Ep. 368: Lazy Wrestling, feat. Thomas & Phillip Barreiro

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. Hey everybody, welcome to BJJ Mental Models episode 368. I am Steve Kwan. BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent jiu-jitsu approach. And today I got two long-time friends of the community from Good Mind Grappling. I've got Thomas and Philip Barrero. Guys, how are you doing? Speaker 2: We're doing well. It's good. We're doing well. Thanks for having us on. Speaker 1: Happy to have you guys. Now, you have been on one of our premium pods before to talk about your work at Good Mind Grappling and I want to make sure we plug that again here at the end. But before we do, why don't we talk about just some quick intros? Why don't you guys tell everyone who you are and what you do? Speaker 2: Yeah, my name is Thomas La Honts the Barrero. I'm Wolf Clan Mohawk from the Akwesasne community in Northern New York, Ontario, Quebec. It's a weird jurisdictional situation. But I've been primarily I'm a wrestler. I've been wrestling since I was 14 years old and it's been well over 20 years that I've been wrestling. So I wrestled at the Division 1 level and after university, I started wrestling in Greco-Roman. I'm a six-time Canadian national champion in Greco-Roman. I've represented Canada at the Pan American Games as well as the World Championships. And then afterwards, got into jiu-jitsu a little bit because we have a friend who trains and coaches at Ryan Hall's gym, 50/50. And uh Ryan Hall, you know, he's a very good grappler to talk about concepts with and to understand deeply the game of grappling. So it's kind of what led me here. Speaker 3: Yeah, so my name is Philip Laoliao Barrero. Um I'm also Wolf Clan Mohawk from Akwesasne. I wrestled Division 1. I also am a I'm a three-time Canadian national champion in Greco-Roman wrestling. Wrestled at the Pan American Games, the World Championships. Um I've also coached as an assistant coach at the D1 level. And now my brother and I work work in a non-profit using grappling and wrestling as a modality to deal with trauma. Speaker 1: I think that's amazing, guys. I mean, I we've talked many times about the power of the martial arts to bring people together and connect them and again, I want to plug your stuff at the end here. But the topic today, something that we've been talking about a lot in our community, something that you guys I know have either have made or are planning to make content about, and something that's very near and dear to my heart, is the concept of lazy wrestling. The idea that wrestling doesn't have to be this like high-impact, TRT-driven, explosive thing, but there are ways that a slower, less athletic person can still wrestle effectively. The first time that I discovered this approach was um through my jiu-jitsu coach here in BC, who I would describe as kind of a lazy wrestler in terms of how he does this and it still manages to make it very effective and has used it in both jiu-jitsu and MMA. And that's kind of when I realized that there is a way that you can do this that is maybe more sustainable, especially for people who are older or more risk or injury averse. But I'll turn it over to you guys. Why don't you talk about the concept here? What is lazy wrestling for lack of a better term and how would this differ from maybe the way that people normally think of wrestling? Speaker 2: So the thing that's funny about this is that some of the most effective stand-up grapplers are out of like new wave, right? Is like the Danaher guys have been pretty effective stand-up. They're not like amazing, they're not like they're not like insane, but they've been effective with it, efficient. And it's like literally that strategy. You know what I mean? Where we're not trying to like blast through people. In in the US, the style is like in the US and North America, which is, you know, Brazil has its roots in jiu-jitsu, but for wrestling, for jiu-jitsu, it's almost like everything, the inspiration is American wrestling. Speaker 3: Yeah, and so the issue with that is there's a lot of outside wrestling. So really hard low singles, blast doubling, very explosive movements on the outside. And this isn't really a thing that is unique to wrestling. It's also in jiu-jitsu. There is an outside, very fast passing kind of style that you can have. And then there's also a slower, more methodical pressure passing sort of style. And so in the US, what happens is the two greatest American wrestlers on the international level have been John Smith and Jordan Burroughs. Right? John Smith is known for his low single. He like created, not created, I don't know if you want to say created, but he definitely popularized it worldwide. And it's a low ankle attack and it's from the outside. It requires a lot of timing and footwork and explosivity. And then Jordan Burroughs is well known for his freight train double, you know, when when he was in his prime, he was unbeatable with that, you know, like it's pretty damn hard to catch him. And so in the US, there's a big emphasis on leg attacks and leg grabbing. You know, you go to uh like the cookie cutter high school curriculum is single leg, high crotch, double leg, and then like a fireman's carry. And you have those four moves and then a little bit of hand fighting and all of a sudden you're like, you can teach like first year wrestlers for American folk style on the feet. Speaker 2: Yeah, so the big issue here is is like what your perception of wrestling itself is. And so the general perception is that wrestling is the double leg, is the high crotch, is the single leg. When realistically there's much more to it, right? It's like saying, okay, well, passing is the leg drag and the toreado. Speaker 3: And the knee slice. Speaker 2: And the knee slice and that's it. You know what I mean? So when we look at it in that way, it makes it such that it's really small, you got to have certain attributes and it doesn't it's not super inviting to everyone. It's kind of like how the triangle from closed guard, like for me, I'm like 5'6" and I wrestle 97 kilos, 214 pounds. So for me, the triangle, I could just like barely ever do it from there, just because my leg proportions don't like they're not meant for that move, right? To be like good at it. They don't predispose me for it. I'm sure there's ways to figure it out. I'm sure against really people who are like way smaller than me, I could do it. But it doesn't mean it's a bad technique. It just means that for my body, it doesn't necessarily work super well. And so when we have this one style that's based on conditioning and athleticism and footwork and explosiveness, and we try to use that style, especially in a sport like jiu-jitsu, where there's a lot of hobbyists and even then like the best guys, you know, like uh Roger Gracie, Marcelo, Gordon Ryan, they're not really super explosive guys, you know, they they take a slow, methodical approach, especially with like no time limit matches. It's hard to like have an explosive strategy. Speaker 3: Yeah, so when we want to expand our idea of what wrestling is, you got to think of it more like it's jiu-jitsu in and of itself. It's just guard passing versus guard on the feet. It's control. Speaker 2: It's control. So wrestling is just when when we're passing on the ground against a guard, it's a little bit asymmetrical because one person's seated or on their back and the other person's more vertical posture, they have better mobility. Whereas when we're wrestling, both of us have a symmetrical posture generally. And if you think about it that way and you start thinking about what are my frames, what kind of guards can I use? I can use a collar tie, I can use uh inside tie hand posts, things of that nature, and you start focusing on the guards of wrestling versus the moves of wrestling, it becomes a lot more simple. Speaker 1: Yeah. Well said, guys. I really like that explanation. One thing that you guys said, which I really like, is you talked about the difference between an inside and an outside attack. Now, this comes up a lot in groundwork in jiu-jitsu. We've talked about the inside channel or the inside position, right? I'm personally a big fan of these techniques, but I admit, of course, that going around the outside works just as well for the right type of person. The thing about going around the outside, though, is just more distance to travel. The closest distance is always going to be two points in a straight line and taking the inside channel means less distance to cover. But it is possible to go around the outside. If we think of guard passing, you guys brought up the toreado, that's a great example of an outside pass where you go around the legs rather than through them. I think a lot of people don't look at stand-up the same way, but you guys bring up a great point. You can do an outside takedown or an inside takedown. And I remember when I was first taught jiu-jitsu, I was told always do an outside takedown because you want to land in side control. But of course, I am an old head here. And the the common advice has evolved since then. The problem with just taking someone down around the outside is great and going to side control, but you bypass the guard and you lose a point scoring opportunity. So a lot of people now will take someone down, try to let them establish the semblance of a guard, but not enough that they can hold it and then pass from there directly. So the philosophy of stand-up in jiu-jitsu has changed quite a bit in the last 15, 20 years or so. What do you guys think, having experience in both of these sports? Do you have a preference one way or the other as to whether outside or inside works quote-unquote better in jiu-jitsu or is that really not a fair argument to make? Do they just have different times and places? Speaker 2: Well, everything always has different times and places. But to answer your question more specifically, you have a fundamental misunderstanding in our language here, right? So when I'm talking about because what you're saying inside control, outside control and channels, like that's also important. But what I'm referring to is range, right? Speaker 1: Oh, I see, I see. Speaker 2: So like a guy like Jordan Burroughs doesn't actually want to tie up close to you. He doesn't go to underhooks, he doesn't go to overhooks. He plays from a hand post range where the tie that he wants to use on you is putting his palm on your face or on the side of your head. And then using his movement more like a boxer, right? Think about Lennox Lewis versus Mike Tyson. One super long, wants to keep him at the jab. Tyson wants to get inside and throw hooks and uppercuts, right? And so what that does is in boxing and striking sports, the sense you're going to use, like the you're going to use your vision. And in grappling, like in jiu-jitsu, you tend to use a lot of touch. Like you still use sight, you use all your senses, but the dominant one is touch, is feel. And so in wrestling, wrestling in the standing engagement is unique because it's the interface between those two situations, between using our sight and our timing and reaction time and using our sense of touch. And so if I'm somebody, right? So like in the US, this is just a general statement. People aren't very good at upper body, right? People aren't good, like you go against any like average high school wrestler, low level D1 wrestler. Once you get like high D1 or like guys who are like really good, this changes. But your average high school wrestler, they're not good in the over-under, in the underhook, in the two-on-one. They're not like actually good there because the prevailing style is John Smith, Jordan Burroughs, kind of playing from the closest range he play from mostly is collar tie, which is our forearm range. And so that's what I'm referring to when I say somebody's an I I the better term would be an outfighter versus an infighter. And if you're wrestling for jiu-jitsu, you want to bias yourself. Now any style can work, but especially for less explosive, older athletes, you want to bias yourself to infighting, to being close to your opponent. And then in terms of your question about inside versus outside channel, the thing is is that both that low single and that double leg are inside penetrations to the body, right? And so if I'm trying to get a quick takedown, if I'm trying to get from point A to point B quickly, I'm going to go right up the middle, straight down the middle. The problem with going straight up the middle is that that's where most of your defense is, right? So in sports like wrestling, it's weird because when you take legs leg attacks, the ref can save you, right? Like there's a couple things where like leg attacks in wrestling are just easier than they are in jiu-jitsu. Speaker 3: Yeah, so like in in judo, we they talk a lot about you do the throw and then they get 10 seconds and then the ref stands you back up. If you do a seoi nage, you can slip. Or in Greco or freestyle, you do a yeah, you do a seoi nage, you slip, they stand you back up. Whereas in American folk style, it's not as intense as that slip, but you still have what's a stalemate. You get into a single leg and you scramble around, nobody's doing anything. They call stalemate and stand you back up. And a lot of those stalemate positions generally would be positions where the guy on top could choke you or break an arm or things of that nature, going to guard positions that are not very good for you. Additionally, you have the wrestling boots, you have the shoes on. And the shoes are like ghee or it's like wearing a ghee on your feet, right? It's something that you can grip on and control. So it's very easy, especially when we're sweaty and no-gi, to just slip your foot out, you know, in the same way that if you're like fighting a heel hook, really late stage defense could be just slipping your foot out, you know? So it changes that way where a lot of the time, what we want to do in jiu-jitsu, if especially if we're not trying to get a quick attack, you know, we want to be fighting close range and threatening the inside channel, but going toward the outside channel to take the back. And we can take the back in many ways, you know, we can like literally get to the back where I'm behind you rear standing or put you in turtle. But front headlock is also taking the back. And if I take a bad shot, often, I'm going to end up in some form of front headlock. You look at wrestlers who have transitioned to jiu-jitsu well, like Michael Pixley, he just puts people in front headlock and then anacondas them from there. It's a it's a dangerous position. Like think about there's a match from the first CJI with Jason Nolf versus Ty Ruotolo. And the match goes like the first two rounds of the match, basically like it's exciting because there's wrestling, but nothing really happens. Like Ruotolo is determined to stay on the feet and he's using his frames to keep Nolf at bay. Nolf gets in on a low ankle and he slips his foot in and Ruotolo slips his foot out. And then Nolf gets in deep on a double leg and Ruotolo finds his way to a guillotine and Nolf defends it and it's going really, really like it's like if this was a wrestling match, Nolf would be killing him. But because it's jiu-jitsu, he's able to defend and keep the match really neutral. And then in the third round, Ruotolo decides that he's going to shoot. He shoots, he gets sprawled on, he almost gets his back taken, but he makes his way back to guard. And Ruotolo is really good at jiu-jitsu and Nolf is a excellent wrestler. Like on a good day, Jason Nolf can win the world championships. But he doesn't have the same level of experience that Ruotolo has in guard play. So Ruotolo gets to a quick knee bar, right? So it's one of those things where the wrestling exchange is very, very different. And you even mentioned trying to get the takedown. It's like, there's no point, like in jiu-jitsu rule sets, the takedowns are almost impossible to get. It's silly. It's silly. Speaker 3: Yeah, so like like I kick you down to turtle is not a takedown. Things like that. It makes it such that we should really be more focused upon maintaining control of where we are in the match. Speaker 2: Controlling the directionality. So in that way, when you look at wrestling in jiu-jitsu, you have to divorce yourself from the idea that you're going to do wrestling in the same way you can in freestyle. The same way you can in folk style. You're trying to pressure them slowly, methodically, so that you can choose where the match goes. Speaker 1: Yeah, I like that a lot. It's funny because when I started jiu-jitsu, like with so many other people, you know, the first takedowns they're going to teach you are the single leg and the double leg. And at a lot of jiu-jitsu gyms, when it comes to wrestling techniques, that's kind of all they teach. Many gyms will avoid the high crotch, especially for beginners because of the risk of, you know, getting guillotined if you make a mistake on as you go around the outside. The fireman's carry people will teach, but you tend not to see it used a lot at beginner jiu-jitsu levels just because it takes a while to get good at that. So many gyms in their fundamentals, they focus just on the single and the double. And it's funny because as you guys bring up, those two techniques, especially in jiu-jitsu, can be really hard to do. There's factors that we have to worry about, which don't come up in wrestling. Most notably, of course, the presence of the ghee, if you're training in the ghee, that really changes your ability to penetrate in if the person's got grips on you, but also of course, the threat of a choke completely changes the dynamics and what can go wrong. I remember many years ago, I read a piece that someone had written, I think it was high percentage martial arts. I'm not sure if that website is still up, but they used to do some data analysis pieces. And they found in in their studies that at white and blue belt, one of the most determining factors of who was going to win a match was the initial shot and what came of it. Because what they found is especially at those levels, basically whoever could get a single or double would probably win the match, but if they tried and they failed and got sprawled on, they would probably lose the match and things would go disastrously wrong for them. So there's a whole series of concepts around how to keep yourself safe in jiu-jitsu when you're making a shot or you're going for a single, which don't quite apply in other sports where you don't have to worry about getting choked if you run head first. Do you guys have any thoughts on how to pivot your wrestling style to be a bit safer in jiu-jitsu so that you don't get choked on the way in, because that is such a common problem, especially at beginner levels, but as you guys brought up, for even at expert or more advanced levels, if you shoot on someone and they wind up on their back in guard, they still have a lot of weapons at their disposal. Speaker 3: So I think it again comes back to reframing what our goal is. If we're trying to get a takedown, you're going to put yourself in those situations where you have more danger. I think that the reframing should be to stay on top. Because the issue is when you shoot a high crotch, a single leg, you're not on bottom, but you're very precariously close to being on bottom. The most common takedown at any level is a go behind. And generally a go behind happens from when you snap somebody down and you go behind them. Or they take a they take a they take a shot whether good or bad and they're sprawled out and then you go behind them. And that go behind in wrestling by itself is dangerous enough, but when we add in chokes and uh you know, other sort of jiu-jitsu scrambles, it becomes even more dangerous. Speaker 2: I just want to make this clear. When you shoot and you are caught in a sprawl, like they're sprawled out on top of you, or you're stuck in a front headlock, you are on the bottom. You are on the bottom in the same way that if they just got behind you to turtle, you're on the bottom, right? And so what wrestling does is it allows us to control the directionality. So a lot of times, you don't like at the low like if if I take a white belt and I train him for two months, what he can do is just be really, really stubborn and just push people around and they'll take bad shots, front headlock, or they'll just pull guard because they're frustrated, right? So like a lot of it is like just being able to choose to be the top player. Speaker 3: Yes. With that in mind, we want to stop looking so deeply at doing the high crotch, doing the single, and start looking more deeply at hand fighting. Understanding using your frames and using your hooks in the same way that we would with guard against a standing person. Speaker 2: You had an episode recently with Chris Round where you're talking about in the ghee and you're talking about grip fighting and the importance of grip fighting. And it's the same thing in no-gi with wrestling, right? It's a lot of understanding how we're using our structure, our hands, our elbows, our head, our shoulders to create asymmetric connections in the same way. And so when people are new to wrestling or they're new to jiu-jitsu, they just want to grab people. They want to come out and they want to grab you. They're so focused on hooking you that they're not focused on framing and creating solid defense. Speaker 1: So what do you mean when you say framing in this context, just to visualize this? Because often when we talk about framing, the context is usually I'm on the bottom and someone is pinning me. Can you give me some examples of how you would use frames from that standing position with your arms, particularly and without the ghee? Speaker 2: Yeah, so before I go into that, I will go into that. But we want to use like for me, when I'm teaching someone to wrestle, I want them to have a frames first mentality. And they want them to have a castle strategy. Where your frames are lines of defense that prevent your opponent from progressing to your body, right? So like in jiu-jitsu, there's an anatomical hierarchy, right? You're getting past the ankles, you're getting to the knee line, you're getting to the hips, you're getting to the body. You're getting past their frames and you're getting closer and closer to their body. It's the same thing in wrestling. You're getting past their head and hands to their hips or their shoulders or their back to their body so that you can control them. You can get more and more control. So there's ranges of the guard, right? So when we're standing, the longest range frame is my hand. And the most common thing that's going to block you with my hand is my thumb. I want you to like thumb blocks, V-blocks. So you take your index finger and your thumb, you make a little L and you point at your opponent, you put your palms on them. That's your longest range frame is your hands. And that's the range that somebody like Jordan Burroughs would play at. He'll post his his palm on your head so you can't aggress into his space. He'll post on your shoulder, post on the side of your head and start taking angles, like elbow passing, head passing, and controlling the head. Then after that range, we have our forearm, right? In the same way that we have elbow frames in jiu-jitsu, you use your forearm. Primarily, it's commonly a collar tie, right? Think of that frame, that elbow frame. Then we have our head and then we have our shoulders. And one of the the thing with our shoulders is we can extend that range through like a down block. So it looks like our arm is defending, but it's really an extended extension of our shoulder. In the same way when I have an underhook, it's really my shoulder on them. Speaker 1: Got it, got it, makes sense. This is interesting to me because a hugely common problem, especially again at the fundamentals and beginner levels, is not paying enough attention to clearing the hands before making a shot. When I see people fail at shooting a single or a double, it is often because they just shot, you know, without really paying attention to the distance they're doing it from, without worrying about whether they're penetrating far enough, and perhaps most importantly, without worrying about whether they've cleared the hands properly. That last bit, clearing the hands, is super important because in jiu-jitsu, especially, if you don't clear their hands when you go for a shot, you could be shooting right into a front choke. That's a problem that, I mean, granted, you still have head control in sports like wrestling, but you don't have the risk of getting submitted from there in the same way. And when I see beginners especially struggle with a single or a double, usually they get frustrated because they can't make it work and often their actual shot mechanics are not so bad because that's usually what teachers focus on teaching. But they're disregarding that initial stage of clearing the hands, using frames and entering from the right distance. I wonder if you guys have thoughts on that, if you agree with that take or if you have something more refined. Speaker 2: That's exactly what it is. It's learning ranges of distance and understanding that like that frames are not just defensive structures. In wrestling, in freestyle and Greco-Roman, or in sumo more popularly, more well known, when you push somebody out of bounds, you get a point. So this pushing that you do through a frame actively scores you points. It doesn't really happen in jiu-jitsu and in American folk style wrestling, you will get stalling calls, but it's not a direct point. So this thing of like we make a castle and you just walk at somebody and if you can just keep pushing them and they go out of bounds over and over and over and over again, they're eventually going to get frustrated and decide they're going to attack you back. Speaker 3: And so a lot of it is being able to punish people for mistakes, right? So we spend all this time trying to invade other people's castle, rather than making our castle safe. What I want to be able to do is have a castle and I put archers on top of the castle and then they can shoot, you know? Or I let you think that you can come in my castle and then I pour a boiling oil on you when you do, right? The thing is we want to have the guard first, right? Position before submission. You don't just throw the submission out there. You got to control. So the guard is there for control, controlling our opponent's movement, immobilizing them, closing doors, opening other doors, creating trap doors where they think it's safe to lean on you and then all of a sudden you're not there. And that is where our offense comes from. And then you get people real discouraged when all they have is offense and they try their offense and then they get crushed and they're like, oh, I guess I just suck, you know? I guess I just suck. Why even bother with standing? But if you can show people how to defend themselves, how to use frames, how to sprawl, because all sprawling is is using your hip as a frame. It's just a hip escape. We can get in that too in a little bit. But if you can teach people to defend themselves, they can stay calm and they can create situations where they can attack from with lower risk. And they can see those openings and they can just wait for their opponent to do something dumb. You know, especially in jiu-jitsu, you kind of just want to wait for your opponent to do something dumb. Think about that match I was describing earlier with Ty Ruotolo and and Jason Nolf. Ruotolo realized he wasn't making anything happen. He was, I guess, trying to stay in the stand-up. He was being very like obstinate about I'm going to be in stand-up. I'm not going to pull guard. And then he realized, oh, nothing's happening. I better take a shot. If Jason Nolf was a better jiu-jitsu player, he would have taken Ty's back and maybe choked him. But he didn't because Ty has that ground game more experienced than Nolf. But as soon as he attacked, he put himself in threat and he ended up on bottom, right? And now, for Ty, it makes sense. Put yourself on bottom where Nolf doesn't have as much experience as you. But that's the thing is if you can have a stout defense, people will take bad shots. Like when I was in high school, I was a really, really, really bad wrestler. Like I was bad. I had been wrestling for like four years and I took fourth in New York State as a senior. It was my fourth year wrestling. And literally all I did on the feet was walk at people, put my head in the way and then they take a bad shot, I down block and go behind. Like that's all you need to be like a New York State place winner, you know, is be able to have solid defense. Now we want to build on that where we can create our openings, but that's where you got to start is solid defense. Speaker 2: Yeah, and so when you have that solid defense, when you have those guards, when you have those frames, it gives you the safety and the time to consider your attacks more. So that allows you to not just throw a thing out. And it allows you to play more. It allows you to hunt someone. It allows you to go after them calmly, rather than you just run out there and hope run of you is going to die and you hope that you don't die. You know, if we hunt somebody calmly, methodically, Speaker 3: I'm going to live, they're going to die. Speaker 1: Yeah, I love that. And I you see this a lot in jiu-jitsu where people appear to have a faith-based strategy of stand-up. Their hope is that they will get the move and they're just going to go for it and, you know, leave it in the hands of fate. And that's really not a great approach, especially early on in the match. I know that many wrestlers like yourself, a common piece of wisdom that they will give you is be the first person to put points on the board. Do not let the other person score first because once you give up those first points, you are now fighting from behind the whole way. And that forces you into reactive cycles. It could be hard to get that momentum back. You see that a lot in jiu-jitsu because many grapplers, because they aren't as experienced on their feet, they get easily frustrated or impatient and make bad decisions. I mean, probably the way that I wind up on top more than anything, and granted, I'm not out there competing, but the way that I wind up on top is just annoy the other person until they say fuck it and just pull guard, right? People in jiu-jitsu tend to be quite impatient. And especially early on in a match, it's so important not to be the first person who makes a mistake. You want the other person to be the first one who makes a mistake. It is better to play conservative and safe when you're standing than it is to go all in really early in the fight and lose the momentum 10 seconds into the match. Speaker 2: Yeah, I still spend on that. I want to explain this like hunting analogy that I like to use. And so in wrestling, in like American wrestling culture, a common term for someone who's like a really bad wrestler is a fish, right? You call them a fish. And yeah, it's because they like flop around and they're just like wasting energy. But when we consider how you hunt a fish, right? You're sitting on a boat, you cast a line in and you don't have to do anything. There's no danger to you. You're not in threat. No danger for me. The only thing that can happen is either nothing happens or I get that fish and I eat it. And then we're hunting a deer. I go out, I go sit in my deer blind, I wait for a deer to come by, bam, shoot it, kill it. If I go out in the woods and I'm running all over looking for a deer, I'm going to waste tons of energy. And then we get to like a higher level where say I'm hunting like a predator, right? So let's say like as an example, I have a older brother who does a lot of like what's that tracking? And so he was out in the Colorado Rockies and he was he caught the track of a mountain lion. And so he's tracking this mountain lion for like a day and a half. And then he starts realizing that the mountain lion is starting to track him. And he's like, oh, I'm going to just get out of here. I've had enough of this. I don't want any of that noise. I'm out of here, right? So at a higher level, it's about we're hunting each other, right? And I'm trying to find my tree stand that I can sit in and get them from or my castle that I can hurt them from where they can't hurt me. And that's what a guard is, is a situation that's asymmetrical in that way where I have defensive structures where it's harder for them to attack me than it is for me to attack them. It's very easy for me to attack them, hard for them to attack me. Speaker 1: Got it, makes sense. I think that's extremely well said too. Do you feel that there is a bias in jiu-jitsu toward a certain type of takedown? Um you had talked earlier about how forcing someone to turtle, we don't look at that as a takedown in jiu-jitsu. And I've always felt that the rules, especially under the IBJJF, really encourage people towards playing guard. And as a result, you don't see a lot of positions that would be more common in wrestling, like turtle for instance. But there's a lot of stuff that you can do from turtle, both from the attacker's and the defender's standpoint. Do you guys feel that that strategy is underplayed in jiu-jitsu because of the rules or am I missing something here? Speaker 2: You mean the turtle strategy? Speaker 1: Yeah, or either way, either being the person who uses turtle offensively or being the person who tries to force their opponent into turtle. A lot of people will try to avoid that in jiu-jitsu because you don't get takedown points if the person turtles, right? Or you don't get passes if the person turtles. And of course, we want to avoid that if our goal is to put points on the board. Speaker 3: Yeah, so I think you can see with the B team, with uh new wave, just ADCC in general, that turtle is really heavily played. It's really important to play turtle and to break down turtle. Speaker 2: So I feel like at the lower levels in jiu-jitsu, people do kind of avoid turtle, but when you're looking at, you know, higher levels, you look at ADCC, you look at CJI, you look at B team, you look at new wave, they're doing a lot of turtle. They're doing a lot of studying of turtle, breaking turtle, standing up from turtle, Grandby's from turtle, and it's it's a lot more like like folk style wrestling in that way. They just like Craig Jones is like power ride instructional or whatever, like a lot of it is just repurposing American folk style wrestling techniques to apply it to a jiu-jitsu context. Speaker 3: Yeah, and I don't think he would even really like debate that too much. Obviously, he there's more to it because of a jiu-jitsu context. But that's what I'm talking about when we say we have to look at the directionality of the fight. If we're trying to be like wrestling and focusing on getting a takedown, the definition of a takedown in wrestling versus the definition of a takedown in jiu-jitsu is different. If I take you down and you go to turtle in wrestling, that's a takedown. If I try to take you down in jiu-jitsu, it's not a takedown. So we need to get rid of the idea that we're taking them down and that we're staying on top of them. In that way, turtle can be useful. And then from there, yeah, now we're going to start doing our jiu-jitsu of breaking turtle versus the turtle defense. So I'm I'm a big fan of turtle. It's real fun being a wrestler who's wrestled at a higher level and you just like because me, I do most of my jiu-jitsu training when I'm like traveling, I just need somewhere to go get a workout in. And so I'll go to like a gym and people don't really understand how to attack turtle. So I just play turtle and then they put their arm in the wrong spot and I just kind of fat man roll them through, Peterson roll them and then take top. And so it's it's very fun in that manner, you know, because I'm wrestled at the Division 1 level. So I'm very experienced from referee's position. But yeah, it can be like a lot of fun that way and you notice even in like mixed martial arts, a lot of it is going to turtle so you can stand up. I have my own little pet theory that as jiu-jitsu evolves more and more and more and more, it's going to not completely because you've got leg entanglements and all that, but it's going to more just eventually be catch wrestling. Because that's the, you know, like that's the roots of American folk style is just catch wrestling. Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think in in continuing to talk about turtle, Jay Luigi did a a breakdown of wrestling from ADCC and in there he talked about, oh, the the primary wrestling exchanges that existed at ADCC were front headlock, dog fight, dog fight and uh turtle. The only ones that were there. But they're all of those are just dealing with turtle from different angles. Front headlock is just dealing with the turtle from the front. Dog fight is dealing with the turtle from the side and your general turtle is just from behind. So I think that as we understand being on top and wrestling about being controlling the directionality, you need to understand that you're going to end up in turtle. And a lot of American folk style is is turtle versus breaking of a turtle. So it's it's directly wrestling. Speaker 1: I bring this up because I mean, what is turtle? One of the situations where turtle arises is when you try to level change to go for the person's legs, but then you kind of stop or get stalled out. If you're doing a speed double leg, then you're still moving forward aggressively and quickly. Whereas if you're taking a slower approach, then when you level change, you're probably going to be in something resembling turtle for a while. So turtle is very much a lazy wrestler's position. You're going to get there if you're trying to do a a drop and a penetration at a slower speed. So being somewhat comfortable playing that position is important, even if you don't want to play turtle, just like you said, being able to get back up on your feet or knee slide through and keep going is super important. This is something where I don't see a lot of jiu-jitsu people do it, but I do see wrestlers do it. With many jiu-jitsu folks, if you sprawl on them, they'll just go to turtle and stop. But a wrestler won't do that. They'll just keep knee sliding through and trying to reshoot until they eventually get something. So there's an interesting philosophical difference between how jiu-jitsu people play turtle versus wrestlers. A lot of the time, I find when jiu-jitsu people get forced into turtle, they just kind of seed the takedown and just give up. Like, uh, it's over. Now I'm in turtle. Whereas wrestlers won't give up so easily. Speaker 3: Yeah, here's the thing. If you look at some of the more explosive athletes, Jordan Burroughs, Zahid Valencia, Ishmael Musukayev, who's a world champion out of Hungary, they're like most of Jordan Burroughs's like massively like like his insane double legs happen from him being in turtle in front of his opponent. It's just that his toes are in the mat. Like so when Pre Mickelson will teach turtle, he wants you to like tuck your toes so they don't have access to your ankles, right? Because they're behind you. But Jordan Burroughs will like do a down block. He'll sprawl, he'll do like a knee sprawl with his toes coiled in and as the opponent raises his level, he just like frog jumps into their legs. You see that with Zahid Valencia, with Ishmael Musukayev. A lot of these guys, that's how they disguise their level change, right? And so when we're like if you want to double leg somebody, again, it's harder to double leg because you don't have in jiu-jitsu, you've got bare feet. So you don't have the same grip that you do when you have boots. So you can't even be as explosive in jiu-jitsu as you can when you're wrestling. But man, you can shoot pretty explosive shots from turtle if you know what you're doing. Speaker 1: And so when we're talking about the difference in turtle, looking at turtle from a jiu-jitsu perspective versus looking at it from a wrestling perspective and you're talking about jiu-jitsu people giving up and making a turtle is because jiu-jitsu people and this is a generality for hobbyists, they don't really care about the directionality of the fight. They don't care where it's happening. They're just trying to make a thing happen. Whereas if we're wrestling, the idea is that we're going to stay in dominant position the whole time. And I think what you're going to see with higher level jiu-jitsu players is they have the exact same mentality. They're not going to just concede something. And so when we're looking at a shot, you need to understand that you're pretty close to on bottom and sometimes holding onto somebody isn't smart. You need to maintain your position, maintain your castle versus just giving up position because, oh, it's easier. Yeah, if they're starting to sprawl on you, your goal isn't to take them down. Your goal is to recompose yourself so that you can then take them down. You're in a defensive cycle. Yeah, yeah. And I like what you said there about your toe placement. This is an interesting debate. When you are turtled, should you have active toes, meaning you're kind of up on the balls of your feet and your toes so that you can shoot a shot forward if you want to, or should you have dead toes where your feet are flat, your insteps are pressing against the mat. My thoughts on that are, if the person is beside you or behind you, you might want to think about having dead toes just because you want to avoid them ankle picking you. But if they're in front of you, it doesn't really make a lot of sense to have dead toes because they can't really grab your feet from there anyway. And you're denying yourself the ability to power forward for a shot if you want to. So I think it's situational. I mean, there are times when you can do the dead toes and just flatten your feet onto the mat. That can be done, but the problem is when you do that, you are giving up your own base. You can't push explosively off the floor anymore. So it's got to be a situational thing. The main time when I go insteps flat to the mat is when my opponent is circling behind me and I feel like this person's going to try to pick my ankle or do something nasty from behind there. If they're in front of me though, it doesn't matter, right? There's really no likelihood of them being able to pick your ankle from the front. So from there, it makes sense to have live toes so that you've got the ability to shoot a shot from turtle. Otherwise, you're just going to be stuck there or you're going to have to reguard and that can be a dicey thing to do from turtle if you don't know what you're doing. Speaker 2: Yeah, you got the proper assessment of it, you know, where it's situational and you have to be able to understand your body's relationship to the ground, right? Like there's guys in NCAA Division 1 who they line up their referee's position, they put their toes in the ground because they want to explode forward. You tuck your the top of your foot on the ground when you're trying to like take a slow quad pod four-point stand-up, right? You're using kind of a pressure system, which makes more sense for jiu-jitsu. But if you're trying to like do an explosive stand-up, you got to escape in four seconds, you need to you need to get those toes under you so you can push up off of them. So it it really is situational. Like most anything, if there's a rule, there's always an almost always an exception to it. And you want to kind of like look at these things and, you know, like a polarity, a spectrum. And so one more thing that I like to talk about is about the stance. Because you get a lot of like wrestlers who look at jiu-jitsu and the stance in jiu-jitsu and they're like, oh, they're like super upright and they should like hinge more and put their head in the way. And the thing is is that I can choose where I take my stance and I make myself athletic. I can choose to put stress on one of two things. I can hinge my hips and put stress on my low back and give you access to my head, or I can choose to pick up my head, make it less available, make my arms stronger and put more strain in my quads. Now, I don't know about you, but I think my quads are stronger than my low back. And if low ankle attacks aren't that aren't as dangerous in jiu-jitsu as they are in other styles of wrestling, I'm going to take more of a Greco-Roman or judo style stance in jiu-jitsu. And you see that at the higher level. Even you watch that Ruotolo versus Nolf match. Nolf also more upright. Doesn't want to give access to the head. You know, I'd rather somebody get to my body than have control of my head. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. Speaker 2: That goes along with the directionality of the of the fight thing because in in in wrestling, if you want to get a quick take, if you want to go blasting takedowns, leading with your head makes sense. But if we're trying to stay on top of you, I would rather have you shoot on me so that I can sprawl on you, cover you. And then by myself being more upright, my hands being more strong, I can hand fight harder and stronger. And in jiu-jitsu, you don't usually see and you don't usually want in jiu-jitsu, it's very similar to MMA. You don't want to hit your knee if you're going to grab the leg. You want to like do a snatch single, like a a snatch double leg even. Right? Because if you hit your knee, it's a weaker base than if you're on your feet. So you don't really and people aren't usually attacking at the ankle and when they do because you're not wearing a boot, their grip isn't strong, right? So it's just easier to defend those things. And so you're not really worried about defending your ankle versus another standing player. You're only worried about defending your knee. And you don't got to hinge very far to have down block in front of your knee. So it's one of those things where and as we bend over, as we hinge, my arms are actually just like weaker, right? I can't pivot as well, right? So my arm drags become weaker. Like if you watch wrestlers when they take their shot, they become more vertical because they're trying to penetrate their hips under the opponent's hips, rather than get their chest to the body. They're trying to get underneath them. So they might start in a low crouch stance with their head in the way, but once they penetrate, they're bringing their hips in their head up. And so if I'm not like trying to have an explosive penetration, there's times to have a crouch stance, but generally it's not necessary. Speaker 1: I like that a lot. One other thing I want to ask you guys here, what are your thoughts on techniques that maybe lend themselves especially well to people who want to be a lazy wrestler? One that comes to mind for me a lot is the low single. I just find in jiu-jitsu, there are many situations where as you're getting up off the floor, you're low enough down that you can catch the person's leg below the knee and the low single is just there. I mean, turtle is an example, the dog fight is another example of where this happens. I love the low single and I think we don't talk about it enough in jiu-jitsu. But on this topic of lazy wrestling, is there anything that you folks want to highlight about techniques that work especially well with this mindset? Speaker 3: So I think it depends on where we're talking about. So if we're actually standing, I don't think the low single is like really like that good if you're trying to wrestle lazy. But if we're talking about you're in guard and we're doing a wrestle up, because we're already down there, yeah, do the low single all day every day. It's really good. It's really good from there. But if we're talking, you know, two people who are actually standing, the tie I would really recommend people do is a collar tie. Speaker 1: Underhook. Speaker 3: Do a collar tie, do an underhook. But I would start with a collar tie. In my opinion, it's very similar to like starting with a half guard. Like a half guard knee shield, but it's just with your arm. Even if collar tie doesn't become your A game, it's something that you have to understand in the same way that like even if half guard isn't your A game, you need to understand half guard because you're going to either be forced into it or it's just connected to so many positions that you should have it. And the thing is that when you're wrestling against other people, because we're in North America, everybody and their mom wants to collar tie you. So you need to understand the collar tie so you can get them off of your head at the very least. And so from that collar tie, we've got a lot of attacks. Specifically, you have a lot of really strong snap downs, you've got a lot of really strong arm drags, you've got a lot of strong head shocks, things of that nature. So it's really just like understanding that when we're dealing with a head and we're hand fighting, hand fighting doesn't mean working on just the arms. It means working on the head and the arms. In the same way that when we're dealing with a seated guard, we're not just dealing with the hands, you got to deal with their head too. Or if they put their legs up, you got to deal with their legs. So I'm going to give you a list of techniques. It's something like snap downs, duck unders, arm drags, elbow pass, throw bys, slide bys. It's mostly upper body techniques that get you past their guard or force them to the ground. So it's a lot of that, a lot of snatching takedowns, like snatch single, snatch high crotch, which, you know, like and a duck under is the high crotch to the body. And then and then it also and then it's dealing with front headlock situations because if we're going to snap them down or we're going to sprawl on them hard, we need to deal with front headlock. And so to circle back to your low single thing, is something that those low ankle attacks do, especially in wrestling. So like if you're a heavyweight, right? You watch like a guy like Gwizdowski from North Carolina State, who's a couple time uh uh national team member, rep for the US at the Worlds. He'll shoot that low single because what it does is it creates leverage such that a person cannot traditionally sprawl on you and cover you with their hips. So if you're a heavyweight, you definitely don't want to get sprawled on because that guy is huge. So they'll shoot like they'll either do a standing snatch single, upper body wrestling, or they'll shoot a low ankle shot because if I've got leverage against your knee where I've got control of your hip and I've got your ankle, you can't really do like a traditional hip sprawl there. You got to do like some scrambling, maybe cover their head with your hamstring and that requires some flexibility, dexterity. So in terms of like locking out somebody's legs, yeah, that's like really, really good. The problem is that in jiu-jitsu, somebody who knows how to scramble, you don't have a good grip on their foot because especially if it's sweaty. So it's it's it's one of those things where there's no such thing as a good or a bad technique. Every technique has its time and place and if something's beautiful for you, you should just be doing it because it's fun. But we have to understand the nature of the techniques we use. So like in our language, in our Mohawk language, we say gonalunkwa, right? We say I love you. That's how we say I love you. And so what it really translates to is I understand you for what you are and I accept you. So like I have a wife and sometimes we don't agree on something, but I understand her for who she is and she and I accept her and she accepts me and we're committed to each other. And so in the same way, all of these techniques and all of the things we're describing, they're just tools to accomplish goals. You know, they're combinations of frames and hooks and levers and all of these other concepts that you talk about so commonly on your podcast. But it's understanding the component parts of the technique and when it's good and when it's bad and when it's available and what can go wrong that we can do risk mitigation and we can understand the place for things. That's what makes a good technique is my duck under is good because I love the duck under. I understand it. I understand when it's available, how to get there. If I get into a bad spot, how to bail out. So I think we need to focus on that more as grapplers. Speaker 2: So that's why when we're talking about lazy wrestling, the technique selection is going to follow our focus. So if our focus is get a takedown, okay, well, we're going to do low singles, we're going to do high crotches, we're going to do head inside singles, we're going to do blast doubles. But if our focus is be a castle, stay on top and crush him, you're going to do a lot of really hard hand fighting. You're going to do a lot of snapping. You're going to do a lot of trying to arm drag to the back and you're going to do a lot of sprawling. And then if we want, we can add foot sweeps and trips and all that kind of stuff too. Speaker 1: Nice, nice. Well, I appreciate this, guys. This is an awesome chat. I know that you guys have some resources online and I'll put a link in the show notes so that people can find them if they want to dig deeper and see some visuals of your work. But let's talk about Good Mind Grappling. Let's plug your work here as well because I think that stuff particularly is important for the community to know about. Speaker 3: Yeah, so since 2023, my brother and I have been running a non-profit uh organization. It's myself and my brother and my wife and we run grappling programs for kids in our community and in other indigenous communities. And we do this free of charge. They don't pay anything. We're funded entirely through grant money and donations. So if people want to, they can look us up at goodmindgrappling.com. They can find us on Facebook, Good Mind Grappling, or on Instagram. And if they feel moved to, they can make a donation. You can do that through our website, goodmindgrappling.com. Additionally, we're looking to try to put out more resources for people. You know, we've been like essentially making a curriculum to teach youth wrestling using constraints-led approach, can using a lot of this kind of of methodology that we're putting together. Eventually, I want to release that as a product that we can use to drive donations. As well, we've been working with a a person at um Island Top Team at Rob Bernaki's gym and she's been working with us to put together an instructional series on lazy wrestling, right? And so we're working on that right now. They can find that at lazywrestling.com. We'll give you the link so you can add that to the show notes. Uh but it's like a just a little like uh newsletter right now, but it'll let you know when we release that that you can come and you can check that out and purchase that and support us. Anything anything that we get, my main intention is to work with kids in our community and other indigenous communities to have them self-actualize and develop their emotional regulation and power through wrestling, through grappling. Lastly, I do want to plug your Discord. Your the BJJ Mental Models Premium Discord. My brother and I are are members of that community. It's probably the best online grappling community that I've been part of. And if you sign up and you put yourself in a rolling review, I'm likely to look at it. Like that's like literally what we've been doing like when I'm on there, that's what I like to do is I like to just talk about wrestling and look at what people are doing. You know, I'm a very busy person, so I can't like do it all the time. But you know, just a little plug for for your stuff too, you know, we we're my brother and I are on there. You've got lots of cool resources on there. Speaker 1: Oh, thanks, man. I appreciate that a lot. Well, I will put links to all of your stuff in the show notes. And again, for for those who haven't been following the podcast recently, I am a really big fan of using grappling as a way to bring people together and build community. This is something where I think we really want to leverage this and make this a focus of the martial arts again. We've kind of lost that, it feels like, but the power of something like jiu-jitsu isn't just learning to fight. It's what it does to bring people together and support people. And one of the best ways that anyone can do that is to vote with their wallet. So like you said, you guys are have instructional content on the way and you accept donations for the organization. I really recommend everyone do what they can to support anyone in grappling like you guys who are doing great work. So again, I will put all of those links in the show notes. I will also put links to our stuff. It all lives at bjjmentalmodels.com. The podcast, the newsletter, all completely free. So make sure you at least cash in on that. And if you do want to level up with us and join BJJ Mental Models Premium, like you guys said, we've got an amazing Discord community. I am just super happy with what we've built there. It's my favorite jiu-jitsu community, virtual or real. It's just it means so much to me personally to have people join and come and be a part of the work that we do. And of course, on top of that, you also get a massive and ever-growing library of content that is along the lines of what we do here on the show, but often structured more in terms of courses and educational frameworks. One thing that we also have is premium podcasts. If you listen to this and you thought, man, I wish I could have heard these guys talk about their work and less about lazy wrestling. Well, the good news is, we already had that conversation. It's on BJJ Mental Models Premium. So you can catch that there. Again, all of that is at bjjmentalmodels.com. I'll put a link to your stuff, guys, and my stuff in the show notes as well to make it easy for people to find. But thank you so much for doing this. I've been looking forward to this chat for a long time. Topic very near and dear to me. And I can't think of two guys who are more experienced and better guests for this topic. So thanks so much for coming by, Thomas and Philip. Speaker 3: Thank you, Steve. Really appreciate you. Speaker 1: Amazing, guys. Thank you so much. Thanks to the listeners as well. Hope you're having a great day and we will talk to you soon.