E215 | The Junk Drawer of BJJ: Unlocking Forgotten Techniques

Full Episode Transcript

David Figueroa-Martinez: Welcome to Tapped In. My name is David Figueroa-Martinez of DFM Coaching, and today we’re going to be discussing the junk drawer of Jiu-Jitsu. If you’ve been in Jiu-Jitsu long enough, you will have learned random techniques that you do not do, you do not technically know—maybe you know to some degree, maybe you don’t know to a big depth—but they’re in your subconscious brain somewhere, and I tend to call that the junk drawer.

David: And when I started teaching, I had this thought that I didn’t know enough in order to teach. And I think I was around brown, and even when I got into black belt, there was this weird view of myself where I didn’t think that I knew enough to hold a program together. And I had this thought that, yes, I’m substituting, yes, I’m teaching kids class at one point, and I’m doing the things that I’m enjoying doing, but they were either a simpler program—which was the kids, because it was 3 to 11-year-olds or 3 to 7-year-olds—and then I was substituting a class here and there or teaching maybe once a week, that it didn’t require me to hold a program together where I have this entire encyclopedia of techniques that I was going to be showing and I had to plan weeks and months in advance for a long period of time.

David: So there I am, and I’m getting ready to take on a program, which at that time was The Dawn Breakers, which is a 5:00 AM class, and I was going to be teaching them five—I’m sorry, three times a week. And I had serious doubts of whether I can do it or not, because my concern was: Do I even know enough Jiu-Jitsu to be able to do this?

David: And as I got started, I started realizing, oh, when I actually put some thought into it, there’s actually more in there than I realized. My immediate game was simple, and it’s grown even in that time period since I got my black belt, but it was on a simpler end. I don’t have a super intricate game, I don’t believe. I don’t have—I don’t do a lot of things that other people do. And I’m sitting there like, I don’t know if I know enough.

David: And so I had to sit there and plan out things for the week. Had to really consider: Okay, so I’m going to teach this, how do I teach this and elongate it? What lessons do I teach, what techniques do I put where, how do I make this work for the week? And then with some time, I started looking at it: Oh, but I can do this, I can add that. And now I have to formulate—there’s times when I can formulate an entire session or a group of techniques, and it lasts weeks, sometimes a month, depending on what it is. We might go a month and a half, and we’re going over certain intricacies and I’m showing two, maybe three techniques per class. And again, this is three times a week. And maybe I’m reverting back because I see something that we’re not doing as well and maybe we need to spend a little extra time on.

David: And before I know it, three, four, five weeks have gone in, and I’m still going over the same position. Like maybe it’s open guard, and I’m showing a lot of intricacies of open guard, which I’m doing right now. And for a long time I was doing mounted armbars, and armbars in general, that I found myself really pulling from all these techniques in my brain where I didn’t have to necessarily go and do research on Google or some instructional to really get a good feel for what I was going to teach. It was just in there.

David: I just had to spend time sitting and, you know, okay, so this is going to be my starting point: What do I know? Where can I take it? And I would just brainstorm, sometimes writing it down, oftentimes just kind of figuring it out for the first couple of days, and then settling on: Okay, we’ll take it here, because I’m noticing some of the students are applying a technique a certain way and now it’s guiding me into this direction. So then I would add that to the following lesson plan, so then I would have a week, and before I knew it, I had more.

David: Your junk drawer is going to have so much more technique that you really don’t even know you know, but is in there. And sometimes the details are a little hazy, and when you put some time into it, they come back to you. Or maybe you start implementing: Okay, so this week I want to play De La Riva. I don’t play a ton of De La Riva, but I know that I’ve been taught quite a bit of it, so it has to be somewhere in there. And then I start playing De La Riva and I’m more conscious of what I’m doing, and then some of the other intricacies and the details start coming back to you. Before you know it, now you’re playing a far more rich game because now you’re putting some hands on it, you’re putting some live rolls behind it, and you start to feel a bit more comfortable, and then your game starts to meld and you have a good structure or framework.

David: And then you start playing with different things. You start: Oh, well, I’m going to try this, I’m going to try that. I’m going to start sitting up. Maybe if I grab the far side arm and I do this. And before you know it, you’ve got this beautiful little bit of a game. But it comes from just kind of digging into that junk drawer.

David: You have—especially if you’ve been in a couple years, especially the way Jiu-Jitsu is where novelty is supreme. When I watch wrestling or I discuss wrestling with people, they tell me: Dude, we do the same three to five techniques every training session, and we’re just perfecting that over and over and over. And then I look at Jiu-Jitsu and there’s this need for novelty every week that we get in. And sometimes the students, no fault of their own—I was the same way at one point—we get back in: "Uh, we’re doing butterfly guard again. Ugh. I already know this." But we don’t really know it. We have an idea because we’ve seen it a couple times. "Oh, I’m doing a foot lock again. Ugh. I want to do something new." And not understanding that the depth is necessary, that we have to repeat things over and over in order to gain genuine mastery and depth of knowledge.

David: But because Jiu-Jitsu is built in a culture of like this novelty, we expect to learn new things every week. So our instruction kind of falls under that in a large portion of what we do in large communities. So oftentimes a year in, you’ve learned all these different techniques that maybe you spent just a little bit, a fraction of the amount of time that they deserve, and you got a thousand different details or techniques that most of which you forgot. Most of which are not part of your A-game, because your cognitive load, especially at white and blue belt, you do not have the time to pull those techniques out from your junk drawer. So you just don't bother.

David: And then you rely on what's old faithful, the things that you do most, the things that you're most comfortable with. Which is not wrong. There's nothing wrong with it; we're going to rely on our A-game. But there's a bunch of things that we just completely neglect and forget.

David: Specifically the blue belt hunter phase. And if you have not heard me talk about it, it is a technique-collecting phase where blue belts tend to want to pick up that new technique because it works. So what we'll do is we'll pick up a technique, it'll work for x amount of weeks, and then as soon as it stops failing—it starts to fail, and it doesn't generate the success that it once did—we throw the technique away, and then we go find a new one, and we start the whole process over again.

David: And what happens is—and this was occurring when I was a blue belt, and I see it in some ways now—is that we have a bunch of techniques, all of which we spent some time with, but they get thrown in the junk drawer. The same way that junk drawer at your house or your apartment has random batteries in it, has a flashlight in it, random tools, random ketchup packets and soy sauce packets, and everything else you can think of. They're all in that junk drawer. And they're in there because they're either half-finished projects in your Jiu-Jitsu game, or they are techniques that you picked up because you went to class, but maybe never actually implemented into your game.

David: You're not expected to implement everything in there. You're really not. And it's not healthy for you to even try. But it's healthy for you to at least have a ground understanding of, so that when either they get applied to you, you can defend them well enough because you know them well enough on the offensive side, or that they at least help you in a tight spot. Maybe you're going against someone who guard passes with a beautiful outside pass. You don't normally do spider guard, but with the outside pass, you get that lasso in, it kind of saves you.

David: So you pull that out of the junk drawer. It's not a technique you do very often, but maybe you start understanding: Oh, it works really well to outside passing. What happens if I maybe implement this on a normal basis? And then you start implementing it, and you start to see it and you feel it, and it becomes a little bit more of a successful technique, and then you start implementing a bit more, and applying more R&D to it. And it becomes part of your A-game, or at the very least, part of your B or C-game. That's great.

David: So your junk drawer is going to be a great resource from time to time. Don't ever look at these techniques that get tossed in there as a waste of time. Sometimes you learn a technique that is meant for you at that exact time, and it never hits your junk drawer; it becomes something that you implement right away. If you're brand new or you're on the newer side, a lot of your escapes are going to be part of that. Your framing, your hip escapes, they're going to be implemented right away because they have to be. You're on the clock. You're behind the eight ball. And these are just fundamental techniques that have to be utilized.

David: But then there's going to be times when you move up the ladder and you get a little bit better, and like I stated, you pull a spider guard technique out of the blue and you find some success with it, and then you start utilizing it. And then you start finding that this other technique that I learned—let's say X-guard, because spider and X kind of work together if you want them to—you start realizing that if I do spider and I plant my right foot, for example, and the left foot that's in the bicep, which is acting as a spider, hooks outward or steps outward, my opponent will tend to kind of step over me. And when they step over me, then I can go right into X-guard. Or vice versa, I'm setting up some stuff from X and they're starting to step out, now I can go into spider.

David: So they'll work in unison if you understand the connections. So then you pull that technique out of the junk drawer: I remember this at one point, I'm starting to remember it more now because I'm in this position a bit more, because I'm utilizing this technique that I didn't utilize before, and now I'm going to develop that.

David: Your brain doesn't necessarily forget everything. It will forget a lot of the finer details, but you're going to be able to identify key positions the longer you're in, and it becomes a little bit easier pulling those techniques out of the junk drawer. It's not easy early on, and there's so much that's just going to get piled up in there, because you're fighting for your life in essence, and you don't have the time and the RAM CPU power in your brain to slow things down enough. But when they slow down enough, you will be pulling techniques out of that drawer.

David: So never go into a training session or a class and feel like what I'm listening to or being taught is a waste. You will be surprised how often these techniques that we think are a waste end up being key moments or techniques for you six months, a year, two years, four years down the line. There's stuff that I didn't do, and maybe I didn't do it because I didn't understand it fully, and it took a little bit more maturity for me to say: Oh, I understand this more now. I could now plug this into this spot here because I've done the foundational work early, or within the last few years, and now it makes more sense for me.

David: I'm not a foot locker. I'm not a big leg locker guy, but I think that once—if I ever get into that space, I have the foundations of a lot of the guard play necessary to really understand that spot. But if you don't understand guard play at all, you may not quite understand a lot of the leg entanglements because they rely so heavily on having a decent guard.

David: So just understand everything you learn is going to be a place and purpose for it. And if you're an instructor, that rule even more so. As a student, there might be a few techniques that you're just never going to do, or maybe you do off-handedly and then never go back to. As an instructor, it's your job to kind of become familiarized with a bunch of different things, so they need to be in there in some form.

David: So sometimes you've got to organize that junk drawer, but for the most part, I try to have a really open mind about everything that I'm learning, because it's super helpful at some point or another. You just never know when it is. Never. There's times when I see a technique, I'm like: I'm never going to do this. And I remember saying that as a younger athlete, and then I look back and I'm like: I'm doing this thing again. Or I'm doing this thing that I thought I never would do, and here I am berimboloing from reverse De La Riva, for example. Or, I don't know, for example, I never thought I'd be doing octopus guard, but there I am learning it because I've got to teach it to people. And then as I'm teaching it to people, I'm actually finding a use for it, and I'm enjoying playing it, and I find myself finding openings to get into it.