E184 | Escape the Novelty Trap: Building a Sustainable BJJ Game

Full Transcript

[: 00:00

Jiu-Jitsu has this weird thing of always wanting to learn something new. Always wanting to try this new move, this new technique, this new fresh take on something. And it kind of gets in the way of us understanding Jiu-Jitsu as a whole.

There's this psychology that I have picked up on or noticed where you will see students kind of... they get to class, they're excited to be at class, and then they learn, "Oh, we're going to be doing butterfly guard." And, "Ugh, I already know that."

There's a difference between knowing it—being familiar—and actually knowing it.

[: 01:00

Here's the thing. When you look at wrestling, for example, which is a grappling art—and I understand you take away the submissions and sweeps, it's a different art—but when you look at wrestling practice, they're not doing a whole lot of different shit every week.

[: 02:00

Jiu-Jitsu, on the other hand, whether it's because of like the surfer vibe, the really relaxed vibe, whatever it might be, we just have this tendency of looking at things from a, "Oh, what's new? What's next? Oh, I've seen that, I want to do this." Almost like how we are with Netflix and streaming and everything. Like, we have this such a short attention span on things that we look at these things and we're like, "Oh, we already know that shit. I was taught this six months ago. I was a white belt when I learned this."

[: 03:00

And I understand Jiu-Jitsu has this giant sandbox feel, and there's no hard, set rules on where it can go. When we think there's an ending, it's almost like the universe where it just continues to expand. We think we've found the end, and this is what works now, and then someone comes up with some weird, funky guard or some leg entanglement that we hadn't seen, or some new back take, berimbolo, whatever.

And then we start falling in love with that, and the sport gets a little bigger every time.

[: 04:00

If you're a higher-calorie athlete: pressure, passing, get to a dominant position, smash.

If you're on the smaller end, quick: you're probably going to be playing guard or passing on the outside, berimboloing. You're going to be teleporting, in a sense, from one position to the next.

If you're tall, you can play spider and... Every body type has this beautiful innate quality of how they approach a guard or Jiu-Jitsu as a whole. And I love it.

[: 05:00

But this need to want to constantly learn something new is going to kill your game, and it's going to, in essence, create a learning curve that doesn't have to be there.

When you settle on a game, you're going to have to learn how that game works from person to person, body type to body type. And then you're going to almost have to start relearning it as you age, because your attributes are declining, but your understanding of the human body is accelerating.

[: 06:00

That's where the growth actually happens. It's not the novelty. There's a diminishing return on novelty.

It's like building a house and... you start with the kitchen. Weird place to start, but whatever. You start with the kitchen, and you get kind of bored. You haven't finished the kitchen, so then you start working on the living room. You get bored of that, and then you start working on the game room, and then you start working on one of the bedrooms, then you start working on the man cave, and then you start working on a bathroom.

[: 07:00

So you don't actually have a house. You have segments of a house that aren't connected and that aren't finished in any way remotely possible.

[: 08:00

And I get it to some degree. For me personally, I know I've been in for a while, so I have maybe a better understanding of how I want to approach Jiu-Jitsu and how I decide what's functionally sound and what isn't, what's going to functionally make my game and what isn't.

But I don't look at things the same way the people coming up do, because I understand how much time it takes to develop something. I understand that the game that I developed took years—a decade, 15 years total—and certain aspects of that game are still in development. They're not completely finished. To the outside viewer, they look great. They look finished, they look put together, but there's elements that I know that I need to do better with.

[: 09:00

Now, me, I have a more complete house. I have a kitchen, I have a bathroom, I have a living room, I have bedrooms... My house is pretty complete. At this stage, I'm now remodeling. I think that's a perfect way of putting it. I'm remodeling different aspects of what I do and the way the house looks. I might be installing something new, but it's not going to revolutionize what I already do. It's something that's going to accompany the house. I'm going to put a little spa, a hot tub in the back. But the house is complete.

[: 10:00

So my house is pretty complete. I'm proud of my house. It's not perfect. There's things that I can fix, there's things that I can remodel, there's things that I can spend some time on to develop a little bit better, look a little fancier, maybe a little slicker. But I'm proud of my house, as imperfect as it is.

And then I start adding things and I start remodeling, but the function of the house is complete. That's where I'm at.

[: 11:00

And I asked him, "So when you get to this, what are you trying to do?"

"Well, I'm trying to sweep and submit."

"So what guard are you playing?"

"Well, I'm trying to..."

And I was like, "Okay, stop. I understand that part. I genuinely understand that. But what guard are you functionally... If you can identify the guard, what were you trying to play?"

He didn't really have one, and which showed in the way we were playing the position.

[: 12:00

He was like, "Okay."

That's what I mean by we don't have to chase novelty. He has something in place that he's sort of leaning to. He hasn't named it yet, he doesn't have a position in mind. He's trying a bunch of different things. So I introduced something that solidified what the position was going to look like.

[: 13:00

And it's rough. It's sometimes difficult. It's sometimes... you want to go... you see this thing on the internet, you see this thing on YouTube, you see this maybe something that you're taught in class, and you want to try those things. You only have so much time in the day. You don't want to introduce new recipes when you're trying to master a specific one.

So sometimes you've got to put that on hold, and you've just got to tell yourself, "For the next four weeks, I am playing this. And I have to understand this really well."

[: 14:00

For me as an instructor, it is one of the hardest things, because I try not to... I really try not to repeat lessons too closely together. Now, if I'm teaching at one gym and I'm teaching at another, I might have one lesson—mount—at Gym A, and a few weeks later I do mount at Gym B. But the students don't necessarily interact all that much, I'm not all that worried.

[: 15:00

So they're not identical. They're never identical for me, because I understand that as a coach, novelty is king in some ways. And you don't want someone to travel to a workshop to get the exact same workshop.

[: 16:00

And so sometimes I don't teach the defensive stuff as often as I should, because I don't want to make people feel like, "Oh, I've seen this already. We've been through this class already, we're doing this again," and kind of roll their eyes and all that shit.

[: 17:00

So if I'm teaching it, understand that there's... even if it's not novel and it's something that you feel like you've learned, I'm telling you there's stuff that's there that you haven't picked up on.

I was teaching side control escapes recently. And something that I picked up on, not just at the school that I did the workshop at, but at my school and the other school... I noticed that people tend to want to extend their arms.

[: 18:00

So then I started showing, "All right, I want you to use the two to three inches between the point of your elbow and your forearm. Or the two inches on your wrist to be able to frame better." And then I showed where to frame, how to frame. I showed when you're framing against the neck, and then you can extend the arm forward—not extension as in like the wrist comes forward, but you're using your shoulder to push through, which then pushes your elbow further away from your body.

I showed that stuff, and there were moments where people were like, "Oh, okay, I hadn't thought of this. This is pretty cool." Very basic shit.

[: 19:00

I don't want us to get caught up in that trap of like, "I've got to learn something new every time I come to class."

Now, there's a difference. An instructor shouldn't be repeating themselves so closely together. They should put some... some thought into what they're doing where they can space things out and make people feel, "Oh, I haven't done this in a while. Or I haven't... it's been six months or four months, a year since I did any lasso guard." It's not a guard that gets played all that often these days.

But you should be replaying things, you should be coming back to things, you should... None of your students pick up every detail. None. Absolutely none.

[: 20:00

But we can only retain so much. So even when you go through a pass of a technique for a week, they're only going to pick up so many details. And then when you pick up that same technique and you show it a week again, maybe six, seven months later, then they pick up some of the other details. Because we're only going to pick up so much based on our ability to retain material and input.

The lower you are in the belts, the more you're probably going to miss, because a lot of it isn't ingrained.

[: 21:00

So novelty can be helpful from time to time. It keeps students engaged. But it should not be the driving force. It really should not. We should have specific things that we're working on regularly, and we should just understand we're working towards mastery and understanding at depth, not shallow understanding of that novelty gives you sometimes.

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[: 22:00

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Until next time, thank you so much.