Ep. 371: Building on a Curriculum, feat. Todd Richards

Speaker 1: Hey everybody, before we get started this week, I just want to let you know we released a new mindset course featuring Rob Bernaki from Island Top Team and BJJ Concepts. It's called Mindset for Betas. It's an amazing resource that breaks down a new way to build a resilient jiu-jitsu mindset. It's part of BJJ Mental Models Premium. I will spare you the full sales pitch because you can try it for free. Just go to BJJmentalmodels.com/beta. I will give you a free month, you can check out the course and if you decide that it's not worth your money, you can cancel, you won't have to pay a cent. I've already been told by subscribers that this is the most valuable piece of jiu-jitsu content they've ever received, so I hope you like it too. Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to BJJ Mental Models episode 371. I am Steve Kwan and BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent jiu-jitsu approach. And I'm here today with friend of the BJJ Mental Models community, long-time correspondent, someone that I've talked to back and forth quite a bit and we finally got you on the podcast here. I've got Todd Richards on the line. How's it going, Todd? Speaker 2: It's going really good. Thank you. Glad to be here. Speaker 1: I am glad to hear that, my friend. Well, why don't you tell everyone who you are and then we'll go into a very timely topic that like I was telling you before we hit record, I just got someone a few hours ago who sent me fan mail and asked about this specific topic. But first, let's talk about you. Who are you, Todd, and where might people know you from? Speaker 2: So, I'm Todd Richards. I don't know if anybody's going to know me from anywhere besides just training with me. I'm not a super famous or really out there black belt, but I'm a third-degree black belt under Keith Owen here in Boise, Idaho, and I actually took over as one of the head instructors after he passed away a couple years ago at his old gym, Team Rhino Jiu-Jitsu here in Meridian. So, that's kind of what I've been doing the last couple years is training and teaching and trying to pass on Keith's jiu-jitsu to everybody else, so. Speaker 1: Yeah, for those who don't know, I mean, Keith Owen has been a fixture of the jiu-jitsu community since, man, I don't know, since before I even started. He's been around for ages and tragically a few years ago, he passed. And you now are, correct me if I'm wrong, the head instructor there now, correct? Speaker 2: A co-head instructor. There's another gentleman that also kind of we split the duties when Keith passed because he and I were both promoted at the same time, so we were the highest-ranking black belts at the time. And so when Keith passed, we're like, well, it was just too big of a shoes for either one of us to fill on our own, so we split kind of the responsibilities for everything. Speaker 1: Now, let's talk a bit about the gym and the affiliation just so that people understand the scope here because today we wanted to talk about the benefits of using a structured curriculum and maybe even how you can go about creating such a thing. But first, people will often want to know, you know, how big is the gym, how big is the affiliation, is this something that's going to apply in my situation? So, why don't we go ahead and talk a little bit about the gym. Go ahead and plug it as well and let people know where they can find you and how to train with you. Speaker 2: Yeah, so the gym is Team Rhino Jiu-Jitsu in Meridian, Idaho. We have a beautiful, actually fairly new within the last couple years, uh space that's about 4,500 square feet of mat space. Big open area, very, uh Keith and his wife Charlene actually right before he passed designed this space. Um so it's it was Keith's dream. And it's designed exactly to his specifications. So we've got this beautiful space. The only thing change we made is we've got a big picture of him on the wall now that wasn't going to be there originally. So, he's always staring down at us as we train. But it's here located in Meridian, Idaho, just off the freeway, really easy to get to, really central location. And it's a just a fantastic gym to train at. Lots of good people, lots of good training to be had there, so. Speaker 1: Well, thanks a lot for the intro, Todd. And just so that people have an idea of the scope of your work, why don't you talk a bit about how big the gym is and how big the affiliation is as well. I think when we start talking about curriculum, a common question that people will bring up is, hey, does this apply in my situation given that my gym is really small? And I'd love to get your thoughts on that based on the size of the work that you guys operate under and whether you think that's going to be appropriate to people of all sizes or whether we're talking today mostly about larger gyms or larger affiliations. Speaker 2: So, we actually have a mix. Our home gym is about 200, 250 students between kids and adults. But then we have about six affiliates around the country and actually one up in Victoria. And those gyms tend to be a little bit on the smaller side. I think our largest affiliate is only about 50 students and our smallest is six guys, I think, that meet in a racquetball court and train. So, it's kind of all we we range all sizes, but they all use our curriculum and that we provide for them at a very low cost. So, they're not breaking the bank because we want to make it accessible for people with those smaller gyms or those little clubs that they put together can access our curriculum and learn and train from it. We also uh offer what we call ground control certified. So, if you have a stand-up martial arts school, karate, taekwondo, kempo, one of those things and want to incorporate some grappling, we offer that as a supplement for your stand-up martial art as well where you can access some of our curriculum and train that for your your students as well. So, we have kind of a little bit of a mix of both. Speaker 1: Right, right, right. Now, let's get into the topic at hand here today. You had told me that you've done a ton of work to put together a structured curriculum both for your gym and also something that the people under the affiliation can benefit from as well. And as I mentioned, with coaches, this is always a hot topic. There's a lot of different ways to attack this problem of how to build a jiu-jitsu curriculum, right down to the discussion of, hey, should we even have one? Because that is in itself is an opinion some people have. They might prefer a more free-structured approach. So, let's maybe define terms before we get into the chat here. What is a curriculum from your standpoint? When you build this out, what are you including in that and is there anything that you're specifically not including in terms of how you structure the way that you teach? Speaker 2: Yeah, I so I think that's a a big misunderstanding a lot of people have is curriculum is not just, hey, here's a set of moves that you're going to do at this belt level, right? As a white belt, you're going to learn to breakfall and you're going to learn to shrimp and you're going to learn an armbar from guard. That is your curriculum, right? It's I don't think that's an accurate way to describe it. I think curriculum is a structure that would be helping you progress along the way. So, it's it's a way to step through your different levels of your each belt and not just be, hey, today I'm learning armbar from guard and tomorrow I'm going to be learning daily heva and on Thursday we're learning X-guard. So, there's more structure to what you're learning every single time as opposed to the instructor showing up and teaching whatever they feel like or whatever they saw on Instagram last night. But you have structure so you can help guide your learning and you can help people understand that when they go through their training, they know what's next. They know what they're going to be learning each step of the way as opposed to they're going to be at the mercy of whatever the instructor feels like. Speaker 1: Now, I think it's interesting that you said we're not just talking about a list of moves here because I have seen curriculum where it is just a list of moves and I've always wondered, man, does this really work? Do you really teach people good jiu-jitsu if you're the way that you're teaching is basically just a checklist of a few dozen moves that you as the instructor have decided are important? I remember one time I saw a curriculum from a a well-established gym and it was just a gigantic list of things you needed to know if you wanted to get each individual belt level. And I remember looking at this and thinking, you know, this is wild because there's a lot of really good black belts I know who probably wouldn't be able to pass this curriculum, but they'd probably be able to beat up your purple belts who can pass this curriculum, right? So, it's an interesting thing, right? Talking about what are we actually testing for, so to speak, when we award belts. I'd love to get your thoughts on that. You know, you mentioned that you guys don't just have a a checklist of moves. Give me the argument as to why that's the wrong approach because there are many gyms who do use that approach and I agree with you it's suboptimal, but can you explain maybe more eloquently than me as to why that is? Speaker 2: Yeah, I think with just a checklist of the moves, there's no interconnectivity, right? It's great to know all of the moves on the checklist, right? You can and great to know all of those moves and they're fantastic moves to know. In fact, the original gym I trained at in Vancouver, Washington, uh Progressive Jiu-Jitsu had that as a curriculum. It was just a checklist of moves that you went through at each belt level. And it was and it worked, but it was sub-optimal. It was not a way to find that interstitial part of jiu-jitsu, right? Because you can't go from passing the guard into an armbar from side control without that interstitial part. You need to have that that space in between. They're not just one move works out of the other. So, having your move structured in a way that they're they step-by-step work through a process makes it a lot easier to learn how to connect moves together. And that's something I think that gets ignored a lot, especially for newer students, is that the interplay between moves, how one move works with another. So, for example, with our white to blue belt students, we have our moves actually structured into I hate to use the word kata, but they're kind of a kata drill formation where they are working through a process like this is a likely situation where you're going to use this move. For example, the first drill we have is you get pushed down and you breakfall as the start of the drill. It's to simulate getting sucker punched or someone coming up and pushing you down. So, you learn how to fall, not just breakfall, but fall when someone is applying force to you. So, it's not just moves in a vacuum, it's moves in a situation, which allows you to begin those thinking processes where you tie things together. So, Speaker 1: Really well said and this aligns with my understanding as well of the best way to teach. I've said before that it is unwise to teach jiu-jitsu as just a collection of moves because that's not how we train jiu-jitsu. When you are sparring, if you want to spar effectively, you don't spar by just doing moves. Often the thing that makes the moves work is the connections in between them. As uh, you know, Claude Debussy said, music is the space between the notes. And I think that is very applicable to jiu-jitsu as well. Jiu-jitsu is the space between the techniques. So, when we try to break jiu-jitsu down into a series of techniques, intuitively that sounds like a good approach and maybe that is a helpful way to understand and explain things to each other, right? We got to have names for terms. But in terms of how we actually grapple effectively, you know, if you talk to a black belt, they're what's going on in their head when they're sparring, they're not just sitting there thinking, do armbar, now do omoplata. You know, they're they're kind of flowing and reacting to things and trying to think strategically about what they want to do one step down the pipe. These are things that don't easily fit into a traditional curriculum. So, I think it's important to figure out a way to teach that aspect of things. Now, of course, the whole point of something like ecological dynamics is it's an approach specifically to solve for this kind of problem. I think that is very helpful, but I'm always curious to get other people's different opinions as to how they structure things. Another observation that I've seen is when coaches talk, they often talk as if there's a right way and a wrong way to teach and absolutely nothing in between. And this can sometimes lead to unproductive or inaccurate discussions about coaching because coaches will sometimes make it sound like your coaching is either good and it's going to work or it's bad and it's not. And in reality, coaching like, I mean, like jiu-jitsu, coaching is on a spectrum. Some is better, some is worse, but very rarely are things as simple as good or bad or perhaps you could say effective or ineffective. There's a lot of coaches who use methods that are maybe not completely optimal, but they're optimal enough that they can produce good athletes and good champions. So, we don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater or or as my friend Priit Mihkelson would say, we don't want to throw the baby with the bathwater out the window. And sometimes when we get into discussions about stuff like this, it turns into a discussion of, are you using the good method or the bad method? I would say there is no such thing. And what we're looking for here is to find ideas that anyone can apply, often to their existing curriculum or their existing structure. It's not like there's just two options, the good and the bad one. I think with curriculum, what we can do is look at best practices and use those to inform and customize our own method. This is just me as a podcaster talking though. Am I talking out of my butt here or is this stuff that you would agree with too? Speaker 2: No, this is stuff I absolutely agree with. I am also in agreement that there is no right or wrong way to coach things and you have to find the right one that works for you. We often joke that we are the school for accountants and engineers because we've structured everything that way. We want to make sure it's very easily understandable by every single person. But that doesn't work for everybody, right? That's not going to be the optimal gym for somebody out there. So, we want to make sure that we're trying to reach as many people as we can, but again, you're never going to reach everybody because everybody's going to have a different opinion on how what works for them and how they learn. So, using a curriculum is a good way to create a guideline for how you teach people, but it's not necessarily the best thing for everybody. So, you have to kind of look at what is your gym trying to do? Is your gym trying to be world champions, right? Like a Craig Jones. Craig Jones doesn't need a curriculum. Craig Jones is fantastic. His gym focuses on what they need to win championships, right? They don't need as much of a curriculum and can focus more on like those ecological dynamic systems and other things like that. Whereas my gym is focused on everyday people, right? People with jobs, accountants and engineers, people that work nine to five and then come and train or people that have families and things like that. They can't train six hours a day every day. So, we want to give them a structure so they know what they're working on. They know what they can do and what class is for that day. So, they're getting the most out of their time on the mat. Speaker 1: So, what does the difference look like in those situations? Because I would hear something like this and I might think to myself, well, isn't good coaching just good coaching and that's it? Why would there be a a difference in how we teach for a casual hobbyist versus a full-time pro? What are your thoughts on that? Is there something specifically that you do to address that clientele that you've described? Speaker 2: Yeah, so we have a ton of documentation. Whereas a full-time pro, they can take the time to break down a move and go through it and go through it and go through it and drill it 700 times in a day. A casual hobbyist that's training two days a week doesn't have that kind of time. And they're if they're going to do it, they're going to be a white belt for 17 years and people are going to be wondering why they're not good at jiu-jitsu. So, we have tons of documentation. So, the our original curriculum was actually not developed by me. Uh Keith before he passed, started this project back in like 2016, 2017. And so when we initially built our curriculum, we started at white belt to blue belt, looked at what we needed and then we built our curriculum around what was needed for that those people. We also made videos for each thing that we do. So, we have a library of videos that our students can study on and off the mat. We also have it in text form, so you can read through your your drills and what you're working on that day. We try and send out a list every month of what we're teaching on what day. So, if you've already done some of the drills and you don't want to focus on that on the things that are coming up on Monday, hey, come on Tuesday and you're going to work on something else. So, and we also incorporate in days where there's not curriculum, right? Hey, you've been stuck working on the curriculum for six weeks, you want to work on something else? Hey, we have a day where the instructor's teaching leg locks. Come to that day. So, it's a great way to incorporate and create that expectation for people to work on their technique, but also give them the support that they need that they can't get necessarily because they have that nine to five job or they have the family to take care of. Speaker 1: So, you mentioned something really interesting here, which I want to expand on. You talked about how with the hobbyists and the casual grapplers, sometimes they need a higher quality curriculum than the actual professionals. And this might be counterintuitive to many people, but I understand what you're talking about here as someone who does train casually. People sometimes assume that if someone is really good at jiu-jitsu, that must mean that they are using the absolute best coaches and the absolute best training methods and that's why they're so good. But that really fails to take into account the importance of things like your natural gifts, your time commitment, and just circumstances. You know, when did you discover this sport? I, you know, did you discover it when you're young in your athletic prime or did you discover it when you're 45 years old? These things matter. And what I have observed is that sometimes the people that you think would have the best methods because they're good at jiu-jitsu, they actually don't. So, I mean, as an example, I once got access to the coach to one of the or some of the best athletes in jiu-jitsu. And I assumed that this person would be just an amazing coach because they train some of the very best. And after talking to this person, it really threw me off because I realized, I don't think this person really actually knows what they're talking about. And I was able to actually corroborate that with some other people who had the same opinion. And I think what happens is if you are a good enough athlete, you know, if the stars just aligned and you are just a natural incredible athlete, you come into jiu-jitsu at the right time in life, you all of the stars align for you and you train really, really hard, you can actually get good even if you're using suboptimal methods. I mean, this is again, if we want to talk about newer methods like the ecological approach, people often say, well, you know, why do we need eco? Because the old methods are producing more champions. Well, that doesn't mean the old methods are better. It just means that look, there could be a lot of freak athletes who came up using the old methods and these people were going to be good no matter what. On the other hand, if you look at hobbyists or casual people, this is in my opinion where producing good grapplers is more impressive. If you take someone who's young and really athletic and trains five hours a day every day and you make them a champion, honestly, that's not super impressive because it's hard to know how much of that was because of the coach and how much of that was just because this person was going to be great no matter where they went. On the other hand, if you can consistently take a bunch of casual people who don't want to be world champions and maybe they don't come into jiu-jitsu in their athletic prime and maybe they're not naturally good at this and you can make them all good at jiu-jitsu. That to me is a much greater sign of coaching than how many world champions you produce. That's my thoughts though. Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's absolutely the correct thought, right? Because people with that natural athletic gift, I've trained with a ton of those people. Um I've been at this a very long time and I have trained with tons of people with natural athletic gifts. They could beat me hands down most days of the week, right? But I've also been at this a long time and I've been to a ton of seminars. I was very fortunate that when I was younger, I had the spare funds to be able to go to a lot of different seminars. And I've run into a lot of those guys that they are world champions, but they can't teach to to save their life, right? They do what they do because they can do it naturally. They don't have any thought process behind it. They don't have any understanding of why it works, right? Whereas with hobbyists, you need to understand why. You need to be able to explain that why because they don't have that natural athleticism or those natural gifts to make up for that. So, you have to as the coach, provide the fill in that gap with knowledge, with instruction, with support. You can't have a hobbyist say, okay, hey, we're going to go out and do armbars. Here's how you do it. I'm going to show you one time, figure it out. I can do that with a natural athlete. That's easy. With a hobbyist, I can't because one, they don't have the time and two, they're going to need extra help. They're going to need me to walk them through it. And that's why I think a curriculum can be really helpful because we create an opportunity for them to learn not just on the mats, but also outside of the mats. They can go back and review the material. They can on their free time, right? You have you can't be on the mat that day because you have to work late. Oh, hey, you can turn the video on on your phone while you're working on your computer at work and review the material, right? I do that all the time. I I sit there and work with my headphones in and I have a jiu-jitsu video going and if hey, here's something I like, I watch that for a minute or two and then I go back to work. So, it's a great way to support yourself because I've never been a natural athlete. I'm still not a natural athlete and I want to make sure that people can gain the benefits of what I do. So, I want to be there to support people when I do it. Speaker 1: Well, let's talk about the actual curriculum itself. You've put a lot of thought into how to structure things. Like you said, since you took over, you guys did a massive overhaul. What does your curriculum look like and what are the main realizations that you came to as you put together this process? Speaker 2: Yeah, so we have a structured curriculum for each belt. It becomes less structured as you go up. So, for our white to blue belts, we have our curriculum broken down into a nine drills that they have to do that walks through kind of the basic positions that you're going to go through in jiu-jitsu, a couple of takedowns, a couple of self-defense maneuvers, you know, so common stuff you're going to see. You're going to do an armbar in that in these drills. You're going to do a triangle, you're going to do a breakfall, you're going to do a shrimp, you're going to do a lot of elbow escaping out of mount. You're going to do a lot of recovering your guard, standing up in base. All of those things that you'd see on that list of moves for white to blue belt, you're going to see in these drills, but they're structured in a way that you walk through them in a scenario as opposed to just, hey, today we're breakfalling and tomorrow we're armbarring. No, we're going to walk through our drill where we breakfall and then we trap somebody in our guard and then sweep them from that position as opposed to, hey, we learned all three of those moves separately and now I've got to figure out how to put them together. So, all of our white to blue works like that. From our blue to purple, we have a similar setup, but it's a lot broader as opposed to the kind of the narrow focus you need for white to blue because white to blue belts need that extra support and that narrowing your focus, right? Blue belts looking to be a purple belt, you can broaden things out. So, it's a lot less focused, it's a lot less these are the moves exactly you're going to do. No, it's it's going to spread out. Here's some options to do things from like daily heva and open guard, spider guard. Here's some combination moves as you move, hey, your armbar fails and now we're going to move on to a secondary move, a choke or something like that. And so that is our uh white to blue and blue to purple kind of. And then as you go from purple to brown, we set no restrictions on it at all. This is something that we do. We set a very broad parameters to our curriculum and say, when you test for your brown belt, we want to see three sweeps from the guard, two sweeps from the open guard, five takedowns, two throws, kind of all going through all the different positions. And we don't want to see the moves that we tell you to do. We want to see the moves that you want. We want to see your jiu-jitsu. So, it's a great way to as you move up, things broaden out for you, but it creates that structure when you're new and you need more structure and then we allows us to interpret and incorporate the way we want people to succeed. Speaker 1: So, I'd love to get your thoughts here on what makes it into the fundamentals curriculum. There's a lot of debates in jiu-jitsu about what is a fundamental. And I don't know if there is a right answer on that, but you will see a lot of variation in this. Some people will carve out specific techniques that they will say are fundamental. So, for example, maybe you consider, I don't know, the cross collar choke to be a fundamental. And so this is part of your curriculum for beginners. Other people will put together a curriculum that is more based on concepts, things you need to know, like how to maintain your alignment. And then, of course, there are people who will have a much more free-form, unrestricted curriculum where it's something that is more about the method than any individual outcome. And this is where things like ecological dynamics come to mind. I don't want to say that everyone who teaches eco teaches without structure, that would not be a fair thing to say. But there are approaches you can take that are more focused on the process than on any specific boxes to check. What are your thoughts on what constitutes a fundamental in jiu-jitsu for anyone who's putting together a say a white belt level program? Speaker 2: Yeah, I think the what constitutes a fundamental is going to depend on what your goals are for your program. For our gym, our main focus is on people learning self-defense skills. We don't we're not a big competition gym. We don't have a whole lot of competitors overall. I mean, we do have competitors, but actually got a decent bit competing tomorrow at a tournament here locally. But it's not our main focus, right? So, when we look at our white belt curriculum, what we said, and this is actually a lot of Keith and through conversations with him over the years how we narrowed it down is we want anybody that gets a blue belt from us to be able to defend themselves. So, a lot of our curriculum is structured on how do you defend yourself in a bad position? How do you escape that bad position and move on to a dominant position or extricate yourself from that situation, right? So, a lot of our fundamentals are focused on that defense, which is a great way, like we work a ton on elbow escapes, shrimps, recovering your guard, protecting yourself from punches while you're in the guard and less on submissions because as a white belt, I think that's more important that you're able to protect yourself. Plus when you move to blue belt, it's a good skill to have already sharpened. Whereas if you want to run a competitive gym, your main focus, I think as a white belt should be a lot different, right? You should be looking more for those submissions, how to dominate the position, right? Less on the escapes and more about how to gain control. So, it kind of really depends on what you're looking for and what your goal is for your program on how you develop your curriculum. So, that would be the first thing I would say if you're developing a curriculum, define your goal for your program first, right? What do you want to get out of your white belts, right? What do you want your white belts to be really good at? What are you really good at? How do you want to be remembered as a jiu-jitsu coach when somebody leaves your gym? How do you want people visiting people to come to your gym and say, man, all of your guys are really good at elbow escapes and are really hard to submit. Oh, you guys all have killer armbars. What do you want out of your program and then design your curriculum around that? If you are a great, just expert armbar guy, you you can hit armbars on every single person. Design your curriculum around that. Build what you want out of that, but define it first because that's going to make it a lot easier. Speaker 1: Yep. I've got some thoughts here on this. You bring up an interesting concept there that you want to tailor your curriculum depending on the needs of your students. Something I observe with jiu-jitsu is that it is a sport where people's attention is so focused on top-level competitors that sometimes that standard and that way of training is held as some sort of gold standard that everyone needs to use. So, you mentioned self-defense. There's a lot of people who are very competition focused who might look at self-defense almost as a dirty word and they might say, well, you know, people use that as an excuse to water down the art. Look at the the traditional martial arts and how ineffective they are, right? And we can get into whether that's a fair statement or not. But there is this belief that everyone should be training like a world-class competitor because that's what quote-unquote works at the highest levels. And my thoughts on this are as follows. If you are only able to teach and train high-level competitors and what you're focusing on is helping specifically those high-level competitors win championships, that's fine, but that means that you are then a competition coach. You're not really teaching a martial art. The idea of a martial art is that anyone should be able to use it. If you're teaching a fighting system that only works for people who are amazing athletes and are looking to win world championships, then it's not a martial art for everybody. And at that point, is it even really a martial art if it's something that only the absolute best are able to do? So, I think we need to understand that there's a reason why over all of these years, martial arts have focused on methods that work for the average person because the purpose of a martial art is to build a something systematized that can be repeated and doesn't require you to be a freak athlete in order to get results. So, I think it's important to have that conversation when we talk about things like self-defense since people are so obsessive about what the very best world-class athletes are doing and how can we mirror that? I mean, we should absolutely look to those world-class athletes for cues and for lessons that we can then deploy to general masses, but we also have to bear in mind that the general masses are not high-level athletes. I have been to gyms before where they teach techniques that they'll say like this is what the absolute high-level athletes are doing and they'll teach something that's like a backflip to get out of the guard or get off the bottom. And you know, maybe that is something that very high-level athletes can do, but the regular person is not going to do those techniques. I think this matters because in order for a martial art to really be effective as a martial art, it has to be repeatable and something that works for most people, not just for the absolute very, very best athletes. And many of the techniques and strategies that get taught at those competition gyms, they just could not be done by average people. They require a high level of athleticism to complete. So, I think that is an important distinction to make when we talk about what is a martial art and who are we actually teaching for? Like you said, it does differ if you are a competition coach where you really are focused on the people who are the very best, versus if you are a martial arts instructor and you're trying to bring this sport to the broader masses. Speaker 2: Yeah, I absolutely agree with that because I do think jiu-jitsu tends to focus on those really high-level athletes, but the problem with that, in at least in my opinion, is that those athletes are what, 0.5% of all jiu-jitsu practitioners? There's not a lot of them. It's the same hundred or so guys at the top-level tournaments all the time. All those top competitions are all the same guys. So, it's pretty easy to pick out who they are. Whereas I'm not one of those guys. Most of the people I know aren't those guys. So, in my opinion, jiu-jitsu does have that problem where we focus so much on those top-level guys. The problem is those guys are 0.5 of a percent of all jiu-jitsu practitioners. There's about the same hundred guys at the top-level competition. All the different competitions are all the same guys over and over and over. You get used to seeing them, you get used to know their systems, which is great for those guys because they get to sell their instructional on that system. But a regular guy coming in on the off the street, that's not a helpful system for them. They need to know things more basically, right? I can't teach them how to do Gordon Ryan's system of passing the guard and taking the back because they don't know how to do that. That is a thing for upper belts. I need to be able to teach them how to keep their elbows in when they're on the bottom and having that as a much more accessible thing as opposed to focusing on what what are the high-level guys doing? No, we don't need to focus on what high-level guys do. We need to focus on what's what what works? What's a martial art? How do we protect ourselves, right? How do you protect yourself if you get knocked down outside in the snow? The most effective tool I've ever used for martial arts is the breakfall because it gets cold here and we gets icy and I slip and fall during the winter. And I learn how to breakfall and I don't get hurt. It's the best tool I've ever used. So, when we're grappling, we want to focus on what works the best for the most amount of people, right? A cartwheel pass looks really cool and it's great when you do a cartwheel pass. But can everybody do a cartwheel pass? No. But everybody can shrimp. Everybody can keep their elbows in when they're on the bottom. Everybody can work on basic things like a basic guard pass like a knee cut pass. So, focusing on what works for more people is a great way to bring people in, great way to support people as they go through their journey, right? And if later when they want to work, when they get a little more freedom, when they get a little more experience, if they want to work on things like the cartwheel pass or worm guard or whatever they want to work on, yeah, go for it. Learn whatever you want to learn. Jiu-jitsu is about your progress, not what I tell you to do. But for most people, we need to focus and narrow down what works best for the most amount of people. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. I find it interesting because often the people who opine about how we should only train what works at the quote-unquote highest levels, these are often people who are not operating at the highest levels, right? I mean, there's a lot of people who will say things like, you know, well, I only train what Gordon trains or I only train what uh, you know, Adelle trains. I'm thinking, okay, that's cool and all, but like, how's that working out for you? Because as far as I can tell, you're a two-stripe white belt who barely competes. So, so I don't know if that method is actually yielding the results that you think it is. I mean, maybe it makes you feel good. Maybe it allows you to signal that you're better than you actually are because you're able to claim that you use the methods that the best do, but is that really yielding results for you because you're not getting the results that the best do? I think that although, of course, we want to take into account what the best are doing and it's very important that we have high-level competition because that is where much of the innovation is going to happen. It's where ideas get proven out. In terms of how we teach people, especially at the beginner levels, we don't necessarily need to teach those people the exact same things that you would need to do if you're going to go off and win a tournament. It's slightly different. Now, it sounds to me from what you're describing, like your definition of the fundamentals is less about individual techniques and more about specific movements that you say are important. So, when you describe what you put in your white belt curriculum, I noticed you didn't say closed guard or triangle chokes. You said breakfalls, shrimps, stuff like that. These aren't even things that would often be considered a technique to many people. They're more movement-based. So, in many ways, what you're describing is almost like a very close to kind of a conceptual framework. Tell me a little bit more about what kind of stuff you guys put in that white belt curriculum. Maybe run through that in a bit more detail. You already talked about breakfalls, of course, shrimping. What are the other things that you think are absolutely essential for people to learn first and foremost when they start jiu-jitsu? Speaker 2: Yeah, so when we teach that white to blue belt curriculum, like I I said earlier, we want to work on that space between the moves. How do we link these moves together? So, that's not to say that our white to blue belt curriculum does not have closed guard, does not have armbars because it absolutely has those things. But it has those things as a factor of how do we move through these positions, right? So, for example, one of our drills in the white to blue belt curriculum starts side control bottom, you escape, recover your guard and then move into the armbar, right? As opposed to we just teach you how here's closed guard and how you hold it. No, here's closed guard and how you move to it and then move beyond it. So, yeah, it is very conceptual based and I tend to think about jiu-jitsu very conceptually. I tend to think less about it as individual moves and more about here's things that you need to retain as you go through your grappling, your space control, things like that, points of control, all that. So, our curriculum focuses a little bit more on that conceptual side as opposed to the here we're going to learn armbar today. Yes, it's great. You need to know the technique for armbar, but if you can't get back to the guard to do your armbar, that technique isn't any good for you. So, working on that that space between those moves, I think is a really important skill for a lot of jiu-jitsu guys that they don't get right away. Speaker 1: So, for me, when I think of what is a fundamental, how would I describe that? To me, a fundamental is something that is foundational, right? Hence the term fundamental. It's got to be part of a foundation. And that means it's got to be something that pretty much you need to know in order to do jiu-jitsu. And I would state that many of the techniques that people say are fundamentals aren't really fundamentals. They might be important, they might be high percentage, they might be common, but that's different from being a fundamental. So, if your gym starts off and they consider the fundamentals curriculum to be things like closed guard, armbars, cross collar chokes, I would argue that even that isn't necessarily fundamental. I mean, you can theoretically get really good at jiu-jitsu and even be one of the best in the world without doing collar chokes. There's a lot of great athletes who don't really play closed guard for all that we talk about the importance of it. So, we could consider these to be early techniques that are important to understand, but that's different from a fundamental to me. To me, a fundamental is this is the foundation of jiu-jitsu and you need this stuff. Not you should have it or you want to have it or a lot of people have it, but you need this in order to get anywhere in the sport. To me, that's how I define it. Speaker 2: I absolutely agree with that. I think a lot of people confuse fundamental moves with iconic moves of jiu-jitsu, right? Jiu-jitsu is very well known for closed guard, cross collar chokes, armbars from guard. All those kind of iconic moves, the Americana, all of those things. Those are iconic moves, but they're not necessarily fundamental moves. You don't need to know how to do them to be good at jiu-jitsu. There's plenty of no-gi guys that can't do a cross collar choke to save their life, but they're still good at jiu-jitsu. Just because they train no-gi doesn't mean that they're any less good at jiu-jitsu. But I can guarantee you all those no-gi guys know how to shrimp. They all know how to breakfall. They know how to do good posture in the guard, how to move their body in the right way where you're not going to move your head in front of your belt line and break your balance. All of that is a fundamental to me, whereas, yeah, I can teach you how to do an armbar. That's great. And it's a great thing to know. But that's iconic move of jiu-jitsu, not a fundamental move of jiu-jitsu. Whereas I need you to know, hey, when we sit in the closed guard, we're back straight, head up, our head is behind our belt line so we don't get bucked forward very easily. Our hips are rolled slightly forward to help protect our posture. That to me is a fundamental. How do you sit properly in guard versus how do you do the armbar from guard? Speaker 1: Yeah, I think the technique-first approach to teaching jiu-jitsu, although it's very seductive because intuitively it kind of makes sense as the way to describe things and we do need it because we need a way to be able to communicate with each other. We have to put labels and terms on things, right? We can't just uh, you know, break down every single technique into a series of concepts and explain it that way. At some point, we need to call an armbar an armbar or we just can't communicate with each other. It is important, but to make that the basis of the way that you teach with techniques being the first and foremost thing, I think is probably suboptimal. I would like to see more people take a a more concepts-based approach as you said, which is not to say that techniques aren't important. We again, for the purposes of sharing knowledge, we need to be able to distill ideas down into things that we can repeat and give names to. But in terms of why we do what we do and the actual reasons behind doing those techniques, that stuff's got to be communicated especially to beginners because if you don't understand why you're doing what you're doing, then your understanding is always just going to be surface level. Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think that's a a place where a lot of jiu-jitsu people struggle, especially with the curriculum as a list of moves that we were talking about earlier, right? That doesn't explain the why of why do we do this move? Why does this move work here? It works here because, well, we teach you armbar from guard as a white belt because that's the move we teach you. That's not why it works from guard. It works because you do all of these other things in between the armbar from guard. And so I think that's understanding that why and having a curriculum that builds that why into it from the start is really helpful for people. Speaker 1: Now, when you are talking about promotion levels, and this is probably not as widespread a talking point as it used to be just because with the rise of no-gi, you know, a lot of people might not do stripes to the same extent anymore. But do you bother defining individual differences between stripe levels or for you is that less important than the major distinction which is at a belt level? Speaker 2: It's stripes are less important for me. It is the belt is really the kind of the big signifier is, yeah, the difference between a two-stripe and a three-stripe white belt is negligible in the grand scheme of things, right? It's an extra three to six months on the mat. So, it's it's not a big difference. Whereas the belt, the difference between a white belt and a blue belt could be a significant gap, especially depending on how long each one has been training. So, it's really the belt level that's more important to me. Yes, we still do stripes, but it's not the end all be all of our how our curriculum works. So, kind of in a nutshell on stripes, I guess would be the point of that. Speaker 1: So, to you, what would be the difference between say a three-stripe and a four-stripe white belt if you had to annunciate it? And I agree with you that I think it doesn't really make sense to obsess over these things, but if someone asked you, you know, if someone was like a three-stripe white belt and they came to you and said, what can I do to get that next promotion? You know, how do you explain or articulate the difference between those very minor levels? Speaker 2: So, for me, the difference between a three-stripe and a four-stripe white belt, a three-stripe white belt has learned all of those fundamentals that we've been talking about. They've started working to they've learned all of the basics and they've started to work on mastering them, right? A four-stripe white belt is somebody who's learned those and is starting to refine them. Whereas once you get that three-stripe, you okay, that's a good signification that you've learned everything. Four-stripe is refining it on their way to being that blue belt, right? Because you can't be that blue belt unless you've refined everything you're good with it. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. And I think it's worth pointing out too that the more distinctions we make here between different skill levels, the the more arbitrary it kind of becomes in terms of how we define these things. Like if you slice a pie into really, really, really thin pieces, you know, it it gets to the point where it starts to become really difficult to tell what the difference is between each of those pieces of the pie. We can quite easily talk about the difference between say a white belt or a blue belt. But as you start getting really granular and talking about the difference between a two or a three-stripe white belt, it gets harder to do that. Now, I know coaches who will say that they do have systems to define those differences and they'll tell me, I have a very clear, rigorous framework and I have a a documented difference between say a two-stripe purple belt and a three-stripe purple belt. So, I know exactly what that difference is going to be. And I'm not going to tell people that that's a bad thing. I mean, there's coaches who do that, but I would say that the more granular and specific you try to get with these kinds of things, the more rigid your framework becomes and the harder it's going to be for people to fit into that framework. Because if you try to get things so buttoned up that like you've got it right down to the individual minutia about what a difference is between a stripe, for instance, it gets to the point where your curriculum starts becoming so specific that people might start wondering how do I even fit into this, right? You might wind up defining things in such a way that it excludes people or it doesn't really fit in in a way that makes sense for them. So, this is always the catch with creating standards. The more specific you get, the less flexibility you have in that program. But on the other hand, you do need to get specific sometimes because if you don't have standards, then what are you measuring against? So, this it's a fine balance, right? Being specific is good, but also having flexibility is good as well. And you need to find that balance where your framework is specific enough that people understand what the objectives are, but it's also flexible enough that it can accommodate all of the people that you're trying to accommodate, right? You you shouldn't have a framework that is so specific that you keep having to create exceptions because you find people that it doesn't apply to because it wasn't defined properly in the first place. Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's one of the dangers of curriculum that you have to be watch out for when you're creating it is the curriculum should not be the standard. The curriculum should be the minimum. So, if you're creating a curriculum for your white to blue belt, it should be the minimum for all the belt, right? It should not be that everybody learns this and then once they've learned all of your curriculum, they get promoted to blue belt. No, they learn that and that is the minimum. Kind of like going back to the example of the three to four-stripe white belt, right? That three three-stripe white belt should know your curriculum by that point. They've been there long enough that they should have learned all of the curriculum. That four-stripe white belt is refining it and perfecting it and then learning some other stuff on top of it too. So, the curriculum should be the minimum, not the end of the line. Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's a a really important point. The interesting thing about the way jiu-jitsu does promotions, as you know, is at most gyms, unless you're Derek Moneyberg, it's going to take you a long time to get your black belt compared to other martial arts. And I understand the logic there, but I often feel that sometimes the other martial arts might actually have it right here. I think we mythologize the black belt a bit too much in jiu-jitsu and there's this assumption that if you have a black belt, you must be some sort of master. I actually think that the way that other martial arts handle this, where the black belt is really just a sign of advanced proficiency and it is something that you can get in a few years, that may actually make more sense to me in many ways because we do often sometimes look at black belts as this incredible level of excellence and I don't think that's really what it is. In many ways, a a black belt like anything, it is a minimum standard that you've met to achieve a certain thing, right? It doesn't mean that you're a world champion or that you're amazing. A black belt just means that you met some coach's minimum standard, however you choose to define that. So, I think we need to keep that framing in mind when we talk about, you know, what is a black belt. It doesn't have to be this big magical thing where you're this incredible world beater. In many ways, it is just another minimum standard. It's just it's a higher minimum standard based on experience than something like a white belt, but it is still the minimum, right? You're not giving black belts to only the top 1% in your gym. Theoretically, if your coaching is good enough, you should be able to give a black belt to anybody. And that's actually where I disagree with some coaches. Some coaches say things like, I will never give black belts to everyone at my gym. My standards are just so high that there will always be people who can never meet them. And my thought to that is, man, if you believe that, first of all, prove it to me because I've heard coaches say that, but I've never met a coach that will actually adhere to those standards and refuse to belt someone because they just don't think they're good enough. Second, I would say, if that's actually your your standard, you better damn well be telling your students that because you can't be taking people's money and training them when you know that you're never going to actually promote them because of some arbitrary standard you failed to communicate. So, I really like what you pointed out there that the belt is the basically the minimum requirement. It's not some sign of mastery. That's a really important thing for people to understand when we talk about promotions. Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. And that's one thing I think I'm in agreement with is I will never tell somebody I can't get them to black belt, right? Because everybody with our curriculum, everybody should be able to get black belt, right? It should be attainable for every single person that walks through that door, provided that they stay involved in jiu-jitsu, right? They don't quit, they don't get injured, all of those things. They should be able to use our curriculum to get a black belt. And they should be not just a black belt with, yeah, we've we've tied a black belt around their waist and they paid us the money for however many years. No, they they're a black belt and they've earned that black belt and when they go to another gym, someone's going to see that black belt and say, oh, yeah, you're a legit black belt. And here's how I'm going to say something really blasphemous for a lot of jiu-jitsu people. We test for every belt. Every single person that comes through our gym tests for every belt. And it is to make sure that you know that every single person has met that minimum standard. If you see somebody with a blue belt, you know they've met the same minimum standard that you had if you're a blue belt or they are a purple belt, they've met that same minimum standard. So, and as all of the black belts in our gym, we discuss like, hey, okay, this person's getting close to getting test. What do they need to work on? And we try and give them active feedback. So, we're assisting their journey. So, when they go to test, there's no issues, right? I don't want to fail anybody on a test. That's that makes nobody feel good. Yes, I've had to do that in the past. It's not a great situation for anybody. I want to make sure that the test is really more just a demonstration of how cool you are. Yeah, technically it's a test, quote-unquote. But it's really about making you look good in front of your friends and family more than anything else. Speaker 1: So, like you said, kind of a controversial thing because a lot of people are very against testing in jiu-jitsu. What exactly do you test for, right? Because again, this is where you have to be careful. If you're testing that people know specific techniques, which is how a lot of coaches do this, I think there can be problems with that approach because you wind up, first of all, you wind up measuring the wrong thing because as we talked about, knowing how to do a technique in a demo is very different from knowing how to grapple effectively. But also, if you get super specific with what you want people to show you, you can wind up in situations where people basically just try to clone their instructor's style because that's what their instructor is testing for. You know, there's this concept in organizational planning called Goodhart's Law, which says that when you assign a measure to something, it ceases to become a good measure. I mean, like if you create a measuring stick and you say, my goal is to have everyone reach this particular standard by checking these boxes, then everyone is going to engineer and optimize their training around checking those boxes. And that could be different from how to grapple effectively. You can wind up creating athletes who are very good at taking your test, but not actually good at performing. So, this is always the catch when you start testing for things. Not to say we shouldn't test, but just that we have to be very intentional with how we test, lest we wind up testing the wrong thing and steering people's behavior in the wrong direction. With that in mind, I would ask, what do you guys test for? If I were to show up for your blue belt test, what would I be expected to do and what would success look like versus say a fail in that situation? Speaker 2: Yeah, so our blue belt test is the best example of this in my opinion. Our blue belt test is difficult because we are going to exercise you first. You are going to work out until you are tired. And we do this for a very specific reason. And this is actually goes back to this is how Keith ran the blue belt test and we're we're holding up his standard. So, we exercise everybody before they test for that blue belt, so they are tired. They are gasping for air. Not to the point where we're like, we're making them puke or anything, but we want them tired because then and then we walk through all of the drills that we taught them at white belt because if you can do those drills when you're tired, when you're exhausted, when you're starting to get that brain fog going on, then you truly know those drills, right? You're not just replicating something that you learned in the last two months when you were getting ready to test. No, you actually know that because you're forced to use that knowledge in a situation where you're being taxed, right? You're not fresh, happy, ready to go. Okay, I'm going to demonstrate my armbar and my triangle and my guard pass. No, you're in a situation where you're tired, you're trying to catch your breath and someone comes and pushes you and then is trying to hit you. That's a different situation, right? You have to be ready for that. You have to know how to do the drill and react in the drill as opposed to just doing the moves when you're nice and fresh and happy. Speaker 1: So, is it mostly the same drills then just under a higher level of stress or are you testing other things? Because um I presume and you tell me if I'm wrong, when we're talking about white belts, we're probably testing those basic movements we talked about earlier like breakfalls and shrimping, am I correct in that? Speaker 2: Yes, and all of those are incorporated in those drills. And so they're doing the same drills that they learned all through their white belt, it just under a higher stress environment. And we've already, like I mentioned before is, we've talked about this. We've gone through and we have checked off like, hey, is are this their grappling at a new blue belt level? All of those boxes have been checked before they even step out to test day. So, they are not we're not just saying, oh, hey, you're ready to go on this. No, we we've checked the boxes beforehand, but we want to make sure that they they can do those drills in a stressed environment. Speaker 1: I like the way that you describe this where you're not outlining that someone must be able to do so many burpees specifically, but rather you're saying our goal is to test you under pressure at blue belt level. I like that because a challenge I see with many people's thinking in jiu-jitsu is is very ableist, right? They look at things through the lens of what a young athlete in their prime should be able to do. And my question is always, okay, would you be able to pass through your system someone who is disabled or maybe they come into the sport older in life. Would they be able to meet your requirements? Because I think if your requirements can only be met by an able-bodied 20-year-old, then there's something wrong with the way that you're teaching jiu-jitsu. So, I like how you're specifically saying we're just getting them tired because that's relative to the individual, right? That's different from saying to someone, like you've got to be able to do 50 burpees. Because the problem with that approach is, yeah, that might work again for an able-bodied young person, but like if someone walks into your gym and they have a disability, if they're missing an arm, are you saying that you will never promote them because of that, right? Because they can't do the burpees? I think that's unfair. So, the nice thing about your approach here is that tiredness is relative to the person. Anyone can get tired regardless of their age or the status of their health. Anyone can get tired to some degree. That's a very personal thing and it's less about, you know, what are they physically doing and more about how do they operate under stress, which is really, like you said, the thing we're trying to teach people if we want to teach self-defense. Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's the thing too is it's not we're going to work you all the same exercise. Everybody's going to do the same thing. No, we're going to work you to what tired for you is. We had a guy that came through and I believe when he was 62, 63 when he tested for his blue belt. So, it's his tired is different than the guy that's 20 testing for his blue belt, right? We're not going to make him work as hard as the 20-year-old. We're going to do things that work for him. There's two exercises that we're that are mandatory in our exercise list for testing for white to blue. And that's shrimping because it's a skill everybody needs to know. And then what Keith called devil squats where you bring your feet together and you do a squat and jump and bring your feet apart and do a squat because Keith loved those and we got to keep his flair in it. So, those are the only two required things. Speaker 1: That's actually similar to how I stand up in guard, so I like it. Now, as we move up to the higher belts, now you talked about how the farther up the ladder you get, the less rigid the promotion structure is. And I agree with that approach. We want to encourage people to start branching out and self-actualizing their own game as they get more experienced. So, I think it's a good thing that the restrictions start to come off as you go up the ladder because you you don't want people to just copy the coach's game and curriculum exactly. By the time they get to, you know, brown belt, they should be really branching out on their own and making jiu-jitsu what they want it to be for them, not just following their coach anymore. The challenge with this though is it makes it hard to test, right? I mean, how do you test someone for a brown belt or a black belt if mostly you're testing them to some amorphous idea and not a specific standard? So, how does that change? Like when you get up to purple belt, for instance, how would you test that person differently from someone who is blue belt? How do the standards vary for that next level up? Speaker 2: So, the analogy I like to think about it with is we're taking the training wheels off the bicycle, right? So, from blue to purple, we're still there teaching you, you still have drills. They're not as rigid as the drills from white to blue and they're a little bit more focused on individual techniques because at white to blue, you learn those concepts of how to string those techniques together. At blue to purple, you're learning those more techniques and giving you more variety to your game, right? So, yes, you are still in a training area, but it's the difference between the dad holding the back of the bike seat as you learn to ride on two wheels versus training wheels. Then from purple to brown, I don't necessarily have a specific curriculum for you to test. What we do is we set a very loose set of guidelines where you have to do certain numbers of moves from certain positions, right? Kind of your your iconic positions, guard, half guard, mount, back mount, all of those fun stuff. We set two or three moves from each position, sweeps, armbars, or not armbars specifically, sweeps, submissions. And then I say, hey, you take this and you figure it out. I want to see your jiu-jitsu. I don't need you to replicate what I do because what I do is my jiu-jitsu. I know it. I know it very well. I want to see what you do. Show me your jiu-jitsu. Don't show me my jiu-jitsu. Show me yours. And it's a great way for them to think about, okay, what do I do? How do I actually go about my grappling? And it's a great exercise for a lot of people that are getting to that brown belt level where they have to break down their own game. They have to understand what they do. It forces them to instead of just acting on instinct to think about what they do. And then for our black belt test, our black belt test is a little bit different because we are a Pedro Sauer affiliate as well. We go with the Pedro Sauer test, which is the Gracie master text, the Helio Gracie master text. And as we like to say, it's it's an homage to Helio Gracie and what he wanted from jiu-jitsu. So, that's a little bit different. That's more of a demonstration than it is an actual test. Speaker 1: At that point, it sounds like it's almost more of a ritual for you guys than it is something you're actually measuring. Am I understanding correctly? Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, for black belt, it's definitely more of a, hey, we want your friends and family to come be amazed and to get see you get that black belt because that's the big thing for you. No one's going to go into that not ready for it. No one's going to be going in to get their black belt and not we're not going to be sure that they've earned that black belt. Speaker 1: Can you imagine someone shows up for the black belt test and, oh, sorry, buddy, you you didn't make the cut. I can't imagine that actually happening because by that point, I mean, by the time you're ready to give someone their black belt, you know, right? You you know that they're ready for it. You wouldn't even have this conversation if you weren't sure. Speaker 2: Yeah. And we actually, so we just promoted the other head instructor and I just promoted our first black belts here six or so months ago because we just got our third degree in March. So, we promoted our first black belts about six months ago. And we took them all and said, okay, you guys are looking, we took the group and said, we're looking to get you your black belts this year. We need you all to come together. You figure out a time that works for everybody and we're going to watch you roll. We're going to make sure your technique's good. Everybody looks like they're they should be a black belt. And actually when we initially did this, we bumped out our test a little bit because nobody rolled like they they actually felt like they were going to be a black belt. So, we we added a little extra time on their training. And then we came back a month or so later and said, okay, we want to see everything again. We're going to roll with you guys. We're going to uh watch you guys train with each other and see where everybody is now. And that second time that we went around, everybody looked really good and we set up the black belt test after that. But we wanted to make sure everybody was good to go. We're we're not letting anybody just wander into black belt and get a black belt because they bought one on Amazon. No, we're we're making sure they're good to go. Speaker 1: I've got one last question for you and it's a bit of a tricky one. Now, earlier you talked about how the difference between some of the earlier belt ranks to the later ones is like taking off training wheels. And I understand this is an analogy and it's an imperfect analogy. So, maybe my question is a bit of a stretch, but putting on my like ecological dynamics hat here, one thing that many coaches will say is, well, the thing about training wheels is they don't work, right? I mean, training wheels as a practice for teaching has been basically proven to be ineffective compared to something like a balance bike. Again, just forgive me here. I know this is a very tortured analogy, but the reason being that when you constrain someone by putting training wheels on, you're constraining the wrong variable, right? Ideally, you want to be teaching people the invariance, the things that really matter. So, in the case of riding a bike, it's can you maintain your balance while the bike is moving? Training wheels allow you to act like you're riding a bike when you're actually not because you don't need to keep your balance. So, what they've actually found is if you want to teach a kid how to ride a bike more effectively, a balance bike at younger ages is better than training wheels because then the child is still practicing the invariant, which is how do I keep my balance while this thing is in motion? If you use training wheels, then your kid might feel like they can ride the bike because they're not falling over, but actually, they're just learning how to pedal, which is not the invariant. The invariant is the balance. So, all of this is to say that when we test, how do we know that we're testing for the right thing? When we teach people, how do we know that we're teaching the right thing, right? Because we can all say that, hey, you know, the difference between like a white and a blue is training wheels, but we have to be careful to make sure that we're actually training the right variables, not the wrong ones. What are your thoughts on that? How do you make sure that when you're building this kind of curriculum, you're testing the invariance, the things that people really need to know versus the specifics? Because this can be a very difficult thing to distinguish sometimes. Speaker 2: Yes, I think that and that's a great point that, yes, the I I am where the training wheels is actually not a great way to learn how to ride a bike. But I think that is a a great point that when you're building your curriculum, you have to make sure that your curriculum is teaching these invariant principles, right? It can't just be the curriculum teaches you how to do X, Y and Z. No, the curriculum needs to teach everything as a whole, or else it's not a good curriculum. It's only a partial curriculum, right? Going back to the thing we talked about at the beginning, the list of moves curriculum. That is a great partial curriculum. And that would be a great example, I think, of the training wheels where it teaches you some of riding the bike, right? Whereas I think our curriculum excels because it does teach that whole skill, that invariant skill. Again, I like to focus more conceptually and I think our curriculum actually focuses on that while teaching people the skills that they need. So, that's I think it goes back to when you design the curriculum. It's not necessarily when what you do when you test, it's what you do as the instructor when you create the curriculum far more important than what you do when people go to test. Speaker 1: Now, one more thing I just want to ask here and I apologize for dragging this on, but I got a lot of questions here though. The other thing I want to ask, you talked about how once you get to, you know, black belt, for instance, a lot of this is less about, hey, do we need to make sure that you're actually at the right level and more of it becomes about tradition and ritual and community. And there's interesting thoughts about this. I mean, of course, martial arts have been steeped with tradition, right? We even have the concept of a traditional martial art. However, there are people who will try to be very calculated in terms of how they think about jiu-jitsu and they'll they'll say like there's no room for any of that stuff. We only care about what works. We got to think like machines, strip out all of the tradition, all of the ritual and just make it completely objective. I probably used to agree with that when I was younger and less experienced, but the older I get and the more experienced I get, the more my thinking on that is changing and the more I'm thinking that you do need a place for tradition and ritual to some degree. Not such that it gets in the way of the training, but I do think that to some extent these rituals are important because human beings are not calculators, right? I mean, we can talk about training like robots. Well, we're not robots. We're emotional, irrational, illogical creatures most of the time. We're hungry and we're lonely and we're scared. And things like community and common frameworks matter. And so I do think there is a place for some degree of ritual and tradition even if it technically doesn't help make people better. But I'd love to know your thoughts on how we balance that. Like how do we balance the fact that as you said, a lot of people do want these traditions and these rituals, but we also don't want that to become the focal point of the training, lest we become, you know, one of the traditional martial arts as we say. How do you balance that? Like the the human level, the social interactions and the things that we need there, the cultural side of jiu-jitsu versus the actual meat and potatoes, let's grapple effectively. How do you find that balance? Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that this is a very difficult balance to ride because you want to keep jiu-jitsu as an effective style of martial art. You want to keep it only focused on things that work, right? But like you said, humans aren't calculators. Humans aren't robots. We don't think that way. We are a social species. So, that tradition, I think is a very important part of jiu-jitsu. It creates a space for that social portion of jiu-jitsu where in my opinion, jiu-jitsu is largely an oral tradition. Yes, now we have tutorials and we have instructional videos that you can watch. There's more instructional content than you could ever watch in your entire life if you watch jiu-jitsu eight hours a day for the rest of your life. So, you can learn jiu-jitsu that way, but there's also parts of jiu-jitsu that are strict oral tradition. And I think that we those traditional things, those ceremonies, the social aspect of jiu-jitsu are important carrying those things on, carrying on the history of jiu-jitsu. Why do we do these things? What created these things? What is the background behind all of this? What is the reasoning behind why are we doing this? Is all part of that traditional and that rich oral history of jiu-jitsu. Those stories that instructors tell during those belt testings, those explanations of, hey, we're doing this because this person who taught this person wanted it done this way. We are using that as a way to carry on those traditions and carry on those feelings of jiu-jitsu because we can't just be robots doing jiu-jitsu. It's if not, we just might as well just type jiu-jitsu with ChatGPT and we'll leave. Right? We're people doing jiu-jitsu. So, we need to have these traditions, have these rituals that bind the people together and make for greater jiu-jitsu communities because that's really what jiu-jitsu is about, right? Most of us aren't here to be world champion fighters. We're here to have an activity and spend time with people. You can't do jiu-jitsu in a vacuum. You can't do it alone. So, we have to have these social aspects to it too. Speaker 1: Extremely well said, my friend. Again, as I get older, the one thing I realize is someone who has spent a lot of time trying to optimize for everything and be as efficient as possible in my life, something that I've realized is that you can over-optimize your life to the point where you optimize the joy out of it completely. You optimize out the things that make life worth living, right? I mean, again, we're not robots. We're not computers. A lot of the things that bring meaning to our lives are by definition inefficient, right? Like my need for social interaction is inefficient in many ways. A lot of the things that make human beings human don't lead to optimum efficiency. So, this is always a balance and in our effort to create the most optimal efficient training program, we need to be careful not to optimize so much that we remove the elements that make us human and give us reason to do the things that we're doing and bring us enjoyment in the practice, right? Because I mean, again, I've done this before, right? And anyone who's worked at a at a company has probably seen this where, man, you can optimize something to the point where nobody just wants to do it anymore. And that is not what we want to see happen with jiu-jitsu. Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. I want to see jiu-jitsu continue to be this great social gathering place. But yes, we have these these awesome martial art that we do too. But it's that's not the primary function of jiu-jitsu for most people. It's that third space theory, right? Where a lot of people have lost that third space. Jiu-jitsu acts as that, I think, for a lot of people. And that's really the function of jiu-jitsu is bringing people together as opposed to just learning a martial art, right? I can watch instructionals all day long, but that doesn't get me a third place and get me people to interact with, so. Speaker 1: Well, Todd, I think this was ultra comprehensive. I really thank you for coming by and having this discussion with me. If people want to ask you questions or follow you, maybe they've got their own ideas about their own curriculum and they'd like to bounce it off you or if they want to train at your gym or learn about it, how can they contact you or find out more about you? Speaker 2: Yeah, so the best way to contact me is probably through my website. I have a website flowframejiujitsu.com. F L O W F R A M E jiu-jitsu.com. And that's my website. It has you can contact me easily through there. It has my email and everything on there. It also has a number of my instructional content that I put out. It's mostly just short video clips that are easy to watch at 30 seconds. It has a lot of my writing about jiu-jitsu because I I like to take time to kind of write about different topics in jiu-jitsu. So, it's a great way for people to kind of learn a little bit about my philosophy and about me. And if they want to reach out to me, ask me questions about curriculum or set up time to come train with me, that's the best way to get a hold of me. Of course, Team Rhino in Meridian, Idaho is another great place. I'm there as much as I can be. I'm been really very busy lately, so I haven't been there as much as I as I want to be, but that's another great place to connect. If you want to reach out to me, I'll kind of the general social media as well. So, you can find me on there. It's just my first and last name all together. So, you can find me there, reach out to me and come train with me, so. Speaker 1: Man, that's another benefit to a curriculum that we didn't even talk about, which is by building a curriculum, you build a system, which makes your gym less dependent on one single person to run the thing. Most gyms that I've seen make this huge mistake where the gym is only operable because of the head instructor. Part of why you build systems like a curriculum is to make the running of the gym repeatable so that you can step back and someone else can jump in. And that is the sign of a healthy gym, right? Is that they have systems in place such that no one element is dependent on this one person being there, but that other people can jump in and use the system as well. The idea behind a system is to make results repeatable. So, if your gym only works when you are physically there, then that means that your curriculum is probably not as thought through as you needed it to be. So, Todd, um I will put links to your stuff in the show notes. I will also put links to our stuff. We're easy to find. Everything's at BJJmentalmodels.com. The podcast, the full-length episodes like this, plus our mini episodes, which are quick hits on key concepts. These are completely free, plus our newsletter, 15,000 subscribers almost around the world. So, please do sign up for that as well. And if you want to level up with us, BJJ Mental Models Premium is the way that you do that. It is the world's largest library of jiu-jitsu audio courses on concepts, strategy, tactics, mindset. These are the things that don't really fit well into traditional instructionals and we excel at that. Man, if you want to talk about the oral traditions of jiu-jitsu, something that we've been experimenting with in 2025 and onward is creating content in an audio documentary format to try to educate people in ways that are new to jiu-jitsu and not used that often. So, if you want to learn jiu-jitsu in a more broad spectrum approach, including the history of jiu-jitsu, learn more about how we got to where we are, not just how to grapple effectively, but also more about what this martial art is. We've got some great courses there that we're rolling out, which cover that in addition to actually improving your technique. So, all of that is at BJJmentalmodels.com. Again, link in the show notes and Todd, I will also put a link to your website and your gym there as well. But thank you so much for coming by. I really enjoyed this chat. Speaker 2: Thank you. I really had a great time talking about kind of my maybe bizarre thoughts about jiu-jitsu, but I had a great time talking about it. So, thank you for having me on here. Speaker 1: Thanks to the listeners as well. It's always great to have people hang out with us here. It's nice to know that people are listening and getting value out of this. And hey, I mean, if anyone has ideas, I always want to hear. How can we make this show better? Are there any topics that we should cover or guests that you want to have on? You can always contact me. Again, that's on the website if you want to know how to do that. But thank you to everyone for listening. Appreciate you and we will talk to you later.