Ep. 372: Plug-and-Play Games, feat. Ryan Rich

Speaker 1: Hey everybody, before we get started this week, I just want to let you know, we released a new mindset course featuring Rob Bernaki from Island Top Team and BJJ Concepts. It's called Mindset for Betas. It's an amazing resource that breaks down a new way to build a resilient jiu-jitsu mindset. It's part of BJJ Mental Models Premium. I will spare you the full sales pitch because you can try it for free. Just go to bjjmentalmodels.com/beta. I will give you a free month, you can check out the course and if you decide that it's not worth your money, you can cancel, you won't have to pay a cent. I've already been told by subscribers that this is the most valuable piece of jiu-jitsu content they've ever received, so I hope you like it too. Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to BJJ Mental Models episode 372. I am Steve Kwan and BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent jiu-jitsu approach. And I'm here today with friend of the community, black belt coach from Granite Bay Jiu-Jitsu. I've got Ryan Rich on the line. Ryan, how are you doing? Speaker 2: Great, man. How are you? Speaker 1: I am also doing well here and I'm looking forward to this chat. Before we get into it though, why don't you give yourself just a quick intro. We already talked about the gym, but tell everyone about who you are and what your gym is like. Speaker 2: So, out in Granite Bay, California, I run Granite Bay Jiu-Jitsu. I'm a third-degree black belt. I've been doing BJJ for about 20 years now and I have had a unique experience for me at least in terms of starting and running an academy mostly by myself. I've had, you know, volunteers over the years and friends help out, but started mostly from scratch and the one of the more interesting things that we do is we actually have a non-profit program for at-risk youth. That was that comes from our our start out in uh Brother's Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu in Sacramento, California. It's one of the first places that popped up in the Sacramento region. In terms of what our jiu-jitsu looks like, or at least mine, currently mine is non-existent. I've been on the shelf for quite some time now due to multiple knee surgeries. I was hit by a car when I was 18, so been dealing with that off and on for the pretty much the entirety of my jiu-jitsu journey. It wasn't as much of a problem until about five years ago. That's when it, you know, you start getting older and it starts getting more and more complicated in terms of staying on the mat and having to strategize and do lots of PT and strength conditioning and whatnot. In terms of what my like stylistically what I would look like if all things were good to go, which they should be in a couple months, heavy guard, really like open guard, butterfly guard. We're a big fan of leg locks and I these days I prefer no-gi substantially over gi, much to the dismay of my coach and uh everybody that I came up with. Speaker 1: I am a big fan of the gi personally, but I am not going to discriminate. Speaker 2: All good. Speaker 1: Now, I wanted to unpack a project that I know you've been working on and we've actually been collaborating on it a bit. BJJgames.com. Why don't you talk about that because that leads directly into the topic we're discussing here. Speaker 2: Great. Yeah, my friend and I started BJJ Games a little earlier this year, probably around December. The idea behind it was I had massively struggled with designing and implementing games or game-based learning at my academy about probably we've been doing it about two years now. So, coming up with games and really understanding do's and don'ts or even if there are do's and don'ts and the concept of uh we were talking about earlier is the plug-and-play versus no plug-and-play philosophy and what I really wanted to do was try to help bridge that gap where there are people that are interested in game-based learning, but their only prior experience is maybe a few things that their coach did years ago that may or may not still be relevant to them or pertinent in some way. And really try to package it in intensive. So, I I've been noticing that the BJJ community has has gone in a an interesting cycle over the years. The first uh DVD that I actually watched was Marcelo Garcia's I don't remember exactly what year it came out. It was right after his infamous Abu Dhabi run where he arm drag, rear naked choke, arm drag, rear naked choke, arm drag, rear naked choke. And I remember going from that to most of the material out there was not to downplay anybody's hard work, but most of the material that I saw from probably 2006 onward up until Danaher released his first DVD, the leg locks one, were kind of hit or miss, just kind of showing moves and praying for the best result. And then Danaher released, systematized everything and then you kind of saw everybody was releasing their whatever system. Doesn't matter what it is, their arm bar system, their takedown system, et cetera. And that's fine and all and wonderful and there's lots of good progress that I think that the community has made as a whole. We've really watched BJJ evolve at a pretty spectacular breakneck speed over the last, let's say, just 10 years. And then we started hearing more and more about the ecological method, the, you know, CLA and um how you actually implement that because it's depending on who you talk to, it appears to be more of an of an actual philosophy to training than an actual like series of things that you do, right? So, diving into that is intense and time-consuming. So, unless you had a lot of game-based, task-based learning previously that you can translate and you have this thorough understanding of, okay, we're working on the back, we want to try to focus on these things. If we're focusing on arm bars, we want to focus on these things. It could be really intimidating getting into it and borderline counterproductive because no matter what you do, you're going to run into pitfalls with your your students and how they develop, whether you utilize the traditional approach or you utilize the game-based approach. You run into the exact same issues, they're just they're just different, right? So, you show, let's say, traditional way an arm bar. We're really focusing on arm bar from the mount. You guys your school can work on that for weeks at a time literally and you'll still have people that at least in appearance make no progress, no forward progress and they just don't get it. Same thing happens with games where there's this frustration portion of, you know, maybe your initial connection, let's say we're working legs, maintaining that initial connection or moving from one spot to the other. Let's say we're trying to move the leg from one side to the other, move our feet from one side to the other. You're going to run into those same pitfalls of my student or several students just can't quite seem to get there. So, the the idea behind BJJ Games other than taking this full circle and it's almost an intensive style of learning, which we're seeing more and more, we're also seeing the this progressive feedback loop where the content and the style of content that gets put out, at least hopefully, affects the community in such a way that we make some progress. Like I said, Marcelo Garcia's arm drag uh created a a ton of competitive footage of people trying and doing arm drags live in a volume that I hadn't seen when that first came out. Now we're kind of seeing the same thing where there's there's clearly something to trying different things and seeing what sticks. Like I said earlier before we started recording, the uh spray and pray approach. So, the idea of packaging these games in intensive style format, I think it kind of coincides with what we're seeing in general. That's where I was trying to go with that, where you'll see a DVD or whatever released by say Gordon Ryan or Danaher where they're they're taking this one thing that you're going to try to work on and maybe some surrounding material and really dive into it. I kind of want to do that with games, which is probably how I should have answered your question in the first place. Speaker 1: Excellent. Now, I want to get into this discussion of pre-made games. This is a topic of conversation right now in the jiu-jitsu community. When you're deploying skill-based games for your students, should you be making your own or should you be adapting what other people publish? Maybe before we do that though, I'm cognizant of the fact that we have new listeners and those who are beginners, they might not be familiar with the whole games-based approach to training and why we like it. What's the benefit to using a games-based approach from your perspective as opposed to a more traditional approach where people pick out and base their instruction around techniques? Speaker 2: So, I personally don't have any issues with learning via techniques. I just don't know if I could go back to that at this point. I don't find it as engaging and I've never found it as engaging. Like I said, we came from an older academy. Brother's was I think it was in 1999 or 2000 was when it first opened up. So, my coach was Charles Gracie's first American black belt. So, he's pretty old school. He trained with Hickson in the garage and so there's definitely a lot of emphasis placed on when we were doing formal instruction, there was a lot of drilling. And I don't have an issue with that so much as I don't know how much I benefited from that and I don't find all that particularly exciting or inviting. So, when I first started implementing this, the initial pushback that I I got was from the existing student base, which I think is what occurs no matter what. So, when we're talking about and we're framing this around beginners, for example, and a beginner wants to learn how to stay balanced, right? I was literally just listening to one of your first podcasts where you talked a lot about BJJ concepts and the alignment theory. And I really like how he put that together. I think that that's a conceptually straightforward thing for someone to learn and understand regardless of level. You could have a black belt that's never thought about that before and I think they could get a lot of valuable things out of that, but I think that's particularly friendly to white belts. When a white belt learns a new skill, and I'm just going to use arm bar because that's generally, I'd say, the one of the most prominent things that you're going to think of when you think of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. I think arm bar and it's probably one of the first things that a newbie's going to learn. I used to teach it traditionally and the turnaround time on it for a person first learning the the technique to actually implementing it on someone that semi knows what's going on was pretty long, like months, months and months and months, depending on the person. Obviously, you have people that are are very physically inclined and coordinated and they're able to pick things up, you know, visually and via some tactile movements that they they practice, but then you have everyone else. And what I'd found is that everyone else takes forever. And in the time that was spent learning a new thing, let's say we worked on it for two to like one week, two weeks, three weeks, four weeks. So, the turnaround time from a newbie learning something new and then testing the skill and actually being able to utilize it, say live, seemed like there was a pretty big gap. And during that that learning period, so to speak, I'd noticed that it just kind of got discarded. Like you could work on something for a while and unless you were really on top of sparring and making sure that they were trying to use it over and over and over again. I personally found it like discouraging when I first started and I started noticing that with the student base, like people that didn't stick around or they stuck around for a couple months and it's like, how much did they actually learn during that period? Versus going right into it and like working a specific position, working a specific submission and then working out of it. I found is able to get them into it more, exposed to it more and they have a better understanding of maybe not the ideas behind the thing itself, like they may not be able to break it down super functionally, but their ability to actually do the thing that we want them to do improved pretty dramatically over a short period of time. Like I said, case in point arm bars, instead of focusing on the setup, why not instead focus on isolating the arm or straightening the arm once you have, you know, a leg over the head. Speaker 1: Got it. Speaker 2: Does that make sense? Speaker 1: Yes. Now, building on that, a big topic right now is if someone buys into the games-based approach to jiu-jitsu and they want to deploy this in their gym, should they start from scratch and build their own games or should they take someone else's framework and use it? Now, there is one camp of people who say that there's no such thing as plug-and-play games. There's another camp of people that say that you should use plug-and-play games as a starting point. Maybe walk through the pros and cons of these. I'd love to hear your experiences. Speaker 2: So, I'm definitely in the games can be obtained elsewhere and then functionally integrated into your program. I don't see a problem with that. I can understand where this idea is coming from that you have to teach to the room and the room might not be super compatible or may have some functional issues with a given game. But, you know, if somebody owns a gym and they're spending all their time teaching classes, they have a, you know, intense kids program. I mean, our place has three kids classes a day and three adult classes a day. It's not a lot of time if you're running a business like that to do even more outside education outside of, you know, watching competition footage, reviewing footage of your students, watching whatever instructional has come out to see if there's something that you could do better. So, it can be really, really difficult to get started. That was like by far the hardest thing for us was actually getting started. So, most of the places that I've seen that have integrated game-based learning have had that weird bridge period where they kind of do both at the same time. So, you're drilling but up to a point and then you're going live. That that seems to be a common bridge period. I think you can implement a game that you saw wherever and then your number one thing has to be focusing on the effects. Like how did the room react to this? And like one of my best examples is every weekday at 12:00 p.m. I have my noon crew and it's I joke that it's the ADHD crowd. It's my guys that like literally cannot focus on any given task for more than about a minute. I have a minute from the time I start talking until we break to go do the thing to get whatever it is that I need to get across across. Otherwise, it's gone. So, when we were doing say leg entanglements, one of the biggest things that I run into with them is body types interfering with one another. So, you know, we'll start out in what's, you know, commonly called straight ashi or single leg X if they're standing and I'll have a guy that's relatively experienced. I can't like my legs never allow me to move from one side to the other. And so say if you're playing a game where you start out with a straight entanglement and the task is to move to an outside entanglement and then say get a false grip on the heel. That becomes our barrier. Like, oh, I can't I can't move my legs. So, then after that game or instead of that game, depending on the audience, obviously, we have to start working into, okay, maybe it's not just moving the feet from one side to the other. Maybe it's just getting to the connection or or starting the connection and then maintaining it. So, if you're not super cognizant about the gate as you implement stuff like this of what the limitations of your room happen to be at any given time, games will be very difficult to implement. The idea that you can't take a specific game and immediately plug it in, like I said, I get where that comes from. It makes total sense that that's kind of the overarching theme, but the notion that you can't take one and get good effects on your group, I don't agree with that. We've seen with minor modification, most games work just fine. Speaker 1: I think a challenge with how people explore these discussions on the internet is it's really easy to get split up into two distinct opposing camps. And I'm seeing this right now with the discussion of pre-made plug-and-play games. People seem to think that either you use these pre-made games or you don't and those are just two categories that do not overlap. However, I think what you're saying makes sense. There is a middle ground where these games can be used as a starting point or to inform your practice, but that doesn't mean you just insist on using them exactly as is and you never pivot. As you brought up, you teach to the room. The games can be a starting point, but if the room isn't responding the way that you intend, then there's some degree of improvisation or iteration that might be required. So, this level of nuance thinking is the way that I like to look at these kinds of problems, rather than trying to split it into a two sides where either you're heads or tails. Sometimes there is an area in between or a transition point where you can move from one side to the other. Speaker 2: Oh, I totally agree. I feel like traditional training kind of left the onus on the student with regard to whether or not they were able to implement whatever it was you're working on. And one of the inherent problems with games is that you're designing a practice. And the reality is you have to accept that sometimes practices aren't going the way going to go the way that you want them to. And anybody that works with kids is extremely familiar with this, mostly due to behavioral issues. So, you have a training room, it's close to Christmas or Halloween or whatever the holiday is and the kids are all cracked out on sugar. You're not going to have necessarily the kind of practice that you were hoping to have, depending on, you know, how you run your gym. With a generic room at any time of the year with game design, you can go for something and it just falls flat. Like they're just they're not there yet or there's something missing. So, again, like the leg's a perfect example. If your students aren't at the point where they can with minimal fussing, for lack of a better word, get into a straight leg entanglement and maintain it with decent hip positioning, tightness, then cognizance about where their feet, their knees, their hips need to be at all times and their grips. Good luck using the inside heel hook transition that you saw on Instagram as the winning condition. Like, okay, I bring my feet to the inside, false grip or double trouble ankle lock. Like you're going to have a really hard time getting that to succeed in the training room. And I think that's for some coaches that are experimenting with this, one of the areas that it it falls pretty flat because previously, if a student doesn't get an arm bar, well, I mean, I'll ask you, you're in a training environment, the coach shows something and you just don't get it. What does that usually look like? Speaker 1: Usually, from my experience, the coach doesn't even really know because no student is going to want to put up their hand and say, hey, I didn't understand this and hold back the whole class. Now, what that student probably doesn't realize is their experience is a shared one. Everyone in the room is struggling. My criticism of I guess a more traditional prescriptive method where you show a technique and you break down the steps is that, as you mentioned earlier, it's one thing to be aware of the steps, it's another thing to be able to execute them live against a resisting opponent. Speaker 2: Absolutely. Speaker 1: So, the challenge with a more traditional technique-based approach, and that's not to say it has no value, but the challenge with that approach is that students will often encounter early frustration because the move doesn't work for them, even though they technically know the steps to do it. And as you mentioned, way down the line, eventually they'll start to put the pieces together, but it takes a long time. You talked about the arm bar and figuring out the arm bar. Man, it wasn't until I got pretty deep into my jiu-jitsu journey that I could say with a degree of confidence that I can pull off an arm bar when I want to. I mean, even for someone who's at a blue belt, it's pretty hard to just whip out an arm bar because there's so much variation. It's once you get more confident in your movement and you have a lot of experience in strange situations, and that comes later, that you start having an answer for everything. So, I agree with you that one of the problems with classic jiu-jitsu instruction is students don't see good results for a while and that can make them really frustrated, with the exception being that if someone is just an unbelievable athlete, they're going to see a lot of results right away. And that adds more frustration on top of the people who aren't natural athletes because they're basically just getting outclassed based on athleticism in the early stages. So, this to me is the limitation of that approach and why a games-based approach helps overcome that frustration, right? You give people more realistic practice earlier. Speaker 2: And they get more repetition within whatever it is you're trying to focus on. Thinking about drilling and then going straight into live. Obviously, it's not a one or a zero, you're completely on point there. With most places, it it seems to be the case though, right? Like there's they're drilling or warm-up, drill and then go live. When you're working out of that model, the ROI is pretty substantial in terms of I'm working on this and now I'm going to try to implement it. And it's a it's a weird conundrum because if I try to implement it and it was something that we were all working on, the other guy knows that that's what I'm trying to do. And I'm not very good at it yet and also I'm going to spend, you know, half of the round getting smashed anyway or several rounds, especially if it's a white belt. I'm going to spend almost all the rounds getting smashed anyway. So, their ability to actually integrate anything new is extremely difficult. Like it's I'd say it's usually athleticism or luck or both that actually allows them to do those things that you're working on. And another factor that I don't think gets talked about enough is body types. My coach has really long legs, really long arms, he's like 6'3". I'm 5'10" on a good day. So, most of his style of guard play, anything that he showed me from the time I started until whenever, last time I went down there, it takes a substantial amount of adjustment for me to do anything that he's doing say from guard, just because he has longer levers than I do by pretty he's built like Hojer. So, I'm not. And when we're trying to do anything that my coach would show me, uh because he's built more like Hojer and I'm not. I'm I'm 5'10" and I'm a mesomorph and he's super long-legged, super long arms. Anything that he would do from guard specifically was extremely difficult for me to recreate, just because I don't have long levers like he does. And in the event that I tried anything that he would do, it it would backfire every single time. That's probably my in a nutshell experience with traditional training where I kind of had to figure things out on my own. So, part of me this with the whole figure it out movement, if that's what we're going to call it for a second, is you're already we're trying to do what was already kind of a thing in BJJ in the first place, which is you you come in, you do your training and then you go live and if you're a white belt, you get smashed, right? So, instead of going that route, to me, it makes a lot more sense to get as many iterations of as possible in a given curriculum. Like this last week we worked mostly on pin escapes. So, focusing on small things that can be done over and over and over again, like for example, a side control escape, making one of the winning conditions getting your inside elbow to touch your partner's hip, right? Getting it in there, getting your forearm all the way in there, would be a winning condition or getting your elbow in and then getting a frame underneath their their neck or their chin. Those are some basic ways to get things that are really simple and are doable for beginners going and as much repetition as possible. Getting that volume in so that they are actually experiencing the thing that you want them to get good at down the line. Because if you're if you're trying to pin escape and you you just lay there and get submitted every single time and that's your only live experience, then it's it's going to take forever to get to the point where you can actively do a decent pin escape unless your partner's being nice to you. Speaker 1: Yeah. Now, you mentioned something earlier that merits more discussion, which is that beginners sometimes don't like this games-based approach, which is a bit unexpected for more experienced coaches because a games-based approach will probably develop skill faster in your students, but that doesn't mean they enjoy it. And I know people who have adopted a games-based approach only to discover that their students hated it. And this creates a challenge for coaches because on one hand, this approach is probably going to be better for skill development, but on another hand, as a business owner, you also have to worry about, can I keep my people coming in? You know, if someone comes in, for example, and they're they're used to a more relaxed approach, which is more technique-driven, where really you're spending most of the class time sitting there listening and suddenly you're going live for the entire class, it feels way more intense for those people and if they're not serious practitioners, it might turn them off. Now, of course, if you want to get good, that intensity is going to help, that extra mat time is going to help, but it can also feel overwhelming to people who aren't committed athletes. And we have to acknowledge the realities of running a business. We could talk all day about producing elite competitors, but really we should be talking about producing income to keep our businesses running so we can feed our families. You have to balance those two things. And if your approach is something that your students feel is too hardcore, then they leave, well, that's not going to help you, no matter how good your approach is. So, there has to be a balance. On one hand, we want to provide quality instruction, but on the other hand, we can't ignore the human factors of trying to bring people into an intimidating martial art like Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. And again, this kind of comes into the discussion of plug-and-play because when someone picks up an existing framework and they just use it, they might not right out of the gate know how their students will react. What are your thoughts on this and how you can balance the benefits of a games-based approach with the reality that some students might be turned off by it? Speaker 2: It's so fascinating because the reaction from like a kids program is the opposite of what you see with adults, right? Like kids love game-based stuff. Adults are iffy sometimes, depends on the day. It's ironically, they're more fickle for once, the kids are. So, I can't really see the difference. I mean, obviously, I've been in this a long time, so there's there's definitely some groupthink going on in terms of, well, that's just kind of what you have to do and, yeah, I've been doing this for a long time, so why can't you? And I think a lot of us forget how hard it is to be a beginner. Like it's it's a really difficult undertaking to be 35 years old and like, yeah, I'm going to go do this thing where we strangle each other in pajamas or uh do leg locks. Like it's a very big undertaking for them. And but at the end of the day, I don't see the difference between the two. Either one is going to be intense, right? For a good chunk of time and either one is going to come with a substantial amount of failure. I keep saying substantial. It's going to come with a lot of failure. And so we hadn't had as big of an issue in terms of the existing student base in terms of like actual turnover when we switched to game-based learning. I think that it speaks more to the average person than we think it does. I don't know about you, but I don't like sitting there listening to somebody go on and on for five minutes about how to do a collar choke. I mean, the second they hit past like two, three minutes, I'm gone. And I've I've watched my students and this is when I'm being extremely conscientious about time and how I'm saying things. And past two minutes and it's a wrap. Like they're gone. So, I think a big part of it is perception. A good chunk of it has to do with, well, this isn't how they do it down the street. Yeah, that's great. Another portion of it is, well, I I haven't heard of these other people doing it. Like there's DVDs where they're just breaking down the the thing that they're doing and they do it over and over and over again. I feel like part, a big part of how you package this to the student base is really important. This is a long-term game. The thing we're doing takes a really long time to get good and we can do this a couple different ways. There are people that have had a lot of success doing it this way, but it comes with some downsides. Your ability to do the things that we're working on is going to it's just going to take longer for you to get used to it. Class structure is going to look really, really similar every single day, like as in the the things you do every day on a month-to-month basis are going to be really similar, even if the techniques are kind of all over the place. Versus a decently thought out game-based program where you're doing, you know, let's say one, two, three weeks of a specific thing and the coach is actively addressing the deficiencies in the room and modifying the way that things are actually done in order to get good results. So, it there's pros and cons for sure, but I feel like this plays more to the culture we live in anyway where, you know, I want to do there's a it was a Chael Sonnen, I think. He was talking about chocolate cake and he's like, I love chocolate cake, but I I want to eat it for like two minutes and then move on with my day. I feel like that's kind of the world we live in at this point and not necessarily playing into that on purpose so much as having that kind of modern human sensibility in your head can be really helpful when it comes to working with an audience that might be getting frustrated. Like no one has really solved, in my opinion, the frustration problem. Like we have all these different approaches. The you know, Gracie Academy in Torrance has a really like white glove beginner program, but I'd be very curious to see how many of those people actually do stick with it after a year or two years or three years. I'd love to see those metrics. I think the attrition rate, no matter what you do, is going to be an issue and I don't think this separates it on a on like an athleticism basis. When I say athleticism, just general endurance, as much as maybe we think it does. Speaker 1: Yeah. That's well said. I like your thoughts on how a frustration problem exists that hasn't quite been solved yet. I think you're right. If someone is really able to resolve the frustration problem, then they can resolve the attrition problem. And that would be amazing for the sport because we do still get a lot of attrition. For all that we talk about how jiu-jitsu can be addictive and life-changing, the majority of people who start jiu-jitsu quit and they quit pretty early on. So, there is something that we're doing wrong or we could be doing better. And I think it merits discussion on that. Now, when we talk about introducing games, walking through this journey, what do you think this looks like for someone who wants to adopt a games-based approach? Going back in time, if you had never used this approach and you were interested and you wanted to start using it at your gym, what do you see the life cycle of that being? As in how would you start out and how would you evolve your thinking over time to get to a more experienced standpoint? Speaker 2: The default thing that I would recommend, even though, you know, before we started recording, I joked about it, would be to read Rob Gray's four books that he has. I know it's I mean, it's not super dense reading, it's pretty readable. But that would be the probably the optimal starting point, all things said, because you need to have a better experience as a coach understanding how people are actually learning how to move. Not understanding that and then trying to teach something that requires a lot of complex minutia with regard to movement, sounds like a really big, big hill that most people are going to struggle to climb and just get frustrated and stop. Like changing how you coach is hard. Anybody that's that's like significantly modified their program in some way will likely attest that whatever it was they were implementing was hard. I mean, doing anything is hard, especially when it goes against convention and it's kind of a hole in the wall compared to everything else. So, there's when I first started doing this, there were some resources, but there weren't a ton. Now, there's a lot of social media content and even like DVDs on how to actually implement game-based learning. So, if I were going back like all the way to the beginning, like, okay, how do we implement this and make it as pain-free as possible? One would be I would have read Gray's books way sooner. Two, accepting that practices, like I said earlier, are not going to always go off and be totally stellar. The more involved the practice is, as in the further you reach into a certain thing because you're trying to get your students to do a specific thing that they're not doing. So, mount is a great example for this one. One of the first things that I do with a new student is here's mount, especially kids. Here's mount. I want you to get to mount. Mount is where we're trying to go. Everything then gets reverse engineered around mount in that session. So, control of the head and control of one of their arms. If you can control your partner's head, control their arm and then be cognizant of where your feet are, you could probably hold this for a really long time. And that will help them kind of get like that little checkbox. Like I I was able to hold mount, right? That's something I saw over and over again when I was teaching standard like just the typical traditional way. People like would get to mount and this is the thing that we're trying to do. This is the I've seen this on, you know, fights on the UFC. This is a dominant position and I can hold it for a whopping two seconds, even when I'm given the position. Now you tell me I have to work for that position to get to a bunch of the submissions. This sucks. No dice. So, instead of going that direction and trying to shove your head into a wall over and over again and hoping that the wall gets comfortable as opposed to it hurting. I think that the way to actually get people that are coaching to start implementing stuff like this successfully is to pick and choose what's causing the thing that you're trying to get them to do to fail. So, I just last week, again, we were working on pin escapes. If you're trying to escape from mount, your focus needs to be on your partner's hips and their legs, right? But they're also allowed to submit you in a real round. So, one of the things you want to also think about is their ability to control your head and your arm. If they can't control your head, it's going to be hard for them to keep you there. And if you can put one of your elbows on the floor, you can roll them over. So, designing games around these things that you've learned over the years that you know are effective in terms of escaping or these things that you know are effective in maintaining a position are really good starting points that are low barrier of entry. It's probably easy to find easier to find resources on it if that's the direction you're going. And then building around those positions that you're familiar with. Speaker 1: Yeah, I like that. You talked about Rob Gray's books as well. I strongly recommend if you're a jiu-jitsu coach or an aspiring jiu-jitsu coach reading at the bare minimum his book, How We Learn to Move. It's quite short, it's quite readable given the subject material. People sometimes make fun of Greg Soder's because, you know, he reads and does a lot of research and they say, well, you know, why should you have to do this if you're a jiu-jitsu coach? My thoughts, if you just read How We Learn to Move by Rob Gray, you already will leapfrog your understanding of motor learning in jiu-jitsu to the point where you can then decide whether you want to go further down that road or not. But the value you'll get out of that single read is pretty substantial. Speaker 2: Totally agree. It's worth its weight in gold, especially if you're trying even if you're not trying to go ego and you're just trying to better understand how coordination works and what it actually looks like. This is a very common thing with parents in our youth program where everything is game-based and has been even before we had switched to game-based, like it's a kids program, so we want them doing games to keep them engaged and keep them, you know, want them to keep training. We'll do a position, like let's say a pin. And this is like the conundrum as a coach. The kids are working a side control pin. And if you're familiar with grappling at all, pinning is a win in judo. Pinning is a win in wrestling. As in like you win the game. Like the actual sport itself, if you get a pin and you hold it, you win. And so BJJ is really interesting because it's grappling, but pins are not a win condition necessarily. Like you can win matches with pinning, but it's not an absolute win the same way it is in those two sports. And so you'll have the kids, for example, working out of a top pin, starting in the top pin because maybe I want them to just get comfortable holding down that position while somebody like relentlessly fights them, right? From the bottom. When I say relentlessly, I mean, any newbie that first gets anybody that was a newbie can relate to how spazzy they probably were when they first started. So, you take a white belt, you put them on the bottom, they're going to kick and scream until they're exhausted, right? So, the person that's on top is at least hopefully getting some kind of a benefit of, I, okay, I can keep my partner down if I control the head, I control the far arm and I'm chest to chest and my legs are past their legs. When the parents see this, I think the same perception gets brought in by beginners, adult beginners. It doesn't look like a whole lot is going on or it just looks like the bottom person isn't getting anything out of it, which I don't think that that's true. I don't agree with that. But let's say that for all intents and purposes it is. Some games are going to be or some things that you do are going to be geared toward one person or the other. They're not always going to be completely mutual down the middle, 100%. You guys are both going to get a ton out of this. It might just be dude that's on top is is really trying to get a better understanding of how to keep the other person down. And it might not look like as much is going on as is actually going on. Speaker 1: I really appreciate you saying that. A big problem with many coaches' mentality is that they are ultimately coaching to satisfy themselves and not their students. So, as an example, maybe the coach has this dream of creating a top competition team and so they try to bring those methods into the gym, whereas in reality, their entire student base is just casual people who want to learn to defend themselves. That's a completely different mismatch. And it's erroneous to assume that the way that you would produce an ADCC world champion is the same as what you should be teaching a bunch of hobbyists. The goals are different. And I know that people who are really meta-focused and competition-focused will argue this and they'll say, no, we got to follow the science and the best practices. Look, we got to understand that not everyone is trying to be the best in the world at jiu-jitsu. A lot of people just want this as a hobby in their lives. And if you're expecting them to train with the level of intensity and seriousness as a true performance athlete, then you're going to be disappointed and they're going to be disappointed. I think that it's really important you brought that up. This is a kind of a common problem I see with coaches where often they do things to gratify themselves and they don't so much think from the perspective of the students, what would be best for them. So, someone on the podcast, I think it was Francesco Fonte, talked about how a coach should only answer questions that the students are actually asking. Because you're right, a coach is very often will sit down and run through every little conceivable detail about this technique and the student is clearly just overwhelmed. They're nodding their heads and their eyes are glazed over, but they're being polite, but they're not retaining all of that information at once. It doesn't make sense and it's not helpful to info dump onto some poor white belt every single detail that you know about a technique. And so if you are going to provide verbal prescriptive details, you got to make sure these are things your students actually want to know. If they're not asking the question, it's a waste of time to answer it. Speaker 2: That's the difficult line. And I'll bring this back to like the youth program versus the adult program. Someone, I can't remember who it was, someone from a major gym just left to start their own thing and they they posted something about how the customer is not always right, which fundamentally I do agree with. We're doing an activity that's difficult. I mean, even in yoga, you're doing an activity that's difficult. Like Bikram yoga or whatever yoga, it doesn't matter, is going to be hard and some pushing is going to be required. Some kind of motivational something. It doesn't have to be like corny, but some kind of motivational extrinsic motivator is going to have to be integrated into your practice, regardless what we're talking about, if it's something that's hard. And I agree and it's at face value that, yeah, the the student base doesn't always really know what's best for them. So, you have a bunch of guys that don't want to learn leg locks and you as a coach like, no, no, no, every time you guys go to an event, the, you know, a couple times a year that you decide to compete, you get leg locked or every time I roll with you, you get leg locked. So, no, no, we have to work on this. There's a line somewhere and I don't know who if anyone has found that line like to the nth degree and it's like perfection. But I agree that you have to teach to what the audience actually is interested in, what they're actually trying to do. It can go too far to where like with a youth program, you you get a coach that's burnt out and tired and is tired of parents complaining about this, that or the other. You could turn your program into a thing that isn't even really jiu-jitsu anymore and then we start seeing kind of what happened with karate and taekwondo and why they look the way they they do now. That's actually a a fear that I have on a pretty recurring basis in terms of what kind of compromise I'm going to make with uh our student base, specifically with the parents. But when it comes to the competitive component, especially with adults, I think my outlook on this is a little more glass half empty than yours. I think it's delusion. I think it's delusion 99.9% of the time. So, we are in a sport that's really, really, really young. And it's young to the point where we don't even have legitimate consensus on what we think the rules should be. And that's something to really think about. If you look at all the different events and all the different ways that the events have tried handling what submissions are allowed at these levels, these age groups for kids and how the point system works and then we have the uh I don't even want to get into it, but the convoluted and utterly ridiculous advantage system that no one really understands. You end up in a scenario where we can't even really pick a direction. So, like we're we're over here arguing about whether or not game-based learning works and it's a one or a zero. Guys, we don't even know what rule set we're following. Yes, the the IBJJF is is the main guy, quote unquote, or the main stay in the sport, but but also not really. In no-gi, it's ADCC. And we're seeing giant events like CJI where literally opposite, the rules are completely different. So, when we talk about something like people in the community that are coaching that maybe they they're well-meaning and want to try to produce world champions because the sport is young and you used to be able to do that in pretty much any region of the US 10, 15 years ago. It hasn't quite sunk in yet that that's like trying like that's insane. I mean, that's insane. Think about that for a second. Like, I want to go be a professional basketball player, so I'm going to go play in my local rec league and the guy that's coaching it is, you know, he he went to college on a basketball scholarship 30 years ago. Okay, good luck with that. I think it's delusional and I think that the training practice has roots in a an activity that used to be geared towards competition to some degree and that that never really left and that the the reality of higher paying competitive sports hasn't quite sunk in yet. We're seeing it in MMA. In MMA, it appears to be much more like business as usual, but in in BJJ, you still have your hole in the wall place where yeah, maybe you have a very skilled instructor and maybe you have a pretty diverse athletic audience and maybe you are in a big city. Your odds at being super, super competitive at purple, brown, black are pretty low. I mean, I don't think anybody would dispute that, but they're not looking at the big picture. They're like, well, yeah, maybe maybe we should be focusing on just getting people competent and maybe another sub focus should be while keeping them competent or getting them competent, excuse me, keeping them healthy and sticking to the things that we know for sure they're going to run into in their grappling career within the first 10 years. Speaker 1: I realize as we have this conversation, you brought up something really good a while back there. You talked about this whole dilemma of, hey, is the customer always right or not? And I realize I should clarify a point that I made. When I say that you don't want to answer questions that aren't being asked, that's not to imply that the coach should avoid steering students. A coach should always have a plan to steer students in the correct direction. So, I'm not saying that a coach should take a totally hands-off approach and just give the student whatever they want. But what I am saying is that a coach should focus on gently guiding people towards a point rather than just info dumping and just spelling out all of the answers to them. However, if a person does truly get stuck and at some point they come and they ask you, then it makes sense to answer that question. So, there is this balance point where on one hand, you don't want to overwhelm your students with too many details, but on the other hand, there is a degree of a guiding hand that a coach has to deploy. And I don't think the right answer is to sit down and give them an endless lecture about every single thing that you know about this particular technique. But I do think that a coach has to have an awareness in the room of when people are struggling and when maybe the approach isn't working. I'd love to know your thoughts as an experienced coach on how you identify that. When you're deploying new games or new teaching methods in your class, how do you tell if it's really sticking with the students or not? Speaker 2: So, I have it goes in phases and I'm still working through what exactly those phases look like, so this is very subject to change. I will outline a game based on the material that we're working on. A lot of the material will come from what I see as necessary and urgent based on our most recent tournament outing. So, we compete once a month. And so the majority of what needs to be done is at least initially based around that. Secondary to that is what I'm seeing in the training room on that given night. And then what I see at the end of the session that'll dictate where we go from there. That's the overarching theme when it comes to what do we need to work on? Okay, I'm going to design a practice around these or a couple of practices around these and see what happens. When we get into the actual, okay, we're doing that now. I look at what kind of reaction I'm getting from the the game. So, the game is always set up like this. Here's the setup, here are the winning conditions and I'm going to have two of these guys play through the game. And if I see anything that might be super helpful or maybe there's a bunch of beginners that just, I don't even know what this is. Here are two or three things that'll make your life easier. Then they go and they play it out and I always I'm a broken record, so, you know, switch every time or it's continuous or whatever it is that needs to be explicitly stated. Then I start seeing where we get coordination loss. So, the group is not doing the thing that I want them to do. This happens all the time when new things are implemented. So, if I if I'm like, I want to tweak this and I want to do this. So, as an example, one of the more recent games that we were working on was working out of half guard. Bottom half guard is trying to they're starting out with a knee shield, a frame and a leg scoop. Okay? So, if you can visualize that. And their goal is to get to a leg entanglement of some kind. Any leg entanglement they want, they just need to have a good connection. And then of course, what is a good connection? Knee and heel together or feet locked, knee in the knee line, some kind of grip on their partner's leg. It could be an overwrap or a false grip. Top player, you are exclusively working for a body lock. As in two arms under your partner's arms from the hips all the way up to the armpits. That's it. The number of times that I've run similar games and, no, no, no, I don't want you to pass. I mean, you can pass if you want to, that's fine. The actual goal is the body lock. Seeing them completely deviate from the task and revert to, you know, whatever else. This is a a regular thing. Oh, well, I got the sweep, so I win. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Your goal was a leg entanglement. Oh, oh, I got the pass. That's great. You're supposed to keep going until you have a body lock. You have to have two arms around your partner's waist. So, that'll end up being like the second stage of is this connecting or not and then we'll build from there. Generally, it takes one or two tries to get the language down right, which is uh probably why Greg gets so much flack because he he's really like dialed in how he communicates what he's trying to do. To the point where I bet you, if on a Monday, you asked him how he's doing a certain thing and then like five days later, you ask him the same question, he'll say the exact same thing, whereas like most people, myself included, it'll sound completely different. And that's just that's just discipline and and being ritualistic, which I think benefits the student base. Like I wish I was more like that. In terms of how this affects an actual training session or when we look at the training sessions over the course of the week, I'm looking how they progress within the specific game. So, if we did that that first game I just described on Monday and then come Tuesday, I'm seeing that there's definitive improvement. Okay, I didn't have to reiterate, you know, five times, it's hands around the waist in order to get the finish or it's the leg entanglement to get the finish and then I start seeing them actually enter into the positions successfully. We're we're in the money. If I start seeing them try to do those things and they're failing because of some specific issue, like the bottom guy isn't off-balancing his partner first prior to trying to entangle the leg. So, he's just kind of pulling his legs in and it's getting blocked by his partner's upper body, which makes total sense because his partner is going to stay heavy on top. Then we start working in modified versions of those games to try to focus on those tasks. Does that make sense? Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, thanks a lot, Ryan, for all of this. As we tie this up, I want to talk about the specifics of your games approach. So, you actually publish all of this stuff at bjjgames.com. Maybe tell people a little bit about what to expect. What is actually in your framework tactically and how do you organize the games that you teach your students? Speaker 2: So, right now, the there's only two things on there. We're working on two right now, two other modules. The first two on there, one of them is 50 games for 50 bucks and that one is kind of our essentials collection. That was our prototype. We wanted to see what kind of feedback we got from the community. So, initially, it's a diverse array of differently categorized games. Some that are focused on stand-up, some are focused on upper body submissions, leg locks, defense, passing versus guard. So, it's a nice variety pack. The sample pack that will be re-releasing shortly alongside the two new uh modules is just really well-filmed content based on each category. So, there's like one of each as opposed to a bunch of each. And we implemented all the feedback that was given to us by the initial customer base. So, now, moving forward, we're going to be working on intensives. So, the next one that's going to come out, hopefully, sooner than later, will be passing. So, we're going to be working on shorter form passing, shorter form upper body submissions with really nice angles. So, you'll be able to see everything that's going on as the two players play out the games. And everything will be narrated with subtitles and that'll be it. Previously, we had done these write-ups. I just don't think it connects well with uh the modern grappler. So, modules, nice 360 view, at least theoretically 360 view. We'll try to get that as much as we can and a narration with subtitles so that you really understand what's going on. And also for coaches, the hope for this is that it can help them with conveying this information to their student base, which is a perpetual struggle. How do I say this thing in a way that will connect with my students so that I don't go on for five minutes, go off the reservation, everybody's looking at me and they kind of just nod along and then as soon as they go to do it, you're like, yep, that didn't work. So, we're trying to help everybody avoid that. Speaker 1: Amazing. Well, I will link that in the show notes, but of course, the nice thing about your stuff, it's easy to find. It's just at bjjgames.com. So, not exactly a lot of memory lifting there if you want to find that domain. But again, link in the show notes. I'll also link to our stuff. All of our stuff lives at bjjmentalmodels.com. The podcast, completely free. Our mini episodes, which are quick hit concepts that get to the point really, really fast. They're also completely free. As is our newsletter. So, at the bare minimum, you should be getting that. The way that you level up with us is at bjjmentalmodels premium. It is the world's largest library of jiu-jitsu audio courses on strategy, tactics, mindset, philosophy, the kind of things that don't blend well into traditional instructionals. Additionally, we do have video stuff on there as well. In fact, we are hosting one of the sample packs from BJJ Games. So, if you want an idea of what that entails, you can go to bjjmentalmodels premium and sign up for the free trial and check it out and that'll give you a better idea as to whether it's something that you want to pick up from Ryan. But again, all of that is at bjjmentalmodels.com. I really appreciate everyone's support. That's what allows us to do the work that we do and advocate for the vision of the sport that hopefully we all collectively share. So, thank you to everyone who supports us there. Again, links in the show notes to bjjgames.com and bjjmentalmodels.com. Ryan, sir, thank you so much for doing this, man. Fun chat, really liked it. Speaker 2: Thanks, Steve. Appreciate it, man. Speaker 1: Most welcome. And thank you to the listeners as well. Appreciate you too. And we will talk to you in the next episode. See you then.