Ep. 338: Gaze Tracking, feat. Timothy Lee Peterson

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 BJJMentalModels.com and check it out today. Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to BJJ Mental Models episode 338. I'm Steve Kwan. BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent Jiu-Jitsu approach. And I'm here today with a first-timer to the podcast. I've got Tim Lee Peterson on the line. Tim, my friend, how's it going, sir? Speaker 2: Going great. How are you doing? Speaker 1: I am also doing good. I was saying earlier with a name like Timothy Lee Peterson, I half expect you to be like a historian who specializes in the study of like Italian fascism and agriculture or something. It just it's a very nice, fancy-sounding name, but of course, you're a Jiu-Jitsu dude. Why don't you tell everyone about who you are in case they don't know the name? Speaker 2: Yeah, my name's Tim. I started doing martial arts when I was about four years old. I started doing Jiu-Jitsu when I was about 15, and I continued training and teaching at UCLA. And then, after I finished teaching at UCLA, I opened a school called Robot, and I ran that for over 12 years. And now I kind of teach at a couple different places and looking to explore a couple of different ideas with you today. Speaker 1: Nice, man. Well, I am excited. You had a really cool topic that you wanted to discuss, and it actually aligns with something I've been trying to figure out a way to get here on the podcast for a while, but I will maybe turn it over to you. Why don't you introduce what you wanted to talk about and maybe we can put this in front of the audience and kind of help them learn some conceptual Jiu-Jitsu. Speaker 2: Yeah, so there's kind of two audiences that might be listening to this. Most people probably do Jiu-Jitsu or are familiar with it in some way, and then there's other people who maybe just have a curiosity about Jiu-Jitsu and want to learn more about it. But first, I would think about the experience of walking down the street and tripping on the sidewalk, and this example's been used quite a bit. You have that feeling of falling, and you try to catch yourself by stepping, or maybe you fall so much that you have to extend your limb or something like this. That reflex is governed by your vestibular system. And it's why when you are startled by a loud sound, it feels very similar to tripping on the sidewalk. Again, your limbs extend, you have this predictable shirking away from what you perceive to be the source of it. And these reflexes are things that we don't resist. We don't think about, we don't process. They don't go up to our brain. They go to our spine, and then they go right back out to our limbs so that we can act very quickly. And in grappling, in Judo, and wrestling, and Jiu-Jitsu, we manipulate this sense of falling. We often call it Kuzushi or off-balancing, so that we can throw somebody or take them down to the floor. And this is super important. You have to learn how to off-balance somebody in order to be effective at throwing them. You also learn about things like how somebody's gait pattern, the way that they walk, affects this ability to off-balance them. If you can make them walk predictably, you can off-balance them predictably. Similar things happen when you're down on the ground. If I'm playing guard, if I'm on my back using my legs to defend myself or to attack you, and you're standing over top of me passing my guard, you can still be off-balanced because your spine is not on the ground. If I move your head around in certain ways we can talk about, then you will have, again, you'll have these sort of predictable falling responses. And again, in Jiu-Jitsu, we use this to trip people, make them fall, sweep them, things like this. You notice that the person playing guard, though, if they're on their back, does not really experience a sense of being off-balanced. They're very balanced. In fact, they're so balanced that they're able to take their feet off the ground and use them against the other person. And we call this playing guard. But there's another mechanical occurrence that is very related to your spine and nervous system that does affect the person whose spine is on the ground, and we could refer to it as something like alignment or misalignment. And this second item is, I think, what I would like to focus on today and sort of how it relates to the notion of balancing that I think a lot of people are already somewhat familiar with. Speaker 1: Nice. I mean, there's a few things I can tag onto there. Talking about when people are standing up, you're absolutely right that there's a level of response that's kind of pre-programmed into our biology that's we, you know, it's very, very hard to stop ourselves from doing this. The interesting thing, if, I mean, for anyone who's a parent, they've probably seen this, when you're trying to teach a kid how to walk when they're learning for the first time, they're falling over left and right, and they do this as well. They have those natural responses that just happen. You know, you don't teach them to do these things. They just immediately kind of go stiff, and their arms become like frames to prevent them from landing headfirst on the ground when they fall over. And that's a very important thing to understand when someone is standing up, right? And you see this in Jiu-Jitsu with sweeps, too. If you're doing an airborne sweep, why do we do a lot of the sweeps that we do? Many of them, the whole intent is I want to get them to post their hands on the ground, right? Because if I can do that, now they're light, I can get up and wrestle up, I can get into a leg entanglement. It's very hard to stop yourself from posting if you're about to land headfirst. Speaker 2: Yeah, and and on that note, the extension of the limb is to protect the nervous system. It's obvious to say that, but it's worth coming back to because the idea essentially is that the nervous system prioritizes itself. Your brain doesn't want to go crashing towards the center of the earth and like a cantaloupe explode on the sidewalk. So it will extend limbs to keep you away from that fall. You could even go back to when we were in our arboreal species and reaching for branches and grasping allowed us to not fall out of a tree if something were to happen. This this extension in our body is very deep in our nervous system, and we sort of repurposed it as we became bipedal into the action that we call throwing. And throwing is very related to our gait pattern of walking, how our head moves in order for to allow us to throw, how our eyes turn in order to allow us to throw effectively. As an example, if you watch somebody who's new to striking in Muay Thai, and you watch them punch a bag, you'll notice their eyes kind of fix on the bag as they punch. But if you watch somebody who's more experienced, you'll see that they start looking out of the corner of each eye as they turn their spine slightly when they throw jabs or when they throw crosses. This sort of turning action, this walking pattern where our head moves that we can talk about, and then the extension of our limbs is repurposed through training in Muay Thai and striking to throw punches and things like that, but also can be, when it's not trained, it can be exploited, and people sweep us, they put us in straight arm locks and things like this. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. And even with training, sometimes you still have to do it. I mean, look, very, very good black belts will post hand first onto the mat to prevent themselves from getting swept. Do they want to do that? It's usually not good to post on your hands for the reasons we talked about earlier, but if the alternative is crashing face first into the mat, you're going to post on your hands most of the time. So it's something that even if you train really, really hard, there are still situations you're going to encounter where you kind of have to do it. And I you also talked about how part of the reason why this happens, people are trying to make their bodies kind of longer, they're extending things. And from a Jiu-Jitsu context, people who have listened to me talk for a long time have known that one of the things that you're trying to do when you're trying to crack open someone's defense and you're trying to, you know, get to a more dominant position, often you're trying to force their body to open up a bit, right? Because I mean, if I were to ask you, what's really the thing that makes side control a worse position to be stuck in than to be playing guard? Why would I rather have you in my guard than have you on top side control? Well, it's because if you're on top side control, you've basically cut my body in half like a pizza. You've got my arms and my head on one side, and you've got my legs on the other side, and you're kind of just sitting right in the middle. You've cut my body in half, and so you're kind of forcing my body to open up, you're getting access to that, you know, my soft, squishy underbelly, my vulnerable area, and it makes it easy for you to hold me in position and also to start isolating things further, right? Because what are you going to do if you get side control on me? Well, you're probably going to try to, you know, isolate my arms or my head so that you can lock in a submission, or you're going to try to open up more access to my belly so you can go to mount or knee ride, or maybe you're going to try to turn me over so you can get to my back. But in any event, you're starting to kind of crack me open like a walnut. You've got that option, whereas if I am playing guard, I've got all my weapons facing right at you, and it's going to be a lot harder for you to just cut me in half until you get past my legs, which we would call a guard pass, right? So that's a general idea in Jiu-Jitsu that's that's very important. You're trying to kind of separate their arms, their legs, even pull their head away so that they're not just this big like shell that that's hard to attack. And much of positional advancement involves kind of slicing a person's body up like a pizza so that they can't use all of their weapons, their arms and their legs effectively in unison, right? That's kind of a defining characteristic of all of the dominant positions. You're cutting the person's body in half to make it harder for them to use every weapon they've got at the same time. Speaker 2: Yeah, and to go further on that idea, when someone is under side control, the essential frame that we all know we have to use is we have to connect our elbows to our knees, like we were in turtle position or like we were crawling. We have to connect our elbows to our knees so that we can move ourselves away from the other person. But when someone has you in side control, they can make things a lot worse for you by cross-facing you in a way where your eyes point, let's say, to your left, and then pulling your leg so that your knees, say, point to the right. And what happens is by turning the top of your spine to the left and turning the bottom of your spine to the right, they put you in a position where your nervous system is saying, I cannot deal with this stress on the spine. This torque on my spine is actually going to cause damage. So we need to get away or stop or get away from whatever is causing me to have this input to the nervous system, which is where you see limb extension again from a pin. The person was not falling, so what is giving rise to this limb extension? Well, their spine being twisted up, their nervous system is saying, we have to get out of this, and they start extending. But what happens if you imagine, for example, you're lying down on a bench press, and you're going to try to move some heavy weight, but then before you go to bench press that weight, you turn your eyes left and you point your knees right. What's going to happen? You're going to feel like you can't move the weight at all, even if you could move it easily before. And the same is true in Jiu-Jitsu. You're still making that extension happen, but it's mechanically compromised. And so the person on top is able to capitalize on that and take advantage of it. And the thing that is so interesting about that is it comes from back when we were babies learning to crawl and walk and stand up and all of the things that we do in Jiu-Jitsu to protect our nervous system, protect our us from a fall, are things we learned as little kids, like how to roll, how to crane your neck, how to come up to a propped position on your elbows, how to eventually crawl, how to eventually hoist yourself up to standing. And it's those same mechanical movements and shapes that we make with our body that allow us to play guard and to do Jiu-Jitsu. And it's the same problems, like our spine being twisted or us falling or feeling like we're falling, that create that extension that we've been experiencing since we were actually little kids. Speaker 1: Yeah, it's really interesting because, you know, in Jiu-Jitsu, we often talk a lot about mental conditioning and how part of the reason we train is so that we can kind of bypass some of the natural responses that can be harmful in a combat situation. You know, someone who has never trained a martial art before, if they get into a physical altercation, they're probably going to go into that fight, flight, freeze response, right? They might adrenaline dump, they'll probably be breathing too hard, they'll probably be way too tense, they're going to tire themselves out, they're going to burn themselves out. So we as martial artists train to overcome that so that we don't succumb to those things that are that can be counterproductive and we can fight more intelligently. However, there is a point where your physiology, the human body's physiology just cannot be denied. And at some point, those natural instincts are just going to take over, and even the best athletes in the world can be forced into panic mode and into making dumb mistakes. And that's actually a big part of good Jiu-Jitsu is you're putting so much pressure on the other person that they can no longer fight calmly and rationally, and they start to panic. The example that I think of, you know, I'm an old ass guy, so I remember back in the days in the 2000s, right? I mean, you probably remember this, there was a it was a pretty dark time when the Iraq War happened, and there were incidences with waterboarding where US soldiers and contractors were being accused of torturing, you know, other people from other countries. You remember this whole thing, right? And there was a some conversation about, well, it's just water. How much torture can it be? And I remember Christopher Hitchens, he didn't think waterboarding was torture. So he volunteered to have it done to himself and have it recorded just to prove. And within like 30 seconds or something after they did it to him, he said, no, I was wrong. This is absolutely torture, right? I mean, we can talk about how we know, you know, even if you know you're not going to be hurt, even if you know you're technically in a controlled environment, when your lungs start to, you know, fill up with water, at some and your airways get blocked by liquid, at some point, your body's innate programming just takes over, and it doesn't matter how rational and composed you are at that point. And we can do the same thing in Jiu-Jitsu if we put enough pressure on people. You brought up some good examples of how that can happen. Speaker 2: Yeah, and the you see people get into situations where, you know, a newer person will unthinkingly post their hand out like you were describing, where a professional athlete, you'll see them knowingly hesitate to put their hand out because they know that, okay, once my hand goes out, all of these problems start cascading in front of me, and I might need to immediately take my hand off the mat and roll to defend a submission that's going to happen because I put my hand out. Things like this where you again, like to emphasize your point, the reflex will happen no matter what, and you see it even at the highest levels, and you see people have essentially bailout methods for dealing with these unavoidable consequences because they do happen and because you do have to have something to do at that point, otherwise you didn't make it to the pro level. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. And again, we've seen a lot of this in Jiu-Jitsu just in the last few years. I came up in a time where we were told that, you know, tapping from pressure is something you should never, ever do. Never tap from position, is what I was told. And that thinking has changed a lot. I mean, nowadays, what is the smother? It is basically, in a lot of ways, a positional tap. You're not even doing a traditional air or blood choke in the way that we would normally think of it. You're basically just like, well, effectively, you're waterboarding the person, just in the most disgusting way possible, right? It's a terrible thing to do to people, and you will see even very good athletes tap out to smother chokes. And that really just goes to show that there's no amount of toughness or composure that can completely override your need at some point to have oxygen and to feel like your body is aligned properly. And understanding that and constantly trying to then take your opponent's body out of alignment, man, that is a game-changing way of thinking. I always tell people, if you can get past the need to feel like you have to do moves and just focus on simple ideas, like you talked about. I mean, a friend of the show, Omid Khorshidi, he's a black belt out of the UK. He refers to this as rinsing the spine. And I first heard that, and I thought, okay, rinsing the spine. Is this some weird British thing I just don't understand? What does rinsing mean? And he said, by that, he means like, think of how, you know, when you're doing the dishes, you've got a wet dish rag, how do you get the water out? You rinse it, right? You squeeze it, you twist it, all of the water comes out. Do that to the other person's spine in Jiu-Jitsu, right? Regardless of what move you're trying to do, if you can rinse their spine, basically twist it, and the way you do that is, you know, you turn their head in a direction that their body isn't facing, it will shut down almost everything they can otherwise do. Any position where you can get the head facing in a different direction from the body is a game-changer. So even if you don't know much about Jiu-Jitsu at all, if you're a very, very early white belt, if you can just force their head to look away from you or look in a different direction from their body, that is powerful stuff, even if you don't know anything else about the sport. Speaker 2: Yeah, and I would say that another a couple ideas on this. One is, you have to use certain cues in Jiu-Jitsu before you can deeply understand the mechanical elements that are going on. So we're talking about the spine and how to move it, and we could talk about the point of your chin or the corner of your jaw and like the ideal placement of your shoulder, things like this. And those are very important. But at first, what you're looking for if you want to use these kinds of ideas is general cues so you can observe when it's happening correctly and when it's not happening correctly, and so you can observe other people do it and when they're not doing it. And I would recommend turning the eyes and turning the knees. And the reason is because when your eyes turn, this turns the very top of your spine at your cervical spine. And your knees are an indicator of where your pelvis is pointed, and your pelvis is where the bottom of your spine inserts. So to get specific, if you were talking about twisting up someone's spine or ringing out their spine, you could think about the very top and very bottom of it. Turning their eyes and turning their knees, as the knees are an indicator of where the pelvis is pointed. Almost, I think, always the best example is to start in half guard where your one of your legs is trapped, and because that leg is trapped, if you move that leg or that knee, their knees will move in accordance with it. And so your cross-face can be used to point their eyes one way by putting your shoulder into their chin, and then your trapped leg, if you pull your heel towards your butt, will exaggerate the effects of that cross-face by twisting their lower spine the opposite way. And what you will notice is they have to essentially do one of two things to resolve this contradiction. If you've cross-faced them so that their eyes are pointing left and their knees are pointing right, they're going to have to get their knees pointing left, which if you can imagine this, would open up a sort of three-quarter mount, or they're going to have to defeat the cross-face itself to turn their eyes to the right, which if you could imagine this, would open up a cross-knee pass. Now, that maybe is kind of hard to imagine just uh visualizing it or hearing about it, but the essential idea is when someone's eyes and knees point opposite directions, they have to resolve this by either getting the knees to agree with the eyes or getting the eyes to agree with the knees. And then a second idea just related to this is if you're playing guard and you're very new to Jiu-Jitsu, you should imagine that your eyes are like a field of vision, like headlights, and that your knees must be within those headlights at all times. Ideally, they should be aligned with your eyes so that your whole spine is pointing the same direction. But the reason this is important is because if you can imagine you're playing guard, if someone goes to pass your guard to a certain direction, the person playing guard is often tempted to fix their gaze on the person that is passing instead of anticipating where they're going and turning their eyes even further. So if somebody is passing to my right and I'm playing guard, I should be turning my eyes to the right more than they've moved to that direction so that the top of my spine is already turned that way, and my legs can follow it very easily. And the way you can know this is true is go play guard on the opposite side. Go play guard on what's most people's bad side, their left side, and notice how much, especially if you have experience, notice how much your eyes want to fixate on the person when they go left and you have to play left, versus how easily you allow your eyes to turn when someone goes to your right, if you have a good amount of experience, I would recommend that. Speaker 1: Yeah, man, I was wondering if you were going to bring this up, and I'm so glad you did. The whole game about what the hell should you be actually looking at when you're doing Jiu-Jitsu is something that most coaches don't really get into. And I mean, we could talk about that a bit here, and I think it'll honestly probably blow a lot of people's minds because they'll never have heard this. In the real world, we generally want to look eye to eye at people, right? We make eye contact. That is how we recognize someone, that's how we kind of track where they're at. You're looking at their face, you're looking at their eyes. That is completely workable when we're at the mall talking to each other. But in Jiu-Jitsu, there are times when trying to make eye contact with someone can actually screw up your body positioning. Because you don't need to be looking at their eyes. You're not having a conversation with this person. You need to keep your neck strongly aligned. So an example that comes up a lot, if you are a Gi player, when you are standing in someone's guard in the Gi, people make the mistake of looking down at their opponent and looking at their face, right? So if I'm standing in your guard, my natural reaction is to look right into your eyes, you know, like we're lovers. And the problem, though, is that when I do that, I have to tilt my head downward to look at your eyes. And that can be enough of a posture break that if you get a good collar grip on me, you can pull me down. So what a lot of coaches will do, I remember my coach teaching me this, is especially in the Gi, don't look at their eyes, look at the wall, right? Like keep your head up, keep looking level, keep your gaze parallel to the floor, because if your head tips downward, it makes it way easier for them to do a snapdown or a collar drag. If you keep your neck upright, it's weird and awkward because you're not looking at them anymore, you're looking at the wall behind them, but that prevents them from doing that collar drag. And there's other examples of that, too. If you're playing a supine guard, for example, people, their natural reaction is to lift their head up off the mat so that they can look at their opponent. But the problem is if you lift your head up off the mat while you're lying down, now your body starts to curve a little bit, and they can more easily like pull you up or spin you around or move your body. So what a lot of people will tell you to do if you're playing a recumbent or supine guard is they'll tell you to keep the back of your head stapled to the mat. And that actually means you're kind of looking up at the ceiling, you're not really looking at your opponent, but that means that your head is now a point of contact with the mat, and that makes it way harder for them to move you. So all of these things are completely counterintuitive in the context of how we live day-to-day life, right? We generally look at people's faces when we're talking, but in Jiu-Jitsu, sometimes to be most effective, you don't want to look at their face because doing so allows them to use your head as a lever, which you don't want. Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm going to let's go off of those two points because on the one hand, I am always telling people at the beginner level to keep their head off the mat when they play open guard, but I think it's for the same mechanical reason you're describing, but it's because they're having trouble with it, which is, first, especially like kids, because their head is like what, 30% of their body weight, they have trouble keeping their head off the mat because they don't have the core strength to really lift themselves up, which creates problems when they need to be mobile to play guard and to spin effectively. But then to what you're saying, when they flatten out their body and you make a strong spine like that, it makes it much harder for someone to move you around. So, on the one hand, yes, definitely agree on that point, but they're also careful if you're a beginner in Jiu-Jitsu, almost always when you're moving around in guard, you need to be able to slide around on your lower back. So work on keeping your head up for your drills and things like this. One thing I was really happy to hear you say a second ago was, I've heard people give the cue to look up at the ceiling when they're it's time to stand up in the guard, which I think often creates a fault in the spine in the other direction where the cervical spine gets extended because the chin gets so lifted up that their lower back overextends and they're more easily broken down when they go to stand. But keeping your gaze on the far wall, I think, 100%. And again, I'm not disagreeing with the point about keeping your head on the floor. I'm simply saying that the mechanics you describe with head on the floor versus head off the floor where someone is easily spun, often beginners will have trouble not spinning effectively, so keep your head off the floor if that's the case. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. I should actually expand on the context. I'm not saying that you should always have your head stapled to the floor, but just rather if you are committed to playing a particular type of supine guard. Speaker 2: Yeah, I think I'm trying to cut the trolls off at the sorry. Speaker 1: Yeah, for me personally, I don't always do it because I'm a turtle player and a shin-on-shin player. So for me, sometimes I want my opponent to pull me up into a ball because it gives me access to their legs. So that's my thing. But if you want to play a game, which is like a lie back down on your back type of guard, often when you do that, you have to be worried about the other person trying to pull you up or to spin your body around, and if you staple your head to the floor, that's an extra point of contact which can prevent it. So not something you always want to do, but if you're committed to that type of guard, it's something that can make it way harder for your opponent to move you. So, good observation there. Speaker 2: Yeah, one other thing that we should maybe we could talk about is related to off-balancing, it's related to alignment. And if you just uh if you imagine when you're at a standstill and you go to step forward, say you're at a crosswalk and it just turned green, it's time to walk across the street. Asking you, what is the first part of your body that moves? And I think most of the time the reflexive response is your foot. But I would think that if that happened, it would look like you were dipping your toe into a swimming pool kind of to test the temperature of the water. What actually moves first, and it's even more exaggerated if you get up out of a chair without using your hands. The thing that actually moves first is your head. Your head shifts forward, and when that shift occurs with your head, your vestibular system cues you up to step forward with your leg to create a new base of support on the ground. And then you flow from the original base of support, one of your legs, to the new base of support. And so you could think about walking as a pattern of movement where your head shifts, you connect a base of support to the ground, and then you flow from one base of support to another. And this is from a book called Freestyle that I can send you a link for. And this gait pattern of shift, connect, flow is very wrapped up in everything we do in the standing position, and then later on, you can see it on the ground, where when you notice people go to grip and move someone's head, they're not generally just trying to move the person's head like they want to put their forehead on the ground. I mean, that would be great if it happened. But usually, the expectation is I move your head in a particular way, and I can make you step in predictable ways. And being able to move your head and control your step is really bound up in knowing that moving someone's head will always force them to step in these specific ways. And so, again, the notion of alignment and off-balance and being balanced is all the same parts of our nervous system, and they feel very different or seem very different at first, but we should be able to appreciate them whether we're standing and moving around and walking and manipulating our sense of walking, or down on the floor and essentially creating torque to twist and break apart someone's mechanical strength, their alignment in their bones. Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, man. Well, how does this translate to the way that you teach and train? I think probably what we've discussed here, it's going to make a lot of sense to people, you know, intuitively, yeah, I don't want to let you twist my head. Cool, makes sense. But how does this actually manifest when we're training Jiu-Jitsu? Like how would you use this to maybe alter the way that you instruct a class? Speaker 2: Yeah, so one of the big things is to use your training time effectively. And so I want people to be very comfortable in the standing position. And this is true Gi, no Gi, this is adults, this is kids, this is everyone that I work with. I want you to be competent at least in all of the major areas of grappling. And so in order to do that, you essentially need to train these things every time you train, every day. So I always start with standing position. I like to get things to a point where if we don't have a lot of time that day, we essentially can do 10 rounds of grip fighting, one minute each, and that can suffice for the day. I also am a big fan of working on something defensively every single time you train. And it might just be a simple defensive movement and escape that gets you into the topic at hand. But I think standing position and defensive movements, guard recovery, escapes, counter movements, things like this, should be in every single lesson. And these help you get a full grasp on what the body sensation is of the topics we're talking about now, which is Kuzushi and and alignment of the spine. A lot of people want to focus their lessons and their training exclusively on their offense, but that's like only hearing one half of a song or practicing one hand of on piano or something like this where you're not getting the full body sensation you need to be properly informed about the technique. However, being in the standing position every day and being on the defensive end of something every day puts you in territory that allows you to develop this body sense and mechanical awareness every single time you train. And that I think is really important for having a strong foundation to work from. So that's one of them. Speaker 1: Yeah. Another interesting thing about kind of tracking the gaze where people's eyes are looking is in Jiu-Jitsu, we're not obligated to just stand in front of someone and just exchange throw attempts back and forth. This is something that's kind of different between us and maybe our our sister sport Judo, right? In Jiu-Jitsu, you can level change up and down as much as you want, and it's always threatening to do so. In Jiu-Jitsu, if I sit down on the ground, that's still a threat to you, which is kind of wild when you think about it. So that's something that you can exploit, too, when it comes to how to how to manipulate the gaze. When you level change, what you're ultimately trying to do is you're trying to either go down while they're still looking up or you're trying to get up while they're still looking down. And you take advantage of that fact. This is actually a huge advantage for smaller people. You know, small people often feel kind of outgunned in Jiu-Jitsu because, you know, they're not as big, they're not as strong. Sometimes people claim that small people are faster, and that might be true, but honestly, there's a lot of really fast big dudes, so I don't even know if you can count on that. But one thing that small people do have is the ability to level change rapidly. And once I realized that, I was able to deploy that really effectively against bigger people. So if I want to stand in front of you and we want to exchange standup, I don't have to just stand there on my feet until one of us gets thrown. I can kind of alternate drop for a shot, even sit down, get back up again. And if I keep doing that, it forces the person on top to have to keep adjusting their gaze, right? Because, you know, if you're looking right at me eye to eye because we're both standing, and suddenly I drop for a double, you know, if I can catch you bad timing, it's going to be real hard for you to do anything about that. And similarly, if we're down playing guard, and then suddenly I just stand up when you expect me to, you know, actually play classic Jiu-Jitsu, if I just get up, that can be devastating. Sometimes the easiest sweep is to just stand up. And a lot of that has to do with gaze tracking, right? You want to take your body to a place where their eyes are no longer pointed in the right direction to be effective against you. Speaker 2: Yeah, a couple thoughts on that. One of them, if you notice a really popular technique in the Gi is to fake a guard pull and shoot for an ankle pick. And you'll see, I think when people have trouble with this particular technique, they have essentially the fake of the guard pull has turned into them faking themselves out. They're sort of psychologically holding back in some way. And it can be tricky if you're not sure what to look for to help a student that's having trouble with this. They're trying to do a fake guard pull into an ankle pick. But when they fake the guard pull, the person that's on the receiving end doesn't believe them and doesn't react properly to give the ankle pick exposure that they're looking for. And what's going on there? And a big part of it, if you watch, is the person doing the technique, they fake, but they don't move their head as dramatically away from the other person's head. And it's the movement of my head when I'm holding your lapel, it's the movement of my head away from your head that pulls your head forward and makes you feel like you're falling, and therefore creates that reflex pull back that I can use and exploit to get to an ankle pick. And oftentimes people imitate a movement of the limbs, but they don't cue in enough to the actual arc of movement that the head must go through for those limbs to create an actual effect. The other thing on the point you made about a smaller person is a smaller person for the same notion, a taller person, always exist in relation to the person that they're going with, right? So if I'm 6'6", but my opponent is 7' tall, then I'm effectively short against them. And likewise, uh for being just taller or shorter than someone in general, usually if someone is shorter, they're almost always going to have an easier time getting their head under the other person's head. A lot of dominant positions or strategies for takedowns involve keeping your head above the other person's, but having your head under is just as legitimate for things like you're describing, shooting into the legs, where you need to keep you need to make sure that your head makes contact with their body unobstructed. And also for sacrifice throws, for Tomoe Nage, for Sumi Gaeshi, things like that, you need to be able to move your head under the person so that your falling body weight can assist you in throwing them. And I think once you realize like tall and short exist in relation to who you're going with, you realize, I might be generally kind of tall or short, but I also need a fully developed strategy for when I'm not in that position. Because I'm usually, I'm a lightweight, but I'm a little over 6' tall. So I'm kind of tall for my weight class. So I really get comfortable throwing with O Soto because I can reach for it from really far away against people. But when I go against someone who's taller than me and comfortable with that, it definitely can take me a second to get my bearings. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. Understanding the body relationship between yours and the other person really informs your game because like you said, many, many strategies, and where you see this a lot is Judo, right? Because many of the sacrifice throws involve you getting your body under the other person's center of gravity, like um you brought up Tomoe Nage, right? Or Seoi Nage. You're basically trying to load up their body onto yours, which requires you to get under them. And so there's a reason why these tend to be techniques preferred by smaller people. Whereas oftentimes more lanky people, like you said, they'll prefer things like O Soto Gari or maybe Uchi Mata. A lot of the things where your legs are doing a lot of the heavy lifting because if you have that range, why not use it? And then, of course, you get into people who are kind of in the middle of the weight distribution, and those people really have to do the work because half the time they're fighting bigger people, half the time they're fighting smaller people, so they kind of have to have options in both situations. I always envy the like the giant heavyweights or the really, really tiny people even because at least they only have to have one game plan because they know everyone's going to be on one side of the weight distribution relative to them. Speaker 2: Yeah, and just I want to say, I really would encourage people to I think there's an inclination to want to teach people Jiu-Jitsu when you do Jiu-Jitsu. I think that's a very common thing you want to maybe it's just you mention a detail to somebody once you're comfortable and you have that much experience, but I think it's something a lot of people want to do even early on at white belt and things like this. And I really would encourage people to do that, and I would encourage senior students to help guide that process because these types of one of my goals when I teach Jiu-Jitsu is to try and create fluency in students so that they can talk about Jiu-Jitsu and accurately imagine and talk about and discuss and break apart problems just through their imagined sense of Jiu-Jitsu, like a musician would be able to do if you described them a bunch of chords or or a scale or something like this. And to do that, you have to practice it. And I think that a wise student and coach relationship is one where the students are teaching each other and the coach is guiding all of them to make sure that they're practicing this teaching well because it is that teaching that will reinforce a lot of these ideas. And you kind of when you help someone develop a game, you see your own game through a different perspective, just like when you, you know, you hear your voice recorded for the first time and you like die of cringing, but then you're kind of like, okay, well, that's what I'm working with. Like, I'm going to try and speak clearly as best I can, you know. But it's the same with Jiu-Jitsu, like, this is what I've got. I'm trying to I'm doing the best I can to expand that understanding, and here's kind of how I would recommend you do things. And then you, you know, you're in the shower and you're like, man, I could have maybe suggested they do this other thing and stuff like this. And then you, you know, you get better at teaching, and I would think about doing that as early as the urge strikes you to help your training partners because it will help you in the long term. Speaker 1: Yeah. This is actually an area where I have a bit of disagreement with a lot of the conventional wisdom in Jiu-Jitsu. People often say, you know, when you're a white belt or you're a blue belt, don't coach. Leave that to the black belts. First of all, this kind of hierarchy stuff, I just it doesn't jive with me. I don't like it, right? We should be trying to learn from everyone in the room. And if if you as a black belt can't find a way to learn from the white belts and the blue belts, you're not really a great black belt. Part of being a black belt, part of being experienced is you should be able to know how to learn and make the best out of the situation that you're in. If you can't find a way to learn with a room full of white belts, that's a weakness, and it's something that you have to get over. So I actually, this is an area where I disagree with a lot of the conventional wisdom that junior belts should not teach. I actually think it's great when white belts and blue belts do things like start up a blog or do a podcast or create YouTube videos. People often, as you said, they're going to cringe about that, and they're going to say, why, they're going to make fun of me because I don't I'm a white belt, and I don't know what I'm doing. And, okay, look, it's not always about you presenting yourself as the font of all knowledge. It's okay to make content and still admit that there's a lot you don't know because you're not trying to position yourself as I am the expert that everyone must listen to. You're just trying to be another voice in the community, right? And sometimes the way that you get the interesting conversations going is by starting those conversations, right? So when people often, you know, criticize white belts and blue belts for trying to coach or create content, I think that is just really ugly gatekeeping stuff. I don't like it. I think that we're better off encouraging people to express their ideas because, first of all, then we can correct them if we need to. But also, I mean, a shocking amount of the time, I learn stuff from white belts and blue belts, right? I mean, there are especially now that our sport is finally starting to pull in best practices from other sports. There's a lot of people who are really well informed on things like motor science or coaching skill. Maybe they bring in a lot of experience from elsewhere in the world, but they just don't happen to be an experienced Jiu-Jitsu person. But they can still speak very intelligently about, you know, ecological dynamics or something. And that is an important thing to understand that your value does not begin and end with how good you are at grappling. Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, if a person was a white belt and they just happened to say something that was the most insightful thing anybody ever said about Jiu-Jitsu because they just dawned on them, it would still be true. And I think human beings naturally, we like to share the things about us that we find change us and that affect us and that are important to us. And when you discourage students from teaching, you're discouraging their actual enthusiasm for the art. Like some people, that's how they express their enthusiasm. It can be obnoxious to a degree, but that's also how they'll learn that it's obnoxious. That's how I learn when I'm being obnoxious. Like, I'm plenty obnoxious plenty of the time. But I try to, you know, understand and you have to learn this through experience where failure is not catastrophic for you. You have to the only way you can actually be effective and learn how to teach is to do it and consider your lessons and the people you're working with, and you think about how you can do a better job. And a good coach, I think, that wants to see their vision of Jiu-Jitsu and their methods expand will encourage their students to adopt their practices and then refine them because then they go, look, if I did this well, in 10 years, I got a lot of people I can really learn from. On that note, when I closed uh Robot, I had a bunch of black belts in that area who ended up opening a school or like an open mat school. It's called The Coop. If you're ever in that area in the Santa Monica area, you should check it out. And I said to them many times, not knowing, obviously, that COVID was going to happen, but I said to them, you know, the standard I have for black belts is that if I were to ever disappear, that you guys would be able to continue training and developing as if I was still here with you, like I would give you all of the things that I knew about to do that. And then that actually happened. And now I'm like, if you go to them, you're in great hands because I know that they continued, they didn't just learn what I taught them. They learned so many things I don't even know now that they've learned in the time since I haven't been with them. And I know that it's happened because that was already happening when we were working together. And I'm really proud of that. I'm not like scared of their development. I take it as like a credit to something I did right. But I think you you have to be willing to approach success in Jiu-Jitsu or goodness in Jiu-Jitsu as coming from a reflection of your students and their and your training partners as well, rather than just like, I am great because I can beat absolutely everyone. And there's a very small number of people who that can apply to. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it's also not scalable, right? You can be as great at Jiu-Jitsu as you want, but that doesn't mean you can reproduce that greatness in the people around you. And that's where we get into the conversation about how coaching is different from performance, and we should never assume that these two are the same thing and that just because someone's a great performer, that also means they'll be a great coach or vice versa. There's even today, there is way too much misunderstanding about how this works. I just saw someone just sent me this again, yet another black belt complaining about the quality of black belts and being watered down or whatever it is. Again, a lot of gatekeeping. Many people think that Jiu-Jitsu is just all about am I able to go into a tournament and win? And there's a lot more to it than that, right? There's a lot more to it than that. Coaching is a completely different thing, and I think you've touched on the the importance of that. And this also, of course, ties back to self-expression, allowing people to kind of figure out their game as it works for them. If you aren't really a great coach, you might just try to make all of your students carbon copies of yourself, which is really never a particularly winning strategy. Something else I wanted to ask about, on the topic of gaze tracking and where people's eyes are going. You know, we talked about how physiologically where you're looking impacts your performance and what you're going to be able to do mechanically. However, you can also use your gaze strategically, and it can even be used against you. One of the funny things about human beings is we tend to care where other human beings are are looking, right? If you and I are talking, and I suddenly stop talking to you and look to my left, what are you going to do? You're going to follow what I'm looking at. You're going to wonder what the fuck is this guy looking at, and you're going to look in the direction that I'm looking, right? So we take cues from other people based on where they're placing their attention. And it's always funny because, you know, some animals like some dogs can understand to follow our gaze, but a lot of other animals don't. I mean, I've got cats, right? I can point at something and tell them to look over there, and they don't give a, you know, they have no idea what I'm going on about. But you and I, if we're sitting across from each other having lunch, and suddenly I turn my head to the side and look, without even realizing it, you're going to follow me. And that absolutely has implications in Jiu-Jitsu. First of all, because I can kind of mess with your head, right? I can make you think I'm interested in something when I'm not based on what I'm looking at. But the flip side of that is I can also betray myself because sometimes I have a wandering eyes, and my gaze will go places where I'm telegraphing my intent when I really shouldn't have been. The most common place where you will see this is two people standing up, probably white belts, right? One person looks at the other person's feet. I know exactly what they're going to do, right? They they have it in their head that they want to shoot. They want to go for a single or a double, but they couldn't help themselves. They looked at the person's feet. First of all, that kind of breaks your posture a bit because you're dropping your head, but also it tells your opponent exactly what your intent is. So it becomes much easier for them to then expect a shot. But on the flip side, you can also fuck with them, right? You can look at their feet, make them think you're going low, and then you don't. So this is a strategy. You can kind of exploit our natural human inclinations to follow gaze and use that as an opportunity to mislead your opponent. If you're not careful, you can also use it as an opportunity to expose yourself. Speaker 2: Yeah, one thing I like to do for my own safety in the standing position, as well as just a strategy, is if I'm grip fighting with somebody, one of the first things I do is I'll bring my hand towards their peripheral vision and see at what point their eyes move to kind of track what my hand is doing. And you know, you kind of flick your hand out there and you bring it back, you don't just dangle it, obviously. But what I'm trying to see is at what sort of proximity does my grip begin to present a danger to them? And if it presents a danger at a range where it's not even realistic for me to have gripped them, I know that they're quite uncomfortable in the standing position. There are other people who if you go to fake a grip and you get a centimeter away from their lapel, their distance management and perception is so perfect that they won't even flinch because they know you weren't actually going to be able to grip them. And that can be really intimidating, obviously, like if you the range that people's sensitivity to movement, especially in the eyes, is very, very high because obviously it's very was very important to our survival. Like you're saying, you can manipulate it, and then you can also manipulate it again with what we were talking about before. If you're down on the floor, for example, and you're cross-facing somebody, let's say you're in side control, right? Their head's on your left, your left arm and elbow are under their head, you've reached forward, your left hand is grabbing into their armpit, you're making that false grip, you're pulling your elbow to your hip, you take your shoulder, you bring it under their mandible, you point it towards their chin, you start cross-facing them, it's pretty good. But if you turned your eyes to your right towards your legs, towards their legs, and turned your stance so that your left leg was somewhat short and your right leg was somewhat long, you would feel this dramatic increase in the amount of torque there was. It would even be if you were looking at their left knee, which in this example is the one that's further from you, it would be more torque when you looked at their right knee. You continued turning your eyes further and further. They would feel a significant increase in that twisting force that they're experiencing, and then they're going to move in these predictable ways. So again, it's not just the the eyes being used as a faint almost, but also to improve the mechanical efficiency of something that you're doing. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. This especially comes up in techniques where you are connecting to them with your head somehow. For example, if I'm on your back, my head placement is tremendously important because that's one of the things that will hold you in position. But even if I'm in top position, there are many situations where I can use my head like a battering ram. It's kind of, you know, I can use it to either hold you in place or drive into you so that my hands are free to do other things. And that is a tremendously powerful thing if you can do it, right? And in some situations, it can be the difference between a technique working and a technique not working, which is your head placement. One thing that I try to be very careful of, too, is I really don't like it when people mash my face, you know? And since I started Jiu-Jitsu, I've had a lot of competitors tell me like, well, you know what, you just got to tough it out. Sometimes they're just going to mash your face. I'm sorry, but no, I'm not that guy. I am a hobbyist. I have to go to offices. I really don't want to have two black eyes when I go into work. So there's a lot of techniques where you can take that away, particularly many low passes or crash passes, um where if you look away from them or you change the angle of your head, you can make it really hard for them to stiff arm your face. So again, that kind of comes down to what you're looking at and where your gaze tracks, right? And what your head positioning is. I just saw Lochlan actually post a really interesting social post about this. You know, he does those sub-meta quiz posts where he says, which of these two is correct, A or B? And he shows you two variants of the same position, and and one of them was like a passing position that was all about where his head is placed. So something else that maybe we can we can talk about here is when we talk about turtle or back position, you know, the reason why these are considered so dangerous, a big part of it is because you can't see what's going on. If I am turtled or if you are on my back, I have to rely on feel rather than on sight to know exactly what you're going to do. And that is something that you can accommodate for. You know, with enough training, you can learn to develop the sensitivity so I can feel where your hands and your legs are. And and I can fight accordingly. But then that changes your strategy as the attacker because you don't want to telegraph your hand or arm placement too much, lest I figure out what you're doing or get a handle on you. So that is its own completely different skill set, right? Because in this case, I'm not looking at you. If I'm in turtle or if you're on my back, I'm looking in a different direction. I can still fight effectively, though, as long as I can keep my head and my spine aligned, right? Because if I'm in turtle, maybe I'm not looking at you, but as long as you're not rinsing my spine, you know, twisting my head and body in a different direction. If I can track you and figure out where you are, I can still fight pretty effectively from there. So that raises a whole other question about how this plays into defensive positions where you're not even looking at your opponent. I'd love to know your thoughts on that. Like how do you apply this from turtle or from back control? Speaker 2: Yeah, so what I would say is uh to break up the sense that we call sight and vision from the cue of moving and turning the eyes as an indicator of where and how the spine is currently positioned. When we talk about things that happen before we make contact with each other, say in the grip fighting phase or things like this, we can actually use feints that exploit our hand-eye coordination. Once we make contact with each other, and we talk about turning the eyes, we're using the eyes as an indicator to say our spine or our body is turning left or turning right, things like this. But actually, the information of vision and sight is not particularly relevant once you've made contact with another person. This is why you can have blind competitors in Judo and grappling, but they must start gripped up. Is because the information of sight and vision is useful in something is necessary, let's say, in something like striking, but is essentially not useless information, but it's not the actual signal that you need when you're grappling. That comes from your skin and the rest of your vestibular system and your ability to feel changes in pressure in your body. That's why you can actually train very effectively in Jiu-Jitsu with your eyes closed. It's also why it's kind of compelling to close your eyes when you do something like listen to music, and you take away some of the information of sight in order to hear something more clearly or to feel something more clearly. On that note, you have to remember that a lot of times we consume Jiu-Jitsu content as vision. We see it, maybe we hear about it, someone's talking to us about it. But if I came up to you and I said, oh man, I really love this song right here, and I showed you the sheet music for it. If you didn't play music, you'd be like, oh, sure, maybe, I don't know, the song might be terrible. But to a musician, maybe they can make sense of it. But that's because music is the heard thing, the thing you hear. It's not the thing you see on the sheet music. A painting is something you see. Jiu-Jitsu is also not something that you just see, it's something you feel. You're the organs, the parts of your body that experience it are your your skin and your nervous system processes that information. And so it's important to distinguish that, yes, vision does have a obvious purpose in the feinting and grip fighting stage. But once we make contact, and again, the evidence of this is that you can have blind competitors, vision is not the primary sense that we're concerned with. It's feel, it's the sensation that comes through your skin. And actually, closing your eyes, just like again, like if you're trying to parallel park or something, maybe you turn the music in your car down, it gives you more attention to use on the appropriate signal. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. Shout out to uh Clinton Terry, the blind grappler from New Zealand, right? He's a guy who's legally blind, from black belt, very sharp competitor, runs a gym called Daredevil Jiu-Jitsu, which is a fucking awesome name if you're a blind grappler. Speaker 2: Oh, cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaker 1: So it's absolutely possible. And this all is a great illustration of how sometimes when we start Jiu-Jitsu, we misunderstand the senses that really matter for doing this sport. And I've talked about this before. You know, when you're living your daily life, a lot of the time you're probably relying more on your vision than a lot of your other senses. Similarly, another thing that I've observed is most of the activities that we do day-to-day, the stuff that we do with our hands tends to be the really cognitive stuff, right? Like typing on a keyboard or painting or driving a car. Like I got to think about this stuff. The stuff you're doing with your feet is often kind of on autopilot. You just walk, and you're usually not putting a lot of thought into where you're stepping and which foot is going in front of the other unless something goes wrong. And you see people bring that way of thinking into Jiu-Jitsu when they start, and one of the main skills they have to learn when they get to around blue belt is how to overcome that. So one thing, like you talked about, is being overly reliant on visuals. That's one mistake that beginners often make. Another one is being overly focused on what their hands are doing and ignoring what they're doing with their legs. Just like because I said, in day-to-day life, I mean, when I'm typing on a keyboard, I'm using my hands, right? I don't do anything nearly that complicated with my toes. So I see with very beginning grapplers, they're often very fixated on like, how am I grabbing this person with my fingers? But then they forget about their feet. And I mean, how many times have you seen this? You're sparring with a new white belt, and they are like in guard, and they get like freaking death grips on you on your collar and your lapel, but they forget about their legs, and so you literally just walk past them, right? This happens all the time to me. They grip up with me, and they're super tense on the ground, and I but they forget about their legs, and so I just walk around them. And so one of the main skills that you've got to learn in Jiu-Jitsu when you get to around blue belt, I would say, is how to coordinate your arms and legs so you can fight like an octopus and use them all equally. That's really what makes guard work. It's that when you're on your back in that position, I now have four limbs to fight with instead of two. That's really where the power of that position comes from if you do it right. And eyesight again is another thing, right? If you're overly reliant on visuals, that means that you always expect to be looking directly at the person. That means that if they change the direction of your head, it can really screw you up because you don't know what to do with it if you can't see them. For me, a big breakthrough in my Jiu-Jitsu was working more on my away-facing defense. So I had spent the beginning part of my journey being told that like, you always want to reguard. Turning away is bad, turning away is death, don't ever do that. And so for the longest time, I was terrified of turning away from people when I was playing guard. So what would happen is I would be trying to hold my guard or retain, and they'd start to pass, and I'd realize, you know when you hit that point where they're going through a guard pass, and you know you've lost it. Like, it's just a matter of time now until they pass your guard. You're not realistically going to stop them. Many times when you get into that position, the logical thing to do is turn away, right? If I can't turn towards you to defend, I can always turn away. I can turtle, I can granby, I can do all sorts of things. But that requires you to be willing to fight without using your eyes because you can't look at the person. But it's a critical skill set because, you know, if you're on top of me and you're cross-facing me, you're trying to make me look away, I might really struggle to turn my body to face you if you're forcing my head away. The easier escape for me might be to turn my entire body away from you. Yeah, I'm giving up my back, but I can defend that. And now at least I have spinal alignment again, right? My head and my body are looking in the same position. And that is way more important than whether I'm looking at you or whether I'm not. So I just encourage people, if you're afraid of turning away from the person as an alternative to reguarding, don't be. That's a very powerful and essential skill to learn, especially in like an ADCC style rule set where turtle is now an essential position to understand. Speaker 2: Yeah, let's think about if you are lying on your back and you took your right hand and you were to touch the bottom of your left foot with it, and then you pulled that away, and you did the same thing with your left hand to your right foot. So you're essentially crossing over. You're doing a contralateral movement. You're cross-crawling. Right hand touches left foot, left hand touches right foot. And you kind of patty-cake this a bunch of times. That is wiring your nervous system with your spine stable on the ground with a gait pattern, a walking pattern. When you walk, you move contralaterally. Your right leg steps forward, and your left arm is swinging to counterbalance the movement. And that is what allows you to walk efficiently forward without having to shift your weight again every single time. And what's interesting about that is if you imagine yourself in a tiny little boat, and you have a single oar, and you take that oar and you put it on one side of the boat, and you start rowing, rowing, and you stay on that one side, what ends up happening is you just turn in a circle. And obviously, on the other side, the same thing. But if you alternate sides, or if you had two oars, one on each side, you would row in what looks like a straight line, what is effectively a straight line. Whether you're alternating one oar or you're using two oars to move. But that's occurring because of two circular movements. When you got two oars and you're rowing, those two little circles you make with the oars to row is what gives you that straight line. The same is true when you walk. When you step forward, you're not actually just making this straight line of movement. Your foot makes contact with the ground and slightly grips it, and the arch of your foot allows you to continue propelling yourself forward. And it's this movement is actually governed by these slight turns of our body. We shift forward and then to continue, this contralateral swinging of limbs gives us this very slight turn that's not as dramatic as rowing a boat with oars, but still produces the two kind of circular movements that give rise to walking straight forward. And the importance of this is that all of our movement really is turning, whether it's a big dramatic turn or a tiny little turn that lets us walk. You need to be able to turn freely. And what's the first thing that turns, or what's the most important thing that moves when we turn? It's our eyes. And so freeing your eyes to turn is one of the best cues you could use as a beginner. I need to use an elbow-knee frame or a frame with my palm on my face in order to free my eyes to turn because if my upper spine can turn freely, the rest of my body can catch up later. Speaker 1: Yeah. And I think it's especially important now that the understanding of head control has evolved a bit. I mean, you know, you're like me, you're kind of like a, you know, a gray-haired old Jiu-Jitsu guy at this point, at least relative to the kids. And the conventional wisdom for the longest time was, if I don't get under your chin, there's no choke. So everyone would just focus on like, just don't let them get under your chin. But we realize now that you can still choke the shit out of someone even if you can't get under the chin, right? You can use pretty much any part of the head as leverage to kind of twist and change the direction of the eyes. And that comes up a lot even for things like choke defense now, right? Because people will, if they can't get under your chin, they will crank across your face to try to twist your neck, right? Because that can open up your chin or get enough of the choke regardless of whether they get under the chin. So you need to get really good at being able to fight when your head is not positioned in the direction that you wish it were. That's just going to be part of the game now, and it's something that people need to deliberately think about and break that need to always be looking at their opponent and to also understand the context, which I hope we've explained here, around how where your gaze is going can actually impact what you're doing. Speaker 2: Yeah, and when you see how much people's skill sets are sort of asymmetrical in that people will be very comfortable even escaping from the back as long as the person's trying to choke you with their right hand. But then you watch a lot of the highest level matches that finish with submission, it's the person's non-dominant hand doing the attack. And in part, maybe it's because, you know, training that offense on your off-side is a little bit more straightforward or interesting for people to do than to repeatedly train the defense on the bad side. But having your defense cleaned up on what would be your bad side, in large part, comes down to, first, making sure you're turning your eyes the correct direction. Speaker 1: Yeah, awesome, man. Well, I think this was a cool one. You know, we've never talked about stuff like this. I'm guessing most people haven't, but it's an important thing to understand. Did we cover everything you wanted to discuss, or is there anything else you wanted to get into which we might have missed? Speaker 2: There's always deeper down you can go and further out you can go. Um it's like trying to describe a circle fully. But yeah, I mean, I just I like having talked about this because it's something I've been harping on people for, you know, 20 years now, and I think now it's really starting to break through into people's consciousness about grappling, and it's really awesome to see. So I'm happy to talk about it again another time because there is like endless depth you can go to and a lot of different directions you could take it. But I think this is a good starting point. Speaker 1: Absolutely, man. Well, you know, I think you've got a great mind for Jiu-Jitsu. I'd love to have you back on at some point in the future. In the interim, though, if people want to follow you or ask you questions or maybe get coaching from you or whatever you're offering, how do they find you? Speaker 2: Yeah, you can find me Timothy Lee Peterson on Instagram, YouTube, Threads, all that stuff. Speaker 1: Amazing. I will put links to all of that in the show notes to make it easy. I'll also put a link to everything we make. It's all at BJJMentalModels.com. All of the podcast episodes, of course, are completely free, plus the mini episodes we do to quickly catch people up to speed on the ideas we share here on this show. I know there is a lot of stuff in the feed, so I always tell people, if you don't know where to start, just DM me, shoot me a message or an email, tell me what you're working on. I am happy to kind of point you to the best resource, whether it's something that we made or someone else's. I just want you to find good information. I also recommend signing up for our newsletter, which again, I'll put a link in the show notes. And I definitely recommend checking out BJJ Mental Models Premium. That is how we pay the bills here. It is one of the most popular Jiu-Jitsu subscription services in the world at this moment. It's a massive library of audio courses primarily, which is our differentiator. We focus on concepts, strategy, tactics. We do have a lot of video stuff, though, but it is really the audio courses that put us on the map. That's also where you get access to a whole family of professional-grade premium podcasts that you can only get as a premium subscriber. So, for example, Emily Kwok, Rob Bernacki, if you're fans of theirs, they have ongoing podcasts, and those are exclusive to BJJ Mental Models Premium subscribers. That's also how you get into our Discord, which I really can't emphasize enough how valuable that is, especially for coaches who are looking for ways to kind of network, figure out how to be better as coaches, and also just kind of integrate with and promote their services within the community. So again, I'll put links to all of that in the show notes. Speaker 2: I'm interested in it now. It's like the audio that sounds awesome. I got to check that out. Speaker 1: You know what, it's one of those things where people, you wouldn't think it would work, right? You wouldn't think, well, how can you learn Jiu-Jitsu through audio? And I mean, the short answer is, of course, you can't, right? At least not completely. But I would also argue, you can't learn Jiu-Jitsu through video either. I mean, you can sit at home and you can watch eight hours of instructionals every day. It'll give you ideas, but it's not actually going to teach you Jiu-Jitsu. So at the end of the day, is there a way that we can really just distill the important ideas and crunch them and give them to people, especially the ideas that don't really have a visual component, right? I mean, if you want to show me how to do a Choy bar, yeah, it's probably better if we have a visual component. But if you want to talk to me about how to build a resilient mindset, or if you want to talk to me about how to regulate tension when you're grappling, or about how to manage distance, things like that, these are conceptual models, right? These are mental models in a lot of ways, and that's where audio really shines. Plus, you can learn Jiu-Jitsu while you're on the toilet. And that I think is really what we're all looking for, right? Is how do we learn Jiu-Jitsu when we're doing the dishes, when we're driving to work, when we're on the toilet? That's BJJ Mental Models Premium. So everyone, please check it out. BJJMentalModels.com. I'll put a link to all of my stuff and Tim's stuff in the show notes. But Tim, thanks a lot, man. I really enjoyed this conversation. I'm so glad we got this one done. Please come by again if you got another topic like this because this is the kind of stuff that people listen to us for. Speaker 2: Thank you. It was a great time. Speaker 1: Amazing, sir. Well, thank you so much, and thank you to the listeners, too. I really do appreciate people spending, you know, over an hour with us here every week. I know you got a lot of stuff to do. It's not lost on me that you choose to spend the time here. So thank you again, and we'll talk to you in the next one. See you then.