Mini Ep. 93: Plus, Minus, Equals

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. I am Steve Kwan and BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent Jiu-Jitsu approach. In this mini episode, I've got a cool concept for you. It is often attributed to UFC star Frank Shamrock, but probably this is an idea that goes back much beyond that. This particular language though, as far as I know, comes from him. It's a concept called plus minus equals. And it talks about how to get the most value out of the other training partners in the room with you. So, Frank's general idea is that when you are seeking out training partners, you want a distribution of people to train with, some of whom are better than you. Those would be the pluses. Some of whom are worse than you, those would be the minuses, and some of those who are on par with you or around the same skill level. Those would be the equals. So, his suggestion is to build a training crew of people that you practice with, some of whom are pluses, they're better than you, some of whom are minuses, they're worse than you, some of whom are equals, meaning they're on the same level. This is important because many people erroneously think that having the best training partners is always a good thing and that to be great at Jiu-Jitsu, you need to find and spar with the best. The reality is there's limitations to sparring only with athletes who are better than you. A distribution, a spectrum of people of all skill levels yields the best results. And again, this is Frank Shamrock. He was one of the greatest UFC fighters of his generation. I definitely would listen to him on this and he's not the only one who shares this kind of feedback. This is an idea that you will hear people all across the Jiu-Jitsu space talk about, that you should seek out a wide variety of training partners. It's not just about iron sharpens iron, sometimes you need that variety. Here's why. When you spar with pluses, the people better than you, what you get out of that is experience with people who can provide you with a huge level of resistance. In fact, so much resistance that you're probably going to lose. And that's important for a lot of reasons. When you spar against a plus, you get to practice your A-game, your best stuff and see how that stacks up and you also get experience battling with adversity and being on the defensive, being on the losing side of a match. This is feedback you're unlikely to get when you're competing or sparring against people who are less experienced than you. The pluses give you that level of variety and they also allow you to really test out the absolute best stuff that you've got on display. The minuses, the people who are worse than you, and I should clarify when I say worse, I don't mean that as a value judgment, I mean either less experienced or less athletic or less performance focused. People that you can generally defeat in a roll. It's not a value judgment of whether they're good or bad, we're just talking about skill here. These people in the minus category are important because this is when you really get to flex your game. This is when you get to see what your peak performance looks like, what your best case scenario looks like and it gives you the best place to test new ideas. If you have a technique or a strategy or a tactic that you want to work on and you're not very good at it, if you try to use it against a plus, someone who's already better than you, it's going to be hard to determine if what you're doing is working or not because this is a person who can generally beat you. And so you're not going to get very good feedback when you deploy your B-game against them. It's hard to see if you're actually improving. When you take something new and use it against a minus, this allows you to try techniques and tactics that you're not great at and that means you're going to get a chance to work those more effectively and get more reps in than against a plus who would just immediately cut through your technique. So against a minus, you're likely to get a lot of reps, especially with something that you're not already talented in and that helps you build up that talent. It is also important to have a moderate degree of success on the mats. If you are always losing in your rolls, I don't care how good your confidence is, it will impact you. So it is important to get a variety of matches and looks in the training room, some of the time in which you lose, some of the time in which you win. And the minuses are the ones who help you build up that confidence. So you will often hear people say things like white belts are the most important people in the room. There's a lot of reasons why that is true, but one of them is because they become a great skill sharpening technique for the higher belts. It also allows you as a higher belt to deploy a B-game that you're not great at and that makes things much more competitive when you're sparring with someone who is less skilled or experienced than you. When you get far into your Jiu-Jitsu journey, you learn that to roll effectively with less experienced people, you want to take out elements of your A-game and focus on things you're not great at. That will make the roll more competitive and it will also allow you to develop skill in new areas. And finally, the last category is the equals, the people who are on par with you. This is where you're going to truly be able to test your skill and get the most realistic feedback on your performance relative to other people in your skill bracket. This is going to give you the closest look to what something in competition would resemble because you are sparring against people who are on the level with you or at least close to it. And you need this because this is where the hard rolls come from. This is where the real practice comes from. When we talk about pluses, we're talking about refining our A-game and working our defense. When we talk about minuses, we're talking about building new skills and building our confidence. The real pressure test comes from sparring against the equals. And so all of these, the pluses, the minuses and the equals are all important in your training journey. This is part of the reason why it's so critical to build and train in a room where you have a diverse level of experience. It's not just about training with the best, you need to be training with everybody if you want to get the best at Jiu-Jitsu. That will help you, it will help them, it will help the sport at large. I really got value out of this idea and I hope you did too. More like this can be found at BJJmentalmodels.com. It's one of the world's most popular Jiu-Jitsu education podcasts. Every episode is intended to teach you something useful. We've got full length episodes, plus mini episodes like this and our amazing newsletter, all at BJJmentalmodels.com. And if you'd like to level up with us, please do consider joining BJJ Mental Models Premium. It's the world's largest audio library of Jiu-Jitsu master classes on strategy, tactics, concepts, mindset and philosophy. If you like Audible and master class and Jiu-Jitsu, you'll love BJJ Mental Models Premium. All of that can be found at BJJmentalmodels.com. Thank you for listening and I'll talk to you soon.