Why Modern BJJ Sucks For Modern MMA (Episode 403)

Speaker 1: What up, guys? So today's podcast is going to be um it's going to be based on Robert Drysdale's new book. He sent me uh the book. We've had him on the podcast before to talk about his other books, which I enjoyed. I know some people very much dislike them, but I think they're important. They get at some of the history of Jiu-Jitsu. And there is an idea that he talks about in this book about some of the important contributions of Jiu-Jitsu to MMA. And then also kind of one of the reasons why modern BJJ kind of sucks for modern MMA. And so again, this is something where, you know, Jiu-Jitsu people our sport has basically MMA has evolved and BJJ has evolved and they haven't evolved necessarily together. And if you look at things like wrestling, like supportive wrestling, wrestling's evolved, of course, but wrestling has remained a dominant like base, a dominant art inside of um the MMA ring and cages. Now, again, everybody uses some little bit of of Jiu-Jitsu inside of MMA, right? Even if like they don't know that they've been influenced by it, a lot of times people have been influenced by Jiu-Jitsu, no matter what, right? Jiu-Jitsu changed the landscape of fighting period. Uh Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. And so that's there. But again, talking about the evolution of the sports because our sport has changed a lot in the last like 30 years. And so Robert Drysdale talks about one of the reasons why that happened and it kind of starts back in 1975, uh based on his ideas, which I think are probably pretty reasonable. Um because basically they set up an incentive structure to support the changes that were going to happen. And they did it sort of unknowingly. They had other intentions. But again, it's one of these things where when you look at human drives, humans are more motivated by incentive structures than they are by like punishments. You know, like punishments obviously can work in some cases, but like giving someone a ladder to climb, humans will that they're more motivated by that than anything else. And this is why like when you look at even the way our government does things or the way companies do things or the way that society does things, when you start placing incentive structure in front of people, you have to be careful because that's what they're going to work towards because you not just gave them a ladder to climb and that's what they're going to try to climb. And sometimes it works out great, sometimes it doesn't work out great. And a lot of times it has unintended outcomes. We'll say it that way. Um but anyway, not going to rant too much about that. Let's get into the podcast. Big thanks to our sponsors for helping make this podcast happen. Charles Web CBD, you can check them out at charlesweb.com. They make a lot of terrific products. They're one of the OGs in the CBD space. 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And it'll give you 12 or more different strategies on how to do that. And I do it in both a video and also a guide, a book that you can read so you can kind of choose what you want to do. But super useful, very helpful. Um and then again, you get my daily email afterwards. And so you can get that at chewjitsu.net/join. And with this with that said, guys, let's get into this podcast and talk about why modern BJJ sucks in modern MMA. What up, guys? So today's episode, we're going to talk about why modern BJJ is why it sucks so bad for modern MMA. Now, I want to make a quick distinction here, okay? Um because sometimes things get a little murky. When we talk about modern MMA, I'm not talking about like a uh hand-to-hand street fight situation on the streets with some guy that doesn't know anything. Because that's a completely different ball game. When you're talking about modern MMA, you're talking about people that know stuff. They know they they train. Um, you know, maybe at the amateur levels, maybe they're not trained so much, but they know at least a little something. Uh, but like, you know, we're we're talking about good fighters in MMA. Those guys know stuff. When it comes to untrained people, you know, I I still think you can a lot of this doesn't really apply to it because if you've and this is just something because there's so much talk about what we're going to get into now about like Jiu-Jitsu losing its fighting roots and so forth. And some of that is true. But I can tell you, if you've ever had an encounter with someone that's never fought before and you're on the street or whatever, it is I'm not going to say that it's always going to go great, whatever, but I can say generally speaking, it's laughably easy to control someone because they have no idea what they're doing. You can watch plenty of videos of like Jiu-Jitsu white belts and blue belts who have awful takedowns, literally taking people down and controlling them and fighting them in a situation. Then you take like a really well-trained Jiu-Jitsu practitioner and they just can completely control the person with no issues whatsoever. Um, I just know that there's always this, you know, everybody it's it's like modern politics. It's so freaking exhausting. Everybody wants to take a side on Just do whatever you like doing. But I do want to talk about it because it's it's a little bit of Jiu-Jitsu history. And it's kind of understanding, you know, this incentive structure that was created that led to the birth of modern Jiu-Jitsu because um until I read Robert Drysdale's books, he's this is his third book I've read of his. We're going to be talking about that by the way, guys. We're we're going to be going off the notes here from this book. Um, The Triumph of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, 50 Years of a Martial Arts Revolution. And, you know, he he's pulling from a lot of like original documents. Like apparently a bunch of these um and we'll have him on a podcast soon. A lot of these like different like documents and these flyers and these newspaper articles that he's pulling from from the Brazilian sources. A lot of these were like digitized, right? Because before they were in some archive somewhere. Now they've been digitized. He's able to use them for the book. And so the book's full of like pictures of like these different things and which again, kind of supports the claims some of it that where he's talking about, you know, the mythology that was given to us, the storyline, the timeline of everything that was given to us was kind of not true. I again, you could disagree with it and he kind of he keeps have to get having to go through the book when you're reading it. He's like, look, I'm not anti-Gracie. Um, he's like, I'm just like, you know, you're just laying it out there for people. He's not saying anything bad or negative. He actually talks pretty highly about guys like Helio and Royce and all these guys that laid the groundwork for us to do what we're doing, right? Um, that said, in the book, there is a theme that runs through it, right? Because he's talking about this evolution of Jiu-Jitsu because many of you may not know this, but I didn't know this until like a couple years ago. Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, when we use that term Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu or Gracie Jiu-Jitsu, that was not a thing until like, especially Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. It was not a thing until the 90s when like the UFC came around. Before that, it was just Jiu-Jitsu. And even talking to, I remember uh Ricardo Liborio talking to him. He said like back in the day in Brazil, they didn't call it Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, they just called it Jiu-Jitsu. And when you look at Jiu-Jitsu and Judo, you know, Judo is a is basically a product of Jigoro Kano, who took mainly two forms of Jiu-Jitsu and sort of combined them together to make this grappling art, right? Uh that became Judo and and tried to make it more sportive and more about education. I mean, Jigoro Kano is the is basically the father of martial arts as we see them, right? Where you basically divorced it slightly from this like warlike fighting element and made it more about like, you know, personal development and education and about not just improving your ability to, you know, throw someone or choke someone, but to improve your yourself as a a person, right? He's like the birth birth of that. That's the guy, right? He he sort of helped create this and, you know, we're um we're in debt to him. And but in Jiu-Jitsu back in Japan back in the day, there was like tons of forms of Jiu-Jitsu. Some of them would be more about weapons, some were about strikes, some were about grappling. They all had different forms. It's basically just think of like Jiu-Jitsu as martial art. You know, and they would have like different Japanese names and I I I don't know the language. I can't speak it, but basically, you know, so forth, so forth, so forth Jiu-Jitsu, so forth, so forth, so forth Jiu-Jitsu and these were to signify what they were. But, you know, again, Jiu-Jitsu then comes to Brazil, Judo comes to Brazil and it starts to morph. And for a long period of time, the Judo Jiu-Jitsu that the Brazilians were doing was basically just bad Judo. You know, it was just basically that. It was just Judo that wasn't done as well as some of the Japanese people. But in 1975, they had a a rule set, which um Drysdale sort of says is like kind of like the birthplace of what we, you know, as modern Jiu-Jitsu people would consider the birthplace of our art as we see it now, right? So, as an example, in 1967, he goes through this in his book. He says basically the rule set was this. It says, a complete takedown was one point. Mount was one point, a back take was one point, general superiority was one point, and flinging the mats was negative points, okay? So you see that you're just getting one point for everything. So there's really like no big no big deal. You're just getting points for this. Here's the rule set for here. In 1975, just as an example because there's a lot of rules here that we don't necessarily need to get into like because I don't I'll have to ask questions about this. Like it says like defective mount. I don't know what the hell a defective mount is. I'll have to ask him about that. Um but um a foot lock, um mount is worth four points. A back take, getting to back mount was a four-point move. You know, belly's three, takedowns two, guard passes two. A sweep is two points. Um and holding a position for longer than 30 seconds was two negative points, which I thought was interesting. Um but basically around this time, you had this departure from just standing techniques. This is where the ground became more important. And, you know, this is where they're starting to incentivize the groundwork. And there's no disincentive for pulling guard, right? And you think about that every every martial art as far as grappling goes that I can think of, it's never a good idea to fight off your back, right? It's always seen as a bad thing to fight off your back. Jiu-Jitsu, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, changed that. It was like, no, no, we can fight off our back. And, you know, at the time they were doing all these Vale Tudo matches. And in Vale Tudo, a lot of times the way that it would work is, you know, some of the guys would use guard to tire people out. You know, if you were a smaller fighter, you might use a guard position to sort of chip away at the person until you could get on top of them and choke them or something. Um, Helio Gracie, um, he has a a quote from him basically saying that he doesn't fight when he fought in Vale Tudo, he wasn't fighting to win, he was fighting not to lose. And it was this idea of like slowly chipping away at the person and then kind of coming back. Um, you know, maybe not everybody's favorite way of looking at it, but that's what was was happening. Um, and so you have these big big incentives with Jiu-Jitsu to take the back, to get to mount. And this created a few different things, both one of the reasons why Jiu-Jitsu was is can be really effective in MMA and also the seeds to why it became not very good for MMA. So we'll we'll talk about the good first. One of the positive things is that with that that 75 rule set, which kind of gave us the the it sort of began it's the beginning of what would eventually become our rule set, right? Because it's pretty darn close to what we have now for like the IBJJF style competitions. It created this incentivizing of getting to position and dominating and basically working up to things like mount to back mount, to getting to these positions. And when you look at the position before submission sort of ethos of Jiu-Jitsu, that is a Jiu-Jitsu thing for us, right? Is is basically we, you know, submissions are obviously great, get them if you can, but otherwise, we're always working to pass the guard or sweep and get on top and pass the guard and then get to side control, mount, back mount and you are advancing the positions. Why are you working to those positions? What's the big deal? Because all of those positions in a fight situation allow you to have control of the person and to hurt them and punch them and so forth, right? That was the whole idea behind it. That's the reason, right? Um, you know, when you look at martial arts in some aspect, they're trying to have the sporty element, but they're trying to have a fighting thing in the background. Even wrestling and Sambo and all of it. It's all the same. Judo's the same way. You talk to Judo people, you know, they're big on the fact that they think it's a superior art for self-defense because you start standing and you can do a lot of Judo takedowns from standing. Just like straight up standing, boom, you throw the person, trip them, whatever. So, you have this working of getting to dominant position and it, you know, working towards mount or back mount to where you could do more submissions or punch the person and strike them. So that's like that's a good thing. That is something that Jiu-Jitsu, you know, did. Um and Robert Drysdale also sort of he lays it out in his book too later is that probably what he believes the most important contribution of Jiu-Jitsu to modern MMA is the back take. There's no other art that does back takes like Jiu-Jitsu. Like we are the we are the the premier martial art for taking someone's back and choking them. It's what we do best, better than everybody else. Um obviously we play guard and stuff. We'll talk about guard in a second because this has some issues. But when it comes to like when you compare like wrestling, you compare Sambo, Judo, which is our cousin, right? Judo players don't play like we do. Like, you know, a lot of times in Judo if the person hits the ground, they'll turtle up and they'll shell up in a ball and they'll just wait for the ref to stand him up because the ref kind of has this um this ability to simply just arbitrarily stand up the match whenever they want because they think that the action stops. So what you typically see in a Judo match is if the person ends up on the ground, they go for these really quick, reckless submissions. They just they they're just have to dive on something. And they don't have that systematic approach because they don't have the time to do it. You know, Judo is very much focused on being standing up. Now, if you look at pre-war Judo, it was a little different, but it still didn't have the emphasis on the back that we do. But, you know, you still had a lot more groundwork going on pre pre-World War II Judo. And so the back take is what he considers to be the big contribution because you look at even if you've never done Jiu-Jitsu, you look at all the fighters, they understand taking the back is a good idea. Right? And um you can see people taking the back, going for it regardless of whether or not they've ever done Jiu-Jitsu much at all. Now, here's the part where it sucks, right? He talks about this in his book that basically with that that rule set that was put in place in 1975, it created a lot of conditions that helped improve Jiu-Jitsu for a fighting aspect for any of these Vale Tudo matches. But the negative side was is that it's slowly created a grappling style that did not incentivize the takedown that much. And it put a higher emphasis on guard work because you can drop to your guard, you can be on your back and you don't have to worry about it being a negative thing. No big deal. So you can basically not do takedowns and sweep the person and get on top of them. And it led to the creation of what we see now in Jiu-Jitsu, which if you watch a Jiu-Jitsu match, there's just I mean, the guard work is incredible. I mean, like the the the things that people can do with these intricate positions is simply phenomenal. And now that's great for competitive Jiu-Jitsu. But for a fighting situation, like lapel, you know, like lapel grips and leg lassos and spider guards and inverted De La Hiva, so forth. So all that stuff sucks for MMA because as soon as you got punches being thrown, well, buddy, it changes. You know, for a for a fighting situation, you basically have in most cases, you got full guard and the variations of that. You have half guard. Got a little bit of maybe butterfly guard, right? Where you're kind of like holding really close on the person. That's about it. Maybe a little knee shield action. I mean, that's about it. That's about all you're going to be able to play with strikes being thrown reliably. I'm not saying that people have never done anything. I'm not saying people have never inverted, but just generally speaking, those are your mainstays. Those are going to be the ones where you can keep control, keep things tight and at the very least negate damage. And so his idea is that you had this art where takedowns were not incentivized. Guard work and back takes were. And so what happened? We got really good at taking the back, which is good, but our takedowns started to come down generally as a whole. And then you have a lot of intricate guard work. We spend, I mean, I've talked about this many times on here and even with my students. When you think of most matches with point-based competitions, they are especially like an IBJJF rule set, which is typically the norm. Like ADCC has his own rule set, but when you look at IBJJF, IBJJF, the IBJJF rule set is basically the same rule set or some close variation to like, you know, NAGA, AGF, and all these other. They all kind of follow the same thing. It's kind of universal. Four points for back, that kind of thing. That's the rule set. That rule set's been around since I was a white belt. Well, with that, you basically spend a lot of time working on your guard because matches in those cases are almost typically won off of the guard pass or the guard sweep. If I pass your guard and I get those three points, boom. Like I'm in a great spot and you probably spent a ton of energy trying to stop that. Likewise, if you sweep and get on top of me, man, like I'm in a bad spot now. And so a lot of matches are won and lost in that guard pass, guard work position. And, you know, that's not a bad thing for competitive Jiu-Jitsu, but when you think of a an MMA fight, modern MMA, that's not where you spend the bulk of your time. You know, because like what happens? You're starting to punch people and you're taking them down and you might be fighting from turtle because the person's trying to get up or whatever. There's there's a lot of different situations going on that aren't necessarily this intricate, complex guard passing stuff. Now there's guard work that that that passing stuff can be very useful. And again, the passing has to change. You're probably not going to be doing a bunch of standing far out passing. You're probably going to be doing very tight, chest-to-chest, solid half guard passing, things like that. And so his idea is that the guard work that we have developed, this amazing ability has led to the the weakness that you see in modern MMA with modern Jiu-Jitsu. Now again, I said there's a distinction between fighting in a street situation with untrained people. And I make that distinction because again, most trained people aren't necessarily going to fight. I mean, there could be some. Most of the time if you're in a street situation, if you've got to defend yourself, it's more than likely going to be against someone who has not trained. Um and and so you're going to be fighting against a person that doesn't know know how to defend these things. And so it it's a lot easier to deal with them versus say a person that has trained and knows what they're doing. That's a different situation. And in modern MMA, you're not dealing with people that didn't know what they're doing. And like when you watch Royce come in early on and a lot of the early Jiu-Jitsu practitioners who would just mop up with their guard, they were fighting people with a technology they did not they didn't know anything about. Didn't know it existed. Like, what the heck is this guy doing? And then quickly people figured it out and then, you know, wrestlers came in. It was first the first wave of MMA was basically or in back then it was called NHB. It was either Vale Tudo or NHB, no holds barred. MMA was a term that got sort of used to it was a term that got created in America so that they could kind of polish it a little bit to make it because, you know, at the time the all these different politicians and scumbag um people in the Senate and every Congress and everything else, they're trying to stop MMA because they think it's just barbaric and brutal and so forth. Um, you know, meanwhile they're doing terrible things and sending people to die for stuff. But you know, we're the bad ones for wanting to like, you know, do the sport of combat, right? Um, and they came up with this term MMA to to to get it away from the origins that it came from because if you remember the old UFCs, everybody's sitting out there. It's no holds barred. Vale Tudo, you know, whatever. They didn't say Vale Tudo, but we call it no holds barred. Like, you know, one man enters, you know, two men enter, one man leaves. And it was just this blood sport. And they were trying to make it more professional. They gave them gloves and the whole deal. And they tried to make it more professional. But MMA's changed, you know, and then quickly you saw the wrestlers come in and the wrestlers started dominating and, you know, the Jiu-Jitsu guys would kind of come back and forth and you had strikers that knew how to use some of the guard work to negate some of the strikes, to get back up to the feet. That was your first three waves by the way in in in NHB and MMA was Jiu-Jitsu people and then it was wrestlers who could avoid the submissions and just basically pound people out. And then it was strikers who learned how to stop takedowns, sprawl and use a little Jiu-Jitsu on the ground to with the guard work to stop it. And then after that, it really became a mix. After that was over, like all of a sudden it just starts getting all over the place, right? And so when you look at the arts, like let's say wrestling as an example. Wrestling is pretty dominant in MMA, right? And, you know, it's not if it's not direct wrestling, it's some form of wrestling or, you know, Sambo, like you have like some of the the the Khabib people. They have their Sambo stuff that they do. But, you know, it's wrestling is the like the dominant sport in in in MMA. And like, why is that? It's because the emphasis on takedowns. There's a lot of stuff that you do in wrestling that you will not do in an MMA fight, that you will not do in a fight on the street. But the the emphasis on grabbing someone and taking them to the ground and getting on top of them lends itself to being able to punch them and and do damage, which is again, the the idea. And so I think it's an interesting thing. We're going to have him on the podcast soon to talk about it. But going through the book, that was one of his big, you know, ideas that he that that threads through it is that that our art martial art that we consider Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu really started to its emphasis or its infancy began in 1975 with the creation of this rule set that was put together by, you know, the Gracies and other people to create this competition federation. And then with the explosion of, you know, the really you would think the IBJJF for it. Um, the IBJJF and its predecessors, when they got on came on the scene, they blew up the competition scene. They created this huge Jiu-Jitsu competition scene that's, you know, incredible. It's grown so much. And it's divorced itself in a big way from the reality of fighting that it was originally tied to. You know, because every every all of a sudden the gentleman's agreement of, you know, hey, this this would need to work in a fight was kind of given away because that's how we all looked at it back in the day. There was a lot of stuff that you could do, but it was always kind of seen as like there's this gentleman's agreement of like, you still want your Jiu-Jitsu to be able to work in a fight, so you won't use this stuff. Well, you know, when all of a sudden you can make your living and you can make a way of life for yourself just doing Jiu-Jitsu, well, that stuff went out the window. You're like, well, hell, I can just do Jiu-Jitsu. I don't have to do this MMA stuff. I can just do Jiu-Jitsu, make my living and I'm going to go for competition glory. And so all the gentleman's agreements were off off the table and you're just doing competitive Jiu-Jitsu, which there's no strikes. You don't have to worry about it anymore. And so I think it's a it's an interesting idea to think about and it kind of explains in some ways how we got here. How we got to this. And again, I don't say this is any negative because I think there's a lot of pros to modern Jiu-Jitsu. And when I say modern, I don't mean that you have to be flipping upside down and bending in half, shooting for leg locks. I I consider modern Jiu-Jitsu all the stuff that basically is divorced from a fight where if you were sitting in a gym and you're sitting there playing like some spiders, spider lasso stuff or, you know, whatever or you're doing some different things that like if you think about it, like, oh, I would totally get punched in a fight right now. You're kind of getting away from the essence of just the reality of combat part. Then you're just playing the game, which I think is what most of us like doing anyway. So I'm not saying it's a bad thing. I'm just saying like, I agree with this idea that that's how we got where we are. Now, there's some stuff in the book that I I disagree with or I have questions and we'll, you know, we'll hash that out um later on um as we as we when we have him on the podcast. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: I think Royce initially like Jiu-Jitsu was just so much more evolved. Nobody knew what it was essentially. And and Hoist being the smaller guy, would use guard as a survival. Like I mean, he did submit people from his guard because they kind of didn't know, they panicked. But he used it more as like a survival tactic. There's like um who'd he go against uh Kimo. Yeah, Kimo was a perfect example. Kimo had some wrestling. He had some uh some grappling, but like, you know, not. Speaker 1: He was big. Speaker 2: And he was big, way bigger, way stronger. And uh Hoist used guard to survive. And I think like. Speaker 1: He pulled his hair and like. Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, closing the closing the distance, right? He's keeping him from at least hitting him as much. And I think guard can be I would say guard in MMA is kind of like turtle. You think of it that way. Like you want to be there for a little bit, but but it's more of like you got to do something, get out of there, right? It's not a good position to to stay in. Yeah. I would, you know what I mean? Like in Jiu-Jitsu, being in turtle is like, dude, you're the clock's running. You're either going to get your back taken or or something bad's going to happen to you. Same thing in in guard, like closed guard in the MMA fight. I think it's kind of like one of those like use it to maybe nullify some of the damage and pick your shots to to get out of that position. Um, and the other thing is I think the point you made is Jiu-Jitsu is not evolved with modern MMA. So like I feel like with the takedowns and stuff, like you still have the same rule set from 1975 and that rule set would did. Speaker 1: It's changed a little bit, but yeah, the essence is still there. Speaker 2: Yeah, like you saw a perfect example of somebody using old school Jiu-Jitsu. Uh, it was Kron Gracie and then May fight and he just pulled guard and just got pummeled. Um, because he was willing to stay there. Now again, the other thing is when the UFC first started, it was no time limit. So you could kind of hang out to some extent and hopefully that your opponent tires themselves out and then when you when it's time, you can they're so exhausted. You get a decent looking sweep or something like that and you can or get on top, scramble up, things like that. So Jiu-Jitsu hasn't quite evolved. And then like we talked about when people know Jiu-Jitsu, wrestlers started to learn how to stay out of some of these submissions, you know, these basic submissions from bottom, like and they were able to kind of stay safe and kind of grind people out, which was why we had that like that wave that you mentioned. Speaker 1: Yeah. And, you know, that that's like the idea of turtle. It's interesting because, you know, in they've changed a little bit with IBJJF, right? Where if I take you down and you go to turtle, if I maintain control of turtle, I get my takedown points. Um, but. Speaker 2: Which I think you should. You know. Speaker 1: I think you should, right? If you were saying that you want to keep it somewhat connected to the reality of a fight, being in a turtle position is awful. I mean, I can tell you from like, I I had several of my MMA fights where I did a lot of damage to the other person from turtle. Because, you know, the person's turned away from you and you're in a position where you can generate some serious force and I can punch you from several different angles. You know, obviously I can punch to the side, but a lot of times I can punch right up behind you. That's like how uh Dan Henderson knocked out Fedor. He shot shot that punch right up the middle up underneath of him. So, you know, he's he's in turtle and boom, you shoot it up behind him straight up the middle. It's like an uppercut. And so, you know, it's not a good position to be in. And so you even think about wrestling. Wrestling, you get really good at learning how to control that turtle position. Instead of taking the back, you're just controlling turtle. And in Jiu-Jitsu, you know, you can control the turtle or you get good at taking the back and getting onto their side. But from a striking standpoint, you can do some serious damage from that position. And one of the fights actually I remember like afterwards, like in the heat of the moment, you don't think about it. You're just fighting. It's like, you know, we're we're both fighting each other, right? Um, killer be killed kind of thing. And I remember I was fighting this guy and I'm hitting him just all over the place from turtle position. After the fight was over, like his whole side of his face where I was punching him was all swollen and busted up. And I'm like, you know, you kind of feel bad about it. But you could see the damage afterwards, right? Like, dude, the whole side of his face is is busted up from being in that turtle position too long. And so, you know, again, that's just like another one of those ideas. It's like one of the reasons why I like I'm not the biggest fan of the ADCC rule set because of this like emphasis on turtling. You know, basically, you know, anything that I do in ADCC, if if we turtle, it doesn't count. It basically negates everything. I always I always think that's stupid because turtle's not a good position to be in if we're talking about a fight standpoint, right? You know, and I think ultimately that's everything that we do, all these are all precursors to a fight. You know, that's really what they are. Speaker 2: Is there a preferable if you end up on bottom, if you're using Jiu-Jitsu, like what guard would you rubber guard maybe? Because that's kind of Eddie Bravo's whole thing was like to control the distance. So rubber guard, what do you think? Speaker 1: If you play rubber guard, I mean, that's to me rubber guard is a variation of full guard. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. So what what do you think's the best guard to play on bottom? Speaker 1: I don't know. That's up to the person. That's going to depend on the person. Like I like when I would play, I would typically play full guard and then I would start to like a lot of times if, you know, I wasn't if I was on the bottom, I wasn't trying to stay there. I was trying to work back up, right? So I was trying to get back on top. And so, um, I only ended up on my back once in an MMA fight. I trained it a lot. And I have like a whole punch blocking uh series that I know how to do. And like I remember like having a guy one time, you know, it's a long story. But basically it ended up with me telling him like putting some gloves on him, some boxing gloves. I was like, here, try to punch me in the face. I'm going to be on my back. You try to punch me in the face. And he couldn't punch me in the face because I knew how to maneuver my body around. Now, he was not a good MMA fighter or anything by any stretch. But, you know, I know how to do some stuff. And that typically would involve getting overhooks and then working to where you use your knee shield and feet on the hips to to basically keep them out of distance from punching and then working your way back up. Um and that was what my sort of focus was. You know, that was what I was trying to do the most. Um and then like I said, there was the time where I did a in that same the fight that I'm talking about where I ended up on my back. I was blocking the punches and then I did a butterfly sweep on the guy. You know, um because essentially what happened was is I went for a big swing, went for the punch, he took me down and I swept him and got on top of him. You know, so, um, you know, I I think again, it always depends, but I think it basically you're limited to butterfly, half, full and the variations thereof, right? And like the the slight changes that you can make with them and things like that. But that's I think kind of what you're limited to because those are the ones where you can keep some some some tight control. Most other guards are going to involve, you know, having this mid-range distance. Now again, it's not to say you can't play some leg locks or do some inverted stuff because there's always exceptions to the rule, but again, there's a it's a rule for a reason. And the exceptions exist, but again, they're exceptions because they're not the rule. They're not what's normally happening. Speaker 2: Yeah. it's just some like I'm just I'm thinking about like, yeah, it depends on what what type of guard you play. So like you're saying you prefer it in closed guard, double overhooks, which makes sense, right? Speaker 1: Double overhooks or overhooks or overhook and then a back of the neck. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, just keep them. Speaker 1: Because because I've I've got your overhook and you can't, you know, you can't do anything with that. Your other hand on the other side, I I'm basically putting this arm up over your head and what that does is that controls your posture so you can't raise up to punch me or press away from me. And then at the same time, it allows me to block my head so you can't hit my chin or my head. Now, you can you can totally drill my body um and punch me to the body, but, you know, at the same time, it's like, you know, you're in an in an MMA fight. So you kind of sometimes you you have to kind of go in and accepting that you're going to get hit and you kind of have to decide kind of pick your battles and I'll allow someone to, you know, tee off a little bit on my body from a non-postured up position, which really isn't that bad versus them being able to posture up and pry away from me and then really deal some serious damage. Speaker 2: Do you think Jiu-Jitsu's here's the debate. Here's a question. Is Jiu-Jitsu the best self-defense martial art or I guess maybe that's different. There's a different let me ask it this way. What's the best base for MMA and then what's the best base for self-defense? I think those would be different, right? Because self-defense is usually more likely if you have some Jiu-Jitsu and your opponent does not, then I think you can get away with more stuff versus MMA. Most people are going to be skilled to some extent in Jiu-Jitsu. Speaker 1: I think when you're talking about style versus style, like let's go back to that real quick. When you if you took people that know knew nothing about the other and you just did style versus style, Jiu-Jitsu wins. Because because of the submissions and the groundwork we have and that that that that emphasis on hierarchy of getting to certain positions, right? The groundwork element that we have. That's what we that that is our premier thing that we do. That's what Jiu-Jitsu guys do better than everybody. But when you take that and you say into a fight situation, well, then for me like thinking about it, I I and again, I'm biased. I'm a Jiu-Jitsu guy, so whatever. But I think, you know, you're looking at it from that standpoint and saying, okay, well, you don't want to fight. You want to get away from the situation. But if you said you had one to choose from, you only get one. You know, I'm assuming you're I for me, it's going to be doing Jiu-Jitsu doing training Jiu-Jitsu that involves having takedowns. I'm not saying you got to be like a college you don't have to be a college wrestler doing it, but you should have takedowns. Because, you know, if you're thinking about self-defense, you have to have takedowns, both takedowns and defenses because people even if they don't know how to do them, they're probably going to try to grab your legs and take you down and tackle you. That's a pretty human thing. I mean, hell, I remember in high school when we would watch people fight, you would see people trying to grab legs. We we used back in those days. I remember people just say they scooped them, scooped up their legs. I remember like someone did like a really ugly double leg, but the guy had terrible balance and he got knocked off his feet. And they're like, damn, he scooped him. Um, you know, and so like it was I mean, it was horrendous to watch because they didn't know any wrestling, but that's that they they just you you figure things out. So I think if you have Jiu-Jitsu that you, you know, style versus style, Jiu-Jitsu was like it's probably going to be Jiu-Jitsu that's the winner. So I think Jiu-Jitsu's probably a great art for learning basic control and defense. Now, again, you you still have to understand that, you know, if you go into a Jiu-Jitsu gym and the only thing you do is pull guard and like invert upside down, well, then you're probably not going to have great defense for yourself if someone ever like gets into a fight with you. You know, you should know some of the basics of like full guard and being able to do takedowns and so forth. And then like after you have that basics down, then it's like, yeah, you you basically spend most of your time doing basic Jiu-Jitsu or fun Jiu-Jitsu, Jiu-Jitsu versus Jiu-Jitsu, playing the game. That's what we do. That's what's fun to us. I think ultimately, this is just my personal take on it. A lot of the arts where, you know, they spend all their time focusing on some self-defense situation that never happens. It's like larping. You know, it's like they're just, you know, you remember the larping like they'd like the uh the guys. Speaker 2: Dress up. Speaker 1: Yeah, they dress up like, you know, knights and armor and stuff like that. And they basically go play. It's like, and again, I make I'm I'm a nerd, so I, you know, I I'm a geek too. So I I make no bones about it. But, you know, they'll dress up in like stuff and they'll reenact Dungeons and Dragons campaigns in person. You know, they're throwing bean bags at each other, screaming lightning bolt, you know, that kind of stuff. That's what that stuff looks like to me because I'm thinking like, you know, like for instance, you'll look at like um, you'll look at a Krav Maga school, which is all about like focusing on the stuff. And it's like in the more affluent neighborhood, it's surrounded by like all these gated communities. It's like, when's the last time you've been in a fight, huh? Like, when's the last time you've been in a fight just ever? You know, like, come on, it's not happening. You know, like, when's the last time you've ever like most people like they do Jiu-Jitsu, they're like, they're training at least in America, right? You're training in a place where for the most part, we do have an effective rule of law. You don't have people just being just trampled left and right out in the streets. No matter what the media tells you and shows you. Um, so you live in a place where like most people don't fight on a regular basis. And so if, you know, if like Jiu-Jitsu if sport Jiu-Jitsu didn't exist, I would be so bored with it. Like it would be so boring. If I was only getting ready for this fight that's never happening. Now again, I have had to use Jiu-Jitsu a couple times and wrestling a couple times in fighting situations, um, outside of a sanctioned event. And it was fine. It was it was easy. It was because the people didn't know what the hell they were doing, you know, like it's not hard. But I think uh I think a lot of times just self-defense stuff is just larping. They're just making stuff up because these people aren't fighting on a regular basis. They're like saying, well, what happens if this happened? And if the guy had this and we had to do this, like, how many times have you actually stopped a knife attack? You know, like, I'm not saying that you haven't, maybe you have, maybe you've talked to someone who has, maybe the people have got information, but like you get these people that are just making stuff up. It's like the Dusty Dale guy from Detroit where, you know, he's just got all these like. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, Dust. Speaker 1: Yeah, he makes all these fake technique moves and doing nonsense. Um, you know, it's just it's you're just larping. You're dressed up, you know, and you're larping and that's what it is to me because it's it's divorced from any reality. And sport Jiu-Jitsu, even though it is divorced from the reality of like fighting in some cases, there's still aspects to it that are 100% real. Like one of the most important things that you get from say wrestling, from Sambo, from Jiu-Jitsu, sport Jiu-Jitsu, from any of these combat arts, boxing, kickboxing, is that you spar on a regular basis. And you have to learn how to deal you have to learn how to cope with that stress that it creates. You know, because you know, the first day, you know, you think about it, the first day you go into the gym, you're exhausted at like a minute and a half of rolling. You know, you look at it and you go, oh man, this is easy. Look at these guys. That's that doesn't look like it's that bad. Then you get out there and you're exhausted in a minute and a half. Um, you get used to people grabbing on your head. I had a I had like a 300-pound dude that came in for a class the other day and, you know, he's newer and stuff and I rolled around with him a little bit. And he's like got all of his body weight laying on me, squeezing my head. And I'm just laying there as if it is the most normal thing in the world to deal with. I'm not uncomfortable. I mean, I'm uncomfortable, but it doesn't bother me. I'm I'm used to it. I'm it's like another day in the office. So like, if I ever do get into a fight situation where some guy grabs my head, it's not going to shock my system. It's going to be like, oh, hey, I've been here before. And so that element is incredibly useful from sport combat sports. So there's a lot of stuff that yes, is divorced from the reality of fighting, but still that aspect of stress inoculation that we get from it is massively important because, you know, think about it, if you've never been in a fight situation and all of a sudden you're in a street fight, what's going to happen? Your fight or flight response is going to kick on and you may just freeze up. Because again, it can it can shock you in weird ways. There's plenty of situations where people are faced with these fighting situations and instead of responding like a an alpha male, I I for any of you guys listening and not watching, I said that with like a shiteating grin on my face like, alpha bro, can't stand it. Um, yeah. Speaker 2: We don't need to get into that. Speaker 1: You know, it's so funny. I'll I'll just I'm going to take a quick detour. It's so funny. Speaker 2: Of course. Speaker 1: There uh I was reading this newsletter that I follow and the guy's talking about how, you know, all this like alpha male culture is talking about. And I'm not saying that some of it's not true. Like men do have real struggles now that did not exist before in certain periods of time. But, you know, everybody's talking about how like or you know, some of these alpha male cultures like, oh, you know, men are just this, that, whatever. We would have been so much better off at another time period, right? And I'm like, what time period is that exactly, right? Like one of the time periods where you got shipped off to fight in a war where like millions of people died or I've seen people where they sort of like talk about medieval times. You're like, oh, so you think that you so you think you would be like the knight in armor that would be winning the battles and not like the random peasant who got ran over by the the the Genghis Khan's horde, right? Like it's like uh when you get into those people that get into the the the woo woo stuff where they talk about their previous lives. Like people's previous lives are always like they were some general or some princess or prince. Like nobody was ever the the the peasant out working on the farm, busting their tail for like next to nothing and dying of famine, right? Um, they always have this grandiose view of it. So, you know, going back to it, I have no freaking clue where I was, man. I was I went off on the rant. Speaker 2: You know, I knew it. I knew it. The alpha, you know, I think. Speaker 1: I know I was going off. I was having fun with it. Speaker 2: I will say those people are hilarious because I think they're the most insecure people. Like some of the most insecure people because they're all about like how they look and trying to intimidate other people and they're really just. Speaker 1: Oh, sure. It's all about show. Speaker 2: It's all about show. It's all about show. It's like there's a there's a a video I saw this this big guy. I don't know. He was just like he was trying to intimidate the smaller guy and the smaller guy was like, well, go ahead. Come on, punch me. And the guy just started getting real quiet, the big dude. It was pretty funny to see. But yeah, it's like it's all all of it's about like kind of peacocking and intimidation and hoping the other person backs down. And when the other person doesn't back down, that's when the issues kind of start. That's when you that's when you get called out on your shit. Speaker 1: I should have fought right now. Whoops. Um, the uh, it's like I was talking to one of the guys, um, one of the guys who's in the military. Like I've met a lot of dudes in the years who are military guys who've done some stuff. Like seen some stuff, done some stuff, like, you know, whatever. Those dudes are always really quiet and, you know, they'll talk about it if you ask them questions, but they're not going to like talk about it openly like, hey, let me bring this up out of nowhere. Whereas like the guys who hadn't really done anything, but maybe served or whatever. Like there's nothing wrong with it. There's nothing wrong you didn't do anything. You just didn't do anything. You just did something else. It's when you lie about it, that's weird. All of a sudden they bring it up. Um, you know, and it's like there's uh I've seen fighters who you'll come into a gym and they'll start talking about this and that and how strong they are, how skilled they are, whatever. And like you said, it's this insecurity thing. And I feel I feel for them in some ways because I understand where it comes from. You know, it's a lot of times as men. I don't know if it's the same for women, but I know as men and this is kind of a lot of times been true in cultures. Men are only valued if they can do something, right? Like just the way it is. It's like, you know, if you think about just as a quick experiment, if you think about a woman who basically does nothing, but she's very attractive and people you see this all the time, like guys are just buying her stuff, whatever. And we're kind of like, eh, whatever. Good for you. But if you see a guy that does it, as a man to man, we look at those guys as like, like, we look at them as negative. We look at them as less than. Like, dude, like, get off your ass, be a man. Go do something, right? And that's part of what it is. And so you think about like guys who haven't done anything yet. Um, you know, again, it's the insecurity because I heard I think it was Robert Bly. I was listening to him recently. I I I like listening to his stuff. And he was talking about this idea of like inflated grandiosity. And he said that its twin is a sense of worthlessness. Right? It's like, and so you have this sort of inflated grandiosity. This like, I'm so amazing. I'm this. Let me talk about it. And on the flip side, you have this sense of worthlessness. Um, you know, and for a lot of us as guys, right? Like you you have to prove yourself. And I don't think it's necessarily the wrong thing. It just it's understanding what it is. But you got to go out and do some stuff before you feel like, okay, I am someone. I have some I have some leg for my self-esteem to stand on. Your self-esteem is like a stool. And every time you accomplish something meaningful in your life, you get like an extra leg to stand on. So if one gets kicked out, you got another one to keep you up. You know, this is why like when I was young, I was super insecure. And so like Jiu-Jitsu and wrestling was the only thing I was good at. And anytime I lost a match, I would be just awful. I would be just my myself esteem was in the tubes. After a while, you get a few more legs to stand on. So if one thing happened, you're like, meh, I'm okay. I'm good. I know who I am. You know, that kind of thing. But um, I have no idea how we got on that subject. So. Speaker 2: Alpha male bros took us down the. Speaker 1: Well, I said alpha male and then I went down the rabbit hole and I have no idea what I was talking about with the alpha male stuff. But um. Speaker 2: But just people kind of show I I just think a lot of that with that ending on the alpha male stuff, it's just validation, not having validation and not feeling like you're worth anything. So you you basically are telling people kind of like, I I do these things, but you really don't believe your own shit. I think a lot of it's like those people that say all the like they've they don't believe that they're they're trying to convince you. And if you believe them, then they're going to hopefully feel like they can convince themselves and that just doesn't work out until you like you said, until you go and do something, until you do some difficult stuff or or go through some shit that's that's challenging. That's what builds kind of that resiliency. Otherwise, you're just, you know, it's all show. Speaker 1: But but but was there a point that I was making before that? If not, I. Speaker 2: I don't know. I don't know where we're going about. Speaker 1: I don't know. Well, let's let's I I knew you went off the rails and I was like, oh, here we go. We're going to I don't know if we're going to bring this back. I should have said hold that point. Speaker 2: What do you think uh as far as for MMA, what's the best base? if you have to go back to it. It used to be Jiu-Jitsu, right? Everybody's like, Jiu-Jitsu's the best base to start. I have an idea on this. Speaker 1: Wrestling. I mean, I think I think a wrestle I think if you took a guy, like if you were trying to create, you know, um as the landscape is right now and you're trying to create like your the next fighter, I would say you give him a good wrestling base and meanwhile they're training Jiu-Jitsu too. You know what I mean? Like that's what you would want. You'd want a guy that basically has phenomenal takedowns, has, you know, that ability, that gritty engine, that gritty that gritty-ness that wrestling can develop. Uh that scrambling ability and then, you know, they get lots of competition experience in wrestling and then you put them into Jiu-Jitsu at the same time and get them some there. Now again, there's a lot of Jiu-Jitsu gyms that do great takedowns. And so, you know, that but I'm saying like when you're talking about generalities, right? You know, wrestling is going to be a strong base for modern MMA and then you give them some Jiu-Jitsu to go along with that so they can finish fights. But I think, you know, wrestling would be a stronger base than Jiu-Jitsu as it stands right now in the current landscape. Speaker 2: Yeah, I think those guys do really well, obviously. I mean, look at look at like the the the majority of like the UFC champions in the last like what, 5, 10 years. Like I I don't know what the number is, but it seems like a good chunk of them were wrestlers to start with. Yeah. Yeah, no, I I agree. And then look at even in in Jiu-Jitsu, you know, we have a lot of high-level wrestlers that have transitioned really well into Jiu-Jitsu and are very good at Jiu-Jitsu. I mean, Brandon's a perfect example. Brandon. Speaker 1: Pixley, those guys that just came out. Speaker 2: Yeah, and those guys had a different and they started a little bit later. You know, they didn't grow up in Jiu-Jitsu. They kind of grew up in wrestling and then transitioned to Jiu-Jitsu kind of after after their life life span in wrestling kind of went to an end. So I think. Speaker 1: And if you watch the way that they did Jiu-Jitsu, the way that they got into Jiu-Jitsu though is when they got into Jiu-Jitsu, they were doing Jiu-Jitsu now. It wasn't like, you know, this is sometimes hard for the wrestlers because it's not as bad as it used to be, but like a lot of wrestlers like they're wrestlers, right? They're I'm a wrestler. They identify with being a wrestler, whatever. Um, guys like Brandon, guys like Pixley, they quickly learned how to use their wrestling to get to submissions. You know, that became their it wasn't their goal just to take someone down and sit there and do nothing. Their goal was to like, I'm trying to finish people. You look at Pixley. Pixley has an incredible rate of finish. You know, because he would snap people down into headlocks and then freaking sink up um his D'Arces and different uh variations of chokes. And Brandon, you know, became like a really good back taker. Um, you know, so he'll like he'll spin around and get around with his passing after the takedown and then he works to the back to try to get, you know, either the points or the finish. Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, I think those guys I mean, I don't know about Pixley, but Brandon played, he played Jiu-Jitsu. You're exactly right. He went and like would play off his back and do things that he wasn't really good at initially off the top. And now they're, you know, he's very good. He's good at at leg locks now. He's good everywhere. And you want to be good everywhere, right? Because you're going to end up in these leg entanglements and some of these positions against true Jiu-Jitsu grappler like Jiu-Jitsu guys that have done it their whole lives. They're going to be crafty everywhere. So if you're a wrestler, you're kind of trying to pick up, I mean, you're trying to make up as much ground as you can. And I mean, I I I agree that they have such a good work ethic. They're they're used to the really tough, grindy sessions, the mental I think they have a lot of mental resiliency, wrestlers do. I think it's a great it's a great base for for a number of reasons. So for me, I would agree. I would agree. I think it's the best base for MMA. Probably, you know, even if you have young kids, even starting them in in some wrestling is really helpful. Even in conjunction with Jiu-Jitsu as well. Speaker 1: Yeah. So guys, at the end of the book, um, Robert Drysdale has this says um, it's epilogue and apprentice to alchemy. Um, aging, um, and Jiu-Jitsu. Okay. And if you guys are familiar with the ideas of alchemy, when they when people use that term, a lot of times that's uh that's you converting your garbage into gold, right? So there's the actual alchemists that would try to convert all kinds of different like materials into actual gold. And then there's what most of us do. You know, like, you know, when you think of um taking taking something bad and you convert it in the way that you you're handed a shitty card and the way that you play the card makes it a good one, right? That's you converting your garbage into gold, right? That's the person like that's like me saying, okay, I got jumped when I was a kid. I um was molested as a kid and I felt all these terrible feelings about myself as a kid and then I got into all these things to make myself stronger and then now I get to help other people do the same thing. That's alchemy, right? Taking it and getting something out. Well, in this little sort of ending of the book that we've been talking about, he's talking about meeting this uh this old black belt who's like 90 years old, right? And who needs help tying his belt on. And like he snaps the belt on a little too tight because he almost does it like you do it to a young guy when you promote him. You like like puts the belt on and almost knocks this old guy over. And he's looking at it and he's thinking to himself like, this is what awaits me, right? And because again, this guy's 90 years old. It doesn't matter how what you are. If you're 90 years old, obviously life gets a little tough, right? Yeah. But he says here, and this is less than a quote, this is more just an idea that you're going to wrap this up. After all, athletic ability has a peak that closely correlates with youth. And as such, at least in the case of something as physical as Jiu-Jitsu, skill levels must always find their way down at some point. What then? What is left of our beloved Jiu-Jitsu skills then? Imagine a life on the mats, a life preparing for a Vale Tudo fight, a life of perfecting your athletic ability and skills only to have it all taken away from you, little by little in an inevitable sequence of moments. This is a frightening thought and one that we are quick to dismiss by waving it off as saying, don't worry, that day is far away. We have all the time in the world. We're still young. Or of course, we can temporarily wave the question away in such a manner, but that day will inevitably come and this heavy knowledge begs the question of, what was it all for then? And so I'll leave that with you guys. What is it all for then? You know, and this is something I think it's really important to think about because we spend a lot of time on the mats. We do this and this is something I've chewed on plenty of times. I've talked about this idea. If you could never train, if you could if you could never improve, you know, think about this, like lifting weights as an example. There's going to be a point where you cannot get stronger. Your body is just not going to do it. You can shoot up all the juice you want to. You're just going to be your body just won't it won't do it, right? But there's still benefits to lifting. Both like health benefits and also mental benefits and things like that. There's benefits to it. So let's say that you were doing Jiu-Jitsu and we're all focused on progress, right? Everything has to be progress. There has to be this steady march forward with everything, right? What happens when that march stops? What happens when it's more of a slow sliding backwards where, you know, the forces of life push against you and you're digging your heels in, but you just feel your yourself basically sliding against the ground and going backwards. Why do you keep doing it? Will you keep doing it? If you spent 20 plus years doing it, what was it for? So it's just an idea to chew on. I won't tell you what to think. I won't give you my ideas on it. But what what do you think? What was it all for? I'll just leave it with you there. Because I thought it was an interesting idea. It's an interesting thing in the end of the book. And um, it's something to reflect on. And again, it's not just Jiu-Jitsu. You can think about a lot of things, right? We're all here for a limited time. If you were born in America, if you were born in most of the countries in the West, you're blessed. You know, no matter what people might say, this and that. I mean, you're blessed. We get to literally play around and wrestle each other for fun because life is pretty safe and we're healthy enough to do so. And we have the financial ability to do so. You know, we're not working out in the fields, you know, 18 hours a day or something crazy. Like we we work our eight-hour day and then we get to go train or something afterwards. We're blessed. And so you got this blessed life. You get to take around this this bucket of bones you got blessed with to live through one time. And then everything that everything that you have, no matter what you have, will be taken away from you at some point. It's going to leave. There's one day that is going to be the last day you train. There's one day where you're going to look at your son, your daughter and it's going to be the last day you ever say hello to them, the last day you hug them. There's going to be your friends, the last time you ever see your friend and you you don't even know it. You don't even know it's the last time. But there's the last time for everything. What's it all for? Just something to chew on. So, I'll uh I'll end it with that. Speaker 2: That's heavy, man. That's a lot. That's a lot. It's uh it definitely got me thinking for sure. Speaker 1: So, guys, with that, thank you for being here this week with us. We appreciate you. Talk to you next time.