Mini Ep. 97: Double Tap

Speaker 1: Hey everybody, before we get started this week, I just want to let you know, we released a new mindset course featuring Rob Bernaki from Island Top Team and BJJ Concepts. It's called Mindset for Betas. It's an amazing resource that breaks down a new way to build a resilient jiu-jitsu mindset. It's part of BJJ Mental Models Premium. I will spare you the full sales pitch because you can try it for free. Just go to BJJmentalmodels.com/beta. I will give you a free month, you can check out the course and if you decide that it's not worth your money, you can cancel, you won't have to pay a cent. I've already been told by subscribers that this is the most valuable piece of jiu-jitsu content they've ever received, so I hope you like it too. Speaker 2: Hey everybody, welcome to BJJ Mental Models. I am Steve Kwan and BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent jiu-jitsu approach. And today I want to talk about the double tap, which is in my opinion, a BS trick for better submissions. This is something that I had been doing for quite a while without knowing the name for, but then I heard Drew Foster on the State of the Meta podcast refer to this tactic as the double tap and it's a great name. What is it? Simple. When you try a submission and your opponent brings up their defenses, let go of the submission, they'll probably let go of the defenses and then you can just do the submission again. This is a great psych out that you can use on folks because it violates this weird unwritten social contract that we just don't really think about, but it happens all the time when rolling and that is, when I try a submission on you, if you defend, when I release the submission, now you'll release the defenses because we're moving on to something else. The game is progressed to the next stage. But you don't have to let it progress to the next stage. You can double tap the person. When those defenses go down, attempt that submission a second time. This flies in the face of expectations in jiu-jitsu where people think, once they've released the submission, well that the submission is done, it's over and now we can go on to something else. It doesn't have to be that way. That's up to you as the attacker to choose. This is helpful because when you are in a dominant position, if the other person feels overwhelmed, they'll often resort to defensiveness. When you're mounted on someone and you're trying to finish them with a choke, their hands come up and they defend, and that's not always the smartest posture to just sit in. You don't want to sit on the bottom and just let yourself get attacked over and over again. But when people feel outgunned, they will rely on defense to buy themselves some time. And you've probably felt this frustration when you're trying to finish that submission and you just can't get it because the person won't move their hands. Well, this is an opportunity to get them to move their hands without having to do much. Make them think that the submission is done with and you've moved on to something else. And then when they move on to something else and they expose whatever it was that you wanted to attack, you just go right back to it. I love doing this from mount with Ezekiel chokes. I find when I try to Ezekiel choke someone and get that fist in front of their throat, they'll bring their hands to defend. And it can be hard to overcome those defenses, but if I just make them think I'm moving on to something else and I release my hand, they'll probably bring their own hands out which clears the pathway to get that choke. The double tap is an example of a pattern interrupt. A pattern interrupt is when we do something that violates the unwritten social rules that we follow. And in jiu-jitsu, even though we never sat down and agreed upon this verbally, we all have certain expectations of how a roll will go. One of those expectations is that when a submission is done, you move on to the next thing. I encourage people to look at pattern interrupt opportunities all throughout the sport. You will probably find many places where things are happening not because they're good or bad, but because we have social expectations about how a roll should go. And if you can find a way to deviate from those social expectations without breaking the rules, you can create really interesting opportunities to psych out and trick your opponents. So that's the double tap, a really awesome hack for just making your submissions a little bit more effective. This kind of stuff is what we talk about at BJJ Mental Models. 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