Ep. 390: Making Jiu-Jitsu Accessible, feat. Ryan Rich & Max Corteggiano

Speaker 1: Hey everybody, before we get started this week, I have huge news. She actually did it. We're pleased to announce that Beatrice Jin, top-ranked women's competitor in North America and long-time BJJ Mental Models premium community member, has published her first ever course with us, exclusive to BJJ Mental Models. It's called Stop Being Nice. It's a three-part audio series designed to solve real mindset problems that regular folks experience in Jiu-Jitsu. If you struggle to be aggressive and competitive in Jiu-Jitsu, you'll find the solutions here. If you're already a BJJ Mental Models premium subscriber, you've already got access, and if you are not, good news, you can get it now and get your first week free. Go to bjjmentalmodels.com and check it out today. Speaker 1: Hey everyone, welcome to BJJ Mental Models episode 390. I am Steve Kwan and BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent Jiu-Jitsu approach. And I've got a fun panel episode today. First, returning champion, I've got Ryan Rich on the line. Ryan, how are you doing? Speaker 2: Excited to be here, really stoked about this conversation today. Speaker 1: Me as well. And we've got a first-timer. We've got Max Cotegiano on the line. Max, how are you? Speaker 3: Hello, Steve. I'm good, thank you. Thanks for having me. Speaker 1: You're most welcome. Let's do some quick introductions before we dig in. Ryan, do you want to go first and remind people who you are? Speaker 2: Sure. I'm a third-degree black belt. I own Granite Bay Jiu-Jitsu in Granite Bay, California, which is about 20 miles east of Sacramento. And I've had um a CLA, uh I've been using utilizing the CLA approach for a couple of years now. One of the early adopters. Speaker 1: Exciting. And for people who missed our earlier chat or any of the convos that we've had on this, we're talking about the constraints-led approach when we say CLA. And we'll get into exactly what that means and how we use it in a bit. But let's get to Max. Max, why don't you give everyone an introduction? Speaker 3: Yeah, sure. So, so I'm a first-degree black belt from France, close to Paris, and you might know me from BJJ Flowcharts, which is my company. And I'm working now on BJJ Games with Ryan, alongside BJJ Flowcharts, obviously. Speaker 1: Fantastic. And that kind of gets into the topic that we want to talk about here today. You guys are interesting because in addition to running the gym, you've also got bjjgames.com where you've been publishing a lot of material and trying to make it digestible for people. We've actually pushed some of it out on our platform as well to share with our audience. But maybe I'll turn it over to you guys to talk about the topic we're going to get into. And Ryan, how about we lead with you because you were the one who sort of proposed it? Speaker 2: Sure. So, today we were interested in talking about CLA simplification so that others can adopt it in a much more straightforward way. When I first started this approach, there was uh basically no resource that was available online at least that I was aware of other than YouTube shorts or Instagram shorts. And then of course, there was when Greg was first offering consultations with other gym owners that were interested in this approach. So, our goal in general was to try to make this as accessible as possible based on some of the scenarios that we've seen over the last couple of years with programs that are trying or interested in adopting the constraints-led approach. Speaker 1: Nice, nice. And I we should probably do a quick primer for people in case they've missed our earlier chats. I'm going to guess that when we talk about CLA, most of the people who are listening to episode 390 of BJJ Mental Models probably know what it is. And they probably know when we talk about Greg, we're talking about Greg Souders. But maybe we should do a just a really quick intro. And I'd love to hear from both of you how you explain this. When you talk to someone who's never used this method and not familiar with it, how do you explain to them what the constraints-led approach is and why they should use it? Speaker 2: So, for my program, CLA was an an attempt to replace drilling, static drilling with total compliance with an approach that fostered independent critical thinking and self-reliance. So, that whole figure-it-out meme in a nutshell would be we take the student, the student is going to interact with us through a well-designed practice where we're trying to work on specific skills for that given week. And as opposed to let's learn how to armbar from mount, for example, and just doing it over and over again and the coach kind of wandering around and correcting when they see specific issues and the student may or may not have taken anything away from that session. Instead, our practice for a week or two at a time will focus on the principles that lead us into that straightening of the arm. So, we typically, and most people are familiar with this to some degree, games. We design games with win-loss scenarios where both practitioners have tasks and their tasks are contingent upon whether or not they're the bottom or the top player or the attacking or the defending player in a nutshell. Speaker 1: Right. Max, I really want to hear your perspective on this because you make two very different products. On one hand, bjjgames.com, but on the other hand, bjjflowcharts.com. And a purist might argue that these two things are mutually exclusive or incompatible somehow. I wondered if you if you've had to field this argument before because I certainly have. People will sometimes come to me and say, Steve, you talk about ecological dynamics a lot, but isn't that fundamentally at odds with the concept of mental models, which sometimes people may classify as an info processing or IP practice. And I mean, we can I don't know if we really want to nerd out into the science about what we're talking about here, but suffice it to say that a lot of people believe that the eco approach versus the so-called cerebral approach are incompatible somehow. Max, how do you jive those two? What are your findings about whether or not these approaches are compatible? Speaker 3: Oh, it's a very good question. So, first, let me just explain how I see CLA approach, and then I will explain how we can use that into the more like systematized uh like ABC type of training. So, basically for me, CLA is simply an upgrade of specific sparring that we've been doing. If you're in a good gym, you've been doing specific sparrings forever. But instead of just doing, let's say, okay, so you start in half guard and you just fight from here. So, you will say, okay, so you start in half guard and I will give you a very specific goal. And that goal is to get chest to chest, for example. And I will also give you a constraint. And the constraint might be, well, I want you to stay on your toes. I don't want you to get on your knees for or something like this, you know. And so I think it's that's how I explain it. It's simply an upgrade of specific sparring. And the way I teach, and that's where I see you can use both approach, uh first, the ABC approach made famous by John Danaher, and the CLA. Is I think you need both, actually. Let's say you take beginners, for example. So, you take beginners and you say, okay, so I'm just going to practice loose passing. And so, okay, one guy on his back, one guy on top, and the goal is to stay away from his feet and touch his head, for example. Well, I think that's perfect, that's great to learn. But why would you want your students to reinvent your wheel? Why would you want him to figure out everything from scratch? It's like, I mean, if you're studying math, for example, before inventing stuff and before like basically being on your own, you want to learn the basic, you want to build on what your teacher, you know, created, basically. And so, I think it will be much more effective if you, okay, I will teach you a system and ideas and concept, but then you will make it your own by doing CLA approach. That's basically how I think you could play with both. At least that's how I see it. Speaker 1: I love that, man. This has been something that I have always advocated for as well, which is a blended approach. Um, I think that eco and I guess a classical IP approach can live in parallel quite well. They're just different tools for different jobs. The approach where you communicate information cerebrally, that still has a place because we have to exchange ideas somehow and like you said, avoid reinventing the wheel. But that can be true while it can also be true that the actual skill development practice occurs in a live environment. I don't think these things are as mutually exclusive as they sometimes get painted to be. But I want to talk about the approach that you guys use in terms of making CLA and games accessible. I know we've talked about this a lot, how to build Jiu-Jitsu skill development games that work for people, that they love. But sometimes when you deploy CLA, you do get a degree of pushback because it can be hard, it can be intense, and sometimes psychologically, people do just want the answer given to them. So, I know that you guys have been putting thought into how we can make this more accessible. And I guess one of the things that's really unique about your approach is that you try to make it bite-sized. Maybe back to you, Ryan, do you want to talk about what your findings have been in terms of how to make CLA accessible to people, both students and coaches? Speaker 2: Yeah, so when anyone starts to adopt, I'm going to call it a methodology because my program is completely CLA with the exception of an older black belt that I have that runs a couple of 6:00 AM sessions each week that I'm slowly transitioning away from the traditional approach. He was a blue belt in 2005 when I first started. So, he's been around for a really long time. He's in his 60s and it's it's hard to get him from point A to point B in general. And then you add in the long period of doing things a specific way and just getting that transition to occur is really difficult. In terms of our program, it's been fully CLA for a couple of years now. And I frame pretty much everything around how my kids perform, specifically the middle to older group. The really little ones, getting those kids to do actual grappling, like real technical grappling, it's either a really spectacular child or there's a psychotic parent involved. It's like A or B. When they're a little bit older, you'll see kids that are a little bit more inclined like mechanically inclined and they can figure things out and try different things. They have kind of the demeanor to experiment and there's also that general exploration you see with children in general when they're doing literally anything because things are fairly new to them. So, I look at it from a design standpoint and a communication standpoint as to whether or not what I'm doing is effective. With the kids, you can't use the exact same terminology necessarily that you use with adults, but it could be pretty similar. I I use body mechanics as kind of where we're going with everything, keep your arm under your partner's arm. Sometimes we'll utilize terms like underhooks, et cetera. But then you run into the same problem that everyone runs into where the grip under a leg was called an underhook for a long time. I don't know who originally, you know, coined the term scoop grip. First time I'd heard that was from John Danaher in one of his DVDs. But over the years, I've made really particular strides toward using cohesive terminology and then being willing to pivot on that terminology when we run into problems. A problem being like the kids are just not getting it, they're just running around in circles trying to pass guard. So, for us, there hasn't really been a problem that I haven't been able to solve in recent memory where I don't just constrain the situation more. And that's whether we're talking about a brand new kid that's never done BJJ before and they're learning how to pass the guard, whether it's a new student that's learning their first submission like an armbar, for example, or we have an adult that's never wrestled or done any kind of stand-up and getting them to learn the, you know, a few takedowns. All the way to having some, you know, 19-year-old kid that just wants to go 130% every single round. There hasn't been an issue thus far, knock on wood, that I haven't been able to constrain. So, I really drink the Kool-Aid on this being a way to get students from point A to point B to C, et cetera. Like I have kids that just started a couple months ago that can effectively armbar consistently on their peers, some of whom have been training for, you know, a year or two or even more, and they have never drilled, not one time a traditional armbar. So, I merge what I want to see and what we emphasize alongside some degree of instruction. This this idea that there's absolutely no, you know, instruction whatsoever and it's the Wild Wild West is kind of a a meme, an exaggeratory meme about how this process works. It's just more hands-off and I think that's the part of it that people have a hard time with. So, while doing all that and and having that in mind, I really wanted to try and avoid onerous terminology. And that goes all over the place. You you can have a term that's just too vague and simplistic and you can have terminology that's just really hard to follow. And I think that there's a middle ground somewhere and I'm still experimenting with it consistently. And I think most of it revolves around body-centric language alongside the terms that we've been using that are kind of industry standards this entire time. Example, mount is mount, back is back, half guard is half guard. But understanding that with newer students, it is just as overwhelming to name every single specific thing all the time as it is to say, here's what we're working on, here's a couple of examples, try to do this while you do this, while your partner does this. All right, go. I think that that idea of it being really DIY, if this is done even remotely properly, when I say properly with any kind of care and that goes into the design of the class, you're going to have plenty of oversight and and things that they can mimic that will allow them to start diving into something and get there relatively quickly. Speaker 1: I think that's great, man. I agree completely. The beauty of a games-based approach is it actually simplifies things a lot because it frees you as the student from the burden of having to remember a bunch of stuff while you're live rolling. That to me is one of the main drawbacks to a more traditional approach is there's a real cognitive tax put on the student to keep a lot of info in their head at once. And I mean, I've been doing Jiu-Jitsu for a long time, even as a very experienced practitioner, I still struggle in a live roll to remember too many details. Our brains just didn't evolve to do that. So, it becomes a a matter of how can I reduce my cognitive load and the amount of thinking I have to do live. And games are a good job of doing that because they de-scope Jiu-Jitsu itself down to something much simpler and easier to understand. Max, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this to maybe riff off of what Ryan said and add your own thoughts as well. Speaker 3: Yeah, sure. So, um, Ryan and I, we actually went back and forth quite a lot when we were working on BJJ Games. And the first thing we wanted to do was to simplify as much as possible the game and the communication without losing any information. Something I really hate is actually when people are trying to make things sounds more complicated than it is because I think grappling is actually pretty simple. I mean, the concept and ideas are simple, but it's very hard to do. So, what we tried is to give you very clear goals, very clear objectives. Let me give you an example. So, you know, when you're doing pressure passing and you're doing knee cuts, everybody knows, okay, you need to take the underhook. Actually, what you need to do is not take the underhook. You need to get his shoulder to the mat. And so the underhook is a mean to an end. It's a very good way to pin the shoulder to the mat. So, but it's not the only way. And so if you tell your student the guy you're training, you tell him, hey, you know, when you're doing the underhook, just think of pinning his shoulder to the mat. I think he will get much better result, much more quickly than if you give him like tons of details or where to get, you know, where to put your hands, where to put your knees. And I think games in that extent are giving fantastic results very quickly. But the main thing is to be very clear on what actually matters. Speaker 1: Yeah, I like that a lot. I think that's an important realization for many, many people. And how does this materialize in the work that you're doing on BJJ Games? What have you kind of found from especially since the last time we chatted, which was a a few months ago, Ryan. What have you guys done to really make that more digestible and more simple for people? Speaker 2: So, the first couple of things that we we had noticed, I gave some of like samples out to friends of mine that have been in grappling for a really long time to try to really understand the grappler side of things. One of the biggest problems in BJJ is that it's so it kind of exists in a vacuum and we get a lot of the cognitive bias just because another BJJ person thinks that this is straightforward or easy or good, that the thing must be near perfection or perfection. So, that said, the target audience is going to be grapplers. So, I've done a combination of things. I've asked other grapplers and I've asked lay people, like what do you think of this? How do you think this would help you if you were say an experienced grappler, a coach, a beginner, et cetera. Like what can we do to make this easier? So, the first thing we went back to the drawing board on was I had originally done pretty comprehensive write-ups for all 50 of the, you know, first games that we released. And that was one of those, this is a recurring thing with my manager for my academy and myself that people just don't want to read anymore. So, really simplifying the text that was associated with each individual game. The way that we filmed is different now. We're trying to get multiple angles and we're making it concise but giving them just enough meat to see a lot of the details. I've also changed up who is doing like the filming. So, the people that are participating in our filming are various ranges of experience. Sometimes that massively backfires just to be clear. Like I'll send something over to Max that was edited and he's like, dude, no. I like this is bad. It's like, of course. I picked a white belt for this and I was I had high hopes that maybe this would be helpful for other white belts, but it would look like. So, those generally go bye-bye after filming. But doing a narration for every single game and then having the narration right there with the user can see it and read it and better understand it. I really want the terminology and the the just general flow to match up with how I would run my room. And again, I'm actively, I'm biased, but I'm actively refining week after week how I relay information to my student base, whether they're four years old or 45 years old. I really want something that's as as inclusive as possible. There are obviously going to be outliers here and there where you just you can't certain people learn differently or they have a lack of, you know, bandwidth when it comes to attention. But I want it to be straightforward, under three minutes, as much viewage for lack of a better word as possible. I want them to be able to see what the students are doing. And I want them to be able to watch that video a couple of times, preferably once and really be able to relay the idea back to me if we were having a conversation. Like if they can't tell me what I just said in a couple of sentences or even just one sentence, I haven't done them any service. This is something that we do with our kids constantly at my place. So, Thursdays, I let the kids design and play their own games. We still use a format. So, like we'll have them do a standing round, a guarded/passing round, and then we'll do like a pinning round. So, they're still doing that, but they're working within those constraints and they have to be able to basically read it back to me. Okay, so, Johnny, tell me what the attacking player is doing today. And they'll have to run everybody through it concisely and then, okay, what about the defending player? Somebody else tell me what's going on there. So, I I want that same thing to occur when people are watching our content so that it is inevitably more digestible, quicker ROI for the people that are, you know, choosing to partake in our our service. And maybe if they had tried approaching the CLA approach a couple of years ago or even a year ago, I want this to be something where they, oh, okay, this is just this is way more up my alley. It's simplified. It doesn't take 10 hours to digest this content. That's one of the biggest problems I have with some of the instructional content that I see. And this is something that Max and I have talked about a lot. When Max is doing some of his flowcharts every now and then, it's I'll get a message at uh 2:00 AM where he's like, I can't believe this whole thing could have just been, you know, a 30-minute instructional. We run into that from time to time and that's another thing that inspired this that making this just really, really straightforward and simple and comprehensive so that they don't have to do any guesswork. Speaker 3: Yeah, the big thing, so the new thing for the new product is actually so the voiceover on top of the video. And so the key idea is to, okay, so you can watch like a two-minute video, you understand what the game is, and then you you go to play. That's that's really something we wanted to kind of force our user to do because I think lots of people they're watching techniques or instructionals. I'm not sure they they go practice a lot after watching uh the stuff. The goal here is to, okay, so look, just watch that two-minute video and go play the game for like an hour. And you'll see very good result very quickly. Speaker 1: Yeah. You bring up a great point about understanding the audience that you're making content for and that the normal way of doing things might not be optimized. I share your criticism of the long-form instructional format. It just really doesn't seem optimized for the way people consume information these days. 10 hours is just way too much Jiu-Jitsu. And my feeling is you've probably got a ton of instructionals that people have purchased where they've barely even watched them or received any value out of them. You almost would have been better off selling them or giving them smaller lessons that are more digestible and easy to remember. It's better to have one lesson stick than have 100 lessons fly over the person's head. I understand this might run contrary to the economics of selling an instructional. People might want to pad these things so they can raise the price further. But I think with many things, less is more. Especially when I find we communicate about Jiu-Jitsu, we have to be mindful of the audience that we are targeting and cater to those needs. It is so hard to get even a fraction of someone's attention these days because there are so many things competing for it. So, when you have someone's attention, you have to make it count. You have to be mindful of the restrictions around how they might be engaging with your stuff. Maybe they can only afford to give you a few minutes. Maybe they have a preferred format or medium of consuming information. Something I bring up quite often is when you're podcasting, you have to be mindful that you probably don't have people's full undivided attention. They're probably not sitting on the couch right now taking notes and listening to this episode. They're probably doing something else while they're listening to BJJ Mental Models. So, sometimes people come on here and they're worried that they're being rambly or they're being redundant and saying the same thing over and over again. And my answer to that is good because that's the way that we communicate. The goal of a podcast like this is not to produce the most specific, precise, say it one time perfect product because that assumes that the listener is sitting here paying attention all of the time. It's okay to be a little bit redundant and to say the same thing in a few different ways because the person might have zoned out or focused on something else while you said something really important. And all of this comes down to just knowing the context of your audience. And so much instructional content doesn't seem to do that. It's more about how the instructor wants to present information as opposed to what really works for the receiver. Speaker 2: Totally agree. Like this piggybacking off of what you just said, the average American's attention span is down to about 47 seconds. So, when you're coaching BJJ, and you and I got into this last time a bit, we're not most places, with the exception of famous institutions, Art of Jiu-Jitsu, Kingsway B Team, et cetera. I think it's Simple Man now. Outside of those very specific places, most places are recreational. Even if you have lots of competitors, the majority of the people that are partaking in your grappling services are going to be wreck players. And we live in that world. That's the reality of the situation. So, you're talking to an audience that is juggling every other life thing so that while they've gotten away from their work, home, whatever for what? Like an hour, hour and a half, a couple of times a week, two to four times a week, sometimes one time a week if they're really ham, five. That's the audience. So, if you're in this business, so to speak, and you're not attempting to extend an all of branch their way, I really don't I like I just don't get that. There's this kind of delusion within the community. I don't mean to be super critical of everything has to be centered around world champions. Now, when we're talking about instructional content and how we're consuming it, right? How the consumer is is actually using this content. First of all, there's lots of of metrics out there that people are purchasing instructionals and not actually watching them. I know it's super, duper common. And I personally know a lot of students that were really, especially my demographic that's in their 40s, that went out immediately and purchased the what is it? The Ageless Jiu-Jitsu series from Danaher and watched, you know, 15 minutes of it and then that was it. That's it's over. They haven't done anything since then. So, I know that there's a lot of content, even if it's really good. The average person does not have the bandwidth to absorb a lot of this stuff. If they are watching it, it's very passive. And I don't I'm sure that there's they'll get something out of it. But when we're talking about a demographic where the average attention span is 47 seconds, they all live busy lives. We we really need to reflect on how our coaching exists within the world that we're operating in as opposed to this is what, you know, this world champion has done. This is what this person over here says has to be done. Like these are people that are doing something full-time as opposed to something that's being done recreationally and part-time. No matter how serious you are, if you're only training twice a week, you're recreational. And that's probably about what? 95% of the user base. So, making things as simple as possible, as digestible as possible, to me, it's just absolutely critical. And we should be doing everything we can to trim time, to trim context down so that it's as easy as possible for people to remember. Because the guy or the gal that's coaching, right, was a student at one point that heard somebody say something about whatever it is they're talking about. This is all built upon other people's work. And we're trying to improve it and improve it and improve it. And while it has improved and I personally think grappling is far more technical now than it's ever been, that doesn't necessarily mean that we've optimized the coaching side of things. Maybe it's been optimized for the world champions, but how, you know, that's a very small population. And it's it's very unlikely that at your club or gym, academy, whatever you want to call it, that the entire room is full of those people. Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it's important to always consider your audience. We can lament the state of the world and how tragic it is that attention spans have dropped as low as they have. And I'm not saying that's a good thing, but we also have to be mindful that it is reality and our content needs to reflect that. My approach is to provide a bunch of different takes. I like to create short-form stuff and then progressively longer-form content as well to catch people regardless of what their attention level is and their amount of time and focus that they can commit to me. But on the other hand, I also have to be mindful of the fact that, you know, as someone who does this full-time, I have a lot of time to do that. Most people don't. Most people have to cater to one particular type of content or maybe two. So, I think when you're creating instructional stuff, especially when there's a video and a highly published component, it can take a lot of work to do. And you got to make sure that if you're putting the effort into this, you really do want people to actually watch it and get some value out of it. So, what does the current understanding of how to produce good games content look like? Either of you, I'd love to know from both of you, structurally, how does the content work? Is it I know it's shorter clips now, but maybe tell me more about what you find works best and resonates best with people. Speaker 3: Oh, yeah, so if I can jump in. So, let me just backtrack just a little bit. So, I think because of attention span being so small, so low nowadays, I think it gives a very good opportunities for coaches to actually improve their understanding of the game. So, as Ryan said, so I spent, I don't know how many hours, but it it's like it's a lot. I spent I watched everything, studied extensively over the last seven years. And the more I train and the more I coach, I realized like Ryan said, I mean, the people you're coaching, I mean, they have jobs, they have like studies, whatever, they're doing something else. There is no way, there is no way you could teach them every single details on like a John Danaher DVD or Gordon Ryan DVD. It's it's way too much. So, I think what I started to do was to try to understand the key points of every techniques or every, you know, every position, every situation. What is the key point here? What makes the technique actually works? And I started to do that for like, I think it's been like three or four years. And since I started, I saw first my understanding of grappling increased a lot. And I also saw a lot of improvement on my students because they don't have to remember 17 steps, 17 moves. If you can just remember, okay, so in that situation, that's what's important. Or in this situation, the key point is this. I think it's much more easy to remember and stress. And so if you do that actually using that like short attention span, you can definitely improve your understanding of grappling. And so back to the game, so based on that, what we did was try to understand the key points of what we're trying to accomplish in a specific situation and turn it into a game, basically. Speaker 1: I like that idea of reverse engineering the invariance back into a game. Can you give some examples of what that might look like? Speaker 2: Sure. So, an example that Max started to touch upon earlier would be when doing like a knee cut as an example. So, we have one knee up, one knee down and we're trying to pass open guard, half guard type situation. Generally speaking, the consensus amongst coaches is to emphasize the underhook versus the concept, which is pinning the shoulders or keeping the shoulders on the floor. So, when I'm looking at everything that we just released, the last 20 games that we released for the 10 passing and the 10 upper body. Obviously, there were multiple iterations of each game. Some were filmed and then had to be redone, editing had to be done over and over again, the narration had to be tweaked repeatedly. It all formed via things that I've already been doing for the last couple of years and have refined over and over and over again. And that I suspect is how I'm going to design our next series, whether we do more stand-up or we'll focus on leg locks, whatever it is that we end up doing is likely going to be a product of what I'm experimenting with at the time or what I'm really into at the time. So, when we're looking at, let's just use an example like mount. One of the, let me ask you this. When a brand new student is has come to train with you and it's their first session ever and let's just say you guys are focusing on mount as your dominant position that week or that evening, that month, however it is you do it. What are some of the things that you generally run into when you take any kind of concept from mount? Like it's it's somehow related, whether we're armbarring from mount, head and arm, just keeping mount, et cetera. What do you run into when a new person then goes into the wild and does like a live round or several live rounds? And maybe that position is emphasized. That's kind of a question for both of you. Speaker 1: Are we talking about mount from the perspective of the top player or the bottom player? Speaker 2: Top player. Speaker 1: For me, the main problem that beginners have with mount is holding the position. They can sit on the person, but as soon as they start trying to move into an armbar or a specific technique, they give the person on bottom room to bump or move or wiggle or otherwise escape. Speaker 2: Max, same thing? Speaker 3: Yes, same. I would say, yeah, for sure like controlling the position and also what is I mean, how to attack, basically, what's the objective? Speaker 2: Right. So, what about back? I'm trying to flesh this out so that my kind of my framework will or what what I would guess I would call a framework would be a little bit more digestible. What about back? What do you guys run into if you have a student that's attacking from back or just holding back? What would you say are the biggest problems that they run into? Speaker 1: I would say the same problem. When you take a beginner who doesn't know how to properly control back mount, one of the frustrations they're likely going to see is they just can't hold the position. The person spins around and turns back towards them and now they're in your guard. And for many beginners, that could be frustrating because we put them under the impression that the back is this amazing position and then they lose it so easily. So, that's a frustration point. Speaker 2: Same thing, Max? Speaker 3: Yeah, I would say also something, so I think they struggle a lot to understand you need to control and attack at the same time. And that's tricky to do, I think, when you're starting. When you start, you just say, oh, I'm just going to hold for dear life, but I'm never going to like threaten the choke. Or they just go go for broke and they lose the position like in in a second. Speaker 2: Right. So, there's lots of ways to approach this, right? So, let's use the mount as an example. We take a newbie, it's their first session ever or it's their first week or first month, whatever it is. Maybe they're not super physical or physically inclined. Here's a great position. I want you to try to stay here as long as you can. And it's gone. So, instead of approaching this from a setting it up for them and then just watching them fail over and over again, I want to give them tasks because those tasks, even if they're not very good at them, will replicate something resembling attacking. So, when I first started coaching, when I'm talking about with kids many, many, many years ago, okay, you know, you're past your partner's legs, I want both knees on the floor. You can move your legs however you'd like, hands on the floor or around your partner's head and arm or under both elbows. I didn't say it like that, but that's kind of the gist. And then just hold it as long as you can. Try really hard not to fall down. If you start falling down, don't, right? Put your hands on the floor, pick up any whatever. And of course, like clockwork, it just doesn't work like that. They're going to fall over and over and over again. And I would sit there trying to rack my brain. I don't understand how I'm supposed to get this person to do it. You flash forward a few years. Okay, we need to start attacking while we do this. So, if you're in the in the gi, let's start attacking the collar. If it's no-gi, let's, you know, try to control the head and the arm at the same time, maybe create back exposure, et cetera. Now, if I'm looking at how to create a game based on some invariance, or excuse me, if I'm trying to create a game, I'm going to utilize invariance that are going to be easy for the other person to understand or at least easier. So, if we're working out of mount, hey, your legs are past their legs, you're going to put at least one knee on the floor and your partner is going to try to get their legs back in. Try your best to negate that however you'd like to. And I'd like you to keep your chest on their chest and I want at least one arm under one of their arms. And I want you to try to control that as long as you can. If you want to put both arms under their elbows, cool. If you want to do the head and the arm, that's great. So, it's really just a short-form, more practical approach where we're emphasizing the invariance in order to create the games. So, a a really straightforward one that I use whether they're kids or they're adults, they have to be a little bit older as kids because of attention span and just fine motor skills not being super good at that at the younger ages. Going to start in mount and the top player's goal is to control the head and the arm. Okay, so you're going to try to get one essentially a seatbelt from that mount position. And once you get that seatbelt and you hold it for three seconds, you win. The bottom player, if you're able to escape or sometimes if we start with one arm under the elbow, you take both your elbows, you bring them to your sides, you win. So, there's really simple ways to take these invariance and then produce games around things that kind of set the player up for something resembling an attack. And that tends to keep their, well, yeah, you're you're trying to access a little bit more cognitive load than just like, all right, just hang out there. I feel like it creates more of a goal. A goal that's actually tangible as opposed to abstract like, well, I I stay here, but then what do I do? And I don't really understand. I feel like it creates better habits right out the gate and they're a little bit more accessible. So, all the games are generally built around that concept. If that makes sense. Speaker 1: It does. The thing I like about kids' classes, as you mentioned, is kids can teach you a lot because you'll get real good feedback from kids based on how they respond. If I create a training environment where I basically just have the two kids fighting and the the bigger, stronger kids are always winning, I'll know there's a problem because the other kids are going to say, I don't feel like I'm good at this and they're going to start crying. Right? An adult isn't likely to do that. The adult will say nothing and then go home and cancel their membership. And so you're going to get better live feedback from kids because they don't have that filter. They will just express their emotions if there's a problem. And that really belies one of the main challenges, especially with beginner-level Jiu-Jitsu, which is when you're getting started, when no one knows what they're doing, it mostly comes down to physical attributes and prior athletic experience. So, if you put these people in an environment that resembles a fight, what's going to happen is the big, strong people are going to win and the non-athletes are going to get demoralized and they're going to quit. Whereas if you structure things as a game and you de-scope it down, so it's not a fight anymore, it's a single skill development game, not only does that make it more focused, but it also changes the psychology of things. People don't feel as much like it's a big hit to their ego if they lose a grip fighting game a few times, right? That's very different from getting submitted. But also, it allows you to scope the game so that if there's a failure, you just reset and you reset and you just focus on playing within the area of skill development. And that allows people to see much more rapid gains. If the roll is more open and this big behemoth just takes someone down, passes their guard and sits on them for five minutes, that's not really leading to anyone developing useful skill. So, constraining the game down is such a great way to again, bring focus to that. And thankfully, the kids tend to be a really good litmus test for whether that's going to work or not. Speaker 2: And especially with adults, you see, I'll say this every now and then depending on the audience, like we generally will do, I really like Greg Souders' framework for, you know, his all levels, which is uh two standing rounds, two guarded rounds, two pinning rounds, and then with whatever time you have left, depending on how long those rounds are, you'll just do live rounds with no constraints. As soon as we finish our six rounds where we're, you know, constraining everything and maybe every now and then we'll have to redo something. And that's, you know, it depends on how you as a coach pivot. But I'll go, all right, now you guys can go ahead and do the same stuff that you try over and over again, go for it, go normal rounds live. Because that's what's going to happen, right? When you keep things really, really open. Yes, live rounds are an important experience for any student. That's why we do at least two of them every single session. But at the same time, over the years, I've noticed that people that really gravitate toward things like open mat where they can just do whatever they want. Number one, a lot of them are uncoachable or very difficult to coach. They want to DIY everything. So, this is like it we've kind of gone full full circle, right? Where we get into this all the time with people that have really strong opinions on whether or not there's any utility with CLA. Like why do you do an armbar? You run into these same problems, no matter what your approach is. You'll have people that just want to do whatever it is that they want to do. And these are the same people that for years at a time, unless they're really disciplined, don't improve. And they do the same stuff over and over and over again. Like their ability to pick up on a new thing is contingent upon factors that as a coach, you just they've made it impossible to adequately coach them. Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, I would say though that often times when people DIY everything, it can be a response to lack of satisfaction with their training environment. Maybe the reason they're doing that is because they don't feel like they're getting value out of what the teacher is teaching. It could be a an attitude problem. It could be that the person is just uncoachable. But sometimes I think coaches are very quick to throw people out and say, oh, well, that person's uncoachable. Whereas something that you brought up, Ryan, is I think it's good to introspect a bit and ask, is it a me problem? You know, if everyone in my room is uncoachable, then maybe it's a problem with the coach and it's not a problem with the student. And so I think again, this is where this comes back to a discussion of how do we make content accessible to all levels. And something I'd really love to ask both of you about, but maybe Max, specifically you, given the work that you do with BJJ Flowcharts as well. Whether it be making games or making content like flowcharts, do you find it's better to create a sort of one-size-fits-all approach? Like are you trying to make a piece of content that's accessible to everyone? Or do you have better luck breaking it down and making different content for different audiences? So, maybe beginner-level games, beginner-level flowcharts versus advanced-level games and advanced-level flowcharts. So, what approach do you find works best? Speaker 3: It's a good question. So, I think definitely you don't teach beginners the same as advanced people. So, if we go back to BJJ Flowcharts, I've got several products. So, I do flowchart of John Danaher and Gordon Ryan instructionals. And those are more for like, well, that's for people who bought their instructional first and people who really want to study like long hours of materials. I've got an app where I'm basically coaching my game, teaching my game with like no fluff, straight to the point. It's like flowchart and very short videos, like two minutes. So, you just watch that and you you go train. So, I guess that's more also for it it's for beginner, but also for advanced people. For beginners, I actually released an ebook last month. And the idea was I was thinking actually last year, I was I was actually on a plane to go play golf with Ash Williams from from Greg, you know, from from Wales. And in that plane, I was thinking, hey, what if you give me a beginner for a full year? I can coach him like 12 months and I'll never see him again. So, how will I do it? I mean, what will be the best way for me to make him as good as possible in a single year? And so I thought a lot about it and I thought, oh, actually, it could be a good uh like book subject. And so my answer to that was actually a blended approach where I explain a lot of con very simple concept and tactics. I've got some techniques with flowchart and I've got games on top of that to go from knowledge to skill. So, my response was, yeah, I think the hybrid approach when you do a little bit of both and you explain basic concept with straight to the point technique, with very clear objectives in all the common situation and you add up games on top of that, I think is the best way to coach beginners. Speaker 1: You know, while I have you here, Max, there's a question I've always wanted to ask you. I've been curious about BJJ Flowcharts on this matter here. So, I have always been a believer that thinking about your own game plan is a valuable exercise, even if it never winds up the way that you planned. The act of planning itself has value. So, if someone is going to sit down and document their entire Jiu-Jitsu game as a flowchart, there's a good chance that when they hit a live roll, things won't shake down the way that the flowchart said they would. There's just too much chaos. But the practice of sitting down and writing out a flowchart is valuable because it forces you to think through your own game and challenge your assumptions and you might find blind spots. Speaker 3: Absolutely, yes. That's the main thing. Speaker 1: You know, if you have a destination that you want to arrive at and a starting point that you expect to begin at, but you don't have a way to get from the beginning point to the end point, then it doesn't matter. And a flowchart might help you find those missing links in the chain and help you build out a cohesive plan as to how to get to your destination. Now, I've always wondered, when you are looking at someone else's flowchart, do you see the same benefit? Because my thought has always been with flowcharting, the main benefit comes from making one yourself. But you often premake them and provide them to other people. How does the experience differ when someone takes a secondhand flowchart instead of making their own? Speaker 3: Yes, a couple of points here. I think so I will tell you for me what are the benefits and then I will try to tell you what I think people might benefit from someone else's flowchart. So, like you said, so actually I started to do that, to do flowchart for my own game like 10 years ago. Maybe even more. My my coach actually told me one day, hey, you should make a flowchart of your own game. And I was, I think I was a blue belt at the time. Yeah, or purple belt, like freshly purple. And I realized, oh, I've got blind spots. Like here and here, I'm I don't really know how to escape this or I don't really know how to go from here to here, which is what I want to do. So, I think there's a lot of benefits here to just think about your own game, like you said. When you're actually doing a flowchart of someone else's game, I think it's a very, very good way, a very efficient way to to learn because when someone is teaching his game, he's not thinking in flowchart necessarily. You know, not everything connects. Sometimes there's a connection between DVD one and DVD six. And you probably don't see it if unless you actually do the flowchart because, you know, there is like six hours of content between the two. So, there's no way to connect the dot. I mean, it's way too much information. So, I think it's a very, very effective way to to actually learn a system, to map it out. And it's probably the same for someone who actually buys the flowchart and so he didn't make it, he just reading the flowchart. I think it's a perfect tool to understand something much better and then to train smarter because once you go to training, you can just take a screenshot of a branch or like just like a few moves connected and practice that for like a week instead of going like, oh, you know, I saw like hundreds of moves. I mean, how are you going to practice that? I mean, there's no way you can practice like everything at once. So, I think just isolating, isolating like like a branch and practice of that is very effective, yeah, basically. Speaker 1: They sometimes say that music is the space between the notes. And my feeling is that Jiu-Jitsu is the space between the techniques. Traditional training focuses so much on showing people techniques in isolation, but often it is the connective glue between the techniques that makes them work. And that's where flowcharts really shine because you're not really talking about all of the steps to nail that armbar. You're more talking about when is the situation going to arise and how can I get there and how can I get out of there if it's a transition position. A personal story, I fell in love with single leg X-guard a long time ago, but I just really couldn't make it work. And I was getting really frustrated. And for a while, I thought, you know what, maybe this position just isn't for me. One day I thought about it and it occurred to me, the problem wasn't single leg X-guard. When I was getting to single leg X-guard, I was having good success. The problem was I couldn't get to single leg X-guard. I was getting my guard passed when I tried to get to that position. And so the problem was not single leg X-guard, it was my entries into single leg X-guard. And by focusing on that and getting from an open situation, like an alley-oopy position where I'm seated and the other person is standing, how do I get from there into single leg X-guard? That was the missing piece that I needed. And I might not have realized that if I was just focusing on the technique itself. So, thinking connectively about Jiu-Jitsu is a really powerful way to patch up those holes and figure out where your weaknesses really are. Speaker 3: It's like a big puzzle. So, basically, let's say your game, your is a puzzle and at first, it's empty. I mean, you've got like a few piece here and there. But the goal is ultimately to connect the pieces. Speaker 1: Over to you, Ryan. I think you had something to say. Speaker 2: Yeah, so I feel like this is an what you're describing is an area where even if you don't utilize games as your primary modality and but you just try to focus on practice design and outcomes, what you'll at least we've found over and over again, we being my student base and myself, is when it comes down to invariance and precursors. You know, starting connected in something that you're trying to work on or working towards the precursor that's going to allow you to gain skill in this specific thing that you're trying to do. I think flowcharts and just generally writing things down can be an extremely useful tool because it's it's forcing reflection on what it is that you've done and it requires this pretty, you know, if you're being serious about it, a pretty substantial amount of buy-in as a student. We talked about this a little bit last time. Like I just went back to school for the first time in like a million years. I'm doing an MBA right now. And the the shock of going back into academics has been really jarring. And one of the things that has despite all the changes in, you know, utilization of AI, like all the professors and all the students are are reliant on AI to some degree at this point. There are some fundamentals that have remained true. And one of those, and I think this coincides really well with the points that you guys are making, is writing things down during and after is an absolutely critical skill if you're trying to be successful, whether or not it's regardless of whether it is a physical task or a mental task where you're trying to better understand the thing that you're doing. And I just think it's invaluable. I didn't journal. It was recommended to me a really long time ago when I first started by one of our brown belts at the academy I started out of BJJ. And I just I was in school at the time and just like, dude, I'm already I'm already kind of tapped out on taking notes. And years later, when I my friend Val, who has a like a Jiu-Jitsu art website, she produces really cool stuff. Like she has notebooks. I started that's when I started journaling because I had this cool Chachki that I was like, oh, this is great. I'm going to start using this. And I can't tell you how valuable it was. And then of course, a couple years later, I meet Max and flowcharts became like I bought every single one that he had right out the gate because they were so helpful in terms of organizing what I was trying to learn from Danaher's earliest DVDs. Speaker 1: Yep, yep. The value in writing things down, it doesn't come from producing this artifact. It comes from the process. It's an effortful retrieval practice. It forces your brain to work to recall old knowledge, which reinforces those neural pathways and makes it easier for you to recall it again in the future. At the beginning of my journey, I was skeptical about the note-taking process and I thought, what's really the point? Am I really going to go back and consult years worth of old Jiu-Jitsu notes? And what I understand now is, although some people do that, you don't have to. You can write down your notes and then throw them away right after and you'll still get value out of the practice because the value is not from having the notes themselves for study later. The value is that the practice of creating the notes is a form of practice itself. It's a form of effortful retrieval and it re-strengthens those neural pathways that you've got and it helps you recall that knowledge. And the more you do it, the easier it becomes. So, people sometimes wonder, well, yeah, how can I get better at Jiu-Jitsu when I'm not on the mats or I have limited training time or real life or injury have taken me off the mats? What can I do? Effortful retrieval practices are awesome. It's not the same as motor learning, but it does help, especially if the area you're struggling with in Jiu-Jitsu is the cognitive level where you're just trying to remember all of the stuff. Some sort of practice to write things down or document can be tremendously useful, even if that documentation never gets used in the future. But really great chat, guys. I just want to maybe close this off with some just some quick hits. If you guys had advice for people out there trying to optimize their own training, what's kind of the one big thing that you would suggest people do if they want to take this games-based approach, your recent findings and add them to their own practice to just get immediately better. And maybe Ryan, I'll start with you on that. Speaker 2: Practice, practicing creation of practice design and how you're going to communicate that practice design to your student base is the absolute most valuable thing that I've done over the last couple of years. It is a it's a never-ending practice and there's always ways to optimize. And if you're trying to just get started, it really starts and ends there. How am I putting this together and how am I relaying this information? And then being really, really honest with yourself when it's not landing. If I've had to repeat a specific point multiple times, it's not working. If I'm and it's no different than anything else. If you're just coming up with your material the day of, there's been no thought put into it. You're going to, no matter how experienced you are, you're going to stutter through it to some degree. It might not be super noticeable if you're really seasoned and if you've done this a billion times, but the effort of communicating your the things that you want to do and and reflecting on how you want your students to get there is absolutely invaluable when you're trying to adopt a games-based approach, even if it's only for, you know, a few rounds here or there or a few sessions here and there. I don't think you can be good at running a practice regardless of the approach if you don't incorporate those two things. Speaker 1: Yeah, well said. I am a huge fan of teaching to learn. I think that even newbies should think about how they would teach concepts because even if they never do, even if they don't feel they have the knowledge required to do so, and that's probably true, but even so, just sitting down and thinking about how would I teach this to something else, man, it helps you clarify your own knowledge so much. Because if you have to put yourself in the perspective of a teacher and think about how you'd communicate what you know, even if what you know isn't that much, it forces you to really fill in gaps and think about things. So, I am a huge fan of using class design and game design as a way to improve your own understanding because in order to do that, you have to have a level of understanding that you can build on top of. And so you'll have to build that. So, I think that's some good advice. Max, what about you? Any big pointers that you would want to share with people? Speaker 3: Yeah, actually, so if I may give an advice for coaches, I will say get rid of the warm-ups because you you won't believe. I traveled quite a lot and I talked to a lot of coaches and people and I've and I've seen different academies. I don't think like running in circle and doing jumping jacks for half an hour is doing any good. So, I think less jumping jacks, more grappling is actually better. And for students, I will give two advice. The first one will be to come to class with an objective. Let's say you want to, I don't know, you you want to work on like single legs or whatever, you want to work on something. Try to do as many reps as possible during that class of something specific you want to improve. And after the class, take a few minutes to like think about what happened during the live training, like what worked, what did not work, and try to try to figure out why you failed on specific occasion and try to adjust for next class. Speaker 2: I could not agree with Max more about ditching the warm-up. It is absolutely insane to me that people are still doing half-hour warm-ups. Speaker 3: It's the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen. This is ridiculous. And and I actually we spent like in my gym, we spent, I hope my my coach won't won't listen to that. Like in the first five or six years, like from 2010 to 2015, we were doing like jumping jacks and like rolling like rolling in circle for like half an hour, doing push-ups and and ridiculous stuff. I mean, it's a waste of time. It's so stupid. Just get rid of that. Speaker 2: Leave the strength and conditioning to the strength and conditioning coaches that actually have expertise. Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, we're all going to the gym nowadays. I mean, just come on, this is silly. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. It is a waste of between 25 to 33% of your entire class when you put people through a rigorous warm-up. And it doesn't make you better at Jiu-Jitsu. If you want to get people's cardio going, just make some good games. That'll achieve the same thing and it's much more relevant to their training. Speaker 3: Just do more rolls, I mean. Speaker 1: Well, let's share some links. Ryan, maybe do you want to plug some BJJ Games? Tell people about what you're working on, what they can expect and where they can find it. Speaker 2: Sure. So, if you visit bjjgames.com, you can find our free modules that are out right now. We have a 50-game one and we have two 10-game ones. 50-game one is kind of a comprehensive look what we felt were the, you know, kind of fundamentals for getting into gameplay. The other two that are recent and vastly improved our format are the upper body submissions and the passing modules. I would like to start working on a leg lock module soon, depends on the feedback that we get. So, anybody that's interested, let us know what you want to see. We're completely open to what you want to see more of, what you want to see less of, improvements that we can make in general. We're, you know, it's invaluable to get feedback from the consumer base. So, anyone that's interested, let us know what you'd like to see next and we're totally game. Otherwise, leg locks. Speaker 1: Fantastic. Max, how about you? Speaker 3: Oh, well, on top of BJJ Games, you can have a look at BJJ Flowcharts. Especially if you're a beginner, if if you're a white or a blue belt, have a look at the ebook. The reviews I got from customers are fantastic and I'm extremely humbled and pleased about it because I was a bit stressed, you know, when I was releasing the book, I was I never did it before. So, you know, you never really know how people will react. And the reviews are fantastic and I I received so many messages telling me it's actually, I mean, helpful, like it's it's it makes a difference. So, if you want to check it out, it's on bjjflowcharts.com. Speaker 1: Amazing. Well, I will throw links to all of that in the show notes. So, if you want to check out content from Ryan or Max, whether it's BJJ Games or BJJ Flowcharts, just open up your podcast player and there should be some one-tap links in there for you to get to those sites. You can also get all our stuff that way. Everything we make lives at bjjmentalmodels.com. Please do check out more of the podcast if you haven't already. There are full-length episodes like this and as I mentioned earlier, I try to cater to people of all attention spans and uh commitment levels. So, we've also got mini episodes that are much, much shorter in our main feed. And of course, our newsletter is completely free. If you prefer written content. And if you would like to level up with us, please check out BJJ Mental Models Premium. It is how we keep this ad-free and how we run things around here. It is the world's largest audio library of Jiu-Jitsu master classes on strategy, tactics, concepts, mindset. Just a a great accompaniment to the training that you get in the gym. Again, if you're a fan of Audible or MasterClass, you'll probably really like it. We also do offer direct coaching. If you want to get a second opinion on your rolling, pull out your phone, shoot a quick video or send me your comp footage if you're in our coaching tier and we'll get that broken down and fed back to you. You'll get some amazing feedback that way. And we also do offer professional services if you need support on your marketing or sales front as well. That's something we can help you out with too. All of that is at bjjmentalmodels.com and I will put a link in the show notes. But Ryan, Max, thank you so much for doing this, man. Always a hot topic in the community these days and I can't think of two folks better to do it with than you guys. So, everyone check out bjjgames.com and both of you, thanks so much for coming by. Speaker 2: Thanks so much, Steve. Really appreciate it. Speaker 3: Thank you, Steve. Thank you. Speaker 1: Appreciate you two as well and the listeners of course and we will talk to you soon. See you next time.