Ep. 348: The Timeline of Coaching, feat. Francesco Fonte

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 BJJmentalmodels.com and check it out today. Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to BJJ Mental Models episode 348. I'm Steve Kwan. BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent Jijitsu approach. And I'm back again with someone that we just spoke to actually not that long ago, but you know what? There's a good reason to have him right back on. I've got Francesco Fonte on the line. My friend, how is it going? Speaker 2: All good, Steve, all good here. We spoke not too long ago, so what's good then, what is good now? Speaker 1: Yeah, that's what I figured. Well, the last episode that we did, I got great feedback on, and shortly after we recorded that, you posted a really cool idea on social, and that kind of got us talking about this, and I thought, you know what? This would actually make for a really good topic for an episode. You called it the timeline of coaching, but I'm going to pass this over to you to maybe explain it a little bit, and then we can talk about it in more detail once we've got the concept out there. Speaker 2: Sure, sure. Yeah, okay. So, what started me being here again is a post that I've done on Instagram where, you know, I just I was reorganizing a bit my thought about several things, and I have a whiteboard in the gym. I write a lot of things on that whiteboard, and then sometimes I take a picture. Sometimes that picture would just be a note on my phone, sometimes it will become a post or whatever, something else, right? So, yeah, I always had this idea, there is a timeline and how you process the information, how you process them, how you pass them, how you use them. There is a timeline in this, and the timeline is you want to go from broad concepts into details, and you don't want to do the opposite, you don't want to start from the details. So, reorganizing a bit my all my ideas about this timeline, I sorted it out just like this on the whiteboard, and everybody can go and check it out on Instagram, right? When you coach, what you need is information to begin with, the knowledge about whatever you are coaching. Now, what do you do with that knowledge about? You want to use that knowledge about to understand the skills that you have to develop on the mat, that your athletes have to develop on the mat. So, based on the skills that you want your athletes to develop, you're going to structure your you're going to design your practice. If you are into the ego world like I am, you're going to design your games, right? For an athlete, this timeline is perfectly reversed, because an athlete is not the knowledge about that an athlete wants to start his journey, so to say. You want to start with the game. You go to the gym and the coach gives you a game. That game will generate, hopefully, skills. And my idea has always been that once you went to the gym, you played your games, you worked on some one, two skills of the day, stand up, pin, whatever it is. You did your sparring session, you're tired, you're exhausted. Now, that's a good moment to actually sit and go over what just happened, and now you're you're talking with your body and and you're talking about that that one very specific solution that you found to the game and that you could implement several times despite the changing resistance of your partner, or you can talk about a very specific setup that you have seen this one guy using in this one match on YouTube, right? That's the moment where you can talk about information. You can reorganize what just happened on the mat, which I believe is going to help a lot your memory retention. I'm not extremely sure that I'm using the the most correct academic term here, but I think that it's clear what I what I mean to say with this. My idea has always been that there is this big debate about drill or games or games and games and drill, drills are not useful, games are, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We we we have all been there. We have there since four years now. I am not necessarily against dead drilling where I'm going over some very specific solution on an uncooperative partner and we are talking to each other about what we're doing. I just think that there is a very specific time for this, which is not at the beginning of the practice, it's at the end. So, after you work your games, you work on your skills, you face problems, you find solution. Now you can talk about it. You can reorganize this information, and, you know, they will they will act as information pool for for your next practice, and they will probably clarify your intention and your ideas for the next session. But it's important to understand that it's not where skills are developed. It's where information are reorganized so that then later you can go back in. And that's pretty much it. It there is because we know, and everybody said it, that coaching is a different skill set than training. But then the mistake that I see very, very, very often coaches do is that they they mess up this timeline, and they treat the athlete, they put the treat the athlete through the same process that a coach should go, which is get gather knowledge about your topic so that you can analyze the skill that you want to work on, and now you can create the games that are needed for those skills. If you look at the practice in many, many, many, many gyms, this is what happens. The coach will give you information about something. Oh, this is omoplata, or this is, you know, reverse flying spider whip triangle, whatever. And then it will proceed to give you information about this topic. You have to put the foot here because then the guy will unbalance you there, and then you have to move the hand like this. The process is just messed up like that. A coach should have of course a huge, big, big, big knowledge about the topic. You have the knowledge about, you see what are the skills needed for something, then you develop the game, and the game is where the athlete start. The game will create skill. The game will make will put the athlete in front of problems, will force him to find solutions. Now the session is over. Now it's a good moment to go over again what just happened during the practice, and you can talk about it, and you can, quote unquote, drill it to reinforce in your mind your finding so that your intentions is clearer the next time you come back on the mat. And I guess that's pretty much what I have to say about this. Speaker 1: Yeah, so what it sounds like you're saying, Francesco, and just to maybe quickly recap to provide a bit of a mental visual here, because of course, listeners can't see the original post. I'll put a link in the show notes so that people can see. But you you drew a diagram here where you showed that from the coach's perspective, you see a a journey that goes from information, which leads into skills, which leads into games. But then that's reversed for the athlete, where you start with games, which leads into skills, and which leads into info. And so the implication, of course, is that the coach follows through these steps to get to the point where they can create the games that they then give to the athlete. The athlete starts with the games, and then they basically go in reverse to kind of reverse engineer the skills and ultimately the info that the coach already had. And this reminds me a little bit of what Charles Harriott had called the threefold view of Jijitsu. He talked about having a a high-level, a mid-level, and a low-level view. It was a little bit different the way that he outlined it, but I think the thing that you're really adding in here is this realization that both the coach and the athlete need the same knowledge blocks, but they kind of attack them from different angles. The coach's beginning is the athlete's end, and the athlete's end is the coach's beginning. Am I understanding correctly? Speaker 2: Absolutely. Yeah, it's exactly. So, first of all, hi Charles, long time no see. I hope to catch up again with Charles as soon as possible. Yes, the threefold point of view to Jijitsu that Charles uses, right? I talk about maps of different resolution, and you want to go from low resolution map to high resolution map. If you want to understand something, you start from a low resolution map, and then you start to go into details. Can you do the opposite? Yes. Is it functional? Is it does move process? Does it help you in the shortest term possible? Absolutely no. This is an example I've done several times talking to people about coaching. If I'm in Frankfurt, in Germany, I want to go to Berlin, I do not need an extremely detailed map of an area of Berlin. I need the shape of Germany, Frankfurt is here, Berlin is here, and you have to go east, start working. And the more I go east, the more I can start to the more I need to correct my trajectory, and the more I approach my end goal, the more I need a very that very detailed map that will tell me second street to the left, you know, third tree, look above, that's the window. Make sense? Speaker 1: Absolutely makes sense. It's a a concept we've talked about here on the show before, this idea that uh the map is not the territory, right? Maps can occur at different levels of resolution, and every time you go up a level to a broader view of things, you're losing some details, which is not a bad thing, because sometimes you don't need those details, or at least you don't need them yet. But as you get closer, you need to start drilling down and the individual little details become much more important. And I really like that uh kind of Google Maps example you gave of how, look, if you're traveling cross-country, maybe you just need some broad strokes ideas of where you're going, but once you're, you know, two kilometers away from your destination, you need to start knowing exactly where to turn left and right. Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. So, a coach needs knowledge about. A coach needs to know the topic. Say, I I teach Jijitsu and MMA, right? I need to know Jijitsu. I need to know the details of of the Kimura, and then the variations, and E-looks, and all the you know, the fashions that comes and go. I the the tiny variations of where you put your hand, I need to know these things. Now, why do I need to know them? Not to info dump them on my athlete, or even worse, to info dump them on the father of three, nine to five, works a nine to five, comes to the gym two, maximum three times per week, yeah? That guy definitely does not need my info dump. I need this knowledge about so that I can see, for example, let's say leg locks, right? I need my knowledge about so that I can see what are the common points between all these leg locks that are occurring. What are the the situations that present themselves more often than others? And what happens more often than not when you move the leg one way rather than another way? I need as a coach all this knowledge about so that I can see what are the skills at play. And now that I once I define the skills at play in that one particular meta that I want my athletes to train, I will design the games to make those skills emerge. But you see that now we are already going backwards, because now I will use what my athletes will find when when they come to the gym is the game. The game will develop the skills, and when the skill starts to be set, now we can talk about those information, and we can go like, okay, you see how much in this one particular situation it helps you if you move your hand like that. But we're going from context to detail. So it's it's just two completely opposite timeline of how you use the knowledge about the topic. And again, the mistake that many coaches do, and, you know, don't get me wrong, I'm not smarter than the others. Sometimes I do all these things. I can recognize mistakes only because I've done those mistakes, or I'm I'm still doing those mistakes, right? So, the mistake is that you have all this knowledge about, you are passionate. Now your athlete is on the mat, and you dump it on the athlete. But nobody develops skill from listening to me explain a 12-step to a triangle, 12-step to to a sweep. Nobody develops skills there. But the time you know, by the third or fourth step, they lost me already. They forget the first one. How is that supposed to create a skill? So, as a coach, I need to look completely the opposite. I will give them the game that I think will create the skills that I I identified. The guys can start to go, and once they face problems, I can give more precise instructions. By the end, there will be fertile ground on the mat to info dump people. But everything I'm going to say now is going to stick, because there is context. Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. And I love that you have brought up the importance of helping your students manage cognitive load. Info dumping on, I mean, I was going to say info dumping on new students, but honestly, info dumping on anyone is never really a valid strategy. I mean, as a black belt, man, I sometimes see these walls of text that people post, and I think, man, I'm sure there's good info in there, but you lost me at the first sentence. You have to earn my attention and get me invested and give me some context before you can start feeding me all of those details. Managing cognitive load of your athletes is tremendously important, because it's really easy in Jijitsu, I mean, as a coach, to feel like you are best off info dumping onto your athletes and just telling them everything you know. But the challenge is, first of all, that's not a great way to learn, because as as you pointed out, it's hard to keep all of that in your working memory. But also, those individual details without the context of when to use them, they prove not to be particularly useful. I think every white belt has been in this situation where some coach told them, well, if you want to arm bar someone, you put your left arm here and your right arm here, and then you put your foot on their hip and your other foot here, and the the person says, got it, coach, I got it. And then they try to do it, and right away the other person moves in a different way that they didn't expect. And now none of those steps work anymore. And the problem is that those individual details, they can be useful, but only within a very specific context. And if you info dump on your athletes, you create this kind of analysis paralysis where they're just overthinking all the time, and they're not actually spending time getting the reps, which is how they learn the context. This is where wrestling coaches tend to be quite far ahead of Jijitsu coaches, where their goal is often maximize mat time. Come up with ways to get people to be doing as much wrestling as possible, and then we can layer on context on top of that once people start hitting the walls and the limits of their abilities. The mistake that many Jijitsu people make is the opposite, where they will come in and they will spend the first 25 minutes of class painstakingly walking through every step on a an unresisting opponent, and then just hoping that people can basically memorize that and then dump it out right after like they're studying for an exam or something, right? And that's just not a great way to learn a combat sport. Speaker 2: No, yeah. Man, you brought up so many points. I should have took note because there's so much that can be said about all the correct points that you made, you know? There are moments where info dump has a value, has a very high value, right? And so, for example, one moment is if two me and another coach, we are sitting at the table because we are eating breakfast, then we can info dump. We can talk about our topic without having to show each other too much, right? Because we know what we're talking about. And there we can share information, we can reorganize our information, we can exchange ideas. There's a value there. There's also value, for example, it's happening right now in my gym. Like, the guy is just bouncing back from uh surgery to his shoulder. So, he goes in a corner with one of the coaches, and this guy info dumps on him, and that's fine, because the athlete is injured. What else can he do rather than organize information in his head? Perfect value for his time. We train for one hour, one hour and a half. We are absolutely done. But there's context now. We can sit in a corner and we can perfectly info dump each other about the things that we just found on the mat. This will help us to reorganize our ideas, it will make make our ideas stick better, it will help our memory retention. Next time we come back on the mat, our intention is clearer, our attention is more focused. We get a boost from that info dump. But the moment is important. You messed up the moment, right? And the moment I step on the mat and you start to give me to info dump on me, I will not remember anything. Like, almost everything will get lost. This is just a loss of of our time. Now, like you said, you want to maximize time on the mat. I am obsessing about maximizing time on the mat. For a very long time, I keep a timer on how much I talk during a class, and it's crazy. It's an unforgiving practice, because you find out that sometimes you talk for 50% of your class. That's not okay. That's absolutely not okay. That's where I started to really check on, yeah, on how much I talk to give more time on task to people. So, a mistake that and this I cannot call it anything else than a mistake. A mistake that many coaches do, even coaches with a lot of experience. I I see this thing happen with even with coaches of with a lot of experience. They try to fix, you know, they get sucked into tunnel vision, and they need to fix the mistake, and they have to make this heel hook work for the guy in front of them. And now they are info dumping the guy and they're trying again and again and again to correct the guy. But that's another way to overload everything and lose time that could have been used better, let's say, right? So, for example, one thing that I do to make sure that I myself don't fall into the trap of wanting to fix that mistake today is I give myself two rounds stand up, two rounds in the guard, two rounds in the pin. And what does not get fixed into those two rounds, we'll have to be fixed another day. And I I believe a lot in this process, because I can put a lot of effort into fixing your issues today, and that will feel like progress. But I do not believe that that leads to medium and long-term retention of what we're doing and, you know, progress. Or I can accept that there is a limit to the things I can fix today, and even if there are minor mistakes, I will leave them be. I will leave them be, we'll move to another topic, we go on. And now the perceived progress that you will have on the day is lower. But the retention and the progress that you're having in the medium and long-term, that skyrockets in comparison. Am I going left and right or is it still logical? Speaker 1: This makes perfect sense to me, and it aligns with a concept that I've talked about here before in and that is to layer info incrementally to help people learn. Many times when a black belt observes a white belt do something, of course, they're going to see a million mistakes that the white belt has made. And the natural tendency of the black belt is to be like, I'm going to pause the roll. Okay, now we got to make all of these little micro adjustments. And they'll sit there like you said, and they'll kind of it's like they're trying to like build a ship in a bottle. They're trying to make it look just absolutely perfect, and the white belt's got no clue what's going on. And next thing you know, you've spent five minutes trying to position this person's body correctly just for the purposes of making it look right in this one moment. And the poor white belt still has no idea what they're doing or why they're doing it, and they're so overwhelmed by having this person barking orders at them that nothing is sticking anyway. And so I feel like when you want to teach someone really any skill, the best thing to do is rather than trying to give them everything, give them the next thing. What's the next thing they need to know? The one thing that will make them a little bit better. Let them play with that, and eventually they're going to hit a wall, right? They're going to realize, okay, I've got this, but now I've got this other problem that's emerged. Cool. That's where now you as the coach can provide a little bit more information. Trying to throw everything at them and the kitchen sink at once in the hopes of making it look perfect, that doesn't take into account the fact that as you mentioned, the coach has years, probably decades of accumulated knowledge about all of these little details that the coach can do without even having to think about. They probably don't even consciously realize what they're doing. The white belt probably doesn't even know what to do with their feet or their hands, right? And so you need to give them a little bit of grace and let them work on one thing at a time. Our mutual friend Kabir Bath has referred to this as a um it's actually part of a broader concept he talks about called the least intrusive intervention, which is when you have to correct someone, you want to make that correction as minimal and unobtrusive as possible. And part of that is kind of, you know, your body language and what you do. Like if you're stopping the roll, you're being pretty intrusive. But the other part of it is how much knowledge are you dropping at them and how much are they really likely to retain in the moment? I mean, for most people, you give them one thing at a time, let them digest that and then move on to the next. Speaker 2: Yes. There is this a coaching skill, which observing people around me, I came to believe that it's actually pretty it's it's not an easy skill to obtain, which is to know when it's okay to let them do the wrong thing. When it's not the moment to fix that. The skill of knowing what's enough for today, instead of absolutely obsessing on getting them doing the right movement now. And uh yeah, again, you know, not realizing that moment, not realizing when it's okay like this for today, would definitely lead to cognitive overload, going over and over over the same, over and over again over the same thing, losing valuable time for the whole class, and uh just like I was saying before, one of the ways I have to force myself to go like, okay, for today, that's enough is in my class, there is two rounds on the stand up, two rounds on the guard, two rounds on the pin, and that's it. If I don't fix it today, we will work on it tomorrow again. Because it's not like tomorrow's class is going to be completely different, you know? Once I have a class that works, we will be on that class for one week, maybe 10 days before I start to change things. So I always give me time to fix tomorrow what doesn't get fixed today. Speaker 1: I have a question for you. Speaker 2: Yes. Speaker 1: Our mutual friend Charles and I both have a background in software and project management. Is that something you've ever worked in? Speaker 2: No. Speaker 1: Oh, interesting. Speaker 2: I've done QA, but uh Speaker 1: Well, here's the reason I ask. I ask because what you're describing there, where you basically compartmentalize and time box and say, hey, we're going to do, you know, two of this a day, and we're going to leave it there. And then we're going to move on and we'll do it again next week, regardless of, you know, how complete it got. This is actually a concept that sometimes comes up in terms of the way that you plan projects. An old school way, if you want to build a software program, an old school way people might think of that is, we got to have everything done by January the 10th, right? And they'll try to cram everything into that window. But more modern thinking basically encourages us to just build things within the time that we've got. So we might say like, look, you know, we're going to take this at one week at a time. We're going to build what we can this week. Here's the number one priority. We're going to focus on that. If there's still more to do, cool. We'll do that next week. But we're not going to try to force everything into a time box where it won't fit. At the end of the day, there's only 24 hours in a day, and we do the top priority, and then we move on to the next thing in the next incremental window. And that's a really cool way that you've got this broken down, because I also think there's diminishing returns to just obsessing over the same thing over and over again. Whereas if you say, hey, I'm going to do, you know, two techniques standing up, two on the ground, right? That puts a box around this, and then at that point, once you've done your work, you move on. You don't worry about getting it perfect, because again, it's highly unlikely you're going to go from white belt to black belt at one technique in one sitting. I've never seen anyone do that, right? So, if you see your white belts doing something where they're making a ton of mistakes, you have to have that intuition to know that like, look, the mistakes they're making, these can wait until next week. Today we just need to get them comfortable. We need to get the motor skills going, the muscle memory built up. We can refine it down the road. Speaker 2: Yeah, look, if they're doing a tons of mistakes, there's something wrong in the game I designed. There's, you know, there's also something to be said there. If everybody on the mat is doing a tons of mistake, something with the game is fucked up, and I need to fix that. Still, I will still fix it tomorrow. I will not fix it today. I can do minor adjustment on the fly, but there's a limit to the adjustment that I can do on the fly. But again, if everybody is doing a tons of mistake, the problem is in the game, it's not it's not on them, right? And for the rest, again, I just need them to do things good enough for where they are, for the experience that they have. Speaker 1: This leads into a question I want to ask you then about how the coach does this. So, as a coach, if you've been training long enough to build up all of that experience, then you have all of that info in your head. And now you're kind of reverse engineering that to figure out what are the core skills that I need to really have in order to do this stuff. And then from there, how do I create games that other people can use to develop those skills? What does that process look like? Because this is a very hot topic in Jijitsu right now. I mean, a lot of people understand that, hey, games-based training is cool, and really it should be at least used to some degree, I think, in almost every training environment, but how do you get there? So, as the coach, if you're someone who has, you know, a black belt with a ton of experience, how do you go about figuring out what are the core skills? Like reverse engineering that out of the info that you've got. Speaker 2: Look, this is how I work, right? And it took me years to come to this. It's a very, very, very long process, and here and there I'm still fixing it a bit, okay? I have my personal map of minimalistic Jijitsu, where I can explain almost everything that happened using just two, I call them attractor. I don't know if it's the the most proper term, but, okay? Yeah, two attractors, two ideas. Everything can get can be explained with two things that happen. How many ways there are to pass a guard? Answer me. Speaker 1: Oh, you want me to answer how many ways to pass the guard? If I had to put them into two categories, I'd say between the legs or around the legs. Speaker 2: Yes, exactly, right? You can only pass the guard between the legs or around the legs. Nothing else happens. And you can do this leading with your shoulders or leading with your hip. So, every time that somebody comes out with, oh, a new way to pass the guard. Yeah, no, you don't have a new way to pass the guard. You're either going around or through, you're either leading with your shoulders or with your hip. Once this is understood, I can create games around this very this just these two things, because I will constrain people and then everything else happens. You follow me, right? This is how I go from info to skill to game. Because, okay, look, the very last thing that I was wrapping my head around, stand up. So, info, I need a lot of of information about stand up. All the grips, all the throws, and the the current meta and the past meta, and what happened in this in in this event, and what happened in the other event, and how they were using their legs, and how they were using the grips, and all these things. But instead of trying to put a label on everything, this was a Uchimata, this was an Osoto Gari, this one Osoto Gari with a different grip, so we give it a different name. Yeah, I don't do that. I try to put everything, I need to reduce everything to a very minimalistic view. So, eventually, how many ways there are to throw somebody to the ground? Two. You are always interacting with their base. You are either blocking their base, and then you steer them, just like if you're driving the car and you have the steering wheel in your hand, right? You block your base and you steer them until they fall, or you lift your their base, and then you steer them until they fall. If I could demonstrate it, it would be incredibly clearer. But probably you're getting my point. So, everything that happened on a stand up exchange is always nothing else happens outside of this. Once there is connection, I either block your base and I steer you, or I lift your base and I steer you. If I steer your back to the floor, I get a takedown and I will end up in possibly a pin. If I steer your hands to the floor, I get back exposure and I will start to hunt your back. Absolutely nothing else happens in any standing exchange ever. I challenge you. I challenge everybody who's listening. Find me a match where something else than this happen. Block and steer, or drive and steer. Back to the mat or hands to the mat. Back to the mat, we go into the pin or into the guard. Hands to the mat, we start to attack the back. Done, right? This is a minimalistic view of standing exchanges. So, the information about stand up, stand up, produced this minimalistic view that now I can base the skills I want the guys to work on, you know, I can base these skills over this minimalistic view. So, block and steer. Speaker 1: So, here's the brilliance of what you said and why I like that. It illustrates the fact that for a beginner, you're kind of giving them broad picture things that they can just quickly pick up and use and games that they can play to experience that. And then the details start to emerge and they start to find those walls and those edge cases, and then you can explain those to them later down the road. This is part of an an interesting debate that comes up a lot and that I've had many times about like, when do you want to provide broad picture information versus when do you want to provide detailed information? When do you want to provide live training versus when do you want to talk conceptually about things? And I've always said that, well, not always, actually, for the long time I kind of leaned more towards one side, but then after talking to John Thomas, I started adjusting my mindset and understanding that you've got to have kind of both ends of this problem at the same time. But the thing that I like about your approach is it shows the path to go from, you know, kind of a how do we play a general game to how do we start to tack on all of these more specific details and concepts that might fit in in the moment. And, you know, again, back to the beginning, this is probably the opposite of how many people would teach these things. Most gyms when you go to a gym to learn stand up, they will give you a technique, right? They will say like, here is how you run the pipe to do a single leg takedown. But they probably won't actually explain why you're doing that or how this fits into this broader framework of takedown theory. Most people, if they ever figure that out, it'll probably come up, you know, three, four years later when they're watching someone's instructional, someone will say it and then they'll think, man, I I wish someone had told me that three years ago, right? But to this day, most gyms lead with a specific individual technique. And I like this approach you've got of, you've got a simple concept, a simple game that illustrates that concept, let's go train. Speaker 2: Yes. What you just said, right? That sometimes, oh, I wish somebody was telling me this three years ago. I'm after all those things that I wish people were telling me 10 years ago, right? So, let's stick to guard passing, right? Because we want to have recorded on podcast the process of how as a coach, I go from information to understand the skills that need to be created, to create the games that the athlete can play to develop those skills so that now he has information, right? This is the timeline. So, let's stick with guard passing, for example. Again, how do we pass the guard? There are only two ways to pass the guard. I'm either going around your legs or I'm going through your legs. There is absolutely no other way to pass the guard. I cannot teleport myself under the mat. So, if I want somebody now I can pick, okay? For whatever reasons, for reasons that can be tactical to the match that the athlete is going to fight, for example, or for the simple fact that right now, that's what we're working on in the gym. We want to develop outside passing. Perfect. That's a skill. Outside passing. Okay. So, I will ask I will create a game where standing player has to go around the legs to connect his leg to the torso of the bottom player, while bottom player has to put their feet between the legs of top player, right? Because these are two concurrent tasks, because the top player wants to be outside of the legs, while the bottom player, what can they want to do? Put their feet between their legs. So, we are no outside anymore, right? And then we can start to work on games, for example, where while bottom player keep trying to put double inside hooks, top player has to go from one side to the other. And probably you will constrain top player into never putting a knee on the mat, so that bottom player has actually more space to create the condition that top player does not want. Then we know that if I'm passing the guard, I can only pass leading with the hip or leading with my shoulder. For example, a body lock pass is a pass most of the time around the legs where I'm leading with my shoulders, because I will first lock myself with my arms around your hip, and then I will pass the legs. A Toreando is a pass where I'm leading with my hip, because I will go probably, you know, I will step outside your legs and I will go directly to knee on belly. That's a pass where I'm leading with the hip. You're still with me, right? Perfect. And now I start to constrain these things. You can or you cannot make contact with this part of your body. Now you start to create the games. The athlete played the game, the athlete starts to develop the skill of being outside of the legs, the skill of closing distance with the body and locking hands around the torso of the bottom player, all these things. And the more we go over these games, the more we can point the finger at how important it is to stop that knee. How much of a difference it makes to take one step back and then go forward again, right? Because everything that I'm saying now falls into context, because I created context before. Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's a really important thing to to explain here. And you know what? There's an example I often give. Um, are you a parent, by the way, Francesco? Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, three kids. Speaker 1: Okay, so you can relate to this. The example I often give on this front is that if you have a child and you want to teach them how to speak, you don't start off by explaining to them the intricate rules of grammar or language or anything. You start off with like, I'm daddy, that's mommy, you're baby, right? Let's get that in place first. And then, I mean, of course, they're not going to be speaking properly for years, but they're going to keep trying and experimenting and learning new words, and you just kind of gently guide them a little bit every time they make a mistake. And then over a period of, you know, growing up and adolescence, they refine to the point where one day you can actually sit down and you can teach them about I before E except after C and all of these grammar rules. But you don't lead with those, because that's just not how you learn. The goal is you give very straightforward but important concepts out of the gate and get the ball rolling. And then over time you gently constrain and constrain until what you want emerges. And this is, I think, a really great way to talk about the constraints led approach and to maybe clarify some confusions about it. I mean, people sometimes hear about this idea of I'm not teaching techniques, I'm I'm using constraints. And they misunderstand that to mean like, are your students just inventing the omoplata on their own? How is that possible? And it it's not like that. You're giving people kind of broad strokes opportunities to get training, and then through constraints, you kind of gently funnel them into the right direction on their own. It's not that they're inventing the omoplata on their own, but it is rather that you're putting them down a pathway where it's inevitable that they will land at that technique in a way that works best for their body type and game. Speaker 2: Exactly. Kit Dale said something like, it's incredibly precise. It's super it's great. He goes like, you know, I will not teach you a technique that you have to drill. If I can show you something and you can immediately put it in the game that you're playing, I'm 100% going to show you a very specific technique or whatever, whatever you want to call it. I will not do it if before putting it in the game, you need to, quote unquote, drill it. Yeah, 10 times left, 10 times right, because you don't understand what's happening. So, my idea is like, a guideline that I have is I will not show you something if you have to drill it. I will not talk to you about a problem that you did not face yet. And I will simply not answer questions that you did not ask. I teach like that. And I find these things to be very helpful in again, helping me avoid cognitive overload and losing time trying to fix problems that it's better if we fix at another moment. And when I say that, like, I will not talk to you, I will not offer you solutions to problems that you did not face. This is, yes, you are in Jijitsu since a while, but in combat sport in general, but not just in combat sport. I think this is a general didactic thing. Do you see how many times this thing happen? People teach something and they talk about problems and their interlocutor, they have no idea what they're talking about. So, all those information add no value. If I start to talk to somebody who does not do Jijitsu about the importance of the meta of Lachlan Giles catching the heel before moving to the hip, you know, this guy looks at me, they they have no value for that information. Make sense? Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I really like that way that you phrased it, which is you don't answer questions that weren't asked, because looking back on it, I think my entire Jijitsu career, pretty much every coaching experience I've been on the receiving end of has been people answering questions that I never asked. Yeah. Speaker 2: Talking to you about problems that you did not face. Speaker 1: Exactly. And this was a big realization for me, because I got to the point where I realized, you know, 99% of the quote unquote techniques that I'm being taught in the gym, I have never once used, because I just don't get into situations where where those come up, or at least not exactly that same way, or if the situation does come up, I've already got a better tool for it. It really, in retrospect, was the coach kind of telling me their life story and their own journey of how they solve these problems. And that's great for them, but it doesn't really help me. And I think that a more student-focused approach is one where, like you said, you give them opportunities to play and explore and find those solutions independently, the ones that work best for them. Speaker 2: Yes. That's so important. Before we went down this road, you were talking about how you teach language to the kids, right? I talked about this with several people already. You know, one of the biggest, let's say, objection, it's not really an objection, but it's more a fact, it's just something that gets thrown out in the air. When they go like, you know, if you want to learn to read and to write, you have to learn the letters so that you can form the words so that you can form sentence so that you can write a poem. And when you want to learn Jijitsu, it's the same. You need to learn the technique so that it becomes blah, blah, blah, right? And several times I've read or heard this metaphor used to justify the need for drilling and teaching techniques. Do you ever heard it? Speaker 1: I'm not sure I've heard it that exact way. I'm not sure I would agree with it either, because I mean, yes, kids do need to learn the alphabet, but usually they're speaking before they learn the alphabet. They at least have a few words and they know important things like, I'm hungry, I have to go to the bathroom. Speaker 2: Yeah. Exactly. But how did you learn to read and to write? Speaker 1: Man, I don't remember. I was way too that was a long time ago. Speaker 2: Yeah, okay. But but regardless the fact that of course, they need to speak, you need to be able to communicate so that you can start to teach them to read, right? But like I I've seen my daughter start when they started to teach her to read, but everywhere else, they will start from the letters. This is letter A, this is letter B, this is letter C. And then you combine they combine them into words, right? Also for writing. I have learned in the absolute opposite way. Like, all this it costs whatever. When I went to I remember clearly how I I learned to read and this thing is stuck in my mind, because I can see a strong correlation between that and all the ideas that I have now about coaching. Because when I when I started to go to school, my first teacher, she gave us strips of paper, and on those strips of paper, there would be written a fairy tale title, Peter Pan, Snow White and the Seven Dwarf, The Beauty and the Beast. And she would show us the she would give us the piece of paper and she would go like, here there is written Peter Pan. Here there is written Snow White and the Seven Dwarf. Now you read it. And you as a as a six years old kid, you have this strip of paper in your hand, and and you just go like, okay, Snow White and the Seven Dwarf, because the teacher just told you what's written there. But at some point, pretty fast, we started to recognize what was written on which stripe. If anything, because of course, Peter Pan is a short stripe than Snow White and the Seven Dwarf, right? And when we started to recognize the titles that were written on the these strips of paper, she would now cut every single word, and she would go like, okay, now you form your own, you combine them and you form your own title. And then you you start very simple, and you go like, Peter Pan and the Seven Dwarf. And when that started to happen, she started to cut the letter. So, I'm talking about unfortunately, I'm old, so I'm talking about almost 45 years ago, but I remember so clearly, and learning to read was incredibly fast, like in two or three months we learned to read, and it was just a game. I will call that ecologically learning. How to read. Speaker 1: Yeah, your kid needs to know what things are before they really understand how the letters work. Like a kid is not going to be able to learn the alphabet and then like put the words P I G together and then see a pig and then be like, oh, that's what it is. Rather, you teach a kid what a pig is, you get them used to the sound, you get them used to what the word looks like when spelled out, and then eventually they learn what the implications of those letters are, but that comes later, right? I think that that is, I mean, that's the way that we learn a lot of skills. You kind of get practice playing with something, and then you start to see patterns, and then eventually you start to understand the rules behind those patterns. Speaker 2: Yes. I really see a strong correlation but from between this way of learning how to read and how I look now at coaching and teaching Jijitsu or MMA or whatever, right? Going from the broad context where I'm literally telling you what to do, and then start to narrow down everything you deconstruct in in tiny, tiny, tiny details. Speaker 1: Yeah. And that is interesting, because that is often not the way that people teach Jijitsu. It's similar with math. When you sit down with a kid to teach them math, you don't necessarily start with the rules of how addition and subtraction work, but rather you do things like you give them, you know, a bunch of objects and you say like, if you break these into two equal groups, how many do you have? And they start counting them individually. They don't even necessarily understand how addition or subtraction are doing it the the very beginning, and that's something that they learn to develop later, right? Once they've got some experience playing with the idea, then you teach them the rules underneath it. Speaker 2: Yes. We can keep throwing parallels between these two things, right? Because what happens with in any field is that when you go to school, you will you will be exposed broadly to physics, to history, to mathematics, to literature. If you go through school, you will have a broad exposure. You go to school and you have a broad exposure to different topics. Then you start to go to university and you start to really dig into mathematics, right? And the more you dig, the less people you will find that understand what you are talking about. So, if now I'm coaching Jijitsu, I cannot start my class from all the tiniest detail of the last meta in guard passing, because that's the equivalent of university level mathematics. You just don't start there. You have to start broad, and then slowly you go there. And not everybody on the mat will make it there. And that's fine, because the hobbyist, the 40 years old hobbyist, does not have the same needs, care of the 20 years old obsessed guy who's driven to be the next Gordon Ryan. And we keep fucking up this order, and we keep info dumping done air style on whoever is on the mat. That's not a good service to your clientele, if you ask me. Speaker 1: Yeah. The other interesting parallel too to the world of academia is the deeper you get into your studies, the narrower and more specific your area of focus gets. To the point where, if you're, you know, a PhD researcher, you're probably doing something or studying something. There there may be nobody else in the entire world who's doing exactly what you do. And so the relevance to a lot of lay people is very minor at that point in time. And unfortunately, that is a parallel to the way that a lot of Jijitsu instructors teach. I often see black belts who will show some incredibly specific technique that just the chances of that ever coming up in a roll are, you know, one out of a thousand. But yet, everyone has to sit down and watch and we all have to pretend like this is useful information we're going to use. When I got to brown belt or so, I realized that most of the techniques that I had been taught, I never use. Maybe because they're just not for me, or maybe because the situation just doesn't arise. And it would have been nice if at the beginning, there were a focus on the broader concepts that almost always apply, instead of these rare techniques where the situation, the odds of that actually coming up in a real roll are so, so slim. Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. But but that's why I'm spending I'm sincere in the hunt for the most minimalistic Jijitsu that I can find, because before anything else, I want to talk about the real things that always happen, always happen. It's not easy to find them. It's not easy. Speaker 1: It is actually very difficult from my experience. I mean, it it takes a lot of analysis and looking at patterns and talking to other people who have different perspectives to see what you can find that's in common and maybe to also find things that you thought were true that actually turn out to not be as broadly true as you thought. So, you know, this is another lesson from the world of software development. It takes a tremendous amount of work to make something simple. It's easy to make something complicated, but making something really simple is actually the sign of expertise. Speaker 2: Yes. What happens all the time when I present some of the minimalistic point of view on stand up is that my interlocutor will start to put things on top of it. You know, sometimes it's like if people are something in the brain of people is fighting against keeping things simple. I do believe that to a degree we need complexity. But yeah, I choose a different path. I want to find the very minimalistic nature of everything that I can do with with Jijitsu and MMA, and then I will use this map to create to see what skills I need so that the game starts to almost to design themselves. It's a very long process. It's unforgiving, it's frustrating, very frustrating. Also there's there's not that many people that you can actually talk to about these things. Like, designing, defining the stand up all the stand up exchanges to this level of again, minimalism, right? Once there is connection, I am blocking or lifting your base and I steer you. Back to the mat or hands to the mat. Back to the mat, there will be pin or guard. Hands to the mat, I'm chasing your back. But to arrive to this, took me a real, real, real long time of, yeah, exploration. Speaker 1: I like that point you brought up about how every time you try to make things simple, someone else will come by and try to layer complexity on top of it. It's like a a pathological need that a lot of Jijitsu coaches seem to need to have. And I think that comes from an internal ego need from those coaches rather than any value they're providing. I think that for many coaches, they feel like they have to be providing more info, lest they come across as not being knowledgeable enough. And I mean, so many Jijitsu coaches that I've met, myself included, have this natural tendency to want to share more and give more info, because you feel like if you're not giving more info, like you're not doing your job. But so often good communication is actually about restraint and about what you choose not to share because it's a distraction. Speaker 2: Yeah, we touched this topic today already, right? What you choose not to share, what you choose not to correct today is as important as what you are sharing or what you are fixing today. And again, I cannot recognize any mistake that I did not do. So, I've been there and sometimes I'm also falling into this trap where I overshare, because, you know, I get I get tunnel vision and whatever else. And the minimalistic approach and forcing myself to a very restricted number of games that I have to do with in every about every situation in every class, it's one way that I can circumvent this tendency to oversharing, overtalking, overfixing, right? Then on top of that, again, you know, a lot of time I I take the time. I check on the clock how much I talk during the class, and I try to cut that down and down and down and down and down. It's it's an unforgiving process. It depresses me sometimes, because you know, many people should try to do that. And uh a lot of people would be surprised to see that they talk 35 minutes in a class of one hour. Speaker 1: Well, you touched on how there really aren't that many people who are thinking deeply about the intricacies of game design in Jijitsu. But the nice thing that I found is that for the people who are, they're all very generous with their time, and of course, they want to collaborate and share more info and learn. And you're really at the the cutting edge of that. If people want to contact you or ask you questions or maybe learn about your method, where can they find you or where can they contact you? Speaker 2: Write me a message on Instagram. I always, always, always take time to answer everybody. I treat people like I would like to be treated when I reach out to somebody else for questions. So, Speaker 1: Amazing. And what is your Instagram handle? Speaker 2: Francesco Fonte 76. Speaker 1: Fantastic. Well, I will put a link in the show notes, because I want to make sure people find it. And like you said, I mean, you're always great about responding to people's messages. Sometimes this kind of conversation sounds really intuitive and agreeable to people, but often they struggle to really figure out, well, how do I do it? Like, how do I apply it? I think that's kind of a interestingly, it's in line with the conversation we had here, right? Sometimes just getting people to get going is the most important thing. So, I always encourage people, if you want to go down this road and you want to learn more about games-based coaching and how this stuff really looks on the ground, contact some of these coaches, right? There's a lot of great coaches in the Jijitsu community, and everyone that I've spoken to is extremely generous with their time. So, I will put a link in the show notes if people want to reach out and chat with you or or work more directly with you just to make it easy. I'll also put a link to our stuff. Everything we make lives at BJJmentalmodels.com. I always tell people, hit up the podcast, get the mini episodes where we kind of just talk about quick hit concepts that again, I wish I had been told when I started. Sign up for our newsletter. We got over 13,000 people on there. That's all free. If you want to level up with us further, go to BJJ Mental Models Premium. From there, we've got the world's largest library of Jijitsu audio courses, specifically on conceptual thinking and the big ideas behind coaching and performance. We've also got premium podcasts from folks like Emily Kwok and Rob Bernacki. If you're fans of those coaches, their podcasts are exclusive to Premium. Um, you can also be a part of our awesome community. And if you level up even further with us in our coaching or pro tiers, we can do rolling reviews for you and we can also actually help market and expand your business. But I will end the pitch there. It's all at BJJmentalmodels.com. I'll put a link in the show notes to our stuff, but also to your stuff as well, Francesco. And as always, thanks for coming by and talking about this. I think this concept of this journey from info to skills to games and back again, gives a really interesting perspective as to how these pieces all fit together. There's a lot of discussion in the space right now about how do concepts fit with games, and can these things even coexist? And I think that the way that you've explained it really gives people a a playbook for how you use these pieces and how they chain together. And that's been a missing piece in this journey so far. So, thank you so much for coming by and explaining it. Speaker 2: Steve, thank you a lot for showing interest and to for listening to my rant. I I really, really, really appreciate it. Speaker 1: I wouldn't offer if people weren't interested. So, I do thank you for doing this, because I know people get value out of it. It's a really unique type of conversation, and there's a lot of coaches out there right now who are looking for better, more efficient ways to not even just produce quality grapplers, but to also make a training environment that's more fun. You know, when you and I came up in Jijitsu, honestly, it's not that much fun just doing, you know, technique copy-paste all the time. Sometimes a more playful environment is better, and I think that this is maybe something that the next generation can learn from us. Speaker 2: I really hope so. Yeah. Speaker 1: Amazing. Well, thank you, sir. And of course, thank you to the listeners as well. I do appreciate everyone hanging out with us here. We'll talk to you in the next one. See you then.