Ep. 333: Coaching for All Levels, feat. Nick Volpe

Speaker 1: Hey everybody, before we get started this week, I have huge news. She actually did it. We're pleased to announce that Beatrice Jin, top-ranked women's competitor in North America and long-time BJJ Mental Models premium community member has published her first ever course with us, exclusive to BJJ Mental Models. It's called Stop Being Nice. It's a three-part audio series designed to solve real mindset problems that regular folks experience in jiu-jitsu. If you struggle to be aggressive and competitive in jiu-jitsu, you'll find the solutions here. If you're already a BJJ Mental Models premium subscriber, you've already got access, and if you are not, good news, you can get it now and get your first week free. Go to bjjmentalmodels.com and check it out today. Speaker 2: Hey, welcome to BJJ Mental Models episode 333. I'm Steve Kwan. BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent jiu-jitsu approach, and I'm joined today by Nick Volpe from Dark Bear Jiu-Jitsu. Nick, my friend, how is it going? Speaker 3: Ah, it's going great. I'm super excited to be here. I've listened to every week's episode, so to come on the show and and be a guest is is incredible. Speaker 2: Amazing, man. And my editor is going to be very thrilled to deal with this episode because your sound quality is amazing. I can tell you've got experience producing content yourself. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 2: Always nice to have someone on who's got a a decent mic. Just makes life so much easier on the back end. Now, you've been a long-time member of the BJJ Mental Models community, of course, a black belt coach at Dark Bear Jiu-Jitsu, but I always want to make sure you have a chance to do the intro. Why don't you tell everyone a little bit about who you are, where your gym is, and what makes it unique? Speaker 3: Sure. So, as mentioned, I'm Nick Volpe. I own the Dark Bear Jiu-Jitsu school in Staten Island, New York. We actually have a lot of different styles between jiu-jitsu, judo, all that. I used to be, it's so unfortunate that this is audio only because you can't see the huge wall of Pokémon stuff behind me. But, very quickly, I need to shout out to Ken Pastore and more importantly, I am straight up challenging him to a battle. I'm using this platform, that's why I came on here. I saw, he claims he's a big Pokémon guy. I need to challenge him to a battle. I don't care about jiu-jitsu stuff. We're going to put it all on the line for Pokémon. Speaker 2: Shots fired. So, okay, so for people who don't know, Ken has also been on our podcast before. Look up the episode about reluctant leadership, and yes, I can confirm. He is a hardcore Pokémon fan. I don't think I have ever seen him not wear a Pikachu hat. I've seen videos of him like working out while he's wearing this like fluffy Pikachu hat all the time. He can go on for days. But of course, I have to ask, you know, my daughter is a big Pokémon fan and she always wants to ask this question whenever she interviews someone. What's your favorite Pokémon? Speaker 3: Oh, super easy. It's the martial art bear, Urshifu. Speaker 2: Interesting. I would have thought you would have gone with Grapploct, right? The jiu-jitsu Pokémon. Speaker 3: The fact that you know that is impressive. I do really like Grapploct. The thing is, Urshifu, I love bears, hence Dark Bear Jiu-Jitsu, and it's a karate bear, it's a martial art bear, and I'm a hairy martial artist. Like it just works. Like it works and that's, yeah. Speaker 2: Amazing. Well, we've probably lost 90% of the listeners so far. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 2: I have actually been thinking about, is there a market for a video game jiu-jitsu hybrid channel? Because, I mean, I think everyone who listens to this knows, I'm a hardcore gamer. I have been my whole life, and I would love to just shoot the shit about this stuff, but I really don't think anyone would listen. So, if you want a jiu-jitsu video game hybrid podcast, let me know. But anyway, enough of that aside. I want to talk to you about your jiu-jitsu practice today. So, when we were lining this up, one of the things that I know a decent amount about you is your coaching method. Of course, you've been a long-time active member of our community, and I see you exchanging with the other coaches all of the time. I'll maybe turn this over to you, though, to explain your coaching method, because that kind of leads into what we're going to talk about today. What's your philosophy on jiu-jitsu coaching, and how does that kind of materialize? Where do you get your ideas from? Just let's kind of set the stage for the conversation we're going to have here. Speaker 3: Sure. I think it's super important that coaches and students feel like there's a level of autonomy. I think as an instructor, I want my students to be able to learn new material, but learn it in a way that suits them, that fits their game plan, that fits their body type, strength, flexibility, all those kind of things. There what we typically call affordances if you were to read anything from Dr. Rob Gray or Greg Souders, who are the people who got me into this ecological dynamics and CLA type approach, which is what I use a lot of. So it's a lot of games, a lot of get into a position and hold it as long as you can. Things to really help you develop and grow a very specific guard or position, whatever it is you're trying to work. And that, like I said, gets to be, it gets to be yours. And as a class, we're all working half guard. I'll give you three different options. You pick one of them, pick all of them, it doesn't really matter to me. It's your training time. But I'm there to help facilitate, be more the guide on the side than the sage on the stage, as it were. So, that is typically how I do things and we'll talk more about the specifics, but it's really geared towards letting the individual students become the grappler they want to be based on what they like and what they're able to do because I've been in classes where they want you to do this really flexible movement or this crazy inversions and that's just not me, and I feel like I get nothing out of that class, and then it's like, well, it's a little frustrating and and that's that's not the feeling I ever want one of my students to have. So I tried to find ways to to teach them new material in a way that they can actually utilize in real rolls. Speaker 2: 100%. And you've touched on something that I think is a really important insight. I know a lot of black belts talk about this, and I think maybe the more junior belts kind of brush it aside, but it is true. Jiu-jitsu ultimately, or I guess pretty much any martial art, is at its best when to some extent it's a form of self-expression. You should be doing the kind of jiu-jitsu that you want to do and that feels right for you, rather than doing whatever your instructor tells you exactly. And if we want to kind of cut through the noise about eco and what is it, because I know people get tremendously confused about it, it can get tremendously technical if you want to dig into it. But at a very high level, what does it do? I mean, the real benefit of it, more than just learning jiu-jitsu faster or better, I think is it also helps you learn jiu-jitsu your way and make the sport what you want it to be. I came up in an era before people were talking about this stuff, at least in depth. I mean, there were coaches who kind of had stumbled onto bits and pieces of this method here and there, but it wasn't really a formal framework that people would talk about. And the main challenge I had coming up in that era of jiu-jitsu was I was constantly being told by coaches to do things because it's what they wanted me to do. It's what they would have done. And the end result is I spent probably the first eight years of my jiu-jitsu journey just copying a game plan that would never work for me and being frustrated because I couldn't make it work. And the weird thing is, when I started actually really putting my jiu-jitsu together, it was when I started ignoring my coaches and just saying, yeah, that's nice, yeah, it's another lapel guard, whatever, let's forget about that. I'm just going to do what I want to do and I'm going to try to figure out something that works for me. And that's when the pieces kind of started coming together. Now, of course, what the ecological dynamics frameworks will teach us is that there's a more structured way to teach that than to just let students do whatever they want, right? That's probably not optimal. And the real benefit here too is I think it democratizes jiu-jitsu a lot too, because now you don't need to be the senior ranking black belt in the room to be the one who's coaching. If you take a more student-driven, like bottom-up approach, it empowers students to take on more coaching responsibility, which actually makes everyone better in the gym, in my opinion. Speaker 3: I absolutely agree. I think the best way to really understand material is to be able to teach it and answer the questions about what happens if this or, you know, whatever scenarios students come up with them. Let me tell you, they come up with some wild ones. But the more that you can teach it and the better you can break it down and simplify it, the more that you really do understand it. Anybody can recreate a technique that their instructor showed them, but to understand on a conceptual level why something works or how something works or how to make it work, I think is an incredibly valuable skill that you will get from teaching. And it's it's very often that purple belts and brown belts get kind of thrown into teaching roles. You see it with blue belts all the time, they get put into kids' role, kids' classes. So the earlier you can learn to do these things, the more effective you become, and teaching doesn't seem so scary anymore. Speaker 2: Absolutely, man. And that's actually the topic I wanted to unpack with you here today. A friend of the show, Sebastian Broche, the creator of Yoga for BJJ, once told me that in his perspective, purple belts are the most important people in the room. And his reasoning was, the white belts, I mean, yeah, technically they're important, but they're not quite at the point yet where they can start really guiding the culture and the direction. They will grow into that, but as a new white belt, you're basically just a sponge, you're absorbing stuff. Similarly, the problem with so many black belts is they get so set in their ways that it's really hard to enact change with a lot of them because they want to do things the way that they've always done. So Sebastian's theory was that the purple belts are really the future of jiu-jitsu because they're the ones who have enough experience to provide value to the room, but they also have enough lack of experience to have the humility to be willing to bring in new progressive ideas. And this very much aligns with my expectations. I've said on the podcast many times that some of the best coaches I've had are purple belts, blue belts, and you know, purple belt, I'm just throwing that out as a label. I don't necessarily mean you have to be a purple belt at this level, but my point is more that sometimes the more junior coaches are the ones who can kind of drive things the furthest. The challenge with those junior coaches, though, is they often lack the confidence or the experience to really feel like they're doing a good job. And I know something you've been passionate about doing is taking your coaching style and framework and figuring out a way to pass that down to the next generation so that people at that belt level can kind of dip their toes into this, into a more ecological, self-organized, bottom-up, whatever you want to call it, approach, that's a really powerful tool for kind of mid-level coaches to adopt, and it really helps everyone in the room. But I'm going to shut up now. I would love to hear kind of from your perspective, what does it look like on the ground in your gym, and how could a quote-unquote purple belt emulate that coaching style if they're taking this on as a new job and they're coaching for the first time? Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it's really important to start with my classes are one hour, so I need to get as much jiu-jitsu in that hour as I possibly can, which means the warm-ups, I'm not making them run laps. We're not shrimping down the mat. We're not doing all the push-ups and jump it's we get straight into jiu-jitsu. I do have a couple of games that we play. They're they're favorites of mine, and that helps us get warmed up and primed and ready to start doing jiu-jitsu. So I usually do some type of guard retention game, guard or guard passing game, person on top's trying to pass, they have a couple of rules, person on bottom just tries to keep their guard however they can. And this gets people really moving. I mean, I've had new people come in who are athletic individuals, but they are exhausted after just two minutes of this game because it's not something they're used to. They don't understand things like economy of movement. They don't it's just very different for them. So, we go straight into these warm-up games. I usually do like two games, two minutes each, nothing crazy because I really want to spend the bulk of our time talking about whatever the topic is. Once we finish our warm-ups, okay, we'll kind of take a breath and I'll talk about whatever position, you know, this month happens to be half guard. So, okay, what are some of the things we could do from half guard? Here's, you know, your objectives. I'm very big on creating objectives for my students. Get your chest to their back. Get their back on the mat. Stand up. Get to different guard or a safer guard or one you like more. And I will maybe demonstrate a way or two for each of those, how students can do it, what it might look like because I think one of the big issues with eco and self-guided exploration is that if you don't know what's possible, it makes it really difficult to know what to start trying, and you end up just kind of pulling randomly and you get you might get a little frustrated. So I do demo a little bit, just like a quick, here's what an arm drag looks like. If the words mean nothing if you don't have something to associate it with. So, there's just a little bit of demonstration and we go straight into real resistance. Do the arm drag, get your chest on their back, but the other person's not just going to let you do it. Maybe if it's a very first time doing an arm drag, person lets you do it a couple of times so you can kind of feel what it's like. But if you're a blue belt, you know how to do an arm drag most likely. Your partner shouldn't just be sitting there idly while you arm drag them 20 times. You are not going to learn how to actually do an arm drag against a person in a real roll if you've never done it on someone who's not trying to stop you. So it's so much of our time is on these live resistance games or live resistance objectives. And I think that is the most important part of the entire class is that it uses live resistance almost the whole time. Speaker 2: So something that you said there, which I think most of the eco coaches out there, their ears are going to perk up about this, and most of the concept coaches out there, their ears are also going to perk up about this. When you gave your example of a game, the objective you set was get chest to chest. And that is probably a deviation and a difference from what a lot of people might expect if they come from a more traditional coaching environment because the games, quote-unquote, that get used in that system tend to be more technique-based. So it's less about reaching an objective and it's more about making it look the way the coach wants it to look. When I started jiu-jitsu, my first gym was a Gracie Barra, and it was very much kind of following that classic Gracie Barra playbook. And I remember we would do these drills where the coach would make you spend two minutes just doing back and forth Matador passes, side to side, against a non-resisting opponent. And what they wanted was for it to be fast and for it to look perfect, right? For it to look textbook, like it look, you know, the movement is beautiful. And at the time, I mean, I thought, okay, well, this makes sense. If I do this, I'll get good at jiu-jitsu. But of course, like everyone else who learned under that approach, I realized pretty quickly, as soon as my opponent doesn't want to let me do that, all of my beautiful katas just kind of fall apart and they don't work. And the reason why is because of coaching goals set by the coach for the students and whether those are actually measuring something useful or not. There's no combat benefit to being able to do 100 Matador passes in two minutes. There's no combat benefit in making it look absolutely perfect like it would on an instructional. The benefit is that you advance position and you control your opponent, right? That's ultimately what we're trying to do. How do you do that? Well, one way to do that might be you get a chest-to-chest connection on them. So, the thing I like about this game's approach you're talking about is when you say that it is goal-based, you're being very deliberate about the goal. The goal is not do the technique the way that it would look on the instructional. The goal is not do it 100 times without getting tired. The goal that you've set is get to a more dominant conceptual position with a bit of resistance applied, which I think is much more versatile and general. But I'd love to turn that back to you to get your assessment on that. Am I kind of understanding your philosophy right? Is there anything I missed there? Speaker 3: No, you nailed it. And it's very funny because I've had students, I started teaching at purple belt covering classes and then I've just been going ever since really. But I started in that same traditional approach of here's three techniques. They may or may not be connected to anything else we've done recently, and try them, practice them a bunch of times until it's time to roll. And that was the class. And and it wasn't until, honestly, this podcast in the past year and a half or so that I've really started to question that model and work towards adapt making my classes better, honestly. I think it's just the right word. And that allows, it's mostly through letting students figure out how they can do it. I've learned a technique. I know it. I love my head instructor. I love him. I would go anywhere with that man. He's shown me some techniques that, yeah, I could do them when we drilled them, and then I try them in a real roll and it's like, this is awful. What am I even trying this? And every single person who's been on the mat for six months, I guarantee has experienced the same thing. And I don't want that. So, what we do, it's I explain what we're doing. Hey, this is half guard. Half guard is great for XYZ reasons. Here's the problems with half guard. Here's where you get in trouble in half guard. Okay. Now that we understand what half guard is, I've defined it. I'm going to talk about an objective. Here's something you can do from half guard. Like I said, here's a way, you know, you can get chest to back or you can stand up. Okay, that's our objective. Here's the game or task that is going to teach you how to do that objective. And each class is usually we work on the same definition, half guard or whatever, and then we have our objective. The objective for this class is getting underneath the person for maybe like a deep half guard. And here's the games and tasks that we're going to do to teach you how to do that objective. I have had a number of students who are like, yeah, but I feel like I'm not learning anything. I was like, were you able to do it? Yeah. Well, then you learned something. And it's very hard for more experienced students to make that drastic change because they're so used to learning material in a very specific set structured way, and now this is a lot more free form. I've encountered some resistance. But you look at them and just like, can you do this? Have you did you were you able to do it in a real situation with resistance? Yeah, I was. But it wasn't exactly what you showed. Okay, I don't care if it looks exactly the way I showed. It's not going to because there's resistance. Every single time you do it, it's going to be slightly, slightly different. And those differences matter. The devil's in the details. So, if you are able to accomplish it, I don't care if you did it exactly the way I showed. The marker for success isn't that textbook Gracie Barra do exactly, you know, the nine steps that I tell you. It's, were you able to achieve the objective that we set out? And however it looks, it looks because you're not me, I'm not you, and you're not the people around you. So everybody's going to accomplish those goals or those objectives just a little bit different. And that's I think the beauty of jiu-jitsu, honestly. Speaker 2: Absolutely, I agree. Again, it comes back to kind of self-expression, right? You find a solution that works for you. And this is maybe a good point to get into the, I guess, the meme-based explanation of eco, right? There's a lot of people out there who think that eco just means the coach doesn't teach anything and the students figure it out themselves. Obviously not true. Speaker 3: If only. Speaker 2: I wish it was that simple. But the thing that I kind of observe talking to folks like yourself who take a more concept-based or ecological-based approach to their their coaching is, of course, they're talking to their students and they're telling them stuff. Yes, they're using their words, right? They are teaching. But what they're teaching is fundamentally different. Rather than teaching what you should do, or even how you should do it, which is kind of the crux of what a technique looks like, you're instead spending a lot more time talking about why. Like what is the real objective that we're trying to get here? There's no benefit, for example, to doing a a Matador pass, right? There's no reason why a Matador pass is preferred or better than any other option you have. What you're really trying to do is get past their legs and pin them chest to chest. And if you cut through the noise and focus on the why, it really helps people then organically figure out the how and the what. And that's where I think approaches like eco and, you know, concept-based training, which I think have a lot more in common than people think. These kinds of approaches are great for that because they teach people why they're trying to do what they're trying to do. And then from there, it's up to them to kind of figure out on the ground what that's going to look like for them and also how to adapt on the fly. You know, to your point, most of the jiu-jitsu that you wind up getting taught, it never looks the way that you were actually taught it. You are going to have to adapt it for yourself. And I remember coming up, man, like people would teach me how to do techniques and they would never explain to me what is the actual fucking purpose of this thing. Like why am I putting my right hand on your left knee? I don't know, coach told me to do it. And so what winds up happening, if you are following a step-by-step copy-paste approach like that, where you're just following instructions from your coach, you're doing things without actually knowing why you're doing them. And that leads to all sorts of problems where maybe you're doing something that looks right, but it's not actually working, or maybe because you don't understand why you're doing things, you don't have the context to know when you need to pivot or stop or try something else. So, I think to me that is the great strength of a kind of self-organized bottom-up approach is it gives students the context for why they're doing what they're doing, and the less important stuff, the details and the techniques, they can figure out or adapt on the fly as it makes sense to them. Speaker 3: Yeah, and a note about live resistance. The key, the main thing about live resistance versus static drilling or passive drilling is that you can do, you can know all the steps, but until you actually figure out the timing of a thing, I think everybody's tried a sit-up sweep or a Kimura sweep, and you just get shoved right back through the mat and you're like, well, that was awful. Why did I even bother learning that? It's because you didn't do it with resistance, so you never learned the timing. You know the steps, but you don't know how or when to apply it or like the best situation to apply it. So, if you are trying to teach something, I think it's very important that you at the very minimum, maybe not explain all the single steps, you explain what the outcome is and what the objective is, but you explain why or how the timing of a thing works. And I think that is an important piece of information that tends to get missed in a lot of instructive sessions. But that's a small sidebar that I just needed to throw out there real quick. Speaker 2: I agree with you completely, and that's a perfect example of where many coaches focus too much on the steps and what things are supposed to look like versus what's actually making the move work. Timing is so critical. And I'm still surprised at how few people actually talk about this in jiu-jitsu. I've only heard two coaches other than you discuss the importance of timing. One of them was Rafael Lovato Jr. I attended a seminar of his and he was saying that look, as a jiu-jitsu guy who went into MMA, he's shocked at how little the jiu-jitsu people think about timing because in MMA, timing is everything, right? As soon as you involve things like striking, timing becomes so important. But even if you look at other grappling arts like judo or wrestling, they understand the importance of timing. I mean, judo has this whole concept of Kuzushi, which really is trying to tell you like the timing matters, right? You time your move for when your opponent is off balance. And the other person I know who's talked about this a lot is Margot Ciccarelli. She's made courses on the importance of timing and rhythm. She actually did a premium audio course with us on these concepts called Rhythm Training on our premium service. And something that she once said is, find the timing at which the technique becomes effortless. And I love that quote because it really upends a lot of the way that we think about teaching jiu-jitsu, right? You can do the most textbook perfect armbar, but if the timing is wrong, it isn't going to work. On the other hand, you can do a like dog shit ugly armbar, but if you do it when your opponent is off balance a bit, you can make it work. The first time I noticed this was looking at a lot of, you know, the MMA fighters back in the day like Ronda Rousey and Fedor. And I remember looking at the way that they did their armbars, right? And these are two people who had amazing armbars. And I remember thinking, these don't look great, you know, from a technical standpoint. They look almost sloppy. They don't have everything as tight as my jiu-jitsu instructor taught me. But clearly, like I'm not saying they don't know what they're doing. Clearly they do because they're some of the best in the world at this. So I know the problem is not with them, it's with me. How are they making these ugly ass armbars work when they're basically ignoring all of the advice that my jiu-jitsu coach is giving me? And then I realized, it's the timing. It's because they're hitting someone off balance, and then when that person is wobbled or off balance and their arm is exposed, they snap an armbar on. No, it's not as tight as like a classic jiu-jitsu armbar where you pinch your knees in, you know, it doesn't look that nice, it's not that slow and controlled, but it works, right? And it works because of the timing. And timing is something that again, often gets neglected when you look at jiu-jitsu as a sequence of steps to teach. Timing really only comes up when you explain to people the importance of timing, and then you give them a game-based environment to train that timing. So I think that is another strength of the approach that you're discussing here. Speaker 3: Yes, and one of the ways that we can, if you are an instructor and you're looking to, how do I implement this everything we've said for the past 20 some odd minutes sounds great. You're into it. How do I actually start to use it? And part of it is games that are online resources for games that you can just kind of read and and then implement. But one of the things that I like to do is I like to control how much variation is happening. How many possibilities can my students have? And the more advanced they are, I let them have way more of opportunities or a varia variability. If they're newer, they're white belts, I'm going to kind of limit how much stuff they can do. And when I talk about variability, I'm just mean, what am I letting them do? Like what the kind of constraints are being set up? And that looks, the way I usually set that up is we're doing, like I said, half guard this month. Okay. Here's what we're doing. We're doing an arm drag to the back or we're doing we're sitting up with the underhook into dog fight or or something, whatever the technique is. I will tell them, if you're a white belt, here you go. This is what you're working on, get resistance. If you get good at this, actually, I don't even, I'm not going to lie, I don't even say if you're a white belt. I have everybody start there. You're going up to do this first thing that we're we're working on, whatever it is. If you can do that, no problem, with resistance, here's the next thing we can move on to. Here's an extra step. You got that, no problem? Here's a third thing we can do. And I add layers, and each layer gets progressively more difficult because it requires more control, it has more opportunities for the partner to escape. There's more things that can go wrong as we add these layers. But it allows the students to progress through different techniques or positions or whatever it is we're doing without feeling frustrated. It's a big challenge when students, you know, you're learning three, four techniques in a class, and you haven't even really gotten the first one down, but all of a sudden now I'm on technique two or three that all builds you don't have to worry about that now because you can just keep going back to the part where you got stuck. And you work that, you work that, you work that until you get it. Okay, now it's time for the next layer. And if you're more experienced, now you can go through layers or, you know, whatever it is, one, two, three, four, a lot faster and you can get to the harder part sooner. And I think putting layers of difficulty is a really good way of controlling for how much stuff can happen and it allows you to worry less about, well, this guy's a brown belt and this guy's a white belt, and the brown belt knows this already, but the white belt doesn't, so how do I reconcile that? Make it more difficult. If it's too difficult, the white belt will never get to it. They'll get stuck on a different an easier part of it. But the brown belt, having more experience, more knowledge, will be able to get through the easy parts and get to the hard stuff. And so you can have like this built-in, how difficult do I want this to be for me, is just a way of controlling that kind of uh difficulty scale. Speaker 2: So this is something we discussed offline and I'd love to maybe expand on it here. You kind of talked about the different difficulty dials that you as a coach can tune depending on the roll. And everyone who is more experienced needs to develop the skill set. I think anyone who's a brown belt or a black belt listening to this, they've probably done this before where, you know, your training partner for the day is a white belt and they're totally overwhelmed. So you know, for this roll, I have to kind of handicap myself. I have to change the intensity level on my side, make things easier for them so that we can both get some value out of this. It's a skill that we all learn. But when you explained this to me, you brought up that it's a lot more nuanced than just resist more or resist less. There's a lot of different dials that you as a coach or a training partner can use to determine the level of difficulty that you want to include. Of course, one of the most obvious is just the the level of resistance you're going to put up, right? At the bare minimum, if I am with someone who has never seen something before and they're trying it for the first time, I'm going to put up zero resistance, right? Because if they don't even know how to do the thing and they don't even understand the objective, we've got to make sure they figure that out first. And then I start dialing it up. Now, on the other hand, if I'm sparring with a brown or a black belt, we can just skip all of that, right? And I can just roll as I normally would. And then of course, there's in-between gray areas. So resistance is maybe the most obvious dial that we can control as coaches and as grapplers when we want to tune the rolls. But what are some of the other dials that you use when you're setting up a classroom to make things more beneficial for everyone involved? Speaker 3: Sure. Before I do a very fast note about resistance, if you are an instructor, it's very tempting and Greg Souders gets a lot of flack for this and I used to be one of those people who didn't understand it at first, but you'd be like, saying 50% resistance means nothing. And he's kind of right, the more I've thought about it. What I've done is because is my 50% the same as some D1 wrestler who's 22? I'm 34 and I'm 205 pounds. Like it is they are not the same levels of resistance. So 50% for that D1 might be my 100. So instead of saying a number, what I tend to do and whether this is ideal or not, I actually just say, give a little resistance because then they know a little, some, a lot. So now it's a lot easier for them to modulate. Oh, I don't want to put too much effort in this. I'm going to go just easy. For whatever reason, I do feel like giving not a number, saying, hey, give a little bit of resistance. Give a lot of resistance. Does make it a little easier for the person who's applying the resistance to understand how much they should actually give. Very, very quick. The other things that I do, I will limit what the person who, let's say it's a brown belt working with a a white belt. I'll limit what the brown belt can do. They might not be able to establish grips the same way or at all. They might not be able to use their arms at all. They might be have to just stay in a position and work their way out of it or just hold. Like if we're working De La Hiva guard, hey, this person's going to pass your guard. Your only objective is to stay in De La Hiva guard as long as you possibly can. If the second they get out, switch. And then the person on bottom is going to do whatever it is we're doing. I think forcing or not forcing, that's not a great word, but encouraging students to kind of pull back a little bit. It's very tempting for students to blow through the technique as many times as they can really fast or just prove that they can do it really well, or whatever the case is. Pull back a little bit. Really focus on your points of control. Really focus on understanding how I can make this guard work and what the parts of it as somebody's trying to move and push and resist and just learning to be there and be comfortable there. If there's even a bigger skill gap, I might put them in a bad situation and say, okay, now you have to work to a guard and instead of starting in your guard, I'll put you in a really bad De La Hiva or the person's really square to you or they whatever it is that I feel like doing at that moment. But I will make you work from a bad spot to a guard and then you can move forward. There are time constraints. I love this game. I give you 30 seconds. You're in a bad spot or you're here. You have 30 seconds to accomplish this objective. Really, people start to panic because 30 seconds is not a lot of time and I really like being able to put on a little bit of pressure because it kind of simulates to a small degree competition. It's really easy for people to get nervous and overwhelmed in competition. It happens to me. The last time I competed, I I got too nervous and did something I shouldn't have and I ended up losing because of it. So if I can give you time constraints, that is a really nice way of, you know, either forcing you to work really fast or forcing you to slow down. So one of the games that I tend to play is, I'll give you 90 seconds or two minutes, whatever it is, and you'll be in closed guard. Just as an example. Person who is in your closed guard, they are winning by two points and one advantage. So, you have 90 seconds to win the fight. And that's the game. And now we tend to play that after maybe a couple of demonstrations of some things you can do from closed guard. Person on top who's in the closed guard, your only objective is to not let them score. You don't even have to pass because you're already winning. Person on bottom, you have to score more than two points because they have two and one advantage. So just getting like a sweep isn't enough. You have to sweep and mount or sweep and knee on belly or something. And it really forces them to get creative. If they are more advanced, maybe I'll allow submissions. If they are not, then I might not or maybe the only submissions they can do are the ones that we've talked about that class. If I really want to encourage them to learn, you know, try a four-four choke or an X choke or whatever it is. I might say, hey, you can do that, but that's the only one you could do. And if you're more experienced, I'll probably just kind of let you go. Speaker 2: Awesome. I love that idea. I've never thought about doing that, but basically creating um almost like a combat simulation there where you've given people the parameters of you are down on points, you've got 90 seconds, go. That's really interesting because that also creates this asymmetric training situation where one person has offensive goals and the other person has defensive goals. Because like you said, for the person who's winning, they don't need to put any points on the scoreboard. They just need to defend. And, you know, in jiu-jitsu, we always give people crap for being overly defensive, but I mean, there are times when that's a valid strategy, right? When you are winning a match and there's only a few seconds left, some people will choose to defend and try to hold out on the score rather than trying to put more points on the board. I mean, there's an argument to be made if that one approach is right or the other is wrong, but in terms of how that manifests in training, that's pretty cool because it means that one person has to bring the heat and the other person just has to shut them down. That's an aspect of jiu-jitsu that we don't teach very often, which is how to counter what Josh Wentworth would call negative jiu-jitsu. And that's a big part of the game is not just I'm trying to do things to you, but also I'm trying to deny you the ability to do things. Um if you get a point advantage or on someone and then from there you just stall them out. I mean, people complain about this, but this is a valid strategy and people will do it. And you have to know how to do it as well. So, I love this because it brings into account all of the real-world parameters that you would get from a competition while at the same time also adding the kind of variability to training that all of the eco coaches tell us is so important. Speaker 3: Yeah, and I like to look at things always from a self-defense point of view. I started jiu-jitsu as part of doing MMA and I really think that at its core, jiu-jitsu is most beneficial to the average person when it's a good workout and they learn some self-defense thing, but I do teach a lot of competition things as well. But one of the things that you realize is if someone doesn't know jiu-jitsu and you put them in closed guard, all they're going to do is try to drive you through the mat. They're just going to try to control your hands and push you down and hold you. And so, how easy is it to do an armbar when somebody's just putting a ton of downward pressure on you? It's not that easy. So, if you can learn how to work around that, and you have to do it in 90 seconds, because I don't, no one has all the time in the world in a real life situation or even in a competition environment. You're timed. You cannot just sit there for 10 minutes and figure out what your next move is. You got to move now. You got to make yourself work. So, that's one of the big reasons that I do it. Another thing that I do with time is my at the end of the class when we do our free rolls, I will either, you know, we do our regular five-minute rolls most of the time, but occasionally, now you got one 10-minute roll that you got to work through. Just because I want you to really keep up a consistent pace, learn to not burn yourself out in the first two minutes. Other times I'll do drop sets. Five minutes, four minutes, three minutes. It's really hard to do jiu-jitsu in three minutes. You have to work so much faster, so much harder. And so, playing with time is a really good way to get people to either slow down or speed up depending on what you're trying to get them to do. So I tend to do those things a lot. We do a lot of what you might call positional sparring. You're in half guard, you have your objectives, here they are. Go ahead, you got three minutes each person, and then we switch, whatever. I play a lot with time. I play a lot with limiting or expanding how many options an individual will have. So, I think those are some super useful tools. And we I will say, and I know I tend to ramble, one of the games that I've played that students really like, and this is great for unpredictability. I do tag team jiu-jitsu. Speaker 2: Yes, yes. Speaker 3: Yeah. I get two people who are either opposite skill or opposite size. So if I have like a 100-pound person and a 250-pound person, they will be paired together. And I try to make the teams even. One less experienced and or smaller and one more experienced and or bigger. And they're a team. They will start off rolling against another person. So the two more experienced guys will start rolling. I put a timer on the clock, one minute. Wherever they end at that one minute, the other pair starts in that same spot. And then I say go and they start going from there. A minute passes by, wherever they end, the original pair comes back and does the same thing. And they just keep going back and forth for the five minutes until or until someone taps. And this is fantastic because it you don't get to choose where you start rolling from. And so if you are always doing your A-game, which for a lot of people is what they do, now you don't get that chance. Maybe not initially, or you have to really work towards getting your A-game. Or if you're smarter, you will work towards your partner's A-game because then you give you set them up for the best chance to end the fight at the one-minute mark when they come back in. So there's some ways we can do this, but I think tag team jiu-jitsu is not only very good for you get stuck in some weird spot and now you have to figure it out and you have no idea how you got there, but have fun anyway. I think it's great for that. And students just really like it. It is so much fun. Like cheering on your partner and then getting into these crazy situations and trying to end in a a beneficial spot for your partner, kind of builds a little bit of uh rapport with students and it's it's honestly a ton of fun. Speaker 2: I am a big fan of making Brazilian jiu-jitsu as much like professional wrestling as we possibly can. So, I mean, I am all about having a tag team division. I also think that everyone who is purple belt and above should have entrance music and pyro whenever they come to the gym. I also think that at least once a week, you should get a mic and be allowed to cut a promo on someone else in the room. I think that that is the future of the sport of jiu-jitsu. Speaker 3: You have to make it fun and I feel awful because I don't remember who said this, but they were saying they have three rules for jiu-jitsu and I tend to do this. I like to think, and maybe it doesn't come across in this episode, but I like to think I'm a pretty fun or funny person. At least in the training room I am. The three things that I always make sure that I do every class is, I need you to learn something. I need you to sweat, and I want to make you laugh because jiu-jitsu is fun. And you should, listen, you want to be top in the world, you want to be the best grappler in the world, you want to take down Gordon Ryan. Maybe you need to be a little more serious with your training. But if you're an everyday person, you're doing jiu-jitsu because it looks cool or self-defense or whatever good work, whatever the reason is, whatever your why is, you need to have fun doing it because if you don't, if you come to class every day and your instructor's showing these random things that make no sense because they're totally disconnected from all the other techniques you've learned or anything that you know, it's impossible to pull them off in real rolls because you never get the time to actually sit there and do it with resistance. So you you're a blue belt that's constantly getting smashed in rolls or you're whatever, it's it's it gets frustrating, it gets tiring. And then people wonder why the attrition rate in jiu-jitsu is so awful, it's so high, and they're happy about that. And it's like, why are you excited about that? Why are you happy that 90% of people who sign up leave? I don't understand. That would be awful anywhere else. I want my students to come in and feel like they accomplished something. And one of the things that one of the ways I do that if because it's very hard for brand new people to roll. And if you're an instructor, you might not know what to do with them. So like do they drill more? Do they sit out? Do they roll? So I actually came up with something for that. I give the new person a task. Everything comes down to tasks and objectives. If I mean, you've been listening to this for almost 46 minutes. Everything's down to tasks and objectives. And I give the new person a very specific task. I get someone who's more experienced, which isn't hard because they're day one. And say, okay, this person, the more experienced person is going to be on their back. They need to stand up. And I preface this with the, you know, scenario. They're, you know, you're out in the world and you see something happen and you tackle this person and you keep them down. New York City average response time for NYPD is about four or five minutes. This round is set to five minutes. Your job is to keep them pinned to the ground, keep them down for the full five minutes until the police get here. And that's kind of how I phrase or set up the the game that they're playing. I create this little scenario for them. They feel accomplished doing it. They and they also realize how difficult it is to hard hold somebody down that does not want to be held down, especially one that knows jiu-jitsu. But I show them, you know, maybe I show them a quick thing of like how we can hold them or how to start or something like that. And then I just let them go. And I usually ask the more experienced person that helped them out if you're getting out too easy or if they're making these huge egregious errors, walk them through it and then reset and try again. And now every time they reset, they should be a little bit better from your feedback. So I actually let the students start to teach them in those scenarios as well. This way it's not just all me all the time because it's one instructor in the room. I can't be talking to everybody at the same time. So I think it's important to have students start to teach. And this is a fantastic way to get people to do it. So, create the some scenario where they pin the person down and that's that's the whole objective. And they enjoy doing it because it's challenging and it's different and it's fun because I made this scenario for them. It's like a game, which I don't know why I said it like that. We've it's jiu-jitsu, it's a all of it's a game. But yeah, that's how I deal with day one people who come to class and when it comes time to roll, even though they don't know anything. Speaker 2: Amazing, man. You know that quote that you brought up earlier, originally the way that I I've got it written down is sweat, smile, learn. Those are the three components you need to have a class. And it was Giles Garcia who said that, I think on the BJJ Mental Models podcast. I love that quote because I think it talks about really the three important things that we do care about in jiu-jitsu. It's more than just performance. It's about putting in a degree of effort, which is ultimately the most important thing. Actually, no, it's not true. The most it's about putting in a degree of effort, it's about learning, but it's also about having fun, which is the most important thing in jiu-jitsu. I mean, I've said before that, look, we can talk about trying to moneyball this thing and create the best athletes ever, but at the end of the day, the thing that makes good athletes is consistency. And the thing that makes consistency is enjoyment. If you're not having fun, it's very hard to stay consistent over the long term. Speaker 3: Yeah, and that falls not entirely, but if that's a large part of the instructor's role is to not only teach something, and this is one of the reasons why it's so difficult to be an instructor at times. It's not only your responsibility to teach something, but maintaining good culture. I know that's something that's been talked about a ton on this on the podcast, so we don't need to go into it here. But making sure that there's a good culture, making sure that people are enjoying themselves, having a laugh and and I don't whether or not the pairs who are working choose to talk to each other while they work, that's up to them. As long as if they want to, as long as they're not being super disruptive to other people. I good, you should talk. You should be friends with these people. Or at the very least, you should be social with them to a degree. You don't have to go out to the bar after if you don't want to, but I mean, presumably you will be at the gym several times a week, an hour or two a day. You know, you spend somewhere between six and eight hours a week with these people. You should like them. You should be able to have fun with them. And I think an easy way to to make sure that people are having fun is that they're doing jiu-jitsu the way they want to because I'm not flexible. I'm not doing these upside down inverted things. Can I invert? Can I berimbolo? Yeah, absolutely. I don't like to, so I don't really do it that much. There are other people who, you know, I'm not saying I'm very strong, but there are people who aren't as strong as I am and maybe these heavy lapel drags or collar drags aren't their thing. Well, that's fine. It's it doesn't need to be your thing. Do your jiu-jitsu and learn how to do your jiu-jitsu by setting up these goals. And that's I think the big thing that instructors need to do is make sure that students are hitting the objectives. You go around the room, you know, you said before, a lot of people think that the instructor in eco style rooms don't do anything, but they're doing a lot. You have to be watching what all your students are doing and trying to understand that individual student's needs. Yes, if everybody's making the similar mistake or something got lost in translation, you get to address the whole class. But most of the time, most of my instruct like feedback is on a personal individual level. They have their own set of problems or questions or constraints or affordances that they're working through. And I need to assist them. And I think it's great when other students who are especially more experienced, they try to help other students walk through things or understand why. Even if you're a white belt, it's okay to talk to your partner and say, hey, I don't really feel that, you know, you're doing it, but it feels like I could get out. Maybe try breaking my posture more. Maybe try doing something, you know, it's just not what it feels like it should be. I think that's perfectly okay for white belts and stuff to do. Even though some people may discourage white belts from teaching, you're not teaching, you're giving feedback. Hey, this this isn't working. I'm able to defend it. I think those are all super, super important for coaches and if you are a new coach, learning to balance all that is tricky, but with practice, you'll get it. The worst, honestly, the worst thing you could do, the worst thing you could do is not teach. But an issue that people encounter, and I still encounter this from time to time, is you bounce back and forth between these games and objectives and discrete techniques. And one of the challenges with that is students get confused. They don't understand how they should be learning or they don't understand what there's no predictability for when they come to class. So it's like, am I going to be working super hard and playing all these games and with resistance or am I just going to be an easy class? And or is this going to be related to what we've been doing? They should be some level of predictability. Try your best to stick to a plan. Think, you know, you have to work ahead of time. It's not something that you could just walk through the doors. Maybe you can, maybe you're better at this than I am. Most people probably are. But plan out your class ahead of time. I do that all the time. I even set, okay, two minutes for this game, two minutes for this game, seven minutes for this, eight minutes for this, whatever it is. And I write it down on my phone. I know there's a thing about instructors and their phones. I'm on my phone. I'm not texting. I'm not watching YouTube videos. I'm referring to my notes and making sure that the class is staying on target and we're playing the games. I'm hitting all the definition points and objectives that I wanted to do for that class. I think being prepared is your best friend. And if you just walk in and like, I'm just going to show a couple of techniques, it might not go the way you want it to. So, just some very quick last-minute tips for some of those new instructors. Speaker 2: Great advice, man. And I I'd love to tie this back around to this idea of how can we help new instructors get off the ground? I think many times people in jiu-jitsu tend to feel like they're not qualified to be an instructor, either because they don't have a black belt yet, which of course is is a completely artificial designation, or maybe they feel that they just don't understand things like ecological dynamics yet. One of the things about this particular area of coaching is it can make you feel really inferior really quick because it's complicated, right? I mean, you can go down that rabbit hole real far. And the more that you learn about it, the more you start to doubt yourself about whether I actually know enough to do this. And this is a sport where we often gatekeep instruction a lot. You know, there's this expectation that, oh, if you're a black belt, you can coach, but no one else should teach. And I don't agree with that. I mean, I agree with friend of the show Rob Bernacki on a lot of things, but one of the things that I don't agree with him on is he has said that he does not allow white belts to teach. And I think that is a a massive missed opportunity. I think that teaching is often one of the best ways to learn, and I think it's wrong to assume that less experienced people have nothing to contribute or nothing to teach. And I also think that that culture can prevent kind of like the the blues and the purple and the brown belts from being willing to really get in there and contribute back to the team. I don't want to be part of a jiu-jitsu team where there's one black belt at the head of the room and they're the only ones who can teach. So I'd love to maybe get your thoughts on this for someone who's listening to this and they're maybe at that purple belt level or blue belt level, and they want to start getting into teaching. They like the sound of what you're explaining here, but they're also afraid that like they're just not there yet. They're not qualified to do this. What do you say to them and how do you help them kind of overcome that first bit of inertia and get to the point where they can really start contributing in a classroom or even lead a classroom themselves if they feel so inclined? Speaker 3: I think first that feeling does not go away. At least for me, it hasn't. I still feel like I know nothing in terms of how to teach, understand ecological dynamics, my jiu-jitsu game as personally. There's so much to learn and that is just a reality. You'll never know enough. You'll never feel like you know enough. And that's not a bad thing. It just means that you are aware of your limitations and what you know and what you don't know, what you might need to get help on. And I think that is a very powerful thing to understand your own limitations. I know what my limitations are and I seek to improve them. You know, I read books from Dr. Rob Gray, I have you learned to move and all these things. I seek out other information about improving my jiu-jitsu. It's a never-ending thing. That's first and foremost. You will feel like you don't know enough and that's fine because no one knows enough. There's just too many things. How to start teaching? Talk to your instructor. Hey, I would really like to get involved more. Is there a way that I can do a couple of warm-up games? Is there an opportunity to have like an open mat? Like can I run a 10-minute warm-up game session or, you know, just to get familiar with talking in front of people and implementing these games and demoing things. If there's a if you're more advanced than like a blue belt and you have like a really established game or position that you yourself are really good at, think of a couple of games. What are the things that in order to do this technique or get to this position, you must have? You know, like for like an armbar, you must have pressure on the elbow. You have to have control of the shoulder, control of the wrist. These are things you must have in order to do an armbar. What are the things you must have for what you're good at? And make games out of them. How do I get to here and hold it? And then just hold it as long as I can. How do I get whatever it is you're trying to do? Come up with these games. Talk to your instructor. Hey, I came up with these games. The next time that we talk about this topic, would it be all right if we tried them? Or, you know, something. There's plenty of ways where you can talk to your instructor. I seriously doubt that your instructor will deny the help or turn you away in a decisive fashion. They we said it at the beginning of the episode, some black belts are resistant to change, but, you know, that's something that I think if you have an open conversation with them about what you want and your goals, I like to think that most of them will listen and be willing to help. But it starts with that first conversation. But again, just like when you go to class, go to that conversation prepared. Don't try to wing the conversation. Understand what you're trying to accomplish and how you want to accomplish so you can present it in a meaningful way to your instructor. And then if your instructor's on board, guess what, the class is probably going to be on board as well. Speaker 2: Amazing, man. Great insights there. And I would just add a few things. First of all, I would say that if you are listening to this and you want to be a coach or you want to teach a class, but you feel like the more you read, the more you study, the more convinced that you're just not qualified to do it. That's probably a sign that you're going to be a pretty good coach because it means that you are deliberately trying to get better at the job and you have the self-awareness to know that you're not perfect. There's a lot of black belts out there who walk into the room with extreme confidence about everything they do and they don't know what the fuck they're talking about. Speaker 3: I've been in those rooms. I'm sure you are. Speaker 2: Or you have as well. And it's not good, man. It's not good. And Speaker 3: No, I'm one of those black belts that has the confidence and knows nothing. You know, I you nailed it. You got it right the first time. Speaker 2: The only thing I'm confident about is that I'm probably not the best expert to talk about on pretty much anything, right? So I I would always bring that up that it's not always about do you have all of the knowledge in your head? Are you the domain expert? A lot of it is just about do you have the mindset of a good coach? Someone who just wants to learn more and is willing to accept the limitations of their knowledge and work on it. If you're that kind of coach, I don't care if you're a blue or purple belt. I would rather learn from you than from a black belt who thinks they know everything. So I would say that that mindset, that kind of feeling of imposter syndrome, that fear that you don't know enough, that's actually the indication that you're probably have the right temperament for that job. The other thing that I would also bring up is just because you're a blue or purple belt, that doesn't mean you're a blue or purple belt at everything. Everyone has areas that they're good at and that they're weak at. And if you want to really teach with confidence and you're worried about, you know, I I don't want to teach something that I don't know very well, well, just don't teach those things. Leave those to someone else or wait until you get better at those areas of the game before you focus on them. I know a lot of people who are, you know, blue belts, purple belts, and you know, maybe across the board, that's a fair way to rank them. But they might have areas of their skill where they are way better than black belts. What we find at a lot of the camps we do is we always try to bring up people who specialize in certain areas. Josh Wentworth calls them subject matter experts, right? Sometimes you've got that guy in your gym or that girl in your gym who maybe they're a blue or a purple belt, and maybe in general, it's fair to peg them that way, but maybe they're just like a berimbolo enthusiast and they study and they've just been like going way deep into that. And they might have black belt level knowledge in that area. So champion that, right? Give them that opportunity. And if you are that person, focus on teaching those things and, you know, you can always delegate, right? If you're not comfortable teaching an aspect of the game, say so and hand that off to someone else in the room who is. For myself, for example, I'm a black belt, but as Valerie Worthington says, um being a black belt doesn't mean you're a black belt in everything. There are massive areas of the jiu-jitsu game where I would be the first person to tell you I am not a black belt. There's areas in the jiu-jitsu game that I would say I'm not even a blue belt. There's stuff I just don't like to do, right? I mean, a lot of stuff that involves tying people up with like sleeves and lapels. That's just not for me. I know how to defend it, but I'm not going to be the one who does it. And so, as a result, I'm probably not going to teach that stuff. If people come to me and they want to learn something, I'm going to teach the stuff that I feel like I actually understand. And if people want to learn that stuff that I'm not good at, as a coach, my job is to find someone else in the room who is good at that and give them the floor. So, coaching doesn't mean you need to be the only person who speaks and it doesn't mean that you need to know everything. You just need to have the sense of awareness and the humility to know your limits and either focus on growing past those or just hand the ball to someone else if it's not something that you're interested in really specializing in. And I know that's not just my opinion. I mean, I've heard very good grapplers talk about how there's aspects of the game they just don't do. They don't feel confident even teaching. You know, people who have won many world championships and they still tell me, well, that area of the game, it's not really my thing. I don't feel good about teaching it because there's better people to do it. That's awesome. If you can bring that kind of mentality and you don't need to be a black belt to do that. Speaker 3: No, not at all. And I think it's really everything you just said, I I agree with 100%. It's really just what you're comfortable doing, but I would encourage you to create these games and play them. I have one of my students, he's my closest friend. Him and I, whenever I come up with a game or I have an idea or something, a day before the class, two days before the class, whatever it is, him and I go to the gym, just the two of us, and we try the thing that I'm going to show or that the game that I want to play. Does it actually work? Does it accomplish what I want to? Do I have to change it at all? And then I can kind of go into, okay, I'm doing this, here we go. And it helps him because he's my go-to, okay, he's the person I usually demonstrate things or work things through with. So now he knows what's coming and he knows how to help me a little bit. Every good instructor has an even better Uke that they work with. So, I think that's important, but you also get a sense for, you get to do a dry run. So when you do it in front of the class, it's not the first time you're doing it and you feel a little bit more comfortable and confident actually running through everything you planned on. Speaker 2: Amazing advice, man. Well, any closing thoughts, Nick, that we want to talk about here before we tie this one up or did we get into everything on this topic? Speaker 3: I think we summarized it pretty well. Speaker 2: I think so too. I feel good about this. I mean, as always, if people want to learn more, I mean, you're an easy guy to find. Of course, I'd love to have you back on the podcast too to expand on this. But if people want to reach out to you and connect with you, ask you questions, or if they want to come train with you, how do they do all of that? Speaker 3: Yeah, you can find me on Instagram at Dark Bear Dojo. That's the easiest way to do it. Speaker 2: Amazing. And I will put links to that and to your gym in the show notes as well. Let's talk about the gym. If people want to train with you, where can they find you and what can they expect if they show up? Speaker 3: My gym is located in Staten Island, New York. You just put into Google Maps, Dark Bear Dojo, it'll come up. And they'll get exactly what we talked about. They're going to get games, they're going to get a good workout, they're going to get a friendly, welcoming environment. We work, you know, you're going to leave that class, you're going to leave it tired and sweating, but you're going to leave there in one piece because I spend a lot of time building good culture and we welcome people to come in and train with us and and if you have something that you're just crushing everybody with, I might ask you to show us show us how it works or at the very least how to defend it. I think collaboration is such an important part of jiu-jitsu. I don't keep secrets from my students. Anything that I'm really good at, they all know that I'm really good at. They all know what I do. They all know how I do it. I don't think it help I don't think it helps anyone to keep secrets. High tides raise all ships, right? If I can get them better and they start getting me in dangerous situations, they start getting close to tapping me, it just means that they're doing I'm doing my job as a coach. They're doing their their job as a student. But that's really what you can expect from training with us is a good time, good work and uh playing a lot of games. Speaker 2: Amazing, man. Well, I will put links to your gym and your Instagram in the show notes to make it easy for people to find you and follow you. I'll also put a link to our stuff. Everything we make lives at bjjmentalmodels.com. That's where you can find all of the episodes of the podcast, both full-length episodes like this and the mini concept breakdowns that we do once a week as well. They're all completely free and they're on there. I also definitely recommend people sign up for our newsletter. We're approaching 13,000 people signed up. It's completely free. To the best of my knowledge, one of the most popular like thought piece jiu-jitsu newsletters in the sport. So I definitely suggest getting in on that as well and you can sign up there at the same link again in the show notes. And I always ask people, if you haven't done so already, please do consider joining BJJ Mental Models Premium. We're really trying to do something unique and different. This is not just a an online academy and nothing against those. I I mean, I recommend some great online academies all the time. But what we make is kind of more similar to Audible or or MasterClass. We try to use spoken word like this to teach and explain aspects of jiu-jitsu strategy, concepts, culture, tactics, philosophy, the kind of things that don't fit cleanly into a traditional instructional. There's a ton of other reasons why you would want to sign up for premium. I will not belabor them all here. But if you're interested, and again, I would ask, please do consider at least looking into it. bjjmentalmodels.com is where you go to learn all about that offering. That's how we uh keep the lights on here. So I definitely appreciate everyone. Uh including yourself, Nick, who's a premium subscriber and keeps us going. Thank you so much to all of you who do support us and for those of you who aren't on premium yet, please do consider it. But Nick, thanks so much, man. This was a fantastic chat. I am super glad to have you here. I'd love to have you back. Maybe I can arrange a a grudge match between you and Ken to get some Pokémon battles going. I can get my daughter in there if you want to. She is like a Pokémon TCG badass. So, let's make it happen. Speaker 3: Wait, I play the TCG competitively. Don't. Listen, Steve, you're a great dude. I will show no mercy. Speaker 2: You're going to make my make my seven-year-old daughter cry. You know what? That's, you know, growth from discomfort, right? She's got to learn. She's got to toughen up. Sometimes you just need to get your ass kicked at at Pokémon TCG. It builds character. Speaker 3: This is how it goes sometimes. Speaker 2: Yeah. You know what's funny? I actually, I gave her a whole lecture about this and because she's she's big into Pokémon. She has been for years. And I said, you know, the the moral of the story is that we all get stronger through friendly competition and to never give up because it took Ash 25 years to win the Pokémon World Championship. And he did it. And if he can do it, so can you. So I'm, you know, I think the the philosophy of Pokémon is actually quite interesting. Speaker 3: Yeah, it's listen, we could do an entire hour about Pokémon. I didn't even get into the fact that I do armored combat fighting. We didn't even get to talk about that. Speaker 2: Oh, all of you like HEMA guys. We actually had one of you at the last camp we did and it's like at some point we had to pause one of the sessions because a whole bunch of guys wanted to go outside and hit each other with swords. It was it was quite the thing. Speaker 3: Yeah, it's like the most fun thing in the world. But I'm taking far too much of your time already. But no, but definitely the Pokémon battles, I want that to be a thing. Speaker 2: Amazing. Well, I you know what? I will move on that. I will get the ball going on that. But thank you so much, Nick, for coming by and and dropping some knowledge on us. This is a great one. Speaker 3: No, thank you. I was super happy to do it and I can't wait for the next one. Speaker 2: Most welcome, sir. And thank you to the listeners too. Always love having you hang out with us here each and every week. I know that there's a lot of podcasts you could listen to. Believe me, I am well aware. And it is not lost on me that people spend their time here with us. I truly appreciate it. So thanks a lot and we'll talk to you next week. See you then.