Mini Ep. 41: Redundancies

Speaker 1: Hey everybody, before we get started this week, I have huge news. She actually did it. We're pleased to announce that Beatrice Jin, top-ranked women's competitor in North America and long-time BJJ Mental Models premium community member, has published her first ever course with us, exclusive to BJJ Mental Models. It's called Stop Being Nice. It's a three-part audio series designed to solve real mindset problems that regular folks experience in Jiu-Jitsu. If you struggle to be aggressive and competitive in Jiu-Jitsu, you'll find the solutions here. If you're already a BJJ Mental Models premium subscriber, you've already got access. And if you are not, good news, you can get it now and get your first week free. Go to BJJmentalmodels.com and check it out today. Speaker 2: Hey, welcome to BJJ Mental Models. I'm Steve Kwan. BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent Jiu-Jitsu approach. And I'm back again with another one of our mini episodes, giving you a quick hit, key mental model that'll help improve your Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. In this episode, I want to talk about a concept known as redundancies. What this basically tells us is that to the best extent reasonably possible, our Jiu-Jitsu technique should not have a single point of failure. Think about the old saying that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. The same applies in Jiu-Jitsu, your technique is only as good as your biggest vulnerability. If you have a vulnerability that your opponent can exploit, if they can make that vulnerability happen, it doesn't matter how good the rest of your Jiu-Jitsu is. You hear this similar concept come up a lot in systems design. If you've ever worked in cybersecurity, you may have heard the term single point of failure. It's common for security specialists to look at an entire system and try to discover, is there a single point of failure, a single element where if something goes wrong here, the whole system is compromised? That's generally considered bad system design. You don't want to have a critical system that will fail if there's just a single error in the wrong place. So the way that you get around this is by having redundancies. You've got extra level of securities, extra places where credentials are required, take backups of everything. A backup is a perfect example of a redundancy. You're taking a backup of your data in case something goes wrong. And this idea of building in redundancies is just as applicable to Jiu-Jitsu as it is to something like cybersecurity. Your technique will fall to the level of your biggest vulnerability. Now, there's a few different ways that these single points of failure can manifest in Jiu-Jitsu. One of them is through the level of commitment on a technique. I've talked in the past on the podcast about how some techniques require more commitment than others. And by that, I mean the risk of something going wrong if you fail is higher. Let's take for example, sacrifice throws in Judo. These are throws where you have to sacrifice your position in order to attempt the throw. A classic example of this is Ippon Seoi Nage, the shoulder throw. If you screw that up, your opponent is on your back. And so we would consider this to be a high commitment technique. Now, that doesn't mean that throws like this are bad. We can use them, but it does mean that we need to be mindful of the fact that if something goes wrong, there's going to be a problem. And so whenever we use a technique like this, we should always be asking ourselves, what can we do to alter or change this technique to minimize the risk to ourselves? Another example of where single points of failure can cause us issues in Jiu-Jitsu is if we have just a single grip that is holding on to something, or a single element of control, which if defeated, would result in us losing everything that we're working for. Let's take an example of a position that has high redundancy. Classic back control is a great example of this. If I am playing a classic Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu back control on you, I am on your back, I have chest-to-back connection, I have probably a seatbelt, I have my hooks in, and my ear is glued to your ear. We have our heads connected together to prevent you from getting your head onto the floor. There's a lot of things there that I'm doing to prevent you from escaping that position. If you want to escape my back control, you have to get past all of those levels of offense. You've got to get past my hooks, you've got to get past the seatbelt, you've got to get past the head control, you've got to detach your back from my chest. It's hard to do. That's part of why we consider back control to be such a dominant position. Let's take a look at a position that doesn't have many redundancies. Let's talk about the old bulldog or bully headlock. For those who can't visualize this, this is the schoolyard headlock where you've kind of got someone's head in your armpit and the rest of their body is behind you, um, so you could give them a noogie, you know, that kind of thing. That's an example of a technique that doesn't have a lot of redundancy. And why do I say that? Because the only thing holding the other person in that position is the headlock. If they can figure out a way to get their head free, they're probably on your back. And so in Jiu-Jitsu, you don't see the bulldog headlock a lot because if you mess it up, then the person's going to get to your back, they're going to get to your legs, a lot of bad things can happen. Now, does that mean that the bulldog headlock is a bad technique? Not really, it can work. I mean, we've seen people get tapped out by the bulldog headlock. But the problem is, because it doesn't have many redundancies, it's sort of an all-or-nothing technique. You're either going to get it or you're going to leave a massive opening. So it's another example of what we would call a high commitment technique. So what can we do about this? How can we build more redundancies into our Jiu-Jitsu so that things don't go terribly wrong? Well, there's a few things that you can do. The most obvious thing you can do is have multiple points of control, so that if one thing fails, then you have other backup options. Again, talking about back control, that's a perfect example of a situation with a lot of redundancies. And you don't have to play back control with a lot of redundancies. If you take a look at the way that a lot of classic Judoka used to do their rear naked choke, they would do it without having their hooks in sometimes. You don't technically need to have your hooks in to attack someone's back, but the hooks are an extra redundancy. So that's why we use the hooks, because it's one more thing that will hold our opponent in that position. So we should always be looking at any position we're in or technique we want to do, what are the number of things I've got that are holding the person in that position? The more redundancies you have, the more dominant the position is. Again, back control, but even mount, side control, you have a lot of things holding the person in that position, which is why it's so hard for them to get out. If you think instead about how we might play standup, there's not a lot of redundancies most of the time. There's not that many ways that you can control the person, which is why those positions are considered more even. There are so many things that can happen. It's hard for me to just pin you and hold you in place. But to the best extent possible, you always want to look for new layers that you can add on to hold that position and make it more reliable. An easy way to do that is to think of Rob Bernacki's alignment system, base, posture, structure. From any position, always ask, how can I mess up this person's base? How can I mess up their posture? How can I mess up their structure? That's an easy way to find new redundancies that you can add in. And if you're not totally familiar with Bernacki's alignment system, go back and listen to the first few mini episodes we did because we talked quite a bit about this. Another thing that you can do is make sure that you've got a solid plan B. Maybe you're doing a technique where adding more grips or more layers of defense isn't really realistic for what you're trying to do, or maybe you've decided that the benefit outweighs the risk and you want to do a technique that might have a few openings. If you're doing that, you need to make sure that you have a solid plan B to fall back on and that you've trained that sufficiently that you can move right into that if your opponent defeats your first attack. A classic example of this is the old armbar triangle Omaplata sequence from guard. The reason why these techniques are so great together is because it's easy to transition between them. So if you try to armbar someone and they are able to stack you, then maybe you can switch to the Omaplata. So if you are trying to armbar someone, but they're able to free their arm, maybe you can switch to a triangle. If they defend the triangle by trying to hide the arm inside the triangle, maybe you can switch to an Omaplata. If they start turning back towards you from the Omaplata, maybe you can go back to a triangle. So that's an example of having a plan B in case your plan A fails. All of this is to say that whenever we're doing something in Jiu-Jitsu, we always want to try to make sure we've got redundancies in place. And this can either come in the form of I've got multiple points of control, like in a dominant position like back control or mount, or I've got a solid plan B that I can transition seamlessly to in case my plan A fails. Always be looking for these two things and always be mindful of situations where you're getting exploited. If you find that every time you try a certain tactic, it goes wrong in the same way, that's probably an indication you don't have enough redundancies in place. Of course, if you want to learn more about this, if you want to have deeper conversations about the strategy behind building a game plan, that's what BJJ Mental Models is for. I recommend going to BJJmentalmodels.com, I'll put a link in the show notes, where you can get all of our podcast episodes, both the long form ones and the mini episodes completely free. Our newsletter is free as well. We publish some awesome thought pieces about how to think more effectively about sparring in Jiu-Jitsu there every week. And of course, if you want to kick it up to the next level with us and really work directly with us to build up your Jiu-Jitsu game and also get access to the world's largest library of Jiu-Jitsu audio courses on strategy and tactics, that's what BJJ Mental Models premium is for. Go to BJJmentalmodels.com or check the link in the show notes for more information. Thanks a lot for listening and we'll talk to you in the next one.