Mark Bell's Power Project - Improve at BJJ Faster With THIS Method of Learning ft. Greg Souders || MBPP Ep. 1014

Episode Date: November 27, 2023

In episode 1014, Greg Souders, Mark Bell, Nsima Inyang, and Andrew Zaragoza talk about the Ecological approach to training jiu jitsu and how Greg's athletes at Standard Jiu Jitsu have been progressing faster and winning more matches with this approach. Follow Greg on IG: https://www.instagram.com/gdsouders/   Official Power Project Website: https://powerproject.live Join The Power Project Discord: https://discord.gg/yYzthQX5qN Subscribe to the Power Project Clips Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5Df31rlDXm0EJAcKsq1SUw   Special perks for our listeners below! The Athletic/Casual Clothes we're wearing! 🕺 ➢ https://vuori.com/powerproject to automatically save 20% off your first order at Vuori!   💤 The Best Cooling Mattress in the GAME! 🛌 ➢ https://www.eightsleep.com/powerproject to automatically save $150 off the Pod Pro at 8 Sleep!   🥩 HIGH QUALITY PROTEIN! 🍖 ➢ https://goodlifeproteins.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save up to 25% off your Build a Box ➢ Piedmontese Beef: https://www.CPBeef.com/ Use Code POWER at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150   Best STYLISH Barefoot Casual/Training Shoes! 👟 ➢https://www.vivobarefoot.com/us/powerproject to save 15% off Vivo Barefoot shoes!   🩸 Get your BLOODWORK Done! 🩸 ➢ https://marekhealth.com/PowerProject to receive 10% off our Panel, Check Up Panel or any custom panel!   Best 5 Finger Barefoot Shoes! 👟 ➢ https://Peluva.com/PowerProject Code POWERPROJECT15 to save 15% off Peluva Shoes!   Sleep Better and TAPE YOUR MOUTH (Comfortable Mouth Tape) 🤐 ➢ https://hostagetape.com/powerproject to receive a year supply of Hostage Tape and Nose Strips for less than $1 a night!   🥶 The Best Cold Plunge Money Can Buy 🥶 ➢ https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!!   Self Explanatory 🍆 ➢ Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1 Pumps explained:      You Need Greens in your Life 🥦 ➢https://drinkag1.com/powerproject Receive a year supply of Vitamin D3+K2 & 5 Travel Packs!   ➢ https://withinyoubrand.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off supplements!   ➢ https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off all gear and apparel!   Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ https://www.PowerProject.live ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject   FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell   Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ https://www.breakthebar.com/learn-more ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en   Follow Andrew Zaragoza on all platforms ➢ https://direct.me/iamandrewz   #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject

So unless you're like a real world beater, you're not going to have a lot of success when you first come to our gym. Even your guys that might be lower ranked? My guys perform very well against anyone. What's the concept that allows you guys to stay safer while doing live grappling? We're putting our students

in a bunch of different alignments each day so they're not getting any overuse injuries from doing the same type of movement. You guys who've trained have experienced this, man. Like everyone's trying to jam a circular peg into a square hole. That's the current model. Having someone tell me over and over again, this is just situational sparring nothing nothing special

i'm like go f**k yourself situational sparring has these positions what you're doing has like infinite amounts of situations what is your advice for the student wants to begin implementing some of this training approach into their own training as an individual find the class that would do most live sparring and set your own focuses of intention and attention. Set your own tasks. Power Project family, we've had some amazing guests on this podcast like Kurt Engel, Tom Segura, Andrew Hooperman. And we want to be able to have more amazing guests on this podcast. And you can help it grow by leaving us a quick rating and review on Spotify and iTunes. If you're listening to the podcast, just go ahead and give us a review.

Let us know how you dig it and help the podcast grow so we can keep growing with y'all and bring you amazing information. Enjoy the show. Yeah, this shit's too professional for me, fellas. I don't know what the fuck is going on. It doesn't matter. The good news is that nobody's listening. That's the good part. There's definitely no women. It's very, very dry out there. Well, hopefully the people who like what I have to say will watch your shit. It's kind of been a thing. Anything I'm on usually gets pre-downloaded. Either because people hate the fuck out of me or they like what I have to say. I actually have a shirt that says, I hate Greg Souders. And I left it on my table when I left the house yesterday morning.

Do you get a lot of hate from jujitsu community because of the way you teach? Because of the way I talk. The way you talk? Yeah, people don't like my personality. Is it your accent? Do I have an accent? I the way yeah people don't like my personality your accent do i have an accent i'm kidding i don't know like you don't like me make you self-conscious you got a massachusetts uh you're like i do what the fuck and i might start accidentally getting one you know it's like i don't know mark bogey's fucking witch magic on me now this weird

accent no actually i i don't know man like people started making fun of my hair recently and i'm Mark uses fucking witch magic on me. Now this weird accent. No, actually, I don't know, man. Like people started making fun of my hair recently. And I'm like, they said I had a perm. And I'm like, do you know what a fucking perm means, bro? Like I literally don't wash my hair for like seven days and I let it, however it comes out. Well, the question is how much did the perm cost? And how long did it take? Zero.

Oh, okay. Just like that. I wake up like this, man. Naturally curly. Has it always been like that. I wake up like this, man. Naturally curly. Yeah. Has it always been like that? For sure. So actually, when I was a little kid, I had big ring curls.

And then when I got my first haircut, my hair laid flat. So if my hair's dirty, it'll curl up. I think people are jealous. Honestly, he has very nice hair, so I can understand the jealousy. That's what I'm thinking. I'm thinking people are jealous out there. When I was 39, my hair was falling out. I'm like, yeah, fuck you.

But you got the muscles. It's all nice. Yeah, it helps. It helps. And'm like, yeah, fuck you. But you got the muscles. It helps. And the mustache. That's a good mustache. I have to compensate. Get some hair somewhere else, if you know what I'm saying. So why do you think people, they don't like the way you're talking about jiu-jitsu? They don't like where you're, I mean, isn't it a plus for everybody if the sport is advancing

and people are getting better? So people don't think what I have to say is advancing the sport. They think I'm just being a disruptor to be a disruptor. That's the kind of thing. You're just trying to sell something. That's exactly what I get. Oh, you're a used car salesman. Oh, you were a Lloyd Irvin student.

He taught you well. You're repackaging something that already exists. And it's like, why do you think I would be doing that? Like I let everybody know that my sole goal is to be the best juju coach I can possibly be and create the best students that i can possibly create so why the fuck do you think i would be telling you something otherwise because if you come near me i live in no other way like i my actions are directly tied to my words so i don't know why people think that and i think it because it sounds catchy it sounds all this just sounds good this just sounds good so and plus i mean our community is inundated with sales and marketing and talk about this all the time. So they're used to that, the new DVD, the new move,

the new fucking whatever. And so I'm just the new guy, right? I can tell without knowing you that you like live it. So it's gotta be annoying to hear that commentary about you, right? Oh, it's brutal. I mean, like I'm just a high school educated person. I didn't go beyond that. And so for me to start to learn this stuff, I had to learn how to read technical articles and it took me so much. It took me so much energy, you know? And it's like when someone says, Oh, you just made this up yesterday. You're making this shit up. It just like makes my work feel like you're stepping on it without actually putting any work to even know what I'm saying. So yeah, it's horrible. I hate the feeling. I put in a lot of effort, you know? But yeah. Did you study some of the history of jujitsu and stuff like that too?

Like anything, anything that I could, man, I was. I was obsessed with it. Like when I started this at 19, this became my life. So, you know, my first goal is to consume as much material around the subject as I could. Like the first day that I did jujitsu afterwards, I went to the local Barnes & Noble and every book that said jujitsu on it, I bought. Even if it was like old Japanese bullshit jujitsu, I had to know, man.

Like what's the fucking secret? The Japanese don't know what's up. Is that what you're saying? Didn't they invent it or no? Well – Am I way off? I don't know what I'm talking about. No, no, no, no, no.

When you say invented, so – You said they did bullshit jujitsu, so I'm just trying to – Oh, no, no. Okay. So the history of jujitsu is basically what works in a fight. That was the big idea, right? So the guy who created judo, which is what jiu-jitsu actually is. It's kind of the same thing, but the words mean different things.

So judo is like the way of gentleness. Jiu-jitsu is the art or the technique of gentleness. So the way signifies a whole lifestyle versus – and jiu-jitsu signifies just the action. I don't think Nsema's got that message. Do you think he's got that message, Andrew? About the – That it's the gentle way? Well – What are you talking about? Well, you know what?

Dude, I genuinely think he does. It's just his level of gentleness is just a lot higher than what my gentleness would be. No, no, you're just fragile. Exactly. You're a very fragile individual. Hey, if a 250-pound elite jiu-jitsu athlete is telling me that I'm too fragile,

I'm cool with it. I'm only a year in, white belt. I'm cool. But yeah, no, the mistake is to think gentle doesn't mean... Gentle, the way they talk about it, meant yielding. And for yielding, they were basically talking about efficiency. And so, I mean, again, I'm not trying to properly

translate Japanese because I don't fucking know what it means. But based on what I think they're trying to say is that we're trying to efficiently manipulate a body as best we can. And so it's the art of efficiency. Gentle, I think, is just the word they chose, but I think that's what they meant. You know, before we get into like the style of what you teach and kind of how you learned about the way you're currently instructing how to learn jujitsu, you mentioned, I didn't even know that you were coached by Lloyd Irvin. So I'm curious kind of how were you taught jujitsu and how long did you do it

that way? So from 2004 until 2013, I did it in the traditional way. So the traditional way is basically like you come to a gym, you do a warmup. After your warmup, you, you,

your coach shows you a series of techniques and you drill them and drilling being specific to static repetition, you know, the movement pattern over and over and over again, or a very, a variation of movement pattern over and over and over again, or a variation of movement pattern over and over and over again in a static, non-changing environment. That's how I learned jujitsu and that's how people traditionally learned it. So I did that from 2004 to 2013, you know, and I was obsessed because I bought in, right? Like I'm the type of dude that if I go to

a coach, I'm coming to you because you are an expert. So if my coach says to me, hey, we drill 250 repetitions a day, otherwise you're not going to be fucking good. So if my coach says to me, Hey, we drill 250 repetitions a day. Otherwise you're not going to be fucking good. So guess what I'm fucking doing? 250 to 500 repetitions a day. So I took it seriously. Um, it so seriously that Lloyd would send other guys to drill with me, like, yo, go drill with Greg. I'll drill with you anytime you want. Um, but anyway, I, there's a lot of reasons it wasn't working for me. And so when I got separated from that system, I decided to try to look at it a different way. I was more, I was more curious, like, okay, I was told this works, but what actually works? So I went searching. And by the time you said you went searching, you were already a, you've been doing it for

nine years. So you were like a black belt at the time. So, but I was a brown belt. Um, so yeah, so I, yeah, I had already had a lot of Jitsu experience. I competed, uh, trained every day in my life if I wasn't injured since 2004. And so, yeah, I had a lot of experience with what was going on, but I didn't feel like I understood it the way I wanted to. So that's really interesting because if you're taught something for almost a decade in a specific way to then go out of your way to try to understand it in a totally different way, that's odd. You know what I mean? It's really cool, but most people don't do that. So why did you feel that? What holes did you see that made you have to go search for something else? So one thing, they used to call me Mr. Glass. I got injured all the time.

And now that I look back on why I get injured all the time is because my volume intensity exceeded my recovery. So I wasn't able to recover fully. And so I felt like on top of that, all the stuff I was doing wasn't contributing to a positive change in my abilities, you know, technically or physically. So I was already sort of trying to find more efficient ways to do things so I could avoid injury. And sometimes I would have to break the protocols I was given to do that. So I guess I was sort of primed to search because I knew that you could do things in a different way. And so when I was left on my own, I was left on my own, my own thoughts. Like, well, what are you really doing, Greg? And I'm a type of dude, I like to ask lots of questions. I don't like to get lots of answers. So I think,

you know, we're a culture obsessed with answers, but I just see things a different way. I'm obsessed with questions. I want to know what the problem actually is. I want to be able to define it more clearly. So anyway, I just took that attitude towards now I'm on my own. Now I'm coaching. Now I'm telling people what I think they should be doing when they come to my hour class. And I wanted to make sure I was doing them justice. Did I really know jujitsu? Did I really know how to coach? I don't know. I don't know. So I went searching. Like I said, that's, that's the reason I, I, I don't believe doing what you're told. Yeah, I was told this, but was he right? Did you feel that through asking questions and starting to build up answers and starting to come up with some of your own concepts?

Do you feel that you were less injury prone? Yes. And maybe you've noticed that in others as well? 100%. We don't have a high injury rate at my gym, for example. And we do nothing but live work. Like I said, our minimum volume for our competitors is eight, ten-minute rounds a day. And a group of my guys trained seven days a week you

know so yeah i mean i got i felt like i got injured less i think it was the variation what's the main difference like it seems like uh am i wrong in saying it's like assigned fighting what say it one more time like assigned fighting like you're you're giving them uh something like fight over or fight for as opposed to like what's the difference between that and drilling. Okay. So two people engaging in the grappling context is a highly variable thing. There's lots of stuff going on in between those two bodies that relates to what they're trying to accomplish. Now, our main mechanism for increasing skill in this area was to have people do a movement that we thought would solve this problem over and over and over again.

But when you watch a match, you don't see that. a movement that we thought would solve this problem over and over and over again and so but when you watch a match you don't see that so why is the mode of training why does it look nothing like what's actually happening in a live match um so yeah sorry i kind of lost train of thought yeah i was just saying um you know what's the main difference between uh the way that you teach uh you know because it sounds it sounds to me like some of the gist of what I got from how you teach, it sounds like you're boxing up some information saying you guys fight kind of for this in this game, in this setting versus the drilling. What's the difference between the drilling and what you're proposing? Because the focus is on creating the outcome, not the

movement. So in a traditional drilling sense, we try to use rote repetition of a movement pattern to try to perfect a movement pattern, but the movement pattern cannot be decontextualized. So why we move is directly related to what we're trying to do with that movement. So we have it backwards. We try to recreate what we think we see is happening. So instead, the way we train is we give them a task, some outcome that we want, and we let the body organize around how to most efficiently reach that endpoint. A simple way to explain it is condition over position, effect over aesthetic. So the way that we train is trying to teach someone how to have an effect over a person as it relates to the outcome we're

trying to achieve. And so we don't care what it looks like. So we're not trying to replicate the same movement. We're trying to get the same outcome, no matter how variable it may look. So again, the traditional method just suggests that it's the movement itself that is the magic. What I'm suggesting that it's how we go about solving the problem that is the magic. So I think the one thing that a lot of people would wonder, especially when they're going to a normal gym, because even where I train, it's been like that where, you know, you're shown a move, you drill the move. There's specific training involved too, and then you spar. But someone was going to wonder, well, how does a new person learn jujitsu and how do they learn these movements if you're not telling them how to do these movements? Like let's say you're trying to instruct them to do a Kimura, but you're not showing them specifically the steps to a Kimura.

So one would wonder how does one then learn, right? Okay, so we have to understand the function of the Kimura. So I don't teach the Kimura. I teach how to twist an arm. So there are many ways we can twist an arm. So a Kimura is a specific alignment that we use that word to define that twists arms. So again, I'm not trying to get them to replicate the movement of the Kimura. I'm trying to get them to understand the conditions that need to be set to create the effect of twisting an arm.

So it's the way you look at it that messes them up. So a coach thinks, oh, they need to learn the Kimura. Well, what is a thing outside of its function? Why must we learn it? If we can create that function in variable ways, is that not true learning instead? Right? So why do I need this specific grip to get this specific outcome? What if I can do it three other ways?

So now what we teach people is that arms are twistable then. So let's say I'm a new student. Well, we'll put them in the Kimura because this is a stereotypical grip that people know about that creates the opportunity of twisting the arm. Great. We'll start there. But then we'll explore the conditions and functions around it or the effects around it. And then we set up different ways to have experienced that same thing, uh, in different alignments. And so now you start to develop a relationship with how your person can create

opportunity to, and then ultimately twist an arm outside of that one specific movement pattern. That's just one way to do it. And so again, it's not that one way that we want to teach. It's any way that we want to teach. And the really cool thing about this is that it doesn't box somebody into being able to do it the way that their coach instructs them because their coach learned from a coach who taught them a certain way. And if maybe their coach has gone out of their way to learn many things, maybe their coach is showing them a few different ways, but those aren't all the ways that they're going to do a specific movement. But the way that you're instructing this, you give the student the freedom to attempt many different ways to get towards a specific outcome, which might have them stumble upon five or six different ways that maybe their coach doesn't even do. For sure.

Well, even more simply that our body only functions relative to the intention we give it so what we're teaching someone is how to organize their body to create that function whether it's variable or not so let's say there is only one way to twist an arm let's say the kimura is it again we want to give them opportunity to learn how to twist arms so if that's the specific grip fine that's fine but how do you tell your elbow which position needs to be and to create this pressure how do we how do we tell each other that and how do i show you that you know what i mean yeah that's the question how would i do that does me explain with you elbow positioning affect your elbow positioning in a positive way how many times have you had a coach like no you got to put it at this

angle this angle but you still can't get it but how many times have you done something your own way without an instruction and had success? It's happened a few times, yeah. Right. It's because the way you perceive the world is a relationship. So your body is interacting with what's in front of it in real time. You're picking up information given to you from the environment in real time, and you're using that to organize into something that you're trying to accomplish based on an intention. And so we're just keeping training true to that idea. We're creating those opportunities for our

students by getting them started somewhere and allowing them to self-organize into that outcome we want from that somewhere we get them to start in. Do you ever like find yourself having to interject though? Because I'm just thinking when I first started, there was kind of a similar situation, not a similar situation, but it was like, like hey here's how to do an arm bar oh and live rounds and i had no idea what i was doing did everything wrong rolled the wrong way uh you know did the exact opposite of what i'm supposed to do um so if you were to see somebody doing that like do would you have to like interject and then if you do like how does that you just let them figure out what am i what am i interjecting for, right?

So we have this misconception that the mess needs to be taken out. The mess is like a comparator. So it's like noise versus signal, right? So all the shit that's wrong needs to be present to find what's right. And it's through those attempts that we attune to the thing that gets us

to achieve the outcome that we want. And so we have to be comfortable with that mess. We have to let it exist because that's what's guiding the student towards that outcome. So if I step in over and over again and keep trying to not to develop that context in which the movement is necessary for, you're going to miss that rich source of information, even if it causes a failure at first, because that failure is necessary for the attunement process to happen. Good philosophy being kicked around right here. Well, I mean, life lessons, really. Well, I mean – Life lessons, really.

Well, I mean it's all tied in, right? Like whether we're intending to do – to twist arms or to do something else, it's sort of the same thing. It's your relationship with the world you're acting within and that intention guides you towards the information you need to act in whatever way that you want. And trial and error is a necessary part of it. Do you believe that fighting is innate in some ways? Innate in what way? What do you mean? part of it do you believe that fighting is innate in some ways innate in what way what do you mean uh like if you just had two guys just uh square off and like maybe not like fight fight but some sort of uh have them like wrestle and uh go at it and they they know nothing yeah um and then

you break them up for a few minutes and say do it again like i think they're gonna know like how to get like um person is going to be able to get an advantage on another person in some ways. And one person is going to be able, one person might not be able to, but I think if you are to communicate and to start to say, well, I think I was able to do this because I'm stronger. And the other person might say, well, actually, you know, I grabbed your leg this way and this is how I tripped you. Do you think, it sounds to me like a lot of your coaching is almost like watching, observing, letting the people do wrong, letting them do right.

And then just intervening, I guess, with a path that might be more optimal. That's right. But who's to say that, like, I realized jujitsu is such a skill and wrestling is a skill that could subdue somebody to the point where they literally they can't move hardly any parts of their body at all. For sure. Regardless of how strong they are, regardless of how skilled they might be in some other sports, their their strength is completely nullified in that circumstance. But for the most part, do you think that like a lot of just regular folks can learn fighting even without much instruction? Absolutely. I mean that's how we got here. So it was the question – So it sounds like the way that you think sounds that way.

For sure. It was the question that got us here, not the answer. We didn't know what fighting looked like. So when Djurgor Okano decided to ask that question, what happens in a real fight if we just let two people go at it? And if we see what happens, what can we train every day with full power without hurting each other that allows us to get better at this fight thing, whatever it looks like. And that's where we started. And then, so we started with that live training. So that the technology that Jigoro Kano gave us was Randori. It literally means live practice. So he got rid of kata which is means like a dancer

and agreed upon interaction which we call drilling so so the the foundation upon interaction yeah so so that's what he got rid of and he created a live environment okay so we need to go live but we need to do it safely so that we can get outcomes without breaking each other's bodies and so he gave us that and then we reversed it it's like because, because, you know, we want to sell this to a larger mass. We're like, let's do the agreed upon thing again. But it really was the question of what happens in a fight. They let it happen. They took the information present in front of them and they tried to do something about

it. You know, they created ways to go about it that they learned from the fight itself at watching, experiencing it. And they, a bunch of guys got involved and sort of, you know their experience uh so to speak a little bit like fight club well it truly can you imagine back in you know mid-1800 japan like yeah fuck yeah even uh even the gracies right when the gracies went to other dojos or i believe you know in the old school penny saver which is not a thing anymore they put advertisements in there one of the uh one of the uncles of hoist i believe put an ad in there and it said want a broken leg for sure question mark and it's like you put up 5k we'll put up 5k and let's see who's better and they would they'd

have videos i mean they have videos of them fighting people uh on a random beach somewhere well that's what got me started actually i saw the gracies in action i saw those tapes and i was like holy shit i'm gonna beat people up, too. I'm going to go do this. So, yeah, man. I mean, how do you test your product? That blew my mind when I started seeing some of that. I was like, what? This doesn't make any sense.

I don't understand. I just saw a guy that's really undersized in comparison to this other guy who looked like a lifter or something like that. And the guy just got – it was like nothing. For sure. I don't know if it was hoist or who was in the video, but they just kind of climbed on the guy's back like a snake and choked him out. And it was like, wait a second, what happened? Like, I didn't even, I didn't even understand what happened.

I didn't even know the guy got choked out. What was, yeah, right here, check it out. So what was our perspective of a real fight before the world got to see what a real fight looked like? Right. Yeah. You know, big guy beats small guy. Okay.

We knew that. So then if you have big muscles, you're the big guy so you probably would beat small guy. And we didn't know how it played out. But now, once we saw somebody who knew how a fight played out and organized their self around what they knew to be true, we got, we could see this beautiful

quality of small guy manipulating big guy or, you know, passive seeming guy manipulating aggressive guy. So yeah, this, I remember this shit. This is crazy, right? I've never seen this. Oh, it's hilarious too, because it's actually really bad jujitsu, but it's still effective. And that's actually a greater point. So the idea of optimization or rightness and wrongness is on a spectrum. So the only spectrum we need to be concerned with is effectiveness. So we have an intention we want to set out to do,

and the question we ask ourselves, are we effective at reaching this intention? We can't be obsessed with how it looks or how it comes out. We need to be obsessed with this effectiveness first. And this over time, we can take what we learn from being effective, and we can transition it into efficient, becoming better at what we do, like doing things in a shorter amount of time or with less energy.

Did some of this come to be where you were getting your ass kicked? Me? Oh, fuck. Did I? Yeah like were you frustrated with where you were at you were like man there's got to be more to this you know the truth is i was in a room full of really fantastic grapplers like you know coming from lloyd's room everybody in there was tough you know dj jackson keenan cornelia's jt jt torres used to fuck me i mean oh my god he's beat my ass senseless you know know what I mean? And I would say that because of my physical quality, I was a little lower on the totem poles than the other guys. Like, you know, I was a smart guy that remembered everything

and read a bunch of fucking books and blah, blah, blah. So I had value there, but like, I wasn't very robust. That's why they called me Mr. Glass. And so that was actually what frustrated me the most. Like not the fight. I love fighting, getting my ass kicked or otherwise, but I hated tearing my knee every two fucking weeks or tearing a quad muscle. And it's like, doing this so anyway i was more frustrated with my physical

incapabilities versus the technical ones because i i was a a decent grappler you know it was not great by any means but you know i could exist in that room you know i have a question about that because you did mention that you were getting injured a lot earlier and i i don't know lloyd's room but having seen uh like some of the people that have come from there and seeing some training footage like they train hard for so that's an understanding thing but you also train hard and you mentioned that yourself and your grapplers don't get injured as often so what's the concept that allows you guys to stay safer while doing live grappling because like you're you're not drilling as much which is like we said drilling is agreed upon you're going live but your suit's getting injured less why yeah so

it has to do with two things so one is variability so we're putting our students in a bunch of different alignments each day so they're not getting any overuse injuries from doing the same type of movement pattern over and over and over again so yeah you know what i mean they're not doing the same like rep you know and even a lightweight if you just if you just took a uh you know a light uh weight and you just fucking pumped that shit every day you start developing problems you know what i mean so now and don't lose your train of thought something that just came to mind and you please don't lose your train of thought but like because your students are moving in such variable ways they have more options to deal with problems that they come across whereas someone who's drilling something in a specific way every time they go against or But like because your students are moving in such variable ways, they have more options to deal with problems that they come across.

Whereas someone who's drilling something in a specific way, every time they go against or try to pass a certain way and it doesn't work, they have no other options. And then maybe because they don't have other options, injury occurs. So that's like that's – I mean it's so simple but fuck. It makes so much sense. That's right. So I'm going to try to not lose my train of thought. No, you're good. You're good.

We can go around it all you want. There is no you're good. You're good. We can go around it all you want. There is no train of thought. We just go. Stay off the rails. We're all set. There's no script. Lloyd, I mean, if you look at – Lloyd's guys are very good at what we call spamming moves. Because of the way that we trained, I mean, Lloyd's guys are incredibly physically conditioned and mentally conditioned.

And they have a good culture of camaraderie and belief in themselves and you know results are all that matter fucking fight fight fight so you get a great quality but they will do the same move to you whether it's available or not over and over and over again and you see the quality still in their current athletes um so yeah that's a little bit tough on the body that's a little bit that's a little bit hard to deal with okay the body the body doesn't like that amount of uh sam. It likes difference and we want to give it some difference, you know? And so, yeah, so that rote repetition can damage the body even at a low energy, even though we're not doing it intensely. Even just the repetitions themselves will cause weakness in the structure.

And then now you put that against intense physical hard training. That's a lot of work for the body to do in a single day. And if you do that over and over and over and over again, you start to wear out the system pretty quickly, you know, especially for someone like me, who's not very robust for whatever reason, genetically or otherwise. So we have to be cautious, you know, cause not everyone's the same. So we can't put them all through the same training. They got to, there's got to be variability. Uh, the second thing is, is the constraints. So constraints are a tool that we use to guide action. So a constraint, uh, in the

academic sense, cause it can be used, you know, colloquially to mean like holding someone still in the academic sense, because it can be used colloquially to mean like holding someone still. In the academic sense, it just means option limiter or limiter of options. So I constrain the ways you can solve the problem to kind of give you a generalized focus that you can operate within. And so this allows variation, but in a controlled sense. So like when I'm dealing with new players and I'm teaching an arm lock, having them start in an arm lock with just staying on top and holding your partner down and trying to extend the arm, even though, oh, it's dangerous.

They don't know it. Well, it's constrained so much that they're not going to do anything crazy because they have a, they're working within a space that's defined that has a starting point and end point and they can explore all the in-between. So there's not that randomness that sometimes causes a injury, you know, like random pulling or falling down, you know. It's a boxed idea. The other person knows that they're going to be doing some sort of bending or twisting of the arm.

That's right. And the other person knows they're going to gamify it, right, by trying to get out of that hold. Yeah. So we use the lie of resistance to struggle the unagreed upon engagement that it's not cooperative. That's what a fight is. So we are fighting. So that must be present. That's very important for the system. Not consensual. That's right. Yeah. Do I joke about that or do I not? Of course. I think we just did. I don't fucking know, man. No, man, I've made this dumb joke on a fucking discord and I got almost got hung for it. And that was a, it was just a joke. I was just teasing a guy about like letting his wife come into his defenses. And I, I'm going to say this, not fucking who cares. And it wasn't even that bad. I was just teasing a guy about letting his wife come to his defenses. And I'm going to say this.

Fuck it. Who cares? And it wasn't even that bad. I just said, I stopped listening to women when I left my mom's house. And that turned into, I got crushed for it. And I was just joking. It's a joke. But I was like, dude, if you were gay, I would have said I stopped listening to men when I left my dad's house.

I was like, the really thing is appealing to some authority that has control over you. Keep digging in. And you did it. Hey, guys, and Seamus said I could say whatever I wanted. That's what he said, man. It's his fault. It's still your choice. I'm joking.

Greg's like, thanks. I'm on my island now. Appreciate it. I know. They took me out and let's all go together. And then they jumped back in the fucking boat and left. And I'm just like, thanks. I'm on my island now. Appreciate it. They took me out and they're like, let's all go together. And then they jump back in the fucking boat and left and I'm just like that guy. I don't mind though.

Do you still rely on drills? Somebody's just not getting something sloppy. No, we like sloppiness. It's all good. It's all good. Searching is learning. So the struggle is necessary. I don't want to minimize the struggle as it relates to like trial and error.

I want to minimize the struggle as in search criteria. So I want to put you in an environment that I know if you search long enough, something will come out based on my personal experience, because that's what I am drawing from. And then I want to let you kind of mess around. And then I'm going to praise what I think is going in the right direction and then maybe correct when you're not. But feedback does not have to be given by an instructor as often as people think. to praise what I think is going in the right direction and then maybe correct when you're not. But feedback does not have to be given by an instructor as often as people think.

There's actually studies to support that in short term, feedback increases performance, but in long term, feedback decreases performance. So the frequency at which you give it. That's the way I coached a lot of times and people would say, you don't say anything. Yeah. I'm like, because you're the one that needs to do the work. That's right. I can only give you like small instruction.

If I give you too much, I'm really going to fuck you up. You're exactly right. And studies show that this is actually true. This is a real phenomenon that occurs. And so it's just learning how to manage this whole system and use what we say to our athletes appropriately. So, yeah, so like the mess is necessary. We want them to use trial and error. We want them to engage.

But we want to guide them along the process. And the way that we guide is with constraints or task focuses, not explicit instruction. Do this, put your hand here, put your leg here, because that will work itself out. Because you put your hand where the hand needs to go. You put your knee where the knee needs to go based on how it relates to your intended task outcome or the outcome of what you're doing. So that works itself out. But you do have to create the opportunity for it to work out. Do you understand what I mean? So it's not telling them to figure it out. You're giving them a place to search and their body is figuring it out. You know, they're,

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Guys, there's endless stuff for you on their website that just looks so good and performs so well. How can they get it? You guys can get it over at Viori.com slash Power Project. That's V-U-O-R-I dot com slash Power Project. And you guys receive 20% automatically when you go to that. Links down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. Why do you think you fell in love with those jujitsu, those early day Gracie Academy

videos? What drew you to that? So I was kind of a little street kid, you know what I mean? I was left alone a lot from six years old until adulthood. That's a long period of time. So I was always running the streets and fucking around.

I grew up in a subsidized housing area with a bad crew. And so we were all like raised by our moms and left to ourselves. And so, you know, we got into some shit. And I liked fighting. Like I liked confrontation. Like even as an early child, like, you know, Greg does not play well with others. Greg does not respect authority. That was kind of like the trope of my existence, you know.

So fighting naturally just drew me in. And I was like, oh, this looks great. Plus, I loved martial arts movies in the 80s, i was like fuck they were the best like i was obsessed all those old old uh movies everyone's on steroids and everyone's talking those are the those are the glory days that sounds like you're dreaming man yeah right yeah but no i so anyway that just drew me to it and when i saw like real fighting i was like this is interesting because i like to fight me and my friends would get to bed together in our backyards we literally beat the shit out of each other and i found that enjoyable so and then when i when i oh yeah yeah us too all right yeah

right guys yeah yeah all the time guys okay well see like man like you guys are like like jack dudes like i was like i'm skinny now but i was fucking i was like i was skinny but i was aggressive you know what i mean so it's like let's go so i just enjoyed it and then when i found there was I was like, I'm skinny now, but I was fucking, I was like, I was skinny, but I was aggressive. You know what I mean? So it's like, let's go. So I just enjoyed it. And then when I found there was an outlet for it, I went towards that outlet. So I did the typical thing like everyone else did, karate, taekwondo, but I didn't like it because I didn't spar. My mom would be like, why didn't you want to go again?

I'm like, because we just kicked the pads. I don't want to kick the pads. I want to kick each other. And so anyway, I found jiu-jitsu. Shitty coach having you kick pads. I know, right to kick each other. And so, anyway, I found jiu-jitsu. You're a shitty coach having you kick pads. I know, right? What an asshole. What do these, like, backyard fights look like?

Do you fight? I mean, because you're two friends. Or is it like a little wrestling and some punches and stuff? I don't know how you guys grew up, but when you grow up, a bunch of fucking hood kids, like, confrontation is nothing. So, like, getting in fights on the regular is normal. Like, we would have a disagreement over a video game and turn it into a fist fight. So it's like, that was normal shit.

So, like, when we did it on agreed-upon terms, it was okay. I mean, if someone fell down and got hurt, we wouldn't just bludgeon each other to death, you know? So we wouldn't got bag gloves, man. Like, the little shitty, like, bag gloves. And then we took, like, an old, like, hose, and that was our ring. And we, like, wrapped around. We would just a hose and that was our ring. And we like wrapped around,

we would just go like in the middle. If you quit. Any of those other guys still fighting? No. Do any of them do jujitsu or anything like that? Nope. Actually, I was joking.

We, this one kid that used to hang out with us, his name was Sean O, right? I remember this kid. He was like a small Asian cat, super aggressive. We used to set up these fights in this dude's house.

So one night we had this like fight against his D one, uh, football player in this high school state chant wrestler. And like 60 people show up to this dude's living room to watch this fight go down. And we could select. It sounds amazing by the way. Yeah.

So we would select like who would go with who and actually fought that kid Sean O that night. And he straight ankle locked me. I still remember. I didn't even know what a straight ankle lock was. Right. That kid I think still does jujitsu, but man,

no, I, I, I'm the only one. Did anyone like know how to fight ish? Oh yeah. I mean, I mean, I mean, just jiu-jitsu. But man, no, I'm the only one. Did anyone like know how to fight-ish? Oh, yeah. I mean – Just from doing it?

For sure, man. Okay. Put guys in there. They try to tackle each other, strangle each other, punch each other. I mean like we all get the idea. I mean like males are competitive with one another and we know what causes damage. You know what I mean? We've been throwing each other around since we were little boys and shit.

I mean the ones who do. I mean the computer guys don't get that beautiful experience. But fuck them. Let me ask you about this um because a lot of people are probably wondering how you got to thinking about jujitsu the way you do and you've referenced that there's a lot of things that you read to to think in this process you know what i mean um so i mean before we get on what are some things that people can read? Cause I talked to Chris and he said, there's multiple texts that even he's like, he's gone through that help people understand the ecological type of approach to learning,

not just jujitsu, but learning in general. Well, it's not about jujitsu. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a theory of learning. How, how, how, what is behavior? Why does behavior come out? You know, what is it? What is it, what does an organism do for behavior to emerge? And it studies that, right? It's really a theory of information. So how we use information to organize, that's what the theory is. So ecological psychology or ecological dynamics is a theory of how organisms use information to organize behavior. And I'm loosely just giving you an easy description of it.

Gotcha. So we can apply that to sport because it tells us something. It tells us that individuals performing tasks in environments is the precursor for behavior. And that intention is what guides that. So as an organism intends to do things in environments, they use behaviors to fulfill their intentions. And where they focus their attention, you know, all the information that they're exchanging between themselves and the environment and where they're searching,

produces a quality within that behavior or it helps it emerge in some way or another. So I'm using that theoretical model to help inform how I create practice. There are other coaches that are doing this too. I was just the first, and I say first loosely

because who fucking knows, but to apply it to jujitsu, right? So anyway, you can just look up ecological approach, ecological psychology, the first, and I say first loosely because who fucking knows, but to apply it to jujitsu, right? So anyway, you can just look up ecological approach, ecological psychology, ecological dynamics. It's written from so many different perspectives, but the professor that I learned most from is a guy named Rob Gray, Dr. Rob Gray. And that's who I've shared with about on any podcast, how we learn to move and learning to optimize movement are the two books.

But yeah, there's, there's tons out there, man. So, um, so reading that it's kind of, it kind of helped me put my focus on what was happening. So if the idea is that organisms perform tasks in environments and that's the precursor to behavior, well, I need to look at what's happening in the body-to-body grappling environment. And so as I looked out, I saw things happening. But I saw like it wasn't just arm locks and knee cuts. There was other shit going on. And I've described this before. So I needed to create a language that allowed my student to adhere to what was actually happening, not around what we thought was happening.

And so the merging of what I was learning from the ecological approach and what I understood about jiu-jitsu, I had to create a new language to describe that relationship. And that's how I got to thinking about it the way that I do now. So much of what you're saying right there reminds me of what we talk about so much on this podcast when we talk about people being obese. And we hear the message all the time. Those people need to move more. Those people are lazy. But they're driven by their psychology. They're driven by their biology. They're driven by their biology.

They're driven by, they are making those choices and those moves via all the other things that are going on in their environment. 100%. Daily. And then the same thing could obviously be said for jujitsu. You put somebody in certain holds or certain moves, they're going to have no choice to either have something broken,

be tapped out or choked out, right? I mean, you get in a certain position and now the person, their options are limited. So that person that's stuck on the couch that we don't, we're having a hard time relating to because we're like, man, you need to, can't you at least go on a walk? And I don't think that we have the ability to totally understand how that person feels. You can't. Maybe the same way like if someone like Nsema or yourself, you guys know how to put a lot of pressure on. Someone your size or someone – Josh Setledge over here, he's not a very – he's not a huge guy. He's not a heavy guy.

He could put pressure on me that would make me tap without me being in any sort of hold. For sure. And people would watch that and go, I don't understand what happened. Why did Mark make that decision? It's like, I can't breathe. Yeah, well, so all this stuff you're talking about, we call constraints. So we basically look at the constraints present

in any given environment as being, or excuse me, as being individualistic constraints, task constraints, or environmental constraints. So your example with the obese person, why they might be making those decisions and causing them to be that way could be based on their individual constraints, things about them psychologically, physiologically, their genetic predisposition, all these things. And so when you're dealing

with someone who's already of that type, we have to take all of that into consideration when we talk about behavior, because it's all related to one another. You can't parse it out individualistically. It's very specific to everything about that person, their past, their now, their current future, all of it needs to be considered. And this is the same thing with sport too. So as a person starts engaging in a task, certain tasks in that sport will constrain them to certain behaviors, which will also be affected by their individual constraints. So it's a whole dynamic system that's interacting at all times. And the way that I coach is trying to understand this system so that I can best learn how to manipulate this system to help people learn

jujitsu in a more holistic way too. A really cool thing that I, that I'm also realizing about this approach is that it, it allows anybody with any type of physical constraints to figure out a way to get to the end solution or the to solve the problem you give them so if someone has just debilitating lower back pain or a knee issue that they literally like they just it stops them from moving in certain ways well you gave them a problem that they need to solve this game right get i don't know pin the slayer whatever whatever that game is right Right. And most people might be able to do it in one specific way that maybe they bend their knee and they drive down

or whatever, but this person, they can figure out something with their physiology to get to that end goal because of their physical limitations. For sure. So it opens that, it opens a lot of that up. And then, you know, there's the discrepancies of like height, leg length, all these things, which will allow different types of people to come to the same type of solution, you know, versus just the one avatar. Right. Right. And that's what all matters. And this is, it's needed too, because you guys who've trained have experienced this, man. Like everyone's trying to, you know, jam a, you know, circular peg into a square hole that that's the current model. And so they're not taking enough about what's happening into, uh, into their consideration when designing a practice. People don't even know these exist. It's like,

coach, I can't do this. Well, try harder. Well, you're not paying attention. There's all these other reasons. But some of those reasons are inborn in the individual or in the moment or in the task itself. So learning how to manipulate what's present to help your student reach these things, whether it be lower back pain, whether it be leg length, whether it be belly size, what the fuck ever. That's a big one. But if you know that all these things, whether it be lower back pain, whether it be leg length, whether it be belly size, what the fuck ever. That's a big one. But if you, yeah, if you know that all these things are present,

then movement makes more sense because now we understand that there's a context by which people are engaging in that's affecting this movement. So if we know that, we know then what to manipulate or at least where to search for

what to manipulate. And we're not doing it from this blind, just because I was taught this way or just because this is optimized or because John Danaher said it. And I'm making fun of John Danaher. I'm choosing him because he's like the authority right now. So, um, yeah, so yeah, we, we, we need to understand more about what's going on so we can do a better job. And I think this approach allows us to do that, or at least take more into consideration when deciding what to tell somebody about what they

should or shouldn't be doing. Yeah. Something that I, I mean, I find interesting and I doubt this is where you were cause you seemed like when you started jujitsu, even at Lloyd Irvin and nine years in when you left that place, it seems that you still had a pretty decent level of understanding of jujitsu. do a lot of things really well, but ask me to explain conceptually why what I just did works really well. I'd, I'd, I'd really have to think about, okay, fuck. Well, I know what I did and I could do it in many different ways, but to explain to you the basis of like, I needed to pin this and I don't have that. And it's, it's almost embarrassing to me, but it's also probably because of the, the, the, the way that I've kind of, I don't know, learned it, you know? And that's, I want to say, this isn't any dig at my coaches or anything like that because my coach is great and his students also, like his students are awesome. But I can tell that just like my jujitsu might be good, but my ability to explain it is not where it definitely should be. There are different things. And so we need to consider that.

There's actually this thing I wanted to talk about on a podcast that I haven't. Did you guys watch the documentary about Michael Jordan and the 96 Bulls that was on Netflix? Yeah. There's a spot where Dennis Rodman is talking about how he became a good rebounder. And people are making fun of it. They may even put silly music on the back. But I thought it was genius. I'm dead serious.

He was like, well, what I did to understand the relationship he didn't say i'm saying these are my words between the ball the rim and thing better what i did is i had someone throw throw basketballs at the thing and he's like when i knew like a ding here meant this and everyone's like to go through to make a goofy thing and i'm like do you know how genius that is he was attuning his senses he knew exactly where the ball was going to be exactly so he did that so he couldn't explain it to you his it was ding dong bang boom but he could do it yeah you know what i mean so it's a different thing being able to analyze and articulate what you're looking at has nothing to do with your ability to do it this is a misconception that we need to kill right away i mean john danner is a

beautiful at analyzing explaining movement patterns in our sport. Right. But he has a hip issue. He has a knee issue. He can't physically perform those things. And maybe he was really good when he was in his 30s or something. He did have his injuries. But either way, the relationship between what he can do and what he can know, there is none. He can know more than he can do. And people can do it the other way too.

You can do more than you can know. So it's a skill you'd have to practice. Yeah. So how many times have you sat down and analyzed yourself to shit? You know what I mean? Like I'm a naturally anxious and thoughtful person. So when I engage in something, I obsess. Like I lose sleep over it.

So if I'm thinking about a guard pass, even back before I knew what the ecological approach was and knew how to analyze things what I would consider to in a more optimized way, I was still obsessing over it. I was still trying to define what was happening. So I was inadvertently practicing the skill of understanding before I knew that I was doing that. So again, it's a skill like everything else. So please don't be ashamed that you can do something you can't explain. Most people are like that. That's the thing, right? I just took up the mantle to try to explain shit.

And I still do a fucking bad job sometimes, man. How long have you been coaching in this way? In this way specifically? So since I opened my school in 2014. So the way I've been using it has kind of been a little bit different. So at first I just was reading information and trying it on myself. I was trying to create little tasks and focuses for myself to see like what effect it had on me so I could develop an understanding of what the science was saying because I really didn't understand it at first. And then my second way I started

utilizing it was on the people that were almost dedicated, the people who were there all the time. So when you're reading some of this information and you're going through some of these books and stuff, are you connecting the dots and saying like, maybe the way I'm instructing or maybe the way I have learned, like maybe, maybe the, maybe it's not correct or not optimal. Yes. I mean, that's, that's kind of what it was when I learned about the concept of self-organization, about how organisms self-organize. I was like reading this and I was like,

oh shit, that sounds kind of interesting. I mean. What did that feel like? Would that like fucking set you on fire? Yeah. You get like fired up. It's crazy. It's crazy.

So it's weird. So like I get like this intellectual excitedness. I'll shake. Like this sounds stupid, but I'll get so pumped up about something I'm reading because it stimulates me intellectually

that I'll actually have like an excited feeling. You know what I mean? I get it. I read a paper the other day, The Muddle of Anticipation. It's a pretty hard fucking paper. And like I was fucking jacked. I talked about it for like three days.

I'm like, this guy's a genius. Listen to this shit. You know? So, yeah, I get pumped about it. So I feel like there's lots of information out there as coaches we're not using. And these scientists are doing a lot of hard work to kind of present to us what they're trying to figure out about the world. And we, as coaches, can take this and we can run with it. We can go right from even a small understanding directly to application. And a lot of these ecological psych researchers are trying to

convince coaches to do that. They think that the relationship between the athlete and the coach and the researcher has to be more connected because they each have a job that each benefit from. So the researcher is trying to figure out what the fuck is happening in the world. The coach is trying to figure out what the fuck is happening with his athlete. And the athlete's trying to figure out what the fuck am I doing? So it's like we can all inform each other.

And so it's my responsibility as a coach to try to understand what the researchers are saying and apply it down to my students. So yeah, I read all the time and I change my mind all the time because I'm like, yo, I need to know more. Oh, here's a bit I don't know. I'm gonna see how I can apply this and then go forward from that.

The people that you've been coaching and training, do they, when they come to you, I'm imagining that some of them are coming from other backgrounds. Are they impressed? Are they giving you information telling you that they're learning faster, that they're making real marked improvements? For sure. And are you noticing that when the guys compete and so forth? telling you that they're learning faster, that they're making real marked improvements? For sure. And are you noticing that when the guys compete and so forth?

I have a small gym. We have about 100 or more adult jiu-jitsu students. We only teach teens and adults. We don't have kids. And it's only no-gi jiu-jitsu. We don't have anything else. And so people come to visit us to train with us because now they hear all the shit I'm saying and want to see if it's real.

So we get a lot of visitors. We have a very strong room. So it's very rare for someone to come in and do anything to our guys. And I don't mean that in a loose way. I'm being serious. So unless you're like a real world beater, like, you know, your, your guys were out there doing it. You're not going to have a lot of success when you first come to our gym. Um, so I see that and it makes me proud. I'm like, oh, my students are learning to do Jitsu well. Even your guys are, might be lower ranked, lower belts. I look at them especially. So I'm very, I'm very particular are learning to do jiu-jitsu well. Even your guys might be lower ranked, lower belts. I look at them especially. So I'm very particular about my white to purple belt, like that zone.

Because that zone is about week one to year five, if you could put a zone on it. It's subjective, but either way. My guys perform very well against anyone, no matter what their level is, at that time. I brought one of my younger students here, Noah Schaffner, with me to kind of hang out. He's going to do the seminar with me later tonight. And so I bring him for that reason. He's been training under three years and I think people are going to be impressed with his ability. He's your guy, like where you just like, go kill him. Well, so no, I mean we have, yeah, but he, well, the reason I do that to him is because he's the youngest of the guys. So he's like the newest, youngest guy who's been trained

exclusively like this. And he's a special newest, youngest guy who's been trained exclusively like this. And he's a special project because he doesn't have any previous experience with anything. That's great. So this is the first time you're hearing that you're a project. No, no, he knows. So my shoulders have been hurting a lot lately. Maybe there's just, he's getting some injections and stuff too. Oh man, nothing like that. No man's like you gotta suffer naturally baby let's go

you haven't you haven't deserved anything extra yet you know what i mean but no like i i tell him like i'm trying his projects i'm trying to make him immune to novelty so if i get it if i get it it's like a black belt walks into my gym like no you got work tonight let's go and so we do that all the time like he always has to train with the new guys like the new guys don't get to train with me or whoever no one gets them first and it's's a project for him too, to see the effect of our training. If somebody walks in from another gym with other skills, can he handle that now based on the way we're trying to get him to learn this skill? And so, I mean, most of the guys are better than he is. I'm in a negative way, but I don't need the world to see them. I need them to see what our lowest can do.

You know what I mean? So I think a mark of a good coach is their beginners, not their advanced guys. At this point, nasal breathing while you're asleep is no longer something that just us bros do, but people are realizing that it can make a big difference in your sleep quality, your recovery, and all aspects of sleep. That's why hostage tape is so important because many people have their mouths drop open while they're asleep. They're snoring and that really affects the quality of their sleep. And that's why many wake up groggy and not feeling extremely rested. Hostage tape will allow you to tape your mouth shut even if you have a beard.

Us bearded folks can put the tape on and can be confident enough that when you wake up in the morning, the tape will still be on your mouth, which will help you breathe through your nose. And they also have nose strips if you're someone who struggles breathing through the nose. Those nose strips will help you open up your airway and breathe a little bit easier while you're asleep. How can they get their hands on some hostage tape? Yeah, you guys can head over to hostage tape dot com slash power project where you guys can receive mouth tape and no strips for an entire year for less than a dollar a night. Again, hostage tape dot com slash power project links down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. I'm curious about this because you mentioned that other sports or there are other coaches that are doing this approach. But do you mean other coaches within jujitsu or other coaches within other types of sports?

So other types of sports. other coaches within jujitsu or other coaches within other types of sports? So other types of sports. So in jujitsu, no matter what anyone says online is I haven't met someone who's doing it. And if they are, they're not doing it well. So I've talked to thousands of people over the last year, trying to connect with those who are using this approach, because I want to create like a little network so we can communicate about the results we're having about our failures, our successes, so we can help grow the sport together right that's the whole idea that of me coming out i didn't realize and i'm saying please and you're gonna fuck me in the comments if anyone watches this but i didn't realize how far ahead i was because i didn't think that i was no i'm i get

what you're saying i agree right yeah so how i actually people heard about me was i talked to one guy and he got like oh fuck i got to give you to another guy put me over here like oh fuck go talk to this guy and you know i started like fuck, I got to give you to another guy. Put me over here like, oh fuck, go talk to this guy. And you know, I started like climbing the ranks trying to find who's the guy at the top. You know, you never think it's you, you know what I mean? Not that I'm saying it is me, but you know what I'm saying? I get what you're saying. Based on my exposure. In this sport, I seem to be the guy as far as the head using this approach in this way. It seems to be that way, but I don't, again, I could be wrong. We have guys like Kit Dale who've been using live resistance training since ever since we have, know guys over in europe like chris

paynes and ed ingamels who are super far ahead i mean we all talk on the phone and we chat and we all have great stuff to teach one another so yeah but yeah i'm curious about this because there's probably i know we talked a little bit about the gym in this but other jujitsu coaches that are currently listening to this maybe something's clicked within what you've talked a little bit about the gym in this, but other jujitsu coaches that are currently listening to this, maybe something's clicked within what you've talked about here. And maybe they're like, fuck, okay, I want to start implementing aspects of this. But I remember in the gym you said it's one or the other. Either you implement all of this or nothing. But is there a way for a coach to start to figure out ways to add aspects of this to their training so that when their students are drilling, it's not as useless as you say it is. Now, just to kind of, to be a little

bit more giving here on this podcast, because I've already been an extremist. I've already put my point out there. And that was really the point of me being so harsh about it, is that use anything until it stops working and work your way into a better understanding. Okay. You can't just say, oh, ecological approach is cool. Tomorrow I'm going to optimize my class structure. That's not fucking possible. Like you need to go through some sort of scaling, even in your own understanding and utility of it.

So what I tell all coaches is do what you have to, but really try to dig into the science, learn what it's trying to teach us and try to apply it in it. And it's, and it's truest form as we come to understand it on a given day. If you need to use static drilling for whatever reason to help you get along, fine. But again, just know that that is a very unoptimized way

to teach people anything, that we want to get away from that and we want to try to go towards what we know will work better. And we need to try it because if we're not all doing it, we're not going to get the result that we're searching for because we're always falling back on old habits

and putting them back on our safety blanket when it gets a little cold. So it's like, man, take that shit off, be a fucking man, and try to fuck your students up and see if we can push this thing further because we all need to be invested in this project if we're going to say that it works. We can't keep ping-ponging between the two methods. Well, go ahead. Oh, no, I was going to say because they –

I've tried to explain this a million times, because there actually are competing theories, right? And again, we're not being really clear on what we mean by that. It's almost like being on two different diets. Well, for sure. I mean, so information processing is one way that we look at how the brain exists in a world creating behaviors. And the other way is the ecological approach.

And explicit instruction and telling people an optimized way to do things is sort of more on the side of an information processing view of how the brain interacts with the world letting people use trial and error through guided you know teaching methodology is more on the side of the ecological approach and so they both see in the ip guys see information as me being told what the world is, trying to program that into my brain and then let behavior come out. The ecologist guys are saying, all the information you need to organize a behavior is already present in the environment.

You just need to know where to search for it. So it's literally two different things. So it can't be mixed, but it doesn't mean that we can't have a path from one to the other. You know what I mean? Yeah. I'll be safe to like compare this to,

you know, like, uh, in, in, in college, some people are studying for like a test and they're trying to cram. They memorize,

they just memorize the answers to the questions so that they understand this is the answer to the question. Whereas some people can try, learn in a way of understanding conceptually why something works. Yep. And then they can figure out almost any way to get to that answer. And that would be a great comparison between the two. So IP would be memorizing all the questions and answers so you can get it done that day.

The ecological approach would be using the concepts to understand the problem so that you can get an answer in many ways. So that would be an easy way to really just have a beginner's look at what's actually happening, I think. Yeah, so I would say that. This must help with conditioning quite a bit. I've seen Josh and I've heard other people talk quite a bit about how you can, you know, get on the assault bike and can do all these things and they are effective

and they can help you with your heart rate and your VO2. But, you know, getting on the mat is a different thing. So have you noticed a big improvement with people's conditioning? Well, yeah, because I think, I think the strength conditioning community is starting to get to, to, to towards the ecological side of things too. And so we're starting to understand that these qualities that we're trying to create in an athlete, whether it be strength, whether it be flexibility, whether it be endurance, whether it be speed are not special things in and of themselves. They're specific to the task by

which you're using them for. And so let's imagine that bigger, stronger leg muscles allow someone to run faster. That doesn't necessarily mean they will. But if you practice running faster, you won't get faster at running. So it's truly understanding how we transfer from one type of practice to the performance environment is what we're all trying to get after. So the most pure way to get endurance for the thing you're doing is to do the thing itself. So because the system is so complex, it's taking everything into account and it's organizing around the context in which it's being developed. So endurance is not just a singular, you know,

a quality that we can pick out. It's a relationship between, you know, how the body is in its current state, what it's trying to do, and it's ability to do that thing. Yeah. So It's a relationship between, you know, how the body is in its current state, what it's trying to do, and its ability to do that thing. Yeah, so it's a complex relationship. You can't really parse it out. So yes, so because we grapple all the time and use nothing but live resistance,

our guys are very well attuned to live resistance and they have good endurance for it. They can grapple for a straight hour, no problem. They don't need to get on the assault bike to do that. Now, we do use strength conditioning protocols for other things, but it doesn't directly transfer to the endurance we express on the mat. It's just like, it's extra training, and sometimes you can over-jiu-jitsu yourself. So you might need other types of training. Also,

you might be injured. You might need different training at different times. And we still want the heart to pump. We still the breath to move we still want to challenge the system so it's more like challenging we think of it as like challenge a system as many ways as you can so it can accept any challenge uh you know yeah so but yeah your endurance and strength and flexibility and all that shit is specific to the thing the thing in which you train we talked a little bit in the gym about um a nasal breathing and what do you how do you how do you have your athletes deal with breathing so i don't personally deal with that so i have a strength conditioning coach you know rob wilson he programs this into my strength conditioning so i can learn how to do it and i i give i talk to my guys about it and our our um our best student deandre corby he's really

into this shit man and so he helps the other guys understand it too. Can you tell us some details about Deon? Like, like what you told us about his resting heart rate and all that shit. Cause that's, that's insane. Yeah. You know,

one of the things about D is like, he's a real, I mean, I'll talk about him for a second. He's a real private and personal guy. Uh, but so I, I only talked to him as a coach student aspect,

but yeah, so he's just a very, um, dedicated student. He does everything in his power to become the best grappler that he can be and so physically he's a he's a fucking handful man like like his resting heart rate is 35 bpm like it's wild like when he went to the doctor they had to like kept checking it to make sure the thing wasn't broken like he's a very conditioned athlete because he cares he's

really doing everything he can to become the best grappler that he can and so yeah his dedication to the process is is something to behold to watch him on a daily weekly and monthly basis is like man it makes you check yourself you know what i mean like when he walks through that door the same time every day and never misses practice and does a whole year seven days straight without ever saying a word like you're like oh fuck he's like wait what's food and everything wait you you said you didn't say a word for a year sir what do you mean oh no i'm sorry no, I'm sorry. No, I said, so he did, he was on a training regimen

where he did seven days a week of training over the last year without a single day off. Okay. And he never said a word about it. He never said about how he's feeling or nothing. Just showed him the practice, did his work, and took the responsibility of the effect that it caused on his body without saying a word.

So anyway, I talk about this only to say that from a coach-student perspective, that's the kind of student you want. And he's a, he's an example of the student that a coach would want his qualities because of that dedication and because of that commitment are unreal. They're really unreal. You know what I mean? So yeah. Yeah. 35 BPM is fly. I think in SEMA was mentioning, you guys use the Morpheus sometimes the app. Yeah. Yeah. Joel Jameson. For sure, man. So D DeAndre got us on that because DeAndre is like always trying to maximize everything.

So he got us on Joel Jamison. We were all like listening to his stuff and reading his shit, and we all grabbed Morpheus. Like we were like sitting in the hotel room this morning like testing our recovery as we were chatting. So yeah, man, there's a lot of great tools out there, and that one is awesome. We like it. I'm just curious because obviously you said this – well, who's the other coach that programs this in for your athletes? Rob Wilson. Rob Wilson. What have you noticed with like the gassing of some of your athletes because of like the breathing and the focus on that? The reason why I ask you that is because like when I started doing that a few years ago, maybe 2016, 2017,

it was annoying to focus on nasal breathing at first. But then after a period of time, I was like, well, for some reason now I'm not gassing out. And now it takes a lot for me to open my mouth when grappling. Like it takes a lot. But the initial aspect of trying to implement that for a lot of people is frustrating because they're like, I can't breathe. Well, cause you're intentionally breathing. We don't do that. Exactly. Right. So now you're, you're adding a new stressor by focusing on something you normally don't focus on. So you're challenging that system in a new way. You're forcing yourself to practice breathing now. And so anytime we add intention to something we do naturally, this is an extra stressor.

So like if you're picking a particular cadence, a three in, three out, four in, four out, whatever it may be, and you're doing it through only your nose, and you're doing it while under load or under stress, that challenges the whole system. And it gives you a new relationship with your breathing. And so there's this cool new trainable thing that we have that lies at the base of our physiology that most people ignore. So by doing so, you develop a deeper relationship with your breath. And I think doing

so helps you find opportunities to breathe more appropriately, if we can even say that. It also, you know, strengthens all the system itself, like getting a stronger diaphragm, learning how to expand your ribs, you ribs, learning how to take real breaths. I mean, however you want to put it. But again, it allows you to train a fundamental aspect of a thing that is at its base the most important thing about your system. So, yeah, I think a lot of positive effects. I mean, me, myself, I notice my recovery between rounds is great. Yeah.

You know what I mean? You know, round gets over. By the time it dings again, I'm ready to go. And I say that loosely because, you know, some days, you know, I got, you know, three hard guys in a row. I'm like, fuck, I'm tired. But either way, the recovery is better than if I didn't do it. You know what I mean? Yes. And also another thing is it helps you notice when you like when you're not breathing right. So typically we like to separate the breath practice from jujitsu because when we're doing jujitsu, we want to be focusing on jujitsu. right? But you'll, you'll take, you'll notice it more often. And it's interesting. So

when you have time to rest, you take that time to maybe breathe a little better to help enhance what's happening or maybe in your rounds or in between your rounds, you, you notice your breath and then you, oh, and then that helps with the whole process. So yeah, it's a, what you got going on over there, Andrew? Yeah. I'm just just thinking i'd imagine your school probably has a really good retention rate um i'm just thinking because like you know even still in my first year um there's days where i'll go into open mat and i get destroyed and then class starts and then we learn a new technique that i can't figure out i'm like dude i got no wins for the day but with some of this task-based training i'm sure it helps like your athletes morale because they're just like oh actually i won a couple of these games today

and now i'm more pumped because like i'm actually improving so have you have you noticed that the retention rate is really high the retention rate is very high so typically when we have students who first because there's there's this period that when someone comes in to try it that's kind of sensitive so as you guys know because you do training in other fields, people don't really want to train. They think they do. And then when you show them what training means, it's like, ah, yeah, it was fun for a minute,

but it feels too much like obligation, I quit. So that's common, no matter what field you go in where you train appropriately. So prospecting becomes more difficult the more true your training is. So the prospects tend to just fall off faster. But when people say, hey, I like this, I know what training is, I've prospects tend to, you know, just fall off faster. But when people say,

Hey, I like this, I know what training is. I've experienced, you know, what it really is. This is good for me. They stick around. Yeah. Our retention rate is awesome. Uh, our, our prospection rate is not that great. Yeah. Yeah. Like here at super training, like, you know, Mark has always said like the gym kind of filters itself, you know, cause like the gym's free, but then it's like, Oh, well you guys will probably have a million like no we don't like it filters itself out but in regards to those uh the task-based games and stuff like how i mean if you can explain like how they're created because you know like for sure yeah if you can go into that because yeah i mean it like we we messed with it yesterday during class because like you know i've been talking about the seminar and stuff trying to

get more attention on it. So our instructor was like, cool, let's try it out. And so we were kind of messing with stuff around. And so he has a bunch of questions for you as well later today. For sure. But it was just like, yeah, like, well, we'll ask him about X, Y, and Z when we get them here because we were a little bit lost. Yeah, man, it is hard at first, you know, like I said, there was no language for it because no one in our sport had been doing it.

So I had to sort of create a language to help create and guide practice. So the first thing you have to understand is the task, the task that we give our students is what gives them an intention and helps them focus their attention because that's the thing we're ultimately manipulating, right? So we want the individual to grapple and do this thing. So we give them a task. I said, well, this is your intention. We're going to focus in this area to try to achieve this outcome. So that's, that's what we're doing now. How do we choose those tasks? So the tasks are based on invariance. Invariance are things that are true person to person, body to body, body to body, moment to moment in a grappling context. So an example would be something like, I can't get to the hips unless I pass the legs, right? That sounds broad, but it's an invariant thing, right?

If I can't cover your hips, shoulders, chest, and back simultaneously, I can't hold you to the mat. That's invariant. So no matter who's doing it, like if we're pinning, for example, that they would need to fulfill those three criteria, covering hips, covering shoulders, covering chest, and or back, is the precursor or the condition that allows bodies to be more pinnable. Would it be helpful if we had a visual, like we're using some of this video? Oh, I mean, I mean, this is me. Like I don't ever write my shit out. Like I know this shit, like I know anything else. So yeah, but this is my foundations class video, but either way, right here, what we're teaching is, uh, making and maintaining connection. So the, the first task of it. So actually let me ask you a question. Maybe I probably shouldn't

ask you anything, but if you had to say the one thing that everyone has to do when they first start fighting somebody, what would you say it is? The very first thing

that any human has to do in order to fight somebody. Manage distance. There you go. That was my guess. Yeah? Mm-hmm. So I'm going to tell you the blade of the process on a podcast

i would say it's to face your opponent okay right now that seems like you just throw it out but it's real yeah because the degree at which we face somebody affects everything we do thereafter okay so that's an invariant feature now it seems like a minimal one but it's everything fights can't start unless i face my opponent. And then they can't, grappling contacts can't start unless I touch you. So the first thing I need to be able to do is I need to turn to face you. I need to be able to touch you. We call that making and maintaining connections. So that's the first skill we have to learn. So here in this video, we're creating games from a guarded situation that allows the bottom player to organize around facing their opponent and making and maintaining connections with their hands and feet.

So we took the invariant nature of facing and touching as the way to organize that initial game. So like this little boy here, it's a second class. He's 13, he's 13 years old. The way he was moving his hips and like his, like that,

that's pretty cool. Yeah, this is wild. It's right. And we see this all the time. That little girl's 11. Okay. We let her join in because her dad brings her to class. and she's she's amazing little girl i mean super tough and i

mean you see these qualities i know the kid on bottom now is romero he's actually a blue belt but he was helping this little kid because romero was the smallest guy that we could get to because the young kid is only about 105 pounds yeah and romero's like 145 so anyway so yeah so anyway uh you know making a main containing connection the first skill. So we use that invariant quality to create that first game. And then we go from there. Now, the second thing we do is once we face somebody and make and maintain connections, what the fuck do we do with our connections? Well, that relates to the purpose of the game.

So the purpose of the game is immobilization as it leads to strangulation and breaking. So once you make connections to somebody, we try to create immobility in the system so we can create paths to parts of the body that allow us to strangle and break it and so we use that to create tasks right so now with our connections can we get closer to you can we make you fall down can we isolate a limb and then we create tasks that help the part that helps the students search the space to create those outcomes so it's really you have to understand what invariants are first and then that makes creating tasks easier. Yeah. I would imagine like years ago when some people would pursue a martial art that it probably had something to do with like fighting in some regard.

You know what I mean? Like they probably got there. Maybe they got their ass kicked or they had – they wanted to like be more secure and they wanted to be able to like fight. They wanted to improve their ability to fight. Nowadays with jiu-jitsu just being so popular, I think people maybe just show up for exercise. They show up for like a lot of different reasons. I would even think that maybe a long time ago, maybe the percentage of people that cared about an actual fight was probably really high. For sure.

And then nowadays, it's probably pretty low. Right. And especially someone who's been doing jujitsu for a long time probably just really – some people probably don't care at all. For sure. To ever get into a confrontation. Well, so Wii fight is a sport. Okay. And to make that very clear, like I'm teaching a sport.

Okay. And, you know, fighting is what we do. Now, that infers, like I'm teaching a sport. Okay. And you know, fighting is what we do now that that infers a lot of other benefits, right? You can become, you know, less afraid of other people. You know, you get physically in a good shape. Um, you get to develop a social environment where you get to feel good about yourself. But these are all for me, secondary reasons. Like again, just me as a coach, I want to first admit we are fighting and we're going to train to become better fighters in this sport. That's, that's, that's what my gym is. Now, if you come there

and you want to have friends, great. You'll make, you'll have them as a by-product. If you want to get in shape, great. That'll happen as a by-product, but we can't lose why we're here. We're fighting in a sport like context. That's the base of what we're doing. And again, there's benefits outside of that. So, you know, you don't have to be concerned with fighting outside the gym to be interested in a fight sport, but you got to like fighting because that's what you're doing when you come in here every day. Now, to water it down, to adhere to a certain population is a thing in and of itself.

If you had a special class for people over 50 that were interested in the movement qualities that were produced in a grappling context, sure. You could have drilling classes and kata classes. So they could experience something that resembled something like a fight. And, but that has to be separated from what we're actually doing. We have to be honest about what we're doing anyway. So yeah, we are fighting no matter if you like it or not.

So if you didn't come to fight pub trivia is what you probably should have done. Do you have to kind of remind the athletes sometimes of that? Like, Hey, we're, you know, hell yeah. Let's go speed it up or be more aggressive or whatever the wording might be. Yeah. One of my guys who I really like working with who's made so much progress since he's come to me, he came to me as a purple belt, Brian Guevara. He has like, he waxes and wanes in his fight ability.

And so I actually use this cue with him all the time. We came to fight. Let's go, motherfucker. We came to fight. Because sometimes like he'll be focused on something that's not about the fight maybe his fatigue maybe something else so yeah so i do it also doesn't mean to do something sporadic and wild that right as you lose the fight well when i say that to him because i know him i can say things to my athletes because there's a relationship i can't just yell at you know mark get in the fight

get in the fight yeah coach i got you no it's Yeah, for sure. I got shit that didn't work. Yeah. Now, now if I'm with Noah, I might not yell that at him. You know, I'd have to calm him down. It's the opposite. He's, he wants to fight so badly. He just starts losing focus and it's like, dude, calm down a bit, you know? But anyway, yeah.

So we had to remind my athletes that we did some of them that we came to fight. We came to fight, you know? Power Project Family Foot Health is something that we talked about all the time on the podcast. And that's why we love Vivo Barefoot Shoes. But we love them not just because they are flat, flexible, and wide, but also they don't look bad. They look actually really, really good. These are their new boots. These are their Modus trainers for in the gym. These are some of their casual shoes. But when you look at a lot of barefoot shoes, some people get turned off because they don't want to wear those shoes outside. And that's understandable. That's very understandable. But with Vivo, these shoes look so good and they're so good for your feet that they're almost a no-brainer. So, well, they are a no-brainer. Andrew, how can they get some of these kicks? Yes, you guys got to head over to vivobarefoot.com slash powerproject and you guys will receive 15% off your order. Again, vivobarefoot.com slash power project links in the description,

as well as the podcast show notes. There are a lot of answers to this question, but I'm curious on your thoughts on this for competitors, for guys who want to compete, but let's say that they get on the mats and they're anxious as hell and they, they just cannot lose that competitive anxiety when it comes to rolling with another person in that environment. How would you help somebody parse through getting rid – or not even getting rid because there's always a level of anxiety to competing.

But getting rid of it affecting the way that they compete. So that's a fucking great question. I think it has to be viewed individualistically honestly. But a guy I met recently, a new friend of mine who works in the strength conditioning field, Austin Yoakum, I did a podcast with him and he uses an ecological approach to design training modalities for his different athletes. And he said something really cool on his thing the other day. He's like, you know, you don't have confidence because you fucking suck at it. You can't do it. And he's like, you hear the students say like, but coach, you know, I did it in practice. No, you didn't. You had 2000 opportunities.

You did it 10 times. You can't do it. He's like someone who can do something never lacks confidence. So rather than worry about how you feel about it, get fucking good first. Like be able to do it in practice. If you can do it consistently in practice, you're not going to be nervous when it comes because you can do it. And I think a lot of this anxiety and nervousness comes from a lot of different things.

But one of the things that I think perpetuates the cycle is these self affirmations, delusional talk to ourselves. It's okay to admit that we're not good at something. It's okay to admit that we don't know or that we have doubt. Those things are all present and totally fine. But what's not okay is going out there and not having skill to bring to the fucking performance environment. So what I try to do is I ask that tough question to one of my students. Like, you want to go out and, you know, you want to do some standing engagement next tournament. You want to, you know, stay on top, put people down, right? How many times do you take your partner down this week?

Right? You had an hour to take them down. How many times did you do it? Five times? Well, you don't, you're not good at it yet. So keep getting good at it and then try. So anyway, I first, I first try that. Make sure they can do the thing that we set out to do.

And then if there are some other reason that they may be experiencing anxiety, maybe they're too excited, or maybe they have negative self-talk, maybe we can then start going in that direction to help them have some better thinking strategy, to help them maybe avoid those things. Maybe it's a behavioral thing. Maybe they need a better routine before the thing. Maybe they need silence. So again, you never know, but I like to start with abilities. Develop abilities that they know that they can do because i would give confidence yeah your ability it's like you you did that to everybody in class so now that you're at this tournament you should

be able to do it to these guys yeah it's funny that dan gable everyone knows dan gable's a world famous american wrestler uh it was asked like you know so how did you know that you're gonna win he's like because i won practice every day like he he literally said that he's like i won practice for three years in a row and he was serious and he never lost anything like never lost position nothing like he said yeah something wild like that it was crazy fuck and when you see that never gave up a point and that makes sense so if you're not giving up points in practice and you're training with three other world competitors how do you think you feel hell yeah yeah i'm gonna put you on that fucking mat right it's like i made a joke about myself when i was talking like i like to run my mouth i talk i talk shit so when they're like when you

guys were like hey you want to come on the podcast yeah sure they're like you're gonna plan what you're gonna say no i don't give a fuck they put me in front of a crowd and say talk it doesn't make me nervous doesn't make me nervous because i know i can run my mouth. Even if I'm bullshitting, even if I'm making shit up, I'm going to go forward with it. So anyway, but I feel that connection, right? But I had to do like a 20-minute monologue about my product in front of some academics. Dude, I was going to shit myself the night before. I was like, oh, fuck. I've never talked to like trained PhDs.

I'm using their science to describe my program, and I'm telling them how I use their stuff. That was the most nerve-wracking thing I had done. I was like, oh, shit. How did that go? Great. I got a lot of great feedback, man. I was shocked.

I didn't know how I was going to sound to these guys. I actually tried to shrink the tension by making a joke. I was like, I feel like the kid who showed up to school without his fucking backpack. I don't know what I'm doing. But they were great. These academics are trying to link with guys like me who are trying to apply their stuff. So they're very patient with our lack of understanding or our misconceptions. So yeah, so no, it was great ultimately, but it was scary. It was scary. Those guys kind of using what you're doing as an example of other people applying these methods

and philosophies. Yeah. So the professor that I learned this stuff from, Dr. Rob Gray out of Arizona State University, you know, talking to him, reading his stuff is how I learned about this. And so he and I had a few private conversations and he gave me a lot of positive feedback on what I was doing. And so, you know, yeah, just talking to him has been a huge help. And so, yeah, it feels really cool. I think for them, too, because they're doing all this hard research and guys like me are excited about it and we're trying to apply what they're saying is true

and so i think they like that relationship because you know it makes their stuff probably love it they're probably like a fighter got a hold of this like someone that's you know for sure i mean where else do you put something into practice you know and that's a great environment for well he got hired by the boston red sox so he designs a practice now so it's like you know there's there's there's utility in this and people need to hear about this approach. It's serious. Like there's a lot

of basketball coaches that are using ecological site guys. They're secretive about it. They don't tell anybody they're using them because they're trying to hide it because it's so good.

They're like, yo, help me design practice. So it's already going on. It's just at the professional level it's kind of under the hat because they want an advantage. Yeah, it sounds a little, like some of the stuff

that you're doing sounds a little bit like James Smith, the thinker that we've had on the podcast before. Have you ever run into James before? No, no, I haven't. He got out of like the strength and conditioning field. He was like frustrated. He's super smart, but he's applied some unconventional thinking and philosophies

and he kind of deconstructed strength strength conditioning in a lot of ways and was like so much of this just seems wrong but he was so frustrated he eventually just got out of the game for sure I mean it's a hard thing man because also too when you're dealing with people and when you do with people you're dealing with expectations and if expectations are built on a traditional framework of things that are already in place sometimes that can be hard to dislodge and so the job becomes infinitely more difficult so you do all this work to gain some understanding and then you try to apply it to a field that refuses to take the information.

That could be exhausting. I mean, having someone tell me over and over again, this is just situational sparring, nothing special. I'm like, go fuck yourself. Like, you know what you're talking about. It's like, I'm surprised you could tie your shoes when you woke up this morning. It's like, Jesus Christ.

On that note, I do have a question. You got to make the voice though yeah yeah but but no seriously though like when when we do think about situational situational sparring everyone thinks about like you know okay mount back all these positions where we do that yeah and that kind of does remind that does remind me of some of the stuff you're talking about but what you're talking about just seems like so much deeper. It's like situational sparring has these positions. But what you're doing has like infinite amounts of situations. Correct.

Yeah. That you spar through because it's now live. Right. So the easiest way I can kind of explain – Well, the first difference is – And you know because you guys do situ do such everyone does situational sparring. So, you guys, we're working from the mount top player, your job to submit the bottom player, bottom player, recover your guard, you know, change, whatever, whatever your criteria is. We already do that. But when you're dealing with a beginner, how do you say beginner?

We're going to situation you spar work on your arm lock. How do you get there? Yeah. Right. So what we do is we take the situation that we want to work within. We find the invariant features that allow students to manipulate it towards known outcomes. And then we guide their task focus towards those own outcomes with specific, um, uh, task focus. Right. So that's the difference. And the difference too, is that we don't focus on the position of itself itself. We focus on the effect. I've already talked about this, right? So if we're talking about the mount, we're talking about the same thing as eye control.

We're talking about the same thing as north-south. When we're talking about the same thing 360 degrees around the body that has no definitive name, it's our ability to create effects that keep bottom players on their back for specific outcomes. So we can use the situation to help guide their understanding towards the effect, but that effect is present all over the place. And even in the undefined alignments or undefined angles of degree, all this stuff. So there's more to it than just the situation and work to this end. So it's much more thought out than that, you know? And if everybody was already doing it, why the fuck is everyone talking to me like fuck me right if you guys are all doing it why aren't you hey

we've been on this already congratulations you know maybe you know i don't know why my students are losing your students but you know maybe some other reason is this helping uh some of your students to coach each other as well yeah because there's a lot of interaction going on between people you know what i mean so i used to be pretty strict because you know what lloyd used to teach me is that like Beginners can't help other people because they'll send them in the wrong direction But I realized that that's not really a thing So I like when people interact like that way. I want them to talk to each other One thing I do try to avoid though is I do try to avoid explicit instruction

Like I won't stop it when it's happening like i'll hear two buddies over there show each other the guillotine They saw this guy do that thing and that's fine because what I it when it's happening. Like I'll hear two buddies over there show each other the guillotine. They saw this guy do that thing. And that's fine because what I think is it's healthy. They're trying to communicate over a problem they're having. And that can affect or inspire each other to see things in a different way. So, yeah, there's a lot of interaction going on person to person. We don't have much talking during practice because our practice is pretty focused. But there's a lot of discussion about what's happening after practice.

So I like that. And sometimes you don't want the classroom to probably be too loud in terms of like the amount of instruction that's coming at one person, right? Right. Because there's already so much information present in the environment. Again, I don't know how sensitive our attention is, but I know that it can be split and taken in different directions. So if I'm trying to focus on one thing, but I'm also trying to remember what my buddy told me, that takes my attention maybe internal or somewhere else. And that could take away from the practice quality. I say could, because I don't know to which degree it does, but I know it does. So we try to minimize the distractions and try to keep

our attention focused in a way that we think produces better outcomes than putting your attention elsewhere. Curious about this. Um, cause you, what, what we've talked about is by training in this way, somebody who's like never seen a move done, right? Because they're solving a problem. They can do certain moves, certain defined movements that they've never seen before because they're just solving a problem. But with your amount of years having like done jujitsu and grappling, have you seen things that have even surprised you? Because I feel as if since, you know, these people are doing so many things and just figuring out so many ways to solve a problem,

have you seen people come up with solutions that you were just like, damn, I haven't seen that before? I mean, I haven't seen- I watch a lot of grappling. So it's like, I don't know what I don't know. I mean, I'm exposed to so much. I feel like I see things pretty clearly and I've seen a lot.

So I don't know. That's a great question though. What I am surprised though is watching my students figure things out. That's what surprises me. Like, so first is the movement itself. It can be defined. Let's say for example, an arm, an arm lock can be defined by a set of criteria. If we reach this set of alignment, we can call this an arm lock. But what surprises me most is how a student organizes around all the degrees around the defined arm lock and then everything else after or before it that's what surprises me like how they solve these problems and at high speed

without ever being exposed to why they should be doing one thing or another yeah that's really what the most impressive thing is to me like uh i remember when noah was interested in the buggy the buggy chokes everyone was doing it right so then he started doing all these weird ones where he would like roll out of someone taking his back and catch it. And he didn't – no one showed him how to do it. He saw a guy do it and got it done to him in a tournament. And so then he started trying it on all of us. And so he created all these interesting ways to find it. And that just happened organically.

It was very cool to see. It was very cool to see. How about – how do you guys approach like competition training? Has anything changed or how does that look? No, because we – so we perform in training. in the training environment we're we're competing with each other and i don't mean like guys we're starting standing nose to nose let's fucking go i mean like we're being competitive over the small stuff so even if we're engaging in something like i'm going to try to get under your elbows i want you to stop it i encourage and be competitive over

that small stuff so again again, training is competition. Now, what I think you're asking about is guys who want to go out into the big stage. We have a competition team, and they train every night from 7 to 9. We do a rudimentary session is what we call it. That's all like your typical invariance. And then the second hour is all standing engagement. And they do that Monday through Thursday. So we're always competing. We're always trying to get better. We're always building skill. And the skill we're

building is relative to beating our opponent at the game. So like, is jujitsu training separate from competing really? Is it? I think the typical view is that training is a thing where we warm up, we drill like everyone knows, and then we save a Friday to go real hard. And that's competition training. Can you imagine that in any other sport? Can you imagine going to play basketball and having Friday competition day? How fucking silly is that? Like when you put it in any other sporting context, it sounds like a joke, right? Pick anything.

Tennis. Monday through Thursday, we're going to practice our forehand, and then Friday we're going to do competition tennis. What the fuck? It's weird, right? So we don't separate the two, you know? Training is, you're training to get better at jiu-jitsu. Whether you want to express that on a world stage,

a national stage, local stage, or just you want to beat your buddy because he beat you yesterday, you still got to compete. Our class is harder? Hell yeah. It sounds like it's harder because like I could just,

okay, we're going to do a bunch of drills and then, you know, Andrew goes and Seema goes and I go and like, you know, there's time to kill. We can kill some time. But if we're all like fighting the entire time or going at it the whole time. Yes, we try to maximize the hour. There's not a time where we're not engaging live for a specific reason. So, yeah, it's tougher. But I mean, what are we doing?

It has to be. Now, we can control it. We can change time. We can change partner selection. We can change the constraints of the tasks themselves. We can manage fatigue a million different ways. But that doesn't mean we don't have to be competitive, right? We don't have to lie to ourselves, right?

We can say, hey, guys, this is going to be pretty tough today, you know? And we can change the day based on the room. Maybe we'll do some games with more movement involved on a Monday. And on a Tuesday, we can reduce how much motion is in the system to kind of help reduce some of that fatigue. You know what I mean? Or maybe we can play a group of three or a group of five. So every time you win, you get to sit out for a few minutes while your other player is going.

So again, we have ways to manage it. But yeah, class is harder. Class is harder. Have you tried to zoom out and think about this even deeper just in terms of like, I don't know, even the way someone walks into your dojo? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So like we we joke we'll see someone walk in like dude don't walk in like with your hat like this and like you know i checked so i had a guy oh man there's something i don't know let's go let's go it's not even that bad it's just kind of my personality so you're gonna find out if you

don't like me right so so the thing is is like, I believe in being punctual. So class starts at six and it has started at six every single fucking day since I opened my doors. Okay. It doesn't start a minute later. And I don't bitch about you being late. When someone comes in late, like, Hey, Sarko, Hey, I'm not daddy. Get on the mat.

Boom. Let's go. You don't have to apologize to me. You know, I already know jujitsu. You're the one who's wasting your time. Go. You're not wasting mine. I already started. So I don't care about being's go you don't have to apologize to me you know I already know jiu-jitsu you're the one who's wasting your time go you're not wasting mine I already started so I don't care about being late I don't I don't ever bitch about that but when people try to pull

me into their world that's when they get weird so a guy will come in like oh hey uh this is my first day I'm sorry I'm 15 minutes late hey no worries man and then I don't I don't talk to me anymore I just go back to what I'm doing and he'll sit there silently because he doesn't know how to interact and well how do I get involved? You were late, right? Oh, yeah, just wait then because you have no idea what's going on. You know what I mean? Because it's like why do I have to cater to your lack of punctuality? I was like what I should do is stop the whole fucking class.

Hey, 30 guys, stop real quick. This is Mark. He was 15 minutes late. We're going to start the class over. Sorry, everybody. So anyway, we had a guy come in, right? It was 15 minutes late. That's why I'm bringing this up and he just starts talking to me and i'm like hey dude what's up and i shake his hand then i go back and he's like just looking at me i know he i know

he wants me to get on the mat how do i start and i was like what do you mean like you want to sign up i was like oh you get seven free classes and then i go back what i'm doing anyway but he like he didn't he couldn't even communicate with me and so i i had no interest in talking to this dude and he's like whoa whoa i mean i mean i don't know man how to get on the mat i was like we were late so you should probably wait to the next you know the next round and he was like um i don't know it's gonna be like that i was like oh you didn't know that when you were late i'm not gonna cater the whole class to you i was you didn't know that before you walked in and then he was like oh man i know it's gonna be like that man i'm out of here i'm like have a good day dude like fuck you

he sounds entitled as fuck like honestly he sounds entitled as fuck so imagine, honestly, he sounds entitled as fuck. So imagine this. Imagine you're a new guy. He's not going to be able to help you. You know what I mean? He's not going to be able to help what you guys are doing. Exactly. Zero help. He's not going to add anything.

So just walk up and say, hey, man, I couldn't find parking. My name's Mark. Good to meet you, coach. I'm really curious about this. I'm really sorry I'm late. Do you mind if I just hang out and watch? Hey, no problem, dude. I'll get you in next round.

But, man, present yourself. Like, what are you doing? So, yeah. So we do judge people the way they walk in. I made a joke in next round. But man, present yourself. Like, what are you doing? So yeah, so we do judge people the way they walk in. I made a joke on another podcast. We have this thing called the two-door problem. We have one door that's always locked and one door that's not. So when you hear someone banging on a second door,

we don't go to it. And they'll call. So if they don't know to go to the other door to open it up, don't even sign up here. It's going to be way too hard for you. It's the quick IQ test right there. It's the baseline. If you can't solve the two-door problem,

standard jiu-jitsu is not for you, baby. You've got to go to Yamasaki or somewhere else. It's not for you. Standard's not for you. So how about, because I know you do no-gi only. I love rolling in the gi, and Seema loves rolling in the gi as well. I guess first off, like, why did you decide to go no gi? And then also, can you still have this ecological approach with the gi? Yeah. So let me just, there is no connection between ecological approach and

no gi jiu-jitsu. That's the connection I'm making because I want to use that scientific framework to develop no gi practices. Okay. So you can do this for any behavior. If you want to learn how to skip stones better, you can probably do it ecologically. So it doesn't matter. But I decided to take the gi off because I was more curious about how bodies interact with bodies. You know, I got to train with John Danner and his crew in 2016. And that was the first time that I got to train with people that trained just without the gi. And their quality of movement, their quality of behavior, their understanding of the sport was so good. I was like, Oh,

I realized what's happening. I only learned how to use the jacket to control the body. I didn't learn how to use a body to control the body. So for me, it was very apparent that there was this big, like level of interaction that I didn't understand at the level of which I thought I did. And that was shocking for me.

I went home on that train, like rethinking my life. You know what I mean? And I, I, I literally donated all my geese to we defy after that i was like done i put them all in a bag and i contact you and go come pick these up yeah i'm done yeah and so anyway it's just a personal personal choice i was more curious about

like i said body-to-body engagement not body-to-jacket-to-body engagement do you believe that people that that like let's say i mainly compete in the gi and i train in the gi right um do you obviously would it be a big strength if an individual like learned good no-gi concepts that, like, let's say I mainly compete in the gi and I train in the gi, right? Obviously, would it be a big strength if an individual, like, learned good no-gi concepts for the gi? Or do you think that's just like – because, you know, some people say, oh, you know, if you do no-gi, the gi could whatever. Or if you do gi, the no-gi could help. Like, what do you think about that? I'll use Feras Ahabi's point on this because he made a really good point a while back.

He said, you know, if you're going to get into a knife fight with somebody, would you be scared of a knife fighter? Would you be scared of Muhammad Ali with a knife in his hand? And so I would be scared of Muhammad Ali with a knife in his hand because he competitively trains to touch you and not be touched. So if you add a tool to that, man, he's going to stab your face up. So like, um, you know, so I, I kind of go in that direction, but I also do know that that's a nice analogy to why I might want to do one over the other, but things are specific to themselves. So even though having a lot of no-gi practice could help you start with the tool of the jacket. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it could.

It could. It could. It could. And I always say it could because we don't know. You know, we don't know the ratio. How's some of your injuries and pain and if you still have any of that or how are you how are you managing some oh my god so i got like four surgeries man like my body's all beat up like i broke my neck in 2008 i dislocated my hip had a hip reconstruction surgery had my knee reconstructed i had two hernia

repairs in my in my belly button um you know a myriad of other So honestly, I think when I took the gi off, and I'm dead serious about this, my injury weight started to go down. And when I started to train with more variability and less drilling, my injury rate started to go down. So one is the jacket allows you to apply tons of force to the torque to the body. So being able to attach to your wrist through cloth and then yank you around, and that produces a lot of pressure on the body. So since I'm no longer receiving that level of pressure and torque on my limbs, I don't feel like they hurt as much. A lot of my pain comes from previous injury, not current injury. So I manage that through proper sleep, proper hydration, proper diet with a nice variable strength conditioning

program. I'm making sure I'm moving my body around a lot. What's some of that look like? What's your strength conditioning look like? Yeah, I was talking to a team earlier. So again, Rob Wilson is the guy who helps me with this. He creates the programs for me. So we do like breathing work and cardiovascular training first typically in my programs. We do a little bit of plyometrics associated with that. We do some hypertrophy style tempo lifting and then maybe some strength-specific movement like a very heavy squat or a very heavy deadlift. And that's pretty much those modalities every day that I train.

So I have a four-day-a-week training program. We go from high to low level of intensity from work, and we do a little bit of that in each of the workouts. Do you have to be kind of cautious with some of that due to some of the injuries? And have you noticed a heavy deadlift or squat? Does it kind of slow you down, just make you feel achy for practice sometimes? The deadlift, the deadlift in particular does.

I have a little, I have stuff with my hips that I'm trying to deal with now. Some, you know, hip flexor issues, I think some glute issues, just stuff from all the surgery and all the damage. So,

uh, hinge movements slow me down a little bit. So I do, but I like them. So it has to be, I had to be a little bit cautious about how I load them and how often I load them. So,

um, yeah, I always have to pay attention. Josh or Chris, if you guys want to start to think of maybe some questions, if either one of you guys want to participate, we can have you come up in a couple minutes. But we'll just keep shooting the shit with them for now. But if you want to think of a couple questions in a moment. By the way, guys, I'm on your time. So go nuts on whatever you want to talk about. TRT, it's a popular topic.

A lot of guys are hopping on it. It's something that we've talked about a lot. And you might think you're a candidate, but how would you know if you haven't got your blood work done and you don't know where your markers are? That's why we've partnered with Merrick Health owned by Derek from More Plates, More Dates. And the cool thing about Merrick is you'll get your blood work done and you'll also have a patient care coordinator that can help you analyze your blood work, analyze your testosterone, all these other markers to help you actually figure out if you're someone who needs TRT. Because there could be things that you could be doing nutritionally with supplements or even with your lifestyle that can boost your testosterone to the levels that they should actually be at. Andrew, how can they get their hands on it? Yes, that's over at MerrickHealth.com slash PowerProject.

That's over at MerrickHealth.com slash PowerProject. And at checkout, enter promo code PowerProject to save 10% off the PowerProject panel, the checkup panel, or any individual lab that you select. Again, that's at MerrickHealth.com slash PowerProject. Promo code PowerProject at checkout. Links in the description as well as the podcast show notes. All right. Yeah, we have a crowd here today. Yeah, man.

We have a live studio audience. There's what? Probably what? Six or 700 people here? At least. 60 here today. Yeah, man. We have a live studio audience. There's probably, what, 600 or 700 people here? At least. 60 or 70. Stop exaggerating. Oh, my God. Is that Josh Settledge?

I think it is. Settlegate? He looks way bigger in person. Now I can see him. Josh has that fucking neck. It's thick as fuck, man. It's thick as fuck. I asked you this in person at the gym earlier today, but I think it'd be good to get it, as Andrew would say, on wax. But what is

your advice for the student who trains at a traditional school who wants to begin implementing some of these principles and some of this training approach into their own training as an individual? Yeah, so I'm going to answer this in two ways, because I think one way will give the student a lot more power. So if you have the ability to buy a set of mats and you have a garage or a basement, do that. Get four of your really good friends. Start learning the science and use some of the live resistance training methods out there and start doing it yourself. That would be what I would recommend. And create practices where you get to separate yourself from your coach at your gym.

So that would be the first thing. from your coach at your gym. And so that would be the first thing. The second thing I would say is that if you're, if you can't do that and you're in a gym that does the traditional method, really try to find the class that would do most live sparring and set your own focuses of intention and attention, set your own tasks. So there's nothing wrong with you saying, Hey, I want to focus on this thing and I'm going to try this today. You can take charge of your own training. You don't need to wait for your instructor to give it to you. So because I do think there are still negative effects of drilling and of getting explicit instruction,

you can't help that. We're going to try to overload it on the other side. So make sure that you're setting your own intentions in life practice. Make sure you're getting the extra mat time when nobody's watching you and nobody's above you trying to tell you what to do. And if you can try to create your own little training environment, somewhere private where you guys can explore and, you know,

search in the way you want to. So really, really create it for yourselves, man. don't wait you know awesome thank you also to learn the science guys like i know like you know these these researchers have a lot to say about how and how and why behaviors produce so if you can adhere to some of these things they're understanding it's going to make your creation of these practices uh much more real. You know what I mean? Don't think you understand it. Really give it a shot.

And don't be afraid of it. I know some of it's fucking dense, but I was able to get through it. So you guys should be able to too. Maybe get yourself outside of just jujitsu, right? Yeah. You're going to find a lot of utility in learning some philosophy or studying whatever the hell it is that you're interested in. You're probably going to be able to carry it over to the mat. I think so too. I think the more we search a broad range of topics and try to take what we learn and try to apply it to what

we're doing, we can start to change our perspective and give ourselves more options for action or more opportunities for action. So yeah, man, it doesn't hurt to search. Searching is the stuff of learning. So make it wide, not narrow and do what you can.. Quick – do you have a follow-up on that? I do. Go for it. Yeah. So for the person who is trying to, as an individual, learn a lot more and maybe the school that they're training at follows a more traditional approach, where do you see instructionals falling into that process if it's even worth the investment at all? Yeah.

So you mean doing videos? Yeah, video instructionals, things like that. So I think there are some things that are good about instructional videos and some things that are bad. So I think the one thing that has to change is the explicit instruction within the video. Step one, step two, step three, step four. This doesn't fucking exist. Okay. Like here's a small thing. Go, go look at it yourself. So there's a little video that popped up. I'll get to that point. Sorry. I'm going to go off in two seconds. Uh, Flo just did a video with John Danaher and Gordon Ryan getting ready for something. And John Danaher shows a sequence of movements like grab the shim, circle north, south, change one hand to

another hand using this specific grip, drop your knee right next to their head and go chest to chest. Great, right? But then if you watch the next section where Gordon Ryan does it, he doesn't do it like that at all. So, and that's okay. But what I'm saying is that is okay. So what we have to do is kind of get away from this optimized structure of what we can do. So if a video is able to do that, there's going to be a lot of benefit to what this optimized structure of what we can do. So if a video is able to do that, there's going to be a lot of benefit to what you're sharing with people. So like, I think John Danner is someone I like, I like to listen to a lot.

I like to listen to his long winded stuff. I really do. I enjoy John Danner, but, um, I like the stuff he says about jujitsu, not what he shows. I don't care what he shows.

Um, so, so that the, the, the, the, the, when he talks about that on his videos,

there's lots of value to that. We can take that and we can create practice from it. We can take his experiential knowledge, his ideas, his concepts, all that learning he's done, and we can apply it to ourselves outside of his specific methodology. So if more instructionals did that, I think that we could take much more from them. And also if instructionals showed more live work, like a student actually trying to do these things, like Gordon Ryan does at the end of his. So what he'll do is he'll show himself sparring a bunch of different people while doing the moves they put on his DVD. There's a lot of value in watching that.

So I think instructors can change, and they can be better than they currently are. Now, they're not completely useless, but in their current form, maybe. Awesome. Thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. What you said about John Donahue was really cool because a lot of the things that you've been talking about, I have a bunch of Donahue instructionals.

And the thing is, is when he explains, like he explains the intention of like, this is what you're trying to do. This is the end goal. And then he explains all the explicit ways to get there. But he always is very clear about the intent of what you want to do is this. So what you're saying there is really cool because then, OK, you have the intent. Figure the fuck out. For sure. You know what I mean?

And this actually confused me about him because I've had great conversation with him and I value his view. And it's strange because I hear him talking in a way that is in line with how I'm speaking and vice versa. I actually asked him about this when I bumped into him. I'm like, why are we saying the same shit? And then – because I thought he was reading the stuff I was reading. And I asked him like eight years ago now. But anyway, what the fuck point I was going to make about him showing his movements? Fuck, I already lost my train of thought.

You're saying like it sounds like you guys kind of came to some of the same conclusions? Oh, yeah. So it seems like he knows this idea that you have to have an intention. You have to self-organize. You have to figure it out. But then in the next breath, he'll say – he'll say step one, step two, step three. And I'm not sure because he's too intelligent. He understands this too much.

So there must be some other reason why he's doing that. But either way, yeah, I asked him. He said we're looking at the same phenomena. We're using our experiential knowledge to try to analyze and define what's happening, and we're seeing it in a similar way. Because I was like, oh, that's interesting. So, yeah. Before we get to the next question, on the line with what Josh asked, I know you mentioned Rob Gray because like you mentioned read the text

and you mentioned there's a lot of papers. I know people need to search, but maybe what are the specific two preliminary things that people can get on and then they can just search on their own. We'll put those in the description. Yeah, for sure. Everyone, I'm sorry,

because I talk to people online all the time in the DMs. So I spread this all the time. So it's Rob Gray's books, How We Learn to Move and Learning to Optimize Movement. The Constraints-Led Approach. That's by, I think, Ian Renshaw and Keith Davids. An Introduction to Ecological Psychology by Wagman and Blau. Non-Linear Pedagogy for Skill Acquisition. That's also by, I think, Keith Davids and colleagues.

So those are the ones that I put people towards right away because I think those are most associated with what I'm trying to share. And I think if you can get through that material, you're going to have a lot to arm yourself with for designing practice. And I tell everyone this. Everyone who contacts me,

I give them the same spiel, the same shit. Okay. And there's also stuff around that that's very helpful. But if you can't get through that, I would just stick with that because that's enough. That's a lot. You don't need to go deeper than that unless you want to. Cool. Chris, you got a question?

Chris, introduce yourself over there. My name is Chris Berquist. Just a jiu-jitsu practitioner. Recently opened a gym in South Lake Tahoe and we've taken on the ecological approach through learning from you. You know, we've gone through some of the process, read some of the books, listened to many podcasts,

both you and Rob Gray, and kind of going through the process as a coach and trying to make our students better. For sure. And our man just got his black belt. Oh, congratulations. Hell yeah. Thank you.

My question is, do you have a set curriculum? And if so, how far out do you go in your planning for your practices or do you just constantly adjust to your room? I constantly adjust to my room. Now I have a framework I operate within. So the foundations are first because the foundations is the only kind of thing that I follow to a T.

Excuse me. So the way that I see jujitsu is we can separate it into three major structures. Standing engagement, that's everything that happens on the feet. Guarded engagement, that's everything that happens in guarded situations, top or bottom,

and pinning situations. That's everything that, top or bottom, and pinning situations. That's everything that happens top or bottom in a pinning situation. So because of safety reasons and because of people's inability to commit maybe to a full training program, I take the standing engagement out of the foundations program. In our foundations program, we focus solely on pinning situations and guarded situations. Each class every week has the first 30 minutes is blocked either pinning or guarded situations depending how i'm doing it and then the second 30 is the opposite so if we do first 30 minutes guarded situations our second 30 minutes is pinning situation so the idea is that we play the whole game every day um and so if the whole game

can be defined in as three component parts and we play at least two of them for the beginners. So again, guarded and pins and we alternate. So we'll go top bottom or pin guard week to week. And I fluctuate based on what I'm seeing in my room. And I experiment with specific task focuses or orientations of the class based on that framework. So again, I'm only doing pinning work, top or bottom guarded work,

top or bottom day to day, week to week. And I just keep fluctuating, keep changing it. You know what I mean? Some other things to add into the practice is like if, if we did on the second half, I use previous games to try to help them, uh, find the connection between what I told them three weeks ago and what we're doing now. Uh, so for example, if we, if we do like a, like a, uh, uh, starting a side control in the first game of the latter 30 minutes of the class, uh, I'll have them start from a Kimura grip and give them an intention.

And then the next round, I'll have them start from chest to back with a Kimura grip and give them an intention. So we take previous lessons and we intertwine them into daily lessons. So, yeah, guarded work, pinning work, split by 30 and 30, day to day, week to week. And it changes. That's it. And my task focus and objectives change based on what's happening in the room. So I argue that there is no one size fits all game. So even though people message me, say, hey coach, give me 52 games. I can't. I mean, I can't give you mine, but, and Rob Gray says his

best. He says, it's not what you do first, it's what you do next. So I take that seriously as a coach, right? So we can start anywhere, but where we go is relative to the outcomes we're getting in the room. People can use the app and score tons of points, right? I'm just kidding. But it sounds like a good idea, right? Score some points on there. Really appreciate you coming on the show today. I have to hop on actually another podcast in a moment. So we're going to shut this one down, but I found it really interesting how you pulled from other places to get some of these results. And a lot of the way that you coach and instruct sounds similar to my mentor, which was Louie Simmons. Louie, he pulled from so many different areas for powerlifting.

And I think that you're going to find that time and time again that people that are great in one specific area, a lot of times they're pulling from an area that you would never think you would find the information from. Is there something now that you're studying that you're really not sharing yet because it may influence what you're going to do in the future and you're kind of just, you're maybe still like speculating whether it'll be effective type thing? Yes, I'll give you- Because I'd imagine you're always probably looking- I'll kind of give you where I'm working in now. So this is to sound extreme, but I don't believe in the positions anymore. I only believe in condition and effect. So I'm recreating how I talk about it only towards condition and effect.

So I'm recreating how I talk about it only towards condition and effect. And so I'm also letting things be completely random because there's a lot of evidence to suggest that there is no – it's nonlinear. Randomness is not really as random as we think and so I'm trying to experiment with that. So I'm trying to take away some of these known quantities and adding a little bit of chaos into how I'm designing practice. And the effects so far are super fucking good. But yeah, so yeah, I'm trying to go as deep into left field as I can. And I'm, man, I'm going all the way to the abyss. So yeah, I just, I want to get as variable and as random as possible while still getting the outcomes that I'm looking for.

And I want to erase, at least in my school and in my practices, all these preconceived notions about how things should or shouldn't be done. And I'm going to try to operate in that uncertainty and see if I can create what I want. Maybe dive into some of that Robert Sapolsky free will stuff. I don't know if you've seen any of that. No, but, you know, the whole free will deterministic thing we talk about a lot. We don't have free will. If you don't want to talk about that, we can go.

Boom. Yeah, it's all determined. Where can people find you, find out more information? Where's your gym located? Rockville, Maryland. So I'm on the East Coast. Yeah, Rockville, Maryland. Where can people find you, find out more information? Where's your gym located? Rockville, Maryland. So I'm on the East Coast. Yeah, Rockville, Maryland, standard jiu-jitsu. Greg Souders, that's me.

So hit me up at GDSouders on Instagram or at standardjiu-jitsu on Instagram. You can contact me there or come to the gym. And I guess hope, you know, I don't know who's watching this, but we're recruiting, fellas. So, you know, everyone moves to these coaches to try to get better, and we're trying to be one of those places. But we're only taking serious people, and we're giving away lifetime free memberships to people who do this. So I'll train you for free for the rest of your fucking life if you're the type of guy we're looking for. So, you know, we're particularly looking for heavyweights, 200 plus, and people under 145. That's what we're really focused on right now.

So if anyone's interested and they want to learn from me or learn under us, come visit. We'll see if you have what it takes to join our team. Andrew, we need you, so please don't leave. Well, I would have to cut a lot of weight to hit that 145. Or gone a really good bulk, maybe. I mean, you don't have to be those two types.

I mean, but we have the, you know, 150 to 180. Our gym is full of that. So, again, we're suffering at the ends. But either way, man, if you're that guy and you want to be that guy, we're that place. So come get it. Yeah, real quick, just like no disrespect to any previous guests, but you've seen some of the names we've had on the show.

We let people know, hey, so-and-so is coming in. Oh, that's cool. Hey, Greg Souders is coming in. Holy shit, you're not going to be there. And so you've seen we had a lot of people walk in today, and I just think that's really cool that we were able to make this happen. So I really appreciate your time today, sir. Man, thank you too, man, because like I said,

I hate Me Too, guys, so I'm surprised that you don't like the Me Too movement? What? See, you're dragging me to the island. You're on your own. Do you hear what Insima said, guys? He was implying something. I like that he kept urging, okaying you to the hole.

He was trying to drag me in. There you go. He's like, let's see if this guy's real. But no, man, yes, thank you. I appreciate the love, anyone who gives it, the people who support the team, who are interested. Because, man, I'm here to work. I'm here to help grow the whole fucking thing.

I'm not here for any other reason. All you Reddit idiot motherfuckers who want to talk about me trying to sell shit fuck you man all this shit i do for free i spend money to teach you fuckers so fuck you strength is never weakness weakness never strength catch you guys later bye