Ep. 322: Technique Zero, feat. Marc Ste-Marie

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 Jijitsu. If you struggle to be aggressive and competitive in Jijitsu, 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 BJJ Mental Models.com and check it out today. Speaker 2: Hey, welcome to BJJ Mental Models episode 322. I'm Steve Kwan. BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent Jijitsu approach. And I'm here today with a fellow Canadian. I've got Mark St. Marie on the line. Mark, how is it going, sir? Speaker 3: Very good, thank you. Happy to be here. Speaker 2: Happy to have you. Now, we'll get into your story, of course. You're a fellow black belt from Canada, but a lot of people listening to this are probably going to think, this guy's name sounds really familiar. Where have I heard that name before? It sounds like it should be associated with royalty or something. Do you want to maybe tell people a bit about who you are and who you're related to and your Jijitsu career as well? Speaker 3: No problem. Here's the deal, like my daughter's making me famous. Like I, I got people crowding me at tournaments saying, hey, can I come and talk to you and stuff like that? And they introduced me as Brianna St. Marie's father. So, I'm Brianna's dad and, uh, yeah. But, you know what? It's like I'm a black belt and stuff, but I stay, I, I keep my distance with her Jijitsu career and stuff like that. I don't think parents are good advisors, they're too emotionally involved. But I'm Brianna's dad and, uh, like I said, I enjoy, I watch it as a fan, like most of you guys do. I think she's an amazing person. Obviously, she's my daughter, so there's a lot of bias there. But, uh, yeah. So, that's what it is. So, she made me famous. Speaker 2: So, what is your official title? I mean, if your daughter is the queen, according to the IBJJF, then does that, I mean, I know that, you know, as Canadians, we're, we're technically monarchists. So, what's your title? Are you like the queen father? Is that the official title that we need to call you by? Speaker 3: I'm the jester. Speaker 2: The court jester. Well, amazing, sir. You know, something that's been on my mind that I'd love to ask is, how did both you and your daughter discover Jijitsu? Is this a thing where you got her into it or she got you into it, or you both just kind of discovered it on your own or started together? I've always been curious about this. Speaker 3: Oh, well, it's a good question. Well, first of all, I've started grappling around five years old when I lived in Quebec City and we did Judo. And, uh, later on, it's like Judo led, when we moved to Montreal, it was no Judo school in my neighborhood. There was wrestling in my high school. So, I converted to wrestling and stuff. And back then, well, there was no Jijitsu, right? It's like you, there was none of that stuff. And I kept going over the years and stuff like that. Then in the 80s, it was like we called it submission grappling, right? So, we did it with no teacher, rolling on industrial carpet and in the grass in parks outdoors and a bunch of guys who put their knowledge together. We had a Sambo guy from Belarus, we had Judo guys, we had wrestling guys, and we all pooled the knowledge and it was a great time. Honestly, I miss that. So, but later on, you know, got kids and everything and, and obviously, I slowed down a bit because all my three kids were elite athletes. So, Brianna played Triple-A soccer, played rugby. My, uh, both my daughters were on Team Quebec Rugby. My son was on Team Quebec Lacrosse. And so, I slowed down a bit. But then I remember Brianna coming to me and saying, Dad, she goes to me flat out, and this is a long time ago. I don't know if she remembers that, but she goes, I want to grapple. I said, okay, well, back then, there was nothing. Now there's a Jijitsu school every second street corner. But so, I was coaching at Riverdale Wrestling Club, a local wrestling club. And, uh, I said, well, you want to come and wrestle? I don't know if I want to do that. So, we stopped talking about it. So, um, you know, life went on. I kept working and training at BTT with, uh, Fabio Landa and Fred Kumsatira and, uh, leaving love, obviously. And, um, she came at some point, she played rugby. She made it to university rugby and I don't know, it was not fulfilling her and stuff like that. So, and back then, she had a boyfriend that did Jijitsu. So, she got into it. That's how she got into it. But, um, so I said, well, that, that's fun. But at the beginning, nobody knew where this was going to go, you know? So, I remember she started, like three weeks into it, she goes, when's the next tournament? So, she always been competing at high levels and all kinds of sports. So, she was a track athlete too. And I think she got closer, she had provincial records of track and field and stuff. So, uh, I was happy for her to do Jijitsu and stuff like that. But, um, and then we had, uh, Cascao in town back then, Leonardo Sadiro. So, you know, so she trained with him mostly and stuff like that. And I just observed. To tell you the truth, I've seen, I've been coaching in all kinds of sport for a long time and I find very rarely there's success stories of parents coaching their kid. I know great coaches that became crappy coaches when it came time to train their kids. And I'm a high emotion guy and just, you know, when I watch her on Flow or some Fight Pass or whatever, I sit in the living room just chewing on my, on the remote control and, you know what? There's no way I'd be able to be their coach. There's no way. So, I always took a back seat and stuff like that. And I just watched her from a healthy distance. If she asked me a question, I answered, but I never commented too much. My grappling game is archaic at best, you know. Yeah, so, we'll occasionally roll together. It's a lot of fun because I try to beat her with being slick and technical. So, it doesn't always end well for me, but I'm more of a, of an old school smasher, you know? But I try to play a different game when I roll with her and it's a lot of fun. We're having a good time, good laughs and, uh, that's about it. Like I said, I try to stay on the sideline a bit and not get too, too much involved in that. I enjoy it as a fan, not as an advisor or something like this. She has plenty of good people around her. People like Dema, people like, uh, she's in Australia training with Adele right now, what an amazing young lady. And, um, she's well surrounded. So, uh, you know what? She doesn't need me to give my two cents, you know? This is how you chin strap type thing, you know? Speaker 2: Well, that's, it's funny, you know, a lot of names that are going to be familiar to the show. I mean, Adele Fornerino, friend of the show as well. Um, of course, Brianna, not just a BJJ Mental Models sponsored athlete, but she's also one of the coaches on our review team. I remember recently we pranked her. I sent in a review video that was actually of you. I didn't tell her. Speaker 3: You know what's the funniest thing? I wanted to do it so bad and I was hurt. I'm always hurt. I'm an orthopedic nightmare. But I said, God, I have to do a roll because sadly, I destroyed my phone by accident. I fell and smashed my phone and I lost tons of footage. I had a rolls. I did some good rolls. So, I said, I had nothing. So, I said, oh, this guy, Steve's going to make me roll, man. I was in agony when I did that thing. But it was fun. I really enjoyed it. Speaker 2: Yeah, so that was a blast when we had Brianna do a a rolling review for you. I I don't get an opportunity to prank our coaches very often. So, I very much enjoyed, uh, sending her a clip of her black belt dad sparring and asking for her advice. Speaker 3: Honestly, at this point, overall, she knows more than I do. Like I've been grappling for ages, but she's current. I'm not, you know? So, I could have used her feedback probably. Speaker 2: Well, hey, something that I wanted to talk about with you here today as a topic. For those who don't follow you on Instagram, you post a lot of really cool, uh, concept content and a lot of like tips of the day, just really quick actionable things that I love that stuff. And something that you talked about on one of your recent posts was about this idea of something called technique zero. Speaker 3: Yes. Speaker 2: And I'd never heard anyone explain this before, but once you told me about it, I realized I've heard a lot of other coaches kind of express a similar idea, but just they never had a good name for it. So, I thought it would be awesome to have you on here maybe to talk about that. So, I'd love to maybe have you introduce this idea of technique zero and what is it and why is it so important for Jijitsu? Speaker 3: All right. Well, first of all, technique zero is a word that was coined by my instructor, Fred Kumsatira. Fred is, I think he's a great coach, but his downfall is that he seeks zero publicity. He'll never be on social media, doesn't put videos, anything at all. I said, what are you doing, man? You know, like, people have to hear you. So, it's him that basically coined the term technique zero, Fred Kumsatira. I got to give reference and be intellectually honest here. It's him. It's his thing. It's the, um, technique zero, I call that the art of regression. And I love a lot of times the material out there we see online and things. This is why my Jijitsu concept tip with the number there I do is basically geared for people who just started because all the material, you look at instructional, I might buy it, but I don't know what an underhook is at this point. I think I'm wasting my money. So, technique zero is basically designed for people who entered the game. And what it is, it's like it's based on observation. So, we can have, you and I can have two different school and teach the same move and you'll see where I'm going with that later. Your technique zero for a specific move might be different than my technique zero based on what you've observed. So, we started doing this. We went to tournaments and I got 30 kids at a tournament. I'm very involved with coaching the kids. And we realized after the tournament, all the coach meet and we say, there's a common mistake here that's happening. There's a common thing that happened with all the, uh, participant. And usually it's obvious because group, when you observe, when you analyze one fight, let's say I do a review of you rolling. This is your thing. But when you look as, as an instructor, when you look as a, at a group, what you will see is your reflection, is your mirror. So, for us, when we looked at how we performed as a team, especially with the kids and the white belts, we said, you know what? This is, we have a common, first of all, we find the common issue. The people that lost, usually, there's common points why they lost or they lost point. They might have won the match, but people that got swept and stuff. So, we look at all this and we say, you know what? This is a, in a group observation, we say, this thing kept recurring in most of the roll. That's a mirror of our coaching. So, and nobody coaches perfect. There's always going to find gaps. So, basically, it's we identified the patterns. And we can do this in class too. We started to do this in class. We have 40 kids in the class. We look and we start the live drilling and we say, wow, they're all doing the same mistake. So, this is a reflection. This tells us how to adjust the coaching. So, I will use as an example a double leg. Why? Because in Jijitsu, people use different name for the same move and I'd like the people who listen to this to be able to relate to what I'm explaining. So, once at a, uh, recent tournament, we looked and we had more kids doing no-gi. And then we looked at their, we had a lot of failed leg attacks, like single, doubles and stuff, like failed finishes, really. So, we looked at it and we said, okay, so there was a lot of issues. Like if you break it down and, and you look at them like they're experienced wrestlers, you can start nitpicking details. But we looked at it and we said, okay, what's the main thing? There was two things. Lack of penetration, no matter what the takedown was, and poor head position. Head was loose, looking down and whatever. So, we realized that all leg attacks and wrestling, I mean, you can do this and say, grab here, grab there, do this, do that. If you don't get penetration on the shot and your head is misplaced, the takedown's going to fail. So, what we did, I said, okay, technique zero. So, how are we going to correct this? So, we basically looked at it and we said, okay, we're going to get them, and this is trial and error, right? Like, uh, we're going to get them to go from a collar elbow tie and they're going to start, we're going to practice duck unders. So, we got them to do tons of duck unders from collar tie. I put a video out there of me teaching that somewhere on Instagram. And once they got it, they got that duck under. We said, okay, so now we're going to start same thing. You're going to duck under and no specifics. We said, grab the legs. And then we observe. Well, here's what we saw. We saw them ducking under, grabbing a straight double. Others were going eye crotch, eye crotch to double. Others were going just slip by double. The person would sprawl, they get, I don't know if you know what a slip, you probably, there's all kinds of names there. We saw all forms of leg attacks that we didn't even teach. They were just playing, having a blast. But what we liked is that suddenly they had penetration. The head position was tight on the, on the body and the hips were scooping under because of the duck under mechanics. So, once they, we let them play with this and then after we can start going back to being specific. Okay, let's do the double like this or like that, whatever. But this was based on our observation, right? So, here's another thing. We have a a basic sweep. It's basically like an arm across sweep, right? From closed guard. Everybody has that in their curriculum. So, they did the sweep and the thing seems to paralyze. So, we realized that we said, okay, so why is this thing failing? Well, there was no hip switch, right? So, or the timing of the hip switch was wrong. They tried to just muscle the guy over to the other side instead of going under. So, we said, okay, how are we going to fix back? So, we took that arm across sweep and we made him, we used the same mechanic to take the back. So, it was back take, back take, back take, back take. And then after, we told the partner was in the guard, you don't want to get your back taken. He goes, no. So, you're going to square back in the guard. So, when the kid square back in the guard, we realized the other one, I said, well, you know, he's basically starting the hip switch for the kid who's under. So, that taught him when to trigger, taught him the timing. And suddenly the problem was taken care of. But a lot of people might think that it's a waste of time. But after that, it becomes organic. Like butterfly guard. We know this because us black belt when we teach, we have a problem sometimes. We do things automatically and because we do it automatically without thinking, what happens? We, we forget to teach it, right? Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 3: So, I said, why come you that he's not doing that? Well, you didn't tell him, but for us, it's natural, but we forget to teach it. So, the key to a butterfly guard is the hip scooping under like a shovel, right? Getting under. So, the kids basically were not scooping. So, then, well, you know what? We're going to find a way to get him to scoop. So, we came up, it's not a sweep. It looks like it, but we got the kid to put his butterfly with double overhooks and just get him to shovel under and elevate the guy. And just until they get the sweep, the, the scooping motion with the hip. So, that's all we did. It's not a technique. It's nothing. It's just like a scoop. Well, once they got this program, everything else, I said, okay. I said, when you turn the guy, you're just going to hold the post on the side you want to roll, you're going to hold the posting arm. You should have seen what they did with the other arm. It looked like a Adam Wazinski, uh, five-part BJJ scalp butterfly. Some guys went over the shoulder, grabbed the belt. Other guys grabbed it from the front. Other guys grabbed cross collar. Other guys wrapped the elbow. But all this happened naturally. Maybe it's what you guys call ecological. I don't know what it is, but what we do is that you cannot be afraid to regress and instead of teaching a technique, teach a movement pattern. And then after that, at the beginning, you say, well, you know, jeez, are we slowing him down? But then, you know what happens? Everything comes up after. Everything cleans itself naturally. So, but it's based on your observation. So, what I said about the double leg or the leg attacks, well, it's based on how our guys were doing and that exposed us as coaches where we made a mistake. Like, you know, how are we going to fix that problem? So, maybe if you watch your athletes, they might have a different problem with their, uh, leg attacks or something like this. But it's up to you after that to create a pattern. Maybe not a sweep, maybe not a a pass, but create a pattern that's going to program them. You want to do like neuromuscular programming. It's been pretty good. It's been solid and, uh, now, what we did after, we started to do that with the adults. So, at the beginning, you said, we tell the adults, this is what we've been doing in the kids class and adults will verbalize better. They said, that's a game changer. I finally understand the concept, right? Why can Steve Kwan do a sweep, a basic sweep on a black belt and it's because you're able to do the adjustment in mid-flight. Why can you do this? It's because you understand the concept of the technique. No concept, your technique, it becomes like, you become like a parrot. You parrot the move, right? But I tell you know that this is why Roger Gracie will do a basic scissor sweep on another legend, right? So, it could be anything like loading a sweep on the leg, you're going to pivot him over and stuff like that. We've done, we had it like for guard passing, for example, or sweeping. Everything start with a posture break. Passing is a, guarding and passing is a posture battle. So, before we taught sweeping with the adults, we just got him to work posture breaks for three weeks. The rest is history. I mean, it's like suddenly, they recognized the pattern through all the sweeps. They loaded the sweep, they did this, they did that, broke the guy's posture forward. So, that type of stuff just pays. And so far, well, now we have at the beginning, we said, what are we doing? We're messing this up. But, you know what? So far, it's working pretty good. But like I said, it's based on your observation of your group. And as a coach, you'll get better because it really will, will identify where you failed or what you omitted or what you should have worked, spend more time on. But it's basically finding the essence of the move and programming it before you actually do the move. I hope I make sense here. Speaker 2: I think so. It makes sense to me. If I'm understanding correctly, what you're saying is, rather than trying to teach people the move in a traditional sense, like let's give them every single step and try to just stuff all of that into their brain. You're getting better results focusing on kind of the entry point to the sequence, the technique zero, so to speak. So, what is the initial movement that leads into the sequence? And let's focus on training that piece. Is that kind of what you're talking about? Speaker 3: Yes, but also being observation based is like a lot of time, I'm going to, you know, we're going to teach the move straight up. And then we see the whole group perform the move and then we say, okay, there's the problem. There's where this is what they're missing. And from there, then we regress. We go down to the part of the move that they're missing, right? But you have to observe because I can tell you those are the corrective for the butterfly guard, for the double leg, for this, blah, blah, blah. You know, it's, yeah, it's fine and dandy, but you with your group, based on your teaching method, you might have other issues with the move, right? So, now we're, like you just said, now, we're going to look at it and say right away, like, what is the key here? So, if you're passing, first, if you lose the posture battle, you're not passing anything, especially in gi, right? Because in gi, once the guy grabs fabric, it's, it's not the same. As a joke, I used to say, gi is like a marriage. You engage a guard, you got to make it work. No-gi is like a one-night stand in the back of a cab, you know? Like, you don't like it, you get out and you go back again. Speaker 2: I have never heard anyone explain the gi in that way, but you're absolutely right. And this very much aligns with something that I've noticed too. And I know I've talked about this on the podcast before. I used to struggle a lot with getting tied up in people's guards and I couldn't figure out how to pass from there, you know, when you're already way deep in there. And at some point, I realized, or at least I had this idea in my head that maybe I should just forget about the technique and try to focus on the first step, which is, they're gripping me. And once they grip me, everything goes south, especially as someone who plays in the gi a lot. So, how can I stop that from happening? Like, let's forget about the techniques. Let's just play this game where I never let them grip me. And what I realized is once you do that, everything else is like on easy mode. Because if they can't grip you, they can't do anything. And then from there, it's way easier to do the move that you wanted to do anyway. Speaker 3: 100%. Like Marcelo Garcia said, when you want to counter something in Jijitsu, where did I read that? Was that an old Gracie mag or something like this? Anyway, he said, he said, you don't need to know what the guy wants to do. He says, every move in Jijitsu has specific gripping pattern. If you disrupt the gripping pattern, you've killed the move, even if you don't know what the guy's doing. And I thought, this for me was like a game changer. So, I always tell the guys, I said, it's your grips or no grips, right? And this was such a great thing that Marcelo, I think it was in a book called Fighter's Mind or something like this. I got to get to him anyway. Not important. But I thought it was so good. He goes, disrupt the gripping pattern and you've killed the move, even if you don't know what he's up to. I thought it was such great advice, you know? And, uh, well, here's what I think for technique zero for today. We, uh, I'm watching the class and my class in the morning, 7:00 AM. And they start rolling. I'm looking at this. I said, there's something that bothers me here. And then I realized they're playing their partner's grip pattern. And they're trying to, they're not trying to establish their own grips. They're trying to play, I'm talking about like white and blue belts. They're trying to play off their partner's gripping patterns. I, you know what? I said, wow. So, next week, I'm going to wrap my head around, I got to change this mindset, you know? So, I'm thinking of a few games, a few things, a few drills we're going to do and so that they don't automatically concede the grips and then try to work from using, you know, the other guy, try to overgrip or whatever. But, you know, so I said, you know what? This is something I need to fix. So, I'm going to wrap my head around this this weekend and Monday, I have to come up with something to do. Technique zero for gripping. So, we're going to do a lot of grip fighting and stuff like that and, uh, I'm going to take care of this because and I'm going to stay on that like a dog on a bone because they make it super easy for our advanced guys to just because they're playing off the other guy's grip, right? Speaker 2: Yeah. You know, I'm glad you brought this up because this is, it's something I have, actually have an episode booked in the future with someone else that I want to talk about. This idea of these social contracts that we have in Jijitsu. You know, we train together and we get into these patterns, whether we realize we're doing it or not. And once we start falling into these like pre-established agreements with people, we sometimes give up the best opportunities to win the fight. Speaker 3: Oh my God, yes. You know that actually, yeah, you know, I'm going to call you on that on Monday. I mean, this is gold. This is absolutely it. Because, you know what? There's something also we call respect. Well, respect is a broad term, but every time, I mean, I used to roll with, uh, Leonardo like three, four times a week. Obviously, never ended well, but but the time I did the best, you know, because I always picking his brain after and, and he was able to coach me in a way that I could never be able to coach anybody. He would teach me right on my limit of everything, right on the edge. And I'm not good enough to coach my student like this. But and I remember, I said, you know what? What am I going to do? I'm going to ask him a specific question and he said, he used to call me the Soviet tank. He goes, he goes, you keep shooting when the piece falls off and the wheels fall off and you keep coming forward and blasting. Anyway, so he said, just be you because he goes, you're respecting me too much. Now, we go sometimes, we go in, it's almost we're going in to lose, right? And this is probably has an impact on you conceding the gripping pattern or something like this. When I'm going there, you know? So, there's something, I mean, I mean, I don't like, maybe the word respect is not the proper term for it, but you got to go in and say, you know what? Fuck it. This guy's going to have the right of his life here, you know? When I came back to competition in 2019, you know, after years, I went to the Worlds and I, I did well. I won my first match. Second match, you know, lack of experience. I kind of lost the clock a bit. They were all coaching Brianna. They left me alone, which is fine. But I kind of lost the time and I've been compete too much and I coughed up some advantage I shouldn't have. But when I fought that guy, he had, he had like four stripes on his black belt, right? Well, you know, I looked at him and I said, you know what? This guy wants to beat me, he's going to bleed. I mean, it's not a question of winning or losing, but when I was finished, he went home. He forfeited the next match. He was done. And I went in there. I said, well, you know, I don't know if it's, uh, about the language, but I said, fuck his four stripes. It's like, on Tolo, we say in French, I'm just going to go in and, and get into this. But we have a tendency and that's a mindset thing also, you know? But I tell people, I said, you know what? It's like, don't go in with the thing like I'm going to get my ass handed as you walk into the roll because then you're going to do mistakes. You're going to concede grips. You're going to hesitate. Sometimes you might have a viable move, but because you're, yeah, well, you know, he's that good and, you know, you, so you, it's not 100%, but that's what it is. But now, you're absolutely right with this. It's, uh, that's going to be an interesting podcast when that guy comes on. Like, uh, yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a great point too about respect. I've talked a lot about this on the podcast before where I always believed that you should respect your opponent. And people sometimes misunderstand what I mean by that. To me, respect does not mean you like them. It does not even mean that you agree with them. I mean, there's a lot of people, if I were in a match with Gordon Ryan, for example, there's a lot of things I don't like about Gordon Ryan. But of course, I am going to respect him as an opponent because if I don't take him seriously, then he's just going to, well, I mean, he's going to steamroll me anyway. But he's definitely going to steamroll me if I don't take him seriously. And if you over respect your opponent to the point where you're deferential to them, that's also dangerous because you're defeating yourself mentally before you even start. And I think that's a, you know, on the topic of technique zero, a big part of that is where mindset comes into play. I think a lot of people, they create these mental triggers for themselves where they kind of start eroding their own confidence before they've even gripped up with someone. And so, I think that this is an area of the sport that is probably underdeveloped, which is that initial opening stage, you know, before you even grip up with someone, how do you enter into that process dominantly, aggressively, assertively, but also effectively too? Speaker 3: I'm going to tell you about one of my student because he went to ADCC Toronto. He's a blue belt. He's very good. Well, now he's a purple belt. But and he entered the advanced division masters. But, you know, I worked with ADCC for masters, right? It's 35 and up. There's no master one, two, three. It's, you know, you go in and it and it's, uh, you can get somebody who's 35 years old, right? This is why ADCC master is not for me at 62. But master seven, I BJJF is fine. But anyway, so Guillaume gets in there and he's a blue belt and obviously, they're all black belts there in that bracket, right? So, he goes in and he has a solid game. I kind of helped him a bit and brought him up and he fights a guy which is a black belt of, uh, what's his face? You know, the black belt from Toronto, he's that who's number one sometimes. He's a short guy with a mustache. God, I'm so not the Jijitsu geek here. It's, uh, David Garmel. He fights Garmel's top student or something like this. And Guillaume as a blue belt murders him. I've never seen that. It finished, I mean, he had 30 seconds on the clock, he was submitting him. He was in mount, smashing the half guard like on his head the whole time, chest to chest, flat. The guy was trashing like, uh, anyway, and Guillaume is the epitome of this is that he doesn't care what kind of, uh, the person, uh, pedigree or whatever it is. He's going to go in there and do his best. He's very calm, he's methodical. He's a financial advisor and he, you know, so, he's very fit, but he's also, uh, he's not a professional athlete or anything. And when he wind up in the final, he fought a guy that had submitted every, I think the guy that won did not roll more than two minutes. He murdered everybody in like seconds. And Guillaume lasted a solid three minutes with him. So, we were very proud of him and stuff like that. But this is a typically the guy who's not inhibited. He didn't do anything spectacular. He was just good, rock solid, basic, chest to chest, flattened the guy. It was a thing of beauty. And I think he epitomizes the ability to say, you know what? I'm going to go out there and do my shit and that's it, right? And, um, yeah, that was quite an event, but he's the epitome of that. Like, he did not get cowed by the person's pedigree or by his, who his teacher was or something. He just went and got the job done. Like, we have a lot of good kids like this. We have some at the Euros right now. And I tell them, I said, you know what? I said, do not, you have to go in. These kids are good. We started them in the teenage class and now Vlad is 17 years old. He got second place at the Euro No-Gi. And, um, Luca and stuff, they're, you know, they're great. Great attitude and everything. But I said, you know, I keep on telling him, you can respect somebody, respecting somebody doesn't mean you're not going to try to kill him. And that's what it is. Like, it's very tough. The psychology of it all, you know? And, um, everything you do when you coach those athletes, you have to understand, you have to teach him belief. Fabio Landa calls it, you got to believe. And, um, that's the term he uses. But it's difficult sometimes. I wish I could give you a formula on how to do it here. But, uh, it's very important and I guess this is why your mindset and psychology is so important. This is what makes your podcast pretty darn good is because you address a lot of that. This is a great area. Speaker 2: Well, thanks, man. Yeah, it's definitely a an understudied area of the sport, I think. And the other thing I love about this idea of technique zero is if you're kind of focusing on the entry to your problem, it really minimizes the amount of stuff that you have to keep in your brain at the same time. And I mean, I'm an old guy too. I struggle to keep track of all of the stuff I'm supposed to be doing in Jijitsu. And I know that there are people out there who are able to just memorize every detail and pull it off perfectly, but I am not that guy. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 2: I need to have as little going on in my brain as possible when I'm rolling. And the challenge too with trying to remember too many details, like you said with Marcelo earlier, is you never really know what the other guy's going to do. You can try to anticipate it, but you never really know. And I mean, what are you going to do? Are you going to memorize every conceivable possible detail that this guy could do? No, you can't do that. So, what you focus on is what you can control. And that is what is right in front of you right now, the technique zero. Speaker 3: Are you aware of Hick's Law? Speaker 2: I am. I've talked about this on the podcast many times. Yes, but why don't you explain it? Speaker 3: That's right. I've been harping about this for decades because I was, uh, I did some striking too and stuff like that. So, usually the memorizers of techniques, guys who can give you all the names and this and that. And I always say, narrow and deep is better than wide and flat. I'm not worried. A guy says, I know a thousand submission. You know what? Not worried. I'm worried about a guy who can do one submission a thousand different ways. Then I start being afraid. But it's very, very, very interesting all this because technique zero is obviously, I said, start with observation, but the first thing you, when you take care of a problem, of an issue or a challenge, what do they say? You have to identify it. It starts with that. So, technique zero is that you look at your group, not at one guy because everybody's different. We had a kid, sadly, he's not doing it anymore. Him, you didn't coach him. The way you coached him, you say, uh, I need him flat. He's going to find a way to flatten the guy. Like, you don't have to say anything. You pull the canoodle flip once on his like, uh, after coming back after a year. I said, what did you guys watch YouTube or something like that? He says, no, no, I just thought I could get past his guard. I said, okay. So, but anyway, so I, I digress once again. But the, um, yeah, so you have to identify the problem. This is why the key to technique zero is group observation. Because when you teach a class, you're not teaching private. You cannot in a class go to 40 people one by one and say, okay, you change this, you change that. You wish you could do that, right? But you can't. So, the group observation will tell you in a generic fashion where your coaching failed or was not what you omitted. Not because you don't know it, but you assume they were going to do it. A lot of time is because you made the wrong assumption. Well, they'll do that because that's what you do, right? But you have to identify. So, you identify the pattern and you go and attack that thing right away. And spend as long as you want. Once they, once you've identified the general issue with, with the group, everything just like, it's like exponential. They start almost like, uh, they'll find the adjustments quicker. If there's an adjustment to be made, they'll understand the move conceptually and, and, well, listen, Jijitsu's like music, right? When you look at two great guitar players, are they going, let's say, saying, okay, oh yeah, now he's in B flat. I'm going to hit him with a G. They're not thinking. It just, it comes out of them, right? Jijitsu's like music. At the beginning, you learn the scales, you learn the chords, the this, the that. And at some point, that thing just comes out of you. And this is your goal. Like, I do stuff sometime and, and, um, you know, Fred will catch me. I showed a move. I said, well, you forgot, you, you showed the move, but you forgot what you do that made the move work. But because I did it naturally, without thinking, I forgot to teach it. You see? So, it's important. You got to catch yourself and say, a lot of times, the most gifted athletes are the worst coach. They just do stuff. But it's like, you know, I don't know if you remember when Anderson Silva was cornering in MMA, it was a joke. The poor guy getting his ass kicked and he goes the next round. The guy looks for guidance in the corner and Anderson says, well, just punch him in the face. It's like, yeah, because that's what you would do, you know? Oh, but the other guy was obviously not Anderson Silva. Speaker 2: It's funny. I've heard the same thing about a lot of great athletes, which is that sometimes they struggle to coach effectively because they don't even really understand how they're doing what they're doing so well. A lot of it is just internal proprioception and intuition and just natural genetics that they've got. And it's that's not something that you can just duplicate. Sometimes amazing athletes make for really poor coaches because they can't understand what it's like to be a regular person. Speaker 3: Right. You know, like Bo Jackson, right? The famous football player? Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. Speaker 3: They ask his coach in college, did you have any special plays for Bo, you know, he's so good and stuff? The coach laughed. He goes, we told the offensive line to push forward. We gave him the ball and let him do his thing. I can't. I can't. Every time I, I listen to that stuff, I laugh because I'm, I'm not a gifted athlete. Everything I won, I bled for. I was more of a honey badger kind of guy. So, my favorite submission as a blue belt was passing the half guard. I got black belt to tap just from the pressure. I got people to go to the doctor, get their jaw fixed. Like, I could, I could, I just passed the half. And people, the standard joke was, oh, he sucks at you. He never can finish a half guard pass. So, people say, yeah, he sucks at half guard pass. Yeah, they all tap while he's on the way out. But, you know, but it's not, I stopped doing that because that's another thing. It's like about technique zero is that some people, I don't believe in specializing your game too early. You need to learn. Like, I've learned some guards that I will never play because a lot of time, technique zero is reverse engineering. To fix the problem, I will teach the counter before the move. So, then I, then the guy says, well, what's the key to the counter? So, the guy says, when you do the move, you got to make sure you don't give him those keys, right? You can do this when they're a little more advanced, like, you know? So, I learned spider lasso and I'll never, it's not me. But, uh, I learned it so I could beat it. So, a lot of time, technique zero, we're going to reverse engineer something. I'll say, let's show the counter for it. What does the guy do to get out of this? Like, we had a problem on sweep when our guys were getting swept in tournaments. It was too easy for the other guy to finish. So, what do we, we observe. We say, okay, they need to separate their hips and elevate to kill the sweep, right? Or that famous leg grip. Remember when Del Pra lost at the Worlds against what, Gomez? Was that Gomez? Anyway, the guy held his leg for three minutes at the end of the roll and Del Pra could not get off his ass, right? And if you, I mean, you can watch that match and I always show like how important that grip is, you know? So, we just worked on that like nonstop. And now sweeping my guys, I mean, you'll put him on their back, but to keep him there is going to be very, very difficult, right? So, we said, okay, so why did the other guy finishes this sweep? Well, we need separation and elevation. So, then this is what we teach. Separation and elevation. And then you basically, every sweep your opponent, then we said, okay, we don't give him too much info. Let the guy, so we did some drills. You're going to do all because we have a sequence on the wall. We have a curriculum on the wall and I said, do all the sweeps on your partner. Your partner's going to let you do the sweep and he's going to kill it on landing. So, when he land on his butt on the side, he's going to try to separate and elevate. So, you know what happened? That was completely organic. The guys became good at not being swept and the sweepers pay more attention to the grip and to the out tight their sweep was because they didn't want the guy. Automatically, when we did the rolls, the sweeps are tighter, are crisper because they know what the other guy wants to do. So, by teaching the counter, the sweeping became better. Like, uh, by teaching a very generic counter. Speaker 2: It's interesting because I was just at a camp in December and one of the topics that came up was the old black belt advice of, well, just don't let him do that, right? This is one of the most common things that especially black belts will tell people is like, how do I get out of this move? How do I make them stop doing this? And often black belts, which and this can be frustrating, is they'll say, well, just don't let him do that. And and and one of the things we were talking about was how that advice can be so frustrating for white belts because they want this big definitive answer about like how to counter every move. But a lot of the time, the best option is just don't get into that situation in the first place, right? You prevention over cure. And I think this is a great example of technique zero where, yes, you can learn the super complicated Berimbolo counter, or you can just not let them Berimbolo you by not getting your body into that position in the first place. And so, that's I think another example of kind of technique zero in reverse. Speaker 3: But look what's going to happen. Based on what you said, okay? You tell them when you teach them how to, how to do something simple to kill the bolo, the bolo guy's going to become better. You see? So, instead of going into this complicated thing, you know, it's funny in grappling because like I said, I've been grappling for decades since I'm five years old, I'm 62. A lot of times, the counters are simpler than we think. And you can like Fabio Landa is just, you want to roll with Fabio? I mean, Jesus, his game is so painfully simple. Yet, he's going to turn you into a human pancake. You're going to moan. And he's like, I mean, he's going to give his wife his shopping list while like he's, while he's murdering you. And there's nothing exotic. So, you have to be careful. You have to be careful not to fall in that rabbit hole of trying to find the specific counter for everything. Honestly, but I'm speaking for myself now, not for the community. I don't want to learn anything new. I think I have enough stuff in my toolbox to counter anything. It's up to me to do it better. So, like I said, that's my own personal philosophy. But like I said, narrow and deep is better than wide and flat. But, I mean, technique zero is everything. It's like it's reverse engineering. Show the counter and the sweeps later on because nobody wants to get swept. Referring to what you said about what happened at the camp, something that's a bit of my pet peeve is that my goal as a black belt is that my student can beat the living shit out of me. Like, I read a biography of Leonardo da Vinci and he said that it is a poor teacher, a poor master when his student do not surpass him at some point. So, a lot of stuff like technique zero, I had people get in my face, why are you showing the white belt that? Because suddenly the guy has to work to finish a sweep. You know? So, there's a lot of ego in there sometimes that goes into it. I do, every time I worked on something for me, the first thing I did with my top student, I showed him how to beat it because that's what ramped up the way I did it. So, technique zero is like this. You show posture break from inside the closed guard. The guy after getting his posture broken all the time, he's going to start focusing on his posture without you telling him to. You see? So, in French, we say, it makes babies. I mean, the thing about Jijitsu, right? Is that if I want to teach someone to execute a technique properly, it's really, really hard because if your opponent has any understanding of how to defend, they have a lot of different places where they can shut it down. But if you flip the logic around and you want to teach someone how to defend something, if they can cut that move off at technique zero, that's the only thing they have to know how to do, really. I mean, yeah, of course, ultimately, you want to learn the more sophisticated escapes. But at the end of the day, if I can stop you from playing the game you want to play, it doesn't matter how much deeper my knowledge is because I've cut you off right there. So, I really like that idea too because that then gives the other person the ability to fine-tune their offense. Because if they're getting shut down on the first step, then they have to look for more openings later. This is how Guillaume beat Garmel's student. This is how he beat him. It's like he just, the guy could not get anything going. And it's like, yeah, we basically, I was, I couldn't coach him because my jaw was on the floor. He was just handling the guy. But we have to understand, it's very, very simple is that this is why you got to teach technique zero. Like going back to that arm across sweep. It's like, okay, let's forget about that. Let's go for the back. Back take, back take. You got to teach in sequence because you do technique zero. Every technique, you know how it is. Like, you do, um, arm across sweep, the guy distributes his weight, wraps, wraps your leg with his elbow, whatever. There has to be a follow-up move to that, right? So, this is why for us, we did the back take and then the follow-up move became the technique that we wanted to show. So, we taught the timing and then we threw in another move on top of that after. But it was notoriously easy because now they understood, they broke the guy's posture. They were able to go for the back and when the guy squared back, they swept, right? So, it's a, it's a bit like, uh, it makes your job at the beginning a little harder, but then your coaching becomes easier because now they see it, they feel it. And, uh, yeah. So, for us, it's been funny. Like, we always make fun of this with my adult student. I said, yeah, you guys, hopefully you'll be as good as the kids now. You're going to get it quicker. But we always do this. But you need group observation and pattern identification. And that is your coaching mirror. You will see how they fail or where's the stick point. You know, you do a bench press sometime and you get stuck at some point in the lift. Well, some people get stuck at the bottom. Some people get stuck halfway. Some people can just walk out. You find where there's the stick point and you hit that nonstop. And as a group, the people, whether it's, you know, the passer's going to become better and then the guarder's going to become better when you work passing concept, technique zero. So, it's just like, uh, it makes babies, you know? Like, it's, it's great. Speaker 2: Now, one last thing I want to ask you, Mark, on this topic. You've said on this conversation that the key to using technique zero is observation, which makes sense, right? If you want to use a technique zero, you have to find it first. As a coach, or even as a student, how do you do that? Like, how do you identify where the place was where things started to go wrong? Because this is often the hardest part of, you know, troubleshooting a game is figuring out where the original mistake is being made. Speaker 3: Right. Well, you know what? Like I said, the key for us, it always jumped up. It always like, it's, it was like a big neon thing lighting up because we look at the group because everybody will do various different mistakes and stuff. And if you look at it individually, you're not going to find that. But as a group, you have to look at the broad strokes, right? Like, for example, in the super little kids, they had a problem. As soon as they got, the guy came in for a double, they grabbed a headlock. They got taken down. So, we had to get rid of that headlock. But they all did that. So, you have to find, try it next time you go with a group of your student at a tournament. Look and you're going to say, you know what? Especially if you have a lot of them competing, you're going to say, you know, some of them make that mistake, this mistake, but it's not an individual thing. It's a group thing. So, when all your student roll in class, right? You do live drilling. I'm not a fan of random, just roll, bro, and, you know? No, no. You do some live drilling of a specific concept you work during the class. And now they're going live with it. Sit down, observe. You're going to notice. You're going to say, you know what? They're all doing this. Like, we were, I was working some Kimura trap stuff today. Yeah, today with some, uh, kids that were, uh, six, seven years old, you know, eight. And I realized that the challenge was to grab the Kimura grip, my friend. So, if they cannot grab a proper Kimura grip, even if I show them the move and they do it half-assed, it might work because the other kid doesn't know what he's doing with either. So, I looked at this, I said, okay, we got to work. We cannot stop this right now. Let's practice on snapping that Kimura grip. So, I got them to make the guy post, put his hand on the floor, come up, roll and grab that Kimura tight. And, you know what? We did this today all day. And next week, I'm going to go back to that Kimura trap thing and it's going to work. So, but it could be something, the problem is, is that because we're smart, we look for exotic problems. We look at some, if you look at a group, but you have to look at a large enough group. If you look at three guys, but, you know, we look at a tournament, like, we got 30 kids there, plus adults. So, I sit there and usually, oddly enough, sometimes the adults have the same issues to some degrees. It's interesting. But the key is observation of a group, either in class, you have a big class, you look at how they're, they're working the class concept you taught, the move you worked on. You look at it and you say like, if I would go to BJJ camp, like you guys did, I would show something, have them drill it. And then next day, I bet you I could go back and say, okay, let's just regress this to this part. And then you do it again. Look what's going to happen. You're going to freak yourself. It's interesting. But like I said, it's the art of regression after observation. But it won't work if you look at, you know, it's, it just sit back next time in front of a, of a class and look. And you're going to see what the problem is. Like, we had a problem with adults. They would get white belts getting their guard passed. So, in order, they would panic. My guard's getting passed. So, they would put themselves on the back, stretch both legs to try to grab a half guard. That went to tits real quickly. And we just realized that we're all doing this. This is us. I told the group, I said, it's our failure. It's my failure, not yours. I mean, this is a huge mistake. I even put a clip on Instagram about this. I think today or sometime. And I said, you know, never do this. But we never really told them because we all know this, but they don't. So, now we fix this, right? So, now suddenly the reconstruction of guard is better. They don't just go flatten themselves to reach with both legs like they go catch a half. And then get smashed into next week. So, we took care of this. But that was based on group observation. I said, look at this. They're all doing that. And then you can address it, right? And then the person passing the white belt passing will be better at flattening the guy. The force of flat back half. So, it's one works, offense works with defense. That's the beautiful thing on this. Both guys benefit. So, you might drill a sweep or take care of a sweeping problem. Indirectly, the passer's going to become better at passing. It just, it's organic. It just happens. Speaker 2: Amazing, man. Well, awesome chat, Mark. Thank you so much for doing this. Like I said earlier, you've got some great stuff on your Instagram. If people want to follow you or check out what I'm talking about, where can they go to follow you on Instagram? And is there anything else that you want to promote while I've got you here? Speaker 3: Oh, you know what? It's like, listen, it's like I'm doing this right now, especially out of frustration from not being able to, to train, you know? It's like, I, I'm doing all that stuff to keep my mind engaged, you know, in, in Jijitsu and stuff like that. So, my, on Instagram, I'm under Quick Sub 2021. Quick Sub spells K W I K S U B 2021. And, uh, yeah, yeah, I put a lot of stuff there. I have also a, uh, a YouTube, uh, channel thing like Fight Specs and stuff and, uh, it's called Fight Specs, one word. And, uh, yeah, so, like I said, like, for me, I'm doing this, keep my mind engaged, stay in the game while I cannot roll, you know? While I can't, uh, train and do stuff like that. So, it keeps me, I do a lot of research. When I broke my back in, uh, long time ago, I fell off a horse and I was a year, couldn't do anything. And back then, it was hard because there was no YouTube or internet. I watched like thousands of hours. My friends were giving me Betamax and VHS of Judo, wrestling tournaments and I still got the notebook somewhere. I was just taking notes and studying, you know? I used to do a lot of striking too. So, I did about 6,000 rounds in the ring. Speaker 2: Holy smokes. Speaker 3: Yeah, it is. But that includes sparring and stuff like that and things like this and, uh, yeah, yeah. So, I studied, I studied, I studied. So, I figured instead of getting frustrated, I'm going to stay engaged with Jijitsu and, uh, look at stuff and, uh, look at matches and all kinds of things. So, I'm always like, uh, yeah, I like doing that and it keeps me, it keeps the frustration at bay. Speaker 2: Totally understandable. Well, my friend, I will put those links in the show notes to make it easy for people to find your stuff. So, if anyone's listening to this, just pop open your podcast player and go to the info or description section or whatever it's called and there should be some links to find Mark's stuff. I'll also put all of our stuff there. Everything we make lives at BJJ Mental Models.com. The podcast, the mini episodes that we do, our new concept breakdowns. Speaker 3: Oh, those are great. Those are great. Speaker 2: Thanks, man. I appreciate it. And the newsletter are all completely free. You can get those at BJJ Mental Models.com. And beyond that, if you want to kick it up to the next level with us, BJJ Mental Models Premium is the way that you do that. Again, BJJ Mental Models.com is where you can go to get that. We've got a massive library of premium podcasts, audio courses, talking about the kind of conceptual stuff that doesn't get discussed enough in the sport. And of course, if you go up to our coaching tier, Mark's daughter, Brianna will tell you how your Jijitsu sucks, which is quite the privilege. Speaker 3: Exactly. She tells me my Jijitsu sucks all the time. So, Speaker 2: You know what? That that's the thing that I, it's like you said, when you are a coach and also a parent, your goal should be that you want your child to surpass you. My child is seven years old right now, but my God, with the day that she's able to kick my ass, I'm going to be both proud and also very demoralized. Speaker 3: Oh, you know what? It's like, maybe it's because I'm older than you, but at 62, I don't have an ego issue. I remember a long time ago, I tapped by a guy, a blue belt. He was 64 years old back then. He got me in an arm bar, fair and square. It was not a give me. It was not like I got nailed. And he kept saying me, I said, he goes, one day I'm going to nail you. I said, you nailed me already. He said, no, that was a give me. It was it. I've been trying to freaking convince him for a decade. He got me fair and square. I'll get you one day. It's like, you know, now he got me, bro. I'm not, I don't have an ego. I'm not ego. I don't have zero problem with, uh, with a bad day on the mat beats a good day at the office anytime. Speaker 2: That is 100% true, sir. Well, thank you so much, Mark. It was a pleasure talking to you. Hope you and yours are doing well. Say hi to Brianna for me. Speaker 3: I will. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it. Speaker 2: Most welcome, sir. And thanks to everyone who listens. Really appreciate that as well. We'll talk to you in the next one. Take care. See you then.