E212 | The RPG Blueprint of Jiu-Jitsu

Full Transcript

**** Welcome to Tapped In, my name is David Figueroa-Martinez of DFM Coaching, and today we're going to be discussing how I view Jiu-Jitsu through a gamer lens, specifically RPGs. If you have never played games, this is going to sound a bit alien, but it'll kind of click. If you're an older gamer, you might connect this to Zelda. If you're newer, I don't know what people play, to be honest with you—the only RPG games that I still play are all Zelda-related. If you're a reader, this is going to sound like Dungeon Crawler Carl.

**** And this has helped me because I used to think Jiu-Jitsu more in terms of chess. And there's an overlapping element to that, and I still think elements of it are still chess-like and chess-related simply because this is still a battle, and chess is still a battle. So they kind of overlap. You're dealing with strategy, you're dealing with movement, combinations of forces, "I'm going to take a piece of you and hoping that you'll want to take something back and I can set traps." So, it's interrelated.

**** I tend to now think of it more in terms of RPG. And it's going to make sense if you're not a gamer, but in every RPG you get dropped into this big world, and you can play the world vastly different than other people and still get real enjoyment and success from the game. Are there elements that require you to play certain things out the same early on? Yes. Kind of like a white belt. We want you to understand basics, we want you to understand framing, posture, your ability to have base, your ability to understand simple movements. Like, all of that is going to be the same regardless of the player.

**** When things get a little different is when you start developing an interest in a certain type of game, or maybe your instructor is imploring you to start playing a certain game because of your body type. Then you're going to have specializations. You're going to have the heavy armor or the tank class—people who love passing with pressure or playing with pressure, whether it's from side control, top of half, top of mount. They are the heavier class within the RPG realm, and they're trying to crush the life out of you. That is their class. They're going to be a little slower. I'm not saying that there isn't speed involved, because I've rolled with Carlos at Five Peaks, and when that man wants to move, he moves surprisingly well. And that's not a dig, but I know his pressure, and I know that I don't want to be put in pressure. So then there's times when I try to use scrambles, and the man scrambles just as well. And halfway through the scramble, I'm like, "What is going on here? Why is he moving this well, this fast? I need him to slow down."

**** And then you're going to have your rogues and your assassins. Those are the people with dynamic guards. Those are the people that create space and take space, and they'll hit you with quick submissions. They use speed, they use their guard play really intricately, really well.

**** Then you've got people who feel like magicians in a sense. Those are the people who play guard in a way that just—they tie you up. You can't figure out sometimes what is going on until it's too late. And you're set up in a trap: your lapel is through your legs, over your bicep, and around your neck. You're in a weird spot where you're like, "How did this person even grab my lapel and I didn't even notice it? I didn't feel it, I didn't feel the tug, I didn't feel when they had it." And when you ask them, they tell you, "Oh, I had that like three minutes ago." It's like, "What do you mean?" And then when they walk you through it, you're like, "I didn't see any of this."

**** So there's going to be different classes. There's going to be different types of guard play, or different types of play in general. You're going to have the heavy guard passers, you're going to have people that are much lighter and they're going to be on their toes, moving from left to right, backwards and forwards. You're going to have people who love playing guard—tall, lanky maybe. Then you're going to have people, like I said, that are magicians and they just have a way of creating things that you don't quite understand.

**** All of this is natural. You get to pick which one you're going to be, but your natural attributes are part of the equation. You come into the game and you're tall and lanky, chances are you're going to be really good at triangles and armbars, spider guard, guard play in general. Then you've got the shorter, stout, more muscular or stronger individuals—they're going to be more heavy top pressure. They might be more wrestling-oriented. You've got people who are fast, they're going to be darting in and out. They're going to be pushing the pace a little bit more than you'd like, and it's going to feel like they can teleport.

**** All these things are in there. Can a certain body type play in a different class? Yes. Doesn't mean that you play that class the entire career. Sometimes you're going to play intermittently certain aspects of the other classes. Like, I'm not great at forcing people to—or wanting to force the pace. I like a slow grind. But if I need to, I hit that gas and I'm going. There was a point in time where I was playing a lot of spider guard because of Leandro Lo, and I played that for a while and absolutely loved it. I don't have long legs, but the shorter legs also assisted in a different way. So you're going to have to pick and choose. Doesn't mean that your entire stay in Jiu-Jitsu is going to be all of that. It's going to blend into certain aspects, and you should be well-rounded. Doesn't mean that because you're a magician with the lapel that you shouldn't be boss-level guard passer or smasher. I think that everyone should be able to smash the guard. I think everyone should understand pressure and heavy weight. I think it should be part of us regardless of what's going on, because as we age, some of these classes don't mean as much. As we age, we're going to be a little slower, we're not going to be wanting to be on bottom, we're going to want to play more advantageous positions. So consider all of that.

**** There's also XP. In RPG games, for every kill or experience that you have that's beneficial to you, you get XP. And XP is attributed to some kind of aspect of what you do. If you're a magician, your magic level goes up. If you're whoever you are, your HP or your health goes up. If you're a guard passer in this sense, your guard passing knowledge is going to go up every time that you play.

**** You could learn some things remotely and through an instructional—you can add that knowledge. But the actual knowledge or XP that you're gaining is only going to happen when you're on the mats actually training. So that's with that. Every time you were playing Zelda, you were playing some of these other games, and you killed this whatever low-level whatever, you move on, you get a little bit of XP, a little bit of experience, a little bit of—you know how to use a specific technique, whether it was a bow and arrow, whether it was a sword, whether it was a spell. Those same things happen in Jiu-Jitsu.

**** Every time that you decide, "I'm going to knee cut," and today I got three knee cuts when I went to training, that's XP. Don't get it twisted—sometimes you don't actually successfully get the knee cut. Someone did something, and maybe you overcame part of that something but got stuck in something else, that's still XP. It's still you gaining experience in the techniques that you're trying to get really powerful in.

**** So every time you get on the mat, you have to be conscious of how are you going to spend your time. Am I going to play randomly and gain XP on random things and always be kind of lower-ish level in a bunch of different things? Or do I want to spend some quality time specifying, "I want to get really good at this"?

**** I was training with someone yesterday because I'm in Gracie Redlands, a purple belt. And he had never seen this armbar that I hit him with. And so he asked me questions about it, and then I sat down with him. He said, "So I've been doing armbars from here, and I've been doing this." I was like, "Those are great, don't get me wrong. You're leveling up your understanding of how armbars work. Now add these two, these three things here," and I gave him a couple of details. I was like, "Your armbar experience or expertise, subject matter SME, whatever you want to call it, is going to go through the roof because you're going to have far more success because you're using more body weight." And he was like, "Oh okay, okay, cool." And I had him do it on me a couple times, and he had 90% of it down. And then I did it on him again, I was like, "Look, your weight is here, I want your weight here." And he was like, "Oh shit."

**** So, as you spend a lot of time in these positions, whatever they are—doesn't matter what, if you're a guard player it's going to be guard, if you're lapel, if you're butterfly, if you're a smash passer, if it's mount, side control—the more time you spend in these positions, the higher your XP is going to be. And there's going to be a level where your XP is going to be so much higher than their defensive capabilities. And when that happens, you're going to be well aware of how people defend, how people adjust, what are the common escape routes. And you're going to get to a position where you are just going to wreck this person, and this person is never going to really feel like they can defend well until they get their experience in that position high enough to defend against yours. And that's the race that we're in.

**** The race isn't "let me learn as many different techniques as possible," although that is beneficial to a certain extent. It is not beneficial when we're talking about the overall nitty-gritty of Jiu-Jitsu. It's: "I need these three to five techniques to be high-level XP against other people, so in-depth and so racked with experience and knowledge that their defenses, even if they're considered really defensive against other people and they're hard to submit by other people, these positions and submissions that you do are so high-level in comparison that to you it's nothing, it's a cakewalk."

**** So, for me right now, it's the mounted armbar. I'm getting a ridiculously amount of people with this armbar. I chase it from different positions: I chase it from mount, I chase it from side control, I chase it from S-mount, I chase it from the back. So if someone gives me really good defense from one position, let's say it's mount, I might start chasing it from side control. It gets me to the same position, but it's a different angle that maybe they don't have experience defending. If they're really good at both, maybe I got the back. Okay, so I'm going to initiate the armbar from the back. Let's see how well your defensive capabilities are from this position.

**** So again, we don't need to be high-level, high XP at everything. We're supposed to have subject matter expert level knowledge in specific things so that your defense is never high enough to give me real-world problems.

**** The other thing that we need to consider when we're looking at this as RPG is mana management, or energy economy. How much energy does it take for me to get past someone's guard? And in some people, I may never get past their guard. So then I have to decide, how am I going to establish this? Where in my game do I find that I get the most exhausted? How much effort do I have to put in certain specific techniques? This is all mana, or energy.

**** And as I get older, the more I need to be really conscious of how much energy I'm spending, because when I play, I try to play without the timer in my head. There's times when I'll go to an open mat and they're doing eight-minute rounds. There's times I'm going to an open mat and they don't even have the clock on. There's times when I'm running the class in my morning program, I no longer put the clock up. Because I noticed that many of the students would look up, and it would dictate how their Jiu-Jitsu was going to work. So if they knew they were tired, they would slow down, they'd pull off the gas a little bit because they knew, "Oh man, I'm wasting too much energy here." And then when they knew they had—"Oh, I only got 30 seconds left, I can use a lot of my energy reserves right now because I know the round's going to end and I get a break." So it dictated what their Jiu-Jitsu was looking like and how it performed.

**** I got annoyed by this—not angry, but, "Okay, so this isn't helping us." So I stopped using the timer, and I started using my phone. So now they don't have anything to look at. Internally, you start getting a good sense of like, "Oh, that feels like five minutes. Oh, that feels like he's usually making it six minutes." So then your internal body clock kind of starts giving you a heads-up: we should be about halfway through, should be about three-fourths of the way through, the clock should be ringing at some point soon, he's going to call the round.

**** That happens after you take away the clock. Some people get it really good, and some people are terrible at it. So then I started just messing around with the clock. Depending on how much time I got, "So we're going to do eight minutes today. Let's see how you manage your energy reserves. Because normally we're doing five or six, today we're doing eight. How are you going to manage that? How do you manage it against someone who's better than you?" That's the real test. Do you have techniques in mind that are going to help you reserve as much energy as possible knowing that we're going to go longer than normal?

**** And then sometimes I turn off the clock when it's getting ready to go off. So I may have set it for six minutes, and I'm like, "Let me turn this off." So I turn it off, and I just watch. And every once in a while, someone would be like, "When is this thing going to be over? When are we going to get this or that? Did you turn the time clock off?" I get a lot of that. Or every once in a while, they'll be a little extra tired and be like, "How long was that?" I'm like, "Eight minutes." It's like, "Oh, it felt long."

**** So you have to have the type of Jiu-Jitsu that's going to allow you to have energy reserves. And if you are normally going five minutes and that's all you do all the time, your game is going to reflect five minutes. If you have a game where maybe you go to an open mat and the timer goes to eight, and around the five, six-minute mark you're like gasping because that's what you trained for, then you have to adjust the Jiu-Jitsu a little bit. You have to adjust maybe how I do the techniques, or which techniques do I use when.

**** And when you're a white belt, you're going to burn out your energy levels real quick. Watch the white belts: about halfway in, they're gasping. They don't quite know how to breathe well enough, they're tired, they're exhausted, lots going through their mind, they're just burning through those energy reserves. So have an understanding of your body, and that's going to change as you get older as well. I'm seeing it, I'm feeling it.

**** There's times when I intentionally decide I'm at the bottom, I'm going to—I'm just going to take a little bit of whatever's coming at me. I stay really defensive, I come up into a shell, and I look for underhooks or I look for something else that can—maybe their weight is off-balance with how they're approaching, and I'm like, "I'm going to take advantage of that." Or maybe I play a certain type of game now that I didn't play before, because now I need to be more conscious of how much energy levels I'm going with. And that's also going to change with who you're going with. You got some people that are high energy, you got some people that are high calorie athletes, and they're going to crush you. You may not want to be under that too long. So consider that, consider those aspects.

**** And then like every other RPG game, there's going to have bosses and mini-bosses. And those bosses are your goals. Those bosses and those changes, or those moments where you get to advance to the next level—maybe your belt tests, maybe the competition that you set up, maybe it's a gym rival. It's really healthy to have a gym rival. Not someone you hate, not someone that disrespects you or crushes you or wants to humiliate you—that's not what I'm talking. I mean a healthy gym rival. Someone who's around your level, could be peer-to-peer, could be slightly above or slightly below. And this person is just someone that you measure yourself up against. And you're going to find that you guys are going to move.

**** Just like in RPG, sometimes they're going to be a little stronger, sometimes you're going to be a little stronger. And it's all dependent on how much XP they're gaining and how much XP you're gaining. And you could only get XP if you're on the mats. So if their schedule opens up and they're training five days a week while you're training three, some of that's going to change. And it can also be how you're training. But have a healthy gym rival. That's going to change.

**** I have a student that I'm working with, he said, "Oh, my rival from the old school came here, and I'm seeing changes in how we roll. He's having some successes." And that's going to happen. Like, I remember Dimitri was mine for a bit. I don't even know, no idea if he felt the same, but he was mine for a bit. And there were times when I would—I would kill him, and I would put it on him. And then his schedule changed, he started training more, he started taking Jiu-Jitsu more serious, and he lapped me by a mile. Like when I—last time I rolled with him, last couple times I rolled with him, I couldn't provide anything of substance. Nothing. And he just—he got that much better than me. That's going to happen, you know what I mean? And then if that happens, switch on to someone else. Switch to someone that's a little bit more reachable.