Ep. 360: The Perfect Training Camp, feat. Josh McKinney

Speaker 1: Hey everybody, before we get started this week, I have huge news. She actually did it. We're pleased to announce that Beatrice Jin, top-ranked women's competitor in North America and long-time BJJ Mental Models premium community member, has published her first ever course with us, exclusive to BJJ Mental Models. It's called Stop Being Nice. It's a three-part audio series designed to solve real mindset problems that regular folks experience in jiu-jitsu. If you struggle to be aggressive and competitive in jiu-jitsu, you'll find the solutions here. If you're already a BJJ Mental Models premium subscriber, you've already got access. And if you are not, good news, you can get it now and get your first week free. Go to BJJ Mental Models.com and check it out today. Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to BJJ Mental Models episode 360. I'm Steve Kwan. BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent jiu-jitsu approach, and I'm back again with my good buddy Josh McKinney. Josh, how's it going? Speaker 2: It is good. Anytime I get to talk to Steve Kwan, it's a good day. Speaker 1: You are the honorary third Kwan brother, right? So it's always great to have a little family reunion on here. Speaker 2: A lot of people tell me I'm like if you mix the two, you know. Speaker 1: Well, sir, it's uh I mean, you've been on this podcast many a time, but, you know, there's always new listeners. Do you want to go ahead and introduce yourself and your work quickly? Speaker 2: Yes, I am Josh McKinney. I'm the host of the I Suck at Jiu-Jitsu show, and we take every Thursday and we try to deliver you something that helps you suck just a little less at jiu-jitsu. Speaker 1: It's not working, man. I still suck too much, and it's been like 20 years at this point. Speaker 2: Yeah, I still suck. Speaker 1: You got to get me on the treadmill here and get me better. Speaker 2: I still suck too, but some of the verb is just like join Josh on his journey to suck less at jiu-jitsu, you know? So you're learning with me. Speaker 1: There you go. Well, this is actually a I guess a somewhat relevant topic. I put this in front of you. What do you want to talk about this time? And you had talked about the perfect competition training camp. I love this idea. You kind of had a an idea of a regiment that you can create in a box and that anyone can use to accelerate and ramp up to their first camp, their first competition. Good timing too, because I actually had someone just ask me for this topic the other day, and I thought, you know what? That timing could not be better because I got Josh McKinney on for this. But maybe I'll let you kick this off. Why don't you tell me a little bit about the the plan here and what you guys do at your gym to get new people on board and off the ground when it comes to starting to compete? Speaker 2: You know, for me, this is something that I probably have adapted just a few years ago. This isn't something that I've been able to use. This is, you know, I really do have a privilege of being a both coach and a competitor. And so it lets me get to see how other people are experiencing competition, but then I don't forget how competition is, you know, I I get to experience that too. And so we do a ton of trial and error at my gym. And with our competitors, it's the exact same way. Like, hey, let's all try everything that you could do, and we will just make sure to, you know, take data and say, oh, this is what you should do. This is how you should look at it. But one of the most brilliant pieces of advice on this quest, um, was from my friend Mark Vivez. Speaker 1: Who has Mark Vivez been on the show? Speaker 2: He has not, but Speaker 1: He's been recommended. I think it was actually you who recommended him to me. Speaker 2: Okay, well, that was I guess that's another take that as another recommendation. But Mark had this thought. He had a few retired NFL players that he was good friends with, and he started to talk about it and realized the similarity between pro football and a jiu-jitsu competition in the sense that it's all about waiting for a whole week to perform at your absolute best in a short time. And it's not like, you know, even the way that it's built with the playoffs in football, it is to, you know, it's single elimination. Just like most jiu-jitsu tournaments, you show up and you have to perform at your best or you're going to be in a lot of trouble. And so as we started to kind of break down that, we started to realize, man, you know what? We look at every day of training, most of us do, as just a day of training. You know, when we're getting ready for competition, generally we go, okay, well, I'll just, I don't know, train harder. And that really isn't how they look at it in the NFL where there's way more money and um, way more research on how to get people better. What they do is they break down offense and defense between different days. So you can focus or, you know, obviously different teams. But then you have different parts of offense and defense that you focus on. You may focus on, you know, for NFL players, they may focus on goal line offense, meaning they're really close to scoring. And those plays are different than when they just get the ball. And so you kind of look at jiu-jitsu the same way and you can break down competition into smaller parts and say, hey, on this day, I am going to focus on this part of competition. I'm going to do it in this practice. And it's really again, just like when you're teaching a bunch of people, they have jobs, they have families, they just have different obligations. And so everybody's training schedule is different. It's very hard to run a gym that is successful and then demand that everybody is there every single night, right? And only cater to that crowd. You have people that can only dedicate two days a week to jiu-jitsu, and they just want to maybe try competition. And so that was really for me is like, man, I have myself who's trying to compete at adult black belt, and then I have students that get to dedicate two days a week and are trying to compete at white belt six month and under at a local tournament. And what do these things have in common? And so that is kind of the start of where we got for these concepts that we'll talk about is just really how can you break down your days? We all have a certain amount of days we can dedicate or a certain amount of sessions that we can dedicate to getting good at jiu-jitsu. And so how are you going to shape those days? Can you define them in a way that allows you to not only get better at jiu-jitsu, but to get better at the practice of competing? Speaker 1: Interesting, interesting. I mean, I'm a big fan of the idea of targeted training. The offense and defense breakdown that you talked about there is interesting to me because in jiu-jitsu, I mean, look, there's a lot of philosophy that you hear from people about the relationship between offense and defense. But the one thing that I observe is rarely, if ever, are you only doing offense or only doing defense, right? If you're only doing one or the other, then probably there's something a little bit weird happening because everything you do in jiu-jitsu is technically a mix of the two, right? If I'm attacking you, it is critical that I also be defending because if I am leaving wide openings, then it doesn't really matter how good my attack is, it's probably going to get turned against me. So how does that manifest in training? If you've got someone and you say, today we're working on offense only or defense only, how do you make that useful for competition without it becoming a bit too contrived, right? Because I guess, you know, when you start putting crazy parameters on the way that you train, you run the risk of making it not so realistic anymore. Speaker 2: So these principles are made for somebody to be able to go into the gym that they're at. Cuz like blue belts, white belts don't have control of their training generally, right? This is a way to focus. And so how the wording on the language is an offensive volume day or a defensive volume day, meaning that if I am going for an offensive volume day, my goal is to not learn new techniques, master new techniques. My goal is to do the things that I hit on the best guys, do the things that I'm best at, do the things that are the most effortless to me getting success. And I can control certain parameters by just lowering the skill of my training partner, right? I can just go with guys who suck just a little more than I do, and then I can go, oh, okay, well, I'm going to get to play more offense now, and that's my focus. But now the defensive day, and that's how most people just roll every day, right? I think rolling this way and thinking of it as volume, right? I'm not trying to perform at my absolute best. I'm trying to be efficient enough to do 30 minutes, 40 minutes of rolling this way or even longer if it's an open mat or something, but where I'm just getting a lot of reps. But the defensive day, I think is what is confusing for people. Defensive volume day to me is we're starting in bad positions. We could call it bad position day, but we are allowing certain bad positions to happen and then starting our fight from there. Cuz like you said, defense is tied in to offense. If I am in bottom side control, I'm basically always in the defensive position, even though I am fighting 5% better and 5% better. I'm incrementally fighting for better position, something more neutral, right? But I'm definitely defensive. And so how I'm looking at a defensive day for me, and this is as a black belt school owner, which that you really need to look at it this way. You always get to play offense most likely, right? Having days where you play a lot and excessive amount of turtle guard with really good people. You know, people that actually have a chance to choke you, right? We raise the level of our training partner, so then we can, you know, again, just kind of manipulate the room to be what we need it to be for our own training. Because as much as like the biggest difference with the NFL and jiu-jitsu, besides that they're two completely different things, is one of them is a team sport and the other's an individual sport. And so individuals are all having to do these little bits on their own. You can't miss, you can't only have offense, right? And the whole thought on this defense is, you know, you can also increase the intensity. You can always mess with, you know, there's like a ratio with volume and intensity that will protect your body. You can always mess with that ratio and go, you know what? I'm going to lower the amount of volume on this defensive day, but I'm going to do maybe some positional spars where we pretend I start in a bad position. I'm so much better than everybody. This doesn't even threaten me. So maybe we'll say I'm better than them and we're going to do two minutes on the clock and I'm down by two points. So now I need to escape and I need to pass the guard or I need to do something else to score. And so there's a lot of ways that you can manipulate these things, but that's kind of the difference between the offensive and defensive volume days and then how you can manipulate the intensity in your environment. Speaker 1: What's interesting about the way that you're explaining this here, when people talk about how they want to structure to train for a goal, like offense or defense, often they look internally. So they'll say to themselves things like, well, today I'm going to work on my best techniques, or maybe today I'm going to handicap myself and and not use my best technique so that I have to work on something else. What you've talked about here takes the environment into more account, where when you want to work on offense, then you do so by choosing training partners that are less skilled. Or if you want to work on defense, then you choose training partners who perhaps are more skilled because then they can put you on the defense. I think that's an interesting approach because it's less about what should I as the the individual do, and it's perhaps more about how can I utilize the people in the room to get the type of training that I want regardless of whatever position we're doing? Speaker 2: Mhm. And the only caveat to it to me is it takes discipline to do this. Cuz if you show up to certain rooms and you expected them to be really good and they're not, then you go, ah, man, training's washed today. I'm not going to do it. You need to it's it's a skill to develop to be able to say, okay, this is what I have today, and my goal is always just to suck a little less, right? I'm always trying to get just a little better. And so how do I do that? And that is when you're looking at that room, that's kind of how I'm gauging this. And this is for me, this is something that I just naturally developed and then started to deconstruct for some of my students cuz I would show up to some open mats and I always at my school, even way before it was cool, had a a real open mat that was just like anyone from our area could come in, it's free. We just need bodies to train with and we want the best people in our area to train and all get better together. And when I would do that, there were these times where I was no longer the best guy in the room. And I got to see how to get better when you have people better than you. It wasn't something that I had a lot coming up. And so as I saw that, I went, oh, okay, well, these guys are getting better by beating me up this way. These guys are limiting the amount of moves that they go for and they're almost trying to hit the same move on me over and over. I'm like, maybe they're not being jerks. Maybe this is how they get better. They just keep rapping the same thing against a guy who's, you know, maybe they don't have a training partner that's just a little worse than them that they can do these things on. And so I started to deconstruct that and use that with people that I was better than and go, oh, maybe I should be hitting the same thing and focused on the same idea, even though I could hit any cool stuff on this guy. But again, the thing is, you have to learn that skill of what does my room look like? How can I use this to my advantage? And then I think if you're not a terrible person, you should also say to yourself, how can I be a help to this room? Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a few interesting myths there that we can bust based on some of the things that you said. One of them is this myth and this concern that beginners often have that they're not adding any value to the room. People sometimes feel like, I'm just not good enough. Everyone beats me all the time. I don't have any value here. That is absolutely not the case. If you want to work on your offense, in fact, finding less experienced people is key to doing that because that's how you as the the um practitioner can get more realistic reps in while still working your offense. It's like you said, if you're practicing against someone who is just better than you and more skilled than you, you're probably going to be on defense more often. So it's very important for experienced people to get practice against those who are less experienced. For myself, when I am sparring against white or blue belts, often I will um take submissions out of my game. So I'll kind of play this game with myself where I say like, if I'm going to tap someone, it's got to be by position. I'm just not going to try to go for a submission. I'm going to try to use positional pressure. Maybe I'll get them, maybe I won't, but that allows me to work on refining my positional control without just trying to rush right to the end of the match. So that is still very useful experience to me, even if the other person is quite new to jiu-jitsu. And of course, the flip side applies as well. I'd be curious to hear what you think about that. Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree with you. The tough thing about I think jiu-jitsu in general is that I think it's different for every single person. And so no matter how much we we split things up, we see, and this is something a shout out to the Eco guys. They they recognize this variation, and it's also just this it's a different experience for every single person. And I guess just for me, what what I'm always thinking about is as a coach, I'm always going, how can we view it in a way that sees all these people's perspective and can still help them in whichever way their direction they're trying to go, be able to help them grow. I don't know if that was even a direct answer, but that was just my that was my thought from what you said. Speaker 1: Well, another thing that I I'd like to expand on here. Everyone knows that it's okay to say no to a roll, but what people might not realize is saying no, that doesn't mean there's something wrong with the other person. I mean, sometimes you say no to a roll because you don't feel the other person is safe or you don't think that their hygiene level is acceptable. But sometimes you just say no to a roll because there's only so many minutes of training that you've got every day, and you have a specific training goal that day that the other person can't help you with. So, I mean, as an example, if I say no to a roll, it might not be because there's something wrong with you. It might be because today, this is an offense day for me. I need to get offense reps in, and you're just too good to roll with for me to get enough of those reps in. That's not a condemnation of you at all. So this is yet another reason why we need to normalize being able to say no to rolls. It doesn't mean there's something wrong with the person you're saying no to. It could just be that your training precludes them today. Speaker 2: And I mean, to be fair, though, sometimes it does mean that there's something wrong with the the person that you're training with. You know, that person's way too violent. You know, the person will has too much potential to hurt you, right? Sometimes there is, you know, like a, hey, I don't want to roll with you because you're dangerous to roll with, right? But yeah, I I think that so many people struggle with this. My opinion is probably wild and it's probably even wrong, who knows? But I really think it has a lot to do with how they view and respect themselves. If with saying no to a roll. I think that there is a quote from the book Essentialism that I love. It says that oftentimes saying no means trading popularity for respect. And I think a lot of people don't respect themself enough to go, not as much it doesn't outweigh the fear that they have of saying no to someone, and they go, well, I'll roll with somebody who might hurt me because I don't want to hurt their feelings. But I really think in terms of values, like you protecting your self physically is much more important than this person's feelings, right? And so I think that and I don't think that people is are as offended by, hey, no, I don't want to do this round with you than people expect. And so I do think that there should be, I really think you need to try to empower yourself to just saying no to those rolls because those rolls can be super dangerous for you, you know, and those and like as you age, you start to realize like, hey, man, I'm I'm one mistake away from not being able to train. And so, yeah, that's just my I think my philosophy on saying and personally, I do even at 31, I say no to rolls all the time, specifically because that person is too physical, and I will roll with them at other times, but when my body is just too physically depleted, there's a just too much risk of injury. And if somebody is ever like, oh, come on, then I will always stand really firm on that. Speaker 1: And you touched on this earlier, when you're competing, your objective is to perform on a single day in a single moment. And getting injured shortly before that moment completely defeats the purpose of the training that you had had put in place prior. So it becomes especially important when you are preparing for an event to minimize your risk of injury while still balancing that with effective training. I'd be curious to get your thoughts on how things like injury prevention and things maybe outside of the context of just the technique come into play when it comes to how we prepare for a competition. I mean, people talk about how they ramp up prior to a competition. What does that mean to you and what do you change as you get closer and closer to the day that you have to perform? Speaker 2: Okay, so that's such a good question. So this is honestly, the offensive and defensive volume days are a little part of what we look at. To me, it's not even close to the the big concept. The big concept that is no matter what, if I am setting somebody up to compete, this is the first conversation that we have. You are going to pick one day to be a performance day. And the idea of the performance day is this gets to be your pretend competition. You get to try your mindset preparation. You get to try your breath work beforehand. You drink your electrolytes, you warm up the same way. You try as much as work and life allows. You try your absolute best to make this a competition. And then, um, whether that means you have you do less rounds, but at a higher intensity, your only goal is to win, and you even rest between rounds like you would typically in a competition, right? You make it as much like the performance as possible, so you can ideally develop that idea of performing when the moment comes. And so that is like, if you had one day a week to train, I would tell you, okay, that's got to be a performance day. You're not going to learn any jiu-jitsu over the next six weeks if if there's a tournament coming up. If you only have one day a week to train and there's you're not good yet, I would say just do volume days to get better and don't focus on competing. But if you really, you know, if you have a little bit of a base, but you don't get to train a lot, it would just go, no, the priority is you get this performance day cuz that's all you can practice right now is you practice competing. The skill that you have is the skill you're going into this tournament with. Speaker 1: Yeah. Now, the funny thing about jiu-jitsu is that we've got so many people who train but just never compete, including myself. And I'd like to know from your perspective, if someone doesn't have the desire to compete, do you still encourage them to go through the process of setting up a camp? Because I think that could potentially be really good for skill development, even if your goal is never to actually compete, just the process of going through this regiment might be helpful. Speaker 2: When you are a non-competitor and you use specific language where you said somebody who just doesn't want to compete, I think absolutely that person probably shouldn't compete. If you've gone to tournaments, you're like, nah, this is fun. This ain't for me. I think you shouldn't compete. If you have a desire to compete and you tell yourself, no, I don't want to compete or competing stupid or, you know, it costs too much or or whatever. I generally think that those people should just challenge themself, do a six-week camp and go out and try a tournament. If it's not for you after you've tried it, then it's not for you, right? But if you just don't have a desire at all, I think you should think about how many days a week you get to dedicate to jiu-jitsu and then structure them in a way of, well, what maximizes me getting better? And honestly, again, even then, I think you have performance days. I think you, again, you control the room at all times. If you're in your 60s, you don't have performance days against barrowing 21-year-old blue belts, right? You make sure you're going with people, even people who will protect you if you're, you know, if it's your black belt coach, you know, and you know they're not going to hurt you and they're going to protect you. That's the type of people you have your performance days. But the goal is a day where your only focus is to win, and that shows you what you should be working on the other days, right? How do I know on my offensive days what I should be trying to get reps of? Well, I missed it 10 times on my performance day, so it's very obvious now, right? And on the other days, I get to let go of things and not have to try to perform. It's not this big thing where I'm going, oh, man, when we start rolling tonight, I better beat this guy and I better beat this guy. It's like, you start to actually get to think of jiu-jitsu classes as, did I get better or not? And your only metric is not, well, who did I beat, right? It's you're getting so many reps, you're getting to see, oh, I hit that move two more times tonight. Oh, I got choked two less times tonight. And it's really easy when your goal is just volume and it's not to perform to go, I don't care if I'm losing. But then when you go on your performance day, you just try your best to win. And it's not about volume. You hold positions if you can rest from them, right? It's just as winning as efficiently as possible. But where you get to see these holes over and over of like, oh, I lost side control. Well, I should spend this week focused on side control. Speaker 1: So here's why I ask this. I think it's easy when you just train jiu-jitsu casually to just get into the flow of it because it's fun. And in a lot of ways, the fact that jiu-jitsu is so fun is one of the things that can make it hard to really focus on skill development because the act of training is fun and rewarding in and of itself. So it's easy to just get caught up into that and not really have a a specific intention for what you want to get out of your your training. On the other hand, having an upcoming competition really forces you to prepare, right? You've got this date that you have to be ready for. And so that that means you've got to back that out. You have to have a plan for how you're going to get ready for that date. And I'm wondering if even if you took the competition out of it, if just the act of having that plan, having this theoretical preparation time where you've got to be ready to peak at a certain day, even if you're not competing, I wonder if the process of doing that would add structure and value to your training. I bring this up because uh folks like friend of the show Josh Vogel from the Jiu-Jitsu Company has talked about project-based jiu-jitsu and structuring and chunking your training into kind of a a time window where you say for the next few months, here's the goals that I'm going to work on. And I think that having a competition plan, even if there's no actual competition, could be a a helpful structure for hanging that plan off of. It reminds me of how in the project management world, there's this concept called Parkinson's Law, which tells us that if I give you a block of time, you're going to find a way to expand your project into that block of time, right? So if I give you a job and tell you you've got six months to do this, if it can be done, you'll get it done in six months. But if I were to come back to you and give you the same project and say you've got 12 months to do this, it'll take you all 12 months. It's not like you're going to get it done in six months and then have an extra six months to just sit around doing nothing. The work will expand to fill the time allocated because if you've got extra time, then you're going to bolt on a bunch more stuff and you know, maybe you'll take a bit longer than you could have and you're not going to be as economical with how your time is spent. So the act of constraining time forces people to think more deliberately about their plan for how they use that time. Now, that's not to say that you should always crunch everything down. You can screw yourself this way because if you give yourself too little time, you're probably going to do a bad job and set yourself up for failure. But the lesson from project management is that carefully constraining your time so that you're not wasteful is really helpful. And I wonder if the same lesson applies to jiu-jitsu, where if we set this theoretical event where you've got to be ready, and I mean, of course, if you're competing, that's that event is not theoretical. But even if you have no interest, I wonder if just saying like, hey, you've got to be competition ready on February 1st. I wonder if that would be useful even for people who have no interest in actually stepping on the competition mats. Speaker 2: I think that is absolutely brilliant. I also have ever told you about the end goal method of training? Speaker 1: No, but it sounds great. Speaker 2: Okay, so the idea of the end goal method is actually the first episode of my podcast. It's called the like the simplest way to progress at jiu-jitsu. Is this idea where you take a move or a position that is kind of a place that you want to be at by the end of the round or a place you can finish for from or an actual finish. So I for example, you could use a Kimura. And you spend a certain amount of time and I recommend different amounts of time depending on how skilled you are. I think the better you are, generally the deeper you need to dive into things to really get something out of it. But you set a time and you set a number of reps that you are going to try to or I guess subs that you're going to try to hit or times you're going to try to get into that position in live training over that period of time. And so for example, the first time we ever did this, I did something really obnoxious and didn't realize it. One of my now black belts, I told him, he was like, I really want to learn guillotines. Like, do you ever hit guillotines? He goes, no. I'm like, okay, well, let's just set a goal. I go, let's do 500 guillotines in the next, I think it was three months. And for a guy that had never hit a guillotine before in his life, he had to work really hard just to get one a night at first. But then what was interesting is it went from one a night to like three a night, and then it went to like 10 a night. And then it was like everybody was complaining about going with him because he was getting like 20 guillotines a night. And it was what you're saying, that time constraint really did make a huge difference. And I really like that thought of, well, what if it was specific in like, you know, and then the same way that bodybuilders, even if they don't compete in bodybuilding, there are people that consider themselves bodybuilders and they generally follow a regimen and they peak at certain times and generally even have program times that they take off and stuff too. But yeah, I think that that's a really interesting thought. I would I would be curious for people to try it and then let me know. Speaker 1: Maybe I should do it. Coach me through it, coach. Speaker 2: That would be really cool cuz that I think the question would be, what is is there, you know, I not to go to Taekwondo, but what's the test at the end, right? What is the thing at the end that we focus on to give you a metric that goes, oh, this did, you know, I mean, what's the control? What's the are we going by feel of, yeah, I did feel better. And I kind of that's you have thoughts on that? Speaker 1: It reminds me of the old uh adage that plans are useless, but planning is essential. That's kind of what we're talking about here, right? Whatever you plan to do, things rarely go according to plan in the real world. But the act of planning and getting ready is of value in and of itself because it gives you a structure to do skill development on top of it. It gives you a kind of a focus, a project, so to speak, right? You've got a deliverable, you've got a deadline that you're working towards. If you don't have that in your jiu-jitsu training, then it just becomes this big kind of vague, confusing blur. And when people talk about how I'm in a plateau, I don't feel like I'm learning anything. A lot of the time that's because I think they're just sort of on autopilot. And a coach, even if the coach does their best to create a curriculum, a lot of the time the student is not super aware of the curriculum. You know, maybe the coach has this great plan for day by day, week by week what we're going to cover. But for the student, if they're not paying attention, they're just going to show up and just passively absorb whatever the student is doing. But I think putting that structure around it, the act of forcing people to plan and think about this stuff, I think is really helpful for their their skill development. And I can also see that helping out with some of the skills that are harder to fit into a regular class. You know, as we know, the actual technique part of jiu-jitsu is not the most important in many ways. Um, your mindset, your ability to thrive under pressure prove to be much more important and just your experience in a difficult environment. So I think that these are things that you could maybe train more effectively if you put yourself through these kind of mini camps, even if there's no competition on the line. I could see that being something that's quite cool, maybe really helpful. Speaker 2: Let's do it, Steve. Speaker 1: We could do some content. You could train my ass. Speaker 2: That would be so cool. I would absolutely love to do that. We could build you kind of a program to and just kind of go off of like, hey, how do you did and kind of like you said, there are specific skills that you don't really get to focus on if you don't that competitors have to focus on naturally, right? And you know, you may not not have that thing. And so maybe we, yeah, really identify a a specific skill that you want to develop in your jiu-jitsu and we build a six-week camp to kind of get you there and do it in a way that's like for competition. A skill that you would probably have as a competitor. That'd be really cool. Speaker 1: Amazing. And I can even shoot you some uh video footage and you can see my rolling. It's going to make you laugh. You know, we talked earlier about how technique sometimes looks really smooth. Not mine, man. My jiu-jitsu looks like a hyena dragging a carcass across the Serengeti. It is ugly, and I'm curious to get your feedback. Speaker 2: I would love it. Have you ever heard of BJJ Mental Models Premium? They have a coaching tier, and, you know, if you sign up for it, you can have people like Josh McKinney or much more famous people. Speaker 1: I have heard of this. Although you are currently the favorite coach. Everyone always asks for Josh McKinney. So sometimes fame and celebrity only go so far. Speaker 2: I pay them to ask for me, Steve. I pay them. I say, hey, guys, I'll send you five bucks if you just tell Steve that I did a good job. You know, I said, I've never kept a job for more than a day, so I'm just I'm just hanging on right now. Speaker 1: Well, here's maybe a hypothetical if we walk through this. Just to give listeners some kind of a concrete idea of what this looks like. Well, someone already trains at your gym and you you trust them not to be a lunatic, and they tell you that they want to prep for a competition in six weeks. Like, tactically speaking, what does that look like? How would you go through this? Do you sit them down and kind of figure out their goals first, or do you have a sort of out-of-the-box structure that you can always use? Speaker 2: So for me, it always the first question is how many days a week do you get to train? You know, like how many how many days are we going to work with? And then cuz some people the answer is like, oh, I train every day, you know? And that answer for that person is going to be one much simpler. You can probably, you have a lot of time to waste, you know, and you'll be just fine. But the people that I really feel like I focus the most on are your two to three day a week people because they're going to be competing against people that get to dedicate seven days a week. And so they are going to need to be way more efficient in the way that they train. And the main focus is, hey, we've got to take one day a week and it needs to be a performance day. That is, you know, whichever one of these days, your goal is just to get reps of winning and competing against people that are tough and you're focused on the moves that you're already good at. You're not trying to develop new skills. You are just trying to win today. And get that performance. If that means, and this is what I'll do with my guys and because I've done it with myself, is, hey, you don't get any anxiety training here. Even if we pretend it's a competition, you get no anxiety. And you're going to get anxiety in the tournament. We want to get you prepped for that. So let's go do an open mat at a different gym and you go train with those guys. And that is usually like for those six weeks. And then the last part of it is if you're going to actually perform at a tournament, I want you resting the last week because remember, the goal is to perform at 100%, and you wouldn't believe how many people that you see training like the night before a competition, like it's a logical thing. And I know you're super skilled and you can still win, but the goal is to be at 100%. You don't want the jelly legs because you just wanted to train way too much. There's a point of diminishing returns when it comes to hard training and a lot of people in jiu-jitsu just don't comprehend it at all. And so there is you see so many people at competition, they don't look like themself. And sometimes a lot of the times it's anxiety, but the other times it's just because they're too overtrained to perform because their anxiety pushed them to train super duper hard for competition. Speaker 1: Have you ever heard the phrase the last mile problem? Speaker 2: No, I have not. Speaker 1: Okay, so this is a an interesting concept that comes up a lot in logistics. The idea is that when you're trying to do something big and complicated, a lot of the time, the very last mile is like the hardest part. So specifically, think of delivering a package, right? If you live in Illinois and I live in British Columbia, having a package shipped from Illinois to British Columbia, that's hard, but the hardest part is like once it gets to British Columbia, to my province, how do we get it specifically from there like to my house? The last mile is often the hardest part of a problem. And this comes up a lot because you will often see projects that go really well up until they get about 99% of the way done, and then they completely fall apart at the very end because of the last mile. And that can either be because it was way harder than people thought, or often times, people will make real stupid mistakes at the end because they think they're done. Like, again, like you said, training really hard the day before a competition and getting injured. Also, sometimes there's a tortoise and hare effect as well, where people as they get to the last mile, they'll take their foot off the gas because they think they're done. You see this in jiu-jitsu matches sometimes, where people are they think they're up on points, and so they just think, I'll just coast out the last 60 seconds, and then they lose somehow, right? Because they took their foot off the gas before the match was over. So that could be a very common problem that affects not just the match, but even the training coming up to it, where stupid mistakes at the very end can screw up all of the hard work that you put in play beforehand. Speaker 2: Mhm. And I see that and even honestly, even off the mat. You have people that will go to the tournament on a day that they're competing, and they don't compete till late, and they stay at the tournament, stand around all day, cheer for all their people, get their adrenaline super high, and then by 4:00 p.m. when it's time to compete, they are exhausted. And it's like, hey, that's not focusing on performing at 100%. You know, and that's like with my students, what I have people competing late, they'll want to support the team. I'm like, get out of here, dude. Go back to the hotel or at least go lay down in the corner and watch stuff on your phone. Don't be here hanging out, cheering and wasting energy. And so to me, when it comes to competition, when it comes to performing at your best, you really should be so meticulous in that last little bit. To me, the last week, we call it the 100% week, and it means I am allowed to train. I'm allowed to go hard even if I want to do a hard training session. But I am only allowed to do so if I'm going into that training session feeling 100%. If I feel that, then, hey, I'm recovering enough. I can train hard and then give myself a little bit more time to rest. But besides that, there's no reason to. The goal was to get better during your camp, and you've done that already. And now the goal is to perform at our best, and that isn't the same practice. It's different. I I need to give myself a little bit extra rest so I can go and try to perform at my best physically. Speaker 1: Got it. So for these six week programs that you're talking about, and I understand as you mentioned that this varies a lot depending on the amount of time the person is able to put in. The way that you would coach someone who trains once or twice a week is going to be very different from the way that you coach someone who trains seven days a week. But are there any overarching themes in terms of how you would structure the time that you get them to use? I mean, you talked a little about about offense days, defense days, performance days. Anything specific about what that person should expect when they come into class if you've got them on a a competition routine to have them ready for something in six weeks? Speaker 2: Okay, so here is my thing. There as a coach, I feel like it's different than being an instructor, right? Now, your instructor shows you moves. Your coach may not actually know the best moves, but your coach gives you guidance to get to where you want to be. And that is why again, the individuality of this all is so important is, well, what are we, you know, what are you going to, what competition are you going to go do? Have we competed in that competition before, right? So you have you have no experience in the rule set. Well, that's probably our top priority, right? That shoots to the top. If you don't have any experience in the rule set because, dude, you've never done a a match with heel hooks. We got to deal with that, you know? And so there, you know, sometimes those problems just show themself. And I'll again, as the coach, my job is to stay on this person, to know my guys and go, hey, have you been dealing with that heel hook? I'm still seeing you get heel hooked in practice, you know, especially on your defensive volume day where you're supposed to be starting on your butt and letting some of these leg entanglement guys get you in leg entanglements and then going from there. Like, you're getting heel hooked a ton, right? We're not dealing with this. And so that's when I can kind of course correct. That's when if I wasn't also the instructor too, I would have the instructor show himself thing or work with him. But I have a lot of black belts that I'll say, hey, you have great leg lock defense. I need you to work with this guy. And so there's this level of for me, being who I am, I get to like with my own guys, I get to give them that advice day-to-day and we can make it tweak for them like day-to-day. What I did recently, I wrote a just like an an ebook called the Competitor's Journey, and it's three different six-week camps. One if somebody was like had two days a week, and it's just the general, hey, if you had two days a week and you still wanted to compete, this is how I would look at it. This is the goals you should be hitting. This is how you should focus on it. And then there's one for three to four days a week, and then there's one for like professional level jiu-jitsu that's six to seven days a week. And I break them down again, just the more days we have, the more specific we can be on those days with our training cuz we're going to get other time to be specific with the other stuff that we need to do. When you have to do everything in one night, it's very hard, right? You can't do that. You know, the practice is different. So there's a lot of variables that are going in. It's dependent on the rule set, the person, how much experience they have, and then how much time they get to dedicate to that training. Speaker 1: I really like how you brought up the different hats that people wear in a training camp. And a lot of jiu-jitsu folks probably aren't really used to this because, you know, we're not operating at like NFL tier in terms of the size of the sport. It's not like a good athlete is going to have a whole crew of people there to kind of help them succeed at the best level they can. But the difference between a coach and an instructor is very real. An instructor is going to be there to actually teach technique. A coach in a lot of ways is almost like a a horse whisperer for athletes. Their goal is to get the optimal performance out of these people. And sometimes that is more of a soft skill than anything. You might not know the best jiu-jitsu or the most jiu-jitsu, but if you have a way of reaching and connecting with your athletes at a human level and motivating them, that in itself can be hyper valuable. I mean, I've talked to coaches before and I've thought after talking to them like, man, I don't actually think this person knows that much, but they still are able to produce incredible athletes. And part of that is because there's more to performance than just what is the level of your technical knowledge, right? Technical knowledge by itself isn't going to win any competitions. That's just one piece of the puzzle. And I like that you bring up that there are different roles that your mentors can play because too often in jiu-jitsu, people are are very critical of of someone because they'll think, well, this person, they don't have the right individual competition success to be a coach, or this person, their technical knowledge isn't good enough. At the end of the day, people have different roles, and it's important to know which role people play in your life because you may have to augment that. I mean, sometimes you might have a a mentor who can play both the instructor and the coach role, but it's not uncommon to need different people for those roles. That's totally okay, but we've got to first have the conversation about, hey, you can't expect your mentor to play every single role for you. Sometimes they need support and help as well. Speaker 2: Yeah, that's so true too. And that like you you hinted at that, that really does it's the culture. The culture in jiu-jitsu says, well, if you can't beat me, then you have nothing to help me with. And my coach was never like that. My coach was always like, I'll learn anything from anybody if it helps me be better, if I if it helps me win. And that was the, you know, and again, like back then, 17 years ago, that really was not the vibe. Coaches, things were very secret and, you know, there was a lot of ego of, no, we know the secrets, and so we we wouldn't need to learn them from anyone else. And my coach was always going, one, if he was the best person, he was always going above and beyond to get better people in our room to just help us with. And so now people will, you know, my coach will ask me a technical jiu-jitsu question because that's still who he is as a person. And I'll share something with him and somebody will make a dumb comment and be like, well, why is he your coach then? I'm like, what's wrong with you? What does that have to do with that? Was two separate things. He's a good coach because he asked me that. And so, yeah, it's just the mentality to me is so off when it comes to how to learn jiu-jitsu and who to learn jiu-jitsu from. Honestly, I know I'm giving too many mental model shout outs, but the the camp that I went to, I would bet anything that I learned more at that camp than anybody else because I have focused my entire life on that I can learn. And there is not a word that's coming out of somebody's mouth that I'm not saying to myself, this could have a lot of value. I better be engaged. I better be ready to to hear this. And then I get so many gold nuggets from all these great coaches. And I'm like, oh my gosh, I have so much to share with my students. And yeah, I just think that the mentality wasn't off there. The mentality was, hey, let's just learn jiu-jitsu. Let's just get better at jiu-jitsu. And and it's so weird because in competition, that is the best way to get better is to not worry about losing most of the time. But people do the opposite and they go into this mindset that says, oh, well, I need to win because winning in the gym translates to winning in competition. And so every round is just about winning. And so then what do you do naturally? You lower the level of training partner you go against. You won't roll with anybody tough because every round is just about winning. That's again, the idea of this is why I think you separate your days. You have days that you know, hey, my job is to deal with some crap today. It's to get beat down today. And it's freeing to not have that as your ego and just to be like, yep, I'm going to eat some shoulder pressure today. And yeah, again, it's just like a a shifting mindset to me that I think people that don't compete tend to gravitate towards anyway. But then people that do compete who would benefit the absolute most from it, they just don't do it. Speaker 1: How would you say that students can take on an approach like this if it's not something they can get the support from their instructors or coaches on? I mean, in an ideal world, of course, your instructor or coach could guide you through this, but sometimes people in jiu-jitsu are also way too dependent on the instructor and coach to lead the initiative. It's very important, especially as you get further in your journey, to take more ownership of your own jiu-jitsu journey yourself. And so that means that at some point, you've got to be planning and structuring these routines for yourself as well. If someone is relatively new to this process, maybe they're a white belt or a blue belt, or maybe they're more senior, but they're just new to the idea of a competition camp. How would you suggest that someone could get the ball rolling today and start adding this kind of thinking to their training? Speaker 2: Man, I would say first things first is conversation with your coach. A lot of people, competitors especially, will have a bad attitude towards their coach because they're like, man, I'm out there competing. I'm representing our team. I'm representing the brand of this gym, and I get no support. But they also don't ask their coach for support. They also don't say, hey, coach, I really want to compete. I love this team. I want to represent our jiu-jitsu. And I think that if you do that, a lot of coaches would be like, I've been waiting for anybody to tell me that. Let's do it. I would love to do that. So I think that that is your first thought is just make sure you have that open communication. If your coach is like, hey, we are not a competition gym, cuz I've had friends that have said that. And they're like, I wanted to compete. My coach said we're not a competition gym. I'm like, hey, man, come and come to our open mats. You know, go to that open mat over there too. Those are you can stay at your gym even. You don't need to leave. Do your self-defense stuff, and then on your other days, do competitive, you know, focus on performing, learn to compete. And and do it that way. And there's there are ways that you can I think open mats, obviously, for most people as you get better, that's where a lot of the rebellious purple belts gravitate towards anyway, right? The more free spirit people anyway. Well, that's because you have freedom in that training most of the time. And so if you can find open mats, and nowadays, there are cool open mats that are just open to the public, and you can go and train. Obviously, try to be respectful of those people's gym and give them a five-star review on Google after you leave, but you can go and train there. And so I think that if you feel like your coach, if you talk to your coach and they're too rigid, honestly, I think the simplest answer is go to open mats. It's going to be very hard for you to have too much control of your training if they didn't see the value in you wanting to compete, I think. And then to help you with it. Speaker 1: Awesome. Well said, man. Well, here's one more question I got for you. We don't talk enough in the sport about the limitations in time that apply to coaches and and instructors. When you are an instructor, the amount of one-on-one time that you have with every person in the room is actually really small, right? I mean, if you even if you try to go full ego and make sure that you're doing as much live training as possible, your instructor just won't have enough time to provide one-on-one direct attention to everyone in the room for any significant amount, right? For most people, in the average class, if you were to think like, how much actual direct attention do I get from my coach every day? It's probably like a minute or two. And that's not because your coach is doing anything wrong. It's just the logistics of having to teach to a room of 30 to 50 people at the same time who are all trying to kill each other and you got to make sure they don't injure themselves, right? A coach has to divide their time. So often people have to supplement. And some people do this through private lessons, but a lot of people don't have the ability to do that. It occurs to me that I mean, we live in an age now where there are so many other options to augment your training. You talked earlier about rolling reviews. I mean, you're one of our marquee coaches on our rolling review service. People send you clips all the time to break down. But those are individual rolls. Do you think that if someone wanted to do something more long-term, like if they wanted to set up a six-week training camp or something to that effect or even longer, is that something that you think people could pursue remotely? Like, would they be able to work with someone like you or another coach to do something online so that they can achieve the same result if their day-to-day coach is too busy? Speaker 2: Yes, I absolutely think so. I get talked, I have conversations with a lot of my coaches' students that are more focused on competition. And because when I left to start my own school, like their best competitor left, right? And so a lot of that advice on competition left. And so that's something that I always try to do, but I also see like the value in it. And there's so many people that I see online that are good black belts and offer private coaching. You know, I I see that as this new and kind of valuable thing. Personally, I coach my people in person, you know? I just uh my the city that I live in doesn't get enough love. And so I'm here for this city, you know, and that's the jiu-jitsu that I try to share. And I hope it's a really valuable perspective, but I also think in terms of if I do that, then I have this chance to, I mean, 31 years old at the end of this month, I'm going to have 18 black belts. And under me. And to have that much value in my gym right now, one makes my gym just this huge step up where I can have these guys sharing so much knowledge with other people. I can be learning so much from these other people. But what started to happen without me realizing it is these people start to spread out. And some of my police officers are teaching at police academies and teaching jiu-jitsu. And then some of my, you know, like I have people that have college programs that they at their school that they go to, they help teach people jiu-jitsu. And to me, that is why I don't coach things online besides just doing the mental models reviews, and that's just because I like you, you know? And uh it seems like all the people that are on there are really cool. And then they all make up lies about me and say I'm a good coach too. So I'm, you know, I mean, you guys have the bots that tell me, you know, send me videos and tell me they like my perspective. That's going to keep me on there forever. But besides that, I just like coaching my people here. Speaker 1: Well, that's a good plug, man. Let's talk about your gym. I want to make sure that we give this some attention. Like you said, it's an underloved, underappreciated city, and I definitely want to help put it on the map. So why don't you talk about the work that you guys do? Speaker 2: Okay, so we at Head Nod, we do we have three different schools in Southern Illinois right now. One in Granite City, one in Edwardsville, and one in Jerseyville. I started the first school almost 10 years ago. It'll be 10 years next month. And really, I just I started a jiu-jitsu school to pay for competition and travel because it was hard to do. And I loved I loved jiu-jitsu. I wanted to start sharing it, but I had no skill in coaching and teaching or anything. But I do have a good skill in running a cult-like uh gym. And so I got a lot of people that have just been with me forever and have, you know, we've all learned so much jiu-jitsu together. And so, you know, I know that in our area in the Midwest to be a gym with 18 black belts, most of them are like from white to black belt. And to be there is really cool. And we run things very, very differently. We are as much of the anti-traditional jiu-jitsu that you would be. It offends people, but on our sign, we have American jiu-jitsu on it to show that we never bow, we never um do anything like that. You can wear whatever color gi you want. And we are focused on innovative ideas. And so you will show up to class and never get a boring class. You I just left a class where I had a visiting black belt that had been in for a few weeks. He had been showing these choke details that I couldn't comprehend. And so what I did was I said, hey, this Thursday daytime class that we have at our gym has my best question askers. We're just going to get in the middle. They are going to question ask you to death until we can all figure out these chokes that you're doing cuz they feel insane. We just can't recreate them. And that is the mentality of our gym. Again, it is about getting better at jiu-jitsu. And it originally started as just about competition, but then as it grew, it people liked that competitive mentality and said, hey, I don't want to compete. You know, like, oh, well, you're you can be part of this too. We're just trying to get better. And so we started to when we deconstructed things, we realized like, oh, all we're doing is jiu-jitsu without any of the other stuff. We're doing just get better at grappling jiu-jitsu. You don't have to do any traditional thing. We don't even do stripes on our belts. You know, so at some point, we're probably just being disrespectful on purpose. But it is one of those things where it's like so many people make jiu-jitsu about so many other things that it isn't. And at Head Nod, we do not do that. We really do take priority of having a good time, being good people to each other, and getting just absolutely amazing at jiu-jitsu despite having no great physical attributes, despite being in a super small town that everybody flies over. We have really special jiu-jitsu here. And so if you're around any of those places, we would love if you would come and join us. Speaker 1: Amazing, man. Well, if people want to look you up or look up your gym, how do they find you? Speaker 2: So look up my gym is Head Nod HQ, and that is that will take you to our main page. You can go to any of the locations. Um, Head Nod HQ.com will take you there. And then anything interesting that I do is on my podcast or my YouTube channel. Both are I Suck at Jiu-Jitsu. And yeah, if you're interested in my jiu-jitsu perspective, we do new episodes every Thursday of the I Suck at Jiu-Jitsu show. They're sometimes talking head videos, sometimes interviews, just like I told you my classes are at my gym. They're just always random and the goal is just to help you suck a little less at jiu-jitsu. Speaker 1: Amazing, sir. Well, I will put links to all of your stuff in the show notes to make it easy to find. So people can pop open their podcast player and just one tap, go check out Josh and Head Nod HQ. All of our stuff will be there too, but it's easy to find as well. It's all at BJJ Mental Models.com. The podcast like this, both full-length episodes and our mini concept breakdowns are all in the feed. They're all completely free. Our newsletter getting close to 15,000 signups now. Definitely recommend checking that out as well. And again, that's all at BJJ Mental Models.com. And please, if you haven't already, do look into BJJ Mental Models Premium. It's how we fund this whole thing. It's the reason why we don't run crazy annoying ads on the show. It's got about 600 subscribers now and it's growing strong. I think it's one of the more popular subscription sites in the sport. We do things a little bit differently. This is not an online academy in the sense that you might be used to. It's not just a library of video techniques. We focus primarily on audio and long-form education. So we've got a lot of chats that are probably closer to a university lecture than what you might expect from a jiu-jitsu academy. Our big thing is trying to explain big ideas, like mindset, concepts, the kind of thinking that explains the why behind jiu-jitsu. Uh it augments the kind of stuff that you might be getting in a classroom or from a traditional instructional. And of course, if you want to get direct coaching, we have a coaching tier. That's where folks like Josh will break down your rolls. You mentioned Josh actually, and maybe this is something we should start looking into. If you've got a competition coming up and rather than wanting an individual roll, if you need a coach who can help you plan out your camp and kind of manage that remotely, that's something that we can help you out with. So do check out our coaching tier if you're interested in getting that kind of support. All of that is at BJJ Mental Models.com. But again, I will put a link to that in the show notes. Josh, my friend, thank you so much. I always love having you on, man. You do such a great job of explaining these concepts. I can tell you're a podcaster. And I definitely appreciate having you here. I know the audience always does as well. Speaker 2: Man, I appreciate being on the show and just to reiterate, I really I know it's over the top and it sounds salesy, but I really think that BJJ Mental Models Premium is such a valuable asset. When I do and I do quite a few reviews, when I do them, I have these interactions with people that are like, I can't believe that this thing exists, especially when it's purple belt, brown belt, black belt reviews. Those people are going, why have I never had this? Just somebody to watch me and correct little things and then to give me actionable steps to fix them. And yeah, I just it's there there really is no I mean, obviously people individually will do it for you, but there is no product like it or no subscription service like it in jiu-jitsu that I know of. And yeah, it's just so valuable. People should definitely check it out. Speaker 1: Ah, thanks, man. I appreciate the plug. Well, all of that in the show notes, but Josh again, thank you, my friend. Great chat. Always love having you here. Speaker 2: Love being on. Speaker 1: Thanks to the listeners too. Love having you here too, and we will talk to you in the next one. See you then.