Ep. 351: Injury Prehab, feat. Dr. Mike Piekarski

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 351. I'm Steve Kwan. BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent jiu-jitsu approach. And back today with long-time friend of the show, frequently appearing guest and community member, I've got Dr. Kickass, Mike Pasky on the line. Mike, how's it going, my friend? Speaker 2: How's it going, Steve? Things are good on my end. Speaker 1: I am happy to hear that. I can't complain either. And this is a topic here that we're talking about today, which I think is going to resonate with a lot of people. Usually, when you come on the podcast, we're talking about things that have gone wrong and people want you to work your magic to get them back onto the mats. But some folks suggested that maybe we should talk about prehab, the things that can be done in advance to reduce the risk of injury, to prevent injuries from happening in the first place. I think that's going to make for a very relevant conversation. But just in case people haven't heard your prior appearances here or haven't listened to the course that you did with us, maybe give yourself a quick intro so people know who you are. Speaker 2: Sure. I'm a doctor of physical therapy, so for you Canadians out of the US, I'm a physio. I'm also a black belt in jiu-jitsu. I used to fight MMA, I still compete in jiu-jitsu. I think probably the big difference between our last visit is now I'm also the head instructor of the gym I train at. So, I understand jiu-jitsu very well, both from a technical standpoint, but then also from the demands of what's required of the body, so that we can keep it as healthy as we can for a sport that's designed about breaking limbs. Speaker 1: That's fantastic. And for anyone who's ever had to rehab an injury, you probably appreciate the idea of a physio that's familiar with the sport, because as you know, Mike, with many physios who aren't acquainted with jiu-jitsu, when you go to them with a jiu-jitsu related problem, their answer will often be, well, just don't do that sport anymore and it'll take care of itself. Speaker 2: Yeah. That's it's so frustrating when people talk about some of their experiences with medical professionals where it's like, you know, I was talking to this this woman, she was in her 30s and the the physician, and she doesn't even do jiu-jitsu, but she was like, they're like, yeah, you should stop your you should quit your job, which is not like a physical job. It was baffling that that was the first thing they said is just quit your job. I'm like, what? So, yes, it's very frustrating for sure. Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, for those who are either looking to rehab an injury, I know one of the things Mike that you specialize in is providing physiotherapy services that you can actually do remotely in many cases. There are a lot of people in the BJJ Mental Models community that I know work with you, including friend of the show Rob Bernaki. So, I definitely recommend people give you a shout if they're in that boat and they want to talk to someone who is both acquainted with physiotherapy, but also an expert in Brazilian jiu-jitsu itself. Like you mentioned, it can be a much better experience for many people if they go to a physio that understands the sport just as well as the science behind recovery. And of course, we've had many talks about this in the past, but today, I wanted to talk about prehab, how to prevent the injuries from occurring in the first place. Now, this can come down to a variety of different things. We can talk about concepts for how to keep your body safe. We can talk about physical activities that could reduce the risk of injury happening in the first place. But you're the specialist, buddy, so I'm going to turn it over to you. Why don't you maybe kick this off and talk about as a physio, if you were to work with someone and to help them build a preventative routine, what would that look like? Speaker 2: Sure. So, we'll start with injury prevention. Injury prevention as a term doesn't really exist, so I really try to focus on injury mitigation. We can't prevent injury. The best we can, we can hope to minimize the injury. Clinically, what I find is when it comes to injury mitigation, the first category that's critical is understanding where injuries are going to occur. It's like if you're going with someone who, you know, has a neck injury and they continually getting stacked, I mean, that's a kind of like a easy thing, like understand where these neck injuries are going to happen in your sport, right? If you have good understanding of where these risky positions or techniques occur, you can try to minimize them relative to you. So, number one, situational and positional awareness is critical. Next, what we can look at is physical capacity training. So, when I say physical capacity, what does that mean? I'm talking about strength, conditioning, mobility, joint training, that sort of thing, because ultimately, we want to use how can we prepare our body so that we can essentially build tissue resilience, because we know that we're going to get exposed to injury. And then finally, when an injury does happen, we want to make sure that we manage it properly, because a lot of jiu-jitsu people are very prone to, well, we'll just wait and hope it heals, but the problem is is as people age, they essentially not quite going back. I think even you said it, at a certain point, it's not that you're recovering from an injury, it's like you're going to develop these chronic disabilities, they're just going to get worse and worse. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's the uh saying that goes something along the lines of once you get past 30 or 40, you know, you don't just have injuries that are temporary, but you basically have little permanent disabilities. And you hear this a lot from older grapplers, as you get older, the recovery process gets more and more difficult. And that's I at least I would assume why you see so many grapplers who start to take a much more conservative jiu-jitsu game as they get older. They maybe dial back on some of the super intense, more risky techniques that they could be doing, which lead to injury, and they kind of gravitate towards that slow controlling pressure game. It's just a lot more reliable and a lot easier to prevent weird unexpected things from happening. Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, and on top of that, like I'm I have nothing against a movement-based jiu-jitsu style, but the movement-based jiu-jitsu style inherently requires more physical attributes. You need to be faster, you need good cardio, versus a control way. And again, you know, I'm masters two, three athlete, so it's not like I'm young. I can still play a movement game. I just prefer a control-based game just because I feel it like the point of jiu-jitsu is how can we dominate our opponent using as little attributes as possible. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, well said. And of course, I mean, we've talked about this on the podcast before. Like you said, there's nothing inherently wrong about having an attribute-based game, especially if you're a competitor, you want to use the tools at your disposal, which are best equipped to help you win. But many of those attributes fade over time, and often what's left is people gravitate towards this more controlled, safer, pressure-based game that takes a lot of the variability out of their roll. I would say that's one of the most defining characteristics that I notice when I roll with older people is they slow things down a lot and they're trying to make the fight controlled, something where they know what's going to happen and there's less likelihood of something crazy going on. I started on this journey pretty young, because I've always been pretty injury averse. I've never liked the idea of accumulating a bunch of damage that could be easily avoided. And I realized pretty early on in my journey that there were just certain things that if I did, it usually resulted in a bad physical outcome, and so I started kind of pruning and adjusting my game. And I mean, from a performance standpoint, that's not always the best approach. If I were looking to be an ace competitor, I would probably be more interested in accumulating techniques that get high-level results. But at a certain point, you prioritize your own health over that, and that's kind of a decision that I made earlier on. Maybe some of the concepts here that we could talk about, you know, you talked about especially some things that we've discussed in the past before, the importance of if you're going to either stack someone or get stacked, how to do that safely. I mean, of course, if you have neck injuries, or if you want to avoid neck injuries, understandably, stacking is a big cause of that. But what are some of the kind of conceptual ideas in jiu-jitsu where you think injuries are likely to occur that maybe we should avoid? Speaker 2: So, from, you know, when it comes to injuries, where are they going to occur? They're going to be joint lock injuries, positional scrambles, or takedowns. So, we'll start with joint locks. There's a few categories or a few situations why people get injured from a joint lock. So, one, it comes from ignorance, either the defender is unaware of the submission, so they don't have a good defensive response, or they don't realize what the repercussion is to a late tap. So, maybe that they don't tap quick enough. It could be that the attacker doesn't have good understanding of the position, and if they apply it too aggressively, what can happen to their training partner. We can then move down to ego. So, a lot of times, a, you know, a higher rank is rolling with a lower rank, and maybe they don't want to tap, so they try to push the boundaries a little bit. This is fundamentally why I disagree with leg locks being taught only in the advanced ranks, because people are going to, you know, you might go train at a gym that has different rules. So, you could be a brown belt and you're rolling with someone who's a blue belt, but you are still a very novice when it comes to foot locks. And then you could be at a gym, you know, that that blue belt, that's all they do, so they're essentially better at that position. I mean, Ryan Hall has gone on the record to say like even when he was, you know, beating world-class black belts at purple belt, he was better solely in that position, even if his opponent had better overall jiu-jitsu, but he had that advantage, right? So, what happens from an ego perspective, that higher rank doesn't want to tap to the lower rank, injury happens. You know, and I've gone, I've worked with training partners that they would go to like an open mat, they train, and someone comes in and and, you know, they're getting heel hooked in the gi, even though that's a move that's like universally illegal in like 99.99% of every training I've ever been in. So, you know, but just because they they shouldn't be doing it, doesn't mean someone's not going to do it to you. So, you still need to be prepared, right? And then we could talk about the speed of application, right? So, you know, back in the day with heel hooks, you know, they they'd pour leg control. So, they're like, well, I need to break your leg before you can escape. Well, now with these intricate leg entanglements, you know, if you have good control, you don't need to apply it fast. So, a perfect example of that was Rob Bernaki's famous situation at ADCC Portland, where he gets the guy in a foot lock, and he's like, he gets him, I think he has saddle inside heel hook, and he goes to the guy and says, don't make me break it. Because he's just holding him, the guy didn't want to tap, and then I think he like slowly applied it and the guy's, okay, fine, he tapped. But that's that I mean, that's a perfect example where one, Rob doesn't have the ego, he doesn't need to be like breaking people's legs. He had good control, so because he had control, he didn't have to apply it fast. And even if the other guy didn't quite understand the position or he had an ego, he had enough time where he didn't have enough time to process like, yeah, you're right, I should probably tap. Speaker 1: Extremely well said, Mike. There's a bit to unpack there. First, something that I always encourage people to do is get on the same page about the objectives of a roll and what's permitted. You mentioned heel hooks in the gi, which is a great example. From what I've seen, often when injuries happen, there's a few reasons why they could have happened. One of them, as you mentioned, is because people don't know the proper defensive response to a technique, but often the other reason is just surprise. And if someone does something that is outside of the rules and outside of what you expected them to do, then it makes it less likely that you're going to defend properly, even if you technically know the defense. So, this is why I always encourage people to make sure they get on the same page about what the objective of the roll is, what the goals are, and what's permitted and what's not. And if you're ever going to do something that is in violation of well-accepted rules, in my opinion, that's a dick move unless you clear it with the person first. And I mean, you can talk about how well a black belt should be able to know how to defend leg locks. All of this is completely true. But a black belt should also be able to defend strikes to the face. You wouldn't strike them to the face in a jiu-jitsu match without at least first clearing that we're doing, you know, combat jiu-jitsu or hits and jits first. So, I think that whenever you're going to do something that is in violation or contravention of a standard norm, you want to talk about that first and foremost. Ego is another great example too, and this is where I think, I mean, you know how I feel about the belt system. This is where having a a high rank in jiu-jitsu can work against you, because if you're afraid to tap to a lower belt, then you're really just hurting yourself, unfortunately. And ultimately, you're putting that drama on the lower belt, because now if they injure you, they're going to feel terrible about it. Yeah, every time that I've been tapped by a lower belt that I can think of, it's because they did something that I never would have expected them to do. It's usually not with, you know, an arm bar or a rear naked choke. It's something totally insane. And so, you really need to be willing to just tap whenever you feel it's appropriate or you're in danger, or even if you don't feel that the roll is safe. I mean, we recently had Lorene Zarky from Off the Zone on the podcast, and she spoke very eloquently about the importance of normalizing the tap for any reason. Rob Bernaki again has talked about this too, how the tap doesn't necessarily mean I surrender. It can in the training room just mean, I don't know what's going on here, and or I don't feel comfortable with the direction that this is going. And so, I think having a culture where everyone is willing to tap to everyone else is extremely important for a good training room. Whenever I see a higher belt who is afraid or hesitant to tap to a lower belt or they're just stubborn, it never ends well. Speaker 2: Absolutely, for sure. Speaker 1: Yeah. So, here's something that I would ask you then from a coaching perspective, because you have this really unique background of being a physiotherapist, and also a coach as well as a jiu-jitsu black belt. How do you find you instill these concepts in the coaching room? Because it's easier said than done. We can talk about how, hey, you should put your ego aside and be willing to tap regardless of who's tapping you. We all know this is true, but people still find this to be a tremendously difficult thing to do mid-round. Do you have any tips for coaches in terms of setting a culture to make this easier? Speaker 2: Sure. So, I mean, a big thing at the end of class, we all line up and, you know, I'll say something. So, I think it comes down from the environment from the coach. So, I I often remind people that training is about skill development, not winning. Like nobody cares if you're the king or queen of the mat. Like nobody gives a shit. So, it should be about getting better. So, I always tell people, and and I tell people, because I don't even have a a ton of black belts to train with on a regular basis, where I'm like, I tap all the time. And if I'm a black belt and I'm tapping, that means I'm likely tapping to lower ranks. So, if I don't have a problem with tapping, why do you? So, I kind of like, I'm trying to like normalize that, because very often, I, you know, and and don't get me wrong, like I still roll hard and I still don't want to tap, but sometimes I might be working on like deep submission escapes, which I'm inherently going to fail at a lot. So, I think that has been very important of just again, changing the culture from like a winning the roll to skill development. And then me just embracing, you know, and reminding people that if I tap, then, you know, why are you worried? Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. I've said before that in a good training room, the instructor should model the behavior that they want to see, and part of that involves tapping. And one of the best ways to set that tone is to tap early in the class and visibly so everyone sees that you do it. Something that I like to do if I'm sparring with a white belt, for example, is I'll expose something that they can work on. So, maybe I'll stick one arm deep in their guard, and of course, they're going to try to arm bar me. And at first, it's a defensible position, and so I'll let them kind of knock me over and deepen the lock and eventually get me on my, you know, on the bottom to make it easier for them to finish. And then at some point, I'll I'll tap, right? This is kind of along the lines of Rob's fuck your jiu-jitsu stuff, right? You want to get as deep into trouble as you possibly can and then work from there, which is if you do that properly, then a black belt should be quite easily tapped by a white belt. You have to give them the level of difficulty that is appropriate for them. If you as the black belt are always just styling on the white belts, that means that you're not putting yourself deep enough to trouble that they can work effectively. And the cool thing is once the people in the room see that the black belts are putting themselves in these positions and are willing to tap like publicly to lower ranks, it kind of sets this tone that, oh, well, if coach is doing that, then clearly it's okay for me to do that too. So, I kind of like to set that expectation. I also find too that if you do that at the beginning of class, it helps you kind of shelf the ego for the rest of the class, because if the first thing that happens in class is you get tapped by a white belt, it's really hard to feel embarrassed by anything else in the rest of the class, right? So, sometimes just throwing that out there and and putting yourself into this position that's supposed to be embarrassing, you realize real fast, actually, this isn't embarrassing at all, it's just fun. And that also doesn't just make it easier for you to park your ego, but for everyone who's watching you, it's going to make it easier for them to do it as well. Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. Another thing I'll do sometimes with positional training is it's like a heavily biased position. So, like today I was teaching and we did a positional training where it was like, you start with like, you know, reverse kaisa, like top half. So, all the person on bottom has is they're just they have the leg entanglement from a basic half guard, but, you know, people like, this is going to suck from the bottom. I'm like, yeah, it is. And, you know, even me, like people are passing my guard. So, sometimes it'll be so biased towards one person that the higher rank is like, you know, they're at a very likely chance that they're still going to lose the battle. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. Now, you talked about some of the common ways that people can get injured. And I'd love to maybe discuss this a bit. Now, you and I actually did a whole audio course on this on BJJ Mental Models Premium, but for those who haven't heard it, maybe just quickly recap, what are some of the main zones of injury that can happen in jiu-jitsu versus other sports? What are the things that a jiu-jitsu practitioner should be especially careful of in terms of the types of injuries that are likely to happen to us? Speaker 2: So, I guess from a we can look at more of like traumatic injuries. So, I think a big one will be knee. Really what we're going to see is going to be more contact injuries where the knee is kind of pushed to the inside or the outside. So, the knee doesn't move sideways. It's called frontal plane, doesn't have frontal plane movement. So, certain things we can think of where if like the person on bottom has a daily heva, essentially what they're trying to do is they're trying to force the knee in. So, sometimes if the person who's passing is stubborn, they actually going to have their knee injured just because they're just trying to stop the position, right? So, that's going to be something that's going to be pretty common from an injury perspective. From like takedowns, same sort of thing, someone goes for either like a reaping takedown or some type of takedown, a sacrifice or a falling takedown where they fall, where they fall on the side of the leg. Like those are going to be some common knee injuries that we see. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. Many of the grapplers that I know have had knee injuries. How about hip injuries? Are those something that are super common in jiu-jitsu as well, or do you feel like they're maybe a bit less common than a knee injury? Speaker 2: So, you're not going to get traumatic hip injuries. I would say any hip injury is going to be based on the fact that jiu-jitsu has an abnormal hip mobility demand, meaning the better your hip mobility, likely is going to have significant transfer to your guard retention and guard offense. There is very little literature on jiu-jitsu athletes and hip mobility, but the UFC, the UFC Performance Institute has some data on combat athletes, and on average, you can see that combat athletes are going to have more hip range of motion than comparative to like regular people. So, it's like with a gymnast, where a gymnast has extreme mobility, which is fine while they're in their peak, but the problem is is you still have to maintain the physical attributes and capacity, because like it's very common for for gymnasts as they get older and they're no longer competing, their body starts to break down because they're not in these great situations. So, I would say that might be an issue for some jiu-jitsu athletes, where again, they might have very good hip mobility, but then as they start to get older, they might not be doing all of the necessary things to maintain hip health. Speaker 1: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You know, people in jiu-jitsu often talk about how, oh, I've got great hip flexibility and knee flexibility. And maybe that's true, but if your game relies on certain attributes like that, and you're constantly letting your opponent push you to the limits of your attributes, then at some point, you're probably going to get injured and then there's going to be a problem. And I think maybe that's part of the reason why you see so many knee injuries. There are a lot of very interesting and strange movements in jiu-jitsu where we kind of turn our knees at angles that are odd and that you don't see in a lot of other sports. And you can get away with that for a while, but if if the thing that is making your techniques ultimately work is your reliance on natural flexibility, then at some point, someone is going to push you beyond that, because one of the interesting things about jiu-jitsu, as my physio has told me as I go through this rehab process, is getting someone back onto the mats from a jiu-jitsu injury is especially difficult compared to other sports, because you have this variable that is your opponent. You're not just running down a track or just lifting weights. You have another human being who can do wildly unpredictable things. And so, body weight is going to crash on you or hit you at weird angles, and as part of the rehab process, you need to make sure that whatever joint was injured is especially resilient against those weird things that can happen. I have definitely had this happen to myself where I have tweaked my knee here and there doing things like a a high leg guard retention movements. Things that are generally not considered to be risky, but just in the wrong place, at the wrong time, when you zig and they zag, sometimes the body weight comes down and it twists your knee in a way that you didn't expect. So, a lot of the weird movement that we do with our our hips and our knees, especially because in jiu-jitsu, so much of what we do is in the guard, and our legs are often the front line of defense in the guard. It just puts those at risk, and maybe that's part of the reason why we see so many knee injuries in the sport. Speaker 2: Absolutely, for sure. Speaker 1: Now, of course, the thing about injuries is not all injuries carry the same risk profile. Some are I'm hesitant here to speak in generalities, because everyone's situation is different. But on average, some injuries are harder to recover from than others. We've talked about knee injuries, which are notorious for taking potentially long periods of time to recover depending on exactly what was injured. I'd like to get your thoughts on things like neck and back injuries, which are tremendously scary, and they can happen. Often when we see really bad horror stories in jiu-jitsu, it surrounds something like a neck injury, where someone has gotten really badly hurt, and not only are they injured, but their ability to return to the sport might be in jeopardy if it's bad enough. Maybe talk about what causes neck injuries, and if there's anything that people can do to maybe be smarter about those and avoid those. Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I think the like the catastrophic neck injuries are going to be when your your neck is like kind of in extreme range of motion, where it's like your chin to your chest or you're looking all the way to the ceiling. Often that's when people like fall on that. So, you know, if like someone is getting like spiked, like let's say you're on someone's back and they try to front roll, so you essentially get that hyperextension movement, but it's not just like you crash, it's like you are full body weight and even their full body weight. So, those are pretty dangerous. Same thing with like a when your your chin to your chest or if you kind of land in that position. You know, the big worry here is for something like a spine is just a spinal cord injury, because obviously with the neck, if you damage your spinal cord, that could change your ability to walk, or depending on on the severity, it could be you can't use your arms. A lot of times people are going to die from that sort of thing. I think the chance I think the the rate of someone dying from this in grappling is very, very, very, very low, but there are people who can get paralyzed for sure. So, I think a key thing with that is like try not to land on your head from like either a takedown or, you know, something like that, because I mean, that's where you're going to see those really catastrophic injuries. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. You brought up the front roll from turtle, which I just I mean, that's a move I will never do. It is wildly dangerous to try to roll someone over by going over the front on them. I had a guy do that to me one time, and to this day, I'm still pissed, because that could have gone wildly wrong. But of course, there's also things that you as the defender can do to minimize that risk, particularly if you're playing turtle. I mean, a lot of people play this variation where you post on your head. I would not suggest doing that. These days, I play kind of a variant of turtle where instead of being symmetric, I actually put my shoulder onto the mat rather than my head. And that way, if I first of all, I like that because if the person is to the side of me, I can kind of semi-face them and attack from there. But also, if I do get rolled over, then I can just roll right over my shoulder. So, there's things you can do to be smarter about this. And again, yeah, takedowns, you bring up a great example. The case that I always cite is the old Pride fight where Mark Kerr shot a double in the first like minute of a fight and knocked himself out because he landed head first after achieving the double. So, you have to be very careful when you lead head first in jiu-jitsu. This is I mean, man, a lot of people, especially in jiu-jitsu, aren't really as experienced at wrestling as a wrestler would be in these situations. And even at relatively advanced levels in jiu-jitsu, I don't know about you, but I see people who shoot singles and doubles just that they will never get. You know, they're telegraphing them, they're doing nothing to set them up, they're shooting them from like four feet away. It's obvious they're going to get sprawled on. That's just not a good double. As Sarah McMahon has said, a mutual friend of both of ours, if you do a double properly, you should make them feel like they're going to lose their lunch, right? And what she means by that is a good double, you're basically body checking the person with your shoulder into their gut. And if you're not doing that, if you're not able to make that contact and you're kind of slamming onto the ground first, then you're probably not close enough. And so, a big way to make things like double legs safer is just do a better setup. It's going to be way harder for the person to sprawl on your neck if you do it close, you clear the hands, you have them distracted, your timing is better. If you're shooting a Hail Mary double from four feet away with no setup, you give them all of the time in the world to drop onto your neck, right? And so, those are situations where your technique being better can reduce the injury for yourself as well. Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, that's actually a super interesting thing. So, because we can talk about takedowns and injuries, and obviously, what happens is people like, well, takedowns are a situation where injuries occur, so I'm going to just not do takedowns because that will reduce injury, which, I mean, there's some there is some rationale to that, but then the problem is is then you essentially staying a novice at takedowns. And obviously, people train jiu-jitsu for a variety of different ways. Not everyone trains for self-defense, but ultimately, like, I mean, I feel that someone should have at least base takedown knowledge. So, one of the things that I think that happens is often jiu-jitsu's taught backwards, like you you're seeing the finish, but, you know, we take takedowns, every takedown, first you have to make your contact, you have to make them off balance, and then the finish, right? So, everyone's just seeing the finish, so they're just shooting like shitty double legs, you know, with terrible setups. And even if they're not going to get injured, they're just not successful, right? So, like for me, when I teach takedowns, it's heavily on like hand fighting, so you get good contact, you can get good positional control, moving your opponent, because once you get good at those things, the finish is relatively easy compared to if you just do the finish, you're not going to happen. And that and you can say like takedown injuries, we could say like the Osoto Gari is a pretty big one. Osoto Gari is not a good takedown for jiu-jitsu in my opinion, but it's a classic one for judo, so it still gets brought in. You know, a big thing with that is people reap the leg, but they have bad balance. They essentially they just fall on the leg, versus if you do an Osoto correctly, you should be almost past your opponent so you can sweep the leg. But again, if you know how to get the leg in good position, you can move them around, the finish is going to be easy. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. And the other nice thing about jiu-jitsu too is there's so much versatility in terms of how to make this sport your own. If there's a technique that you just don't feel has a level of injury risk that you're willing to accept, you can often tailor it. I mean, I, for example, don't really shoot blast doubles, just because I tend to be on, you know, smaller than my training partner, and I don't want some giant whale to sprawl on my neck. I've had that happen before. So, I do a lot of low singles and low doubles. There's ways that you can adapt the sport to your body type and and your needs. Of course, as a if you're a competitor, you've got to kind of weigh this strategically, because there's always going to be a level of injury risk that you need to calculate and be willing to accept if you want to compete in jiu-jitsu. But even then, you can tailor the sport to whatever you want. I mean, there's a lot of people who are amazing at takedowns and never shoot a double. So, and even for people who do, like I said, there's ways that you can tailor it to do it a little bit differently. That's an interesting point about Osoto Gari, and I tend to agree. The challenge that I see with I mean, I think probably most people know what that is, but for to kind of describe it, that's basically the classic judo takedown where both people are standing upright, you get in close, you go hip to hip with them, and then you kind of kick your leg back and kind of like a pinwheel, you spin your body and they go flying, right? It's the hip connection that um with your leg connected to their leg that makes them kind of sail. And the challenge though is that that can work very effectively in judo where you have an upright posture. But in jiu-jitsu, because people have that leaning forward posture, it's very hard to get hip to hip like you would in judo. And so, some people will try to cheese it, and instead of getting hip to hip, they'll try to like you said, just kick you in the knee. And maybe that'll work, but it's not a clean Osoto, and the injury risk is way higher if you do that. So, you see a lot of people who do really shitty Osoto Garis in jiu-jitsu because of the posture, and that carries a significantly higher injury risk than I think you would expect to see in judo. Speaker 2: Absolutely, for sure. Speaker 1: Let's talk maybe about actual work that people can do to strengthen their bodies. You know, we've talked about some of the common injury families that can happen and why they happen. But a big part of prehab is the physical conditioning to make yourself stronger. So, I presume we're particularly concerned, like you said, about some of the common injury families you see in jiu-jitsu that can be serious. So, we're talking about neck injuries, knee injuries. What kind of stuff do you recommend to jiu-jitsu practitioners as exercises or things they could be doing to strengthen those parts of their body to reduce the risk of an injury just in case something does go wrong? Speaker 2: Well, so there's two ways we can look at this depending. We could talk about like pre-jiu-jitsu warm-ups, and then we could talk about physical capacity, because I'm going to include some of them in both. I'll start with a warm-up because it's going to be quicker and it involves the other one. So, in general, when it comes to a warm-up, like what is the goal of a warm-up? The goal of a warm-up is to prepare the tissues for the activity you're about to do. So, what that means is we need to make sure that we get the body temperature warm. We want to make sure that the joints that are going to be used are going to be relevant. So, you know, I I've been to so many different jiu-jitsu gyms, where they'll do like the running in the circle, and they're doing solo drills. I've been to gyms where they do like more of a field athlete like dynamic warm-up. But in general, the goal is to get the body temperature warm, and then to prepare the joints for what's going to happen. So, then you have to consider is what does the joint or multiple joints have to do for jiu-jitsu? So, you have to say, you know, obviously my neck needs to go in every plane of motion, because so much of neck is going to, you know, going to get torqued from, you know, various chokes. The spine, I need to be able to be in a flexed position, I need to be able to rotate. Hips, I need to make sure that I can rotate them. You know, and then from, you know, an injury mitigation standpoint, where are a lot of knee injuries happening? So, one, there's going to be frontal plane, which there's not much we can do about that. But there's a rotational plane, right? That's how heel hooks work. The knee knee doesn't rotate a lot, but it does rotate. And a lot of injuries happen from knee rotation. So, for me, what I want to do is I have my joint specific prep, my tissue specific prep, and then I have my sport specific prep. So, there's a a series of exercises that I do that are called controlled articular rotations. These are an exercise that was, you know, coined by functional range systems. But essentially, what a what a controlled articular rotation or a car is, is it's an isolated rotational joint movement. And the reason what you're doing is you're trying to take a joint through its full pain-free range of motion, hitting not only every range of motion, but every degree of freedom that it moves. So, a degree of freedom is a plane of motion that the motion has. So, you take the shoulder, the shoulder moves in every plane of motion. But then you could take something like the knee has two, etcetera, right? So, one of the things that I would want to do, because if you think about it, a lot of the injuries in jiu-jitsu are going to be happening in these rotational planes that you might not get stressed by just doing like a solo drill or doing like a basic, you know, field athlete dynamic warm-up. Speaker 1: That makes sense. Yeah, yeah, it does make sense. Here's a question, with many of the gyms that I see when they do a warm-up, a big part of what they're doing is calisthenics and thing to kind of get people sweating a bit and get the heart rate going. Is is that even really useful for a warm-up, or is the goal to basically just limber up the joints like you talked about? Speaker 2: Well, yes and no. So, ideally, what I would do is I would first kind of take a joint through its full available range to prepare it for whatever stress it might happen, right? So, you know, your knee might get stressed with rotation, I want to make sure it rotates. My shoulder, etcetera, right? So, that's from a joint specific prep. But we still want the body to be warm, because as you raise, you know, raise body temperature, that's going to make the muscles more pliable. The problem is, and I've done some research on warm-ups. So, obviously, you want to do a great exposure from low intensity to build up to a high intensity, because if the sport requires high intensity, you want to prepare it beforehand. But if you think about a traditional jiu-jitsu class, usually you'll do your warm-ups, and then there's that period of dead drilling, and then you go into roll. Well, we know that from a warm-up perspective, that the benefit of the warm-up kind of goes pretty quick, right? So, if you do a warm-up and then you do dead drilling, like there's going to be likely by the time you actually go to live training where you need to prepare it, the benefit of the warm-up is lost, right? So, for me, that's an important thing to consider where maybe you don't need to do as aggressive of a warm-up early on. Like I've been to some classes where they do like heavy calisthenics and they're horrible, and you're just tired, which I think is kind of a waste of everybody's time, because the point of jiu-jitsu is skill training. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And this actually leads to another question, which is, is there an optimal length or intensity of warm-ups? Because like you said, I've been to gyms where the warm-up is like 20, 30 minutes, and the class is only, you know, an hour to an hour and a half. So, you're spending a significant amount of your time doing jump like jumping jacks and sprints. And we all know that that's not really an effective use of time for a warm-up. But even for a warm-up like what you suggested, which is maybe more targeted towards injury prevention, is there an optimal length for that warm-up that a coach should be targeting? Speaker 2: So, you can get warm with a 5, 10 warm-up, 5 to 10 minute warm-up. I was looking at one paper that was looking at jiu-jitsu injuries, and, you know, they had recommended like a 30 minute warm-up, but like clinically, I find that's a waste of time. I would say about a 10 minute warm-up is good. And again, obviously, people are going to run their class however they want. For me, I would I currently my class is kind of like a hybrid, CLA like traditional. So, a lot of times my warm-ups, so I'll do cars for myself. Sometimes I'll run a run the class through cars. I don't always for the same point of, you know, I want training to be for training, right? Also, a lot of the students that I work with are also former patients or clients. So, somewhat familiar with my stuff, but, you know, I'll get to class 10 minutes early and and I'll do my cars. Sometimes I run them through the class. But then, you know, but then my warm-up is just, you know, can straight led approach games of low intensity, because they're low intensity, but they're skill specific. And then it's a great exposure of, you know, I'll do do my games. I specifically pick lower intensity games that gradually build up. If I'm going to show any kind of like technique to let people practice, that will be some portion. And then when it comes to training, I do positional training and then full training just because positional training tends to be a lower intensity training, because you're going to have less positional scrambles. So, it's kind of a great exposure of you're doing these low intensity, sport specific moves, then when it's time to actually do live training, it's going to be a lower intensity live training, and then we finally progress to full training. But by then, you'll have got warm. I mean, for me, personally, like if if I go to open mat, I'll do cars and then I'll just warm up with with somebody that I trust, like just a flow roll, and then I usually feel pretty good. Speaker 1: I see, I see. So, tactically speaking, I understand conceptually what you're describing here, but if someone were to actually show up to your class and go through this cars warm-up with you, what would that look like? What are the actual things that you have them doing? Is it always the same, or is there kind of a a portfolio of warm-up techniques that you use? Speaker 2: So, for cars, I mean, you can change body position. For a class, I usually don't. So, functional range systems has many different courses. So, one of them is called kin stretch, which is essentially a group functional range system class, which I'm an instructor. So, but generally is I would just be in in some way, whether I do what's called passive blocking or active blocking. So, if I'm moving your my shoulder, I might just be standing and just doing an isolated motion to make sure that I can move my shoulder in every plane. If I see that maybe sometimes people are having trouble, I can do what's called a passive block. So, I put them in a position where they can't really cheat. So, I might have them where they're on their knees, their free hand is on their thigh, their elbow's there. So, then when they do that movement, they can't rotate their body. So, I can make sure I get full rotation. So, for me, as a kin stretch instructor, I can just kind of modify depending on if like I see people are doing a poor job or they don't get it. I usually, so, I could go through every joint of the body, but usually what I do is I just kind of pick maybe a few joints that are relevant to what kind of like the focus of the class is. So, if it's going to be more of a guard focused, I might be doing hip movements. If if I'm doing leg locks, I might do ankle and knee, that sort of thing. So, like the person is a little bit more prepared for the specific stress. Speaker 1: Got it. Now, of course, some of these things are kind of hard to visualize through audio. I think you've made some content on this that people could check out if they want to see this in action, right? Speaker 2: Sure. Yeah, so I have I have three different courses. I have a kin stretch for jiu-jitsu, I have an upper body, I have a lower body and a spine course. For people on the Discord, there is a discount. But they got to be a member of the Discord group to get that discount. Speaker 1: Awesome. So, that's the BJJ Mental Models Premium Discord, by the way. We'll plug that at the end. Okay, that's good to know. Now, Mike, back to what people can do on their own time. We talked about first the things that a coach could implement in a class, but if I myself at home wanted some exercises to, you know, strengthen the the parts of my body that are most likely to get injured in jiu-jitsu, what are some things that as a physio, you often wind up recommending to people for this purpose? Speaker 2: So, obviously, in general, if you look at the data, strength training in general is going to be by far the best thing for injury mitigation. It's just as you go through some type of resistance training, it's going to be more likely to build tissue resilience, which is always our goal. But then obviously, there's going to be based on whatever modality that we use, we can kind of funnel that's a little bit more relevant to what we're going to do. So, one of the things that seems pretty consistent in literature is that strength is range of motion specific, but also degree of freedom specific, meaning, right? So, most of the literature is looking at like squats. You can do a full depth squat, partial squat. Generally, you're only going to get the benefit of the range you're training in, right? So, what I do is I would want to match injury or building tissue resilience in joints and tissues that we expect are going to be injured in jiu-jitsu, right? Because, you know, you can do all the bench press that you want, which I think bench press is is important for sports performance, but not necessarily for injury mitigation, right? So, if I wanted to train a shoulder for injury mitigation, I'm going to be doing shoulder rotational movements. And this is something you always see in rehab. People go to rehab and they're doing band resisted rotation, and then they're out of rehab and then they're going right back to that bench press. But really, what you should be doing is doing the rotational work. The problem is when people go to rehab, because if you have an acute injury, really the goal of rehab is a concept called mechano transduction or mechano therapy, meaning what you're doing is you're appropriately loading the injured tissue to build resilience. But because it's injured, the intensity needed for an adaptation is going to be much lower, right? So, for me, if I'm working with someone who's not injured, I can still take one of those rotational movements, but I have to make sure that the loading parameters match my goal, which would be the intensity, the volume, and the frequency have to match what I'm trying to achieve, okay? Next thing we have to consider when it comes to physical capacity, that solely focusing on strength, like maximal strength, is not necessarily going to translate like a one-to-one for tissue resilience, because maximal strength essentially is the ability for your nervous system to exert a lot of force. So, it's less about the biological system. Now, again, if you start working to higher volumes and lower intensity, now you start to transition to hypertrophy, building muscle. But ultimately, if you're just doing a power lifting, you know, approach, which don't get me wrong, I still use a lot of lifts that a power lifter would, but from an injury mitigation standpoint, I don't think it translates as well to an injury an injury you're going to get in jiu-jitsu. Speaker 1: I see, I see. Now, hey, here's the thing that I always want to ask a person in your position, Mike. Is there anything that just you wish people would stop doing when it comes to training more safely? Anything that is just kind of like a common grievance that you have as a physio and you just think, man, this sport would be better if people could just break this bad habit or if they would just stop doing this one thing. I'd love to know, because this usually translates to very good actionable advice for the listener. Anything like that that kind of falls into that category? Speaker 2: Well, there's two things. One, we can look at, well, I'll take one set of exercises. So, neck bridging, I'm not a fan of neck bridging. I think ultimately, you have to consider that neck bridging is more popular in wrestling, but a lot of people that are wrestling are doing it at a very young age, and they're not really doing it in their 20s. Like most times people are wrestling from maybe if they're lucky, they're wrestling at age seven, and then they're probably stopping at high school or if they're really, really good, maybe at college level, right? So, but also, when they are at younger, their body's going to be a little bit more adaptable. So, theoretically, the there might be less repercussion. The problem is in jiu-jitsu, you're going to get more of an older crowd, whether they're their 20s, 30s, or 40s. So, now people with not good neck health, with poor disc health, now they're doing something where they're going to axial load their neck with it. Just in my opinion, it's not a good way to strengthen the neck. It just the you have to weigh the benefit and cost. Again, in a certain situation, if somebody has all the necessary joint prerequisites, their neck is healthy, they have no problems, they're young enough, they do it at a way that they can load it. That's one thing. I find that that's not the case. So, for me, I would include neck strengthening with ways where there's potentially less adverse responses, and I'm going to get better results. Speaker 1: I see. Got it. Yeah, that that's an interesting point about the age difference. Oh man, a lot of the time when I watch wrestling, there's a lot more intensity and a lot more slamming and impact than you see in jiu-jitsu. And yeah, sometimes the way that they like use their head and their arms for posts fly in direct contradiction to the things that we're told not to do in jiu-jitsu. And I think a big part of that, like you said, is when you've got people who are much older doing jiu-jitsu, you've got to be much more careful about, you know, telling them to do things or encouraging them to do things that could dramatically reduce the quality of their life down the road. This is one of my complaints with the way that a lot of jiu-jitsu coaching is taught. It is often taught with the expectation that you're teaching, you know, like a a young teenager or a 20-something person whose goal is to be a world champion, whereas the vast majority of people in the room come to jiu-jitsu to improve the quality of their life, and they have little to no interest in competing. So, if you are putting techniques on their plate that could lead to serious risk of injury, I don't think you're really delivering to them the jiu-jitsu value that they came to sign up for. I think at the end of the day, you want to be bearing in mind that most of the people who do jiu-jitsu do so for wellness purposes. Speaker 2: That's cool. I agree. Speaker 1: Awesome. Well, as we get close to the end of this, Mike, I would love to just get any closing thoughts here, any ideas or concepts that you think are critical for for prehab and injury mitigation that are worth discussing here, which we didn't talk about yet. Speaker 2: Sure. So, from an exercise perspective, I didn't really get to go as, but when I'm building tissue resilience, one of the the things that I use heavily with my patients, my clients, and myself are isometrics. So, one of the things that we know is and there's a lot of research out of uh UC Davis, Keith Barr's doing a lot of research on tendon health. And as we get older, we know that people are going to have worse and worse tendon health. And when I say tendon in jiu-jitsu, a lot of the injuries that are going to happen are going to be tendon-based or ligament, but from um like kind of a a cellular level, the they're very, very similar. So, a lot of times when people talk about tendon tissue and ligament uh tissue, it kind of they kind of work together, right? But so, the reason why I like isometrics is because as people age, we know connective tissue health or tendon health gets worse. You could have what's called degenerative tendinopathy, so poor tendon health, and have absolutely no pain, right? You feel absolutely fine. And this is why rotator cuff injuries tend to happen as people are in their like 30s and their 40s, versus under 30, you're more likely to have a labral injury, just because the, you know, the quality of the rotator cuff is going to be stronger as you're younger, right? So, isometrics when they have the proper dose, the proper intensity, and the proper volume are going to be really, really beneficial to load tendon. And the reason why is because when you have a degenerative tendon, you're going to have all this tendon with this gunked up stuff. Well, that gunked up stuff isn't actually able to generate force. So, all the healthy part of the tendon will get loaded, but not the gunked up part. But ultimately, we want to stress that gunked up part because that's where the problem is. So, it it's called stress shielding. Ideally, the the stress is protected, which we don't want, we want to stress it. So, if we hold an isometric for long enough and the a proper intensity, what happens the healthy tissue will start to fatigue, and then that poor quality tissue will then properly get loaded. For me, because in jiu-jitsu, a lot of people are managing ligament injuries, I do a lot of direct ligament loading. So, it almost seems counterintuitive, because people like, well, you don't want to stress the ligament because it has to heal. But we know from a healing process, the healing it goes from an inflammation phase where the initial injury happens, and it sends a lot of hormones to the area. Then you get to the proliferation phase where now your body takes that hormones and it starts to kind of connect the dot and it starts to fill the damaged tissue with weak tissue. We know that scar tissue is fundamentally weaker. And then there's the remodeling phases where you can go and you can take that tissue and make it the way that it was pre-injury. But the problem is, the healing process stops at proliferation. The remodeling, that's rehab, where you have to appropriately stress the tissue to make it go back. So, for me, clinically, I find that a lot of rehab professionals, they're not actually appropriately stressing the ligament. So, if there's a ligament injury, it's still weak. And we know that ligaments can respond to load. And we know that they can stay weak for like months to years after injury. So, for me, and I don't necessarily do this proactively. I I'll do a lot of isometric training proactively, but if somebody has a ligament injury, doing appropriate loading is in my opinion, critical, because I have to make sure that when that joint gets exposed to a stress, which you know it will, because that's part of the sport, that it can handle that, so it's not like the the limb gets damaged. That makes sense? Speaker 1: Absolutely. It's actually very in line with what my physio here has been telling me as we go through shoulder rehab, right? I had surgery several months ago, and um something that he has been really trying to reinforce to me is like, you need to you need to push through it at this point. You're you're past the phase, the first six weeks or whatever, where the healing happens. It's healed. And now we need to start actually re-strengthening this. And part of this is you have to push through it, right? You have to make the joint work, you have to build up strength, and you have to have the confidence that it's going to be strong enough to do that. And so, this is the big thing that he keeps coaching me on is like, every time you kind of feel like you're getting comfortable with your lift or whatever the exercise is, throw another five pounds on it. Like do not settle with, hey, this is good enough. You need to keep loading and getting it higher and higher to help get it stronger again. And it's definitely made a difference. Like I I mentioned, I think it's been about it's been a while now since I've had my surgery, and it's at this point, it feels amazing. I mean, my physio says I'm not at the point yet where I'm ready to go back to sport just because again, this is such a dynamic and unpredictable sport. But following that advice has been super helpful at least for me. I mean, people's I'm not a doctor, but I have found that in this case, listening closely to what my physio said has worked quite well for me so far. Speaker 2: For sure. Yeah, so it's super important. And then the the last thing is is as I said that tissue are strengthening is range of motion and degree of freedom specific. So, with isometrics, which we know are very specific in the range of motion trained, a lot of times what I'm doing for jiu-jitsu athletes is I'm doing rotational end range training in those positions where they're going to get hurt. So, if you got an injury from a Kimura and Americana, I'm literally doing an like a a high intensity isometric in that position. You just got heel hooked, I'm doing a knee rotational input isometric in that position. Obviously, the intensity is based on the phase of tissue healing. So, if they just got heel hooked, it's going to be low. If they've never done this style of joint training, it's going to be low. But obviously, as people go, you know, they've done it or they're past, then I'm starting to ramp up that intensity so that I can know that like literally, I'm I was working with a client and they're like, are you just heel hooking me? I'm like, kind of, but it's relative to what they're trying to do. I have to make sure that their knee can tolerate knee rotational stress. I'm just appropriately doing it because I know how to gauge. Speaker 1: Yep, yep. At this point, most of the exercises that my physio has me doing involve me Kimuraing myself. So, I can relate. Speaker 2: Absolutely. And that's the thing, there's there's a the creator of functional range system is named Andreo Spina. He's a famous quote that's saying like, you should be training the position where you got injured. And I feel like this is something that doesn't happen a lot in rehab, because a lot of times, either A, they're not used to working with athletes, or B, they're worried about getting injuring their person, which is true. I mean, but if if I'm working with somebody who has like an unstable shoulder, or we know when they're put in that Americana position, that's where the shoulder is at most risk of being damaged. If I want to make sure that their shoulder is going to be safe for jiu-jitsu, I'm going to put them there, and I'm going to be doing high isometrics. I might be doing fast ramping isometrics, because again, jiu-jitsu isn't slow, it's fast. But then the goal of this is to make sure that now they are comfortable because they're like, I've essentially been Americanaing myself for months now. They know that their shoulder can tolerate it when that happens. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. Reminds me of I think it was George St. Pierre. There was an old UFC fight. He was coming back after an injury, and I can't remember what body part it was, might have been his knee or something. And uh someone after the fight interviewed him, probably Rogan, and said something like, how was your knee? Or was it okay? You know, did you have any lasting damage? Were there any problems? And George just was like, pure confidence, shut that down and said, no, it was completely fine. I wouldn't have been here fighting unless it was 100% fine. Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it was his ACL. I think he tore his ACL and he got came back from that. Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, great advice as always, Mike. Now, again, for people who want a physio in the sport, you're always my first recommendation on this front. I mean, in many ways, you're kind of like the unofficial official physio of BJJ Mental Models. I know that there are so many people in our community who work with you first and foremost. And again, one of the cool things about your work is in addition to being able to do onsite stuff, unlike a lot of other physios, you've got programs that can be delivered and used remotely, and you can also do a lot of your physiotherapy services remotely. And you've also got services to help other physiotherapists learn to cater to this crazy sport that we train. I do always want to make sure at the end here that we give people a a chance to contact you. So, let's plug your stuff. Again, this is kind of the the first line recommendation I have for people who need a physiotherapist in jiu-jitsu. Speaker 2: Sure. So, so I've if you were kind of interested in some of the program that I talked about, those end range isometrics or those controlled articular rotations, I include them in my kin stretch for jiu-jitsu program. Again, like I said, I have three different ones. I have a lower body, upper body, and I have spine. Essentially, it's ways that I incorporate this type of joint training for myself. And this can be used in conjunction with traditional strength training, just because I do this specific joint training, but I will also do additional training as well. So, that's a good starting point for what I would consider joint training. I do work with people virtually. I tend to like doing what's called a return to jiu-jitsu coaching. So, often what I do is I have someone work with their physio. When it's time, when they get discharged, but they're not ready for jiu-jitsu, I kind of take over. So, I can kind of make sure that their joint can handle what it's supposed to for jiu-jitsu. And being a jiu-jitsu black belt, I can give them very specific guidance on when they can get back to different parts of training, because as you know, a lot of these young guys go out and they're like, I'm injured, I'm just going to go back light. And then within very short period, they're rolling full without any thought, and then they get reinjured. So, I can make sure that one, the joint can handle what it should for the sport, based on wherever they are. Yeah, that's amazing. And then finally, the last thing is I have some courses for physical therapists. So, I have multiple courses which talk about recognizing mechanisms of injury, what are the physical demands of jiu-jitsu, what I clinically use for return to sport. So, I have three different courses. I have a train the jiu-jitsu athlete, which is kind of like understanding where these injuries occur, how I return someone to sport. Um I have jiu-jitsu rehab masterclass where now I go like joint by joint, kind of some basic concepts that I address. And when it comes to ligament loading, I include these concepts in both courses. And then this November, I'm going to do my first in-person uh treating the jiu-jitsu athlete course. So, it's I believe the first in-person course for physical therapists on treating the jiu-jitsu athlete. So, it's going to be kind of a unique experience. I'm super excited about it. Where not only do I get to explain to physios what jiu-jitsu is, we all get the point to actually do jiu-jitsu together. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. Well, amazing, sir. And if people want to find all of this, I mean, I will put links in the show notes, but I presume probably the easiest way is for people to follow you on Instagram and stay up to date, or are there any other websites that you want people to check out? Speaker 2: Uh, Instagram's best. I mean, I have my website, but it's not a a clear code. So, probably Instagram's the best way to find it. Speaker 1: Amazing. Well, I will put a link to that in the show notes. I'll also put a link to everything that we make. It's all at BJJ Mental Models.com. The podcast is entirely free, no ads. We've also got quick hit mini episodes now that we release every week. We've been doing that for over a year at this point, just to quickly bring people up to speed on some of the main ideas that we like to communicate regarding the key concepts in jiu-jitsu. And of course, beyond that, I always tell people, please do consider BJJ Mental Models Premium. If you haven't already, uh we crossed over 600 subscribers, so it's uh one of the bigger subscription services out there, but it's also totally unlike all of the others. The thing that we're best known for is audio. We provide a lot of long-form audio courses, which instead of focusing on technical details like a traditional instructional, our audio courses talk about concepts, tactics, philosophy, strategy, the kind of things that tend to get glazed over in a course or in a class, but they're actually incredibly important. And we're one of the only places where you can get access to a large library of that stuff. You also get amazing premium podcasts from pros like Emily Kwok and Rob Bernaki. So, some of the best actual skill development and coaching content is available only through BJJ Mental Models Premium. And of course, if you are a video fan, there's a ton of video content on there as well. But beyond that, one of the main reasons you'd want to get in is the Discord community, which Mike talked about earlier. And again, there's a whole bunch of exclusive partner discounts and stuff that are exclusive to BJJ Mental Models Premium subscribers. First week is free, so I always tell people, please do check that out. I really do appreciate it. Link is in the show notes, but you can get it all at BJJ Mental Models.com. And again, I'll also put Mike's stuff in the show notes too. But Mike, thank you so much for doing this, man. Great information as always. I hope this was something that gives people some ideas on how they can be more safe on the mats and also how coaches can institute that culture of safety to help their students as well. Speaker 2: Absolutely. I'm happy to be here. I'll look forward to coming back in future date. Speaker 1: Definitely. And thanks to the listeners as well. Appreciate you too. And we will talk to you in the next one. See you then.