Ep. 328: Training Intensity, feat. Dr. Mike Israetel

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 1: Hey, welcome to BJJ Mental Models episode 328. I'm Steve Kwan. BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent jiu-jitsu approach. And today, I'm here with a first-timer, I've got Dr. Mike Isratel on the line. Mike, how are you doing, sir? Speaker 2: I'm doing great, man. Thanks for having me on. I plan to make this the year least conceptual and least intelligent episode at the same time. Speaker 1: Thanks, I think. Well, people probably know you, like you said earlier, people are probably used to seeing your big gigantic head all over their YouTube and Instagram feeds. But in case people don't know the name, why don't you give yourself a quick intro, tell people who you are and where they may know you from. Speaker 2: I am Mike. I have a PhD in sport physiology. I am a competitive bodybuilder. I just received my jiu-jitsu black belt from Josh Vogel at The Jiu-Jitsu Company in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, that amazing city with flying cars and zero crime and no litter in the streets. And I am currently training just a bit of jiu-jitsu and mostly focusing on my hypertrophy and bodybuilding stuff, but I look into getting back into jiu-jitsu at some point much more heavily. And I've recently been giving a lot of thought to these topics and I'm super pumped to chat about kind of a bit of a scientific approach to jiu-jitsu training that I have been fiendishly and secretly developing in my lab. Ah. I got nothing. That's it. Speaker 1: No worries, sir. Well, you know what, that's a little bit ominous, but hopefully, this goes in the right direction here. What you had talked about was getting into a discussion about training intensity in jiu-jitsu. And I am fascinated to hear your take on this. You know, for those who have never seen you on YouTube, like you said, you're a competitive bodybuilder, you're a big boy. And so I would love to hear your thoughts, especially informed from a science background around how you look at training intensity in jiu-jitsu, just kind of going into that framework that you teased there a second ago. Speaker 2: Absolutely, and please feel free to cut me off at any point to ask follow-up questions or tell me to shut up or just tell me I'm wrong. And I I would love pushback on any and all of this, by the way, I don't attach my ego to my intellectual pursuits. I used to attach my ego to my sexual performance, that was a mistake. Oh boy, let me tell you. All right, so the way I see training intensity in jiu-jitsu is in a spectrum. And every part of the spectrum has a very good use case for training in it. First, let's define what intensity means. Intensity can be defined in jiu-jitsu training as how much are you contracting your muscles during the rolls relative to your abilities. Muscle contraction can be scaled on at least two variables, both will apply here. One is the speed of muscle contraction. The speed of muscle action, rapid movements, explosive movements, quick guard passes, jumping guard, super quickie dippy takedowns. That is high intensity, and low intensity can literally be defined as a resultant very slow movement where you're actually not trying to move quickly, but someone's stopping you, but you're literally just trying to move very slow through the movement. The second factor in intensity is revealed as how much force are you imparting on your opponent. And how much force are you imparting to both work your system and advance your position or resist their various advances. And so, for example, if you are like me and you do slow, low, heavy, grinding guard passing, then, you know, as you pass, people push against you, they try to shrimp away, how much you're squeezing into them, leveraging your body weight into them and like very extensively pulling them into you as you pass, can be scaled on a scale of you're rolling against the new 12-year-old white belt that showed up and weighs 60 pounds and you're just literally going through the motions, all the way to you're in a competition and one pass gets you the advantage and wins you the whole tournament and you're halfway past and it's just collars, grips and just grinding your life away until he gives you the pass. And so speed and force are really the two variables there. And you can scale them on anywhere from, you know, zero, these are actually objectively definable. Zero on speed means you don't move, typically not what you do in jiu-jitsu. Though, unresisted drilling and letting someone drill on you technically is zero speed intensity from some perspective. All the way to 100, which is your most rapid fire movement that you're capable of. And then zero on the force production scale is like you get if you're pulling someone's leg and they move it out of the way with any amount of force, you lose the position. And 100 is like either your bicep tears off or you're getting the pass. One of those two things is going to happen. And so that's kind of the intensity spectrum, and then any questions about that spectrum before I talk about where on the spectrum we can have different kinds of training. Speaker 1: No, but I can maybe just chime in with my personal experience as well. I started jiu-jitsu and like many people, at the beginning, I was told, go slow, go slow. Very common advice for beginners, not because going slow is necessarily the best way to get results, but because when you're a beginner, it's the best way to get you to settle down and be productive and be safe and focus on learning. The challenge that happens though, is as you get more advanced in the sport, you eventually realize that once your technique is there, once you know what you're doing, there are times when you actually need to speed things up. And I spent so many years focused on going slow that it kind of left a permanent imprint on my game. And even to this day, even though I know I don't have to do this anymore, I still have that white belt Steve in my head who it was beaten into him, go slow, be controlled at all times, if you can't do it slow, then you can't do it fast. And as a result, I have a very slow, crushing, like glacial jiu-jitsu style, I think sort of similar to what you've described. And I'm very curious to get your thoughts onto whether these are inherently good or bad and how safety comes into play, especially at beginner levels. But I'll turn it over to you to continue your point. Speaker 2: Yes, that is excellent, excellent insight and I would love to address some of those. So, what we can do is try to go across the intensity spectrum, even if it's as simple as making three, two cuts into it, thus giving us three zones of intensity. One is the easiest zone, some combination, though these can be bifurcated in a more advanced discussion, some combination of pretty slow and just not using a lot of force. You know, like how a purple belt 200-pound guy would roll with the blue belt 110-pound girl. You know, like if you see anything north of 30% effort, you're the black belt professor, you pull them aside after class and you're like, my man, we are not here to try to kill each other, please understand what's going on. You know, some shit like that. And then there's the kind of middle zone, kind of the middle 33%. Where it can be some combination of significantly faster, but with pretty light force execution, or significant force execution, not crazy, not your best, but pretty damn slow. And then the last zone of intensity can be the hardest one, the top 33%. Some combination of very, very rapid movements and plenty of force. All the way to the slowest movement in the world, but only because the opponent is pushing back against you and won't give you the position with all his force, and the slowness is only as a result of you putting in very high levels of muscular force on your end. So, now that we have these three categories, roughly, very roughly, and remember in each one of these, we can play with how we sort of fill up the space, is it more with speed or more with strength or an even combination of both? Or both maxed out, and then once we figure that situation out, we can say, okay, for these big three categories of how to move in jiu-jitsu, what are use cases that we can fill in under them? So just imagine a sheet of paper in like Microsoft Word or something like that, or just even PowerPoint. And we have like just a line, the line at the very top goes zero to 100. And that's intensity. And then we have three boxes that sit right next to each other under that line, they're the entire length of the line, each one is a third the length, they're all crunched together. And, you know, the box on the left is light intensity, then moderate intensity in the middle, and all the way to the right at the top is hard intensity. Below each box, we can write a list, one list for each box, one list below each box of here are the use cases in jiu-jitsu that really match this intensity well. And what we end up doing if we try that exercise is a really cool thing because as you fill in the use cases, some of them will be like, dude, that's actually really good use case, it makes total sense, it passes the sniff test, but it doesn't seem to relate to any grand architecture of how to figure out how to jiu-jitsu. But a lot of these will end up having a lot of commonalities and kind of this logic emerges from within this space of three different difficulties of training and what goes well with them. So, on the very left side under the light space, I'll just give a couple of examples because, you know, like this podcast would last a lot longer and bore people even more to tears than no doubt they're already on their way to being, if we just like perseverated on a sort of an inclusive list, a very expanded list of all of these, but I'll give just a few examples and try to weave them together. A really good approach to light training, I can think of two cases for this right off hand. One is folks learning new things. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. You ever hear about that? That whole thing? This is the exact case for that. Like, you're not going to learn a whole lot if you're on the hard box all the way to the right, because fight or flight engages, when you are in fight or flight, you actually have trouble learning as much. Relaxed posture lets your brain learn better. And at the same time, if you go too hard, you'll make mistakes because you're going faster than your movement world model in your head can accommodate. You're just kind of stabbing in the dark, but your movement world model, some combination of your primary sensory, primary motor cortices and your cerebellum, don't really know what's up and down or right or wrong, it's just about for you to teach them. And so if you move like stochastically and jumpy and, you know, psycho white belt energy when you're learning new moves, then like you're going to learn them bad. You're going to learn them wrong because you can't slow down enough to actually follow proper trajectories. And so there's another problem there. If you're learning all the time, and your learning saps your energy and beats you up and exposes you to injury risk, and then also your live rolling also does that, well then, Jesus Christ, like you're just not going to last very long in the sport. Steve, you ever have a situation where you like come up to a white belt in the gym who's like losing it for the fifth day in a row and you're like, hey, man, like I know this is exciting. However, if we slow down and chill just a little bit, you'll get more out of this and you won't just break your arm in two weeks. Speaker 1: Yes, 100%, 100%. In fact, advice I often give to beginners, white belts and even some blue belts is learn to become aware of when you're being tense. I've observed that with beginners, they often tense up without even realizing that they're doing it. Just because again, for people who are not quite comfortable with jiu-jitsu because they're just getting started, it's fight club for them, right? They're the fight or flight response kicks into play and they're in here to scrap, whether they realize it or not, their body just goes into fight mode. And as a black belt, right, you know this, you can feel that in a beginner. You can feel when they're too tense, and it also makes it easy to exploit them because the tenser they are, the more rigid their body structure is. There is a time and a place to tense and to squeeze, but if you're always tense and always squeezing, you're not really using that strength effectively. So I always tell beginners, if you can't self-regulate because you don't know how yet, leverage your training partner, get them to tell you, hey, I've noticed you're just way too tense, tone it down a bit, and then after a while of doing that, you can train in that looseness. But yes, I've absolutely observed that before. Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, for jiu-jitsu guys who are tense, there are actually many ways for you to exploit that, someone who knows more things. One, as you mentioned, is rigidity and then you can sweep them easier, you can take them down easier. The other one is you just realize they're tense. You hold your position with minimum required tension on your part, mostly via positioning and gravity alignment, and you just cook them until, well, really, you don't cook them, they cook themselves. And then at some point you feel their tension fading and they start gassing and you're like, now I can apply 5% more tension and get an easy pass because this dude just fried himself. So, there are 10 trillion different reasons why it's a bad idea. But in any case, that learning mindset for jiu-jitsu and even in other cases for folks learning is a very, very good thing. The other way that this works is for fatigue management. And at the same time, for the reinforcement of proper movement patterns. Every single person, I don't care if you're the best jiu-jitsu player in the world, can always refine their core movements, even the ones they know well. And the best way to refine them is to go back to first principles, back to basics, back to doing the move slow, and seeing if you can examine, you know, why am I moving exactly in this direction? This is one of the excellent use cases for what's currently called a quote-unquote ecological approach in jiu-jitsu, where you sort of explore the vector space in a position and see like, okay, like I typically move like this, what if I moved a little to the left or to the right? Would that make the pass easier or harder? Now, is that something you can really do well at speed and at great intensity, but at slow speed and slow intensity, you can really, really figure out a lot of stuff. And so the fatigue management component is also big because anyone who trains jiu-jitsu for real knows one fundamental thing, maybe they don't know this. Now they're going to know this. Your body's physical abilities to do hard rolls are vastly smaller than your brain and nervous system's abilities to adapt from movement training. And because of that, you only have so many hard rolls in you per week. But you have way more rolls in you per week that if they are light, still reinforce and teach and rewire and improve those motor patterns. The same motor patterns that when you learn to crank up the intensity later, you will just be smoother at every single intensity with. So for folks, there's many ways to do this. One is you tell yourself, I'm going to do hard rolls until my body is beat up, and then I'm going to take a couple of days or a couple of sessions of just light rolls, and cap my intensity at like 33%, and then you can also do it in a more programmed, periodized style. You can take every other roll as a light roll, every other roll as a hard roll. There are many, many ways to slice it. So these are some of the really awesome benefits of rolling light. Speaker 1: So something that happens a lot, I mean, you've seen the meme, right? Two guys say, hey, do you want to roll light? And they slap and they bump, and then they just beat the shit out of each other. There's something about jiu-jitsu where we just gravitate towards escalation and escalating the intensity, especially at beginner levels, it's very hard to turn that off. Do you have any suggestions for people in that situation who are maybe beginners and they just they struggle with that natural instinct to escalate? Because that can work against you, not just in terms of your training goals, but strategically. If you get sucked into a game of trying to go fast when the other person is better at that style than you are, you're playing into their game and it's going to work against you, not even getting into risk of injury, less effective learning. Do you have any thoughts on how you can better self-regulate to kind of get yourself into that target zone that you want to be in? Speaker 2: Yes, I have at least one thought, possibly a few. So, it's good to go back and examine why you're upregulating as they upregulate. There's really only one answer, it's ego. Like, just that's just it. Like, you just want to win. Which is dope, you can feel free to pat yourself on the back. But when you realize that your ego doesn't match your long-term training objectives, and thus it doesn't even match itself in the future because you want to be a black belt killer eventually, you don't want to be like a purple belt with five different fucking casts on at the same time, then it behooves you to think this through and go, okay, that's dumb, I'm not going to do it. If you never admit to yourself that it's egotistical, you can get, you know, some new blue belts pushing you and you got to you got to put the hammer down. The other way, that's kind of a negative way to look at it. Not negative in a bad way, but moving away from the ego. There is something to move towards. And for absolutely lack of a better word, I'm going to put it, here's the definition today, folks, hearing it for the first time. Move towards slickness. You ever see someone like the old 55 like coral belt rolling with like a like a 20-year-old brown belt and the brown belt's getting after it, he's like, I'm one weapon is strength and health and youth and speed, and I'm going to use it. And it seems like he's barely even trying, and the elder coral belt gets a sweep, you're like, what? Like, he just basically trapped everything he needed to do and just slowly leaned his body to the right, and at the last minute, the young brown belt realizes all of his posts are gone. He can't post, he's just getting swept. There's something so goddamn magical to that. And that is actually the very core of jiu-jitsu. Because you can always dial up your speed and dial it down. You can always dial up your strength and dial it down. You can't dial up and down your technique because you only know so much technique. And so technique is the thing that makes you slick. And so when you're rolling, let's say you are a purple belt and you're rolling against a relatively new blue belt, roughly your size, pretty aggressive dude, you know he's going to come for it. Like, of course he's going to come for it. You're going to tell yourself a different goal in your head. You're going to say, my job in this roll is to cap my effort at like a third of what it normally is. And I know what that feels like. And I don't give a flying fuck how many points this guy scores on me or how much tapping I do to him. But what I'm going to shoot for is I'm going to shoot to execute my shit, but I'm going to shoot it with almost no intensity, and thus anytime I get what I want, it's going to be on baller slick technique. If you can train with everyone with slickness as front of mind, then eventually, when the guy comes in on a Friday and you're all nice and healed up and, you know, like on Wednesday you rolled with him and he actually like he subbed you twice, but you only got a couple really slick sweeps on him. He thinks he's better than you, he told his friends, like, you know, they were like, how's jiu-jitsu going? And he's like, oh, man, I'm subbing like pretty competitive purple belt. He was pretty good. He comes Friday and that's actually when you turn up the realness on him. Then you go like at the low end of hard, you're practicing slickness, so you're slick, but now your slickness is augmented by much more speed and much more strength. And then you shut him out completely scoreless and sub him five times in two rolls. And obviously, he's going to leave the mat like, whoa, okay, I misconstrued my totem pole hierarchy position here. You're going to benefit greatly because you weren't beating the shit out of yourself, you took the ego out of the equation, and you just said, you know, I'm going to only do slick shit. I have a way like when if I train with like girls or something like that, and they're much lighter, much weaker, lower belt rank, what I'll do is tell myself, Isratel, you are going to get zero points unless you're using a child's level of strength to execute them, and your goal is to sequence together your moves like with as much slickness as possible and timing as possible. And here's the thing, if you're not worried about effort, if you're not worried about winning, you can be patient in guard, for example, and get the timing just right. You know, like if you're doing like a deep half game in ghee, and you pull out one of the lapels and you like just hold it for a while, and they're like, that seems like he's not doing anything with that. And then like, you know, you get into deep half and you kind of weave the lapel around and they're like, okay, no danger yet. And all of a sudden, you've crossed the lapel over their legs and they're just falling. They have nothing to say about it because they're like, oh shit, I he took my post away from me. That is a real good way to still have a positive mission on your hand and not just being able to be in a place where like, okay, I can't train hard, I can't go hard. I don't have an ego, but like, what the fuck am I even rolling for? Am I just a training dummy? No, no, no, no. You still want to beat on slickness. And, look, if it's a killer UFC black belt guy, you could be as slick as you want, they're only 33%, he's just going to stomp on you. No big deal, at least you didn't get hurt. But if you are rolling against people that are not as proficient, then you had better be beating them on damn near slickness and nothing else because that's the thing you really want to train the most. Speaker 1: Yeah, well said, man, well said. Reminds me of that old classic Heberro book, Jiu-Jitsu University. I remember reading that back when I was much younger, and a lot of it is old technology. I don't know if it, I mean, I haven't revisited it in a long time. I don't know how much of it stands up, but one thing I do remember him talking about was looking at jiu-jitsu as kind of this hierarchy of skills that you need to develop. So, and he actually kind of color-coded them by belts, which is not really the perfect metaphor because you are learning all of these things kind of at the same time. But the idea was, the foundation thing is you've got to know how to survive. And then from there, you've got to know how to escape. And then from there, you've got to know how to sweep or reverse. From there, you've got to know how to improve your position, and from there, you can start thinking about submission. And in reality, again, all of these things kind of mix together, so it's not really quite a clear progression like that. But I think there is wisdom in looking at jiu-jitsu in that way. It is very easy when you're early on to get a lot of false positives because especially if you're athletic or much bigger or stronger than the other person, you can get a lot of taps just by muscling your way through things or using the attributes that you've got. And that again can give you false positives because you feel like, well, I'm tapping people in the gym, I must be good at jiu-jitsu. Meanwhile, while you're kind of doing these things that have significant technical deficiencies, everyone else, they might be working on their survival or their escapes or their reversals. So even if it looks to the untrained eye like they're getting their ass handed to them, they're actually getting better because they're working on realistic skills that will help them improve. And over time, those people often tend to surpass the meatheads, right? If someone is only thinking about how do I tap this person in front of me, that probably means they're not putting a lot of thought into how do I work the deficiencies in my game? And so the trajectory eventually, you know, you're going to overtake those people. There's going to be an inflection point where one day, and it, you know, it varies a lot from person to person, but I remember when I got to brown belt, around that time, I'd spent a lot of my time trying to figure out how do I deal with people bigger and stronger than me? And I tailored my training around that, and I got to the point where I realized, I feel pretty good about this. You know, you can put me in there with someone who outweighs me by 100 pounds, and of course, they they've got a size advantage, and I got to deal with that. And of course, that's going to be a problem if they're also a brown or black belt. But I feel like I got a chance. I feel like I can do the jiu-jitsu I want to do. I feel like their size is not going to block me from doing that. And so I always encourage people, especially earlier on in their journey to focus on those things. If you're doing all or nothing jiu-jitsu, where either you get that armbar right away, or you fail, and then they pass you, and then they just beat the shit out of you for five minutes. If that's happening to you, where the outcome of the match is like rolling a dice, that's not good. That's an indication that you need to maybe stop trying to end the fight right away and try to figure out why is it that I'm getting my guard passed so easily? Why is it that I'm I'm getting just pancaked on bottom side control? Dealing with those, and then kind of working your way up to trying to figure out how to finish the fight. I I think it's pretty helpful. I think it's super helpful. Oh, real quick, the on the offensive training side, training defense is a whole other different discussion. A shorter discussion, but nonetheless a discussion. On the offensive training side, what is core to understand and to kind of underline in what you just said, I think is actually your goal every single roll is for rapid submission. Period. The intensity you apply determines how successful you are against any given opponent. And you're going to get not maybe most of your good training, but incredible training, I would say maybe even most of your best training, when you can dial your intensity such that in order for you to be successful in getting to the submission and securing it, you are in a roughly 50/50 fight with that person and it takes a while. And because you're going to win that fight, you got to dial up your slickness and your technique. And so every roll is neck and neck, but only because you're only trying muscularly and speed-wise hard enough to receive all of their obstacles and overcome them. That's how your black belt can take a blue belt and get unreal training effect out of them. Because like if you're super slick and you practice on some people and you submit them in 30 seconds and you get up and slap hands and do it again, that's dope and all. That's not the look you're going to get at in most cases from other black belts. They're going to just shut you out of the first takedown, you're going to be like, fuck, this usually goes better for me. But if you intentionally cap, especially your strength, what can happen is a good blue belt can get real defensive with you and you're like, how do I work out of this position? Okay, I have options. I can go harder. Nope, nope, nope, not an option. I got to actually be better at jiu-jitsu just to put this a fine point on this example. The reason that works really well is it's really good to anchor your frame as I want to win because fundamentally that is the only single purpose and goal of jiu-jitsu is submitting people. Period. And so if you never change your North Star, but you accept all of the difficulties to it based on your own decided intensity, you're always getting the highest quality training. Just to put a an example to this, I'm going to talk some shit. And honestly, this guy's been up my ass for long enough, so good, I'll I'll do some beef. My coach, Josh Vogel, is roughly the same height as me, just a little bit taller. But I I think I have like 80 pounds of muscle on him and like infinity more strength. I think I passed his guard when he was trying once ever. How is it that he's fast? No, his nickname is the sloth. You see everything coming, you just can't do anything about it because he already positioned your leg outside of where you can control it. You're like, fuck, this is going to happen to me. Is he strong? God, no. Like he's strong for an adult man, but like there are levels to this, you know, like I've squatted 500 for reps. Like it's just kind of a different level of strength. Why the hell is he beating me? Because he knows how to move his body in that vector space. He knows exactly where he's going. He's got GPS. And I'm fucking out here reading map quest or some shit like that, looking through fucking sheets of maps. So, if you put him, his brain into my body, oh my god, dude, he'd be like fighting crime or some shit like that. How do we get to be as good as Josh Vogel? We have to make sure that we are not just rushing through things and using our strength a ton and even using our speed a ton. And that when we roll with people, not all the time, but many of the times, we scale our intensity down to them. The goal is the same, to beat them at jiu-jitsu. But if we scale our intensity properly, either they beat us, and because you're good, even if you're at 25%, my 25% intensity, my arsenal of technique is not good enough to win. Plain and simple. No big deal. But you got a lot of looks about where your body should be. And next time you might be able to like lose less and go up that spectrum, the Heberro spectrum, right? But at the end of the day, if you match them, or basically match your intensity to whatever it is you want, and focus on the technique, that is what's going to get you to train best in the long run. Is that emotionally satisfying? No. It's not as emotionally satisfying. Just beating the dog shit out of people is emotionally satisfying. What is going to make you better in the long run? Uh, yeah, it's that. And so you got to think of what you want. It doesn't have to be just one or the other. Again, there's always a time for getting your swag going and just like stunting on white belts or stunting on blue belts, just like doing skateboarding moves on them, basically. That's dope. Have at it. If they think it's funny, you think it's funny, it's great. But most of the time, you should be challenging yourself by limiting your intensity or increasing your intensity to get the best kind of training possible. It's quote-unquote cooperative, but no one's actually trying to cooperate. It's only quote-unquote cooperative, it's really good training because you dial your intensity down to where everything is a challenge to you, an unovercomable challenge if possible, but a challenge nonetheless. And if you can do that just through dialing intensity, you've kind of unlocked an ability to get great training on almost everybody. Absolutely. I've realized that these days, I kind of train similarly with almost everyone. I don't really struggle to get value out of rolls. A common question that people often ask is, well, how do I roll with someone who's much bigger than me? I'm not getting anything out of it. Or how do I roll with someone who's much smaller? It's not a fair fight, so I'm not learning anything. And I don't have that problem anymore. I find that if I just make sure that I let them make me work, then I can get good productive training out of almost anybody. Rob Bernacki from Island Top Team and BJJ Concepts calls this idea, he's got a game he plays called fuck your jiu-jitsu. Where basically the idea is to just disrespect the other person's jiu-jitsu. Just give them stuff, right? Just walk into their A game and let them work from there. And spend as much time fighting from inside that pocket, from inside a difficult position as you possibly can. I find that that mentality is very helpful regardless of of who I'm against. Because even, you know, the widest of white belts, if I let them put me in a fully locked in rear naked choke, they're I'm going to have to do some work to get out of it, right? So if I can find a way to help steer, and not just give them stuff, but make it somewhat realistic, so they still have to work, right? Because I want them to be getting value out of this too. But if I can let them get into their kind of the entry point of their funnels, where they can start doing the kind of jiu-jitsu that they want to do, and then I can just basically defy them. That's a very powerful way to train, and I have found that you can get value out of almost anybody training in that way. You know, regardless of who I'm training against, I walk in now with pretty much the same mentality, which is I'm going to take this to the point where I've got to work. If I with a brown or a black belt, and they're already making me work, cool, we can just roll. Maybe I've got some stuff I specifically want to work on, but my default intensity is probably fine. If I'm sparring with a white or a blue belt, I might be glacially slow until I kind of figure out what they're trying to do, and then I'll start trying to give them looks, right? Give them things that they can do, maybe make it a bit easier for them to get access to the end of my lever, like my arm or my leg. I'm just so that then they have some chance to start initiating offense, and I have to defend. And it's funny, it's in a lot of ways training jiu-jitsu in the lab, in the gym, it's a lot like professional wrestling, right? I mean, yeah, it's to some extent this is a little bit scripted because we want to guide towards an outcome of mutual gain, where we both get good training and we both learn. But on the other hand, there is this element of, you know, this is still an athletic, physical endeavor. You know, you can get your ass kicked doing professional wrestling, even if it's supposedly fake. That's the most hard sport in the world. Dude, like, don't even get me started on this. It is a whole sport that has evolved around trying to be fake and scripted. But the problem is the audience is now clued into the fact that it's fake and scripted. So, so now, to really make sure the audience is bought in, they have to make it as violent as possible, while still being fake and scripted. It's tremendously dangerous. Of course, we don't want to bring that danger into the jiu-jitsu room, but that idea of having almost like a semi-scripted match, where I'm giving you enough that you're really putting me on the back pedal. I've got to actually work. You can get great training out of small people, less experienced people, non-confident people. I love this training method against people who are still developing their jiu-jitsu confidence. Because once they start to see that like, okay, yeah, I mean, I'm going to get my ass kicked most of the time, but I've got something. If this black belt lets me kind of get the ball rolling, I can actually do some stuff. That gives them confidence too, and that means that they're going to come back. And one day they're going to be a black belt, hopefully. And then I can get much better training out of them too if I want to dial up the intensity. So, I think it's a really great mindset to understand that, you know, you can put yourself in the pocket. You can give them looks that will help both of you get better at jiu-jitsu. It's not always about just smashing the other person. I would say there are two ways specifically of doing that, which I like most. Actually starting the roll and then giving them positions. I think can work, but it has a big downside. And that downside is that you are now practicing getting into bad positions. You don't want to do that, not in a fluid roll. Because your neural network can't tell, and it'll just like reactively put you into those positions in live training. And then you're like, oh fuck, I'm like learning wrong. For example, when you're letting someone pass your guard from like standing guard, don't just lay down for them playing style and just let them pass your feet. Don't ever fucking do that. This is not a skill you want to reinforce. There are two ways in which you can help this. One is by starting in distinct positions and then slapping hands and going. Like, take my back, put in a collar, go. Get into mount on me, go. Halfway passed through my guard, go. That's a dog shit position to start from, but because you're starting there, you're not practicing getting into it. You don't want to practice getting into bad positions, not dynamically, not while you're doing jiu-jitsu. And then you say, okay, but like once we start there, is it full blast to get out? Nope. Then you do intensity capping. So you're always actually trying to win. But if I say, I want you to go at literally 50% speed and 15% of your strength, 15, you're going to lose to almost every white belt. Why? Because they're just going to move you out of the way. But in your mind, as you adjust while they pass, for example, you're going to go, okay, which way do I adjust to re-get my guard? To re-establish my guard. After they passed, which way do I go to try to take their back off a guard entry? And even though you suck so badly at that, that they get to the next position and you start having to defend the next one, your mind is always in that slow, calculated, where do I go next given they're in this bad spot? You're never putting yourself into a bad position on purpose. And you're always trying to work out from it. But if you work with sufficiently less speed and sufficiently less strength than is required to overcome them, you are going to get great training because it's awesome slow training for you, reinforcing all the good patterns and only all the good patterns. And they succeed a ton because like they just beat you a lot because you're never there to the fucking punch. For example, if I train with my wife on occasion, and she weighs like 100 pounds less than me or something like that. If she catches me in a single, I still practice turning my hips in, sagging a little bit, pushing my hips forward to sprawl, pulling my knee back. I don't do these things with enough force that she's not successful. You know, often times she is. It's great training for her. Not only does that give her a realistic look, like this is what's actually going to feel like, but I'm not putting enough force to be successful myself, but I'm always reinforcing the direction of those patterns. It's like even if you're not driving at speed to try to race to a hospital, you still follow the rules of the road even if you're going 30 miles an hour. Because you want to really get used to following the rules of the road and because you don't ever have any use case where you drive Grand Theft Auto style. Just the same way in jiu-jitsu, if you quote-unquote let someone win or get good positions, it's never because you're letting them do it. It's because you just started in a bad position and then said go, or it's because you're just too fucking slow or too weak to stop them from advancing their game. Everybody wins this way and you lose nothing. I've spent a long time putting myself in sub-optimal positions. And what I realized after a while was like, I'm just really good at getting into sub-optimal positions. Why the fuck would I want to be good at that? I want to be good at if I find myself in a sub-optimal position, asking myself, what's the next best way out of here? And start moving in that direction. And if my force isn't high enough or speed isn't high enough, I won't be successful. But at least in my brain, that same pattern of ideal movement is being reinforced. It's funny, you bring that up. A friend of the show, Nick Perler from the Perler Wrestling Academy in Missouri. He's got a saying, he's a wrestling coach, and he says, you can get really good at really bad wrestling. And I I think that's absolutely true. And you have to be very careful when you're training jiu-jitsu that you don't ingrain into your habits bad practices because they're convenient for training. One of those that comes up, like you said, is giving unrealistic defenses, just flopping your legs down and letting someone pass your guard. Why would you ever do that? How does that benefit anyone? It doesn't benefit them because they'll never see it ever again. Exactly. So it's fine to have semi-scripted outcomes in a match. I mean, a lot of the time I will do the Josh McKinney designated winner thing where I might say, okay, like the goal of this roll is, we want to help you work on your guard passing. And so, we're only going to call this a win if you're able to actually pass my guard. So, I'm here to collaborate with you and to help you do that. But you still have to beat me. Like, at the end of the day, this is going to go in the direction where we are going to make sure that you're able to pass my guard. But you're going to have to work for it. I'm not going to make it easy. I might give you some openings here and there. I might kind of give you something, but at the end of the day, I am going to make you work for it. And you see this a lot in jiu-jitsu where people get so obsessive about the defensive side of things, which is understandable, that sometimes it becomes kind of part of their identity. And and they look at jiu-jitsu, they look at not losing as a form of winning, right? The old Helio Gracie thing. If you don't lose, you eventually win. Well, I mean, there is some wisdom in that. I do see the value in that concept, but I would still much prefer to win if I could. And many people, because defense is such a key foundational skill in jiu-jitsu, we all have to go down that rabbit hole. We have to. Yeah, don't worry, you'll get plenty of looks on defense one way or another. Exactly. But if you spend all of your time trying to be that person who pulls bottom side control because you want to work your bottom side control defense, that has benefit up to a point, but at some point, you're just going to get really good at not getting tapped. And although that is important, you need to actually develop beyond that to I want to get out of here. And at some point, too, just I never even want to be here in the first place. I think many people, they kind of stop at that defense level. They get really good at defense, they can't be tapped, and they feel like I'm totally happy just being on the bottom and just defending myself the whole time. It's easy for that desire to practice one aspect of your training to become your whole training identity. And I think that that can be dangerous, especially for bigger people. I have seen so many big giant people who are terrified of giving any realistic resistance against a smaller person because since day one, they've been basically told, you are dangerous. Don't do anything. And I've said this on the podcast many times, I'm sure you can relate. I find this hilarious because all of the bad injuries I've ever had, it's never been from a 300 pounder. It's always been from some little mofo who thought they were going to try to do some shit they saw on YouTube, and they like tweaked my knee or something. It's never the big guy. It's always the little guy who's trying to be like a backflip gymnast lunatic, or they're trying to do something they saw on the internet. It's never the big guy. So I think big guys especially are very prevalent to this because there is almost an anti-big guy bias in jiu-jitsu. They're always told, like, don't do that, don't know, you got to tone it down, you got to tone it down. And you wind up creating these big guys who are basically boulders. They just don't do anything because they've been trained to not do anything. I think we got to avoid that mindset. We should always be trying to push the pace of the fight. Yes, but how quickly and how much force you put into pushing the pace will determine where that actually goes for you and where that goes for them. You always want to give everyone the best look you can. But if you dial down the speed to work on smoothness, and if you dial down the force to work on, do I really know things? Everyone benefits. That big guy thing has another that I love that by the way, that character is so, so true. And I think another way that happens to contribute to the madness is, let's be completely honest. Big dudes will try to do some shit, they'll blow their load conditioning-wise, they'll gas, and then they'll pretend that they're just going to defend from bottom side with the really doing this, just try not to die. And how do I know this so well? Come on, now, I've done it like 100,000 times. Man, that's my game right there. Matter of fact, Steve, it's hard. You know, don't even post this podcast. It's offensive that you would call me out in this individual respect. It's just a totally a real thing. And guys will be like, yeah, man, I'm just strategizing. Shut up. You just still smoke cigarettes and overeat all the time. Why don't you adjust that? And then you can be have good enough cardio to do good jiu-jitsu. But yeah, to your point, when you're on bottom, and you're only defending, no. You're only defending if defending is the approximate thing you have to do to not get submitted. As soon as they aren't submitting you and they're just kind of chilling in side control and plotting their next move, even if slowly, even if with minimal force, you are moving your hands and your body into the positions that need to occur for you to get out. So, for example, if you're in bottom side, you had better be turning to your side. And even if you can't because they're really good at adjusting and squishing you, every time they adjust and squish your left shoulder, you start moving to the right one and start tilting to the side. If they haven't controlled your hips, your hips better be goddamn vertical, you know, side to side on the mat, even though your shoulders are pinned to the mat. And you got to be weaving your arms, going for, you know, cross grips, whatever it takes to move yourself out of the equation. And if you want, it's a white belt girl and you want her to win the roll, just dial your speed and strength down so far, even with your best movements, it looks like molasses and you're the weakest person ever. You're still training absolutely the same excellent motor patterns. And she's getting great training because she's having tons of success. Amazing, man. Well, one last question I want to ask you here. I always try to advocate for the regular people in jiu-jitsu. People who kind of do this as a a casual hobby. And I bring this up because so much of the literature out there and so much of the content that people produce assumes that you are the type of person who wants to achieve maximal jiu-jitsu performance regardless of what it costs. And this is I think where there's a big divide in terms of the way that we present and teach jiu-jitsu versus the perceived goals of the actual student. Most people who train jiu-jitsu, the vast majority of them, they're not going to be training five, six, seven days a week. They're not going to be trying to become a world champion. Most people who train jiu-jitsu are going to be, you know, accountants in their 50s, maybe they're a mother of three, they've never done anything athletic in their life, and they've just decided they really like jiu-jitsu. And so the challenge that I often have when I am one of these people is that when I see content out there that tells us me how to get better at jiu-jitsu, or how to improve my conditioning, or how to do this, or how to do that, there's kind of this baked-in assumption that jiu-jitsu is the only damn thing I care about in my life. And yeah, if you want to be good at jiu-jitsu, you got to spend five hours a day training, and then another five hours a day buying and watching instructionals. I'm just not going to do that, right? And I'm not saying it it's a bad approach. I'm just saying, I have a time box in my life around how much effort I want to put into this sport. And that to me is kind of my goal. So I'd love to know for for people who are maybe non-athletes, they're kind of they dip their toes into this, but they love a casual relationship with jiu-jitsu. Maybe they train twice, maybe they train once a week. You're older, they don't have a lot of advantages athletically, they don't have a lot of sports experience. What would you say to these kinds of people when it comes to how to really get better at jiu-jitsu, especially as it pertains to this conversation around training intensity? Is there anything that you would encourage a kind of a less committed person to do to be more effective on the mats as opposed to the lifer, the pro competitor, who's going to be here and they're going to get good no matter what? Speaker 2: Yeah, I'll tell you this, a couple of things. One, this is a very difficult question for me to answer because my entire career is to think exclusively at the top end margin on almost every physical endeavor. As a matter of fact, like when I got into my PhD program, the major professor there, Dr. Mike Stone, just a legend in the field, he said, you know, don't come here if you want adult fitness or health or epidemiology. We take good athletes and make them better, and that's all we do. And I was like, goddamn, that is ringing my bell. So, uh, it's tough to make the perspective shift, but I'll give at least two pieces of advice. The first, not so great piece, but it has truth, is, yeah, you could qualitatively approach your game a little bit differently and your training regimen a little bit differently. Definitely there are ways to do that. I have explored that latent space almost to no extent whatsoever because I could care, I could give a flying fuck for it. Like, I don't do jiu-jitsu much, but I always want my brain on thinking of strategies for the very best. Why? Not because I think like it's competitive jiu-jitsu or die. Everyone is not doing a tournament every hour, sucks. If you're not like, you know, buying everything off of, you know, BJJ Fanatics, you're an idiot, which by the way, great website and has amazing instructionals. So, go buy stuff. But maybe like, you know, there is absolutely like something to say for just doing jiu-jitsu as literally a hobby. And, you know, getting a little better at it. So, 100%. But the reason that the champion mindset is really good to have for everyone is because fundamentally, at most levels, all you're going to do is take the champion mindset and just fit it into how many hours of jiu-jitsu you can actually do per week. And then just fuck off and not think about jiu-jitsu and just go have the pasta and pizza night with your family. Like, that is really probably the best answer and my preferred answer from which to start moving around and seeing the mental models around it. So, basically, it's this, you train with the same principles in very, very similar methods as the pros. The pros train 30 hours a week, you train three. That usually checks all the boxes. I mean, like, that's just it. And if you're one of these people, because there's a couple of sub-concerns, like, okay, let me re-ask that question. It is, it's not just that I need a different way of training, it's that I I play pickleball, and I don't want tennis elbow after three months because I'm jiu-jitsuing myself to death. Got it. Then it's all about intensity modulation on your end. If you ever roll harder than 50% and you look me in the face and you say I really have serious jiu-jitsu injury concerns, you're a hypocrite. Stop doing that. Roll easier and you will have a great time and you'll almost never get hurt and it'll be a lifetime sport. If you want to crank it all the time, great. And listen, a lot of this stuff, I'll render the advice, people can do with it what they will. Are there people who will roll once a week, but roll every single roll psychotic life or death? Yeah, yeah, man. And again, as long as you understand the tradeoffs, my man, let's get it popping. Is that the ideal way to approach it if you want a good balance with the rest of your life? Fuck no. Hell no. But seemingly that's where your spirit energy is, so I'm not going to tell you to stop. It's just about knowing how to do the thing well. Like imagine if you you were, uh, you know, my wife used to be like, uh, do like track days and stuff. She like drives like Subarus or whatever. And so, uh, she, you know, didn't do it a ton, didn't do it heavily, but when she did it, she listened to the coaching and watched the videos and tried to do every maneuver like a professional race car driver would, but just at her own pace. And just once every few weeks, instead of for five hours every day, and then another five hours in the simulator. Honestly, just frequency of training and volume of training is by far the biggest separator from folks that are just having a good time versus folks that are trying to make a real big impact to themselves for jiu-jitsu. Speaker 1: Nice, man. Well, thanks so much for this chat. This was fantastic. Before we tie this up, any closing thoughts or things you wanted to talk about on this topic that we didn't get to yet? Speaker 2: Oh, jeez, we're like, I don't know, like 100,000 things. But, you know, there's lots of periodizations, lots of sequencing. Another really cool question in jiu-jitsu that we could talk about, maybe if this isn't the worst episode you've ever recorded and and then I email you three months later and you're like, Mike, honestly, I just I need to eat, so I can't afford to have you on again because literally no one clicks on these things. Maybe something down the line to discuss is how to develop a game plan for jiu-jitsu. Because, and I'll give a hint to this, and I already did earlier. Game plans are instrumental. You can't organically rediscover all of jiu-jitsu by yourself and be the best at everything. If someone's like, hey, what's your end of your go-to offense? You need two things. Moves you're really good at and an ability to sequence those moves from a typical starting position to a typical finishing position. And so, if you don't have either one of those two things, either you have some really awesome moves that you do, but there's no sequence and no transitions, you're not thinking this through. And the other one is, if you don't have any go-to moves because you decided like you were going to be like good at everything. And so someone's like, what's your favorite like go-to submission from closed guard? And you're like, oh, armbar. Oh, cross body armbar. Triangle. Oh, I'm messing with this like big guy triangle. And I have wrist locks and blah, blah, blah, blah. And you just keep going. And it's like, okay, so you have never trained any of these things in a high enough volume to get beyond blue belt level in them. There is a concept in just overall the science of defense and game theory called like the concept of a salient. It's when two armies are fighting and they're pushed up against each other on the front line and no one has an advantage. The way you make breakthroughs is you group your forces in one specific area, locally overwhelm and drive a big, big distance through the enemy line. Because you put your best foot forward in just one place. And unless they catch your intel early and meet you with equal big defense, they're late to the game, you crush through their defensive line. And that's how you win. And so sometimes, what people do is they can become pretty decent at every move. And then when they're a blue belt, they go up against a good purple belt, they literally cannot score because defense by game theoretic definition, and that's how it plays out in real life, is it like three to 10, depending on the situation, times easier than offense. And so, if you don't have any moves that you really grooved in, that your fucking moves and you're goddamn good at them, you just pretty decent at everything. And if you don't have a sequence between those moves, you are not understanding the situation properly. Almost every of one of the best grapplers has very slick sequences between moves that are real goddamn good at. They're going to get you in those moves. And so if you train your jiu-jitsu more specifically than not, especially as you get better, especially if you want to compete, that is going to just make you better at the sport. Versus if you just like do move of the week. I know we're going to both bitch at each other for forever about this, but like, you know, like the kind of gym you go to where every day they're learning something new because like a different brown belt instructor showed up and there's no connection to anything else. And like, oh, I know like eight moves in jiu-jitsu, I know zero of them good enough to pull them off against anyone who's not dead. You functionally know essentially nothing. You are combat ineffective. Now, if you drill the same damn move sequence about 800 times and then introduce it into moderate training and hard training, nobody gives a shit if you always double leg people, pass their guard, take their back and submit them cross collar choke. You're just going to get it done. And you're going to be a blue belt master world champ after that shit. And they're going to be like, yeah, but that guy just does one thing. So what, pussy, stop him then. Look, what, you know, really, you want to collect a game for what? For highlight reels? And listen, for for spirit energy, you want to be able to be amazing at all a bunch of different moves. Fucking rock on. If you want to be the best competitor you can be, you're going to realize that you have to have a sequence and you have to train it over and over and you have to make that sequence have your best go-to two or three moves. Period. You could know like 18 total moves in jiu-jitsu and be a world champion. If you are, if you know 100 moves, but you know them all at a blue belt level, you ain't going to black belt worlds. I mean, you can sign up and get shut out the first fucking bracket, but that's the best you're going to do. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. I think if you want to learn hundreds of moves in jiu-jitsu, that's probably a career path that's better suited towards being a YouTuber than being a world champion. Yeah, for sure. I agree with you completely. This is something, I mean, the other martial arts have learned this. In judo, this is a concept they call Takui Waza, the idea that you've got signature moves. Out of all of the moves in the judo canon, all of the throws you could use, most of these judoka, they really only are especially proficient at two or three. And those are the ones that they really use. Jiu-jitsu is the only martial art I've seen where you're expected to be almost like a collector of techniques. And we look positively on people who know more, whereas realistically, like you said, the best grapplers, you really only need a very small handful of things. It can be boring, but I mean, I think anyone who's watched jiu-jitsu competition would agree, it normally is boring, right? The goal is predictability of outcome. I want to win this fight. And sometimes the best way to be predictable is to have a really, really well-grooved path that you can just execute on, and you've trained it enough that no matter what the other person does, you can get back on track and get to that path. And I mean, if you want to come back and talk about game planning, I would love to have that conversation with you because, you know, I was asking my Discord, and they they said, I told them, you know, we're going to be talking to Dr. Mike, what do you want to ask? And Speaker 2: Let me guess, they asked about protein or some shit like that. Speaker 1: No, no, no, I was going to say they wanted to know at what point did you decide on your personal journey to stop worrying about being good at jiu-jitsu and focus more on being big at jiu-jitsu. That was what they wanted to know. Speaker 2: Are you serious? Did they really say that? Speaker 1: No, no, I just told them I would troll you. Speaker 2: Oh my god. trolling received, sir. Uh, good guy was like, big at jiu-jitsu. But I have a body weight problem. I can't stop eating. Everyone knows this. This is just embarrassing at this point. Yeah, listen, Steve, if you want to do that, do you ever do three-way podcasts? Or you're not deviant enough for it? Speaker 1: I do do three-way podcasts. Speaker 2: My god, how absurd. I would love, love, love to have some future podcast with you in which I bring on one of two people alongside with me. One, especially for that sequencing convo and game plan convo, is actually the person I learned game plans from, and that's Josh Vogel, my friend of the show. Speaker 1: Yes, friend of the show. Speaker 2: Yes, yes, yes. Yes, yes. He's not really friends with anyone. He's kind of a fucking weirdo. But, um, I mean, this is jiu-jitsu, right? Everyone's a fucking weirdo. He's about as friendly as I found. No, 100%. 100%. Preach. All jokes, all love. Josh knows I'm kidding. Uh, or he doesn't, he's going to break my fucking arm next time he sees me. And then I'm powerless against him. But he I would love to get him into the discussion on game plans because like, boy, oh boy, like, can we him and I like put our heads together and really wrap a good game about that. And then another person I'd love to introduce you to, and this could be a your own podcast if you wanted, or if you would want him on with me is my actually my local coach, Mr. Will Starks, pro MMA, brown belt in jiu-jitsu, and boy, is he smart. And boy, is he thought it through. And he has actually like, like a theoretical framework for all combat sport like space development. Like, he's sharp and he thinks about this day and night. It's his profession. And he would be an excellent addition to the show because, look, if you want nerdy, brainy shit, uh, some mental models type of shit, boy, do we have dump trucks of that for you, my friend. Speaker 1: Nice. I love the nerdy shit. Well, let's set that up, man. I am excited. But in the interim, you're an easy guy to find. You're very well known, especially on the YouTube space, man. If people want to check out your content, how can they go about doing that? Speaker 2: You know, I just say just don't even bother. I mean, like, I've had my run. It's and it hasn't been fun, you know. And people call it the time in the sun or 15 minutes of fame. I just call it like, like a disaster like most of the rest of my life. But if that wasn't convincing, and you still insist, then just go to RP strength. Just go, just type that into YouTube search. My giant head will come up. You can type in Dr. Mike. If you type in dr.mik, then you will find either one of two people, a profoundly good-looking actual medical doctor. That ain't me. Or a person who looks like a triceratops and an M1 Abrams tank had sex. And that's what ended up happening happening to their head. So that's me. That's probably the best way to find me. If you just Google me and Google podcast or anything like that, like I've just yapped way too much so that you're never going to be at a loss for that shit. And yeah, that's how you find me. But man, I got to tell you, this discussion was super, super awesome. It was super fun. You're an amazing host at this. And honestly, like you just have a really soothing voice and I feel like I'm kind of one of those early 90s smooth jazz radio shows that I called in to like complain about my breakup, but you really kind of cheered me up with that soothing voice, Steve. Speaker 1: Thanks, man. I appreciate it. You know what? I've never been told I have a soothing voice, but fuck, I'll take it. I'll take anything these days. Speaker 2: Hey, hello. Speaker 1: Tell you what, I will put those links in the show notes. I definitely recommend people give Mike a follow if you haven't already. I mean, I know I always tell people this, but Mike, you're very popular in my household. My wife is a molecular biologist. She is a huge fan of your YouTube channel as someone who works in fitness and the sciences. So, she was actually very excited that I got a chance to chat with you. She's going to love this episode. I definitely recommend for anyone out there who wants an intelligent look into sport science and nutrition, check out Mike. I mean, Lord knows, there's a lot of dumbasses on YouTube, and one of the big problems is separating good information from bad. And so if you are looking for good, reliable, smart people to tell you what, you know, about sports and nutrition, Mike, your stuff is some of the best that's out there. So I will put a link to all of that in the show notes. Speaker 2: Thank you so much. I just have to do the announcements here. Folks, at least at first, and probably ever, do not turn me on around your children. I will say the darndest things. Actually, your children and others that you like other adults that you aspire to have esteem around. Like, if your boss is at work and he lets you listen to podcasts while you do your work, don't turn me on around your boss. I'm going to say something audacious and he's going to be like, what kind of degeneracy is this? You're fired. So, yeah, just a heads up. I do swear quite a bit and I haven't gone on too many tangents with preposterous jokes and scenarios that I think God never happened, but it's typically my style. So, uh, heads up, people, you're in for something. Speaker 1: People often tell me that they listen to BJJ Mental Models with their kids, and I always think, man, I don't know what that says about you as a parent, because I wouldn't want to listen to me. Speaker 2: You're going to hear a lot of shit. I love it. I love it. Speaker 1: Amazing, man. Well, like I said, I'll put links to all of your stuff in the show notes. Also to our stuff. Everything we make lives at BJJmentalmodels.com. We've got tons of episodes of the podcast. So if you like this style of jiu-jitsu education, there's a lot of it there, completely free. We also have mini episodes that break down some of the key concepts that we talk about on the show. If you're looking for a quick way to catch up. And our newsletter is growing like crazy, so I recommend signing up to that too. That's all on the website. And of course, if you want to go to the next level with us, BJJ Mental Models Premium is the way that you do that. We offer the world's biggest library of jiu-jitsu audio courses on concepts, strategy, and tactics. Speaker 2: Wow, cool. Speaker 1: It is pretty cool stuff. We got a lot of like heavy hitters who have made courses on our platform. The way I like to think of it is, if you like Audible or you like Masterclass, you're probably going to like BJJ Mental Models Premium. We also do live coaching too, remotely. We've got some amazing coaches. I mean, Brianna St. Marie is one of our coaches. So if you want to have the IBJJF Queen give you direct feedback, sign up for BJJ Mental Models Premium. There's a bunch of other stuff there, but I will save the rest of the plugs for later. You can get everything we make at BJJmentalmodels.com. But Dr. Mike, thanks so much, man. I am excited. This is a good one. I love this conversation. I've been looking forward to picking your brain on this for a long time. I learned a lot, so I hope that the listeners found the same. Thanks so much for coming by. And yeah, I would love to hit you up on that offer to talk about game planning in the future. Speaker 2: You got it, dude. Thank you so much for having me on. Speaker 1: Most welcome, sir. Thank you to the listeners as well. We'll talk to you next time. See you then. Take care.