuff. I'm like, that kind of creates that we're hierarchy that I'm not about. You know, we're we're just training and we're training in a practice, especially if I'm training in my teen class. You know, we're we're not eating we're lining up, high five, let's go. We're training. Call me coach, call me Rob, I don't care. We're just playing and we're we're put doing these live prep. That's that building that culture. And we could, we're always doing that because that's what's always happening. I I think I went on like four tangents there, but that's okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:56

It covered a lot of what it covered a lot of what we wanted to. Um, there was one note that I'm curious about, and it's uh, what did you mean by how to win, quote unquote, win at practice?

SPEAKER_01 1:01:07

Yeah, so yeah, I um so it started as a joke. Uh so like I say, on Monday night, I I trained in the comp class, and that's my hardest training of the week. So I would come home at night, and then uh uh my wife and daughter would be like, hey, how was training? I'm like, I won practice, and they would laugh and I go, they go, what? I go, well, I trained hard, I put in effort, and I didn't get hurt. And that's how I know I can win practice. So if you look at it, that's my easy metric, whatever you want to call it. I have two of them. That's it. Did I train hard and put in effort? If I did, that's good. Did I not get hurt? Boom, I won practice. Now let's do another way. Did I train hard? Yes. Did I get hurt? I did not win practice. And I probably hurt myself in the next practices also. Okay, now let's go the other flip side. Did I train hard? No. I just kind of showed up. And did I get hurt? No. You did not win. You basically just showed up. So, what what did you develop from that? If you do not put in that effort, I'm sorry to say, and these are those uh hard truths of grappling, you have to put in effort. There's just no way around it. And I think we we have gotten to that point of the lowest advice that you ever see online is just show up, bro, and it'll get better. No, you can show up a lot and still not get better. I I've seen it. I, you know, it's you, you if you you could show up for 10 years, you might get promoted because you're paying your dues, but that doesn't mean you get better. And that's why you see these posts on Reddit or this and that. I've been training 10 years and I still think. I'm a brown belt and I still don't know what I do. And a lot of it is kind of that, you know, they they kind of say it as a joke, but there's some truth to that. To me, if you're a purple belt, you're a brown belt, and you're saying, I'm not that good and I don't know what's going on. I would, I would kind of look at what you're doing when you're training. Did you put in that effort? And I'm I'm big into strength and conditioning these last couple years. And then it's like, do you see this, you know, I I go, I've been going to the gym for five years and I still not getting any gains. Well, you're still, are you still doing three sets of 10 of the same weight for five years? Are you still doing the same thing? No. Are you using progressive overload? Are you adding in weight? Are you making it harder? Are you training to failure? Do you know what training? How do you know what training the failure is if you never train to failure on that? You know, and you don't have to do it a certain way, but there has to be some effort involved in that. And that's the only way you're going to progress. And that's just, that's just kind of being in an effortful, ever-based sport. You know, that's that's what it is. Showing up is the is the is the bare minimum of a thing you could do. So you have to do that. So how do you win that practice? I win that in the same way my strength and condition. I go work out outside in my backyard. I did, you know, weighted dips, weighted push-ups, and I push myself and boom, I put in effort. Do my neck work, do this, I put in effort. Did I get hurt? No. Okay, I won that training session outside. You know, comparatively to maybe in the past, I go outside, I do, you know, 20 push-ups, mess around, this and that. I might have got some. I'm not getting that much though. You're gonna have to keep progressing. And strength and conditioning and grappling, skill acquis, it's all the same. It it's based on the same premise, you know, of putting in that effort and not getting hurt.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:42

It's such an wow, it's such a nice, simple mindset. And it it goes back almost like to the philosophy part of like, what is the foundational win of this practice? Putting in that effort, not getting hurt. I really like that intention. Uh, it like doesn't overcomplicate things. Like, no matter what, if that happens, you won. And then everything else, all the intention, intention makes it even better. You're learning even faster. Um, and for the colour.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:04

Well, yeah, real quick on that, uh, you met you know uh Alex Serner. He's on Instagram. He he does a really good strength and conditioning guy. I think he's a brown or black belt. Um uh he he has a lot of he's really good strength and conditioning guy for jujitsu. You know, check him out if you haven't. And he put a reel and he was doing like some uh Zercher squat and he put like I I don't, I didn't know the weight, 400, whatever. And he and he was like, hey, is this a rep or not? And he was boom, and he kind of almost got there and he put it down. And then people are like, Yeah, that's a rep. No, that's not a rep, that's a rep. And then I just commented and I said, rep, uh whether it's a rep or not, doesn't matter. You did actually get one max effort. And so adaptations were gained. And he's like, Exactly, that's real. That that's what it is, because he's all about, you know, getting to that level. So even if you didn't complete that rep, the effort he put into that is always going to be the positive. The adaptation. Are going to happen. So that next, and he didn't get hurt. So that next training session, maybe he does get that rep or not. It's the same way in grappling. You know, you may shoot that double leg and get stuffed and stuffed and stuffed again, and your face is smashed in the mat, but you picked up a lot of data. You may not get it next training session, but you might. And you wouldn't have got there without it in the beginning. So you you have to gauge. That's how I gauge uh how I get better. Is something I'm focusing on, have I gotten better at it? And you could kind of see that, but you're not going to see it in one session. That's why I used to I used to talk with a lot of people in the beginning of the whole uh ecological the debates, the the so bad debates, the so poor day debates. I'm like, people from a traditional approach, success a successful practice to them looks much different than a successful practice than what we do. They want to see did I show you a move and did you do that move in training? That is success to them. Oh, look, that person did the move I showed. Success. No. They did it, but can they do it in live sparring? Can they do it two days from now? Can they do it in two weeks? Could they do it against somebody bigger? Could they you're you're never gonna learn it from that one session? So if you if I train you a one constraint load of pressure session, I don't know what you're gonna learn. Learning is not, you may not. I don't know, but it's gonna be a cumulative effect over consistent effort over a long period of time. There is no training hack. There is no shortcut. It's consistent effort over a long period of time. At least that's what I've figured out after 20 something, 30 years of doing this, you know. It takes a lot of effort, you know, and that consistent effort over a long period of time.

unknown 1:07:44

Beautiful.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:45

Not just showing up. Yeah, and it's showing up the bare minimum.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:48

Right. Yeah, it's a beautiful way to put it. And it definitely shows, especially, man, you're 51 years old. It's it's it's before we start recording, I was like, I thought you were 40 something.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:57

But uh I say I'm I'm now I'm one year into my pride. Like I'm counting this as I'm counting this as I I like I'm saying, I had a I thought I coined a new term when I started training and doing all I don't call it a midlife crisis, I call it a midlife renaissance. And then I I thought I've could then I looked it up and I've seen that term used before, but it's true because I started doing different things, understanding, you know, um philosophy, all these other different things I try to learn on. And I, you know, I started, you know, drawing a little bit again with my daughter, just doing little different things, you know, just kind of expanding my repertoire of what I do. And it just started with, you know, just doing these type of things. You know, it's just it's it's an accumulative effort, you know, and I'm I'm trying to, I'm just trying to stay on the mats. And if I keep training hard and not getting hurt, you know, that's great. Listen, it's gonna happen. You can't stop injuries. You're you're gonna twist the knee, you're gonna do that. But not no anybody who tells you, oh, I know how to train without getting hurt, they're lying. They're just making it up. You know, like it's not possible. You know, things are gonna happen, but I'm gonna do the best I can to do it. I'm gonna try to stay in shape. I'm gonna try to develop myself. I'm gonna try to have good training, and then just we'll see what happens from there, you know.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:12

For uh people who want to know what's next or where they can go see you or follow you, where should they go?

SPEAKER_01 1:09:18

Uh I'm actually next Monday, I will be going up to Maine for uh the Globetrotters uh Main Camp. I do that once a year, and then uh then I also will be in Arizona again for the Globetrotters Arizona camp. That's in November. I believe there's still tickets on that. Um, it's a good time, a lot of training, uh, a lot of open mats, uh, a lot of different people to roll with, which is a lot of different people to roll with, is a lot of data. I I always encourage people to uh even if you have a really good Jimmy trainer, go to open mats. Go to these different things because you because you ever notice, I'm sure you've done it, you roll with the same people all the time, and the role kind of looks the same all the time. That's because we kind of default to what we know best. So it's up to you to take that self-intentioned attention and put it into play, take those losses, but you're gonna kind of change the role. So you could kind of do that. And what's a better way to do that than a bunch of people at, you know, 200 people on the maps, and you get to pick people from different parts of the world all over, and it's a really good environment that way. So that's what I'm doing. You could always catch me on Instagram. Uh, it's a kind of a mix of memes, uh, some fake motivation, uh, some just uh, you know, maybe talking some theory, maybe talking some things or show you my, you know, sometimes I throw stuff out on what I'm working on, or I'll throw out these things. Hey, here's some intention, attention for you to work on. Uh message me if you want. And then I always uh I'm always looking at the ecological dynamics for submission drop in Discord. There's a lot of good people on there. And it's if you're gonna come on it, just know those the people that are on it, they've put in the work, they've read the books, they did the study, and you you will learn something about these people. You know, there's a lot of people like if I think about this, I've been involved in this for, you know, over four years now, or or whatever it is. It's like it's a lot of effort, it's a lot of work. And I've this until this day, I have not gone backwards. Well, I call going backwards of showing the technique, drilling this. I still don't show you how to shrimp, I still don't show you how to do all that stuff. And trust me, you put in that effort, you will get better at this, and it's a fun way to train. Like, what's better than grappling than grappling? Like, this is what we're here for. So let's do it. Let's be in this environment and we could play all these different ways, and you can you could just understand what grappling's about. And it to me, it's it's it's uh the best expression of one person against another person without getting punched in the head, knee in the head, you know, you get some of that. You may you get busted up a little bit, but hey, that's life, right? You get busted up.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:00

Amazing. Thank you so much for sharing that. Thank you for coming back on the podcast. And uh, I'll put a link. No problem. Yeah, I'll put a link in the description for the Discord, uh, your Instagram, and then where people can go to see you in person. So thanks again, Rob.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:12

Yeah, awesome, man.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:14

Thank you.