Ep. 391: Am I Getting Better? feat. Josh McKinney

Speaker 1: Hey everybody, before we get started this week, I have huge news. She actually did it. We're pleased to announce that Beatrice Jin, top-ranked women's competitor in North America and long-time BJJ Mental Models premium community member, has published her first ever course with us, exclusive to BJJ Mental Models. It's called Stop Being Nice. It's a three-part audio series designed to solve real mindset problems that regular folks experience in Jiu-Jitsu. If you struggle to be aggressive and competitive in Jiu-Jitsu, you'll find the solutions here. If you're already a BJJ Mental Models premium subscriber, you've already got access, and if you are not, good news, you can get it now and get your first week free. Go to bjjmentalmodels.com and check it out today. Speaker 2: Hey everybody, welcome to BJJ Mental Models episode 391. I am Steve Kwan and BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent Jiu-Jitsu approach. And Josh McKinney is your guide to Josh McKinney. How's it going, Josh McKinney? Speaker 1: It's going great, Steve. How are you doing? Speaker 2: I am doing well, man. Do you want to say hi to everyone, give a quick intro in case people have missed our earlier chats? Speaker 1: Yeah, I am Josh McKinney. I am the host of the I Suck at Jiu-Jitsu show, and I am here to talk about a huge problem facing Jiu-Jitsu, and that is that nobody freaking knows whether or not they're getting better. Speaker 2: That's fair. I mean, a lot of us suck at Jiu-Jitsu, some of us so much so that we create a podcast about it. And I think that given your particular areas of expertise and the amount of conversations you've had with people about helping them assess their own Jiu-Jitsu, you would be a great guest to discuss this. So tell me about what you're talking about here. I have definitely felt this as well, where sometimes it can be hard to know, okay, am I actually getting better? Or maybe you are getting better and it just doesn't feel like it. Sometimes we can't really easily assess whether we're actually getting better, and that can make Jiu-Jitsu really frustrating. People talk about plateaus all the time, and much of the time that's probably just psychological. Why don't you kick this off though and explain your thesis about how to tell if you're actually getting better at the sport? Speaker 1: Okay, well, let me start with this because I think you nailed it. I think most people feel stuck, right? Like they feel like or can feel stuck at times. Like plateaus is the perfect example, the word that with a buzzword we all use in Jiu-Jitsu for when you're just frustrated with your training, when you're just going, man, I know that there was a time that I was getting better. You know, for whatever reason, something told me that I was getting better, and I knew it. But right now, I am either not getting better, or I'm getting worse. I really just can't tell. And I think that a lot of people have had these times and have experienced this. If you train Jiu-Jitsu for, I would argue about two years, you will at least experience one noticeable plateau. And if you train for a long time, you will notice a lot of them. But for me, I really don't think I have experienced a Jiu-Jitsu plateau in my learning. I don't claim to be good, but I don't I know that I have been getting better consistently at least since I've been a black belt, which is about eight years now. And that is just due to understanding that there are other metrics other than people's opinion, like, hey, you get your next belt, or you get a stripe, so now you know you're getting better, even though you may not feel like you're getting better. Or the only metric that anyone ever tracks is, did I submit this person or did they submit me? And that's a fine metric to track, but there's so much more to knowing that you're getting better at Jiu-Jitsu. And I think if we just talk metrics for the next like 45 minutes to an hour, we are going to have a very clear way, kind of like a clear picture to how to notice yourself getting better at Jiu-Jitsu. Speaker 2: That is a fantastic introduction and leads to the first question I wanted to ask you, which is, what does it even mean to get better? You touched on this beautifully about how there's different ways to interpret how you even gauge your progress, and many people, myself included, would argue that we tend to gauge our progress the wrong way by the wrong metrics. And there's a time and a place for different metrics. Sometimes whether you're winning or losing should be the main thing that you care about. Sometimes it should be something a bit more abstract. Sometimes you need to be looking at what's right in front of you. Sometimes you need to be looking at your progress and where you think you'll be a year or two from now. So, when we say getting better, what does that even mean to you? Speaker 1: You know, I think I've always defined getting better as more efficient and more effective, right? Jiu-Jitsu is broken down into accomplishable tasks, and we will name it, you know, pass the guard or choke, right? And there are these ways that we explain that task. I could just say, hey, you over there, choke this guy, and not really teach you anything about how to choke the person, how to control the person, how to make the choke tight. Or I can like transfer some knowledge to you about how to accomplish that task. And there's all kinds of argument about how we're going to transfer that knowledge or how we should transfer that knowledge. But I think we all agree that that is what is happening is that there are these certain repeatable things that we can observe, like, hey, he is trying to get a submission via choke. He's trying to get a submission via armlock. And I think that once you start to see Jiu-Jitsu as these repeatable tasks to accomplish, and then you start to see the techniques as like, these are tools that I use to accomplish these tasks. I think just that mental shift in itself helps you start to get better at Jiu-Jitsu, and it stops to be such a big puzzle. For a lot of us, this is like this internal process. I'm sure, you know, you're a black belt. I'm sure if we talked about, hey, how do you look at Jiu-Jitsu and we started to deconstruct it, there is a framework that you look at Jiu-Jitsu, and it's almost kind of like a simple process of things that you value. I don't let them touch my hips while I'm trying to accomplish this task, right? And it's because you understand the task of passing the guard because you've done it enough times. And I think just starting to understand like, oh, it can be broken down is the first metric to start to understand because then you're not going, oh, I'm just getting submitted or I'm not getting submitted. You're going, oh, I'm getting my guard passed. I'm getting held in side control. I can't escape that. Then they're moving to mount and then they're submitting me. And then I might even notice, and it's always the same submission. And so there are all these different ways that we can look at our own training. And this is weird because this is not this is separate from the the belt promotion thing. The belt promotion thing is acknowledgement that you have gotten better. It doesn't make you better, right? We should be, I think a lot more focused on the tasks and the training methods that make us as an individual better. So then we can start to lean into that a little more. But I think this idea of self-coaching is shocking to people. It's like, why would this coach tell me that I should not it's not like telling you not to listen to your coach. It's just telling you that you listen to your coach and you use your coach for what they're like best at and what they're best for. And them acknowledging whether or not you've gotten better. Hey coach, what should I be working on? Hey coach, am I getting better? Those are questions as you grow, you should be able to answer them yourself in your Jiu-Jitsu. Because once you get to black belt, you don't get any more belt acknowledgement. It's just like, hey, if you're here, no one really knows if you've gotten better, right? And yeah, I just think that that shift of metrics. I don't know if I even answered your question directly. I think I just hit you with a lot of different things. Speaker 2: As I often do. Go for it, man. Hit me, baby, one more time. Well, Speaker 1: Here, I have I have a story for you. Uh, when I this is just for me like when I started to observe metrics in Jiu-Jitsu, like, and it was the same it was the one we all track, which is submissions. But I just started to tweak that with training method a little bit when I was a brown belt. When I was a brown belt, I think I did Nogi Worlds or something. And I went with this guy, I got on his back really, really early. And I always did Gi. And in the Gi, you have this superpower when you're on the back where you can just bow and arrow choke people. And it's like, it's such a hard thing to stop, especially when your back just gets taken and you're tired in a competition. That's why you see them so often. But in Nogi, you still have to hand fight, you still have to know how to get the right angle to get the choke. And I really just found this huge hole in my Jiu-Jitsu in the middle of Worlds, couldn't get this finish. I eventually, I think I finished this dude with like 30 seconds left. And it was 100% because he was on all fours and he looked up at the time and I got under his chin and got the choke. And after that, I was like, man, I really need to fix that. How will I know if I am getting better at rear naked chokes? Because I can I can rear naked choke, you know, anyone in the kids class. So like, I know it, right? Like I can do this sometimes. So like, how do I know if I'm getting better? So I just set this metric of, I'm going to not go for any other submission in training until I hit 500 rear naked chokes in live training. And no matter how long that takes me. And I was also, you know, I'm a brown belt, so I'm like 20, so I'm training a ton at that time. And I, you know, it takes me like three or four months, but I do get there. But what the thing that was noticeable, and this is just back to noticing metrics in your own Jiu-Jitsu. The thing that I noticed was, man, there were some days early on that I hit zero rear naked chokes and I trained live, you know, quite a bit. I just couldn't hit any, I couldn't finish any. And then I started hitting like one a day consistently, or maybe a couple a day consistently. And then it got to this point where it was like, man, I'm hitting five or seven a day consistently. And it was just this noticeable thing that was like, oh, well, since I'm making it happen, I'm able to accomplish the task more, that is a sign that I am actually getting better. And I started to go, oh, this is a really simple way to notice myself getting better at Jiu-Jitsu, especially as somebody who, like when I'm a brown belt, I'm a coach at this time. So I'm having to self-coach. I've nobody watching my Jiu-Jitsu and telling me what I should be working on. I'm having to just take that responsibility for myself. But I started to note in my students like, man, I can use this little training method for them and they can start to notice themselves getting better. And again, it's just by that number of submissions, and you see that number of submissions go up, you gain so much confidence, and you gain so much knowledge around hitting that submission. But again, I'd also argue that that is, you know, after, I guess that would have been 11 or 12 years ago now. I argue now, I understand the idea of metrics so much more than just that value of submissions. Speaker 2: So you touched on something really great there, which is our tendency to measure the wrong thing. Really in anything, but in Jiu-Jitsu especially, it's a sport that is very tactile, very immediate. And so we tend to measure the thing that is directly in front of us right now. And that often means how did this roll go? Did I win? Did I lose? Did I tap them? Did I get tapped? Other surface level things like what belt is he wearing? You talked about this before. People often get fixated on belts and they think that that's the sign that they're getting better. Look, the thing about belting is belts are completely subjective. You won't find two instructors who have the exact same understanding of what belts even mean. A belt is a subjective decision made by your instructor. It doesn't reflect how amazing you are. It reflects your instructor's impression of your Jiu-Jitsu based on however they score what they score to give you a belt. And that can be different, right? Some people wait time spent more heavily. Some people wait skill or results. Some people wait knowledge. There's a lot of different ways that you can weigh the value of a belt. It's not just about who's better at Jiu-Jitsu. We have competitions for that. Belts represent something different. And that's why when you get to 60 years old, they don't take your black belt away. It's because it's not about, okay, how many people can you tap? It's about more than that. So, in a sport like Jiu-Jitsu, it's so easy to get hyper-fixated on the thing that's right in front of you. And that means that people often gauge their skill based on surface level signals, like how often am I tapping or getting tapped in the gym, as you said, or what was the result of my latest competition. But the skill development journey goes much beyond that. Yes, it matters how things are going right now, but that can be almost the opposite sometimes of what you need to get somewhere in the future. The most obvious example we can give is over-reliance on your so-called A-game. Once you've been training for a while, you're going to put together a series of moves and techniques and strategies that work really well for you. And if you only ever do those because they work well for you, you're not exploring and finding other things that might even work better for you. So, if you stick to what's working right now, and I've said before, one of my most hated uh catchphrases is, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. I hate that because we should always be looking for ways to improve. And if you're sticking to what's always worked for you in the past, there's no guarantee that will work for you in the future. So, this becomes a bit of a a burden once you start getting decent at Jiu-Jitsu. You have a game that kind of works and you can make it work, and it might even be getting results for you right now. But if you assume that means that you can just stay there forever, what you're going to find is all of the people that you're training against are getting better and you're kind of staying in place because you're not evolving. So again, an example of measuring the wrong thing. You're measuring the short-term results, whereas that is quite distinct from your long-term progress. Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I totally agree. I think that you nailed it there. I think so many people, yeah, I just think so many people feel exactly how you described is like that that A-game thing. Because there's all this pressure on you should change it up. And I would argue, I would agree. I definitely am not an A-game only person. But here is kind of how I look at it. Again, with this idea of I am just looking at Jiu-Jitsu as trying to break it down into accomplishable tasks. I can tweak so much of my round by just starting in a worse position. I can still play my A-game with somebody, the same partner. I can play my favorite game. But if I'm starting in bottom mount, and like I don't even maybe I don't even let them know that I'm letting them start in bottom mount. You know, they pass my guard and they get to mount, and then I start to go, well, I allow them, just by skipping a few tasks, letting them accomplish those. I get to now go, well, now I need to get back to half guard. This is something that I need to work. I need to get back to my butterfly. Do I have a sweep from here? And then I can start to, even though it's my same game, I'm able to just get a more valuable rep. But then the other thing I would argue in this is why we note it as coaches so much. The don't just play your A-game thing is because the guys that just play their A-game, typically just like to win. And there's nothing wrong with liking to win, but there's something wrong with like, the best way to explain it is you're a purple belt, you have this A-game of half guard Kimura that works, and you only roll with blue belts that are smaller than you all the time. You don't increase the level of your training partner. You could play that same half guard Kimura A-game and get so much better at it by just going with an other purple belts, going with the brown belts, going with the black belt, going with people that are bigger than you. And I think that so many people like that's the thing that we actually don't like as coaches with the A-game thing is it's not just A-game, it's that you try to control the room for yourself to be weaker, so your A-game works. And that is that's not helpful for you, and that's not really helpful for anybody, right? And so I think that that is the solution to the don't just play your A-game problem is you just change how hard you can play your A-game, you can play your best stuff, but you change how hard it is for yourself. You start in a worse position or you just go with a tougher person. Speaker 2: So Jeff Shaw from Bellingham BJJ has said that learning Jiu-Jitsu happens on a complexity U-curve. And so what he's saying is that there's this inverted U of complexity. When you start off training Jiu-Jitsu when you're a white belt, everything you do is going to be incredibly simple. And that's just because you don't know anything, right? So with the little building blocks you have, it will by necessity be simple. Then at some point, probably around blue or purple belt, Jiu-Jitsu starts getting incredibly complex. And you've learned enough now that there's a good amount of knowledge that you have and you're always acquiring more. And at that stage, most people focus on just accumulating more knowledge, just stuffing more stuff into their head. And that's why you, in my opinion, that's why you see these blue and purple belts who are like walking databases of Jiu-Jitsu, where they can tell you like any single thing that's happening in the current meta or the results of any current competition. They're sort of this like honeymoon phase of Jiu-Jitsu where people get really obsessive about it. But then at some point, that approach of just knowing more stuff becomes unsustainable because you can't keep all of that knowledge in your head and roll live. And also, as you get older and you've put more time onto the mats, you realize that a lot of the things that you've been training, they're not as permanent as you think. Things come and go, right? Techniques might be really hot one week, and the next week they've already been replaced by something else. So you start looking at Jiu-Jitsu through a more critical lens of, okay, how can I assess whether this is actually a worthy thing for me to be focusing on? And that's when, as you said earlier, you start to put together a mental framework for what Jiu-Jitsu means to you. And this is part of why talking to old black belts is so frustrating because they've always they talk in platitudes. You know, as as Beatrice Jin once said, like, old black belts will talk about how like Jiu-Jitsu is a circle. What does that even mean, right? I don't know what it means. But I'm sure it means something to that person. Every old Jiu-Jitsu person has this philosophy of what it means to them that they've put years of thought into. And the reason why you do that is because at some point you have to start making Jiu-Jitsu simple again. You can't just endlessly collect more knowledge. You need to start pruning and organizing all of that in your head and making it much more simple. So I bring this up because I think this ties into how people assess where they are on their journey. They often assess by things that don't really matter, like how much stuff do you know, or how many instructionals have you watched. One of the weirdest uh flexes in Jiu-Jitsu is people bragging about how they watch tons of instructionals. I mean, to me, all that tells me is you wasted a lot of time and money probably because I'm guessing you didn't really remember much of that. If you spend just a tiny amount of time studying, but you maximize the value of that and you apply that to your training and you're intentional about it, that's going to be way more worthwhile than binging 10 hours of Danaher and immediately forgetting everything afterwards. So, I bring all of this up because you may have different goals depending on your journey. When you are starting in Jiu-Jitsu, I mean, you're going to get better pretty much no matter what because you're starting from zero. Anything you learn is going to be an improvement from that. But then, and I think, you know, we talk about the blue belt blues and plateaus, and I think there comes this point of diminishing returns where a student can no longer just roll into Jiu-Jitsu every day and assume they'll get immediately better. That to me started to probably happen around blue or purple belt, where I already knew all of the basic stuff. And so me just showing up, it was no longer a guarantee that some new novel technique would get dropped on me that would make me way better at Jiu-Jitsu. Now I had to start being intentional and thinking about, okay, how does this fit into my game? Is this better than something I'm already doing? Because if it's not, I don't know if I really want to deploy this into my game and put focus on it. Am I better off patching holes today or am I better off taking what I'm already working on and what's good and making it even sharper? And these kinds of tactical and strategic learning decisions are something that again, coaches don't often teach. They're so focused on, here's the techniques we're covering today, that they don't talk about, how do you guide yourself, as you said, through your learning journey and make sure that you're being intentional about what you're doing? Speaker 1: Man, I think of it like that you said like three different things that I wanted to that I agree with that I really deeply agree with. I think first, I just wanted to talk about the old black belt thing. I think that that is so true and there's this big disconnect between old school and new school Jiu-Jitsu that's different than the disconnects from when I honestly, not that I'm old school Jiu-Jitsu, but I have been doing Jiu-Jitsu for almost 20 years. I know I'm young, but I still I was around when it was the last old school new school debate was different. The last old school new school debate was, you should fight with your Jiu-Jitsu. It should be MMA based, it should be self-defense based, or it should be Gi Jiu-Jitsu based, it should be just have fun, enjoy Jiu-Jitsu based. And I mean, we all just agreed that we just like to enjoy Jiu-Jitsu and have fun with it and just train it to fight each other with just Jiu-Jitsu. Then there came the new debate, right? And the new debate of old school new school is that old school ideas work just as well then or just as well now as they did then. And I think that I really think that it's probably true, but the problem is language. I think that it takes so long to find a really, really good old school black belt. Meaning like, we think about it. These Jiu-Jitsu techniques and stuff that we have, they were not thought of in a lab. They were first done. They were done by feel, right? They were these people trying to accomplish these tasks against people that were good at stopping them, and they found new ways to do it. And then after they did that, then they had to turn it into language. And then we turned it into a different language, right? And I think that, you know, when you see that, there's so much lost in translation. And when you get a really amazing like high level old school black belt and you start to understand what they mean about weight distribution or connection or different things like that. But you can only really do it through, I mean, a lot of verbal abuse and, you know, a lot of searching because it's hard to know who actually knows what they're talking about. But once you start to be able to do that and you start to learn their language, you start to, I don't know, kind of learn how to learn other black belts languages. And I think that that is that was just the first little thing that you hit on that I'm like, man, that's so true that it's just so hard for that communication between this generation of Jiu-Jitsu and the last generation of Jiu-Jitsu. I think so much has just changed since then. But I do think there's so much value in learning that communication both ways for sure. Speaker 2: Yep. On the topic of measuring progress, when you're trying to learn from an instructor, sometimes people only take the surface lessons. So they want to know what are the techniques? Like, show me that foot sweep that you do that's awesome. And that's good. You know, you want to get exposed to those things. But that's a very surface level way to learn from someone. I think, as you said, it's much more helpful to really study that person as a whole and unpack exactly what they're saying and why they're saying it and how they got there. And this becomes especially important as you talk to a lot of the more experienced folks because they tend to speak with a lot more nuance and with kind of more abstract statements because again, over the years they've had to build this mental framework for what Jiu-Jitsu means to them. And so they'll often give you a more philosophical answer than just saying, you know, make their left leg light and then sweep it. They'll usually give you a more broad statement because that's how they think about Jiu-Jitsu. That can be frustrating to a beginner who goes to one of these elite old school black belts and asks them a question and they want a specific answer, but they get back almost like a Socratic answer. That can be very frustrating when people just want to be told the answer. So, I would suggest if you're trying to really learn from someone, do better than just listening to what they say and trying to copy the techniques that they show step for step, but take some time to think about why do they think that way? Like what was the reason they got to the point where they are and why are they thinking about this approach versus how someone else might explain it? There's probably a good reason why. And understanding why they think that way or explain things that way is often more valuable than the specific technique because that's how you start to dig up key concepts and mental models and stuff. And you start to really understand the the reasoning behind these moves. One of the biggest mistakes that you can make, especially early on, is just doing moves without knowing why you're doing them or when to do them. You know, that matters. The context around a move often matters more than the move itself if you want to be successful. Speaker 1: That's so true. I think with so many of so much of that disconnect is like, you want the solution and then the guy of course is just, you know, like I spent my the last 30 years boiling down this all of these solutions into these few sentences. And then they want to deliver just that sentence. And it's so hard because then you're like, well, what does that sentence mean? You spent 30 years building that one sentence. I need more context, right? And so a random hack that I have that's really works for this is if you find somebody like that that you really are trying to learn from that you feel especially as a high level coach, like you're just getting answers like that. You assume they're probably right, but like they're just so like kind of either conceptual or just like have to do with their own context that it's hard for you to comprehend it. One of the easiest things you can do is just ask some of their students. Any of their best students have learned how to learn from this person, and you ask them some of the same questions, and a lot of times their answers will have so much more context because they had to kind of decode it on their own over the years. And so I found that that is a really, really great way to learn from a high level person is after learning from them, trying to learn from one of their highest level students, and you will get this new perspective. I figured this out when I did a I had watched every Marcelo Garcia instructional until that until I was like a purple belt. And I had John Satava come in and teach a seminar. I got to do a private with him and I got to train with him. And after getting that connection of, well, yeah, you saw this on a video, but this is how it actually feels. This is what we actually use. This is how we use it strategically. I was able to get so much more by getting that from a student, right? Because he's like, this is, you know, he taught me that too, but then he taught me it way more and way more and way more. And now I have all this understanding and you can get a new perspective of that same idea that you've been working. Speaker 2: Yeah. It's funny. If you've ever had to hire someone and onboard a new employee, and this has happened in Jiu-Jitsu, right? When you're hiring a junior coach for your gym, when you bring on board a new junior person, it's always so funny to see them come in and try to make a bunch of improvements out of the gate without understanding the context. You know, they'll walk in and they'll say things like, well, the way they're teaching here isn't really optimal because according to coach Dima, this is how a class should be run in this way and this way and this way. And as you start explaining to them how things work and why you do things the way you do, eventually they realize, oh, there's reasons why maybe you're bucking the conventional knowledge or the conventional trend here. And what I often find with like new employees and and coaches is they come in and they've got all of these great ideas that they've picked up everywhere that they want to just deploy. But once that meets the reality of trying to do this job live, and they start seeing all of the real world situations that come up and they understand why things have been done differently here, eventually they'll realize, oh, actually, no, there's a reason why we do things differently here. There's a reason why we don't just copy and paste the playbook off of the internet. It's because every environment is different. And by understanding the context, you can make better decisions about how we should run this place. And I think that same mentality applies when we're learning from instructors, as you said here, or even when you're building your own Jiu-Jitsu game. I strongly encourage everyone to look at Jiu-Jitsu as more than just a collection of techniques they learn, but to really and to do early on to start thinking about the why behind what they do. Like what all the way up to what are my goals? Like why am I even training this? Because some techniques and moves and strategies will be incompatible with your goals. And that's okay. But it is only through introspection that you can figure that out and that can be a powerful lens to figure out what to work on. So, in terms of how do we tell if we're getting better, I think it makes sense if you've got an idea of where you want to go in the first place and what your goals are for training. I mean, I've said many times, my goals for training, I want Jiu-Jitsu that works against pretty much everyone under pretty much every rule set, and it's going to keep me safe, meaning it's got low injury risk. Because of that, there are some moves that I immediately disqualify and I just don't do. Even though I know they're good moves, nothing against them, but maybe I I've just assessed the risk profile and the risk of injury to myself is higher than I'm willing to accept, or maybe my findings have been like this move only works against people smaller than me. That's not really aligned with my goals. I want a move that'll work against someone who's 50 to 100 pounds bigger. Now that's not the same for everyone. Other people may say that's dumb, Steve. I, you know, I'm here to compete. I don't care if it works against someone 100 pounds bigger than me. I want stuff that'll win me competitions. And that's that's cool. But that's just different goals. And by knowing your goals, I think it gets easier to measure whether you're on track moving towards them. It's really hard to assess your Jiu-Jitsu if you're just showing up every day and just taking lessons from the coach, like a little baby bird getting fed by its mom, right? Then it's a little bit hard to actually measure what you're doing, unless you're just doing base level measurement, like how much stuff do I know and who am I tapping in the gym? And again, these are probably not the best ways to measure your progress. Speaker 1: Yeah, and even competition is not the best way to measure your progress. Competition, it's a specific sport, it's a specific rule set. The rule sets may be different. The person the people that you go with may be feeling better than you that day, may be feeling worse than you that day. And you may have not really had a tough division. You like there's so many things that you can look at that you go, well, I'm not really in control of it. Competition is an awesome thing. I've competed for 18 years. But the problem with it is is that people look at it as, oh, this shows who is better at Jiu-Jitsu. No, it shows who is better at winning an IBJJF or winning an ADCC. It's not just Jiu-Jitsu, it's not just grappling, right? It is not just trying to submit somebody and not get submitted. I know I said that that is not the only metric, but that's the only metric. I'm saying that there are other metrics that we can track that will help us get better at not getting submitted and being able to submit people and then look exactly how you nailed it with efficiency and effectiveness, meaning, I need to be able to do this without as much strength, meaning if somebody has more strength than me, if somebody's bigger than me, this move should still work because that often happens. So why would I want to do moves that don't work for that situation? And so that is just a a such a simple way of looking at being efficient in Jiu-Jitsu is um that kind of mindset. And the problem with that mindset though is, it seems to only come as people age. When people are younger, when especially competitors, when they're younger, the idea of being more efficient and effective is like often just like, oh, I don't care. I just like you said, I just want things that are going to win me these matches. And like, if you want to win more matches, your focus should be on getting better at Jiu-Jitsu. And then yes, getting better at that specific sport, learning the strategies that are going to work for that rule set and that time limit. And like, I just think though that it's just easy to get those things confused of like, oh, this person won, that means that this person is great. It's like, ah, no, this person is really good at ankle pick and then hiding behind the knees from open guard and not letting anything happen for nine and a half minutes, right? And so they're good at that. They're good at winning in that rule set. It doesn't really show that they could actually accomplish the task of passing that person's guard, of mounting them, getting them in side control, taking their back and then tapping them out, right? And that is like, I think that that debate plays into or or that thought process of competition plays into why people don't see themselves getting better because they're going, well, it's just about who I'm beating in the gym. But those people are getting better, right? Those people are and they could be getting better faster than you. But on top of that, when it comes back to the training method thing, and that's kind of what you referenced in the beginning is it's like different strokes for different folks. How you train, right? And people will say, like you said, Dima is going to say you need to train this way. It's like, yes, if that clicks for you, you should train that way. If that works best for you, you should train that way. But again, back to the problem, most people don't know, they don't have valuable enough metrics to know like, hey, am I getting better at Jiu-Jitsu when I start to train in this new training method? And so like for me, if I look at it like, man, I added a night of positional sparring per week, and I look at metrics other than just who I'm beating, you know, I'm looking at things about like, hey, how much effort is this taking to beat this person, right? How much strength is required to beat this person? Because I can always lower that metric. When I start to play in that, I start to go, hey, I am passing the guard even more efficiently now, and I've been positional sparring guard passing. I should keep doing this positional sparring thing, right? Does that mean that everybody should positional spar one day a week? No, they you know, it may be different for you. And I just think that also that then plays into the problem, the other problem that it's not just, you don't shouldn't just use metrics to track whether or not you're getting better. You should be choosing metrics to track whether or not you like you know what you should be focused on, right? Because it's also hard to know like, you can't see yourself getting better at everything all at once most likely. But you can see something like, I am getting this submission more. I'm not getting this submission more. I'm passing the guard more. I'm passing the guard easier. I'm passing the guard on better people, right? You can start to to measure it that way. But I think that the like the problem still comes back with when you're looking at like, am I getting better or not? It should be what should I be working so then I can be putting that effort of that positional spar week that I've discovered that really works for me. How can I take that positional spar week and know that I'm putting that effort in the right place? And I think that there's other valuable metrics of like, hey, if you looked at all your rounds, if you just went out and trained, you're just trying to win. You looked at all your rounds at a night. What percentage do you spend your time in like bottom side control? If you're spending 80% of your time in bottom side control, we know what you should be positional sparring. We know what you should be asking questions about. It should be bottom side control. And so I think that, yeah, I just think that there are so many other ways that not just we look at metrics to say, am I getting better, but we can kind of look at metrics to find the path to getting better. Speaker 2: I love that idea of not just following the metrics themselves, but having, I guess you could call them meta-metrics, which are metrics that assess whether you're doing things the right way, whether the system is working as intended, regardless of the result. That is so important. It it harkens back to my days as a as a software engineer. They would have this idea of writing test code. So, even if you're non-technical, you are probably aware that computer software is tremendously fragile and it just breaks all the time, right? Bugs happen, stuff breaks. So, and the more complicated your product gets, the more likely that bugs are going to occur. So, a practice that many developers will use is they will write the code for whatever it is they're building, and then they will write more code that is a series of test cases that execute against the code itself to make sure it's working. So, they've got multiple levels. They've got the code, the product they're building, which is supposed to be the thing that does the thing. But then wrapping around that, they have the all of these automated tests that are it's more code that tests the product itself to make sure that regardless of whether the product is giving the right answer, that the way it got there makes sense, right? Because there could be some tiny little bug in there that doesn't surface immediately. Maybe it looks like things are working, but it's causing some sort of catastrophic error that you won't even notice until months from now. Very similar situations happen in Jiu-Jitsu. My coach Emily talks about the idea of resulting, which is kind of where you chase the result that you got rather than the quality of the process you used to get there. It is completely possible to do everything wrong and still get the result that you wanted. I mean, you could go into a division in a competition and find out when you get there that every single other person contracted staff and they have to pull out. And so you win gold by default, right? That's possible. But that doesn't mean that you trained right. That doesn't mean your your methods were sound. It doesn't mean that you could repeat this process again next week or the week after. And so it's important not just to test ourselves against the results, but also against the broader systems and processes that we have. Are they good? Even if we didn't get the result that we want. I mean, there's no guarantee in a competition that you will. Even if you didn't get the result that you wanted, can you verify that at least the process was right and that it will eventually guide you in the direction you want to go next time? Speaker 1: Yeah, I think something full circle for what you've been saying. This is something that I got from Henry Akins. And which is a, you know, an old school black belt that you have to decode, but he has so much valuable stuff I've gotten from him. But one of the things he talks about with measuring how effective you are, he says, how many steps does this move take for you? Like, what do you mean? How many steps does it take? You're trying to pass the guard, you're trying to hit a sweep or whatever. How many steps is it? Is it undo the lapel, put your foot on the hip, wrap your lapel around your leg, feed the lapel to the other hand, off balance to the right, off balance to the left, and then you have your sweep. Because if you look at that, it's like six or seven different steps. That's six or seven different times that I can actually defend, right? Until you actually accomplish the task. What if you were so good at the Adam Warzinski, put both feet between the leg, get the right upper body grip and sweep, right? That has two steps to it. And when you look at that, you go, well, yes, that is going to be harder to learn because you're having to figure out how can I defend all these different things to make these this two-step process work. But when you're looking at like effectiveness, and this is back to that idea of I am trying to look at what task can I broadly look at needs accomplished. That's how I'm looking at whether or not I'm getting better or whether or not I'm winning in this Jiu-Jitsu situation, right? And so then I say, well, if I can take the number of steps that it takes me to accomplish it, and again, this is mental. I'm not telling you to do this as a teacher. I'm telling you to do this as a self-coach. When you start to look at it this way and have that mental shift of, wow, I am able to start offense of my guard passing by just pushing the feet to the side and starting to get chest over chest. You start to notice, well, that accomplishes this this task, right? That accomplishes this task of distance. I can start to flatten this person. I can start to whatever I look at it. I can start to to pummel and and win this. But when I look at it as, I need this specific angle, this specific grip, and they have to I start to get so detailed that I turn this into like a seven-step process to make it work. While I'm doing that, the two or three step process guy is going to probably hit one of his two or three step process moves. And so just kind of taking your moves and like you said, with the U-shape thing is you come back to simplicity. The better you get, like, maybe it takes a really complex way for you to hit sweeps right now. That's totally okay. But if you're starting to wonder, man, am I getting better? Well, something you can start to look at is, can I accomplish this task with less effort or can I accomplish this task with less steps, with less movement? Speaker 2: Yeah, I absolutely love that. And just thinking through what you're saying here, it makes me think, I mean, there's not a lot of Jiu-Jitsu that I would say confidently that I'm good at. Hey, look, you've got the I Suck at Jiu-Jitsu podcast, but man, you should have me on there every week because I suck at Jiu-Jitsu. But there's a few things that I do feel I'm really good at, particularly the stack pass and maybe the knee cut pass. And if you were to ask me how I do them, I really only have two, maybe even one step to doing the moves. Basically, I try to get my body into a certain shape relative to where my opponent is, and then I just move. Like it it's really not that complicated. I have a particular body shape I like to get myself in, and I know if I can get into that shape inside your guard, if I just turn my torso, I have a stack pass. Like it's really not that complicated. Whereas if I think about the stuff that I know I'm not good at, I'm really not as advanced at leg locks as like my brother is or a lot of people who train more in Nogi. To me, I'm still at kind of the middle of that complexity curve, where it is just a bombardment of ideas, positions, techniques, and what ifs. And I don't have the experience and knowledge yet to build a framework about that. And I feel okay about that because I know that most people don't. Like leg locks are still evolving very quickly. But I think that's a really great way of thinking about things. How many steps does it take you to do something or to understand or explain something? If you can do it in one or two steps, that means you must be pretty good at it. Speaker 1: And that is and so like when you think about that too, and you have your one or two step guard pass thought, what that means for you and then why this is so valuable too for you is you know if your body is not in that shape that you're probably defending. You're probably not even thinking about offense at that point. You're probably just like, okay, I'm protecting my hips, I'm protecting my neck. I know my angles that I don't want. And then you see your opening, you go, oh, there's my shape, and then I've hit my move. And so it allows you to understand offense and defense so much better than the person who just knows a bunch of moves and is just throwing them at, you know, at the situation. You're able to understand like, I know where I'm protected and where I'm not because you kind of have I would almost argue, you don't Okay, so I would I would argue not that you shouldn't train leg locks. But like, I think that a lot of people look at it as if you aren't good at Jiu-Jitsu if you don't know how to do dot dot dot. No matter how great you are everywhere else. You aren't good at Jiu-Jitsu if you can't do this. And I think that there are certain tasks that do you that you have to be able to accomplish. But I think of it differently. I think of it more as and this is back to the A-game thing. To me, even though I'm not I I don't even think of it as an A-game. I pretty much am always trying to follow the exact same path to victory. No matter where we're starting from, no matter who I'm going with. I am definitely lowering the amount of strength and the amount of effort that I'm giving if my training partner needs that and if it would benefit me to do that with my training partner. But I'm always still trying to accomplish the same task. But if you have me in a leg lock, yes, I still want to choke you from mount, but there are going to be different steps that I have to kind of or tasks that I have to accomplish before I get to mount, right? We've kind of changed the game a little bit. And so like my kind of argument, and this is why I started thinking this way is I had a brown belt that was a really, really high level collegiate wrestler. He was a purple belt when he came to me, but by the time he got to brown belt, he was winning a lot of stuff and he was like 265 pounds. And he said, hey, when do you want me you never push me to work on guard? And like I said, he came to me as a purple belt. He's like, every other coach made me spend like half of my time playing closed guard and butterfly and this and that. He's like, you never have me focus on that. I was like, yeah, but I have you focus on bad positions from mount, bad positions from side control, bad positions from these others. Let me ask you this. I go, you wrestled for 20 years, you've done Jiu-Jitsu for whatever seven or eight at this point. I go, if you were to get taken down by somebody in a tournament, because we are like you said, our goal was competition. If you were to get taken down by somebody, how long do you think we would need to train guard for, closed guard for, for you to have a chance to sweep somebody that's 270 that is good enough to take you down? And he goes, I don't know if we'd ever be able to sweep that guy. I said, look, dude, you train guard if you want to because you're interested in that. But if you can go to if you can accomplish the task of going from bottom to top, even if it is just always belly down single leg, and that's all the guard that you know, well, you're still accomplishing the task that leads to the rest of your Jiu-Jitsu game, which is pass and get to north south and finish from there. And so to me, you can still kind of always follow that same path. To me, you don't have to think as broadly. You can think about Jiu-Jitsu just deeper and deeper by saying, can I accomplish this same task against again, a better level of opponent or in a position that they're better from, like a different starting point. And so that doesn't mean that you have to have every ending point. I think though, great Jiu-Jitsu has is able to be accomplished from any starting point. Speaker 2: Well, I think I understand what you're saying here. You're saying that the guard is not real. It was propaganda created by Big Gracie to sell IBJJF memberships and to suppress the greatness of the turtle position. I believe is where you're going with this, correct? Speaker 1: And unrelated, I have been doing this American Jiu-Jitsu thing, you know? And uh, you know, I I really don't I just look at it like this. I play guard and I love it and I I wouldn't go to a Jiu-Jitsu coach that doesn't know how to play any guard. Unless I was in that situation where I knew that I was probably never going to play guard either. But it's back to different strokes for different folks. You should find the style of coaching that you best learn from. And of course, in the environment that you feel safe and you have fun in. And I don't understand why people then have to do that and then argue that their environment and their training method is the only one that works now. It's like, hey, let it work for these people, but I think that there should be more responsibility taken on the Jiu-Jitsu person themselves. And not the, you know, not the gym or whatever affiliation or whatever brand or whatever coach they have. And I think that they should be taking this responsibility to find the training methods that work best for them and the training groups. And it may even be as simple as finding what classes at the gym you train at have the coaches that you seem to learn from the best. It doesn't have to be a personality thing. Doesn't have to be, oh, I hate this coach and I love this coach. It can be simply, this coach explains Jiu-Jitsu in a way that makes sense to me. You don't have to go much deeper than that. You can just let it be like that. Speaker 2: But you do agree that the guard is not real, correct? It is a collective mental delusion. Speaker 1: I don't even know what you're talking about. What is guard? What is that? Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like the Mandela effect. We just all collectively imagined this thing into existence. It never worked, it was never there. It's just it's just fake. Speaker 1: Yeah, I uh I don't know why you wouldn't just stand up. You know what I mean? Like what are you doing? Why are you down there though? Why didn't why aren't you on top? Speaker 2: You know, you joke, but you're also 100% right. I think that everyone from our generation came up with this realization at some point that, wait a second, why don't I just stand up? I know that now it's become a meme, just stand up. But there really was a point in time where we were all conditioned of the greatness of the guard and it's this foundational important thing. And when I came up, like it was all about closed guard and, you know, you got to be a master of the pendulum flower sweep, whatever. But then at some point I realized, like, I've never actually hitting these moves. You know, they're great. I love a good pendulum sweep. But like, it's real hard to hit a good pendulum sweep against a good black belt, especially one who outweighs you. And at some point you do realize, if I just stand up and push the other person over, I achieve the same benefit and it's much easier than than if I did this fancy intricate move. So I think there is sometimes value in questioning, okay, why are we doing things this way, right? Is is maybe it works, yeah, but is it really the optimal way given what everyone else is doing right now? Speaker 1: And also, like, when you just stand up, if the person actually wants to play top, they will have to put effort to hold you down, which opens up sweeps and it opens up submissions. And so like, I remember, I remember going with this guy for I think I was a purple belt and he was a black belt and I hated rolling with him because nothing would happen in the round or he would butterfly sweep me or guillotine me. And I couldn't figure out what he was doing. And one day I realized, he literally just runs away. He just scoots away from me until I give him this exact look that he likes. And it was like until and that like thought was like, well, he keeps running away and then what he would do is anytime I would start to get in on him in a way that he didn't like, he would like do the old school get up and base. He would just start to stand up and then I would hug his hips. I would go to take him down and then he would be back in on a guillotine or back in on a butterfly. If I would start to get close, he would just scoot away. It was just he was just running away, trying to stand up over and over and over. And I noticed that having to actively hold him down was putting me in all of these submissions. And uh yeah, I remember realizing like, yeah, I don't think you should never play guard, at least if you're me. I there are times that I'm tired and I just need to play some guard, man. Like, I just need to we just need to this round is, you know, this five minute round, this 10 minute round is a whole painting. And I used way too much paint in the upper left hand corner and I'm running out of paint, brother. It's time to sit down for a second and chill out, play some guard. I just actually got a hot take on my hot take hotline where a guy called in and said, I I run a drywall company. And he said, I'm doing drywall all day, 12 hours a day. You cannot get mad at me for sitting guard if you sit work. He said, you can't, you know, if you sit at a desk job and he's like, and you get to sit work, you can't get mad at me for sitting guard, right? He goes, I just I started Jiu-Jitsu to sit down. He said, I just I just started Jiu-Jitsu to have a place to rest. And so sometimes I will play guard. But I agree, effectiveness wise, you should probably just always stand up, out wrestle everybody, take them down, pass their guard, mount them and submit them with, you know, an Americana, cross collar choke, something like that. Speaker 2: Yep. Well, is it really an Americana if you don't get it from inside the person's guard? That's the holy grail, right? You want to Americana them from inside their own guard to establish complete dominance. Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, honestly, that's pretty much all I focus on. You know what? Speaker 2: Again, we joke, but I'm telling you, man, one day, someone's going to nail that in high level competition, and then there's going to be a thousand instructionals about how to nail the Americana from inside the guard, and it's going to be at every single gym in America. It's going to be fantastic. I'm telling you, this is my prediction. It's going to happen. Speaker 1: I think you're probably right, sadly, when the truth is, in that situation, we should just all question the validity of the person that got submitted with the Americana from closed guard. If you're getting submitted with that and you're in high level competition, why are you playing closed guard? You should literally be playing anything else if you don't understand closed guard and you're getting Americana like that. Speaker 2: Well, as we wrap this one up, Josh, I want to ask you a little bit more about metrics. We talked about some of the false metrics that people chase, which don't really yield best results. And we talked about some practices for how to build better systems of metrics. But for you, at your gym, for yourself and for the students that you teach, what do you find are a more productive way to look at metrics for assessing whether you're really being good at Jiu-Jitsu? We touched on this here or there, but I'd love to maybe just hit this one more time to close this out. Speaker 1: So, this is kind of the like I was very abstract in the way of explaining that, but the process that I really use is that you have a focus and then you get reps of that focus somehow, right? It does not have to be it's different. Like I said, it's different for different people and it's for me, it's different per day. Sometimes I can't train too hard on something and I can't train too, you know, I just need some like some reps of something. But having that focus is huge because it allows you to focus on getting better at something. When you go into your training, you make sure that you keep that focus. This is the most valuable metric to be tracking because we all have this moment after training. It's maybe sitting on the side of the mat stretching, it's in the drive home, it is in the shower after class. Maybe you got beat down, maybe you're crying during this moment. Maybe you had a great training session and you're super happy. But either way, after hard training because we are so in the moment when we are rolling live, the only thing that you can typically help but think about is, wait, what the heck happened? You know, I wasn't analyzing really. I was just I was just going, right? And when you have a focus, you can look back and you can say, okay, I was focused on knee cutting today and I hit two knee cuts today, right? And that's a very simple way to go, oh, well, I I now know that I'm getting better. I hit zero knee cuts today. And then you can ask yourself, why? Well, I was getting put in lasso guard. I was getting put in something like that. So I can start to look at and say, well, do I even have an answer for that? Do I know how to deal with lasso guard? Maybe I should ask my coach, right? Maybe I now have a valuable question that I can start to ask. Again, back to a metric is who you go to and you get a good answer from is a good metric to track. Some people give you advice and they don't know. I don't know if you've ever like asked a question to chat GPT and it doesn't know the answer. It gives you the same confidence as when it 100% knows the answer. And that is how some people are with Jiu-Jitsu. They're like, oh yeah, this is what you do. And so maybe they're not giving you good advice. So you can really test like, okay, well, this person really did help me with my knee cut. Maybe they're going to be able to help me with my Americana from closed guard, you know, or a better move. But you're able to start to kind of track those metrics by just having a focus and then in your time of reflection that most of us just naturally have after Jiu-Jitsu, where you say, hey, am I actually getting better at this stuff? You can start to look at it with all kinds of different perspectives to actually know are you getting better? And then the other things that I'm always looking at when it comes to metrics is how hard are you going, right? How hard is it to you may be able to accomplish passing the guard on every single one of your training partners. So then you say, well, can I accomplish this task with 50% of my effort? Can I accomplish it with 25% of my effort? And people will argue like, you can't distinguish effort. I agree that like, I can't say 20% and everyone's going to go the same 20%. But I think again, this is not about coaching other people. This is about like the internal you know when you're going harder, right? You know when you're using more strength. And if you don't, you need to start to figure that out. That's only going to be something that you can tell yourself. That's not going to be something that somebody else can really explain to you. And so knowing how hard you have to go to accomplish that task. Or like, am I in bottom side control? Do I have to put in much effort? Am I able to be relaxed and survive? Even if I'm not escaping, am I able to not get submitted and not get mounted and not make it worse and be relaxed and not wear myself out, right? I'm able to kind of judge that and say, well, how I've always looked at it is, well, if it takes me 100% effort to escape side control or survive side control, and I can get it down to 50% effort, well, I probably just got like twice as good at Jiu-Jitsu. And that's how I'm always looking at again, back to I'm looking at each task and saying, how hard is it for me to accomplish, right? And so just by changing those things, you make such a difference in your Jiu-Jitsu. And then as you start to get good, I think you have to find new ways to find metrics because you may just win every round easily as you start to get good or most of the rounds you get to go with and then the other times you're rolling with people that just absolutely crush you. And so you're having to kind of change the way you look and I think the best way to start to look at that is just to say, hey, how many steps is this taking and then how hard is this for me to do it? As much as I can, I'm just looking at managing how hard I am going and yes, this is good for longevity. This is also just good for knowing that your Jiu-Jitsu is going to work without strength. And then the last little note is like a lot of people just struggle with that idea of what is Jiu-Jitsu without strength, right? And I think that because you're always using some strength. And yes, I would agree. But you look at it like this, when you go with a much bigger person and you do the same moves you always do and you get way more tired and they're not as effective. Wouldn't you argue that you've married some of your technique to strength? Because you can roll with some people. If you get to if you're lucky enough to roll with a really high level person, especially one that is smaller than you and they start to beat you and you're using all of your muscle and nothing is working and it almost looks as if they're not going hard and they're not trying. It is because they aren't trying. They're using just their technique. They're not using their strength. They're using the right angle, the right timing, the right defense. And I just would argue that that is what we all should be pursuing. No matter how big we are, no matter how young we are, no matter what our goals are because, let's say that I get good at accomplishing this task at 20%. When I go into competition, if I want to go up to 80%, if I need 80% or 100% to accomplish this task, I can do it. But I don't have to be going 100% all the time and I'm able to pace so much better and I'm able to especially when you're doing adult black belt 10 minute matches, you're able to make so much more happen at the end of a match and turn up that pace because you're efficient. And so there's definitely reason to do it this way even if you are a competitor. Speaker 2: Fantastic, man. Well, if people want to listen to more of you or if they want to call into your hotline and troll you, how do they do that? Speaker 1: So, hotline, the hot take hotline is 951 hot take. And if you call that, you'll hear me on an answering machine and you can deliver whatever piece of information you want. You can tell us your belt level, where you're from, or you can just be completely anonymous, completely up to up to you. But besides that, yeah, I think that that is the best way to talk to me. And the best way to hear for what we're doing, hear from me and my ideas of Jiu-Jitsu is always listening to the I Suck at Jiu-Jitsu show. We put out new episodes every single Thursday and we are always doing different stuff. Recently, you know, obviously we have the hot take hotline. Recently, I did some ranking videos on all the submissions in Jiu-Jitsu, all the guard passes. People were furious. They were so mad. And I was just sitting back, letting them argue in the comments when I really knew that techniques don't exist anyway. And so they were arguing about nothing. But a lot of people really liked that one. And so I think that I would recommend that is a good place to start if you check out the show. But yeah, besides that, I I hope this stuff was helpful. Speaker 2: Well, it definitely was to me, man. I always love having you on here. You've got such a great way to explain the stuff. So I encourage people to get more Josh McKinney. I'll put the links in the show notes so people can find you. Our stuff is also easy to find. It's all at bjjmentalmodels.com. You can get our podcast, full length episodes like this, plus our quick hit mini episodes, which are just individual concepts intended to get you up to speed fast. All of that's completely free. Our newsletter is well over 15,000 subscribers now and that's also free. So please do sign up for that if you haven't already. It definitely is worth your time. And if you would like to level up with us, please do consider joining BJJ Mental Models Premium. We've built the world's largest audio library of Jiu-Jitsu masterclasses. This is a very different approach from what you get with traditional video instructionals, although we do have video on our library. But if you've listened to this, you probably have a vibe for how we like to teach. We like to focus more on concepts and strategy and the why behind what you do. This stuff often fits in almost like a missing puzzle piece to the kind of stuff you're getting into the gym. We're getting close to 700 subscribers now. So please do consider becoming one of them if you haven't already. You can get that at bjjmentalmodels.com. And of course, we also have a coaching tier. In addition to all of the fun premium stuff, if you want to have awesome black belts, including Josh, review and break down your rolling footage, and Josh is very nice about it, then you can sign up for our coaching tier on bjjmentalmodels.com premium and we will get those reviews routed back to you. And thanks as always, Josh, for doing that. I really greatly appreciate getting a chance to work with you, man. I hear nothing but good things about people who get coaching from you. Again, anyone who's listened to this can probably tell you've got a great way for explaining this kind of stuff. Speaker 1: Yeah, man, I honestly, I really appreciate the opportunity to do those reviews. That's uh, you know, having Jiu-Jitsu as a job in that way, a remote like, I just get to have people from all over the world sending me videos that I tweak their Jiu-Jitsu, help coach their Jiu-Jitsu. That's just such a cool thing. That's such a fun thing to get to do. And then I've like even had situations where I've got videos sent in from people that live like 20 minutes away from me. And I'm like, hey, why aren't you getting a private lesson with me, dude? What's what's your problem? But it's really fun to to get to do those reviews and just in get to make those connections with different people and just see all the different Jiu-Jitsu, hear the different languages because, you know, when somebody sends in a video, they're saying something like, hey, I was in reverse Uchimada and then my upside down salami guard didn't do this. And I'm like, man, I don't know what they're talking about. Like, wait a second, he just he's just closed guard. Like, I didn't know people were calling it this stuff now, right? And so it really does. I don't know, it kind of keeps me up on the up and up of Jiu-Jitsu a lot. But it's so fun to get to just share my Jiu-Jitsu perspective in a way that I think is helpful to people. Speaker 2: Well, that's actually one thing we didn't plug. Why don't you talk about your gym? If people want to train with you, where are you and where can they find you? Speaker 1: So, my gym is called Head Nod and we have three different locations. We have Head Nod in Granite City, Edwardsville, and in Jerseyville, Illinois. They're all in Southern Illinois. And we have, man, great coaches and just really, really great Jiu-Jitsu. And I think the most important thing though is we just have like a fun vibe to the gym. It's just people that are there simply to get better at Jiu-Jitsu from all kinds of different walks of life, all kinds of different jobs, different religions, and they just love to go and train Jiu-Jitsu together and try to get good at Jiu-Jitsu together. And some of them compete, some of them do it for self-defense and well-being. But again, the focus is simple. It is to just get better at Jiu-Jitsu. And so, yeah, we would love to come show you guys some American Jiu-Jitsu. Speaker 2: I love it, man. Well, I will put links to that in the show notes too. But as always, Josh, thank you so much for doing this, buddy. Speaker 1: Yes, of course. Thank you for having me. Speaker 2: Most welcome. Thank you to the listeners too. Appreciate you and we will talk to you soon.