BONUS: Marcelo Garcia vs Lachlan Giles Analysis, feat. Drew Foster

Speaker 1: Hey everybody, before we get started this week, I have huge news. She actually did it. We're pleased to announce that Beatrice Jin, top-ranked women's competitor in North America and long-time BJJ Mental Models premium community member, has published her first ever course with us, exclusive to BJJ Mental Models. It's called Stop Being Nice. It's a three-part audio series designed to solve real mindset problems that regular folks experience in Jiu-Jitsu. If you struggle to be aggressive and competitive in Jiu-Jitsu, you'll find the solutions here. If you're already a BJJ Mental Models premium subscriber, you've already got access, and if you are not, good news, you can get it now and get your first week free, go to BJJ Mental Models.com and check it out today. Speaker 2: Hey folks, check out this awesome breakdown of the upcoming Marcelo Garcia versus Lochlan Giles match from One Fight Night 38. This is by Drew Foster. It's from the State of the Meta podcast on BJJ Mental Models Premium, but I wanted you to have this one for free. Speaker 1: Welcome to State of the Meta. Thanks for checking in, everybody. I want to talk this episode a lot about this upcoming matchup with Marcelo Garcia versus Lochlan Giles happening at One Fight Night 38, December 5th in Bangkok. This is a really, really cool match. Marcelo Garcia versus Lochlan Giles. This is like, it's, it's a, it's a matchup of two legends. We want to talk a little bit about like why this matchup matters, kind of what's at stake for both athletes, some of the narratives about like old school versus new school, top game versus leg lock, a little bit about the career arcs of both of these guys and break down the styles a little bit. By the time this episode comes out, it will probably be getting pretty close to the December 5th matchup. So when you're listening to this, the matchup might be right around the corner. I'm not sure how much they're going to promote it or not, but definitely keep an eye on that. There'll obviously be like a link in the podcast description on where to check the match out, as well as probably a lot of supplementary materials on this episode. There's just so much footage of these two guys, um, to check out. This is really cool. These guys are like two legends from two different generations. Marcelo Garcia, in my opinion, is the greatest grappler of all time. Uh, let me talk about each one of these guys a little bit, just kind of the, the pedigree, you know, how they, how they came up. Marcelo Garcia really made his name in the 2000s and even the early 2010s a little bit. Mostly at ADCC, uh, in No-Gi, he pioneered a ton of the No-Gi stuff that, uh, is very commonplace today. He won ADCC, uh, four times. He got silver in the absolute division. He's the smallest person to ever make it to the finals of an absolute division in 2007. He submitted his way all the way through his weight class, all the way through the absolute, made it to the finals and got submitted by Robert Drysdale. Still one of the coolest runs that anybody's ever had. He got a bronze in the absolute as well. I think he's also the smallest guy to get a bronze, uh, in the absolute division. Just like an all-around, uh, beast of a competitor. Really did so much stuff in the 2000s that's like really common now and a lot of people didn't do a lot of the stuff that he did in the 2000s to like a large extent. I always thought it kind of looked like he was playing a different sport as everybody else. And then now it almost looks like a lot of people are kind of playing Marcelo Garcia type games with just the addition of leg locks involved. Marcelo was never a super big leg lock guy, which is kind of pertinent now to swing over to Lochlan Giles, who's very much a leg lock guy. Now, Lochlan Giles, uh, does not have the same like competitive pedigree as Marcelo. Speaker 1: Lochlan Giles is big, his big claim to fame competitively was at ADCC 2019. He got bronze in the absolute division against three athletes much, much larger than him. He was 77 kilos and ended up submitting Kanan Duarte, Patrick Gaudio, and Muhammad Ali in the ADCC absolute division. All of those guys were at least 99 kilograms, if not in the over 99 kilo weight class, which at ADCC is pretty much unrestricted. If you're over, if you're over 99 kilos, you can just weigh anything you want to weigh. Lochlan is a not a huge 77 kilo guy either. And he really, talking about the games of both of these guys a little bit. Lochlan Giles really, he's good at a ton of stuff, obviously. So is Marcelo. They're, they're both, nobody's that good at that level and isn't good at a lot of different things. But Lochlan really like, he really staked, staked his claim at that ADCC with the like K-guard to the backside heel hook game, right? He really kind of helped put that on the map. Now, he wasn't the first person to do it. I think he got a lot of inspiration from the Miyao brothers. The Miyao brothers back in the mid 2010s, they used to use a lot of K-guard in IBJJF competitions to get into the 50/50 position where they could sweep and take the back. That's like was very popular on the IBJJF Gi scene. And they even did it in some No-Gi competitions as well. There was an EBI, Eddie Bravo Invitational with Joelle Miyao where he did some K-guard to 50/50 stuff, but, uh, Lochlan took it and really instead of just using it to get to the 50/50 and sweep, he would like get behind the top player and throw in the, the, the 50/50 hook from behind and he would go ahead and try to trap the toes from behind him and almost like finish a heel hook from behind your, your partner where their hands are almost like on the floor, they're kind of leaning forward, you're behind them. It's like harder to defend the heel hook from there. And he did that on all three of those guys. So he's very good at open guards, right? If you watch his match against, uh, like Kade Ruotolo at the ADCC after that, the 2022 ADCC, he was very good at playing like supine on his back. And he's just got a very, very difficult guard to pass. He's really good at keeping his knees and his elbows together and keeping his feet kind of on the outside. So this is going to get to a big difference between him and Marcelo, but Lochlan Giles' guard game is very focused on keeping his feet on the outside of the guard passer's hips, right? And with the feet on the outside, it's, it's like it's very difficult for the person on top to, uh, to get like outside passing is really difficult to go on and it's just very difficult. It's, it's very good at retaining guard and then he just finds all those openings to get in on the legs. He's got good, uh, he's got good butterfly guard, uh, he's got good half guard. One of his like original instructionals was on the half guard position. Uh, from the top position, uh, he's, he's very strong as well. He's got very good like rolling headlock chokes, very strong anaconda choke, good guillotine, good back attacks. Um, on his back as well, Lochlan is like very good at the Choi bar. A lot of times even from bottom north-south, he's able to get in on a lot of Choi bar attacks. Now, Marcelo's game from the guard is, is very different. Marcelo got really popular for putting butterfly guard on the map. So Marcelo really played seated a lot. Now, he did a lot of wrestling. He wasn't necessarily a huge guard puller. I don't really think of him as a huge guard puller, even though he did play a lot of guard. Marcelo would usually try to wrestle with people and do a lot of single legs, a lot of arm drags to single legs, a lot of arm drags to the back. But if he couldn't take you down, he would almost like pull guard in a very aggressive way where he's still going forward as he's sitting in onto his butt and would almost treat the guard pull as a wrestling shot. So he would like pull into seated guard or butterfly guard, however you want to think of it, and then immediately either wrestle up or get in on the legs. Now, he didn't use the legs to do leg locks, but he used the legs, you know, with his feet on the inside of your legs, going into like one leg X and all of those kind of inside X-guard leg positions. He would use it to sweep and get on top, right? He would use the arm drag. He was just big butterfly guard, seated player and is that's where so much of the modern style really traces back to, in my opinion, is a lot of the Marcelo Garcia stuff. He was one of the first people that was doing a lot of wrestle-ups, wrestling up from butterfly guard onto single legs and double legs and body locks. That stuff that's like so common in the modern game today that just was not really a thing when he was doing it. And he's just so innovative and would always think outside the box and really had no, I remember one of the things Marcelo said is that he never cared a whole lot about tradition or doing what you were kind of supposed to do or following dogma. He always took what felt good with his body and what felt strong and good for him. And if it felt efficient, he would do it and didn't really care what anybody thought. And I just thought that was super cool. It's a lot of times it's rare. This is a little bit of a side track, but we have a lot of people in our sport that are either really good at like following a blueprint and doing a lot of repetitions of patterns and getting really good at an existing framework. And then there's a lot of people that are creative and innovative and they add to the game and they create a lot of new things and they leave a lot behind. And I always thought it's very difficult to be a super high performer and also be very creative and innovative. And Marcelo was definitely that. He would do different stuff like every ADCC, every two years he would have like a whole different game. Like he, I'll just go through this a little bit, right? His first ADCC was 2003 and he was doing pretty much all arm drags to the back, rear naked chokes on everybody. Butterfly guard, arm drag to the back, rear naked choke. He would just get around you, take your back and throw that rear naked choke on. And nobody kept up with him. The next ADCC, he incorporated a lot more X-guard into things and, and one leg X. So people were like maybe ready for the arm drags and the butterfly guards, but then all of a sudden he's going underneath and he's getting on their legs. And then he's playing a lot of top game at that ADCC as well. He's doing a lot of chest-to-chest half guard passing, which is super dominant in the sport right now. Very, very common. You, you, there are no high-level guard passers in the sport that aren't good at passing from chest-to-chest half guard. It's like one of the most prominent things in No-Gi Jiu-Jitsu is getting chest-to-chest in your opponent's half guard and getting your leg free. Marcelo was running a lot of that at his second ADCC. Mounted arm bars, like stuff that you might not traditionally think of as, as being him. Most people think of, you know, rear naked chokes and guillotines and north-south chokes. After ADCC 2005, he does 2007. This is where he really breaks out the guillotines and the north-south chokes. High elbow guillotine was his big thing. He was not big on arm-in guillotines or any chokes with the arm in. He hated anaconda chokes. He hated D'Arce chokes. He hated kimuras. He said that all of those things felt like they were very strength-based for him. He hated arm triangles, head and arm chokes, anything like that. All of his chokes, if you look, they focus two arms directly on the neck. And he thought as a person with shorter arms that that was a stronger path to victory for him. He said he had short arms, can't get people's arms and their neck very easily into his grip, but his arms are short and strong. So he would just focus on two arms directly on the neck. The north-south choke to this day is not really a move that very many people are good at. It's definitely a specialist move. It's kind of a controversial move. I've seen a lot of prominent black belts out there say that it's not a very good move. I've seen a lot of prominent black belts say that it's the move that they've struggled with the most. I love it. I think it's an awesome move. I'm pretty good at it. Uh, I mostly got good at it just by watching Marcelo. He just won his comeback match at One FC against Emma Nari with a north-south choke. And again, this was the ADCC where he broke out those high elbow guillotines, north-south chokes. He had a very underrated omoplata game. Never really used it to submit anybody, but he used it to sweep a lot of people. Then ADCC 2009, the next time it comes around. This was the only ADCC that Marcelo did not win at his own weight class. He lost in the finals against Pablo Popovitch, who he had beaten multiple times by submission up to that point. Uh, three times by submission up to that point. There was some controversy around this match. It's pretty much the only time that you'll ever see Marcelo Garcia pissed off. Uh, Pablo grabbed his rash guard and his shorts a whole lot during the match. And it really aggravated Marcelo and it kind of, yeah, it just, it got him really heated. Pablo passed his guard at the very end of the match in like the last 15 seconds and Marcelo recovers his guard after like exactly like four seconds. Just enough for Pablo to get points. That was enough to give Pablo the win. Uh, but up to the finals match that year, Marcelo just high elbow guillotined every single opponent. He did a ton of like the double, the dummy sweep is what I learned it as, but a lot of people I think nowadays with the Japanese terminology, they call it the double Koichi sweep, but basically where you're sitting on your butt, butterfly guard, your opponent's standing up on both feet and you hook your shoelaces behind their ankles and push on their knees and they just fall backwards right onto their butt. Marcelo was doing that on everybody. He did it on Kron Gracie, he did it on Rodney Ellis, he did it on Kintaro Nakamura. I'm looking at these names right here. I think he did it on every single, every single one of those opponents. Found the neck from top position. All the high elbow guillotines were from the top at the previous ADCC. I believe he was doing some of those from butterfly guard and just like snapping the head down or hip heisting. Again, super common strategy and game plan in today's game that nobody was really doing before Marcelo. And so he did not win ADCC 2009. He did the absolute as well that year and did not medal in that either. He lost to Braulio Estima with one of those Ruotolo teen like arm triangles from the back position. Braulio did like a body lock pass and arm triangle him from the back. We might talk about Braulio sometime. Another one of the most innovative grapplers ever that doesn't get nearly enough credit. So 2009 was like not Marcelo's best year at ADCC. And then Marcelo did one more ADCC in 2011. Won all his matches, three out of four by submission. Uh, he got a couple high elbow guillotines. He was doing a lot of Toreando passing, a lot of outside passing in this event. This was like one of the first tournaments in No-Gi where you saw him doing like a lot of footwork passing, throwing the legs by, stuff like that. That was something that you probably saw him do a lot in practice, a lot in training, but not so much in matches. And then in the finals, he faced Leo Vieira, who is another big-time legend. And Marcelo did like a mounted triangle choke with his legs. Again, something that he had never done in a match up to that point. Probably wouldn't expect it because again, he talked about how he doesn't like arm-in chokes all that much. I don't know if he really thinks the leg triangle is, is a big exception or not. I haven't seen him do a ton of those, but he is obviously pretty good at them. He snatched that thing on, got a tap and that was his last No-Gi match. Marcelo is not as old as people think. One of the things to consider about this match up between Lochlan Giles and Marcelo Garcia is the age factor. So I've seen a bunch of people online say things like, ah, Lochlan Giles has the big age advantage. Marcelo Garcia is, he's really old, he's really, he's way, way past his prime. And I'm not going to argue that anybody 42 is in their athletic prime. Lochlan Giles is 39, Marcelo Garcia is 42. But 42 is not super old. It's definitely not super old compared to 39. I mean, these guys are only three years apart. Marcelo Garcia was active much younger, I think than people realize. Like when Marcelo was lighting things up and winning his, all his ADCC medals and all his Worlds medals, which we didn't even talk about, he was in his like early 20s. He might have even done his first ADCC at like 19 or 20 years old or something like that. So, you know, Marcelo was a lot younger, I think than people realize. So he's not that old. If you're checking social media or if you ever check on Reddit, there's a good amount of recent Marcelo Garcia training footage and he looks awesome. I mean, he's doing all the same stuff. He looks sharp. He looks a lot leaner. So one of the other big things about Marcelo Garcia is he had a very prominent battle with stomach cancer over the past four or five years or so. And, uh, thankfully, I believe he is cancer-free. Um, I don't know how many years you have to be cancer-free to be considered in remission. I'm not sure if he's in remission or not, but he did have a battle with stomach cancer. He's, he looks a lot leaner now. He doesn't look like unhealthily lean or anything like that. He doesn't look skinny. But he does look leaner and I actually think in the recent training footage I've seen, I think he looks like he's moving as sharp as ever, as clean as ever. I think having maybe a little bit of that weight off might actually be a good thing. I think he's an incredible athlete. One of the big misconceptions that I've heard a lot about Marcelo over the years is that he's not athletic or not strong. And those two things are 100% not true. I've heard some crazy stories about his athleticism. I've heard that his warm-ups, the warm-ups that they do at his gym, I've heard are really intense. I've heard stories about Marcelo teaching himself how to skateboard in less than a day and being able to do like kickflips and like tricks on a skateboard in basically just a weekend. I've heard of some random story about him like jumping from one boat to another boat on like one foot and landing like a pelican or a flamingo or something like that from like a pretty high height. He's definitely an athlete. Anybody that's that coordinated is 100% an athlete. And Marcelo has a lot of explosion in his movements. He has a lot of when he commits to something, he explodes into it with full force and full commitment. And I still think at 42 as a guy that's not huge, never had any major injuries as far as I know. He's, I think he had like a really clean competitive record. He definitely never got injured badly in a match. And as far as I know, he's pretty much trained the whole time, hasn't had to take extensive time off due to injuries. I think he's going to be coming into this pretty healthy and all things considered, I think that he is going to be pretty healthy. Lochlan Giles doesn't seem as explosive to me. Doesn't quite seem as much of like an athlete athlete in that sense. I think of Giles as like a little bit more of a technician, like maybe a little bit more cerebral, maybe a little bit more of a game plan. I know for sure, I've studied a lot of Marcelo's thought processes going into matches and a lot more of how he approaches things. And I know that Marcelo Garcia at least, at least until the time he retired, he did not watch footage on his opponents. He was not into studying footage. He, he thought that looking at footage of his opponents got him out of his own game, got him thinking about his opponent's game. And in his mind, he said, I never want to be thinking about my opponent's game. I never want to be thinking about what my opponent is trying to do. I'm already losing before I even start the match if that's the case. I want to know, I want to, I want to play my game. I want to get my opponent playing my game and not have them into their game. And Marcelo would, he said he would watch a few things to study his opponents. He said he like wanted to know if they pulled guard or if they wrestled. Wanted to know if they stood right foot forward or left foot forward and maybe just watch a couple little things about how they like to hand fight. But as far as their game on the ground, he said he wasn't really interested. So another big thing that I'm, I'm seeing people talk about is, I think a lot of people think that Lochlan is probably going to be the favorite in this match. I haven't seen odds on it, but I think people are really viewing this as an old school versus new school kind of a thing. And Lochlan being sort of the flag bearer for more modern Jiu-Jitsu with the leg locks and all that stuff. And Marcelo being more old school. But I, I honestly, I mean, I'm not saying that I think Marcelo was like a huge favorite to win. I think Lochlan very well could win the match. You can't be surprised at all if Lochlan wins. He's an incredible grappler. But I don't think the generational divide between Marcelo and Lochlan Giles is as big as everybody thinks. I think that Marcelo was so far ahead of the curve that a lot of what he does translates so well right now. He plays a style that a lot of people still play right now. You can see so much, much of it these days. And Lochlan, you know, does a lot of stuff that Marcelo does as well. They do a lot of things similar. They do some things different, obviously, but like, I also just think that this technique stuff and the meta stuff, in a lot of ways, I think it matters less than people think it does. Marcelo is amazing at the real skills of Jiu-Jitsu. And when I say the real skills, I mean things like hand fighting, not letting someone get their hands on you. Not letting somebody get their feet inside your legs. Not letting somebody pin your hips to the floor. Not letting somebody get chest-to-chest contact on you. Like he's really good at the overarching skills that just make somebody a good grappler. And to leg lock Marcelo, you got to get at least one of your feet inside of his legs. And I'm just saying that is really hard to do. I've seen a ton of training footage on his website. This was another legendary thing about Marcelo. He would publicize all of his rolls on his website at a time where nobody did this. I mean, I think he started this website in like 2009, 2010. And he would just put like three to four rolls every single day on his website. You could watch all of them. Not only could you watch them, but he had tags on every single roll saying exactly what moves he did during the roll. You could click on any of those moves and it would take you to a page that would show you every time he taught that move in a class, every time he did that move in a roll, and they had an in-action tab. The website was MGNaction.com. You could just click this in-action tab on the move that you chose and it would just show you on a loop like every single time that he did it on somebody in a roll at the gym. And it was like one of the coolest ways to learn moves that I've ever seen. I used to use that website all the time. And again, he publicized all these rolls, let all his opponents watch his game, let all his opponents watch his classes. This was pre-instructional era. People were not putting out content. They were very protective over their rolls in the gym. And Marcelo just showed everybody. And nobody, nobody could beat him those last couple years. And I just always found that was so commendable. But if you watch that website, he rolled with guys like Johnny Grippo, Ryan Hall, Cobrinha, all guys that didn't necessarily play like that same kind of backside 50/50 game that Lochlan Giles plays, but they did play a lot of 50/50, all of those guys. They did a lot of inversions, they did a lot of funky guard work, they did a lot of leg entries and you just watch Marcelo with some of these guys. I mean, Cobrinha is the second greatest featherweight of all time. And you just, Cobrinha doesn't get leg entanglements on Marcelo. Marcelo just keeps Cobrinha's feet out from between his legs. He keeps Cobrinha, um, from going behind him and threading the legs in. Same thing with Ryan Hall. I mean, the only times you really see Marcelo end up in those positions is when he wants to play them and kind of allows his training partner to throw him in the 50/50 to like explore from there. And he has decent leg locks. Like again, if you just watch his matches, you don't see him do a lot of leg locks, but if you go on his training website, you can see Marcelo doing like heel hooks and berimbolos and cross, like even Wodgelocks, man. Marcelo Garcia was doing stuff that looked very similar to the Wodgelock back in like 2010, 2011. Uh, though I can't find those videos at this point. They're not going to be in the show notes or anything like that. I really wish I had them. But Marcelo was 100% doing a lot of really creative foot lock stuff that is just getting like very popular in the past couple years. So I don't think that Giles is going to have this huge, uh, huge technical advantage on Marcelo. Now, paths to victory, how do I see the match going? I, I think that Giles will probably pull guard. And I think Marcelo will probably be trying to look to close the distance and force chest-to-chest half guard. And I think he's going to try to pass from the half guard and then, uh, either take the back or probably get like a north-south choke. I think Giles is, is probably going to, uh, work on the legs or work for Choi bar attempts. Maybe even, uh, attack the back from bottom position and see if he could get a win there. Um, it's really going to be interesting to see time away from competition for both of these guys. Neither one of them has competed in quite a while. Marcelo obviously, it's been longer. He hasn't competed since 2011. Well, he just competed at One FC, uh, earlier this year, but it, one match, a few minutes of, of match time in the past 15 years. Lochlan, uh, I don't know when Lochlan's exact last match was, but it's definitely been, uh, it's definitely been some time since Lochlan had a match. And, uh, it's just going to be interesting what the time away from the sport looks like with both of these guys coming back in. I have heard that this will be Giles' last match. I believe he made a statement saying that this will probably be his retirement match. This clash of styles is going to be super interesting. I think, I just see Marcelo probably dictating the pace a bit because he likes to be a grappler that's always first, that's always leading the dance, that's always pushing the pace. And from what I've seen a lot, especially in Giles' recent ADCC matches, I think Giles really looks comfortable letting his opponent kind of dictate the pace a little bit. And Lochlan seems very comfortable kind of relaxing into his guard and allowing the other person to kind of set the pace and then Giles looks for his openings to kind of counterattack and spring traps. I really, I really feel like Giles is kind of very, very good at setting traps. It's like trying to walk through a room filled with mouse traps without getting your, without getting something snapped. And Marcelo is really good at like charging from one side of the room to the other. Marcelo is just going to put on like a crazy pace. And it's going to be really interesting to see how, uh, how this goes. I know here's a quote from Giles. He said, if I can, I will like to pull guard and go for the legs, but I do want to show that I have a full well-rounded game. The way that Marcelo plays his game, even from guard, he's not an easy person to isolate a leg on. He's always pummeling the feet on the inside. That's exactly what, uh, I was talking about how Marcelo just like never allows inside position on his feet. And this is, I don't know, it's going to be a really, a really fun match. In a lot of ways, it's going to be very bittersweet, no matter the outcome. I think both of these guys are huge fan favorites. Everybody loves Marcelo. Everybody loves Lochlan Giles. They both have contributed a ton to the community. They're both very likable. They both have really cool styles. They're both fun to watch. And it's going to be kind of sad either way. It's one of these matches where you kind of don't want either person to have to lose. I know I've seen a lot of people say things like, you know, my mind thinks that Giles is going to win, but my heart says Marcelo is going to win. Um, I don't know. I don't know. I, I almost feel like it's a coin toss. I actually, I, I kind of think that Marcelo can can pull the win off. I kind of think that Marcelo is going to pull the win off, but I think it's going to be a very close match. And I don't think that it is going to be a blowout by any, any stretch of the imagination. So I hope that everybody checks this match out. I think there is a big market potentially. I would love if there was for like legacy matches. I would love to see more of that in our sport of like legend versus legend matchups. And I think the viewership will obviously determine whether we get more of these kind of matchups in the future, whether it's on One or whether it's on other events. And if you can, really try to tune into the card live or try to watch a replay the next day or as soon as it's up. Really try to support this match, support these legends. And I really hope everybody has fun watching the match. Uh, the next episode, I want to talk about Shinya Aoki a little bit, some of the things that he's brought to the table. I want to talk about Rafa Mendes a little bit. Maybe talk about some other matches that are coming up amongst some younger, younger folks that are new on the horizon here. And yeah, thanks everybody for listening. We'll catch you on the next episode. Thanks for listening. Peace. Speaker 1: This has been a BJJ Mental Models production.