Ep. 358: Please Tap, feat. Rob Biernacki

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 Jijitsu. If you struggle to be aggressive and competitive in Jijitsu, you'll find the solutions here. If you're already a BJJ Mental Models premium subscriber, you've already got access, and if you are not, good news, you can get it now and get your first week free. Go to BJJ Mental Models.com and check it out today. Speaker 2: Hey, welcome to BJJ Mental Models episode 358. I'm Steve Kwan. BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent Jijitsu approach. And I'm back again with the Vancouver Island sensation, Rob Bernaki. How's it going, Rob? Speaker 1: Fuck life. I'm not even going to pretend anymore. This timeline sucks, fucking traveling sucks, people are idiots, fuck everything. Speaker 2: Fair. Well, you know what? There's nothing I like to do more than give you a platform to complain to the whole world about your grievances. Speaker 1: If only I could take a Tylenol. Speaker 2: You can't, well, you can, and in fact, if you do, it might make you a world champion from what I understand at this point, right? Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: Well, let's complain about something else here. You had a topic at hand here, and the timing is actually really good because we just had a Dr. Jen Case on the podcast and she talked about a very similar concept regarding competition safety. You had some items that had come up recently at local tournaments, which I think are symptomatic of bigger problems we have in the sport, but I'll maybe turn it over to you to introduce the topic. Speaker 1: Yeah, so we're talking about people being fucking idiots and sacrificing their ligaments or bones or for like not even glory. Especially at like lower level tournaments. So like I compete a fair bit, not at like the highest level, but I compete, you know, I compete at black belt in relatively big tournaments. So it's masters divisions. So like I understand that at a certain level of competition, there is a a compromise to be made sometimes or a sacrifice to be made sometimes that might under some circumstances be a perfectly valid one, which is to say, if you're caught in a submission and you feel like maybe you have a chance to get out of it and it involves, you know, as the vernacular commonly goes is a eat some pops, which eat some pops usually means that there is a damage being done to the ligament, the capsule, sometimes the tendons, in very severe cases, it goes from pops to what tend to be more snaps where the bone actually starts to, you know, take damage. But basically, people at certain levels of competition have historically just been willing to eat a certain amount of damage to a joint lock. Not to mention some people will just, you know, not tap to a choke and just fully go out, which I think is honestly not that big of a deal. But what has not really been the case in in my observation until recently, and I've been, uh, you know, a club owner for almost a decade and a half now, 13 years coming up on. And so I've, you know, coached almost every single tournament that any of my students have been to in that time, like we can like probably count on, you know, one or two hands the amount of tournaments that I've ever missed. And other than some like just epically incompetent reffing at a Vancouver Island tournament, which I will gladly throw under the bus later on. We really haven't had to worry about, you know, my students injuring people in competition because they just don't tap or because like they're willing to eat a bunch of pops. Like I said, at the level, I get it at black belt. I still think it's kind of silly at a certain point to just let your body get damaged, but I understand it. What I don't understand is this like drastic increase. It's been like we're in end of September. I've now had three or four just this year, so September 2025. I've had three or four of my students pretty severely injure people in local tournaments. I'm talking grappling industries in Vancouver. I'm talking bumfuck nowhere SIO on Vancouver Island. I'm yeah, like stuff like that that just wasn't really happening before due to people straight up just sitting in a submission, not intelligently defending it in any way, just literally hoping that the other person either doesn't have the skill or the, you know, the stomach to break your shit. And I just want to talk to the community about that level of fucking idiocy. I don't think we're going to get to the bottom of it in terms of where this mentality has come from, although I'm certainly willing to speculate, but I would certainly just like to communicate to anybody who is at all inclined in this direction just to like pull your goddamn cranium out of your goddamn rectum. It's one thing for a high-level competitor who is in the middle of a hitchhiker escape to like in a calculated fashion eat a pop to their elbow to complete the escape. It's another thing for dumbfuck local blue belt to sit in an arm bar and basically just wait until their elbow gets severely hyperextended, three, four, five pops go, and then they tap anyway because they weren't going to get out to begin with. So yeah, there's just there's a level of recklessness with people's bodies that has kind of snuck up on me. I don't know if we're late to this and it's been happening for a couple of years. It certainly has never happened like this before in any of the tournaments that I've observed. So that's what we're going to talk about today. Speaker 2: I mean, of course, this is Jijitsu, so I doubt anyone is really studying this closely, but if anyone is collecting data on this, I would love to know if there has been a an uptick in this. Like you mentioned, just recently, we had Dr. Jen Case on, who came on here because she wanted to give a similar plea to help keep Jijitsu tournaments safe for a variety of reasons beyond just people being willing to eat unnecessary damage. The point that you're bringing up is something that I have always struggled to relate to. I don't compete. I've never had any interest in it. And I've always been fascinated by this culture of expectation in Jijitsu that not only must everyone compete, but everyone must take their competition as seriously as a world champion in a world championship match. Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm just going to push back on that. I don't think that expectation exists at all. Speaker 2: You don't think so? Because I hear it a lot. Now, maybe it doesn't everywhere, but I know a lot of people who they act like their tournaments that they're going into are these huge big deals and they take them way more seriously than they should. Speaker 1: I get for the people. I'm just saying that like in the community, the vast majority of clubs are hobbyist clubs and the vast majority of people don't compete. And the vast majority of people that do compete don't take it that seriously. I'm just saying like I don't think that in the community in in most clubs, there is this expectation that everyone compete. I just literally never seen it. I mean, if you're in a at a competition school, there's an expectation that if you're training seriously, you should probably compete. But like even the most hardcore, you know, competition places, they've got regular classes for hobbyists that are not competing. Speaker 2: Yeah, I just I think that that's a thing in a subset of the Jijitsu population. I don't think that's a thing in the vast majority of clubs. I've never seen anybody be like, hey, everyone should compete. I've literally never heard an instructor even say that. Speaker 2: Well, let me clarify my point here. I'm not saying that it happens at every single club, but I have definitely seen it firsthand and heard of it happening firsthand. My bigger concern though is not what the coach says necessarily, but what the community zeitgeist at large says. So, it may not be the coach who is putting this idea into people's heads, but I think participation in the broader community, especially on social, really encourages people into this particular mindset, and this can create a problem because if everyone thinks they're Gordon Ryan and they want to train accordingly, they might wind up taking dumb risks for a $5 plastic medal, right? And I think that's the point you're trying to make, correct? Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I like I just want to be really clear here is that I don't think this is a community problem. I don't think like one of my issues with the Jijitsu community is we are one of the only sports on the planet where the vast majority of the people playing the sport or participating in the sport don't ever actually play the games, right? Like we are a community of people who attend practice and never actually do the game. Like nobody who plays hockey goes to hockey practice and then doesn't do the games. If anything, it's the opposite. People will play beer league hockey, they'll do some games, but they'll never go to hockey practice. Jijitsu is the opposite of that. So I think that if we're talking about culture as dictated by what are the majority of people doing, we don't have that problem. I think the reason or at least part of the reason this problem exists is because so few people do compete, you get people rolling like idiots in the gym, and then if you've got these like lower level people who are competing locally and they're they don't compete all the time, they don't have an understanding of what competition means and doesn't mean, that's when they take it too seriously. I don't really know anybody that competes regularly that is like a serious hobbyist that is willing to like get injured because they just want to compete. They want to compete more often. I think this is a a subculture, not a general culture issue. Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And to be clear, I'm not implying that like the significant majority of people in Jijitsu would be willing to eat a stupid injury. What I'm saying is there are enough people who talk like that and who roll like that that it proves to become significant. Speaker 1: Oh, yes, yes, I agree. Yeah. Speaker 2: And that can happen beyond the culture that your coach sets for you, right? I mean, every coach that I know is going to give the speech about safety in the gym, but there is this cultural aspect of Jijitsu where people, and I think maybe hobbyists are more prone to this, they kind of like to cosplay as UFC fighters and act like these badasses, even though they're a white belt who train semi-recreationally. This comes up a lot in the kind of dialogue you have with people, especially if you're talking on social, right? People like to to talk big and act like because they train Jijitsu, they're these tough guys or tough girls. Speaker 1: Oh, dude, can I tell you a quick story? Speaker 2: Yes. Speaker 1: So I just taught a camp not too long ago. I won't specify which one, and there was a guy that came in and he was like, we were doing a training session for a ADCC open. And he was like, yeah, so I'd like to compete in uh, I'd like to I think I've I'm going to train for about six months or a year, and then I'm going to try to do ADCC. I'm like, you you mean uh, ADCC like open beginner division? He's like, no, I want to try to get into ADCC. I'm like, do you mean the world championship of ADCC? Like the one that's every two years? He's like, yeah. I'm like, so what you're saying is you're going to try to win ADCC trials? He's like, yeah, that's what I want to do. I'm like, after training for six months to a year, you think that's reasonable? So like when we're talking about cosplay and being deluded, yeah, there are some people out there. Holy shit. Speaker 2: Yeah. And I do think that this is where the culture maybe kind of caters to some of those people. I mean, goodness, if you try to participate in online discussion on Reddit or something, like there are some people out there who just live in a state of delusion. Um, it can be very difficult, I find, to engage with these people sometimes because you'll get like white and blue belts talking like they know everything and they're big tough guys, but I mean, I can see your your belt rank right next to your name, right? I know that you're not as good as you think you are or as experienced as you think you are. And I think there is something about Jijitsu, and maybe that is just the kind of misfit culture of of this sport, right? It attracts a certain type of people that are looking for something. I mean, I and I'm not judging here, I was the same, right? I got into Jijitsu many years ago because I thought it could fill a void. And I think that when you bring in people like that, it makes it easy for those people to kind of cosplay and act bigger than they are, right? It allows them to, it gives them some degree of social proof that they can talk like a tough guy. But ultimately, at the end of the day, again, like it it's all down to context. If you are in a world championship match, then whatever, but if you are a blue belt in a local town level Jijitsu tournament, and the prize is like a $5 plastic medal, what the hell are you doing collecting injuries at that rate? Speaker 1: Yeah, this is where I'm getting. And even if you are, so let's just take this into like, for those of you that haven't seen the match, I'm sure you can find it on YouTube. It's um, Mikey Musumeci in one against some Mongolian. I'm not even going to try to pronounce his name. And this guy basically sits in like fully applied heel hooks to the point where pretty much every ligament and tendon in his knee and ankle are shredded. Like I I I think I saw something somewhere about where like the surgeon, you know, half-jokingly, but was like, his legs were literally just attached by the skin. Like his bones were attached by the skin. There was nothing, like everything was fully ruptured in his knee, everything was fully ruptured in his ankle. There was no connective tissue attaching anything. That guy's done. Like he's never going to fight at any kind of level ever again. So like, what did you prove? What did you win? I think even at that level, like regardless of how high, if we could focus in on like a like a really specific kind of notion for this episode is, there's a difference between I'm defending because I know what I'm doing and I'm actively trying to escape, and maybe during the course of that, one of my joints may suffer a bit of damage, and I'm willing to deal with that as a consequence because I may still be able to win the match. And again, regardless of level, sitting in a submission, blankly staring with your yokel half-intellect at your opponent and just hoping that they don't know how to break your shit. And I think that part of where this comes from, honestly, certainly I I do believe it's part of it with the people that have done this against my students, is because most people training in most places have god-awful finishing mechanics. Most people have to go zero to 100 on a submission to get someone to kind of like panic tap in the gym. And because people tap fairly early under a lot of circumstances, because submissions are applied fairly sharply under a lot of circumstances, people have a bit of a like just a deluded idea of how much damage can be done because most people have, like I said, poor finishing mechanics. So you go into a tournament and someone puts you in something and you are caught, like you're you're not doing anything intelligent to actually extricate yourself. You're just fully caught and you are eating it. And because most people apply submissions so sharply, if someone doesn't do that and they're just gradually increasing the amount of force that's being applied, it's kind of like the boiling the frog thing, like people don't perceive it as being like, oh, this is going to catastrophically injure me. And I've just like I said, I've seen that a couple times now where, you know, I have a student who's like, okay, I'm going to go about 30, 40% on this. And because of that, that's all that it should take to get someone to tap. And that's what I teach people. I'm like, look, we this especially in local tournaments, we're not out here to injure anybody. We're not out here to like wreck a fucking accountant's elbow or shoulder or knee. So when you put someone in a joint lock, take it to full extension, make sure there's like a traction on the joint, make sure the breaking mechanics are on point, make sure there's a a sharp fulcrum, the PSI is everything's good. Like all the the conceptual stuff is good. And then start applying a little bit of force. And if they don't tap, start applying a little bit more force. So I think some people are doing is just because of this lack of, you know, again, experience with better breaking mechanics, they're just bluffing, or they think that you're bluffing. So they're like, man, I don't think you've got a lot left, and I'm still in a lot of pain and maybe my ankle has popped or maybe my elbow has popped. But I'm going to bet that you don't have enough left in the tank to catastrophically wreck my elbow. And I just think that's an incredibly stupid thing to gamble on. And that's more what I'm like I really want to focus in on. It's like, if you think you're going to hitchhiker out and you want to move, that's fine. The more you move, the more I'm going to move. So if you want to make like a quick play to try to get out of something, like if I was going at 30, 40% on something, I'm going to go to 80 real quick. And if that's what risk you're willing to take, that's fine. But if you're just literally sitting there, like I I competed in uh like the first ADCC open that I did. I hit a Kair Tera ankle lock in my first match in about 20 or 30 seconds. And the guy just fucking sat there. One pop, two pops. I'm like, hey, man, please tap. Three pops. Dude, please tap. Four pops. Five pops. And then his ankle made that tearing, ripping, card stock kind of sound, and everything just loosened right up and that's like that was like most of the ligaments in his ankle going. And then he finally tapped. So like, what was gained there? Like, yeah, I I like that is the mentality that I really want to try to caution people against. Particularly, you know, if you're going up against me or one of my students in competition, like we're being nice. We're not going to be nice for like ever. We're just being nice at the beginning to give you a chance to tap. So yeah, I think people really need to clue in to as you go up against like more properly trained people, people who have good finishing mechanics, you're taking an incredible risk by just sitting there and not doing anything and hoping that your limb doesn't break. Speaker 2: First of all, I want to thank you for using accountant as a parallel for hobbyist. That is my favorite thing to do is refer to hobbyists as accountants. So, I am glad that that is spreading and catching on. But especially if you are one of those accountants, that's where I especially don't understand what leads people to make this decision to try to play chicken when they're in the middle of a submission like that. I mean, what do you stand to gain out of this? Your best case scenario is maybe you survive that round and you go on to get a shitty medal at a tournament that no one cares about. Your worst case scenario is you're on the shelf for potentially years, maybe your career is over. You could wind up having to spend thousands of dollars on getting the injury treated. I mean, there's no upside, but in the moment, people make these incredibly dumb decisions. And I think that is that probably is on coaches for not properly explaining to people the consequences of injury. Many of the coaches that I hear talking about and chirping off, they are way too cavalier about the risk of injury to their students. I mean, they'll talk about it and they'll pay lip service, but they won't really deliberately try to shut that down and make it a cultural thing to to fix that. Speaker 1: Honestly, one of the guys that one of my students broke off earlier this year, dude just sat in an arm bar. And the coaches were making stupid jokes about like breaking mechanics and like, oh, he took that, he was he thought this tournament was really important. Or this tournament was really important to him. Well, like, bro, it's a local Vancouver Island tournament. It's your job as a coach to inform your student that that tournament shouldn't be that important to him. And also, punchline, it was a round robin and the dude had lost all his other matches. So like, this was the final match of the round robin, and even if he had gutted it out with a broken arm and found a way to win the match, he was still going to finish last. Like it was baffling to me, like to the point where I'm like, am I like, is this a Twilight Zone episode? Am I on Candid Camera? Like, the level of like one bad decision after another by everyone involved, yeah, it was just confounding to me. So like, I suspect this is a fairly recent thing because like I said, I've coached for a long time. I've coached against, you know, some of the people involved for a long time and this has never happened before. So yeah, I don't know if this is a recent change or like people are less involved or people are buying into too much alpha dog like bullshit propaganda or whatever. I really don't know what it is, but I just want to highly discourage people from falling into this like this mindset, this this pathway of thinking that a suitable thing to do is just gut out a submission. Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's especially different too if Jijitsu is just a hobby for you. I mean, if you if you have legitimate aspirations to make this your career, I can disagree with people being willing to eat stupid injuries at tiny tournaments, but, you know, that's a decision that people can make. However, if you just do this casually for fun, what are you thinking, right? I mean, if what if you have a job that requires you to use your hands or your legs? I have friends who were kind of goaded into competing despite not wanting to do that, and they had jobs that required a lot of dexterity because they needed to use their hands and they, you know, ate injuries and it impacted their ability to feed their family and take care of their employees. It is amazing to me how Jijitsu culture is able to blind people sometimes to what's really important in life, and people will sometimes take on these incredible risks for things that have very little value to them. And again, like you, I don't know where this started. It has always been there to some degree, at least since I started. I mean, the the history of Jijitsu, right? Right back to the beginning has always had some of that like want to be macho tough guy alpha stuff embedded. So it's always been there and I've always seen it, but it does feel like it has gotten more prevalent and maybe that is just the rise of social presences like all of these UFC fighters who now have platforms. I don't know, but it really does feel like people are much more willing to eat catastrophic injuries than is reasonable at all. Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, first of all, like, you know, not to beat this point to death, but there is absolutely zero reason for any hobbyist to be eating pops in a local tournament. You know, maybe, maybe if you're doing like Master Worlds and your whole year was leading up to that and you want to eat a pop to try to get out of an arm bar, sure. You know, injuries happen in combat sports. So like the odds that you can do something like this for any amount of time and like completely avoid being injured are basically zero. But at local tournaments, at fucking white belt, blue belt, and purple belt, man, I can't overstate how stupid it is. Like these the win has no value beyond the value that it has for you. So if you can't like I I just want to like kind of circle backwards to like really frame just how stupid this is. Because what is competition? It's a way to measure our skill, our proficiency at Jijitsu. Like we could hopefully agree on that. At least that's the primary reason, right? Like we play this sport so that we can determine given day, given time, under pressure with someone who's actually trying to beat you, are they better than you at Jijitsu? If they've already put you in a submission, that point has kind of been proven. Like if somebody puts you in a submission that's strong enough that damage may occur. Like I don't know those of you that are like familiar with the the match between Roger Gracie and and Jacare. This was like a couple decades ago at the Worlds where Roger Gracie just breaks Jacare's arm with an arm bar and Jacare manages to like run around for another minute or two because he's up on points and and he wins. For those of you that are familiar with the match, is your perception of that match that Jacare is better at Jijitsu than Roger Gracie? I know it's not for me and no one I've ever had the conversation with has been like, yeah, man, and fuck Jacare sure proved that he was better at Jijitsu than Roger in that match. Literally no one thinks that. Everyone's like, like some people, who I think are idiots, are like, oh, yeah, he's he's brave, he gutted it out, you know, that's an incredible display of mental fortitude. Because really like I I watched that match and I think that Roger's better at Jijitsu than Jacare is. So ultimately, if the reason you're competing is the the major reason to compete, which is to test your Jijitsu, to see if you can solve the puzzle in real time against a trained opponent. The fact that they've already put you in a submission just means that that point has been proven. So you like taking an injury to maybe get out and getting some kind of like Hail Mary win. Again, what are you actually proving? If the point of competing is to get better at Jijitsu or prove how good your Jijitsu is, part of what you want to do is compete a lot. So again, if you get injured, what are you doing? You're reducing your training time after the tournament and you're potentially reducing the amount of tournaments that you can do in a given year. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. Speaker 1: How fucking stupid are you if you take none of that into account and just eat a pop or a break at a local tournament. Local tournaments are basically still practice. If they're your Super Bowl, re-evaluate your life, dude. Like nobody makes a big deal out of winning a beer league hockey game. Nobody makes a big deal out of winning a like, you know, basketball game at the YMCA. That's the equivalent of what you're doing. If you're building that shit way up in your head, you're a goddamn Nimrod. Like again, please like I I want to be as blunt about this as I can because I want to put a fucking stop to this to anyone who listens to it. You are not a wolf, you're not a fucking gladiator, you are not a warrior, you are not like you're none of those things. You are an idiot. You are an unintelligent human being that is dragging down the fucking gene pool. Please do not breed. Speaker 2: Wasn't there a footage of you at some point having to berate a guy while you had him in a fully locked in leg lock because he wouldn't tap and you were trying to negotiate with him until he finally gave up because he wasn't going to do it? Speaker 1: No, I mean, it wasn't so much that. So this is where again, like the you're not that far off. It was more just that like I knew I had him. He thought he had a chance to slip his knee. So like I had heel exposure and I basically said, and you can yeah, the clip that kind of went around was me saying, don't make me do this. He was like, I think my knee is clear. I'm like, I don't think it is. But if you want to take the chance, cool. Don't make me do this. And as soon as we moved a little bit, he realized his knee was caught and he tapped right away. So he was this isn't a case of someone being stupid. This is a case of like when you get to a fairly high level, obviously people are pretty confident in some of their defense and this particular guy had spent two or three minutes doing a really good job at avoiding or extracting from my leg entanglement attempts. So like I understood at that point that I had him pretty dead to rights. But he felt otherwise. So he was not trying to eat it. A similar thing happened for me when I won Nogi Worlds at my opponent in a knee bar and he had just been in that situation before with other people and was able to clear his knee and he just thought he was going to be able to do the same thing with me. And I was asking him to tap. I was I'd asked him two or three times to tap because I knew I had it and I knew that I could apply a significant amount more force than I was applying and he chose to try to get his knee clear and that it had like pretty catastrophic consequences for him, like a pretty severely damaged MCL. But again, that's black belt, that's Nogi Worlds, that's somebody with a lot of experience. You know, unfortunately, and this is not me trying to like spray my shoulder patting myself on the back, but like I'm pretty good at this stuff and a lot of people who have not competed against or rolled with somebody with like really good wedges and really good like finishing mechanics, they may be feel like they're safe when they're not. They may be feel like they can get out, especially if that person isn't applying a ton of force right away, which I never do because I want my opponents to like have a lot of chance to tap. I don't want to go zero to 100 on a submission even in a high-level tournament. It's always gradual. And so I really encourage, you know, any of my opponents that are like looking me up to like, you know, do your research as they say, which is just a way of getting stupid people to believe more stupid things nowadays, so maybe that's not the way to the phrase to use. But anyway, like, please know that if I put you in a leg lock and I'm asking you to tap, it's because I'm trying to be nice. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: But like I have not really had too many of these instances. It was really just the one at that ADCC in California where the guy just literally sat there and tried to bluff it. The other situations where I've injured people, it's been more they thought they could get out. They were actively trying to like slip their knee. The injuries that I've witnessed this year have just been people sitting there while my students slowly increase their the amount of force they're applying to the joint and then people just sitting there and then all of a sudden you hear a and, you know, a foot has detonated or someone's elbow has gone, you know, several degrees the wrong way. Yeah, it's that kind of stuff that I'm just really concerned with. Speaker 2: Do you think the problem is simply that a lot of people don't understand how devastating injuries can be? Because I kind of wonder if for a lot of these people, especially those who are either really young or have limited athletic experience, they just don't understand how bad it can get if your knee gets shredded or your shoulder gets ripped out. I'm or or their their neck gets damaged. Could it just be ignorance that is leading people to take these risks or do you think it's something more? Speaker 1: I mean, possibly, yes. So like one thing I like I can never speak for other coaches, right? Some of the experiences I've had so far this year lead me to believe that perhaps some of the coaches I know are not as um emphatic in their training room as I am on getting people to understand how injuries work, where injuries are possible, how to avoid them, both in training and in competition. You know, like I've had the grappling industries where one of my guys wrecked someone's foot pretty bad. Another one of my guys was put in an arm bar and I straight up just told him to tap. Like I I knew his opponent. I knew that he was not going to get out of that arm bar and I was just like, dude, please tap, just tap. And that's me telling my student to tap, right? So I definitely I make a really concerted, significant effort to get people to understand what the risks of injuries are and what the injury mechanisms are. And also not just mechanisms in terms of like, this is what's going to happen to you. I want people to understand, and this is maybe we should have touched on this earlier. There is a a term called time under tension. So people tend to think that things break just because there's like an overwhelming amount of force being applied to a single point, right? So like if I just have a certain amount of PSI, uh for anybody who doesn't know what that means, it means it's pounds per square inch. It's a way of measuring pressure. So there's a certain amount of PSI that's focused on a a point and then when you get to enough PSI, you break something, which is true. Like obviously, if you were to take the example of like say if you want to like um snap a twig, right? Like you can grab it on both ends and just start to bend it, or you can just like snap it over your knee. So if you grab it on both ends and you snap it over your knee, you're applying a tremendous amount of like sudden force at the midpoint when it's being gripped on both ends, like you're going to overwhelm the tensile strength. But with time under tension, you get like if you were to a good analogy would be like if you hold a rubber band like fully taught for a while. After a given amount of time, that rubber band is going to snap because like it's it's slowly basically degrading its ability to withstand force, right? So if you were to grab a twig, for example, and rather than snapping it over your knee, you just start bending it. And you know, maybe you're not like the strongest person ever, but you're just steadily applying the same force to it over the course of 10 seconds, 20 seconds, 30 seconds, and then it goes. So the feeling the twig would have, if I can if you can put yourself into the brain of a twig. Speaker 2: I think a lot of people in Jijitsu probably can do that really easily. Speaker 1: That's what I'm saying. I think a decent number of people can probably actually do that. You would not feel a dramatic increase in the felt amount of tension. It's just over time, all of a sudden, it goes. So understand that when you're trying to like eat a joint lock, if you're feeling a certain amount of pressure and the amount of pressure is not increasing enough to where you feel like, ooh, that is a dramatic increase and I can feel that something's about to go. Just somebody holding a steady amount of pressure over a given period of time, if it's five or it's 10 or it's 15 seconds, is going to lead to damage. So if yeah, if you're not aware of that mechanism, if you're not aware of the idea of time under tension and how that can can work, become aware of it and don't sit there and just hope that things will work out. That's just not how your body works. Speaker 2: And to expand on that, because injuries don't always happen all at once, sometimes you can be doing damage to yourself without feeling it because something hasn't completely snapped yet. So to give an example, listeners to this podcast probably know I've been dealing with a shoulder injury. Earlier this year, I had to have reconstructive surgery. I just got cleared to return back to rolling. So this has been a it's taken me a long time to recover. And there wasn't really one definitive thing that did it. I mean, when I first noticed it was I was rolling at the gym with a blue belt who honestly was going too hard, but, you know, at the time, I didn't feel anything wrong. My shoulder felt a bit weird after class, but like it didn't feel like it had been ripped out of socket. And the next day, I just did very light positional stuff and it still felt weird. And the moment when I really noticed there was a problem was after three days. I was in bed doing light stretching and I stretched my shoulder and I could feel it go and I was like, okay, something is seriously wrong here. It wasn't at Jijitsu, it was days later. And so when I went in to see my physio to figure out what happened, his take was that, look, probably honestly, this wasn't a single traumatic event. Probably this was just years of wear and tear of me doing shit to my shoulder and getting away with it because I didn't notice it at the time, but then finally when I'm sitting in bed, that's when it went, right? So sometimes just because in the moment you don't feel something pop or snap or go sideways, that doesn't mean that you're safe. You could still be collecting stupid injuries that you might wind up paying for and maybe it's not today, maybe it's tomorrow, maybe it's next week, maybe it's years from now. But all I can say is, man, as someone who just went through that, you do not want the the hit to your time and to your budget to have to deal with that kind of injury. It is much better to avoid that if you can, especially in situations where you have nothing on the line. There's no stakes on the line. Speaker 1: So just to touch on that, because even further than like just competition scenarios, there are people who in training will just eat a cross face, like just let you absolutely wrench their neck sideways and not do anything to like move their body to alleviate the pressure. And I have seen that happen like over time where somebody's been training for a while and their neck is just fucked. And they're never like they don't put two and two together. Like I didn't get neck cranked, I didn't get this, I didn't get that. I'm like, man, I've seen you sit in a full cross face for five minutes. Over the course of years, the amount of damage that adds up because of that, yeah, this is not just a competition thing. It's definitely a a mindset thing. Speaker 2: And I want to expand on that too. For those who don't know, you and I are publishing a mindset for betas course right now, which is on BJJ Mental Models Premium and we're probably going to throw it on BJJ Concepts as well. Um and basically that's just you expanding on your particular method, which I I guess if we were to explain it, it's really a rejection of the alpha bro ethos, which is so common in the martial arts. I think a lot of what we're talking about here stems from that that alpha bro mindset, right? You mentioned that the point of competition in a perfect world, like it is to test your skill and ideally to test your skill so that you can improve your skill. But I think there's a lot of people who compete for more results-oriented or external reasons. They want to either look like a tough guy or they want to be a champion. And that's a very different thing from looking at competition to test your skill, right? It raises the stakes mentally for you and it can make that tiny, unimportant regional tournament feel a lot more important than it is. And I agree with you. I think this is a huge problem in our sport, and we can explain why, but the number of injuries getting racked up at those local levels where the stakes don't matter, I think to some extent it amounts to a degree of commercial malpractice from the people coaching these students, right? I mean, in Jijitsu, one of the smartest things a coach ever said to me was that his goal was to get us deep into this sport without any serious risk of injury. It wasn't that he wanted us to all be world champions. It was that he wanted us to be able to experience the benefits of Jijitsu without getting derailed by all of the the problems that can happen, especially if you get injured. And if at your gym, your culture is permitting people to get serious, like devastating injuries before they even get to blue or purple belt, that's really bad. You're not, you know, in a martial art where we preach that this is all about improving quality of life. If someone comes into your gym and in the first six months they need reconstructive surgery, you failed miserably as a coach in my opinion. Speaker 1: While I do agree, like there are some hilariously stupid people out there. And somebody can come into your gym and do the most idiotic thing despite your, you know, like instruction to the contrary and injure someone. Speaker 2: Oh, yeah. Speaker 1: So I don't want to go so far as to agree that it's that you as a coach fucked up because some half-wit came in and dropped someone on their head and dislocated their shoulder or like damaged their vertebrae while disobeying a safety regulation at your club. So, just to kind of like, yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah, there will always be outliers, right? Speaker 1: But what I'm saying is I don't think those are outliers. Like when I have seen injuries at a lot of gyms, it has often been somebody doing something really stupid of their own volition. Often in like like direct contravention to safety rules. Speaker 2: But you also did bring up that you've seen coaches who kind of make light of this too, right? So I think there's two parts of it. Speaker 1: Oh, 100%. I'm just saying that like the fact that someone gets injured in and of itself is not a guarantee that the coach. Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely. Speaker 1: That's all I'm saying. Like I I think a lot of injuries that happen in gyms are because individuals do really stupid things. Speaker 2: Yeah. And also shit happens, right? Sometimes despite everyone's best intent, shit happens. Speaker 1: Yes, and exactly. But yes, there are coaches who are not really doing a good job about that. Yeah, like there are I try to stay in my own lane, but there are definitely coaches that I, you know, will have conversations with where I'm like, hey, dude, this is not cool, right? Like the way that I don't ever try to tell anybody not to cross train, right? In fact, if anything, I encourage people to cross train. I tell people I will pay your drop-in fee to go cross train at another club because I want you to see what it's like. But there are clubs where I'm like, something happens and I'm like, ah, fuck. Okay, now I got to tell people like, hey, I'm not telling you not to train there, but just be aware that, you know, like there are people that have been kicked out of my gym that are training at somebody else's gym and the other person running that gym seems to have no problem with having someone who I believe is genuinely a psychopath, you know, at their gym and behaving in a way that's reckless enough that it might get people injured. So like that kind of shit, yes, I think there is absolutely cause for laying responsibility at the coach's hands. Uh feet, hands and feet. Speaker 2: And to clarify, like you said, when we're talking about the coach's responsibility, if a single person gets injured in the room or at a competition, I mean, look, that happens, right? Even if everyone is doing the best they possibly can, this is a combat sport and injuries will happen. And in addition, like you said, some people, they're just they have a kind of a flawed mindset when it comes to how they compete. They're willing to take on more damage than they should. And a coach can try to train that out of people, but at the end of the day, you as the coach can't completely control every variable in your room, right? At some point, someone's going to get injured. So I'm not saying that a single incident is a reason to condemn the coach. But look at it like something like staff or ringworm. If one person in the room is getting staff or ringworm, hey, that happens. Bacteria exists. But if everyone is constantly getting infected, at some point you have to look at the culture of the gyms where this is happening. Are they taking cleanliness seriously? And I think with injury, it's the same thing. I mean, if you've got a gym where your people are constantly being shelved due to injury, at some point, I think people have to start pointing fingers at the coach. Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that part of the problem in our community is that we have a decent amount of coaches out there who are like you mentioned about bacteria exists, you know, germs exist. Speaker 2: That's controversial now, apparently. Speaker 1: I know, there are people who don't believe that simple medical fact, right? So if you've got people that stupid that are running a gym, yeah, good luck to you. Speaker 2: And I wonder sometimes if that kind of level of detachment from reality leads to these sort of problems. Speaker 1: I think it is. I I you know, again, I I don't want to turn this into a polemic, but yeah, I mean, there's definitely a cohort of people who are just they're not engaging with reality. Yeah, yeah. I mean, if you got somebody who like actually believes the like, you know, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times. Like if somebody genuinely believes that, like they're a few quarts short of a fucking load, right? Like just, you know, maybe don't trust what they think about anything else. Speaker 2: Did you just say there are a few quarts short of a load? Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: What does that mean? Speaker 1: A few uh. Speaker 2: I've never heard that. Is that a real thing? Speaker 1: It's a few bricks short of a load. I know it's I I like to mix these things sometimes for comedic effect. Speaker 2: Well, Rob, let me ask then, what can we do about this? Because I would hope, I would really hope that most people regardless of how serious they are about Jijitsu could agree that we should try to avoid injuries in general. With that in mind, if you had your magic Rob Bernaki wand and you could change the world, what would you suggest we do to make Jijitsu safer and reduce these dumb injury risks? Speaker 1: Man, if only my magic Rob Bernaki wand did that instead of just giving me an infinite pleasure. Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess we should clarify. It's a Hitachi we're talking about. Speaker 1: Yeah. It's uh, man, this is such a difficult question to answer because it's like, you know, how do you change people's minds? How do you get somebody to just realize that, hey, I've decided to not participate in reality because of like stupid bullshit that I built my identity around that puts me on a team that doesn't allow me to believe certain things. Like, how do you get somebody out of that? I I don't know. I don't know. I I would I guess if we could get to the point where enough people understand this to the point where there is actually like a commercial like lack of viability for your gym if you are the kind of coach that that has this sort of atmosphere that that creates this sort of circumstance. But man, I just like I don't see that. The same way that I've never really believed that at least for the foreseeable future that there will be enough pressure commercially from an educated consumer base about quality instruction in Jijitsu, right? Like so many Jijitsu gyms thrive despite having absolutely dog shit quality. I don't think that there will be enough pressure on gyms to like offer a a suitable approach towards safety in training and competition as an absolute prerequisite for, you know, a bunch of people to sign up there. I think you're certainly always going to have a bunch of meatheads that don't have a problem with just going to war in the gym all the time. I mean, I think the culture will change, but because like, you know, the culture certainly changed in MMA. Like back in the day, everybody left their chin in the gym, right? Like people were sparring absolutely full out in, you know, in most MMA camps most of the time. And that did change because at a certain point, people whose job it was to like, you know, make money competing in MMA, they did have a strong enough pressure like to realize that, man, if I'm getting knocked out in training, it's going to shorten the quality of my career. You know, maybe they were around enough people that have uh CTE or what used to be called pugilistic dementia that that did change, but that's a different pressure. That's a you're talking about professional athletes where their financial incentive to have more effective training is high. We're talking about hobbyists here. There is no financial incentive. So like unless people really start losing business over that kind of stuff, unless gyms start to get reputations over that kind of stuff. I mean, Christ, like we can't even shut gyms down when their like head instructors are like are rapists or are like hiding pedophiles by sending them to Brazil, right? Like if we can't even get that to go, you know, how are we going to get this to go? I really don't know. I struggle. I just want to be on the side of letting people know that you don't have to do this, that doing it is stupid and if you're at a gym where this is encouraged, you're just at a shitty gym. Like I guess that's all I can do is just try to get more people to like hear this hear this side of the argument. Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's well said. And I think people like us who live in this sport very quickly lose perspective about how tiny and insignificant the sport is. You brought up MMA and especially the UFC, and that is a great example because the UFC has grown tremendously in the last three decades. And at some point, when a sport becomes mainstream enough and there's enough money in it and people are incentivized to actually chase that money, they've got to make the right decision. And that means you've got to start training more scientifically. I mean, kind of where the tipping point was, I think was around the GSP era. The big thing that stood out about him was he was the first person who was really training like at a high level, at the top of the sport, like an athlete, rather than just locking himself in a room and beating the shit out of his training partners. Jijitsu is nowhere near that size. I mean, as an example, I just checked as we're recording here, Gordon Ryan, you know, maybe the most famous grappler in the sport, at least the best, still as of this writing, and it looks like he's about to pass it, but he's still got under a million followers on Instagram. That is tiny. There are other sports where even like a C-list athlete is going to have way more than that. This is still a tiny sport. And that allows a lot of things to go unscrutinized. I mean, I can give you a a relevant example, WWE for a long time got away with some really heinous stuff behind the scenes. Like I mean, God, if you studied the history of that company, they've done some dark shit back in the 80s and the 90s. And part of the reason why they got away with it was probably just because everyone thought it was this like joke carny sport, so no one really paid attention to it. Speaker 1: Well, you say everyone thought that. I mean, it's because it it's a joke carny sport. Speaker 2: It is a joke carny sport. But, you know, it it was this tiny thing and it, you know, if it if it made it into the zeitgeist, it was mostly ironic. And I mean, it has grown and changed a lot since then. But when something is small, it's easy for it to escape scrutiny. And I think in Jijitsu, we get away with that. Speaker 1: Oh, I I fully agree. I mean, we get away with abominable practices, whether it's the, you know, the overall ethics of the people. Like one thing that is really good about the whole Dale Buchkowski situation is that he has revealed how like stupendously lacking in ethics some of the people at the top of our sport are. Because I guess it it wasn't enough again to have like multiple rape and sexual abuse scandals to show how lacking in ethics our sport is, but the fact that people will just like sell black belts to folks and just glaze, you know, fucking dipshit financial scammers for, you know, a few bucks and a podcast appearance. I guess that has finally gotten more people to realize just how utterly morally bankrupt some of the people at the top of our sport are. But yeah, like the sooner we realize this shit and the sooner we start to get like some attention on these problems, the better. Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, I think what you're doing here where you're actually opening your mouth and vocalizing this is probably part of the solution because if enough people do that, maybe that's how we normalize making better decisions regarding injury, right? I mean, if you really want to produce the best athletes possible in the world, the most important thing is to prevent stupid injuries, especially at white and blue belt. Because if your people are getting taken out before they ever get good at Jijitsu, then you're not going to see them make it up to those elite levels. If you care about building a successful business, your ability to retain customers is going to be greatly reduced if they're getting devastating injuries and they have to stop training for years, maybe for life, right? If you believe in the in the sanctity of Jijitsu as a martial art, it's in your best interests to prevent injury because at the end of the day, this is supposed to make people better. It's supposed to be elevate people. That's the purpose of martial arts. And if people are coming into your gym looking to be elevated and they're suffering catastrophic injuries within a few months, you're really not doing your job, I think. So, regardless of why you train Jijitsu, there is a strong argument to be made that injury should be taken more seriously. And I think coaches like you vocalizing this is part of how we start pushing that tide back. So, again, I've noticed there have been a few people recently who have been willing to to cover this topic directly. I appreciate you doing it as always, Rob. Speaker 1: Yeah, no problem. Anytime I can call idiots fucking idiots, I'm available. Speaker 2: Amazing, sir. Well, let's plug your stuff. If people enjoy your brand of sarcastic at Jijitsu education, taint humor, where can they find you and where can they learn more about your material? Speaker 1: Well, if you just want to skip the foreplay and get right to the fucking, you can just sign up at BJJconcepts.net or .com, either address will take you to my website, which has something like 3,000 videos right now. We're still, I think, the only resource for learning how to teach or coach. We just recently updated our pedagogy section with a lot of stuff about different uh training methods, Eco, IP, what have you. So we've got that. If you are in Nanaimo, I mean, you probably already train with me, but if you don't, you should come train with me. If you want to visit Nanaimo and train with me, we might have, I don't even know if I want to plug the visiting student program because we're literally at the point where like the slots, the time slots are pretty much all full. We just might have like an extra spot during a week where there's already a visitor where we can squeeze you in, but I do have a visiting student program where anyone from anywhere in the world can visit for free for one week. You can stay at my place, you can train at my club. We host anywhere from 50 to 100 people every year from all around the world. That's coming to an end in May of 2026. So there's that. Islandtopteam.com is my school's website. I'm on Instagram at Islandtopteam. If you want to reach out to me there. And yeah, if you're competing against one of my students, fucking tap, dude. We're being nice. Speaker 2: Fucking tap. Yeah. I will put links to all of that in the show notes and people know that my first recommendation for anyone who's looking for online conceptual video instruction is BJJ Concepts. It's the first place I refer people to. So, definitely recommend checking that out if you haven't already. I'll put links in the show notes. Our stuff's easy to find. It all lives at BJJmentalmodels.com. That's where we've got the world's largest library of Jijitsu audio classes and increasingly expanding into premium podcasts as well. If you love Rob and you want to hear him yell into a microphone even more than you got today, then good news, that's what BJJ Mental Models Premium is for. We're actually just launching a mindset course with Rob, as I mentioned now. It's included in a premium membership. Plus Rob's awesome coaching podcast, the coaching coach. Rob, I just blasted out your Eco episode the other day. I quite enjoyed it. So, thank you for all of that. Also, great opportunity to hear from your co-coaches, Corey and Gary as well. All of that stuff's bundled in premium. So, all of that lives at BJJmentalmodels.com. I'll put links to that in the show notes as well. But as always, Rob, thank you, man. I really appreciate it. Speaker 1: My pleasure. Speaker 2: It sure is. Awesome. Well, I'll talk to you later, buddy. And thanks to the listeners too. Truly appreciate you as well. We'll see you soon.