Ep. 325: Economy of Motion, feat. Mike Mahaffey

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 325. I'm Steve Kwan. BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent Jiu-Jitsu approach. And I'm back again with the old bastard himself. I got Mike Mahaffey on the line. Mike, how's it going, sir? Speaker 2: It's going fantastic. How are you, Steve? Speaker 1: I am doing very well. I am excited to have this chat. We've been talking about this topic for a while. I think you're the perfect guest for it. But before we unload that, just in case people haven't heard you on the podcast or our courses before, got to give yourself a quick intro, man. Tell them who you are. Speaker 2: Oh, jeez. My name is Mike Mahaffey. I am a second-degree black belt out of Lansing, Michigan, training at Magic BJJ. Our school is a combat-based school under Chris and Melissa Hotter. I've been training for about 18 years at this point in time, and I'm old. I'm 52, which is old in Jiu-Jitsu years. I've spent a lot of time working on a game that works for people my age with all of the strengths and limitations that come along with that. Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. So people probably who listen to this podcast will best know you as the guy from the ad read at the beginning. Speaker 2: That's right. Oh my God. And I've gotten so much better at guitar since then too. I listen to that riff, I'm like, oh, I would have changed that, but... Speaker 1: Well, people will of course also know you as having been on our podcast several times, having done courses with us. And really what that's all about is your old bastard Jiu-Jitsu framework. People often, I tell them, do you know Mike Mahaffey? And they'll say, oh, is he the old bastard Jiu-Jitsu guy? Yes, that's him. So that's who we're talking to today. And like you said, the thing you're probably best known for is developing a style of Jiu-Jitsu that doesn't require youth or athleticism to be effective. Really, it's a focus on that old school pressure, control, efficiency game. And I think that's going to tie very closely into the topic that we discuss here today. So how about I turn it over to you, Mike? Why don't you kick this one off? Speaker 2: Sure. Well, uh, today we're going to talk about economy of motion and why that's important in Jiu-Jitsu, how you can develop it, and what makes it so effective. Speaker 1: That raises the question, what is economy of motion? It's a saying that I'm pretty sure everyone has heard. It's not a Jiu-Jitsu thing. You hear this everywhere. Economy of motion. Well, to you, in the context of Jiu-Jitsu, what does that mean? How would you define it if you had to put it in the dictionary? Speaker 2: I would define it as using as little movement as possible to solve Jiu-Jitsu problems on the mat. Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's very similar to how I would define it. Basically, trying to get as much done with as little effort as possible, right? So we're really talking about efficiency. How can I get maximal result for minimal effort? And to me, this is one of the bedrock principles that I am always looking to apply to my Jiu-Jitsu. I always try to look at what I do through the lens of economy of motion. How can I get the most by doing the least? I will turn it over to you though, to maybe elaborate on this. Why is it so important in Jiu-Jitsu? Why would we do this? We certainly see, you know, young super athletes who really don't look like they're trying to conserve energy. They're just going a million miles an hour. Why do we care about economy of motion in Jiu-Jitsu when there's clearly other ways to do things? Speaker 2: Well, I mean, I think we care about economy of motion for a whole bunch of different reasons. One of them, I think, is particularly important to practitioners in their later years. And, you know, when we talk about later years in Jiu-Jitsu, I think we're really talking about late 30s and 40s and up, because this this is a young person's game in a lot of ways. And so for the older practitioner, one of the reasons you want to be as efficient as possible, so you can save energy to train longer. We've all seen the person in the gym who has a crazy hard five-minute round, tons of motion, tons of scrambles, lots of back and forth, and then they're taking the next three rounds off to recover because they've gassed themselves out completely in one round. If you're thinking about efficiency and economy of motion and solving your problems on the mat while doing the least, you're going to have a lot more energy to keep training, right? You're not going to gas out in one round. And something that I try to do when I'm rolling is I try to make my opponent do more work than I am, so they're gassing out while I'm chilling out, waiting for my next opportunity. So the first reason I would think you'd want to use this concept in your Jiu-Jitsu is to save energy to train for longer. Speaker 1: Yeah. And there's a lot of benefits to doing that. When people hear save energy, a big part of what they think is, okay, are we talking about cardio? Because I'm a beast. I see red. Cardio's not an issue for me. Cardio's part of it. But there's more to it than just cardio. Another factor to consider is that the more movement you introduce into a match, the more variability that you create. That can mean a few things. It can mean that you're creating openings that your opponent can exploit, right? It is very hard to be moving at a really intense clip and to still keep everything tight. The other problem too is because of all of that variability, it increases the risk of injury, because it increases the likelihood that as bodies are in motion, someone's got a leg or an arm left where it shouldn't be, someone falls on it, something's broken, and now someone is on the shelf. It's really hard to injure someone in Jiu-Jitsu if neither of you are moving, right? I'm not going to say it's impossible, but it's going to be a lot harder. So you get these benefits as well of a more predictable fight and also a lower risk of injury as well if you cut down on the motion a bit and try to be economical in how you move. Speaker 2: Right. I mean, that's one of the first things I tell our students even, no matter what age or skill level they're at, is to slow things down, get rid of your scrambles, you know, take your time. Not only are you less likely to hurt yourself or each other, but you're going to see things happening that you're not going to see happening if you go really fast and use a lot of big motions. You're going to see opportunities to progress your position, to catch a submission. Maybe you're you're going to improve better if you slow down and use less crazy motion to accomplish the same goals, right? And something that again, for the older practitioner, you're not only to do big motions and have a lot of scrambling and movement in a Jiu-Jitsu round, you're not only risking hurting your partner, but like you can hurt yourself. I mean, I have before like injured myself doing something totally stupid on the mats that my partner, it wasn't my partner's fault at all. It was because I was trying to use speed and athleticism to solve this problem instead of technique and pressure and weight and efficiency. So you're going to lower your risk of injury to yourself and your partner if you slow down and make sure that your movements are as precise and small as possible. Speaker 1: Yeah. Most injuries that I've experienced in Jiu-Jitsu are to some degree a self-own where you did it to yourself to some extent. I mean, don't get me wrong, a lot of the time the other person played a part in it too. Maybe they weren't being safe, they were too focused on getting the tap. There's a lot of reasons why it takes two to tango, it can also take two to cause an injury. But every time I've been injured, yes, sometimes my opponent was partially responsible, but there was always an element of I put myself in this situation. I was probably going harder than I should have. I probably wanted to see if I could win that leg lock shootout, right? So to some extent, a big part of economy of motion is restraint, right? So that we don't just go out there and throw our body weight at people, but that we're careful and judicious about what we choose to do. That kind of conservative approach gets very important as you get up the belt rank and the experience level as well, because the better your opponent is, the less you can afford to make a mistake, because they will make you pay for it, right? When you watch white and blue belts spar a lot of the time, it's just like an orgy of mistakes. Whoever creates the most mistakes is going to be the one who loses, but it, you know, no one is playing a perfect game. When you are competing against a black belt, on the other hand, one of the most important things is to not make an early mistake, right? You have to be the one who initiates on the scoreboard and makes things happen, because if you make a mistake and you start falling behind right off the bat, it's very unlikely you're going to be able to claw your way back out against a good opponent. So part of economy of motion isn't just efficiency and safety, it's also, let's be strategically smart and not make dumb mistakes early in the match. Let's make sure that we keep our defenses up and we only enter into attack mode when there's a clear path to do so. Speaker 2: Correct. One of the things I like to tell, actually, before I go into that, I want to tell you, I'm going to steal, what was that term you used, orgy of mistakes? Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 2: Is that what you said? Yeah, I'm totally stealing that, Steve. People at our gym are going to be like, he's talking about orgies? What? I was like, no, no, it came from BJJ Mental Models. It's a legit thing. It's a concept. Speaker 1: But something I like to tell folks when I coach is that if you have to scramble, that means you don't have control of the position. A scramble is what? A scramble is a whole bunch of movement really fast, and it's pretty chaotic, and it's definitely not efficient or economical, right? And if you have to scramble, means you screwed up somewhere. You lost control of the position, and you're most likely utilizing big movements, athleticism, speed and power to solve your problems, rather than good Jiu-Jitsu, right? Like, I know people, I've heard some of our students say, oh, I just love to scramble, it feels good. Yeah, like it feels good, you know, it feels like you're doing something, but it's not super efficient, and a scramble means a loss of control of the position, right? You've got to try to go fast and catch up to your opponent because you lost something. I would rather not have to play catch up with my opponent. And I I would rather not initiate a scramble that's going to use a ton of my energy. There's I'm nine times out of 10, I'm able to avoid a scramble because my motions are tiny and small, and even if I lose control of the position, like I know where I'm headed, I'm not going to have to rush for it to catch back up. You know what I mean? Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. Something that our mutual friend Rob Bernacki is known for saying is there's no such thing as a scramble, which he says a bit facetiously, right? But what he means by that is that most of the time when people are scrambling, what's really happening is neither of them are in a position where they either can do a technique or know what technique to do, so they just YOLO and use athleticism instead. And when you substitute technique for athleticism, that's when injuries and mistakes happen. And so being economical with our motion has the benefit of preventing us from doing that. And that's not to say there's never a time or place to scramble, but that when you do a scramble, you also need to be making sure you're doing it from a safe position. If you scramble recklessly, that's how you get guillotined, that's how you get arm-barred, leg-locked, that's how injuries happen. So even when you're scrambling, a good person is going to make sure they do that from safe angles, right? And that is a skill you can develop, but for everyone as a baseline, if you don't know what you're doing, you definitely don't want to try doing it faster. Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, correct. I mean, especially in the learning phase. I mean, like I said a few minutes ago, if your Jiu-Jitsu constantly looks like a scramble, you're not seeing opportunities to do things better or more efficiently. Um, not only are you leaving yourself open for your opponent's attacks and counters, but you're not seeing things that you could be doing better. So I'm always encouraging students, both people sparring in the training room, slow it down. Slow everything down, see the opportunities to do good Jiu-Jitsu, see the opportunities to use your weight, use your pressure, use your leverage, because this flailing around in in orgy of mistakes is not going to work well for you. Man, I'm going to be stuck on that phrase. That's going to be... Speaker 1: Uh, we're a family show, Mahaffey. Keep it together. Speaker 2: Well, hey, here's another thing to discuss, right? When people hear about economy of motion, often they will think that's an old bastard game, but I'm not an old bastard. I'm a young bastard. I'm in my prime. And so people will often think that this is something that older people need to worry about. And I would say that it is probably closer to a requirement for older people, but I also strongly suggest that younger and more athletic people also look at things through the lens of economy of motion. I really think this is a framework for everyone. But I would love to hear your thoughts on that because I know you share that opinion. Why does it help these young people? Like what is it going to give them that they that might surprise them if they assume that this is a framework for older grapplers to use? Speaker 2: Fair enough. So that brings a couple of thoughts to mind. First of all, effective Jiu-Jitsu isn't always pretty Jiu-Jitsu, okay? So effective Jiu-Jitsu isn't always highlight reel stuff. It can be. Highlight reel stuff is often very effective Jiu-Jitsu, but effective Jiu-Jitsu isn't always the highlight reel of the big flashy movements, right? Of the the giant throws or the spinning reverse De La Riva arm bars. I'm just making crap up now. So I want people of all experience levels and ages to understand that it doesn't have to be flashy to be effective. And your question was what? Why should people of all ages and skill levels train like this? Speaker 1: Yeah, why is it so effective even at a younger level, especially when you're dealing with opponents who might be really scrambly? Why would you want to try to slow things down rather than to use your own athleticism to match theirs? Speaker 2: Well, because slowing things down puts you in more control of the match. Like old school Jiu-Jitsu is about in old bastard Jiu-Jitsu, and old bastard meaning anybody on the mat who wants to identify as an old bastard, right? It's age and gender agnostic. It's about controlling your opponent, basically draining the will to fight right out of them and then submitting them when they tell you they want to be submitted. And that doesn't happen with big flashy movements necessarily. You know, it's good for newer students because it teaches newer students the principles of weight distribution and controlling an opponent. It's great for older grapplers because it it reduces the risk of injury, keeps us on the mat longer. Like I believe this for grapplers of any age, like your number one nemesis on the mat is injury, right? If you're 16 years old and you're out there scrambling and throwing your arms and limbs around and uh you pop your knee five times, you're off the mat for weeks or months, right? You're not getting any better when you're off the mat. So training like this is going to help you continue to improve with much less risk of injury, which keeps you off the mat, which keeps you from improving, right? You can't get better when you're not practicing. So this is good for older grapplers, this is good for newer students in avoiding injury. This teaches people how to control their opponent better. This is good for competitors, right? Like if you're in a competition and all it is is flying, jumping around scrambles, you're likely to leave something wide open and get it snatched up and then you're done, right? If you're in a one and done tournament, if you're in an IBJJF tournament and you don't have control of the situation, you're increasing the risk of your loss. Something that you said earlier, Steve, made me think about back in the day when I would go to tournaments, uh coming up through the ranks, white, blue, you know, ish. So quite a long time ago at this point. And there were very few black belts in Michigan, okay? And so we'd go to these local tournaments and uh we'd compete and we'd watch other people compete, and we would see the lower belts, white, blue, purple, even, big flashy movements. I remember one of our guys, one of our purple belts, won one of his matches with his highlight reel flying arm bar, right? It was pretty amazing, okay? Fun to watch, you know, it was effective, but not necessarily economy of motion. But then there were black belt matches and I could probably count on one hand the number of black belts within 150 miles of us. And so this was super rare. And the whole gym would go quiet, and these two black belts would slap bump, and they would go, and it would be the most freaking boring match of the whole day. Somebody would get a takedown or someone would pull guard, and, you know, there'd be these very tiny little movements, and then boom, a position would change and it would stop, and there'd be these very tiny little movements. So it was super efficient, and it struck me even back then, the difference between what I was seeing with the lower ranks and these black belts. Like their economy of motion was, I mean, it was so economical. Like they were doing things and I couldn't even figure out what they were doing because their motions were they were slow and they were controlled. Complete difference from all of the uh white, blue and purple belts that I would see competing back in the day. And that's what I'm going for, right? And that's why I try to teach our students to go for. Again, not like you said, not like you're never going to do a fast motion and you're never going to scramble and and that never happens, but 90% of your Jiu-Jitsu, I think, should be at that pace and with that goal of doing as little as you can to get as much result as you can. Speaker 1: Yeah, 100%. Something that one of my coaches once told me was that when you are older, it is inevitable that you will develop a slow pressure-based game. It's just a requirement of our biology. Yes, you can invest in your teens and 20s and maybe even 30s in doing flashy athletic stuff, but time is undefeated, right? Father Time is undefeated. It is inevitable that you will have to slow down. So the challenge is that a lot of the fast flashy Jiu-Jitsu, it has a shelf life. Whereas the older, slower, pressure control-based is something that you can really do as long as you're able to move. And so it's easier to keep doing that as you get older. And in fact, because of your experience level, it can even become more effective as you get older because you're better at doing it. If I have two bodies in motion, then a big part of what is going to happen comes down to who's more athletic. I mean, skill aside, yeah, skill matters, but it's very hard to overcome a a huge strength, size, speed, athleticism disadvantage. Very hard to overcome that. But if I can just halt all movements and I can control exactly what happens, then for me, that is going to play directly into my wheelhouse because it takes away all of the advantages that they're relying on. It's why I love a lot of techniques that kill the person's base completely. Like a stack pass is great. I love the stack pass because Speaker 2: Yeah, I remember that. Speaker 1: Yeah, it's I love that move because if I can get someone's feet off the ground and I can hold them there, it doesn't matter how athletic they are. What are they going to do? I mean, I've sparred with real young athletic people and once I get them into a stack, they will try to explode their way out of it, and it's not going to happen. Speaker 2: You're going to get a hernia trying to do that too. Oh my word. For your listeners, my snide comment about Steve stack passing, the first time Steve and I met in person and trained, he stack passed me, and I had to tap from the pass. It was excruciating. And yeah, it did a great job of keeping me from moving and uh slowing everything down, and he, I remember his smiling face up above me just grinning away, like, oh, yeah, what do you think of that, Mahaffey? I'm like, okay, this is good. Speaker 1: I was very satisfied with the result. Speaker 2: You were. And I was impressed with it. And yeah, it's not something I'm going to forget as long as we're friends. I will uh never let you stack pass me again. It was awful. But I mean, that is a great example of economy of motion. You got the desired result, and you didn't even have to move once you got me in that position. I wanted you to. I was trying to give you the pass, right? I was, please, just take side control. Please just take side control. But you got the desired result with very little motion. And, you know, that's another thing, I think. I'm a big proponent of not just showing somebody how to do something, but having them feel it too. And that's one thing with very economical Jiu-Jitsu. I mean, Hickson has that thing that he calls invisible Jiu-Jitsu, right? And that's just super economic. I don't want to say just. I'm not Hickson. I'm nowhere near the level that Hickson Gracie ever was, but I love his concepts of invisible Jiu-Jitsu. And a big component of that is super economical motions that are really not very easy to see. Like you can't really watch video of a match and be able to pick out exactly what's happening when somebody has Jiu-Jitsu like that. Like there's like this shift of the hip and uh, you know, a little bit of weight distribution here and it's not this big motion that a camera picks up. It's not John Wick stuff. And like I want people, when I teach people, when I'm teaching them something that's along those lines, like I want them to feel it. And it feels totally different than the person scrambling around you, cartwheeling, barrel rolling to take your back, right? It's demoralizing almost for an opponent. Like your stack pass, for example, it was demoralizing. Not like in a bad way. I didn't need more therapy or anything because of it. But I was stuck. Speaker 1: I guess I didn't do it right then. Speaker 2: I know. I know. Next time, Steve, how about uh April in Louisville? We'll get it on camera. We'll just pose it. It'll be perfect. But yeah, like this kind of Jiu-Jitsu, when you feel it, it's kind of demoralizing. That's part of the effectiveness. Like you want to use these techniques and your weight and your leverage to kind of drain the will to fight out of your opponent with this. And that's not done by cartwheeling and flipping around. So it's another reason why I think everybody should learn this. Again, you're not going to use it all the time. It's not like you're never going to move quickly or do a big motion, but the foundation of what you do on the mat, in my opinion, should be the biggest bang for your buck with the least amount of effort. Speaker 1: Yeah, I would agree. It's it's interesting because I remember back when the advice you would get in Jiu-Jitsu was do whatever you can to advance up the positional hierarchy and score your points along the way. And you want to make that happen quickly. I want to get past your guard quick. I want to hold position, advance quick. And that has changed a lot now as pressure has become kind of come back in vogue and people are much more concerned about this now. Often now, people are not in a big hurry to pass. They want to stay there, right? And there's a lot of ways that you can describe this. One one thing that people used to describe it, they'll sometimes call it camping, where you hang out in a position. Rather than trying to pass too quickly, and part of the reason why is because in certain positions, if you stop there, it depletes their energy and their morale a lot faster than yours. Now, I mean, time considerations aside, right? If you're down on points and you've only got a few seconds left, then yeah, you're going to have to go fast. But that consideration aside, sometimes it makes sense to hang out in that horrible situation for them, right? Where you're not exhausting a lot of energy or effort, but you're putting your weight on them. As you have said, one of the principles of old bastard Jiu-Jitsu is make them carry your weight. If you can get into a position where they are tremendously uncomfortable and your weight is on top of them and you can just kind of hang out there for as long as you want and they have to work, it can be tremendously demoralizing to get stuck there. A lot of those positions like the stack pass is a great one. If you can just hold someone upside down, you'd be amazed how quickly you can break a person there. It doesn't feel like it should be bad, right? But, you know what? It's different being gently stacked for two seconds versus being gently stacked for 20 seconds. It makes a huge difference. And at some point it almost becomes like a submission. Speaker 2: Correct. 100% correct. I utilize camping all the time. I like to camp, I like to get to half guard. I mean, ideally, of course, if I can pass in one fell swoop to side control or mount, that's awesome. But nine times out of 10, you end up in half guard, and I just camp, flatten them out in half guard and take my sweet time. And there's very little motion involved. Very little. I'm just keeping my weight on them in a way that is very uncomfortable for them. I'm completely relaxed, you know, and they they'll tell me when they want me to pass. So, you know, yes, camping is one way that's a very concrete example of using economy of motion in your Jiu-Jitsu. Speaker 1: Yeah. Sean J. Habero on this podcast once said, 15 seconds of proper pressure will crumble a lot of men. And I think that's an amazing quote. Speaker 2: Oh my gosh, yes, that's awesome. Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's absolutely true. And I think this is where maybe the classic self-defense wisdom about Jiu-Jitsu actually has a lot of merit. You don't have to rush to get a submission necessarily. Just holding control and taking advantage of those positions, that will just break a lot of people. And people often think we're talking about untrained people, but not really. I mean, really good people can get destroyed by pressure. You see this now in high-level competitions. There was this time where people would say that, you know, well, you can endure the pressure, blah, blah, blah, blah. Not really, right? If the person is really intent on using pressure as a tool against you, it's very hard to endure that. And even if you do endure it, whatever's left of you afterwards is not going to be in the same state as you were beforehand because the other person has made you put in all the work, which is the beauty of that strategy. Speaker 2: Yeah, correct. And pressure can cause panic, which can then lead to submission. It can cause people to make mistakes, which can lead you into a submission if you're patient enough. But you have to be patient. You have to have economy of motion and not feel like you have to rush to the next position, right? If you crush somebody enough, I've had it done to me and I've done it to other people where they start to freak out a little bit. Next thing you know, their neck is exposed or their arm is exposed or, you know, something is exposed that you can take advantage of. But that doesn't happen if you're rushing from one position to the other. Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. Now, I want to pick your brain about some specifics and how to apply this. But one last thing I want to bring up is a potential objection. You talked about how for many people when they see people playing a game that is heavily focused on economy of motion, it can look really boring at first. And of course, Jiu-Jitsu is not always the most exciting spectator sport already. When you watch two black belts go at it, often it can look like they're not really moving or doing much, even though as you said, if you were the person in the match, you would know that these two are fighting for their lives. But to the spectator, it can look like no one is moving. And that can be a problem for people psychologically because no one wants to be a boring fighter. The issue there is that sometimes if you're focused on being flashy, you can work against your own self-interests and create mistakes because you feel pressured to go crazy when it would be better to be restrained. What are your thoughts on that in terms of how that fits in? Because this is a I mean, I don't think it's necessarily the biggest concern, but if you're a pro competitor, you may reasonably be concerned about being an exciting fighter. What are your thoughts on how to balance that with just this idea that economy of motion is a good strategy? Speaker 2: That's a really good question. I am super far from a pro competitor, as my competition record will show. But my knee-jerk reaction to that is I don't care. I don't care if I'm flashy to watch. All I care about is effective. And I would rather, on a personal level, I would rather have my sparring partner or opponent say, man, Mike, I was stuck. I couldn't go anywhere, you know, or I thought I was going to die under your pressure, than have a bunch of spectators say, oh, that was a fantastic flying arm bar or, you know, flying triangle or that was the best hip throw I've ever seen or whatever. You know, I'd much rather have my opponents feel stuck or, you know, panic from my pressure than have the spectators tell me what a flashy match it was. Take that with a grain of salt though, because I'm not a pro competitor. I am not focused on putting butts in seats to watch matches. But as a lifelong martial artist, I do think that the focus, the flash can water down the combat effectiveness of an art. Jiu-Jitsu not being the only martial art I've ever done, I've felt that way about the other arts I've trained as well. So my feeling is I really don't care. Like I don't care if people don't like watching me or not. So I hope that answers your question, but, you know, I'm sure there's pro competitors that you have on the show and friends of ours that would beg to differ. And that's okay. I'm open to hearing that. Maybe I can be convinced. But I don't think my body can do what theirs does anyway, so probably a moot point. Speaker 1: Yeah, there's absolutely a style question there. I mean, I know that there are amazing grapplers out there who completely abandon this concept, right? I mean, we were talking about this, one of our friends of the show, BJJ Mental Models sponsored athlete and coach, Margo Ciccarelli. Speaker 2: Love Margo. Speaker 1: Yeah, but then her whole game is the opposite of this. It's incredibly speed-based. And in fact, a lot of the time when I watch her, it feels like what she's trying to do is disorient her opponent. And that is a valid strategy, but the attribute requirements and the skill requirements for doing that are exceptionally high. First of all, you need to be able to move like she can move to be able to play that kind of game. And second, your technique needs to be so razor sharp that you can do like a 12-move sequence, right? Without getting tired and also without leaving any openings. That it's possible, but it's very hard to do. I would say in terms of how I square this away, the way that I like to think of this is all other things being equal, I would prefer to optimize for economy of motion. But Margo's case is a bit different, right? Because you're talking about someone who is specifically invested in that type of game to the point where her ability to do that is probably more effective for her than you or I just doing a stack pass or something like that. So all other elements are not equal for her, right? She's using this strategy, she's heavily invested in this to win. So in those cases, I think it's fine, absolutely fine to build a game like that. But I would say that like if all else is equal, if I'm grappling with someone and I've got two different options in terms of what I could do, and they're both going to achieve roughly the same result, like they're both roughly as positive, they both have roughly the same downsides, but one of them requires a lot less movement and energy expenditure, I'm going to choose that option, right? If all else is equal, if I feel that my odds of success and the risk of failure is basically the same, but one option is going to be a lot less work for me, I take the option with less work, right? That's to me what economy of motion means. It doesn't mean you can't move fast if that's the better choice for you in the moment. But if all else is the same, I'm going to choose the thing that's lazy. Speaker 2: Correct. I would agree. And, you know, Margo's Jiu-Jitsu is phenomenal. There is no I have ultimate respect for her. I got to attend a seminar last year with her and meet her in person, and it was a great seminar. I really dig Margo. She's very cool. Her style works for her. It is not the style that I think most people in the general population can adapt to and make effective. And that's fine. That's A-OK. 100% A-OK. Not all of us, there's only one Margo, and she's freaking awesome. If I were equally as good at her style of Jiu-Jitsu as I am mine, I would probably teach mine to the majority of our students and teach hers to the people that had lots of time and energy and innate athleticism to take advantage of what she does. Does that make sense? Speaker 1: 100%. Makes sense. Speaker 2: And Margo, if you listen to this, please don't come murder me. I really like you and I like your Jiu-Jitsu. I just can't do it. Speaker 1: You're going to get dojo stormed by Margo. Speaker 2: Oh my God. I know. Speaker 1: I heard some old guy here said my Jiu-Jitsu sucks. It's going to be great. Speaker 2: Oh, not at all. So when I was at this seminar with her in Michigan last year, you know, there are a lot of people that I knew that attended because you just know people in the Jiu-Jitsu community in your state, right? And uh she was doing like AOJ style passing and she kind of made this joke like, oh Mike, you need some mobility training. And one of my buddies there said, Margo, this is Mike with mobility training. I'm going as fast as I can. I know. I know. Pretty much. Pretty much. Speaker 1: Well, that's another thing that I also like about a focus on an economy of motion game and in your old bastard Jiu-Jitsu framework, I love this element as well, which is that it's very applicable for people of all shapes and sizes. It's a very adaptive form of grappling. So even if you have disabilities or disadvantages, you can use this concept to figure out a flavor of Jiu-Jitsu that's going to work for you. And I think that's one of the reasons I really like these kind of high-level mental model ideas is because they're less prescriptive. They're just ideas that you can take and apply and you can kind of interpret them however you like. So in this case, again, economy of motion doesn't mean you have to be slow and deliberate. It just means if you're going to be fast, make sure you're doing it for a good reason. Make sure it's the best option at the time for you. If it's not, then maybe you want to dial it back and be a bit more conservative in the moment. Speaker 2: But that's a great point and it makes me think that I'm hoping that for the last 40 minutes, I haven't been giving the impression that speed is not economical motion. I don't even want to using Margo again as an example. There is no wasted motion for her. She's not being fast for the sake of being fast, right? She has specific goals that she wants to do and every she's so precise and every motion that she does, there's some intent behind it. There's nothing wasted. She's quick and she's agile, but she doesn't take four steps to do something that could be done in two. So I don't think it has as much to do with speed as it does with pairing down what you do to make it as efficient as possible with the least amount of steps. And so I hope this whole conversation hasn't been giving the idea that I'm like against going fast at all. I'm against going fast like 85% of the time. Speaker 1: If I'm going to go fast, it's going to be because there was a reason. It's going to be because I'm confident it was the best decision in the moment and that the the benefits are greater and the downsides lesser than whatever else I was going to do that was maybe more or that was maybe lesser intensity. Speaker 2: Correct. I was training with one of our female blue belts earlier this week. We had a local Fuji tournament that our team went to and she was it was her last training session prior all of our last training session prior to competing. And she's 60 or 70 pounds lighter than me and she's all arms and legs and she's 15 years younger, you know, and her game is completely different from mine. And she said to me during the roll, you know, I'm trying to work top pressure because I want to make you proud of me. And I said, well, I'm proud of you, but top pressure may not be your game because your body is not like mine. You can be have economy of motion and not have your game look just like mine, right? And so I helped her tweak a few things that she was doing to kind of tighten everything up, but within the context of her game. So this isn't necessarily one prescriptive thing where everybody has to play this game to have good Jiu-Jitsu. Like you said, it's this broad concept that can be applied to everything to make it a little bit better. I just happen to be partial to the pressure game. I'm a 200-pound guy. That's my body. It work that pressure works because of me, but you can be economical with your Jiu-Jitsu, no matter what quote-unquote style of Jiu-Jitsu you play, and I think that would be beneficial to everybody. Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. Well, presuming that people understand the concept here and they're convinced, I guess that raises the question of how do we make this actionable? Like how do we do it? You know, this is always the battle when you're talking about conceptual stuff in Jiu-Jitsu is we can all agree that, okay, this idea seems to make sense, but how do we actually map that down into the way that we train? So if someone listens to this and they say, you know what? This idea is the thing that I was missing. I'm all in. How does this change what I do in the class? How do you coach someone to start implementing and thinking about this and how does that actually manifest in the moves and the techniques that they do? Speaker 2: Slow down. That'd be number one for me. Go against your instinct to solve your problems by going harder and faster. One of our friends, Jesse Walker, who our listeners may know from previous episodes, he has this great methodology he uses at his school, Rough Hands out in Louisville, Kentucky, called the California roll, where he urges his students, it's not quite like a flow roll because it's not necessarily all gelatinous and loose and constantly flowing, but he urges his students to California roll, meaning not to solve your Jiu-Jitsu problems with speed or explosiveness or strength. And so that methodology is a great way to start exploring economy of motion because when you slow things down, you can think about what you're doing, especially if you're newer to Jiu-Jitsu and you still have to think about where to put your arms and legs and how to move your body. You can slow things down and figure out the most efficient ways to get your thing done without all that extra movement and flailing around. So that would be number one is slow down. Number two is as you start to understand Jiu-Jitsu a little bit more, you should be thinking about the goals of each position. You get to a point in Jiu-Jitsu where you're no longer thinking about applying technique per se. You're not thinking, let's take an arm bar from guard, bottom guard, right? You're not thinking, grab the arm, put it across the center line, put my foot on the hip, turn my body. You know, you're not thinking step by step through that, right? So slow down and then think about what the goals of each position are. So for an arm bar from guard, for example, your goal is to get an arm across the center line, break posture, isolate it and hyperextend it. How do you make that more economical? Well, maybe you can start to take some of those steps away, right? Maybe you don't have to put your foot on the hip, stop and turn. You know, maybe you can accomplish some of those things with fewer steps. There's a particular arm bar from guard that I like to do that is more economical and it's sneakier because it gets rid of some of those steps. You accomplish the goal of breaking the posture and isolating the arm quicker. You're not moving quicker necessarily. You've just eliminated some of those two, three and four steps that a beginner might do. So first is slow down, and then you've got to start thinking about what your goal is in every position with every technique. Not just the steps, the one, two, three diagram, but what's your goal here? And that does take kind of a deeper understanding of Jiu-Jitsu, but, you know, we're in this for life, so we got all the time we need, right? Speaker 1: Yeah, one thing that can be really handy is especially when you're talking about a particular submission, this is where this often comes up, is changing your training to focus so that getting the tap isn't really the priority, but rather focusing on control. So our mutual friend Josh Wentworth, Kenton, right? From Apex MMA in Georgia, the way that he teaches this is he's got games that he plays with the students where if someone gets the other person into a submission, the goal is not necessarily to tap them, but it's to hold control for as long as you can. And that also allows the other person to work on their escapes against really good resistance. Now, there is a time and a place to train your finishing mechanics, but often the thing that you really need to train is how can I actually get into and hold this position so that this person cannot get out? And if you do that, if you move away from the need to actually complete the submission, it really helps you focus on working your control. And if your control is good, then you can have as much economy of motion as you want because you don't have to move much. Same with a technique, rather than being in such a big rush to complete the technique, try to see if there's a way that you can pit stop part way through the technique and just hold it. Like the stack pass is a great example, with a lot of half guard stuff. If you can crowd the person in half guard and get to kind of a quarter guard, you can camp there. You can play that position and really make the person on bottom work. There's no urgent rush to complete the technique. And so I think that can be a helpful way to work on whether or not you are good at economy of motion, because you should be able to get part way through a technique and then not pull the trigger on finishing it and make the other person work, and you should still be able to control it and let them burn their energy while you don't have to. That I find is a helpful way to think about how to train a more abstract concept like this. Speaker 2: Yeah, I would agree. That's a great example of that. And, you know, some of the stuff that I love to teach, in particular about base, is a great way to think about economy of motion as well. Some of the stuff that I've done at camps, at BJJ Mental Models camps, which, you know, your premium subscribers, I believe, can access some of those videos. The motions you use to maintain your base, they're really tiny. They're really small motions, really tiny adjustments of your weight and shifting of your hips, because if they're big, you're going to lose your base. Your opponent's going to take advantage of that. So, you know, that's another example of something that where economy of motion is super, super, super, super important, right? If I'm making big adjustments to my base, I'm going to lose it. I'm giving my opponent a chance to take advantage of that. So it's got to be super tiny and super subtle motions. Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. That's a big part of it too, right? Is focusing on making your movements smaller. I've talked a lot about this recently, both in some of the camps that we did and I think also on the podcast, but the way that we often train our moves when we're drilling, we tend to do more exaggerated motions than we actually need to do if we want to make that move work in the real world. The example I often give is the hip bump, right? If you do a classic drill in class where you're working on your hip bumps, they're going to teach you to bridge as big and explosive as you can. And that can work effectively against a completely untrained white belt, right? If they're sitting on you and you do a massive bridge, yeah, they'll probably go flying. The problem is against anyone who is remotely good at the sport, that movement is very telegraphed. And big explosive movements also create big explosive openings. So if I do a massive hip bump, then I have to basically raise my hips up into the air. I open up my body. I open up my torso. It makes it easier for people to do things like climb up to high mount. It can make submissions easier because you can accidentally expose your arms doing that. If you do it wrong, you can even give up your back. There's a lot of reasons why you got to be careful there. So the thing that I always coach people to do is instead of doing a big explosive move like a hip bump, do a lot of small little ones. And you shouldn't be trying to, you know, displace the person with a massive burst of energy. What you're trying to do is just never be still enough that they can settle their weight on top of you. You're trying to be a shifting platform because it's very hard for a person to settle their base on a platform that's moving. So if you do a big explosive bump, what happens is you burn a bunch of energy and you create a bunch of openings, and then the person's just going to settle their weight down on you again anyway. But if you're constantly shifting and moving, they can never quite feel safe there. And they're going to have to be the one that moves and adjusts. And that's how you can get enough openings that you can escape mount or whatever bad position you're in. So I always encourage people when you're practicing moves like this, if you see a big explosive move, take a look at the context and try to figure out, okay, is that just for drilling or optical purposes, or is this actually something that needs to be done to complete the technique? Some techniques, particularly a lot of throws where there's momentum involved and there's a fulcrum, you might really need to actually do a big explosive movement, especially if you want to do a lot of Judo throws. But for a lot of other techniques, smaller, more consistent, low energy movements are often better and safer, and they even get better results a lot of the time too. Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree. From bottom like that, instead of teaching a big hip bump, I like to teach people ratcheting your hips. Like a little click at a time until you get into the position that you want to do your escape because you're right, that big hip bump, I feel like I'm going to pull my hamstrings out when I do that, especially with a decent sized person a top of me, right? So teeny little ratchets until you get the angle that you want to actually affect your escape. Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, man. Well, this was a great chat. Is there anything else on the agenda that you wanted to talk about, Mike, which we didn't get into on this topic? Speaker 2: I mean, if you're going to work on your economy of motion, if you're going to work on trying to do the most in Jiu-Jitsu with the least amount of effort and movement, just know that like with any other thing that you put in your game, you're going to suck at it at first. You know, you learn a new submission and you want to start hitting it on people, you're not going to hit it at first. You're going to suck. So this is just like that, right? So it's you're going to have a period of time where you probably feel like you're not making any headway. And I would encourage you just to stick with it and find partners that are willing to slow down the pace with you, okay? I mean, you don't have to do every, if you're doing live training, you don't have to do every round at a snail's pace, but find those partners that are willing to slow it down with you so you can get your reps in and you're going to get you're going to find yourself making progress. But just know that like with any new endeavor, learning any new skill, you're going to be bad at first, and that's okay. And if you've been doing Jiu-Jitsu for a little while and you're not used to this kind of style of training, you may feel like you're taking some back steps. And that's 100% okay. Like I recently put a a new style of passing into my game a few months ago, and when I first started trying it, I felt like I was going backwards, right? You just have to kind of resist that urge to go back to the old way of doing things because you're going to be better in the end. Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a great point and something that is often very hard for people to get their head around. When they try a new technique or tactic, usually when they first give it a go, it's just not going to work. They're going to fail and they're going to get demoralized and they're going to think, why should I do this when all of this other stuff I do works better? So if you focus on trying to play a low motion game, at the beginning, you're probably going to find people blow past your guard and they wiggle out of everything you try to do. But it's important to understand that that's part of the learning process and to not get discouraged, right? So much of the time when people try something new, they give it up way too quickly because they don't see the results right away. Especially if they have a bit of experience under their belt because then they've got other options, right? If I have a blue belt level arm bar, why would I try a knee bar if it's only white belt level? I'm going to have better luck with my arm bar. But, you know what? The way that you get good at things is you practice it. So I think that's great advice. The people should lean into these areas of weakness. That's how you develop them and that's probably going to mean that you get your guard passed a bunch in the gym and people escape all your stuff. But what you find is over time, the more you do that, the harder it's going to be for people to escape your your grasp, right? And that's how you build that boa constrictor pressure where the person just can't escape and they're getting so tired. That's kind of the beautiful thing about Jiu-Jitsu, right? Is they have to work and I don't have to. So this is the game plan to get there. So hope that was helpful. I really enjoyed this conversation, Mike. Thanks so much for doing this. Speaker 2: Oh yeah, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it, Steve. And remember, Margo, I love you. Your Jiu-Jitsu is amazing. I'm really thinking back on this. I'm like, God, please don't come after me. But, you know, different styles for different people. It's all good. Speaker 1: I hope that Margo posts this giant weird cryptic Instagram story about how like, the old people in Jiu-Jitsu sometimes say things about me and blah, blah, blah, blah. And they and everyone's going to know she's talking about you. That's going to be. Speaker 2: Oh my God, that'd be amazing. That would be absolutely amazing. Speaker 1: Awesome. Well, Mike, if people want to contact you or they want your coaching or they want to train with you at like one of your seminars, how do they go about doing that? How can people find you? Speaker 2: Well, you can find me on Instagram at Old Bastard BJJ. Last year, I changed my handle from my given name to Old Bastard BJJ, so super easy to search for. I will post upcoming events on my Instagram. I do have a seminar at our uh friend's school in uh near Grand Rapids, another friend of the show and former guest, uh Ben Van Doren, his uh school, uh Deep Blue Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is hosting me in March for on March 22nd for a benefit seminar for the Solace Center, which is a LGBTQ center in Lansing, Michigan. So all proceeds are going to go to that. So you can find information about that on my Instagram. I just actually posted this really cool poster my daughter made, uh my teenager made for it on Instagram today. So you'll or yeah, today, but so whenever this comes out, it will have been on there and I'll be posting it continuously. There's also BJJ Mental Models camp coming up in April, April 11th to the 14th at Rough Hands Jiu-Jitsu in Louisville, Kentucky, and I'll be there along with a bunch of other people from the BJJ Mental Models community. You can find information about that, I believe, on your website, right, Steve, on the BJJ Mental Models website. Speaker 1: Yep, that is correct. I will also put links to all of this stuff in the show notes too to make it easy. So a lot of opportunities to train with Mike coming up. And of course, like you said, we've got that camp coming up in April. So if you are in Kentucky, would love to see people. Uh well, we're going to have a bunch of people out in Louisville, so that's going to be a blast. I will put links to all of that in the show notes. Of course, I'll also put a link to our stuff. Everything we make lives at bjjmentalmodels.com. I always tell people that you can go back and listen to any of the episodes that we've done and they they're all intended to be timeless and we don't talk a lot about current events or things that are kind of fashion-based, you know, they go in and out of vogue. We don't talk about that stuff that much. Everything should be just as useful today as it was when we recorded it. So I always encourage people, go through the back catalog and if there's a topic you see that really speaks to you, it's probably worth a listen. You can also, please do reach out to me. If you've got any questions about things you want to study on or if you have any areas of skill that you want to develop, I can probably point you to some resources that, you know, we don't even charge for. We've also got our mini episodes. So if you want quick hit concept breakdowns of some of the big ideas in Jiu-Jitsu, you can get those in the main feed too. Join our newsletter. It's also at bjjmentalmodels.com. And please, if you haven't done so, I would really appreciate it if everyone would take a look at BJJ Mental Models Premium. For those who don't know, if you struggle with the kinds of problems that go beyond technique, like I'm having trouble remembering things in class. I just I feel like I'm not good at this. Uh how do I learn faster? How do I stop hesitating when I'm rolling? How do I beat bigger, stronger opponents? If that kind of problem is the kind of problem that you're dealing with, and frankly, I know it is, then understand that that's where we make a a lot of course material to help people overcome those issues. Specifically, if you liked this conversation, Mike and I have a great five-part course on his framework for older grapplers, but I think it's really effective for anyone, quite honestly. And of course, you can also get coaching from folks like Mike, and you get access to our awesome Discord where you can tell me all about your life problems. Mike has well. And and we will do our best to help you out. Mike actually is a social worker. So he can actually help you, whereas I can just pretend to. So there you go. There's real talent out there and it ain't me. But anyway, all of that's at bjjmentalmodels.com. Please do consider taking a look and yeah, I I would love to see people in our Discord, on Premium, and definitely at the seminars that we've got coming up as well. So, as always, Mike, thanks a lot for coming by and I'm looking forward to seeing you in person in just a few months. Speaker 2: I cannot wait, Steve. I appreciate you. Thanks for the chat. Speaker 1: You too, my friend. And of course, I also appreciate everyone who listens to us. I know you guys have a lot of stuff on your minds. I know that you're very busy and I know there's a ton of podcasts and Jiu-Jitsu stuff out there. So I do appreciate everyone listening to this one. Thanks a lot to everyone. Mike as well, and I'll talk to you guys in the next episode. See you then.