Ep. 379: Position Series: The 90/90, feat. Rob Biernacki

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 1: Hey everybody, welcome to BJJ Mental Models episode 379. I am Steve Kwan and BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent jiu-jitsu approach. And I'm back again with the Vancouver Island goat. I've got Rob Bernaki. Rob, my friend, how are you doing, man? Speaker 2: Oh, man. Anytime somebody asks me that, I'm like, do I, do I do the autism thing and answer very honestly or do I mask super hard and be like, I'm doing great, Steve. How are you? Speaker 1: Well, you know what? I think given what's going on in the world today, I think most people probably have some shared degree of answer or trauma around that, but from a jiu-jitsu standpoint, Rob, maybe let's downscope here. How are you doing, man? I know you got a seminar coming up, or seminar tour coming up rather, in Europe. Before we get into the topic today, did you want to just quickly talk about that and then we can talk some shop about jiu-jitsu? Speaker 2: Yeah, let's get some business out of the way. I am heading to Europe in April, also heading back to Europe again in September. In April, I will be in mostly in Germany, but also in Switzerland and Bosnia. So, I'm doing a camp in Switzerland in the lovely ski town of Verbier. It's a ski/BJJ camp, so you can learn some jiu-jitsu from me and learn some or do some skiing with someone other than me, because I'm way too fucking old to ski and do jiu-jitsu on the same day. But I will be teaching, I think, five or six sessions over the course of three days. Leg locks and back attacks is the theme for that one. Yeah, so Verbier, Switzerland, Mountain Top Team is our affiliate over there, so I'll be hanging out with Dugi and the crew for a few days. And then I'm off to Germany for a bit. I've got a camp in Heidelberg with Team Choco in Heidelberg, and I've got a camp with Team Lorian and Alex in Munich. CLA camp I'm teaching jointly with Cal Jones, who's a judo guy and a fantastic CLA-based instructor. So this is a constraints-led approach camp where I will be handling the jiu-jitsu side and Cal will be handling the judo side. So I'll be over there. And in between those camps, I'm doing a seminar in Berlin and a seminar, the seminar in Berlin is with Bear Hug BJJ, and the I'm doing one more seminar in Bosnia, in Banja Luka, I believe, with Gavran BJJ. So, yeah, if you want to check me out on this particular visit to Europe. I know a couple of those camps are sold out. And there's definitely tickets available for the Heidelberg camp, but I know you can get tickets to the individual seminars. But yeah, check all that stuff out. Look on my Instagram, Island Top Team, if you want any more information on that. Speaker 1: Nice. Well, I will put the link in the show notes to your Instagram. People should be following you if they aren't already. So go follow Rob on Instagram, especially if you want to get up-to-date info on where he's going to be for seminars and how you can get there as well. It's funny you mentioned Cal Jones. I actually just got off a recording with him about an hour ago. So he, yeah, so his episode is going to go live right before this one, the week before. So you're going to get a Jones-Bernaki sandwich there. People who are into CLA and concepts are going to be very, very thrilled. But Rob, Speaker 2: Oh, no kidding. There you go. Yeah, Jones-Bernaki sandwich on air and then a Jones-Bernaki sandwich in person. Speaker 1: In Munich in April. Well, let's get into the topic here today, Rob. You had a position that you specifically wanted to talk about because I think you mentioned you've got an upcoming module on this for BJJ Concepts. I will turn it over to you though. Why don't you tell us what we're talking about today? Speaker 2: Yeah, so we're going to talk about the 90/90 position, which unsurprisingly is a leg lock position as all the one number followed by another number positions tend to be. Although this is more of a position that we use as a defensive approach to leg locking. So, if you're familiar with, you know, 50/50 or 80/20 or 90/10, whatever like these nomenclatures we tend to use for leg entanglements tend to come from the perspective of, I am a leg locker, I am looking to break your leg arms and I will use some form of numerical entanglement to do so. Whereas this is in reference to a position that we put our body in in the capacity as a defender of leg locks whose primary interest is not just defending and fleeing a leg entanglement, because there's a whole bunch of stuff that you can do to get yourself like to extricate yourself from leg entanglements, but a lot of the positions that people take when they respond to leg entanglements with a very purely defensive approach tend to leave you a very or at least somewhat vulnerable to follow-up sweeps, back takes or passes and do not permit you to go on counter offense. Whereas this 90/90 position puts you in a very strong counter leg locking scenario, but especially a very strong like crushing the other person and getting to counter back takes like bolo type stuff and especially passing and dominant positions. So, this is a configuration you need to be familiar with if you're intending to defend leg locks aggressively, stay in the pocket, try to turn your opponent's leg lock attack into your own offense. And conversely, as a leg locker, if you are not capable of dealing with the 90/90 position that your defender throws at you, you're you're going to be pretty far behind the curve and you're going to be vulnerable to what we've referred to in the past as being that like leg lock or bust person who, you know, you go for leg lock and if it doesn't work out, you're kind of fucked. Speaker 1: Yeah. I love how all of these positions, as you mentioned, they all have numbers in them. I don't know why all of the leg lock positions have numeric values. This one is especially annoying to me because it doesn't even add up to 100. You know, at least with things like 70/30 and 90/10, at least my, you know, my OCD brain is okay with it because it lines up with 100. Why is this called the 90/90? And most importantly, why doesn't it add up to 100, Rob? You need to answer this for me. Speaker 2: Absolutely. So this is just like if you're familiar with any amount of stretching, so like yoga, Pilates, and just like general stretching that people do, there's a position called the 90/90, which is like a 90/90 stretch where you splay your legs apart in like 90-degree angles forward and backward. And that so that's all we're referring to. So this 90/90 position is a position that you will have to go to when your hips are on the mat and your partner has attacked your legs to like at the very least to hide your heel, but also to give you the possibility to then build base. So the 90/90 position both when you are parallel to the floor, but also when you build up and you are then perpendicular to the floor. So in both of those planes, we will be using that sort of 90/90 configuration. So if you were to be like let's say you had me in like the saddle or the 411, I would turn away from the leg that's entangled. So if my right leg is entangled, I would turn to my left throwing this 90/90 shape to hide my heel, and then I might build up into base into this 90/90 shape, which if you picture like the some people use the term Captain Morgan, where you're like putting one foot up on a barrel kind of thing where if you so if you had one knee down and then one foot up as you build up into base, you would now be resembling that same 90/90 configuration. So it's just the reason it doesn't add up to 100 degrees is because the full range of motion, what we talk about, you know, mathematically, geometrically, isn't 100 degrees, it's, you know, 360 degrees. So we're just using the 90/90 to reflect like the degrees between your knee pit and your femur and your tibia. Speaker 1: Understood. Got it. And you would describe this to me earlier as being kind of akin to a pigeon pose. Speaker 2: Well, so what it looks like is if I want to put myself into the 90/90 position on my right hip, right? My right knee would be, you know, bent at a 90-degree angle so that my heel would be like drawn towards me, my knee would be pointed away from me on my right side, on my right hip. Like in so my right knee would be in front of me, and then my left knee would be out behind me. So I'd be let's say turning towards my right hip. I'd be leaning forward so that my weight would be going onto my right knee. And as long as my leg is bent at roughly a 90-degree angle, I have some good stability from that. And then my right leg will be bent behind me or like out to the side and behind me so that my right heel, sorry, my left heel, my left leg would be going out behind me, my left knee would be going out behind beside me, my left heel would be going behind me, so that I've got a like an L-shape with my leg in front of me and an L-shape with my leg behind me and they're complementing each other. So it's like an L towards my hip on one side and an L towards my hip on the other side with the the heels being about as far away as they can be in that configuration. Speaker 1: Got it. Now, what is the history of this position in jiu-jitsu? What kind of led you to realize that this is solving a problem that needs to be solved for and isn't being solved for in any other way? And I mean, that leads into like how does this fit into the ecosystem of leg lock positions and when you would use this? You mentioned it's primarily defensive, but like how did we get to the point? Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I mean, I think the initial 90/90 position is pretty much standard. It's what everyone does at a high level to defend leg locks. Like if you are looking to hide your heel, you're going to establish a 90/90 configuration because that 90/90 configuration turns your heel against your partner's body in a way that makes digging a heel hook like very difficult to achieve, right? So we are hiding our heel with the 90/90 and you can throw the 90/90, so this is where we get it like we can get pretty rabbit holey with it. You can throw the 90/90 at your partner, depending on the format of the leg entanglement, either to both sides or only to one side. So the simplest way to think of it is if I am finding myself in what's usually referred to as a straight leg entanglement, and straight doesn't mean like when people say straight ankle lock, they're not necessarily referring to the configuration of the ankle. It's just straight leg entanglements are the ones where the person doing the attacking is positioned in between the legs of the person being attacked. And then cross leg entanglements that are where the attacker is outside of the legs of the person being attacked. So like a saddle or a 50/50 would be a cross leg entanglement, a, you know, a standard ashi or single leg X or outside ashi would be a straight leg entanglement where you are inside of your partner's guard. So if you are in a straight leg entanglement, you can throw the 90/90 depending on what's happening to either hip and still get some results. If you're in a cross leg entanglement, you have to throw the 90/90 turning away from the entangled leg because if you turn into it, you are exposing your heel. Just to clarify, if you were to throw the 90/90 to the other side if you're in a straight leg entanglement, you are also exposing the heel. It's just you're also then able to build yourself up into base in a way that makes knee slipping very easy or I should say simple, not easy. Whereas in the cross leg entanglement, you're making knee slipping a lot harder and you're exposing your heel. So, if you're outside of the if your partner is attacking you from a cross leg entanglement, you will throw the 90/90 turning away from them. If your partner is in a straight leg entanglement, you can choose depending on the circumstance to throw the 90/90 to either side. Speaker 1: Got it. Now, of course, the trick with leg locks is because there is this, I think you once called it a Cambrian explosion of techniques and positions that are being brought into play here. It can be very difficult for people to keep all of this stuff in their head at once. I find as someone who does, you know, trains primarily in the gi, I don't immerse myself in this culture as much and so it can be hard to keep track of all of this. I just want to confirm and clarify, if people wanted a visual companion of this, I think you'd mentioned you're putting stuff like this on BJJ Concepts, so people will be able to see soon exactly what you're talking about, correct? Speaker 2: Absolutely. Yeah, there's a full module on the 90/90 position that's coming to BJJ Concepts shortly. When I teach leg lock seminars, which I can kind of cover quite a variety of topics in my seminars, but leg locks are definitely one of the most popular. Primarily, say over the last couple of years, what I've been working with is just regardless of the level in the room, we work everyone towards the point where they are able to effectively use the 90/90 position to defend, which thereby causes the attacker to have to learn how to defeat the 90/90 position because for my money, if you are a leg locker and you don't have the ability to contend with like somebody who is proficient at using this 90/90 defense format, you're pretty much behind the curve. So it like I think it's a whether you're not interested in leg locks at all as an attacker or you are very interested in becoming, you know, as good as you can be at finishing with leg locks, even in the current meta where leg lock defense is leveled up. If you don't have training partners or you yourself are not familiar with how to use the 90/90, you're probably not dealing with the best level of leg lock defense. You're probably dealing with people who are, you know, fleeing to some degree, extending their legs, just trying to clear their knee, rolling, spinning, running away, that kind of stuff, kicking you in the butt, that sort of thing, where all they're interested in is just getting their legs the hell away from you. The 90/90 allows you to stay in the pocket, stay within leg entanglements in a way that makes it very difficult for someone to attack effectively and then allows you to clear the knee to the degree that you need to to then go on offense. Speaker 1: Interesting. Speaker 2: Well, not clear it at all and counter within the leg entanglements. Speaker 1: Interesting. I like that because that is one challenge of of training leg locks. The greatest defense against leg locks is to just not let them do that, right? And to just be completely avoidant. But the problem then is you're also avoiding skill development opportunities. Speaker 2: Exactly. Speaker 1: Yeah, so I think this is a really cool approach here. So you talked earlier about like the Captain Morgan, I also use that terminology. Of course, one of the the best ways to defend against leg locks is to build base and height like you talked about. Maybe explain this, like how does this all fit together and what would it look like if you were to use this as a defensive option to prevent people from just heel hooking you right away? Speaker 2: Yeah, so I mean the first thing it's going to involve is just assuming that you have had your hips put to the mat, you would assume this 90/90 position in the interest of first hiding your heel and then enabling you to start to put a significant amount of weight on the leg that's being attacked. Like what we want to do is build to a base where our partner is having a really hard time creating a strong lever control on our leg. Like if you work backwards from what does somebody need to leg lock you? They need some form of lever control at the very minimum. They need some immobilization of the hip. They need some wedging at the knee and they need to control the lever that they are attacking. If they can't even control the lever that they are attacking, then they're going to have a really hard time getting anything working. So if we can put our leg into a position where while we build base, we are safe from being vulnerable to a dig to create heel exposure or to somebody being able to strongly wrap an overhook ankle lock grip in a way where they could hyperextend your ankle because we're no longer in a meta where heel hooks are the primary form of attack. There are a lot of very effective ankle locks nowadays, but those ankle locks do require, you know, a pretty strong lever control. So if we can weight our leg in a way where our partner cannot create that lever control, while we build into base and then while we're building into base, we now have the ability to if we're in a strong 90/90 position where we've gone from parallel to the mats in 90/90 and now we're perpendicular to the mats, we're upright, we can start to bring our hips directly over our partner's hips and that's when we assume that kind of Captain Morgan position. Now we're no longer like fully 90/90. Now we're more 90 with one leg and we get more to like 45 degrees-ish with our leg that's being attacked because we're trying to sit our hips onto our partner's hips and thereby create the angle where our knee passes our partner's thighs, at which point we shouldn't really be vulnerable, especially to heel hooks, uh, but even to ankle locks at this point. And then we can start deciding how we're going to counterattack. Speaker 1: We refer to this, by the way, in the 90/90 module, we refer to this as the ass-to-ass position. Speaker 2: For those Requiem for a Dream fans out there. Speaker 1: As our mutual friend Margo Chikereli once told me, Rob, jiu-jitsu is all about butts. And she's absolutely right. Like ass-to-body distance is a key metric when it comes to how effective your jiu-jitsu is. You want to have your ass as close to your opponent pretty much at all times. Speaker 2: In this case, as close to your opponent's ass as possible. Speaker 1: That's true. That's true. Now, I want to get into some specifics here about like what you can do from this position. But maybe before we do, I am well aware of how challenging it can be to have a bunch of information dumped on someone who's brand new to this stuff. So, something that you have always been especially good at is figuring out an icebreaker game. Like here's something that we can do, a game that we can play, kind of like a fuck your jiu-jitsu thing as you would call it, that at least gives people a a comfort zone. I know our our mutual friend Joshua Wentworth talks about this a lot as well. When you drop someone into a new system, the first thing to do is to give them a simple game that's easy to understand that they can play so they can build comfort and confidence and then you can start layering on the rest. Speaker 2: Yeah, so we just do our like our leg spaghetti with this and we do the legs there are several variants of leg spaghetti. So we have mutual offense, we've got mutual offense with back takes, mutual offense with passing, but the most basic version is offense defense. And so we would do a round of offense defense where attacker gets to just pull you into a leg entanglement and from that leg entanglement, you are then trying to defend. Now normally with offense defense, what we go for is you allow because we're more using it to try to develop offense to some degree. We instruct the defender to allow the attacker to kind of get as far as they can before you start defending. So basically, you defend as late as possible. If we're trying to develop the 90/90, we don't really want to do that. So we would instruct our partner to just be like, okay, as soon as the attacker gets a wedge above the knee closer to the hip, you are now free to start trying to establish this 90/90 position. You're going to try to build base and you're going to try to free your knee. And your partner's just going to try to hold onto that knee or try to get a an overhook ankle lock grip or try to get a heel exposure. If they successfully get a a heel exposure and your knee is inside of their thighs, we reset and we start again. If they successfully get a strong ankle lock grip, your knee is inside of their thighs and especially if they can put you back down while you're trying to build up to the perpendicular version of the 90/90, then we just they've they've won or we continue going. And then if you're able to build up to the 90/90, extract your knee, squish their hips, then you've won, we can reset and we can start again. Speaker 1: Got it. So, just to reiterate and confirm, it sounds like you're saying the basis of the game is once your opponent gets to a place where they have control of your knee, that's when you start playing with the 90/90 if we're talking about skill development, right? Speaker 2: Yeah, because if you start throwing the 90/90 before somebody even gets you in a leg entanglement, Speaker 1: You'll just get right out of there. Speaker 2: You'll just get right out of there, exactly. Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, I've talked about this many times. The signal that you're about to enter into a vacation to Leg Lockistan is your opponent has control of your knee. That's basically when all of this stuff starts to go into that system. And a very common mistake when people are practicing leg locks is they will just bail right away before their opponent even gets that control. If a person grabs your ankle and you immediately just dive right into your A-game leg lock escapes, yeah, it's going to work, but you're not getting the benefit of training from a realistic place where you're actually in danger. Speaker 2: Well, yeah, and it is actually more to it than that, which is to say, if your A-game leg lock escape is to bail the fuck out of there the second someone touches your foot or your toe, then frankly, your A-game sucks donkey balls because you're responding to the like very initial stages of an attack with what is more appropriately done as a mid to late stage defense. Like if you're dropping to your hips, turning away and fleeing the second somebody touches your legs, you know, good luck to you. You're never going to pass the guard of a leg locker. And more often than not, actually, what will happen is you will get swept by leg lockers and worse than that, you will get your back taken or you will get your guard passed by leg lockers because your preemptive response to somebody touching your legs is to turn and yank your knee the other way, which basically just exposes your back, your hips, the backs of your knees, really like everything that a good back attacker, wrestle-up specialist, passer, all of the things that those people need to create that form of offense on you, you're giving them that by overdefending the leg entanglements. So like it's super easy to overdefend leg entanglements by just throwing your hips to the mat, turning away and running. But that shit only works on leg lock or bust people. It doesn't work on people who do good follow-ups. Speaker 1: It's been a while since we've talked about this terminology. I've got some things I want to ask you about, but before we do, do you want to explain what is meant by leg lock or bust? Because I love that framing. Speaker 2: Yeah, so you've got a type of grappler that, you know, used to be more common. Like if you if you go back like five to eight years, you could be a leg lock or bust grappler and get pretty tremendous results. Like if you just knew proper wedging and breaking mechanics in 2017, you could show up to any local tournament, you know, as a blue belt probably, and just heel hook brown and black belts that just were not familiar, were not up to date on this stuff. So there's a period of time where the leg locking game, the offense that was available but not that well known. If you discovered it and you were competing against the majority of people who hadn't, you just had a free ticket to a win. And like any advanced division in a NAGA or a grappling industries or whatever, if you just showed up with this stuff, you could literally know nothing else. Like you could have dog shit sweeps, dog shit passing, no top game, you know, no upper body attacks from the guard. You could have a very like funneled game of like sit to your butt, play butterfly single leg X, you know, reap 411, etc, etc. 50/50, yada, yada. You could just do that stuff and you could beat a lot of people. And if you ran into somebody who had a similar game and were just conversant enough with the defense that they could negate what you were doing and then they just got on top and passed you, then you had nothing. And there are a lot of people like that were like, the only option they have to win is they're going to try to leg lock you. They're going to go for the leg lock, they're going to wrap your leg up. And as you are defending by building base and crushing them, they are still trying to leg lock you. And that's the number one, you know, dead giveaway of a leg lock or bust player is like as you build base and start to underhook them and smash them and sprawl free of their leg entanglement, are they still trying to maintain the grip on your leg and still just trying to leg lock you or are they recognizing that, hey, this first attempt didn't work out, I should get back to a lever control and get back on top or at the very least, I should bail back to a solid guard structure and prevent myself from getting fucked up with, you know, a back take or an arm triangle or whatever, which is very, very common. Like you'll see people just getting their knees smashed, they're they're getting underhooked or they're getting claw ride like done to them and they're still just hugging the leg desperately trying to attack. So that's when we say leg lock or bust, that's what we're referring to. Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. Now, you know, there's a few techniques in jiu-jitsu that I would consider to be almost like a a skill check, where they are basically as close to a guaranteed win as you can get if your opponent doesn't know how to defend. And it's not just leg locks. I mean, I would say guillotines, for example, are a skill check like that. If you are sparring against someone who doesn't know how to defend a guillotine, it's pretty much a guaranteed win. However, most people know how to defend a guillotine at least to some degree. With leg locks, there was a time period, and I remember this time period, where if someone knew even just how to do a basic heel hook, they could win every single time. When my daughter was born, I took a year and a half off of jiu-jitsu, and that was around the time when the leg lock explosion really took off. And I remember coming back and seeing all of this stuff that had evolved while I was gone. And there was a period of a few weeks there where I was getting just massacred by every blue belt in the gym because they had very rudimentary knowledge about how to execute these techniques, and I had effectively no knowledge about how to defend against them. But as soon as you start building that knowledge, then again, it becomes a little bit more difficult and that's when you get into these nuances about the game. I also really liked what you talked about regarding how if people are just trying to bail and run at the first whiff of a leg lock attempt or even a leg entanglement, that's a sign that they're going right to the late stage defenses. Another mutual friend of ours, Jeff Shaw, has uh famously said that in jiu-jitsu, you've got early stage defenses, late stage defenses, and oh shit defenses. And I love thinking about things in terms of these different phases because as you get deeper into trouble, you're going to have to start using defenses that might come with a little bit more risk because the situation is much more dire for you. The challenge, especially with beginners, is they get hyperfixated on the late stage and the oh shit stage defenses. And I get that because you naturally draw your attention to where the trouble is. If I want to know how to escape a triangle choke, I'm probably going to be thinking about what do I do when this thing is fully locked in and I start getting desperate? What's the the late stage oh shit thing I can do to escape that? However, as Kurt Osiander once said, you fucked up a long time ago. You would have been better off preventing that from happening with an earlier stage defense. Whereas many beginners, when they think of how to escape, they will be thinking about, okay, what do I do if I'm two seconds away from tapping? Realistically, you need to have levels of defense, some of which you apply earlier. And bailing and running is best suited as a a pretty late stage defense, right? Because as you said, it exposes your back, it allows the person sometimes to get underneath you. It's not always the greatest option. Maybe talk about that nuance and kind of how you teach this and layer in those levels of defense and how that ties into the 90/90. Speaker 2: Yeah, so actually it's an interesting point about that like late stage defense versus early stage defense thing, which is that I actually find that there's a basically like a flip that happens with that idea in when it comes to leg locks because people will look for late stage defense for stuff like you mentioned like arm bars and triangles and even like rear naked chokes and all that kind of stuff because those things tend to come from, you know, fairly dominant positions and so we've separated the idea of like defending an arm bar from the mount by just not letting yourself get mounted from the idea of defending an arm bar from the mount by like, oh, he got you in the arm bar and then I'm going to start defending the arm bar. Whereas we don't really do that as much in leg locking. And kind of, you know, kind of rightly so, which is like, there's a defense for a heel hook itself is by definition really fucking late stage versus a defense for an outside ashi or a, you know, a saddle is more of a defense to a position. It's just we don't tend to think of it that way as much. We tend to think of it as being like, oh yeah, it's a it's a leg lock defense. Yeah, but there's the position itself, which you can have somebody in a leg entanglement and be like really, really far away from actually threatening to break their leg. And until you understand that distinction, and until you understand that you should defend the submissions as though they're submissions and defend the positions as though they're positions, until you understand that distinction, you will tend to overreact and you will defend the positions as though they're submissions and do that oh shit running away kind of defense. Does that make sense? Speaker 1: Yes. Definitely, definitely. Speaker 2: So with the 90/90 is, is it's a way of being in the position, recognizing that it's a position, but not fleeing as though you're in a submission. It's a way of putting yourself in a situation where you've somewhat neutralized the position itself. And now you can stay within the position, building up your base, degrading your partner's base and alignment, and then like elect to counterattack from within that position. So and I think that the the reason we have this dichotomy is we're just a lot more comfortable with just because of the the far greater level of exposure and familiarity. We're a lot more comfortable, you know, being in the pocket. If somebody goes to arm bar you from the guard, you'll grab your biceps, you'll do the figure four thing with your arms, and you'll like you'll try to squish them, you'll try to pull your arm out so that you can pass their guard rather than being like, oh God, it's an arm bar and then like falling over and flipping around and trying to yank your elbow clear. Whereas with leg locks, because of the the stigma and the propaganda that came back in the day where if oh if somebody just touched your foot, your leg was going to explode. People are have not spent anywhere near the same amount of time just getting comfortable within positions that aren't actually all that dangerous and knowing how much time they have before they actually have to tap because of certain amounts of laxity in the joint and like, you know, heel slipping and just ability to weight the leg and all that. So like as you get more and more familiar with these positions, you start to recognize that they're they're positions just like any other. And, you know, it's like if you have a kimura on me, but I've got my hand glued to my belt or my my shorts in front of my body, you've got a long way to go before you're going to hurt my shoulder with a kimura. It's kind of the same thing with the leg entanglement. As you gain more familiarity with it, you should be able to be like, oh, well, I'm in I'm in standard ashi or single leg X from the top. Like, who fucking cares? It's not that big a deal, right? But if you're not familiar with that, you're like, oh my God, I'm in whatever origami ashi salami. I got to run from this. Like, if that's your level of familiarity, you're going to overreact. So just gaining more perspective on what is a leg entanglement versus what is a like strong submission on the legs and understanding the distinction between the two and when you can just use the 90/90 to keep yourself a lot closer to the edge of just that position where you are safe, but they think they can attack you and just knowing how to dismantle their offense from there is what we're aiming for. Speaker 1: Got it. Now, I want to dig into something you mentioned earlier in this chat. And honestly, we might wind up just saying the same thing twice, which is okay. I think that for this particular topic, a bit of repetition helps. But you had talked about the difference between how this applies and what you can do when you're in a straight leg entanglement versus a cross leg entanglement. Could you maybe expand a bit on that just to give people an idea of from a technical standpoint, how you would play this differently in both of those cases? Speaker 2: Yeah, so like let's say you've got me in, you know, single leg X, standard ashi. You are on your left hip, you are attacking my right leg. I'm kind of on my right hip. I can choose based on the circumstances whether I'm going to go 90/90 towards my right hip and try to put my right knee on the ground, hiding my heel and building my base directly over top of you, rather than turning away from you. So like in the case where you don't have good heel exposure, and especially if I've got fairly flexible hips, I can build up towards the knee of my leg that's being attacked. I can throw the 90/90, my right leg will bend, my right knee will become my post, and I will push off of my left foot to drive my weight up onto you. You're I'll be trying to get rid of your left foot off of my hip. I might need my hand to do it, but more likely than not, as I build up into the 90/90, your foot will just slip off. And then all that's remaining between us is your right shin and knee. And if you are still just holding onto my leg and not framing me at all, I will probably grab your head. I'll probably break your posture pretty badly with my right arm, and I might use my left arm at that point to try to force your knee a little bit out of my way. And I can start to build up and basically threaten to pass your guard, or I can hop all the way over to the other side, like over your left leg, while controlling your right ankle, and then start to free myself, maybe build up into the mount. I could maybe even omoplata you from there. Like there are a bunch of counterattacks that I can throw at you. Conversely, if either my flexibility doesn't permit this or you've done a good job at initiating a either a heel exposure or a reap, then I would just throw the 90/90 to my left hip. I would build up onto my left knee, even while you are exposing my heel, I would build up onto my left knee, look to turn, put my right knee on the ground and keep your legs separated while I build up into that Captain Morgan position and back my hips up over top of yours, preventing you from generating the force you need to create any breaking mechanics, like effective breaking on my heel. And at that point, I would start to concern myself with whether or not to slip my knee, so that I could either, depending on your leg configuration, I could junilock you from there, which is an inside heel hook done on your reaping leg, or I could complete the extraction of my knee and either start backstepping with my posted leg, the Captain Morgan leg, and going into like a scissor wedge back take, or just keep spinning around into a guard pass. So that would be for a straight leg entanglement, that's what would be what I would do. Versus for a cross leg entanglement, I'm literally just going if you're entangling my right leg, I'm going to turn to my left, throw that 90 position, hide my heel, build base, clear my knee, get my hips on top of yours. Speaker 1: Got it. So it sounds like in a straight leg configuration, you have that great option of being able to crowd the person and get hips over hips and basically compress them and squish them so that their movement is kind of killed. Speaker 2: Yes. But in the other position, you're trying to do the same thing. You're trying to gain that hip height so that you can compress your partner from there as well. It's just you have to turn away and take some weight off of them before you build your base up and then put the weight back on them. So there's a little bit of a race for hip height there to make the position effective. Speaker 1: Right. Now, you had talked earlier about how one of the great things about the 90/90 is that it's not just about defense, but that it can be used to transition into offense. And you gave some examples just now about techniques that can work, um that you can use offensively from this position. I'd love to hear you maybe expand on that. What are the most common counters and attacks that you would deploy from the 90/90? Speaker 2: Right, so I mean the number one attack from the 90/90 if you want to be like slick is just getting to a scissor wedge back take or some form of bolo or crab ride. Assuming that we can clear our knee, and even if we can't fully clear our knee, as long as we our foot is in a safe position while our knee is still on our on the other side of our partner's or our opponent's thighs, we can simply like move ourselves around the axis of their femur and drop our knee as a our free leg knee as a wedge in between their thigh and the rib cage and start rolling for the back. Uh or rolling to the crab ride or rolling to leg drag situations. So that's probably the number one threat. Like you'll see people kind of allow a reap or an especially an outside ashi and then spin into this this wedging back take. That's kind of the number one threat in particular from any of the the straight leg entanglements. And with the cross leg entanglements, it's a little bit of a matter of just like building up and then kind of swapping your legs so that you can go into that same thing. You kind of force a straight leg entanglement reap version of it and then you can roll into the same attack. If you're not as slick, if you're not as well developed with those things, then we're more looking to just complete the the spin and just pass our partner's guard or at least put them on a a strong like guard retention cycle. And then if you're quite conversant with counter leg locks, the two primary counter leg locks there become the junilock and the straight leg entanglements and things like toe holds against cross leg entanglements. Speaker 1: Got it. And it sounds like if I understand correctly, one of the strategies that you can use here is if a person has a cross ankle configuration, you can use the 90/90 to get their leg back into a straight ankle configuration, which you might find a bit more easier to defend and attack from. Is that correct? Speaker 2: Yeah, you can. Speaker 1: Awesome. Speaker 2: And then just to follow up on that in case you aren't going to ask this question, there is a vulnerability to using the 90/90 exclusively, just like there's a vulnerability to any what you would call universal defense, right? So like if people aren't familiar with the term universal defense, the the term should make it obvious, but it's basically you do one thing to defend all attacks. Right? So like in boxing, the universal defense tends to look like like earmuffs, right? Like where you just bring your gloves up to your temples and you tuck your elbows in and you just let somebody kind of peter out their attack by blasting at your your gloves and your forearms, which you know works lovely if you've got headgear and 16-ounce gloves. Not so great a defense if you're talking about like MMA gloves or, you know, let alone bare knuckle. Like that's an artifice of the equipment, right? Where because you're not allowed to kick somebody in the balls, you're not allowed to leg kick them, because we're only attacking certain things. If you just shell up and use that as a universal defense, you can be circumstantially effective, but it's a terrible way to build all of your defense around that one approach. So, you know, a universal defense often times for people looks like, I'll just glue my elbows to my sides and you're not going to get my arm away from my body, you're not going to get an underhook and it's like, cool, I hope you like my shin on your neck because you can't just do that in jiu-jitsu. Although a lot of people do. We use the term taking your ball and going home, right? Like isometric contraction is not a defense for everything. It's, you know, just just shutting down and going into the fetal position is not a great defense in jiu-jitsu. There's a reason that like babies can do it. That's why it's called the fetal position, right? Like it's not an intelligent way of moving. But goddamn if a lot of people don't just think that like all you got to do to defend stuff in jiu-jitsu is like, oh, you've mounted me, let me glue my arms to my torso to prevent you from like moving them. Hey, what if we allowed punching? Or what if we're in the gi and I can grab your collar or or like just shit like that just immediately breaks a universal defense. So when people start using the 90/90, one of the things they default to is it's just like, if I can get my hips over your hips and just stay there and do nothing, then I'm good. And I just want to caution people against that because the more sophisticated leg lockers are now realizing that that while the 90/90 configuration defends almost all leg locks, it's really, really bad for defending calf slicers. So if you just throw the 90/90 and let's say I go to hit you with a reap and you spin to the 90/90 and you put your butt over mine, there's a really simple adjustment I can make and especially if I can anticipate that you're going to do that, and I can start to threaten you with a calf slicer where if you've committed fully to keeping your hips close to mine, finishing a calf slicer requires your hips to be close to mine. If I can body lock you and I get that calf slicer position from behind, you're in a lot of trouble. So if once you learn the 90/90 and are conversant with it as a method of defending, you know, most of the panoply of leg lock attacks, you then have to develop a really strong awareness of how to defend the transition to calf slicer attacks while you are playing the 90/90, which is a bit of a different game. Speaker 1: I see. I see. Now, you talked briefly there about the gi, and I always love asking this question because there's a lot of folks, myself included, who primarily train in the gi. Many of these positions, they, you know, their bread and butter is a no-gi application, but even in the gi sometimes, despite the rule changes and the differences, there could still be benefits to playing them. Do you think this position has any utility in the kimono? Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely. It has tremendous utility for defending straight ankle locks. And it has tremendous utility for dealing with the 50/50 position, which is less of a leg locking position and more of a lapel sweeping position in the gi. But the fact of the matter is, if you are proficient at building to the 90/90 and untangling your legs from there against the 50/50 in no-gi, it'll work really well for you in the gi. And it's great for defending like knee bar type positions like the 411, the saddle, the way that it's played in the gi because people can't even try to heel hook you. So, you know, it's it's a hell of a lot easier to hide my heel from something that's not even a threat. And just understanding how to move yourself into the 90/90, you can actually in the gi start to throw the 90/90 to the other side in a way that you wouldn't do in no-gi because you would just be leaving a heel hook vulnerable, right? So like, I could try to throw the 90/90 in the other direction and spin myself around the axis of your hips on top in the gi, which I would recommend like strongly against ever doing that in no-gi. Speaker 1: Got it. Awesome. Well, this is a really fantastic chat, Rob, but I know that we can talk endlessly about this. Is there anything specifically that you want to add or get into which we didn't cover here? Any other specific things that people need to know before they start deploying this stuff? Speaker 2: Nothing I can think of. You know, obviously check out the module when you get a chance. I've probably got some leg lock seminars on the BJJ Concepts YouTube channel that involve this topic because I put a fair number of the the seminars that I do up on there for free. So yeah, like if you if you want more information on it, I've definitely put some stuff out there about it, you know, paid and unpaid. And if you want to learn any of this stuff, again, like hit up those seminars. Uh and at some point we should bring up my second seminar tour in uh September. I mean, at one point I should just come on and just like give you my itinerary for the next two years. You know, I'll be in Australia and Asia in 2027. So like I'm booking for 2028. So Speaker 1: Well, we can do that for sure. I will put links to again, your social is probably the best place for people to follow you if they want to stay abreast of what you're up to. So I will put a link there. Speaker 2: Yeah, especially since I'm kind of like I've reduced my role at the uh at my home club here at Island Top Team in Nanaimo. We've we've even separated the the social media accounts. So like Island Top Team is just my personal Instagram account nowadays. And Island Top Team BJJ is the uh school account. So if you want just like info about the club and classes and tournament results and celebrating our students and all the cool shit that they do, that stuff's all going to go down on Island Top Team BJJ. If you're interested in like what am I kind of personally doing with any competing, any seminar tours, you know, maybe what's going on with my cars and that kind of shit, you know, where am I going to be living, where in the world is Rob Bernaki, then Island Top Team is the place to go. And then BJJ Concepts is the Instagram for our online academy. So any stuff about new modules, sales that are coming up, that kind of shit, that's all taking place on BJJ Concepts. Speaker 1: Nice. Well, I will throw links to both your gyms and your Instagram plus BJJ Concepts in the show notes. There is one last thing I wanted to ask you though before we tie this up, Rob. Just broad strokes, and I guess it's related to the topic here with 90/90 being a thing that that you're advocating for now. Where do you see the leg lock game and meta changing? How has this position changed the future of leg lock evolution and what do you see coming in the near future that you think is going to be the next hot thing? Speaker 2: Well, I mean, I think one way in which this position has changed the meta is that you can no longer be a like standard pathway leg locker. So I think Lachlan Giles uses the terms proximal control and distal control. I originally use the terms like standard pathway and reverse pathway. But basically there are kind of two overall methods to to gaining a strong leg lock finish. You know, one is that you attach to primarily the like the femur as close to the hip as possible. You know, you get a strong leg entanglement, like a classic leg entanglement, like a 50/50, like a saddle, 411, standard ashi, whatever. And then you work your way back to the end of the lever. And then you've got the, you know, the the distal control, the reverse pathway where you attach yourself basically at the ankle joint without any strong entanglement above the knee or near the hip. And you work your way towards that afterwards. And so what the 90/90 does a great job of is defeating the standard pathway, the proximal control stuff. So we're already seeing the evolution towards some of the more reverse pathway, distal control stuff where if I know that anytime I put you into, you know, a more conventional leg entanglement, you're just going to build to a 90/90 on me and start squishing my hips. You know, one of the ways I might go about attacking you is I'm just I'm really going to try to get a good grip around your ankle and try to control the end of the lever and try to just prevent you from building to that 90/90, make you stay on your hips for longer and or if you're going to go to the 90/90, make you stay in the grounded 90/90 where you're parallel to the mats rather than perpendicular to the mats. And if I can keep you there, I can keep you from going on that counter cycle where you're simultaneously defending the position and then going on your own offense. So you're already seeing a lot more of that stuff with uh just like different varieties of leg attacks that work on the secondary leg, different varieties of leg attacks that work more on like seizing a grip of the ankle and the foot, stuff like the Locky Lock or the Woge Lock that are even though they're still a little bit more on the primary leg, they make building to that 90/90 position so difficult because you're not trying to have an attachment at the knee and then work to manipulate the foot for heel exposure. You're manipulating and controlling the foot to create the the configuration for the attack, which makes the 90/90 position harder to get to. So we're already in one element of like a subsequent meta cycle. Maybe because like I didn't invent the 90/90. It's not new. It's just an approach and a terminology that I want people to be familiar with. Like if you're going to defend leg locks, you kind of have to know it. Speaker 1: Yeah, I love that. I would actually like to do a follow-up chat with you specifically about that philosophy at some point. I find this fascinating, the idea of when you're trying to secure someone's limb, do you start at the end of the lever, like their wrist and their ankle, and then work their way up towards the torso, or do you start at the torso, which means the shoulder or the hip, and then progressively try to isolate the rest of the limb? Like in this case, it would be the knee and the ankles. Kind of do you start from out and move in or in and then move out? Speaker 2: The answer is yes. Speaker 1: Uh but I mean if we're still on track to do that uh leg locking for imbeciles, that's definitely something we can discuss in that series. Speaker 1: I would love to do that. I mean, I am definitely an imbecile when it comes to this stuff. So we're probably going to be shooting some more content on this. But in the meantime, like I said, I'll put links to Rob's stuff in the show notes. Specifically, if this 90/90 stuff intrigues you, it sounds like there's going to be upcoming content on BJJ Concepts that you can look at there. So again, link in the show notes. I will also put links to our stuff. Everything we make lives at bjjmentalmodels.com. I think most people know our focus. Primarily audio, but not exclusively. The podcast itself, mini episodes that get to the point with concepts much faster, and our newsletter are all completely free and all worth your time. And if you want to level up with us, BJJ Mental Models Premium is the world's largest and most comprehensive jiu-jitsu educational audio resource. Think Audible or MasterClass, but for jiu-jitsu specifically. So it's a great vehicle if you want to talk about things like tactics, strategy, and concepts and just go beyond traditional technique instructional. Please do consider checking that out as well. It is how we fund this and keep it ad-free. So everything we make, both premium and the free stuff, is at bjjmentalmodels.com. I will put that plus links to Rob's stuff in the show notes. But Rob, as always, my friend, thank you so much for doing this, man. Really appreciate it and have a good trip, man. I'm excited to see how your seminar tour goes. Speaker 2: Good trips. Plural. Speaker 1: Trips. Speaker 2: Thank you. It's really always a pleasure chatting with you, Steve. I appreciate you, buddy. Speaker 1: You too, my friend. And thanks to the listeners as well. You are also appreciated and we will talk to you soon. See you then.