Ep. 376: New-School Fundamentals, feat. Lachlan Giles

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. Hey everybody, this is Steve. Welcome to BJJ Mental Models. BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent Jiu-Jitsu approach. Back again today with the legend from Australia. I got Lochlan Giles. Lochlan, how's it going, man? Speaker 2: Yeah, very good. Good to be back. It's been a while. Speaker 1: Been a while since I've chatted with you directly, but I've been following your messages. I saw that hilarious exchange you had with Marcelo going back and forth between your match on Reddit. That was great. Speaker 2: Yeah, it was good, good experience getting to uh compete against the the best of all time, so, yeah. It was amazing. Speaker 1: I have to ask, was that exchange between you and him planned or was that just spur of the moment? Speaker 2: I think I was um, so we were just like at the weigh-ins and then there's like a little sign up that said like Reddit, you know, hi, I'm it was like the, I guess the placard he was holding, which said like, you know, I'm Marcelo Garcia, ask me anything and and then he walked out. I hadn't seen him, I just saw the the writing and then I saw him, he walked out and I told him I was going to um ask him his game plan, so. Yeah. Speaker 1: Well, awesome stuff. And, you know, while we're talking about this, this kind of, I think, is going to lead into the conversation we got going on here today. Something I wanted to chat with you about. We'd been talking about what you've been working on on Submeta recently and if there's anything that you wanted to speak on. You'd mentioned that you'd like to talk about the idea of fundamentals and maybe even stepping the clock back a bit, but what is a fundamental? I love that idea. That's always a great talk. So, I'll just maybe cut right to the chase. Why don't you give me the pitch to you in Jiu-Jitsu, what is a fundamental? How do you look at that at Absolute? Speaker 2: Yeah, so I mean, I think we've been running like a, you know, on Submeta now there's like we have a foundation series, which I've kind of like the way I designed Submeta is like is kind of like the syllabus or structure that we sort of can run our introduction classes and our fundamentals classes. And so we sort of have like introduction classes, which is like your first nine lessons of Jiu-Jitsu, just basically give people a very broad overview of like what the positions are, how they connect and some of the main concepts. And then we move on to fundamentals. And then after that there's like intermediate advanced classes as well. So we're lucky enough to have enough students that we can kind of split classes based on like the experience level and so on. And so we've been running this fundamentals program for a while, which kind of, I would say, follows somewhat of a standard approach to teaching the fundamentals as in like, and I still think this is a good way to do it. I've just been also thinking about a different way to approach it, which I which we'll kind of get into, I guess, but um this one's, you know, like it starts with escapes, you know, like I'm teaching like escapes, guard, takedowns, passing, controls and submissions. So so kind of the full uh spectrum of Jiu-Jitsu, I guess, but kind of heavier on escapes because that's usually where you're going to be landing at first and then working into guard. The guards that I chose for that were ones that I thought, you know, in choosing like what do you teach a beginner for guard, like the first thing I actually showed in in that series was half guard because I think it kind of slows things down, it's easy to learn, anyone can do it, that's sort of like applicable for everyone. If you different people might start Jiu-Jitsu for different reasons, like a lot of people might have self-defense or mixed martial arts as their goal and at least like it keeps a close range, it's tight, so it can be applicable in self-defense scenarios as well. So kind of like ticks a lot of boxes there. So it's kind of like, I guess the fundamentals are sort of designed for that I've got is kind of like, it kind of, no matter why you're doing Jiu-Jitsu, you're going to have something useful out of it. If that makes sense? Whereas I've sort of been looking at revisiting that like a lot of people, you know, especially at our gym, like we do have a lot of competitors and I think for a lot of them, it's actually, you know, their goal is to do well in competition. And I think there's some things in that approach that are not necessarily ideal for someone who's a competitor. And I think, I guess like trying to re-imagine the fundamentals as around like what are the main things, you know, if you want to be a good purple belt, that's if your aim is to beat other people in purely a grappling scenario, whether it's in the gym or in competition, like what are the fundamentals around like how you approach it, the mindset, the main concepts and positions you'll be using. And I think that is a little different to like a general fundamental system. So I guess when we're talking about fundamentals, I think it's very specific to what your goal is actually in Jiu-Jitsu. Speaker 1: Well said. I was going to ask you about that specifically, whether fundamentals are a universal thing or whether they should be tailored depending on the rule set. I mean, even to this date, there's a lot of people who get into Jiu-Jitsu because they're interested in self-defense or MMA or maybe they are specifically focused on Gi or No-Gi. And I always find it interesting to talk to people like you and ask, do you guys see fundamentals as being some sort of unifying fabric that ties all of those together or should even the fundamentals be tailored depending on your goals? And as a guy who's, you know, has been doing primarily No-Gi for a while it seems, I'm wondering from your perspective whether you believe that. And it sounds like the answer is that you think there should be some degree of tailoring done depending on the rule set. Speaker 2: Well, that's sort of what I'm working on filming at the moment. Like something that at least that the one I want to film first, I want to do a separate one for Gi and No-Gi, but just a No-Gi No-Gi sort of I'm trying to come up with the right term for it because it's not just competition. I think it's also, I think the like with the goal being beating other grapplers in a No-Gi scenario, whether it's competition or just in the gym, I feel like the same sort of uh concepts and approach tends to work. It's just a different to, you know, there's like there's some major differences, for example, between a self-defense scenario and a purely grappling only scenario in wanting to manage distance on bottom, for example, you know. If you're on bottom and someone can strike you, you do not want them to have any space at all. Whereas generally, when you're on bottom, you actually want, you know, you want to work from quite a bit of distance actually, so you can use your legs well and keep frames and keep layers of defense ahead of you. So I think it's vastly different how you approach in terms of that. So yeah, that that's basically it. I wanted to revisit that. I'll talk about, I mean, I I guess I'll maybe get into like um probably one of the most controversial parts of the mindset that I'm thinking at the moment for this, but again, because I think people are probably going to get a bunch of angry um comments about this one, but I think for like um fundamentals for a competitor, if you actually want to compete, spending a lot of time learning how to escape out of bad positions is not really a great use of your time. Basically, if someone has, if you've had your guard passed or like you're you're stuck under side control, mount or the back, it's a extremely hard task now to come back and win that match. You should have like, I guess, time spent preventing that from happening is probably a better use of your time rather than spending a lot of time actually getting good at getting out of those positions. That's that's probably like the most controversial take I have on this for the from a competitor point of view. And there are exceptions to that, which we can get into as well. But I think if you look at like, you look at a competitor such as um Rafael Mendes, actually there was one match, but otherwise, I basically haven't seen him ever under side control, anyone on his back, anyone past his guard. Would it be to his benefit or his detriment if when you started the man in Jiu-Jitsu, he spent 80% of his time escaping out of bad positions or would it have been better to take someone like that and go, okay, you're going to be spending most of your time playing guard. Let's start you there and get you good at keeping there and prevent them from passing. I guess that's a good example around what I'm thinking in that in that regard. Speaker 1: I think that's a really interesting point. When you are competing, you're playing to win primarily. And whether you call that a competition class or not, I don't know. To me, I kind of think of that almost like a performance-based outcome. Your objective is to win. And that is slightly different from self-defense in some ways. In self-defense, your objective is to not lose. It is to protect yourself more than anything else. If I get jumped on the street, I don't particularly care if I'm able to choke the other person unconscious or knock them out or anything. My goal as a Jiu-Jitsu person interested in self-defense is to protect myself. I mean, as long as I'm able to protect myself until the cops arrive or whatever, I'm good. That was my goal. I don't need to win. I just need to, as as Helio said, not lose. And although the conventional wisdom from the past, I guess five or 10 years has been that training under competition environments is the best way to also learn self-defense. I think that's generally true, but I think that has more to do with the quality of the training than it does to do with specifically the the rule set or the environment that you're looking at. I do think you're right that there is a fundamental difference. And I think it matters especially because when you talk about fundamentals, you're talking about a lot of people who are inherently casual to Jiu-Jitsu. People who are maybe getting into this for the first time. They may have no competitive aspirations. And as one of those people myself, one of my great frustrations starting Jiu-Jitsu was this expectation that I should train like a competitor. It was never my intent to be a competitor. I just wanted to get into martial arts and make that a part of my life and benefit from everything that comes with that. But I've never had the interest to go and compete. It's just not something that resonates with me. So I think that is an interesting distinction. And I'd love to hear more about how that manifests in terms of the actual training. I mean, if you were taking a beginner who comes in and they're a young athlete who wants to do an ADCC run, how would you structure their training versus maybe someone like me, a guy in his 40s who wants to throw on the Gi and learn how to defend himself. Is there a fundamental difference there or is there some degree of overlap? Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's like where, you know, you can teach, I sort of like in my current fundamentals, like the way I'm implementing, I have sort of tried to find the positions where it does overlap, like a half guard or something. And sort of make sure I showed them so that people who kind of want either would be happy. But I still I think like you could actually, you know, this is this is where I'm thinking if so if you do get someone early who wants to do that, that's their primary goal. They're not interested in, you know, the other aspects of it. They want to compete, for example, then I think getting them spending time doing the things, earlier you get them doing the things that are going to help them win the competition in competition, I think is is probably better. So spending more time on guard retention than escapes, I think would be, for example, the things that you can do before you are scored on are just much better. Defending hooks from the back is a better skill set for a competitor than being really good at escaping once someone's got hooks because now you've they've got the hooks, they've got their points, it's a very difficult task to not only escape, but then come back and actually re, you know, get yourself up on the scoreboard or submit your opponent. So yeah, I think it does change things quite a lot. On the inverse, I probably I'll get to this now. I think like uh sometimes if you're a good enough competitor, if you're good enough at Jiu-Jitsu, you actually want to then flip that a bit and work your escapes a lot. I think like Gordon Ryan's a pretty good example of that. Where I think he's so good that he almost needs to train the contingency plans quite a lot. Like he goes against someone, he's going to win. He needs to make it so, what if I make a massive mistake, someone takes my back. He's still, I'd still back him that against most people, someone they take his back, he's going to get out, come back and actually still win that match, which I think you need to be like considerably better than your opponents to be at a level where that's kind of the most viable thing to be to be working on. But yeah, I think I think it's like an interesting difference between, you know, like the self-defense or or like just even just, you know, just generally Jiu-Jitsu, you know, like if you want to enjoy, if you're training Jiu-Jitsu just to enjoy it, like you like exploring different positions, then you should work all of it. Develop escapes from everywhere, submission escapes, you want to develop stand up, ground work. Even using Rafa Mendes as an example, like I think he's spent very little time working any takedowns at all as part of his game. You know, his game plan was apart from ADCC, but in IBJJF it was pull guard. So basically, by eliminating areas of the game that you need to practice, it kind of allows you to um spend more time on the things that are going to make a difference for you in the actual competition. Speaker 1: This is a fascinating area of conversation because it really gets into what are the goals that you're trying to achieve through Jiu-Jitsu. And when people talk about fundamentals, often they talk about specific techniques. But I think you bring up a good point that a lot of this is goals aligned. Speaker 2: Goals and strategy, you know, it's yeah, and mindset as well. Yeah. It's uh like what how are you approaching the Speaker 1: And the difference changes quite a bit depending on what you're trying to get out of the sport. I mean, if, for example, you're a hobbyist or a casual grappler, your main goals are probably survive and do okay against superior athletes and stronger people and don't get hurt. Whereas if you're a competitor, you likely have different goals and you brought up a great one, which is you have to dominate the board. One of the most important things if you want to succeed in a grappling art is make sure that you're the first person to put points on the board. This is something that Sarah McMahon talks about a lot and has discussed with us. You know, it is tremendously important to be the first person who scores. And that aligns with what you're talking about. If your foundation is defense, and I do think defense is a good foundation, but if your focus is defense in a competition environment with very limited time, you want to avoid a situation where you're on the defense at all. If you are on defense, then you're already behind. And so the question becomes, how can I lead with offense and prevent myself from ever needing the defense? That's an interesting take you've got. Speaker 2: Yeah, I think so. Well, I mean, I think defense, there's defense that matters a lot. Like I think guard retention, you obviously is defense. It's just much more proactive and it's closer to being offense. If that makes sense. You know, like if you're retaining guard, you're closer to being able to set up, get back to an attacking position than if you're escaping out of side control. Because defense before you've actually been scored on in a competition, there's like, if you recover, you know, someone's trying to pass your guard, you're in a bad spot, but there's no points yet. You might even have to turtle, but you prevent them getting hooks, you escape, you're still in the match. You need, you know, you only need a smaller movement, you know, you maybe you sweep your opponent or like have a near back take and suddenly it's it's um it's even the match again. So, but once the points have been scored, you've got a huge amount of things to do. So, I think, yeah, like the idea of bringing your defense forward from escapes into guard retention. And even then, like, you know, and this is something I sort of think about is is a fundamental skill for like a good competitor is is um winning that initial exchange. When no one's got control of the grips, like how do you make it so that you're the one that goes on the offense. And then of course, that's this is just part of the game. Obviously, you need to then continue to develop um a full strategy of passing, sweeping, submissions and and so on as well. But I guess like I've I've started talking about escapes and and guard. Speaker 1: Well, this is something we've been talking about a bit recently, which is you mentioned here, the opening exchange, the opening salvo of the match and how risky that can be because that's where there's the most chaos. That's where there are the most variables, whether you be standing up or even if you are about to enter a guard engagement and the grips and the position haven't really been settled. There's so much variability and so many things that can go wrong that winning that exchange is super important. What happens later, you can kind of has a bit more wiggle room. I mean, if you are on top side control and you're pinning someone, you've got a lot more wiggle room than if you are standing in their guard without really getting your grips yet. Does that factor into the way that you teach fundamentals? Do you put an outsized focus on those initial exchanges or do you think that we need to kind of be consistent all the way through the whole process? Speaker 2: Yeah, again, the fundamentals for like winning against another grappler in a grappling match, I think that is extreme. I would put a heavy emphasis on that, which again is is a different type of fundamentals to perhaps your your standard one. But yes, I think those early exchanges are perhaps the, you know, perhaps the key components, especially in No-Gi where it's very easy to disengage. It's very easy to force like that kind of reset position where no one has any grips. So, um I think it's crucial to be good in in that particular area and have a good strategy. Um and actually, I mean, I we're sort of talking about competition, but I do want to say as well that I think this sort of approach we're talking about is also like if you're just rolling, you're having a roll at the gym, someone who's good at this area is also the hardest person to beat. It's not just that they're good at competing, they're actually the hardest people to beat in a grappling match, in my opinion. I've when I roll with someone, if I find that they, if I can pass their guard, I can usually submit them. It's just a like if if I can get to dominant positions, even if they've got good defense, they're just in they've got much worse leverage compared to someone who's actually very proactive at having good guard retention and so on. So these strategies that are good for competition are actually, I think, just good for beating other grapplers generally. The mindset required of when you have that mindset of like, no, no one passes my guard. I have to fight. Yeah, I can't let someone get hooks. If I start to turtle and expose my back, I have to like fight these things very hard and be very good at these earlier battles. I think it just makes better grapplers, to be honest. Speaker 1: So a lot of conventional wisdom that I hear from many folks, and I myself have have espoused this, is that defense is a really powerful foundation because once you get to the point where you can protect yourself, you can fight with more confidence and attack from other positions and you feel like you have a base to work something off of. But it's also very possible to become too defensive and to build a game that is entirely defense focused. And the problem then is you are effectively fighting not to lose. You are trying to grapple with the intent of denying the other person success from their attacks. But you're still sitting there letting them attack you. I think that there's wisdom in what you're saying about making sure that you are insistent in achieving that dominant position. I think that can be relevant from pretty much any rule set. But I'd love to hear you expand a bit more on that. And specifically, how do you teach that? Build on Submeta and at Absolute, you know, when you get beginners in, how does that manifest? How do you build that mindset into someone over time? Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I mean, that's that's sort of like I'm I'm playing around with this um I kind of want to film this course and and obviously on select students, I might get them early to like play with this as their fundamentals. And I kind of want to use that as you know, to basically as an experiment, see see if I feel like they get to where they should be getting faster. Uh in terms of what you're saying there, yeah, I agree like feeling confident in your defense allows you to attack. So that's why I said like I still we're still training, you're still training defense. It's just earlier defense. If you were frightened of, if you had no guard retention and you have to win that first initial exchange, it's going to be pretty like a lot of the time you won't and you've got no contingency plan. But for example, for guard retention, there's multiple layers of that. There's like early retention where you're pummeling your leg, where you can usually pummel your legs back in front. A little bit later, you can often get knee shields and sort of shin-based frames. After that, you're looking at like turning on your side, hiding under hooks, potentially trapping half guards and and building back from there. And then again, after that, there's turtling, turning your back and preventing hooks. So there's like probably four major layers of guard retention that are all actually very difficult battles for the person on top to win if the person if the bottom player is doing them well. So, I mean, in the end, escapes are just another, they're just kind of the fifth layer beyond that. And then you've got submission escapes, which become like the sixth layer. But instead, we're just getting good at these first four layers of that and being proactive at that. So I think you still develop like by being defensively sound in those areas, you'll feel confident to attack knowing that if it stuffs up a bit, you've still got your defense to bring you back there. Speaker 1: My friend Jeff Shaw once said that in Jiu-Jitsu, you have early stage defenses, late stage defenses and oh shit defenses. Right? Depending on how deep into the reeds you've gotten and how much trouble you're in. The challenge though is with most beginners, they gravitate right towards the oh shit defense. They want to know, if I'm in a fully locked in triangle or arm bar, how do I get out of that? And, you know, as Kurt Osiander said, you know, you fucked up a long time ago. You shouldn't have even got into that situation. I think that prevention, early stage defenses are so important. Even as psychologically, they're often not the thing that people want at a beginner stage. They think about the submission and how to get out of the worst case scenario. And that is important, of course, but your odds of success are way better earlier on before the person even gets into that situation, right? The earlier you can defend the submission, the better it is. That's why black belts so much of the time, when I hear white belts asking questions of black belts, the black belt's answer is usually something like, you shouldn't have let them do that in the first place, which is an inherently unsatisfying answer to get as a white belt, but it is the best answer. If you can just prevent the situation from ever happening, you have a much greater odds of success than if you allow it to happen and then try to drive the car out of the ditch after it's already in there. Speaker 2: Yeah, especially, I mean, like uh, you know, someone's in on your back, setting up a rear naked choke. Of course, you want to know how to defend that, of course, but there's a lot of mistakes have also occurred along the way for you to get there, which I think for a competitor, probably the focus usually would be on on the earlier stuff, how did someone get to your back? Because there's, you know, multiple things that have gone wrong. I will I will say I even in this series, I've put a bit of submission like quite a bit of submission defense in as well. There's submissions that occur before points have been scored. You're playing guard, someone sits back on a foot lock. You've got to know how to defend that. Because if you defend, it's different to again, it's different to the rear naked choke. Someone's got two hooks, they're on your back and they're going for a rear naked choke. You can defend the rear naked choke, you've still got a long from a competition point of view, a long way to go to recover. But like someone sits back for a foot lock when you're playing guard, you need to know how to defend that because if you escape, you're fine. There's the match continues. You've still got a very good chance at at winning. So, anyway, this is just like uh, I mean, I don't know if this is necessarily completely fundamentals, it's just like the mindset around a competitor and making sure people are training the areas that are most likely, spending more time training the areas that are most likely to win them a match. Speaker 1: Well, that leads me to the question I've got here for you, the big one I wanted to ask, which is, are fundamentals actually just a mindset or an idea or is it specific techniques? When I came up in Jiu-Jitsu, I came up under a more old school environment and they would tell you the fundamentals were a series of positions and techniques. So I remember very clearly being taught closed guard as my day one thing you've got to learn and then some techniques like scissor sweeps, pendulum sweeps, cross chokes, arm bars. There's your fundamentals. However, I think that if you look at what actually works percentage-wise, I'm not sure if those really are the fundamentals. They're maybe commonplace, they're maybe traditional, but I don't know if you would really call them the fundamentals. And part of the CLA and Eco movement has been maybe distancing yourself from that and focusing on more of like a a games-based, play-based approach to learning. And I think something that that emphasizes, which I really like, is this idea that fundamentals is kind of a conceptual understanding of thing. I don't even know if the actual moves themselves matter that much. I'd like to get your perspective on that. Do you see fundamentals as a series of techniques or more a series of ideas and mindset lessons that you teach? Speaker 2: Well, I think the like the conceptual like the concepts are obviously extremely important. I think it's a mix of both, to be honest. I think, yeah, if you look at like positionally, I mean, I would look at the positions that are quite, if you wanted to do for competitors, what positions are more common and make sure people are training them. How you want to go about training them, like obviously there's people who are very heavily on the CLA and won't do any technical instruction. I personally prefer a mix of both, you know, like having some technical instruction and I like the freedom that the CLA gives people to explore and find solutions within like those constraints. So I think personally a mix of both. But I think I would look at what's more common, you know, for as an example, I think the knee shield is extremely common. And that's a position that heavyweights will use, lightweights will use. Probably even weight divisions will tend to like change what's what might be fundamental or like the general framework that people are using. But I I would say like being mixed between knee shield and some sort of guard, whether it's inside position or outside position, so whether it's De La Riva or potentially like a butterfly and working to get into positions such as single leg X guard. That seems to be extremely common in the competitive grappling world. But again, you'll have people that don't do that at all. You'll have some people that never go to leg entanglements and they're still successful. So there's always going to be exceptions. So if we're saying fundamentals are things that everyone has to do, then I think it's very hard to put any technique, any single technique down. But if you want to just look at it as like what's common, which I think is a pretty good way to go. You get most people, like if you're teaching a large amount of people, the things that most people will use, but also allow them the freedom to find things that they like. I think that's probably the best way to do it. Speaker 1: That's an interesting approach, right? I mean, I think, God, I I hate to even say this because it comes across so poorly all the time. But I think of comparing this to what you would experience in academics where your four-year degree begins with more general studies and you specialize over time. And I I hate to even bring this up because I hate equating getting a black belt to a degree or anything like that. But the idea of starting general and then specializing over time is an interesting one. I think it's an interesting point that you bring up as well that if you can shut down or deny entire areas of the game, then it doesn't really matter how good you are at them. This is an interesting thing I find about the foot lock game specifically. I mean, that's a whole universe that you can enter if you choose to, but there are also a lot of people who build their entire game around denying leg entanglements. And if you can shut down someone's leg entanglements, it doesn't really matter how good they are at leg locking, right? And you can flip that logic around and say like, look, if you can shut down traditional positional control as well, then it doesn't matter how good you are at traditional moves as well. Speaker 2: Yeah, I think I mean that's where I think like what I love about Jiu-Jitsu actually, but you're never going to, you know, whether you're using CLA or teaching positions and like you're never going to like every game that you come up with, for example, there could be someone who's just like, yeah, that's that's not something I'm going to use at all. That's not for me. Yeah. And it's you you're essentially, you could be for them wasting their time. So I think like at some point you have to just go, okay, a lot of people use these positions. Let's train this and just either you're either kind of go give people full freedom to just choose their own games and they're kind of self-directing their like with the flipped classroom, sort of they're choosing their own training or if it's like a group setting, then unfortunately, sometimes people are going to have to work within areas that are not part of their actual A game. Speaker 1: I think it it's really helpful that you of all people said that because so many Jiu-Jitsu people get into their own heads and feel almost this um sense of guilt or lack of self-worth or imposter syndrome because they feel like their knowledge is inadequate. There's so much stuff to know and they feel like they're obligated to know it all. But we have a podcast called State of the Meta hosted by Drew Foster and he talks about the kind of common ongoing competition meta and what's hot right now. And one of the things he said that he learned in 2025, one of the biggest lessons was, we have to accept that we can't know everything. And we have to abandon this feeling that we're always behind, we're we're always behind the curve, we don't know enough. There's almost this sense of FOMO that I think people have in Jiu-Jitsu, this feeling that they need to know everything. And I think it's great that you of all people specifically said like, hey, look, no one knows everything. We all have to cherry pick, we all have to filter and specialize and sometimes something just isn't for you. I'd love to hear you expand on that because I think that you probably have a lot to say there. Speaker 2: I think as a coach, you want to try to like have a broad understanding, of course, and be able to teach most things to a decent level, you know, I think that's like what you should be striving for as a coach because you want to be able to help people, you know, if someone has a likes this type of game, you want to be able to direct them to improving to a certain level. But of course, you can't, there's just too many positions that you can't be good at at all of them. In fact, it starts to become the idea of specializing and like if you want to be a again, a good grappler that beats other good grapplers, you want to have your position and system that you and set of things that you use that that you're really good at that someone else just can't have spent as much time as, you know, like you go against an opponent and they just will not be able to catch up with all the traps you're setting and so on because you've spent a lot more time than them. And then that's where trying to follow the meta can be a real issue, I think, because you're if you move away from what you're you've got all those finely tuned things in and then start trying to do the latest thing, you're just not going to have that same amount of time behind you in using that position and you're going to get found out a lot more. So it does become a point and I think that's why you see, I think like when I early in my black belt days, I remember when the when the Berimbolo was just getting popular. I remember looking across the mats and every purple belt was doing the Berimbolo. And I was like, wow, this thing's Jiu-Jitsu's changed. That's all Jiu-Jitsu is now, just the Berimbolo. But then the black belt came along and in the black belt division, I think there was like Rafa Mendes and maybe one other and all the other black belts were just doing their other guards. They were doing, you know, half guard and spider guard and whatever else was they'd been doing for 10 years. And that's because they're so dug in to their system. Even if if you could theoretically say like let's let's say in theory that the Berimbolo was that is a better mechanic like mechanically a better system to use. Like it just has objectively it's better. Even then, for those people to move out of their A game towards that, they're going to be worse because they're taking something that's so finely tuned out and then just being okay at a new thing. So there does become a point where it's not worth chasing the the meta itself once you've got your own game, except for because it's enjoyable to like work on new things and yeah, because I do think like if you study the current game, the current meta, I would say it probably overall is these are the you see what's happening at competition right now a lot. These are probably the areas of Jiu-Jitsu that people haven't like they're causing the most issues to people. Like people haven't solved, let's just pretend it's, you know, outside camping. They haven't solved how to deal with that problem as much as they've solved, you know, the knee cut pass, for example. So there might might actually be objectively to some degree a better system to like if you started from scratch, if you're a purple or a blue belt right now and you were choosing what to work on, you can work on this new thing and that's the best currently available thing. But if you've already dug in and started to develop in a certain area, I think it starts getting harder to change. That's a long rant, I'm sorry. Speaker 1: Hey, it's a good rant, man. Rants are great for listenership, so you just go at it. If you want to take a shot at, I don't know, Derek Moneyberg or something, you just go for it. I will clip it out and get some views. But no, I really appreciate you saying that. I think for a lot of people, they look to you specifically to get a vibe for where Jiu-Jitsu is going because, you know, beyond your reputation as a competition guy, you're now the Submeta guy. And you and Livia working on that, that's a big deal. A lot of people look to you two as kind of the queue for where they, maybe they don't learn directly from you as coaches, but you guys are kind of the, I guess, the faucet where a lot of information comes from. I always tell people that, hey, look, there's a lot of great subscription sites out there right now. And if you have a special needs where there's a specific thing you're working on, I got a lot of recommendations of what you should look for. But my only general recommendation is Submeta. I really think that pretty much every grappler would benefit from trying Submeta at least for a while because as a general Wikipedia of Jiu-Jitsu, it is the best, I think, objectively. And so I think that of course, the flip side of that now is people look to you and probably try to emulate you and see where you're learning stuff from. There's so much stuff that you guys produce. I would love to know how do you choose what to focus on? And I think this comes up a lot because of course, at the beginning, when you are focusing on the fundamentals, you're basically taking what your instructor gives you at face value. But as you mentioned, when you get more experienced, you need to start being your own filter and looking at things that are put in front of you and deciding, does that jive with the type of Jiu-Jitsu that I want to focus on? I mean, it's okay to say no. I find myself often saying no to things because they just don't blend with the type of Jiu-Jitsu that I'm doing or that I want to do. But I I'm guessing you feel a different pressure because of this service that you provide. How does that work? Like how do you guys decide this is what the next module is going to be? Speaker 2: Yeah, so obviously like because of sort of the way I wanted to structure Submeta, like because of what I was talking about, you can have so many there's so many pathways you can take in like styles and areas you can work on. I kind of wanted Submeta to be like one resource you can have that can kind of give people a lot of freedom to, you know, I want to work on this area and there's there's something that they can look up and explore over there. So there's certainly things I haven't covered, you know, like octopus guard, for example, I don't have an instructional out on on that. That's something I once or twice, two or three times in the last like year or two, I've sort of dabbled in it and I want to eventually get it to the point where I'm comfortable like what would be a what I feel is a good system around the the position, for example. So like part of it's, you know, I enjoy that. I enjoy exploring different aspects of Jiu-Jitsu and and trying to develop it at least to a level where I feel I can go against other black belts and and make it work. And when I when I feel like I can do that, I usually happy to film film something on the topic. without it necessarily being my best position. Obviously, like when the Marcelo match came along, like as soon as that was as soon as I heard about that match, I thought, okay, well, I better go back to like what am I best at, you know? And that's where I went back to K guard. And it was actually really good because I got to, you know, you explore a bunch of different areas and then often when you go back to your best game, you have you learn like little skills that can translate by exploring other things. But I went back to K guard and and basically tried to hone in on that again and and go back to my A game. But now that that's done, back into exploring more Jiu-Jitsu again. Trying to learn foot sweeps at the moment as well, which has been fun. Speaker 1: Well, here's a follow-up I've got here. You mentioned that sometimes you have to present information and you don't feel like it's your best technique, but you've got enough to show. How do you decide what the next thing is to show? Because you have kind of two competing pressures. One is, what does the Zeitgeist say? What are people talking about? If I mean, if Craig puts out an octopus 2.0 instructional, everyone and their dog is going to be talking about octopus 2.0. However, as a content creator yourself, and I can relate to this very much, you feel this pressure to be qualified enough to talk about this thing. And so there has to at least come a point where you feel like, okay, I've I know enough to speak about this. But also, you don't want to wait too long because information, its value can change as it ages. Sometimes the novelty is part of the value. And as something becomes more solidified and entrenched, it might not be as useful for you two years from now to put out an instructional as it would be today, even if the instructional today is incomplete or you feel like it would evolve over time. How do you balance those competing pressures of, hey, I want to get something out right now because it'll help people versus I also feel like I might need to hold back because there's still so much to learn. Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, that's there's definitely been a few topics that I have started to work on and not been just not been happy enough. I mean, I I sort of I'll work on it and I'll I'll try to use it in rolling. And when I when I feel like I'm getting it against good training partners, I'm I'm pretty happy, you know, like if it's working against the higher belts and some of the black belts, I'm I'm pretty happy that I can at least provide it at a level that and actually, I think that's the funny thing. I think even though like we often want, we want to learn from an expert in an area, which is obviously good. They're going to have like very good solutions to problems. Often, they've been doing it so long that they've forgotten what they would have had trouble with. So I think like the process of if it's especially if it's something fresh, you know, like you've let's say octopus guard, like as as I said, there's been a couple of times I've have sort of dabbled in it trying to get better at it. Eventually, I will feel like I'm at a level I can put something out on it. But because like all the issues that I've run into will be more fresh in my mind. I think sometimes you for like someone who wants to learn the position, you often have a better understanding of the troubles they're going to run into than someone who's just really like if you're just really good at it and you've been like that for the last 10 years, you can't even fathom what it's like to like not put your leg in the right spot because it's your leg's been in the right spot for the last 10 years that you can't understand that some people might not know to do that. So, yeah, I think there's that side of it. But yeah, I still want to at least be competent, like, you know, to a reasonable, a pretty, what I'd say is a pretty decent level of competency before I want to put something out. That's why I haven't got a wrestle up. I want to do a wrestle up instructional as well, but it's a bit different to my natural style, so there's more work to be done before I get into that too. Speaker 1: Well, one of the things that's been really interesting about Submeta over the last few years is is seeing this evolve beyond this is the Lochlan and Livia show towards this is now an open platform. And you've got a lot of other content that you host there as well. And the benefit of that, of course, is that you can now bring on other coaches who maybe can fill those gaps for you. I'm guessing that's probably part of the strategy as well, is that diversity of thought and expertise allows you to cover all of those bases. Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, that's something I um we're looking to doing a bit more of now. So we just had Tariq Opstock film the Trica Plata series. So of course, he's going to do that in a much better way than than I can. So, um yeah, that's sort of one way we're looking to bring on more people like that. So keep working on stuff myself, but in certain areas like I'd like I'm working on foot sweeps myself at the moment, but I I'll probably try to find someone to teach like, you know, I I brought um a wrestling coach on to teach wrestling. Like as much as I've trained wrestling, I just feel like, I don't know how you feel teaching takedowns, like especially especially something that I'm bringing to a public audience when you've got a whole sport like wrestling where there's um people spent their lives and they're very good and it's it's just like the levels are so much higher than what I can bring. At least with Jiu-Jitsu, I feel like I can like the ground work, I feel like I can compete with being, you know, I can bring it to a pretty high level. But the wrestling side, I I felt like I have to to bring on guest instructors for that. Speaker 1: Yeah, I am very similar. I am not a takedown specialist. I came to Jiu-Jitsu a bit later in life and although I love takedowns, you know, as an older guy, I did not have that benefit of spending my youth training wrestling in a highly competitive environment. And I think there's a level of knowledge that those people bring that I just can't quite emulate. And so I think it's awesome to open up a space in your platform for them to come and share that information as well, right? And it also breaks the feeling that like, hey, this is the uh the Lochlan and Livia show. It also makes it feel like more this is a global platform that a lot of people are contributing to. Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, that's certainly the goal and and what we're sort of working to more of moving forward. It's it's a bit hard being from Australia to get people out here. But that's Well, that's actually an interesting conversation too. I mean, I would love to have a whole separate chat with you just about the logistics of content creation as this becomes more global. I'm in Vancouver, Canada and of course, there's different time zone considerations. I find that you guys in Australia are pretty easy to connect with because you're almost a full day ahead, so the time zones line up okay. But man, folks in Europe can be a real pain because their midday is like a completely unorthodox time for me. And so we've got folks like John Thomas that I always want to get on the show, but it's so hard because the the time zone doesn't work. So I'd love to put a pin in that and address that with you guys at some point, just the logistics behind that. While I have you though talking about fundamentals, I want to expand on the aspect of game planning. People often don't talk about this enough at the fundamental level. Do you do game planning sessions or conversations with your like very base beginners or do you focus more on just getting the reps in and getting ideas into their head before you even talk about strategy? Speaker 2: No, I usually don't, but that's kind of part of like, at least like that's what I want to sort of trial with this um this alternative look at the at the fundamentals. Like, you know, actually because I think the game plan is really, I think we do have to be careful not to box people in too early. That's that's another potential issue. Like especially like when it comes to, you know, selecting, like I think really, if you look at a competition game plan, you're either depending on the rule set you're preparing for, like if it's IBJJF, for example, you're either pulling guard or you're wrestling. You don't need to develop both of those skills essentially. Like if you watch someone's matches, they're either immediately trying to pull or they're going to be standing up trying to get on top using wrestling. But you can eliminate a lot of essentially almost wasted training time by choosing one of those things to work on early on. But I think you do have to be like and I'll just give you an example like, you know, I think like someone like uh like a Nicky Rod or a Michael Pixley, uh obviously extremely good wrestlers. Like I don't know if it's a great use of their time to spend a large portion of their training working guard. I think it's good for their general skill set development, but they should be spending a lot of time just staying on top and if they do happen to land in guard, just standing back up. Or if there's any sort of scramble, they'll turtle. They should turtle, remove hooks and just get good at standing back up, make it back into a wrestling match. So I think a lot of it's just time, like having a good game plan and training for that is a lot of a lot of it's time allocation. Similarly, in IBJJF, if your aim is to just pull guard, then you don't really need to work wrestling. You need to work chasing someone down, like if you come off with on a leg for a single leg out of it from guard, you might need to work wrestling someone down. But the actual stand up hand fighting battle might be irrelevant to you. But I I am a little cautious about boxing people in too early to something like that. I think it I think it maybe takes a couple of years of training before you know, okay, I'm clearly better on top and I'm good at wrestling. I'm athletic. I don't really, you know, my game plan's going to be to stay on top, like get the takedown, stay on top and pass. Or it might be that you're, you know, having a lot of success from guard and their game plan's going to be to pull. So I'm not sure how early you should be specializing in that. So I think it's still probably good to sort of keep that somewhat broad early on. Speaker 1: That's an interesting point. With beginners, often times when they hear advice from a coach, they really take it to heart and internalize it. And sometimes don't have the nuance to understand that the advice that they were provided with, maybe that doesn't apply all the time. Maybe it only applies in certain situations. So when you are coaching a true beginner, you've got to be careful about how you present information because if you make them think that there's one true path to doing things, they might hyperfixate on that and close off their mind to other things. And it might not be until they're purple or brown belt that they start reversing course and undoing that that limitation within themselves. So I think that's a good point. Speaker 2: I think the most difficult thing in as a coach, I think, and teaching to a room is like, how do you navigate the issue between the breadth of what's available and the fact that people are going to have specific games. I think that's the hardest thing to actually, you know, because I think people like how if like, do people, let's let's say a Bernardo Faria. Did he, how did he come across his deep half guard? You know, like if he was training at AOJ, would he have come into the deep half guard game or would he have been forced to be a De La Riva guy and because he was not that flexible, like he wouldn't have had a game that suited him. You know, like if you box people into a particular style, that might limit, you know, you might not get your like how did a Adam Wasinski? Probably, if you took Adam Wasinski, a blue belt and he he comes to you and says, I want to be a black belt world champion. And then he's like, and I'm going to use butterfly guard. And then you looked around at the world championship level and you said, but hey, Adam, no one's some years, some time ago, Marcelo Garcia was using butterfly guard, but now there's no one that's really playing butterfly guard. I think that's a bad idea, Adam. And you talk him out of it. What would he have become? You know, like so you kind of need to encourage freedom, but then how many people choose things that had they actually stuck with like, you know, the De La Rivas and the more common positions, they would have been better grapplers. This is a very difficult area, I think. Speaker 1: I love this dichotomy here. We've talked about it quite a bit, the difference between innovation on one hand and evidence on the other hand. And it is real easy for people to lean heavily on the evidence-based approach, which I get. It totally makes sense. If you want to know what's working at the highest levels and you want to emulate that, that's not a bad strategy. But innovation also comes from and it often comes from bucking the trend and trying things that are different. And that often means doing stuff that your coach might think is ridiculous or low percentage. But all of these techniques and tactics that work now, they were low percentage at one point. They were scoffed at at one point until someone was able to prove them out. So there's almost a degree of a self-fulfilling prophecy with a lot of this stuff where the more popular something becomes, the more people study it and the more likely then that people will be able to succeed with it at a high level. Is this something that you think about a lot? This kind of balance between innovating and trying new things versus following the money, so to speak, trying to moneyball Jiu-Jitsu and just take a look at what's working and what the data says and duplicate that. I'd love to know how that lines up in your head when you're planning out a game plan, either for yourself or someone else. Speaker 2: Yeah, I think about that a lot. And I think the answer, I don't know if I have the right answer, but I think probably you should spend, I mean, in the end it comes down to what what I think is the general, like if you want to get better at Jiu-Jitsu, you have the best use of your time. The general class formats for everyone, kind of for the majority. And that's not going to be necessarily optimal for you. So it's hard for as a coach to like do what's best for you can kind of do what's best for everyone as a whole, but not what's best for everyone as individuals. So I think it's probably spending a little more time on the more common positions that you see. Um but also having occasionally in classes, you should be kind of rotating through some of the more obscure positions to in case there's someone in the class that's does sort of pick up on that. I think having a lot of open mats and or allowing like the flipped classroom model where where, you know, like you show something, but people can start to practice their own thing. I think those sort of things are good ways to allow people a bit of freedom to find what what suits them. Speaker 1: I love that. I think that diversity too of of games brings a lot of value to the team because if everyone is just doing the same thing, then you're only really ever pressure testing your game against the people in the room with you. And it's easy to get surprised. But every gym's got some person who's got some weird game that no one else does. Like they do Ezekiel chokes from bottom north south or something like that, right? Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, there's definitely we've got like a couple of people that'll kind of try to submit people from under side control at our gym. Um but like almost almost as their first port of attack. And I mean, yeah, I think some straight like, you know, those are the sort of ones where I think probably those same people would have been more effective had there if they had this mindset of, you know, like don't let your guard get passed. Whilst they some of the some of the people that do that are actually very good from those positions, but still, you know, if I'm rolling them, I feel like if I just kind of stay safe, I can I can dominate position and put a lot of pressure on it compared to someone who's like very offensive from guard. So I think there are some like fundamentally more sound positions that it's just if you can, you you're better off working from those positions. But at the same time, it's it's nice to have those people at the gym because you get to practice dealing with people with like unorthodox attacks and then learn how to deal with those. So, yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's an important consideration. Like I would not recommend to someone that they base their entire game around sacrifice chokes from bottom position. But that said, having people who are willing to experiment and try weird stuff in the gym can be helpful because a lot of the time when people get submitted or caught by stuff, it's because they were surprised. They've just never seen this before. Even if something is really low percentage across the board, if one person specifically has never trained it before, it might be high percentage against them. I mean, this is probably not so important for black belts who have kind of seen everything, but especially when you're a beginner, having some degree of broad exposure to differences in the ecosystem, I think can be quite helpful because it gives you more different types of games to pressure test yourself against and to develop more awareness of the weird things people might do that you might not expect because they don't happen in your regular rolls, right? So I think that kind of diversity, it it makes Jiu-Jitsu interesting and I always love to talk to people like you about this balance between doing crazy weird stuff versus following the playbook and doing what the data says. It's a really interesting balance that you guys have to strike. Speaker 2: Yeah, it's um I think maybe like, I'm trying to think like what the best I think if you like how do you tell as a coach like whether your room whether you've got the right balance. I think probably like if you look around and you probably should see maybe a majority of people playing like the common major positions as their sort of A game, but you also want to have some flexibility in that. I think it would be bad coaching if everyone was just like if everyone at the gym has to do De La Riva. Like that's if I said that's the best guard, we all have to do De La Riva and K guard because that's what I, you know, that's my A game, so you all have to do it. I think that's the wrong approach. Even though I think like De La Riva and K guard, they are some very solid reasons why those two positions are form somewhat, maybe not objectively, but close to objectively, they've got some very big pros and very few cons to them. I still think you want that diversity. Speaker 1: Well, one last thing I want to ask you, Lochlan, while I have you here. A big challenge that many folks have when they're presented with a lot of Jiu-Jitsu content is where to even start, where to even begin. And often times people can get themselves paralyzed because there's so much stuff available to them that they don't even know where to attack. So, if I am a new grappler looking to get started and I sign up for Submeta, what's the journey that you suggest? Like how should people figure out what to focus on within the platform? Speaker 2: So new grab like completely so the introduction course is kind of so that's free actually. So if anyone wants to watch that, that's it's about a four-hour long course. A lot of it's just like talking about concepts and how to think about training and so on. But that's there's nine actual like lessons in there as well. That's kind of designed to give you a very broad overview. After that, we've got the currently the foundation series, which is kind of as I said at the start, that's that's like uh foundations for for everyone. If you're starting Jiu-Jitsu, you kind of maybe you want it for partly for self-defense and partly you might maybe you want to compete one day or maybe not, you're not sure. Like teaches a good effective game kind of no matter what your sort of goals are. I'm working on this other fundamentals series that'll be a little more specific to sort of fundamentals of beating people in grappling if that's the goal, which I think is I do think there's some things that you just want to like a great large shifts in the way you think about certain positions and so on that might sound somewhat silly, but when you actually implement them well, you're a harder grappler grappler to beat and you'll be better at beating people at grappling. So I think I'm sort of working on that as well. That's another thing to work. And then after that, we've got our intermediate courses, which are sort of like the fundamentals course at the moment, foundations, that kind of gives you like one or two things to be focusing on from positions. Whereas you want to eventually have a full system. And that's where you want to start to specialize to a certain degree. You know, like you have your guard. One of the biggest issues I think when you speak to someone, if you you know, if you take talk to a blue belt and you say to them, like what's your what guard do you play? And they if they can't answer that, that's a big problem. You need to have a type of guard. You have to have type of passing that you like. So that's where you start to choose and we we have a game plan feature, which is still still not released yet, but I promise it's coming soon, which is going to take in like your attributes and preferences and goals and sort of recommend what style might suit you based around that. You know, so it could be that you might be suited to a half guard or a De La Riva or particular types of passes or submissions even based on whether you're tall, short, heavyweight, lightweight. But having something that you're good at and then building upon that and that's like a system. So you kind of you're building offense, defense, ways to enter, if someone starts to cause you issues from there, how to defend, recover and keep them sort of stuck in that until you execute your sweep or attack. So that's sort of how it's structured. And then there's advanced courses beyond that. So the intermediate is sort of like if you're new to, you know, if you wanted to first learn, you've done your fundamentals, you now want to learn De La Riva, that would be an intermediate course first. And then there'd be an an advanced course, for example, on underhook De La Riva where you go through like the things I think like an advanced competitor might want to know and advanced reactions and troubleshooting. So. Speaker 1: Awesome, sir. Well, let's plug it. If people want to sign up for Submeta, what do they have to do? Where do they go? Speaker 2: Submeta.io. Speaker 1: Wow, that's easy. Can you repeat that domain for people with bad attention spans? Speaker 2: Yes, Submeta.io. Speaker 1: There you go. And if you've got a really bad attention span, I'll put a link in the show notes so that people can find it and click on it easily. I will plug this, I mean, Lochlan is not paying me to say this, but I I will say that Submeta to me is kind of the Wikipedia of Jiu-Jitsu. If you want a place that's got all of the knowledge that you need, I think it's the most broadly comprehensive. I don't mean that as a slight against any of the other great content that's out there, but most services and instructionals that I see are kind of special purpose. They're sort of tailored to a specific problem you're trying to solve or a specific area of the game. But I look at Submeta kind of like Wikipedia because if there's something you need to know about Jiu-Jitsu, Submeta is probably the place to go. It's about as close as I would say there is to an an essential membership in the sport of Jiu-Jitsu. You, you know, you would always want to have access to Wikipedia, you wouldn't want to live without it. I think Submeta is kind of like the same thing. So, regardless of your goals, I think Submeta is a pretty safe recommendation across the board. So again, link in the show notes. I think everyone should check that out. At least try the free stuff and if, you know, if you decide you hate Lochlan, that's up to you, but at least try it out. I'll also throw a link to our stuff. Everything that we make is at BJJmentalmodels.com. Podcast is free, both full length episodes and mini episodes. The newsletter is completely free. You can level up with us at BJJ Mental Models Premium. That's our paid service. If Submeta is the Wikipedia of Jiu-Jitsu, I would advertise BJJ Mental Models Premium as the Audible or the Masterclass of Jiu-Jitsu. We focus primarily on concepts and tactics and strategies explained through audio. So a very different model than a lot of people employ. And we've also got a massive focus on community building. So if you're looking to network and build relationships in the sport, either as a competitor, a hobbyist, or a business owner, it's a good option. So again, all of that is at BJJmentalmodels.com. I'll put a link to that and to Submeta in the show notes. Check them both out, please. But Lochlan, man, thanks as always for coming by. It was good to connect. Glad to hear that so much is going by and I'm so excited about that game plan design feature. I've been looking forward to seeing that. So we should definitely chat when that's ready. I am fascinated to see how it materializes. Speaker 2: It's been a long time in the making, so yeah, it's a it's coming. Yeah, it'll be very very good. Speaker 1: Amazing. Well, thanks, buddy. I appreciate it. And thanks to the listeners as well. Really appreciate you too and we'll talk to you in the next one.