Ep. 366: The Gripfighting Scorecard, feat. Chris Round

Speaker 1: Hey everybody, before we get started this week, I have huge news. She actually did it. We're pleased to announce that Beatriz Jen, top-ranked women's competitor in North America and long-time BJJ Mental Models premium community member, has published her first ever course with us, exclusive to BJJ Mental Models. It's called Stop Being Nice. It's a three-part audio series designed to solve real mindset problems that regular folks experience in Jiu-Jitsu. If you struggle to be aggressive and competitive in Jiu-Jitsu, you'll find the solutions here. If you're already a BJJ Mental Models premium subscriber, you've already got access, and if you are not, good news, you can get it now and get your first week free. Go to bjjmentalmodels.com and check it out today. Speaker 1: Hey everybody, welcome to BJJ Mental Models episode 366. I'm Steve Kwan. BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent Jiu-Jitsu approach. And this is going to be a fun episode. We're going to talk about tactical grip fighting. But first, let's introduce the guest. I've got Christopher Round on the line. Chris, my friend, how are you doing? Speaker 2: Doing great. Thanks. Doing awesome. Thanks for having me, Steve. Speaker 1: Glad to have you here. Why don't you give yourself a quick intro? I think once people hear this backstory, they're going to understand why we've got you here to talk about this topic. Speaker 2: Sure. So, I am a black belt in Judo, a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. I also have a PhD. I came up under Jimmy Pedro. Um, for those who don't know him, he's an IJF Hall of Fame coach, two-time Olympic bronze medalist. He coached Ronda Rousey, Kayla Harrison, uh, Travis Stevens, and actually those three individuals, I was a training partner for them. And I started in his dojo. Actually, his father taught my father, and I was with him until I was about 23, 24 before I left for graduate school. And I came up basically, if you want to understand why America's winning Olympic medals, it's off of grip fighting. Americans, they was long ago realized that we could not reliably throw everybody like the way the Japanese players do. We may not have the physicality the way that some of the Central Asian or European players have. But if we can choose where the match happens, we can win. So when you look at players like Kayla Harrison, Ronda Rousey, Jimmy himself, they were all players that could ensure that they made sure that the match happened in favorable circumstances for them. Speaker 1: Yeah, extremely well said, man. I have said on this podcast many times that grips dictate position. If you asked me to give one concept to the average practitioner to help them immediately get better results in Jiu-Jitsu, that's probably the one I would suggest. Understanding that whoever wins the grip fight is likely going to be the person who gets to dictate the position is absolutely critical. And from my experience, the amount of time people in the sport of Jiu-Jitsu spend learning grip fighting is pretty minimal. Now, you actually have a really cool framework for grip fighting, which is what I want to talk to you about here today. But maybe before we do, do you want to continue setting the stage? Is there anything else you wanted to talk about in terms of the the ecosystem of grip fighting in Jiu-Jitsu and how you see that as maybe being different from Judo or what people need to really focus on in our sport? Speaker 2: Sure. You know, before I go even further, I just want to call out one thing. You know, the thing we're going to be talking about today, it came as a result of, you know, my long-term collaboration with Dr. Rhadi Ferguson. He's the one who gave me my black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. He is one of the best grip fighting coaches in the world as well. So I personally apprenticed under two of the best grip fighting coaches in the history of the United States. And I was very, very fortunate in that way. You know, I was a Jimmy Pedro Black belt, but I also got to work with Dr. Ferguson. So, when we talk about this conceptual structure, I got this originally from him and I've and through collaboration, he and I have worked on it. So, when we think about Jiu-Jitsu, so one of the things that's interesting to me, and look, I love both sports. That's why I'm here. And it's interesting to watch Jiu-Jitsu grow because in some ways it's speed running things that, I'm a history nut. I love knowing the history of Judo competition and there's some elements of that it's been kind of speed running because, you know, the amount of resources that are available just in terms of people if people watch film, stuff like that, it's just very different than it was for Judo players in the 80s. So, where I go with this is, you know, we look at Gi Jiu-Jitsu. Gi Jiu-Jitsu, just like Gi Judo, is completely defined by a few different elements. You have angles, you have distance, and then we get into attachments. Attachments can be a wrap, which is I have something on you, but you can angle your way out of it. Most attachments in Nogi are inherently wraps. We have hooks, which are attachments that you have to do something to break it apart. I've basically made a circle around something, whether it's your wrist or part of the gi, and you have to break that attachment. That's what I refer to as a hook. And then of course, we have frames, which are more of a defensive element, but I might create frames using different attachments. So, this is something that is universal to grappling. We are wrestling, we're doing judo, we're doing Brazilian jitsu, we're doing sambo. This is universal. So, if I have that in mind for jitsu, grip fighting is exceptionally important because because we don't get reset in jitsu, effectively, you need to think about your gripping because that's what's going to define what's about to happen. If you have bad gripping at the beginning of a 10-minute match at Black belt, you're not going to have a fun time at minute nine because the person who wins that initial exchange, that initial grip fight, it's not just people think about like starting on bottom versus on top. That does matter. Let's be very clear. But it's very, very different. If I'm looking to be on top, if I start in and someone gets their butt and we're disconnected versus someone gets it's their butt and they have cross collar or or even they're getting into spider. Totally different scenarios and those scenarios are very much defined by what I allow to happen during the grip fighting phase. Speaker 1: Yep. Absolutely makes sense. I realized this way too late into my journey. I remember like many people in Jiu-Jitsu, I was struggling to really get my game off, to make things happen the way that I wanted. And I I thought at first it was because I didn't know how to do techniques properly. And I thought that was my deficiency. But I realized at some point, no, my deficiency was actually grip fighting. I was basically ignoring the status of the grip fight so that I could focus on doing the move that I would want to do. So if I wanted to do say a knee cut pass, I would be focusing on doing the knee cut and not focusing enough on clearing and controlling grips before I do it. And of course, if you try to pass someone's guard while they hold dominant grips on you, you're making it first of all, way harder for you to do the guard pass, but you're also opening up a lot of opportunities for the other person to sweep you. So, this was a huge realization to me. I decided at one point, I would change my thinking and prioritize the grip fight. I would not try to do any quote-unquote move until I had the grips that I wanted to get. And I would focus on that. And just that realization alone, without even getting into the tactics of how I would do it, but just that realization of making the grip fight my number one priority, completely changed the way that my jiu-jitsu looked. It suddenly became way harder for people to execute on me because if they can't get the grips they want, they just can't really make anything happen, right? Getting good grips is the key to almost everything else in jiu-jitsu. You can't get leverage if you don't have grips, right? So much of what we want to do requires having good dominant grips on the person. So, to me, that was a big breakthrough. It's something that, man, in retrospect, if I had learned that at white belt, it would have been a huge game changer for me. Speaker 2: And I think in fairness, you know, one thing I want to mention to the audience and fairness to anyone looking at this, part of why gripping gets, you know, under analyzed is because you don't necessarily get a score. Like, it's something where everyone's focused on the moves that let them get score points. And the same thing in Judo. Everyone's focused on the throws. Well, to get to the point where I get to score, I have to actually do my grip fighting and win my positioning and win my angles. And this is a thing that I think the main reason why this is understudied in both sports for many, many practitioners is because they don't they're thinking about the move that scores them points. They're not thinking about what gets them there or they're giving it very kind of a rudimentary analysis. So what ends up happening is a lot some people who have a lot of talent, they'll kind of figure something out on their own and they'll find a sequence. But one thing that's actually really important to call out is a lot of times the folks who don't have formal grip fighting education become highly, highly predictable because they'll use two or three different things that if you're a really skilled grip fighter, you'll pick up on very quickly or if you're a skilled coach, you'll pick up on very quickly. And all of a sudden, you'll never get to use those or it'll be very difficult for you to use those because I know the counters to those. So I'll actually get to my move long before you ever get a chance to even think about yours. Speaker 1: Yep. Absolutely. Now, before we dig into this, I do want to ask just a quick broad question. Of course, your background is judo here, and grips are one area where you will see difference in the gi versus in no gi. Do you have any meaningful distinctions between how you look at this framework when you're talking about someone doing no gi grappling versus wearing the kimono? Speaker 2: Yes. So, the structural framework is very different in Nogi because the reason is I mentioned the difference between hooks and wraps. Most grips out of gi are hooks. You have to do something to break them or it's very hard to slip them out. Nogi attachments just because people are slippery are much, much harder to enforce. Like I unless I've actually hooked in and like I have like I've enclosed and circled you with a body lock or with my closed guard, it's very hard to establish a permanent position. So when I'm thinking about grips in terms of Nogi in stand up, when we're actually, you know, we're in the neutral wrestling phase of it, I have less time with those than I would in a gi position. So actually, the visual hierarchy we're going to talk about today, we're talking about primarily gi. It doesn't really directly apply to Nogi because it's a different positional hierarchy, but the underlying principles are the same. Speaker 1: Got it. Okay. So we'll talk about that and I just encourage people to bear that in mind. If there's interest, we can always reapproach this and talk about it from the no-gi perspective. But of course, the gi perspective will likely, as is often the case, be more complicated. So I think it's good to maybe have this chat first. Now, you said something really great. You were talking about how people often ignore the grip fight because it's not something that has a score attached to it. And people prioritize the things that give them points. And that can kind of steer where people focus their training and their game. I think that is very much the case. And if there's an area of the sport that you want to work on, creating an artificial point scoring system where you can measure your progress can be a really helpful way to focus on that. Because without that in place, you're just going to focus on the things that actually put points on the board. But sometimes you want to focus on a micro area of the game or a specific concept or strategy. And having a way to rank that and score that can be super helpful. As an example, Rob Bernaki has a concept for jiu-jitsu that he calls alignment. Basically, it's a really simple three-part framework. We've talked about it extensively on the podcast. But one of the things about it is he's got a scorecard system for measuring whether you have good alignment or not. And it's a three-point system. And it's very easy for anyone, regardless of their jiu-jitsu knowledge, to score themselves on the system and tell, do I have good alignment right now? And people find that approach really helpful because as Rob would say, anyone can count to three. You can easily apply this system and do it live mid-roll without suffering too much cognitive overload. If you're trying to remember detailed intricate sequences, that can be hard to keep in your brain while rolling, especially if you're a novice. But a three-point scorecard is pretty easy to think about while you're grappling. And so you've come up with a scorecard that you have, which helps grapplers determine how good their grips are. Again, doesn't necessarily put points on the board, but in terms of helping people understand the quality of their grips and whether they're winning or losing, I think this is awesome. Do you want to introduce this and maybe we can walk through the concepts? Speaker 2: Sure. So this is a positional hierarchy. Now, I'll be very clear. This positional hierarchy is more judo focused, but it applies to stand up in the ghee and the underlying concepts are going to be really, really important for understanding grip fighting in ghee jiu-jitsu. So, I work on things on kind of a -6 to a 6 with the idea being that zero is kind of a truly neutral position where neither of us really have an advantage, whereas something that's say a score of three is something I have an advantage and we're working increasingly towards asymmetrical positions. So we're working increasingly towards positions like your equivalent of mount and standing. Now, one thing that is interesting I'm going to call out is one because one thing that's different about standing versus groundwork is that an asymmetrical position in groundwork, often things are so isolated and they're so asymmetrical that the other person doesn't have a ton of other options. Because you're on the feet, the level of control, even in highly controlled positions, the other person still kind of always has a way out or a way to threaten you. So, just as a note, just because you're at a six, which is a very powerful position, doesn't mean that you can't get countered. So that's just an interesting element about standing versus groundwork. But that's how I think of it is and the simplest way to think about it is one, by the way, if you have not picked a lead leg for stand up, please do so. And there's a million, million reasons why. And if you don't know which leg it is, ask yourself which hip you play your guard from, sit down into your guard, and then do a technical stand up and see which leg is in front. If you are a primary jitsu person and you do a technical stand up from the hip that you mostly play your guard off of, that is your lead leg. Whatever is the lead leg that is there when you stand up, that's your lead. Why does this matter? Well, and we're going to get into the gripping system in a second. This matters because you will have, just as we're right-handed or left-handed, we will have a preferred leg and that leg that has more dexterity, that's the one we want to be able to have do a knee cut in the air or catch a kochi or, you know, if I'm going to be stuck and someone's going to have my leg in a single, I have to work that leg out. I want the leg that has more dexterity to do that job. So, with that in mind, a very simple way to understand this hierarchy is most of the time, if my lead leg is my right leg, then I'm right-handed, which means I'm going to probably need my right hand on the ghee to deliver a particularly powerful attacks, or at least I'm going to need to be able to control my right shoulder to do so. So, this is the first thing. In stand up, I tend to want to control the lead side. And the reason for that is if I control the lead side, I'm actually going to shut down a lot of things. So, in Judo, the preference because we can't grab legs is always to grab the lead sleeve or at least beat the front side hand, quote unquote. So we want to either control that sleeve or we want to bypass it. It's a little different in orthodox versus southpaw, but nonetheless, if I think of it as you and I are both right-sided, if I'm controlling your right sleeve, I'm at one. If you're controlling my right sleeve, I'm at negative one. And when we weren't attached at all, we were at zero. It was even. Now, let's say I go ahead and I move up the chain a little bit and I get to cross collar sleeve. So I have your right sleeve and I have your right cross collar. That's a very powerful position. In fact, that's a position that's so powerful in Judo, you'll get penalized if you hold on to it for too long. In Jiu-Jitsu, you can hold on to it for as long as you want. So, that actually is up around a four. Now, when I get into positions like what's referred to as Georgian, which I grew up calling that same side over the back. So that's a position where I'm controlling your right sleeve or your right lapel and then my right hand has gone over your shoulder to grab your belt or the gear around that area and I bent you over into an L where your chest is out over the mat and your shoulders are no longer in alignment with your hips. So, to step back for a second, what are ultimately we're talking about? We're talking about the ability to lock somebody out of their move set. So, the most important thing about when we're thinking about how we're gripping is, are we getting to an asymmetrical old position? Are we in a situation where I have more options than the other person or I have options that are better than the other person's options? Because sometimes you may not have a lot of options for a particular grip, but your options are really, really good and their options aren't great either. Does that make sense? Speaker 1: Yes, yes. And I like that you brought up the distinction between a symmetrical and an asymmetrical position. If you have one person on the bottom and one person on top, then by definition, the position is not symmetrical. Really, the only symmetrical position that comes up a lot in jiu-jitsu on the ground is 50/50. When we're standing, it's quite a bit different because if both you and your opponent have your feet free, there are a lot of ways that you can get into something that is more symmetrical. And probably the most obvious example is what is often called the judo 50/50 grip, not to be mistaken with the 50/50 leg entanglement. And this is where I'm grabbing one of your sleeves and one of your lapels and you're doing the same to me. We could hold up a mirror and both of us are mirroring the grips on each other. That's a symmetrical position because no one has an advantage. As soon as you do something like you talked about where you get a cross collar grip, this is no longer symmetrical anymore. Now, if I get a cross collar on you, one of the cool things about that is my forearm is now going right across your neck. So I've got this frame in front of you that's going to make it hard for you to close the distance or do anything to me. So we are no longer in a symmetrical position. I now have an asymmetric advantage, which is why I'm presuming you are scoring that higher than you would just a standard 50/50. Speaker 2: Exactly. And there's one important adjustment for key jiu-jitsu versus judo. And that is because of the presence of the leg grab, um lapel grips play a little bit of a different role. So I may not, depending on who I'm fighting, I may not prioritize the sleeve in the same way, though if I have sleeve control, I do shut down a lot of leg attacks. But there are some people who, like for example, when I fight anyone who's a good wrestler, I know that if I control one of their shoulders, I've shut down most of their game. If I control both of their shoulders, I've completely shut their game down. So for me, a lot of times that's a preference of I'm still usually looking to control the lead sleeve and then I'll have I will usually in that circumstance put my right hand on their left lapel. Um I will sometimes go a little higher, but I have to keep my elbow down so I can use that frame. Like me is I'm if I grab the neck, I make sure that my forearm is in front of the shoulder and my elbow points down so that way they can't close the distance. So all of a sudden, the moment I establish a grip on each side, they can't shoot on me anymore. They can try. I've had people try that and it's ended very poorly for them because they either get framed out or it's one of the meanest sprawls you can give you can provide. So because they're going to be stuck out in space, they can't close the gap. And once you control both sides, they also really, unless you bring your own leg into range, they really can't get to your legs. There's no sweep single when that position happens. So that's an important element that I do want to just clarify about the difference between judo and jitsu. In judo, I am going to prioritize that sleeve in a much larger way because one, I'm really not worried about you swinging into my legs. That wasn't already a priority when we could grab the legs, you still wanted to control the sleeve. But the other element is I can I have a little bit more of a safety range around that. Whereas there are times when I would be fighting guys and for reference, I actually until I was 19, competed with leg grabs in judo and actually leg grabs weren't completely removed from judo in international Olympic competition until 2013. So actually all of my main developmental period as a judo player occurred back when you could grab legs. The only difference was in the 2012 quad, you could only grab the legs as part of a counter or as part of a combination. So going Kochi knee pick, for example, was legal. So I have a lot of experience just formative core memories of dealing with these things. So there were some times when I might prioritize the shoulder, but regardless when I look at the positional hierarchy, I'm almost always looking to control that lead side because once I do that, I stop so many things from happening. And when I'm thinking about this from a guard pull perspective, a position like cross collar sleeve, I mean, that's a guard in its own right and it's also a super, super powerful position in standing. So a lot of the principles too for how you manage this, you can also think of these grips as, you know, it's not just standing, I can also think of these grips a little bit when I'm thinking about how I'm grip fighting in either top of closed or open guard or how I'm grip fighting bottom of guard. And you know, more of the older guards like a classical open guard or other positions like that. Speaker 1: Got it. Now, I want to try to keep this white belt friendly. When you say you want to control their lead, I presume what you mean is your opponent, like you, is going to be taking a stagger stance. They're going to have one lead side, which is forward. And when you say controlling the lead, basically you mean controlling their arm on whichever side is forward on their body, right? Their arm or their lapel, I guess. Speaker 2: Yes, exactly. I want control of either their shoulder, which is going to be usually their lapel, or I want their sleeve. So if it's if I'm saying my right foot forward is their right sleeve or their right lapel. If I've got that, oh boy, I can do a lot of great stuff. Speaker 1: Got it. Okay. Well, let's walk through this positional hierarchy then. I guess a neutral position would be again, a 50/50 with no grips. How exactly would you define like a zero point position here for grips? What would be a true neutral grip fighting position? Speaker 2: So you and I are standing in front of each other, we have a staggered stance each and we're just roughly symmetrical. This can start to edge towards one become like 0.5 or negative 0.5 based on the angle of attack. And that's hard to talk through audio, but just know that some angles are better than others, just as they are in striking. And then kind of the one area is like I'm coming out, if I can just take your right sleeve, I take it, and that puts me at one. If I can't get control of it, but I can get to the lapel, I'll take that. I roughly put that as around the same score there. But then I'll go ahead, I'll get to once I kill the sleeve, I can actually jump. This is a big reason why we like sleeve control. It's because I can jump from one to like five and six, if that makes any sense. Like literally there's a position in this hierarchy is the sleeve fully controlled and either in the pocket or across the chest. That means I have complete control of your right hand. I'm either shoving it down to your hip where you've where now your arm is long, you can't generate power from it, or I'm pushing it across to your far shoulder where now I actually can at that point I could just double you in jitsu, but I've now removed most of your ability to do much of anything. So that's one of the reasons why we prioritize taking the sleeve because it allows us to jump from one to five or six versus the other positions are more gradual. You can get to six from say like a double lapel position, but there's more steps involved. Speaker 1: Got it. So just to kind of walk through this, I guess, if I've just got one grip on your lapel, that would be kind of like a neutral 50/50 if the other person is doing the same. My position improves if I can now get my other hand to grab your sleeve. So I've got kind of that traditional one lapel, one sleeve grip. That would be an improvement, correct? Speaker 2: Yes. Speaker 1: Okay. Now, what's interesting is this can still be a symmetrical position, right? I can have your sleeve in one hand and your lapel in my other, and you can do the same to me. So that can still be a symmetrical position. Speaker 2: Here's the difference. If I take your sleeve and I break it off, and now that right hand, if you're a righty and I'm a righty, is not attached to anything. That's an asymmetrical position. Speaker 1: Yes. Sorry, just to reframe this then, you're drawing this distinction between a situation where I've got two grips on you and you've got two grips on me versus a situation where I strip one of your grips. Now I've got two grips on you, but you've only got one on me. Speaker 2: Yes. And the grip you have on me doesn't necessarily stop me from doing a lot of my judo or a lot of my jiu-jitsu. So it can it can frustrate things, it can narrow what I'm doing, but it is not capable of stopping me from accessing my primary game or a large portion of my primary game. So now I get to play and you don't. Speaker 1: Yeah. Something that Stephan Kesting has said before is when they grab cloth, you grab cloth. So the idea is as soon as someone gets grips on you, your number one priority is to counter that. And an easy way to do that, I mean, it's not a great counter, but at least it's something is to anchor back onto them. Because what you want to avoid is a situation where they are say grabbing your sleeve, but your hand is just dangling in the air. It's not connecting with anything. At that point, they have a dominant grip. If you can at least counter grip and grab onto something, you can restrict their movement a bit, which gives you something. So I think that's what you're saying, right? You want a situation where you have a good grip on them, but their hand is connecting to nothing. It's in the air. Speaker 2: Yep. And I will just caveat one element and that is there are some positions where they might have one, like they have my grip and I don't want to attach back because I'll actually give them something much better. So, let's say once again, we're right on right, you have my right sleeve. If I just take my right hand and grab your left hand, I'm just cementing a really good position for you versus if I go, nope, you don't get to keep that. I pop that hand off. I fight like hell to make sure you don't get to one. Because as long as you're on when you're one is my negative one. Does that make sense? Speaker 1: Yes. I think that's worth pointing out that connection to your opponent just by itself is not necessarily a good thing. It can be, but it's possible to connect to someone and just reinforce their dominant grip. If they've already got a good grip and you just grab onto them, you could be locking that grip in place for them and making their job easier. So a degree of counter gripping needs to be taken into consideration as well. You can either break the grip, you can invert it, which is often where you swim your hand to the inside or the outside, or you can change the angle of your body. There's a lot of things you can do, especially if they grab your lapel, whereby angling your torso, you can reduce the power of that grip. So you've got options, but the important thing is you don't want to lock yourself into a bad grip. If they've got a good grip and then you just double down on that and hold on to it, you're just making it worse for yourself unless you can figure out a way to counter it. Speaker 2: And so ultimately, when we think about this hierarchy, what we're really talking about is to what degree is there asymmetrical entanglement. So, the more entangled we are and the more asymmetrical that entanglement is, the better off one of us is. At the end of the day, that's what we're talking about. We are talking about and when you look at how jiu-jitsu is scored, jiu-jitsu is actually inherently scored like this. Mount is you are more entangled with somebody in mount than you are in side control. You're more entangled with somebody when you have their back than when you are in mount. I guess there's some debate you could make, but ultimately, back is more asymmetrical position than mount unless we're doing MMA. So, that's ultimately how you should think about all of this. And whether I'm talking about the hyper specifics of say Olympic, you know, because I coach on the IJF tour, the International Judo Federation tour. So I coach, I coach athletes who are trying to make the US Olympic team. And I've trained with many athletes who were world and Olympic medalists. You know, whether I'm talking about the all the idiosyncrasies of that game, ultimately, the way I need to think about this, I think about this in Jiu-Jitsu all the time is does this position, is this bringing me towards being in a more asymmetrical position that is favorable to me? Am I getting to a more asymmetrical entanglement? So, if I were to go, you know, swing over to Nogi for just a second, you know, if I think about 50/50, 50/50 is ultimately it's a shootout. It's a 50/50 guard is a position where, okay, whoever's better at that is going to win. Well, compare that to, I think some people call it different names. Some people call it honey hole. I just think of it as it's, I think of it as like a 70/30 type position. You know when instead of being in 50/50, you reap across the knee and you create a triangle, you create like an inside triangle or inside Sankaku. That is an asymmetrical position of its own right. I can access different leg locks from there that you don't get to access. So that's a more, so suddenly we're not in a 50/50 position anymore. We're into both the literal 50/50 guard and conceptually 50/50 position, but we're now in an asymmetrical entanglement that strongly favors one person. Speaker 1: Yes, yes, absolutely. The way that I like to think of this, for people who are trying to figure out why is a good position actually a good position in jiu-jitsu? Why is say mount better than being inside someone's guard? The way that I like to think of it is when you're advancing up the positional hierarchy, really what you're trying to do, the goal of these positions is to slice up your opponent's body and isolate their limbs. You're trying to chop up their body into pieces and prevent them from being able to coordinate all of their weapons together. So, if you are playing guard, then you as the guard player, ideally, you're using your whole body against me. Even if you're on the bottom, you are using your arms and legs in coordination to attack me. When I'm passing your guard, really what I'm doing is I'm trying to cut your body in half across the torso. I'm trying to separate your arms on one side and your legs on the other side, and that's going to make it harder for you to use them in tandem. That's the reason, one of the reasons why having your guard passed makes it harder to fight, because if I pin you in side control or knee on belly, it's now much harder for you to coordinate your arms and legs together. And then if I mount you, for example, I'm just locking in that division further. And if I move up to a high mount, I'm just isolating your arms and your head even more. So one of the things that makes positional advancement work is we chop up our opponent's body, we isolate the limbs. That's ultimately the goal. And that does apply when you're standing up as well. It's a bit different because you can't really do the same kind of control on a person's legs, but by getting asymmetric grips, you can create situations where you have easier access to the targets on their body that you want, and it's much harder for them to do the same to you. Speaker 2: 100%. And ultimately, what I'm talking about, you know, look, if you pass me, you get points and I the difference between you and I is negative. You know, if you get to mount, I'm down now four more points. So that mount to me, when you mount me, it's a negative to me. That is what I'm ultimately saying is, look, we can treat the grip fighting with its own kind of scoring system in this way. I know that when you control my right sleeve, I'm down negative one. Now, the difference is, these aren't actual scores on the scoreboard, but they're highly predictive. You know, at the elite levels, if someone gets to their key position, they're probably going to score or they're going to get what they want because at the end of the day, they've gotten to the space where they're comfortable and they know what they're doing and they're and they have either a technical delta that they've developed in that position or there's just a flat out physics delta. Like, if you pull my, it's funny, you know, because of the guard pull in jiu-jitsu, you'll see this bent over stance where people have their shoulders way out past their hips. This is fair because of the nature of the sport, but in ghee, like if you had a rule set that was even slightly more focused on stand up, you would actually see that start to go away to a large extent. It's not that people don't bend over or like that to an extent in judo, but there's a very different reason why they're doing it. It's they're actually oftentimes they're fencing with their heads in the same way you see in wrestling. And there's different attachments on them that create that. So I just want to make sure I cover that caveat. But the reason why you see a lot of judo players put their shoulders over their hips is if I want to throw you, I just need to get your shoulders and hips out of alignment because if your shoulders and hips are out of alignment, you're inherently off balance. Speaker 1: Yeah. Something that I've said many times, like a quick hack to tell if you're in good body alignment is are you L-shaped at the moment? In grappling, you very rarely want your body to be L-shaped. It is almost always bad because it's such an unathletic position. If you think of any time when your body goes L-shaped, like as an example, if you are standing up but you are bending over and like you said, you're kind of like chest down towards the ground, your body is L-shaped, you have terrible posture and balance from there. Similarly, if you're on the ground, if you're just sitting down with your legs out and your back up, kind of like in what I guess Priit Mihkelson would call panda, that's not great body alignment. It's much easier for the person to spin around you and attack from there. So there are very few positions in the grappling arts where you want your body to be L-shaped. And that's just kind of a quick hack to tell if you're in a good position or not. You had mentioned earlier that the best position in your mind in the grip hierarchy is where you force them to go L-shaped. They're bent down and you know, you've got your hand over their back, possibly grabbing their belt. That is a brutal grip to have on someone. I mean, you have so many options if you can get someone into that position. It's one of the reasons why it's so frustrating to do ghee stand up with taller people because they have a much easier time getting that grip. Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's and you have other positions that are similar, like the lat position. This is a position that is brutal. It's happens in right versus left. I as a righty come out, I gain control of your left sleeve and I pull that across my body and my right hand comes around your back and grabs your lat. All of a sudden, not only, it's actually a better position, frankly, because not only have I now bent you over into that L position, but you really don't have much recourse. Like you, I have completely taken away the agency from your lead shoulder. As long as I don't screw up my foot position too much, and that's a different conversation, that's such a powerful position that you'll see people in international judo tournaments just flop their face to the mat and wait for the mate to get stood back up because they would rather take whatever penalty they're going to get for making a bad attack, making what's called a false attack that I went to the throw without really trying to throw you. They'd rather take that penalty than try to fight out of whatever God-forsaken throw you're about to hit them with. So, that's the thing. In fact, so I I'm also one of those dudes who started to really look at how to incorporate ecological dynamics and constraints led. And a lot of the constraints led work I do to teach gripping is around after we do some of the initial, you know, opening stuff where, you know, you're trying to get my sleeve, I'm trying to get your sleeve and stuff down that line, or I'm trying to control your lead shoulder, you're trying to control my lead shoulder. It very quickly turns into who can make the other person into an L. I'll sometimes say, all right, your goal is to make the other person's hands touch the mat, or your goal is to pick up one of their legs, usually with your legs. So, that exercise in and of itself, that becomes very, very useful quick because it will teach people to stay in alignment and also not to leave their legs in weird places. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, makes sense, makes sense. Now, I want to just clarify something. You talked about the lat position. I think I understand what you're saying, but it's worth kind of double clicking on that. You're talking about where you basically wrap your arm around behind their back and you kind of cup their lat on the far side, sort of like you're doing a like a bear hug with one hand. Is that what you're talking about? Speaker 2: Yes. So, I'm a right-sided player. If you are lefty, so you have a left leg lead, so our we're now in that bladed position. We're in that open stance. My left hand crosses to your left sleeve, which is your lead sleeve. I'm pulling that across my body and my right hand is grabbing almost to the armpit, but I'm grabbing control of that lat and I'm putting my chest on top of your lead shoulder, so your left shoulder. So when I bend, you have no choice but to bend. Speaker 1: Yeah, and in jiu-jitsu, and I actually, I wrestled as well. This was actually a position I got fairly good at in the context of the wrestling I was doing because I wrestled middle school and high school. And I was able to use this for a quick two points on a very regular basis where I would come out when I was playing an opposite side wrestler, I would be able to do this. Usually I would hit like um it's called a slice in wrestling. It's Uchimada, but you're not actually lifting your leg all the way. A lot of times you're just knocking people on their face. And you do that and you can get a quick two out of it. In jiu-jitsu, it's like you're in a wizard fight, but the person's arm is in front of you. They're not actually entangled and you're half on their back anyways. So you could actually use this. In jiu-jitsu, I used to use this sometimes to enter into leg locks where I would put somebody on their hands and knees using that lat position and knocking their legs out with Uchimada, you know, kind of get what appears to be near points and then use that to roll in on their legs if they give me the wrong reaction. Or if they give me a great reaction, which is they try to pull their leg out, I get right to their back. Speaker 1: Yeah, makes sense, makes sense. That kind of lat position is very familiar probably to a lot of people who came up in a traditional jiu-jitsu school because many of the first self-defense takedowns they'll teach you will be to close the distance, reach around behind the person and cup onto them, and then you're kind of anchored to them by their side, which makes it easy to either trip them or go to their back. Speaker 2: Yeah, if you Google Sumi Gaeshi, S U M I G A E S H I, a lot of people like Josh Hinger and a lot of other folks who, you know, came up doing judo post 1990s, when they show Sumi Gaeshi, they show it from this position. Speaker 1: Oh, interesting. So rather than reaching over the belt, they grab the lat? Speaker 2: Yes, it's actually, so people will grab the belt, there's value to it. Um you do get some value from it, but the problem with grabbing low on the belt from this position, and by the way, be very clear, there's somebody in the comments is going to go, well, technically that might be Hikomi Gaeshi, to which my answer is, sure, I don't care. I'm just caring about the entrance. Sorry, I just did the IJF Academy, my international coaching license recently, and I had to know all the subtle differences between every single throwing variation to get that license. So, we have our nerds too. In fact, we're pretty much if you're in grappling, we're all nerds together, but nonetheless, the to get to it though, effectively, yeah, instead of, you know, in the Georgian position which I described earlier, you'll see Sumi Gaeshi very often from that position. That's kind of a straight on, you know, I'm going directly, not directly in front of you, but I'm going at an angle roughly in front of you. This is a situation where I'm actually going to the corner. So, but it's very common for to be shown this way. If you, the folks who really kind of brought this to judo, as far as I know, as a tactic and a position were the French. So the French in the 1990s did a lot of really cool tactical stuff. You know, for example, they would come out with a false lead. You would think that they were lefty when they were actually a righty, so you'd end up giving them the wrong hand and then you're that suddenly you're behind, you're negative one almost immediately. And if you look up, if you ever have the chance to watch it in the 1996 78 kilo final between Djamel Bouras and Toshihiko Koga, Bouras basically mugs Koga. Koga was supposed to win that. Koga usually beat Bouras without much effort, but Bouras was able to use this specific position and the gripping sequence that get to that position to keep Koga from ever getting a chance to fight. And Koga is one of the greatest players of all time. So it's just if anyone wants some interesting judo history, go look up that match from the 96 Olympics. Speaker 1: Got it, got it. Now, just to maybe put some perspective in terms of the scale here, we've talked kind of about what the neutral or close to neutral positions look like, and that's basically when you're symmetrical. We've talked about the most dominant grips, like when you have someone bent over like an L, when you take that lat position. Is there anything in between? So you're climbing up the hierarchy, anything that is, you know, better than being symmetrical, but maybe not quite as dominant as those super dominant grips that you talked about? Speaker 2: Yeah, double lapel is their best example. Double lapel with both my arms on the inside of your arms is the is a great position. It's actually, I think of it as a checkpoint position for some people, particularly if I'm fighting particular styles of judo. It's also it's a great position to just play wrestlers in jiu-jitsu from because when you do that, all of a sudden their wrestling really isn't available. Particularly if your elbows are on the inside of their elbows. One mistake people will sometimes do is they'll grab both lapels thinking that all double lapel grips are equal. I always, as a rule of thumb, I usually want to control the inside space. And this is true in a lot of grappling. And if I have the double lapel and I have my hands are on the inside of your biceps, on the inside of your arms, that's a position that even can turn closer to being almost a symmetrical position because they might also get double lapel, but they're going to be on the outside of you. So they're able to stop you from turning. I can pummel my shoulders, I can do a lot of different stuff there. I can play my most of my judo from that position without giving up those grips, but it's not completely asymmetrical. They can still play. Another example is when we're on we each have a sleeve. When we're on double sleeve, there are different confirmations you can have with that where technically it's neutral, but really, for example, um if I take a cat's paw grip or pistol grip on the sleeve I want to keep, that is super powerful. All of a sudden that sleeve is anchored. You're not going to people who's a pistol and we're not in a very short, if we're in regulation ghee, if I have a pistol or a cat's paw, you're going to have a very hard time getting that out. I'm talking about in judo or jiu-jitsu. Some regulation ghee are still close enough that it's hard to actually form a proper pistol grip, but a cat's paw is just super strong. Cat's paw was actually banned in judo for many years because it's so strong. So double sleeve while technically being a 50/50 position, it turns into if you know how to position your hands inside versus outside, it actually starts to favor somebody more in a 60/40 kind of way. Speaker 1: I have a question for you. When you say double lapel grip, and I suppose also double sleeve grip, are you talking about putting both of your two hands on the same one of their lapels or the same sleeve, or are you saying one hand on each lapel or one hand on each sleeve? Speaker 2: One hand on each side. So one hand on each sleeve, one hand on each lapel, and I'm not crossing my arms. My hands are, you know, not crossed. So my left hand's on your right hand, my right hand's on your left hand. That sleeve position is more closer to 50/50 versus double lapel. Double lapel is a true asymmetrical position. It's not as asymmetrical as other stuff, but we are it's scored as a three. It's not a six, but it is scored as a three for a reason. And does that make sense? Speaker 1: Yes. Yes, yes. And I like that you brought up that doing this, it locks you into the inside channel, the inside position, which is in many situations in grappling, it's what you want to do. One of the benefits to doing it here is it makes it hard for them to get their arms back into play if both of your arms are on the inside and they're locked in with grips. Speaker 2: Yeah, so you automatically, I was actually just going over this. So I have a student who was competing at the World Veterans Championships and they were taken down with a single leg. And the guy who hit a very good single leg, actually he and I used to train together. I remember having to secure that double lapel because otherwise I was going to have a very difficult first 20 seconds of any role he and I did. And when my student came home, I was like, hey, look, you need to get to double lapel very quickly because otherwise this person's going to get to a single and even if it's just a position you end up just camping in in either judo or Brazilian jitsu, you end up just camping in this double lapel position. It's you have enough agency and you've removed enough of their agency that at the very least, you can get some pretty solid foot sweep attempts, you can show your hip, you can do a lot of stuff to appear busy and make them look like they're stalling. Or and sometimes just appearing to be more busy than somebody will help drive their heart rate up. This is actually another thing about grip fighting that a lot of people don't know. So, if you grab a hand bike versus a normal air bike, not like a rogue echo or something, but if you grab a hand bike versus your normal stationary bike, your heart rate will go up much faster using the hand bike at the same speed than using a traditional stationary bike. And the reason for that is the proximity of the amount of blood that's flowing with your arms and that location in relation to your heart. So, actually, there are match plans built around this where a lot of times when you train people in a high volume of grip fighting, it also helps to keep their heart rate lower in matches because they're used to having their arms do that level of work. So, when you get very, very good at grip fighting, by having a position like double pound, I'm camping there, I'm going to be more comfortable and their heart rate's going to go higher than mine. They're going to expend more energy trying to deal with that, not just because it's a stronger position, but because they're doing stuff they're not comfortable with and that can help me on the conditioning side. Speaker 1: I see. One thing we didn't talk about, which comes up in almost every martial art is the idea of crossing the center line. So if you can pull someone's arm or leg across the center line of their body where their spine is, the the vertical line that runs down your your body, that is a devastating thing to do in almost every situation in martial arts. And anyone who's ever been leg dragged or arm dragged or had their opponent grab their sleeve and pull it across their body, understands how devastating that can be. I'm wondering how that kind of crossing the center applies to this framework that you've talked about. Speaker 2: 100%. So I mean, you look at a cross collar in this framework, a cross collar is right up there. That's among the more powerful positions. Now, let me be clear, if I am cross collar against somebody and it's not a grip I normally function in, that's not, you know, yes, it's technically more powerful, but if it's, for example, for me as a right-sided player, if my right hand crosses to your right lapel, there's a lot I can do. Like I'm in a great position. So let me be clear, just because something's a higher position, if you don't know what to do from there, it's like if I put a white belt in worm guard, like super powerful position, very asymmetrical, super annoying, but they don't know what to do with it, then cool. But yeah, so crossing over, those almost all the positions where I've created that kind of crossing effect, I would rank much higher. So, a lot of times those crossing effects happen either because I've crossed your arm over across your body, or I've put two hands on the same side and I've basically cut off an arm from the rest of your body. If that makes any sense, or I've cut off a shoulder from the rest of your body. So, something I have on like a five in my mind is I can control of your lead sleeve and I push it across your body or and that forces you to be pushed at an angle. You don't have a lot of options, like you can't shoot from there, you can't really do a lot of judo from there unless I there's one mistake I can make at that point that would put you back in the game. But otherwise, that becomes super asymmetrical. So Hashimoto from Japan just devastated people from 2017 to 2021 using that position. And he would get people, he would win that sleeve battle, win control of that lead sleeve, and he won, you know, world championships. He was in the mix in every tournament he fought and he was the number one ranked player in the world for a long period of time. The only reason he didn't win the Olympics was he lost to Shohei Ono in the trials. Speaker 1: Yeah. I guess something I should probably clarify here when we talk about crossing the center. People who have practiced things like the pendulum sweep before have seen this. There are many techniques in jiu-jitsu where part of what puts your opponent off balance is you force their arm across their center line and then that makes it harder for them to stay standing and it's easy to tip them over. So it's good and powerful to force your opponent's arms or legs to cross their own center line. However, what's interesting is it's also good and powerful in one case at least to do it to yourself. And that's when you get a cross collar grip, right? So if I reach across and grab your cross collar, people might look at that and think, well, hold on, aren't you crossing your own center line? Isn't that a bad thing to do? Because we just said, don't cross the center line. But when I get a cross collar grip, am I not doing that? And my answer to that is, the difference is when you get a cross collar grip, first of all, you're grabbing onto their fabric. You're anchoring your hand where it is, so they can't force your arm any further than you want it to be. So there's that. But also, when you do cross collar grip someone, you're not trying to pull your own arm so far across their body that now you're turning away from them. You kind of want to have your elbow sort of aligned with their center line. If you were to let it go all the way across, then yeah, you start exposing your back and that's not good. So I think it's important to draw that distinction that there are times when you reach across, but that's not quite the same as forcing them to cross their own center line, right? If you if you bring your elbow to sort of your your midpoint and you can hold it there, like your your spine, the center of your core, if you bring your elbow in there and you can hold it in a position, you can work with that. But if you can force your opponent to pull their arm all the way across their center line, then their torso starts to turn and they can't face you. And that's when it gets really problematic for them. Speaker 2: You call out exactly what the difference is here. So, when I take a cross collar grip or even a cross sleeve grip, now cross sleeve grip is a bit of a different animal in stand up. Usually I'm going to go cross sleeve, I'm either going to use my other hand to establish control on the shoulder or I'm or I'm going to pass it over to my other hand, but or I'm going to attack right away. So one thing to be aware of when we're talking about all this grip fighting, always remember that a skilled grappler should be able to attack from a lot of these grips. Not attack necessarily from every single one of them. You know, that's an idealized thing that, you know, if we were all immortals, we would have time to do just like if we were all immortals, we would have great attacks from every single guard. You have to remember that these different positions, you have to think of them like you think of your different guards. So there are moves that are available from them, there are finishes, there are moves that, you know, they're effectively acting like the way a sweep would where they're just changing position slightly or I'm advancing to the next more powerful version of the guard or powerful version of the position. But to get back to the point, yeah, if I have a cross call and I have an attachment, that's super powerful. As long as I don't make certain mistakes like bending my elbow in, which allows you to get towards my back, which I might do if I'm trying to throw you, but if I'm not trying to throw you and I'm in jitsu and I do that, I'm going to probably give you my back. What we're talking about when we're talking about pulling something across their body, we're talking about we're pulling something across their body and then they don't have a control point on me. Like I pull your sleeve across your body and then that sleeve's not attached to my lapel. That sleeve's not attached to anything that's dangerous to me. All of a sudden like I've just taken one of your limbs out of the game. And the other thing I've done is now you're very vulnerable to being taken to the side that is now cut off because it's like it's the legs of the table idea. Like if I take away one of the legs of the table, then I can shove the table in that direction. Speaker 1: Right, right, right. Now, as we get close to an hour here, I'm of course mindful of the fact that grip fighting can get really complicated and there's a lot of different variants here. And you do have video content that you've made. If people want to actually see specifically what we're talking about in detail, and we can talk about that in a second. But if we were to sort of summarize all of this, what I'm getting out of this conversation is you're basically saying that the a neutral position is where we're symmetric, where both of us have the same options available versus each other. And the goal to improve our our hierarchy of grips and to get into a better position, first of all, is we want to start doing things that make the position asymmetric. And that's probably going to mean that I can still face and attack you, but you can't do it as easily to me. And that might mean that either I am taking the inside channel, like I'm getting double grips on the inside, and that means that you can't easily reach and counter grip, or maybe I'm pulling your arm across the center because then you can't face me as easy. Either way, I'm trying to make the position more asymmetric. And to really nail this home, like the absolute best situation is where not only do I do that, but I also start killing your posture and alignment. And that means that I'm now starting to make your body go L-shaped for the most part. I'm trying to prevent you from being in a a powerful athletic posture where you can easily respond to being off balanced. If I can force you to go L-shaped, then you're immediately in a terrible position. And I think of, you know, looking at the jiu-jitsu perspective, going beyond just grip fighting, if I'm standing with someone, if I can get them in that Sumi Gaeshi position where I'm reaching over their back, or even if I can snap them down into a front headlock where they're bent forward, those are always terrible positions for the other people. I mean, I I have had this happen. I am not a great wrestler, but man, I have sparred with good wrestlers before, and even against a good wrestler, if I can make them go L-shaped and get a front headlock, they are in big trouble, and they have to start seriously worrying about what's going to happen next. So, is that a fair way to describe this where it's like baseline is we're symmetric, improvements mean I start making it asymmetric, and that can mean either I take the inside channel or I take a dominant angle where you can't easily face me. And then the tippy top of that hierarchy is I start killing your posture as well. And now you're bent over, you're at risk of tipping and falling, and that often means you're going L-shaped with your body. Is that a fair way to describe this framework? Speaker 2: Yes, and I'd add one last thing, which is if I'm on the inside, I'm going to occupy the inside space and it allows me to keep them out of great alignment and then work towards getting them into an L. If I'm ever stuck on the outside, then my job is to break their posture down and make them get into an L. So, either way, I'm trying to get them towards that L position, but the difference between when you're stuck on the inside is that you're going to try to occupy that center space. It's like you're like expanding foam, if that makes any sense. Whereas if I'm stuck on the outside and I'm trying to do this, it's like I'm crushing a car. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that the example I think of is, man, if you've ever stood up with someone and tried to underhook them and then they turn that into a wizard on you and they force you down, basically they're making you go L-shaped, but they're using the overhook to do it. Speaker 2: Yes. And here's the thing, you know, I know a lot of folks who listen to your podcast, like things like constraints led and eco and stuff. All those concepts we just talked about, you can make games with them and do some awesome, really cool work. That has been central to how successful my players have been. I run a club right outside Washington DC and we've been able to punch far above our weight just by going ahead and understanding really what are we trying to do and then gamifying it. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, this stuff blends very well to gamification because it is really easy when you're talking about stand up to get super occupied about the exact position you're in. Like, where does my left hand go? Where does my right hand go? Stand up is very finicky with this stuff in a way that groundwork often isn't because things like foot placement and your leading foot and your base become so much more important when you're on your feet. And it's really easy for beginners to get lost in those details. So, like with groundwork, my suggestion is usually focus on the simple conceptual framework that we just talked about here. And then as you practice that, and you can easily build games around getting to those positions, right? Like, how do I make my opponent go L-shaped? That's a great game. Once you start getting some practice doing that and seeing the different ways that you can do it, then you'll start seeing how these actually map into known and defined grips and positions. And I find that approach is a lot easier for absorbing this stuff rather than just trying to like read through the judo list of throws and try to memorize them all, right? That can be a little bit difficult to do because there are so many variations. Speaker 2: And truthfully, guess what? You don't need to know all of them. To be a functional grappler, you need to know maybe 10 to 12 max and really, so and this is going to sound like sacrilege to some folks. Here's the deal. You can be a very successful judo player as long as you can hit at at least three to four different angles. So, you know, back left, back right, front left, front right, and you're able to hit those angles, preferably from a couple different grips. Usually that means what you're doing is you're reusing the same type of takedown. So it might be an inside trip and learning how to do that inside trip from many different positions. And then you're able to and if you can do that and you can not even foot sweep well, just foot sweep enough that like you can do it without getting countered and the other person like suddenly, okay, my foot just got hit, my I'm distracted for a second. And you then you add maybe a level change technique, like a Tomanagi or if we're in jitsu, maybe a high crotch or something down that line. All of a sudden, I'm a complete grappler on the feet if I know how to grip fight because I just like you don't need 27 different passes. You need to be able to pass when you're inside the thighs, when you're outside the thighs, you need to be able to pass to each side because of um, you know, maybe you need to get away from a stronger someone's stronger off of one hip and you need to be able to go over the guard and under the guard. So right there, you can narrow this down. All of a sudden we're not talking about learning 67 throws. We're talking about learning how to offensively deal with some angles, have a couple things that are countery. And if I know all the grip fighting that goes along with it, I have enough. I have enough to be a functional adult, which, oh my God, do we have so few of those in society, including myself sometimes. Speaker 1: Well, I really appreciate this, Chris. I think this is a great breakdown. I'm going to venture to guess that if people listen to this and they found it compelling, they're probably going to want to dig deeper and see some visuals. Why don't we talk about where they can find that? I know that you've got a course that you made on this and so let's promote that and make sure people have a chance to find it. Speaker 2: Sure. So, okay, so before we go any further, so I run a nonprofit organization called Martial Arts for Social Transformation, Equity and Rights. We try to improve access to martial arts for folks on a community level. We're actually running a self-defense seminar with one of our our friends, Maya Matalon. We try to do some community service type things. The other thing we are trying to do is um we're helping several people who are trying to make the US Olympic team. In fact, just today, we had a young 17-year-old, Chloe Williams, kind of shock everybody by walking out and beating the number two player in the United States at a major international event in Montreal. And, you know, we are trying to raise money to support people like Chloe or Leka'ea Vargas or, you know, some of the other folk or Rhadi Ferguson Jr. So, ultimately, any money that you hand me, that is going to support those missions of making martial arts more accessible to the larger community as well as, you know, helping people pursue their Olympic dream. So, just know, before I go into this, any money you send over my way, it's not necessarily going to my pocket, it's actually going towards these causes. So, I put together an instructional called Tactical Grip Fighting. You can find it. I'm just go to tacticalgripfighting.com. If you sign up for our newsletter, you will actually get a portion of it. It'll just focus on grip breaks. But you can go to our store at martialartsforsocialgood.org. It's right there. You can purchase the instructional, you can purchase an add-on where myself and 2000 Olympian Lauren Meece, we break down some of the classic matches from her division back in the late 1990s when you could grab legs. And we're also of course available to do things like, you know, if you want to go really deep, you know, you can go ahead and talk to myself or Dr. Ferguson. We're always available to do distance coaching and we can do some great work with you. But tacticalgripfighting.com, if you want to sign up to the newsletter, you'll get a portion of it. But if you want to go to our store at martialartsforsocialgood.org, you can purchase the instructional plus some add-ons and you're going to be supporting a great cause. Speaker 1: Amazing, Christopher. I will put those links in the show notes and I I really appreciate you explaining the community benefit to this. People often ask, you know, what can I do? What can I as just one person do to make an impact on the sport? And man, look, there's not a lot of money in jiu-jitsu and any dollar that you put towards a cause you care about makes a huge difference. I've seen this firsthand working with athletes. You might think just a few bucks here and there won't possibly move the needle, but it it's no exaggeration to say it can absolutely change the life of a young athlete. So I really encourage people to vote with their wallet and support causes that they believe in. And especially in this case, it's going to provide some helpful content for people if they care about this kind of grip fighting stuff, which really, everyone in jiu-jitsu should. So I will throw those links in the show notes to make it easy for people to find. Just go to your podcast player, tap info or whatever, should be one click away to get to that. I'll also put a link to everything we make. It's all at bjjmentalmodels.com. For you, the podcast, the mini episodes and our newsletter, this stuff is all completely free. So please do take advantage of that. There's a lot of content we've made. My suggestion to people is if you don't know where to start, just shoot me a message or an email and ask, tell me what you're working on and I'll try to point you in the direction of the best way that we can help you out with the content that we've made. If you want to level up with us, BJJ Mental Models Premium is how you do that. Speaking of voting with your wallet, there's a reason that we don't run advertisements. There's a reason I'm not selling crypto or CBD or anything like that on this episode. It's because we don't take sponsors in that manner. We are completely funded by the hundreds of people who have signed up for and support us on BJJ Mental Models Premium. It's the world's largest library of jiu-jitsu audio content. If you like Audible, Masterclass, and you wish there were a way to improve your jiu-jitsu knowledge in that format, this is the best way to do that. We've got tons of courses on there. We're also expanding into jiu-jitsu audio documentaries. We're doing a really interesting, two actually courses right now. One with Emily Kwok on jiu-jitsu and motherhood. We're doing another interesting one with Ben Van Donk and Eva Schubert on the dark side of martial arts history, particularly jiu-jitsu and how that's uh how that threads in with the narrative of martial arts throughout time. Really interesting stuff. We've also got great premium podcasts on there hosted by folks like Rob Bernaki as well. So some of the best pro podcasts you can get are exclusive to our premium network. I'll spare the rest of the pitch though. All of the details are at bjjmentalmodels.com. So that link will be in the show notes as well. Christopher, alongside your stuff. But thank you so much for coming by, man. Really valuable chat. I love these scorecard type discussions. I think that if people can figure out a way to easily score in their mind what good looks like, it's just way easier to grapple more effectively, even if you don't actually know that much jiu-jitsu. Just knowing the concepts and being able to center your strategy around that can make even a new white belt much more effective very fast. Speaker 2: You know, one of the things I think about is that in the end, we win on concepts. End of story. Like, we can talk about some little technical detail about how I move my wrist a little bit, but at the end of the day, you win on concepts, not moves. Speaker 1: Yep. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much, Christopher. This is a fantastic chat. I really appreciate it, buddy. Speaker 2: Steve, thank you so much and thank you all for your time and your energy and I hope you have a great day. Speaker 1: Same for me as well. Thank you listeners, really appreciate it and we will talk to you soon.