Ep. 382: Simple Beats Fancy, feat. Tum Energia

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 382. I am Steve Kwan and BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent Jiu-Jitsu approach. And I'm back today with Toom Energia from Energia Martial Arts. How's it going, my friend? Speaker 2: Steve, good morning to you. Good evening from Europe and I'm doing very well, man. Blessed to be here again. Speaker 1: Always glad to have you, man. Want to give yourself a quick intro if we got newbies who haven't heard you on your previous appearances? Speaker 2: Yes, welcome to the podcast, guys. My name is Toom. It's my third time here on BJJ Mental Models. I'm a Jiu-Jitsu instructor, a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, also teach MMA and grappling from the Netherlands. If you haven't heard of the Netherlands, aka Amsterdam. If you have never heard of that, Europe. We have several Jiu-Jitsu schools here, MMA, martial arts. Besides the physical school teaching, I also teach the Police Academy, teach schools. I come from an elementary teacher background and I'm also on BJJ Fanatics as the first Dutch instructor ever and I have a YouTube channel on where I share Jiu-Jitsu techniques, Jiu-Jitsu concepts, et cetera. I think that's it. Speaker 1: Amazing, sir. Well, I will put that info in the show notes as always. But let's get into the topic here today. You had a lot of great ideas. You've always got a lot of great ideas. That's why I love having you on here. For people who haven't heard our prior chats before, I think they're in for a treat because you've got a really interesting way of explaining kind of the why behind what we do in Jiu-Jitsu. And that sort of touched on the topic that we wanted to talk about here. The abundance, arguably overabundance of information in the sport right now and what to do about it. But I'll shut up. I'll pass it back to you. Why don't you set the table here? Speaker 2: Yes, thank you, Steve. And we've been talking a little bit just before we got started on back in the day when we started Jiu-Jitsu, it was more about finding the correct techniques and the information was hard to get by, man. I had to travel a long way to learn Jiu-Jitsu in the train, traveling to different gyms and there was not a big gym near me. And back in that day, I sound really old by the way by now. I'm not that old, but we had to find a good DVD or a good instructional or I even have e-books and flowcharts from Jiu-Jitsu and physical books on Jiu-Jitsu. For the younger guys listening, I think you can't imagine this, but we had physical books with pictures of Jiu-Jitsu. I think I had a book with Eddie Bravo, if I'm not mistaken, showing Jiu-Jitsu moves and explaining them underneath. While nowadays, things are way different, but before we get to that, Steve, how was that for you when you started out Jiu-Jitsu? Where did you get your information from? Speaker 1: It's crazy, man. Kids these days will never understand it. Back in back in our day, if you wanted to convey information, they would, believe it or not, they would take a tree and chop it down and turn it into pulp and then dry it into sheets and then write words on it. This crazy concept called a book. You don't get many of those anymore these days. But yeah, I was the same as you. Information back in our day. And you know, we say back in our day like we're super old. I'm talking about like the late 2000s when I started Jiu-Jitsu. Speaker 2: That's a few years ago, yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah, so really not that long ago. But information was not that readily available. I've told this story on the podcast before, but I remember hearing rumors of this new guillotine that Marcelo Garcia had perfected, which, you know, we call the Marcelo T or the high elbow guillotine now, but back then, I had never heard of this thing. And I remember looking all over the internet to try to find any information about this and just not being able to because we weren't at a point where you could just go on the internet and find info. So, yeah, you basically would be getting info from your lineal instructor. They would be the vast majority of information that you get, just what you get through training. And there were instructionals you could buy on, you know, VHS or DVD, but even then they were quite limited. There weren't as many as there are today. Whereas, man, you look at it now today and there is just an embarrassment of riches. The problem is flipped. It's no longer about how do I find good information? It's more about I've got way too much good information. How do I start? How do I find the thing that I should be focusing on when you've given me a thousand good options? Speaker 2: Exactly. And that's it. The abundance of technique now a days, it's amazing and I think it's a really good evolution for Jiu-Jitsu, but it comes with a challenge. And that challenge is, I think, filtering, besides your coach or people showing you technique, there are shorts, there's TikTok, there's reels, there's DVDs, there's even concepts and platforms, some of which are doing amazing. I can't say enough how big of a fan I am of like Submeta and things where you can find techniques filtered in a program or set together in a really good way of explaining those by a good teacher. But the credibility also is no longer really questioned on skills or knowledge, but more on the amount of views or edit skills. Like if you scroll through Instagram, I don't have TikTok personally, but like Instagram or anything, short format or even YouTube, you will find beautiful videos, cool edit skills, cool POV videos with Jiu-Jitsu techniques and most of them are No-Gi. I think that's my algorithm. Sorry about that, but I couldn't even say if these guys are purple belts, brown belts, black belts, white belts, blue belts, have experience, don't have experience, have a teaching background, don't. It doesn't even matter. We just see the video. I see 1 million views, so I think, well, it should be cool. Let's drill this technique. So navigating through that content, that should be the real deal now or that is the real deal. It's not that hard to find the content anymore, to find the techniques. It's more about how do I approach this? And imagine begin standing at the at the first steps of your Jiu-Jitsu, Steve, like a few years ago, or a few years ago for me, like you start out Jiu-Jitsu, you have a thousand of techniques. Where do you start, man? What works for you now? What what doesn't work? What do you filter? What do you take out of it? And then slowly as this conversation will go, we're going to look more as to the not the how, but more the why and when and how certain mechanics underlying Jiu-Jitsu will improve your Jiu-Jitsu, maybe faster than just spamming techniques. But that's the question, right? Speaker 1: Absolutely. And I think that's a great topic to get into here today. How do you find a through line across all of this stuff and figure out what you actually want to focus on and get value out of that in a meaningful way. Rob Bernaki has talked about technique hunters in Jiu-Jitsu, people who look at this as just a game of collecting as many techniques as possible. And that's, I mean, we don't need to beat a dead horse here. I think most people understand now that that isn't really the most effective way to train. You're better off focused on thinking in concepts and using some degree of constraint-based game to create like a a variable dynamic training environment. So cool. We all agree on that, hopefully. But that aside, it's easier said than done. I mean, you still need to kind of figure out where to focus your attention. And when you have too many options, it actually makes it harder for you to focus and to get started, right? Again, I've said this before, it's like when you sit down in front of your TV, turn on Netflix, you want to find something to watch, you're presented with thousands of options. The more options you get, the harder it is to make a decision and actually get started. And it's also going to be harder to make the right decision because you're going to be more concerned about what is the right decision, right? I mean, the more time you put up front, you can wind up getting into this analysis paralysis situation where you spend so much time just trying to figure out what to do that you don't actually get to do it. Speaker 2: That you spend 30 minutes just selecting what to watch on Netflix before you start watching anything on Netflix. And end up rewatching the original Star Wars trilogy once again. Speaker 1: Exactly, exactly. So it it's kind of self-defeating at a certain point because we get presented with more information than our funny little monkey brains can actually handle. And so that can lead to all sorts of problems. One of them just being hesitation or withdrawal. We just kind of don't engage because there's too much and it's too hard to make a choice and the process of making a choice is is too painful. And I think this manifests in a roll itself. If you're in a high pressure, time constrained environment like a Jiu-Jitsu sparring session and you've got microseconds to respond to what this other person is doing, you've got to be able to make fast decisions on the fly. And that means you've got to be able to think simply about what you're doing. You can't just be trying to think of your brain like a database where you're pulling out the right technique at any given time because that's too slow. It's too hard to make a good decision that way. And that kind of gets into I think the playbook you wanted to talk about here. So, how do you teach people to do this and how do you do it yourself? How do you find a simplified way to think when there's so much information to go through? Speaker 2: Yeah. And that leads beautifully into like the mechanical models, like you have them on your website, like just like the three joint rule, the the three joint rule, the the body tethering, breaking mechanics, the center of gravity, all these short keywords to engage Jiu-Jitsu match or engage Jiu-Jitsu competition or engage Jiu-Jitsu at all, instead of just trying to remember techniques and then in a split second as you say, right, in a very pressured situation, trying to remember these techniques, well, that's very hard. Well, how we go about that, I think I really don't want to go in all the I'm a big fan of CLA and every form of training, also from a teaching background in how people learn and develop within constraints given. So what I really think is very important for people to understand is first off, if people look at techniques and if people look at Jiu-Jitsu, a lot of people say, yeah, but this really works or this doesn't work or this is a good technique. But before we go into how I approach it at the gym, it's important to know that when people look at what works or what is very valuable in Jiu-Jitsu, 99% of the people listening or doing Jiu-Jitsu are not on the same level as the guys that we watch. So for instance, if I'm watching the Tacket Brothers or Joseph Chen or anyone at ADCC competing or Levi's guard or whatever, and I'm going to say I'm going to train exactly like that as a white belt. I think it's very good to take some of these techniques or these training methods, but you can't skip a certain phase. And what works at a certain level doesn't work. I I've seen it time and time again, Steve. Do you ever go to local Jiu-Jitsu competitions? Speaker 1: Not that often anymore. I'm not really super involved in the competition scene, but yeah, that's obviously something I'm familiar with. Speaker 2: Yeah, but how many times do I see people who know the most high-level skill drill techniques from the highest level of athletes and then just getting caught in closed guard, side control or basic submissions, arm bar from the closed guard in a white, blue, purple, whatever belt match at their local competition grappling industries or Naga. Speaker 1: Oh, all the time. I mean, that is one of the most common traps for beginners, right? They they focus and I mean, this is how our brains work. We're excited about novelty. We focus on cool, exciting things. And unfortunately, the algorithm is incentivized to feed us those cool, exciting things. Whereas the reality of Jiu-Jitsu is much of the stuff that works and works timelessly is unbelievably boring. And not always pretty, right? Sometimes it's ugly and it's slow and it's not super fancy, but that's always been the history of Jiu-Jitsu. Going back to when the UFC started to get popular, the big hurdle they had to overcome was for a layperson, Jiu-Jitsu looks real boring, right? It's not exciting to watch. Speaker 2: Yeah, 100%. And then if you look at the results, imagine someone pulling off a crazy submission. Imagine like a whatever, a buggy choke or a twister lock or a there was a guy at the Eastern trials, ADCC, a few weeks ago, who submitted he he blasted through his division with rubber guard. He submitted someone with a dead orchard. Are you familiar with the technique? Speaker 1: I am. My legs are too stubby to pull that off. I can barely hit a regular triangle, let alone one with both arms in. Speaker 2: Well, this kid pulls off a dead orchard at the ADCC trials and the video goes viral or some of these videos, like I'm just taking an example, could be the first time we saw a buggy choke, whatever. This goes viral, so people think, wow, I should drill this. This is the next rage, this is the new thing. But that's because the hundreds of videos ending in a basic rear naked choke might not go viral. So you're left with this false illusion that these new techniques are the best and highest percentage, but just because they get shared a lot and viewed a lot and hyped a lot, it's not necessarily so. We don't really hype the videos of someone doing a beautiful, well, I I love watching good guard passes or takedowns, don't get me wrong, but usually someone just doing a good back take and rear naked choke doesn't get as million views as the newest craziest leg lock. Am I right? Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. Speaker 2: So you get a false sense of confidence that this is the thing you should study and you're missing out. And that FOMO, well, we're all very very sensitive to FOMO. Like, oh man, I should drill this new leg lock. I should only drill this new very small detail in Jiu-Jitsu and that's going to be my new game. And that leaving out 90% of the work, which is the basics. Speaker 1: So, it's one thing to say that we should focus on the basics, but it's another thing I think now to even understand what the basics really are. This is a harder problem to get to the bottom of than it used to be. It used to be that you would just go to class and your coach or your instructor would teach you stuff and you do what you were taught. And you wouldn't really get exposed to the broader Jiu-Jitsu ecosystem until you were a little bit further on. Whereas now, again, you've got white and blue belts who are way more in tune with what's happening in the competition scene and in the meta than, you know, a lot of black belts are because it just it becomes an obsession focusing all of this stuff. And that can create a really really difficult signal to noise ratio where it's now hard to understand, okay, what do I really focus on? Because some of this stuff does matter. Every once in a while a a trend comes out and it really is important. It really is disruptive. And it can be hard to tell what do you actually need to understand out of all of this stuff and how to assess whether one of these things is worth becoming your focus. Speaker 2: Yeah. And then we're back to filtering, but let's stay let's stay very optimistic because to be honest, I think I'm very happy to see that a lot of Jiu-Jitsu gyms are doing really good, man. I think a lot of coaches are really growing in the way they teach. I see so many gyms and coaches online doing they share more games, they share more concepts, more drills. And this is not Reddit, so I'm not here to bash on all the teachers out there, man. I think everyone is doing a great job and I can learn so much from them. And this is not Reddit saying like, oh, it's super shitty here and it's cold here and everyone, but I'm actually super optimistic for the future of BJJ and I'm really happy to see a lot of people approach class in a less old school way like, okay, guys, run labs, drill, here's 10 random techniques and now just roll for live routes. I'm think I'm confident in saying I find these gyms harder and harder to encounter. I'm not sure about you guys over there, but I'm sure that's even you're even way up front than we are here or even way more developed than we are here in Europe, but even here everywhere I go in gyms, people are doing way more constrained learned approaches. They do engage games, they're working with way different ways of learning and teaching side from just doing random techniques. And now how do we approach that as a coach? Well, let's just let's just go through a few moves and let's just get a little bit specific in our examples and not talk vaguely just about how to filter and how to do. Sounds good? Speaker 1: Absolutely. I love it. Let's get some examples. Speaker 2: Okay, so let's take something from the top of my head. How about so engaging the guard. So a lot of people they learn a guard pass, right? Or a move like you can do like drag pass or scoop pass or a toreando pass or whatever. But what's really fun to know is if people when they start out, like for instance, like say, okay, we're going to approach the guard like a concept. Do you prefer being the guard player on top or on bottom? Just give me one. Speaker 1: On bottom. Speaker 2: On bottom. Cool. Yeah, I like this. So, let's play around. Oh, so we're the guard player. So usually a guard player, when you play guard, you know a few moves. So you might know a dummy sweep or tripod sweep or a wrestle up or a leg entry, right? And if all you do is spam that technique on someone that's not in the situation to spam that technique on, you're eventually just going to, well, fail or going to try so hard that you eventually succeed. But you're just throwing darts at a board and hoping you hit bullseye, right? So what's really cool for coaches to like like teach or for the athletes listening to play around with is like first engaging this as a concept like, hey, the guy that is passing me, so the the let's assume I'm the guard player, like you said, and the guy in front of me is passing. How is he engaging me? Is does he have a squared stance? Is one leg in front of the other? Is his head higher or lower than his hips? So it's cool for people to imagine as they're listening to a podcast, maybe you're driving a car, please stay focused on the road. But if you see this this example for you, like if I see someone in front of me and for every reason, right, so looking for beginners especially, their head is way higher than their hips. So they're standing pretty up straight. Then what would be very easy for me to attack or engage, Steve? Just give me some examples from the top of your head. Speaker 1: The legs. Speaker 2: Yeah, the legs. Yeah, I love the legs. I was coming back to this, but I'm a dirty leg locker myself. But yeah, it would be very easy to enter the legs. Now, not only for leg locks, but different entries like controlling like entangling De La Riva, reverse De La Riva, X-guard or taking back takes. And also very important to understand for a lot of guard players is we're not married to playing guard. It's not like we we we took a vow that I have to stay on my ass. I think what we see now a lot is mixing Jiu-Jitsu and wrestling, like wrestling up from the guard is a is a magnificent tool to start approaching your your Jiu-Jitsu. Even if you really want to get leg entries or play guard, at least threatening the wrestle up gives you so much entries, especially if people start pulling grips away or as you engage for a leg, start to wrestle up, they pull the leg back, it exposes the other leg, et cetera. So, a good game, something you also always say on the I think you mentioned it somewhere on on the website is getting like inside channels or inside channel control, something like this. Yeah. So let's look at if I'm correct and correct me if I'm wrong, is the space between your opponent's arms and legs, right? Speaker 1: Absolutely. Yeah. When I talk about the inside channel, I'm talking about what a lot of other people call inside position. I just try to avoid that terminology because it's easy for people to get confused about like, is this a position? Are we talking about when we say inside control, are we talking about inside control? Just gets a bit messy. So, when I say the inside channel, I'm basically saying the space between their arms, their legs, under their head even, right? If you can get under the chin. Speaker 2: That's actually very interesting. That's cool to know that the I didn't think of it that way, but really cool the the inside channel. So for instance, we're still back to visualizing visualizing me being the guard player. Am I seated or am I supine? Okay, I'm seated in my guard. The guy in front of me. If his legs are very wide, so there's a lot of space between his legs, that would be a perfect time for me to control the space between their legs, either with hooks, grips or leg entanglements. Even if you're listening to this, you don't even know what a reverse De La Riva or X-guard or single leg X or any of these positions are, just playing this game around like, hey, when their legs are pretty open and I can enter their legs and their head or grips are not blocking, that's a good time for me to enter the space between their legs. Then we talk about getting connections, grips and disbalance, like in that order, if you're still with me. So hooks, grips, connecting myself to my partner and from there disbalancing or for the for the Japanese people who love terminology, the Kuzushi and then getting into a technique from there. Now, this is a way we could approach the guard. And if you say, okay, cool, now what if their legs are not there's no space between their legs or they got a staggered stance or whatever. Okay, cool, then we can start maybe entering the space outside of their legs. So like back takes from the outside of their legs or K-guard or anything where we start moving around the legs. And then we get okay, into the scenario where my partner's head and or grips are blocking his legs. So imagine your partner just hinging down a little bit, his head is around hip height and it makes it very hard for the guard player to then enter the legs. Now, if you just spam this technique, you just learned a single leg X or a shin on shin or an X-guard, it's going to be a very hard time for you if your partner has his grips in front and his head in front. So that's when the technique hits a wall and you can either do two things. You can like try and muscle your way through it and really start fighting for that inside position, but you will get passed by someone half decent. So then you will be, okay, cool, now let's get to the next dilemma. If people have their hands in front of their legs, it's very hard to enter the legs or control that inside space, at least for the legs. But as you just mentioned, there's also inside space underneath the head or in between the arms or between the arms and chest, if I'm not mistaken, right? Speaker 1: Right. Speaker 2: So then we can look at, okay, how do I control the space or how do I control grips with their hands? Like even for beginners, it's easy to understand if you get a grip or a two on one or an arm drag, you can wrestle yourself up from that grip or like a chin strap, even if their head is lower. And you can work your guard more as a conceptual approach, just only by engaging like who is in front of me? How are they in front of me? Are they staggered? Are they square stance? Do they have their hands and head in front of their legs? Or are their legs in front and leading beneath their hips? Is there inside space or is there no inside space for me to control? And then where can I insert grips, control and from there disbalance and get connections, disbalance and then apply the correct technique. And I think getting one technique from one of these approaches is better than having 10 techniques and don't have a single approach and how to do it. And I want to get into some mechanical concepts, like what what are good mechanics to move your body to use this, but let's stay a little bit more in the in the concept before I go completely off trail. Does this make sense so far? Speaker 1: Absolutely. I agree with this completely. I think that when you're in the middle of a high pressure, time constrained situation like a like a roll, you want to be able to make good decisions quickly. And part of effectiveness in Jiu-Jitsu comes down to how can I reduce the amount of thinking I have to do mid-match so that I can make those decisions more quickly. There comes a point when it becomes less about learning more and it becomes more about learning less. How do I choose what to do with a very quick set of decisions? And so, when I am in a highly variable situation like the guard, which you described here, Speaker 2: Especially open guard. Yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, there's so many things that could happen. And if you're trying to think of this in a like a technique tree, you know, how do all of these techniques fit together and what do I do in every single situation? It's like trying to memorize a speech word for word. It's really hard to do. It's easier to think about the talking points and to just kind of freestyle a structure around that. And that's similar to what you described when you are engaging someone in a variable position like guard. What are the the core concepts that you have to think about? And it comes down to things like again, what is their posture? Is one of their legs free? What is the space between the legs? Those are just simple things and and then instead of thinking about, okay, do I do an Imanari roll from here? You can think more about, oh, there's space between the legs. If I off balance, I can probably get in there. And that's just a much simpler way to think about things than big complicated technique sequences. Speaker 2: Just having some cues or some I sometimes call them like flags. I think it makes uh makes more sense in Dutch anyway, but when people like I'm I'm rolling, I'm trying to do a technique, but as soon as I see his arm getting cross body centered, I can smell my buddy just takes back take. Boom. As soon as that arm goes across my body, back take, whatever I'm doing, wherever I am. As soon as I feel that head leading into much, boom, snap down, front headlock. Just that's also repetition and experience. And that's hard to now explain to someone who's beginning, but if you anytime I'm rolling with someone and they for instance, they're down in guard and they base a foot. So their knee is higher than the foot and I see this inside space, boom, I'm down in a leg entry. Whatever I'm doing, wherever I am. These cues are so drilled into my system and drilled into my students their system because of repetition, but also because they're just looking for cues. Like if someone pushes, you pull back. If someone pulls, you push back, et cetera, et cetera. And seeing that space between their legs or seeing their butt lift up, like if if anytime their butt goes up and beyond their knees and like, okay, cool, that's a time to enter for the legs or if their arm goes across my body or in any way they're they're fighting a submission and their arm goes like an arm drag between our body or they have space in an underhook for instance, that's also something a lot of everyone that does Jiu-Jitsu knows the concept of an underhook. As soon as I see that underhook, boom, I go into back take mode. It's just looking for these cues rather than looking for techniques and enforcing them on people. Now you can implement some games on that. I think one of the most common games a lot of people know is like dirty feet. You know what that means? I mean, it it sounds pretty weird if you heard it for the first time, so let me elaborate a little bit, but we're back in the scenario. I'm the supine guard player. Let's say I'm just flat on my back, engaging my guard. Something I really think is really good for people to learn are self frames. So your legs and arms and limbs don't get extended away from your body. So I'm controlling my knees for people visualizing. So when my partner pushes me to the side, I'm rolled up on my back, my elbow hits the floor and I'm way more base and centered and I cannot pull my legs away from my body. My feet are not going to be symmetrical. It's going to be very easy for him to pass and push either my ankles or shins down or lift my heels up for a stack pass. So I love putting one leg up, one leg down. And then the game from that, let's assume these things are out of the way, I have a proper supine guard. My game is just to keep the soles of my feet and my feet pointed towards my partner. And I can use that for the beginners laying on my back. For people to get more experienced, journeying side to side, like crossing over and people more experienced, even going upside down and inverting. Something I want to address later on. But my goal is to just keep my feet pointed towards my partner and in the next step, attach to my partner. So like sticky feet, they're always basing on their hips, knees, hooking behind their knees, hooking behind their thighs, hooking behind their ankles and just getting my feet controlled. Now my partner's goal is obviously to keep their my feet away from them without being allowed to really pass me and dive in chest to chest. Like these are simple games. Now during this game, as my body knows how to move, how to apply, my feet are always facing him, I get one job. Find two hooks on the inside or find two grips on the inside. Okay, cool. And then I get another job. Find a post or find a hook on the inside and a grip with your hand. Like grabbing an ankle or grabbing underneath the knee, like a scoop grip or whatever. And from here you can expand these games and give constraints, well, we're getting into CLA anyway now, but give constraints to either the top player and or the bottom player and progress from there. And then as these games evolve, you get good control, you know what to look for, you know how to enter, then comes the technique. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, well said. I absolutely love it. And again, back to simplified thinking, how can we reduce the amount of decisions that we have to make on the fly. This also addresses such a super common problem in Jiu-Jitsu, which is hesitation or inability to pull the trigger. When people come to me and they describe this problem, often it's because they're thinking too much. They're getting in their own head and they're trying to come up with too many details and then they wind up basically trying to solve an equation or a formula in the middle of a roll. So when people say I hesitate too much or I I struggle to pull the trigger, my feeling is that that is often because people are being overly analytical. They're they're thinking more about Jiu-Jitsu than they should be. And the more complicated you think Jiu-Jitsu is, the easier it is to fall into that trap. So the thing about external cues that I love, like the dirty feet game is it really downscales the complexity of Jiu-Jitsu and it makes it a very simple thing. And that can almost be counterintuitive sometimes because I know that in Jiu-Jitsu we often look at this as an intellectual fighting sport and we, you know, especially after the Danaher era, we love to try to make it sound as complicated as it possibly can. But the big pushback coming from the ecological and CLA side is this realization that actually simple is often better because if things are simple, that removes barriers to entry. That makes it easier for people to engage with the game. And Jiu-Jitsu is ultimately about getting reps and practice. You cannot outthink Jiu-Jitsu. You cannot get good at it just by creating mind maps or, you know, trying to memorize every single possible detail. At the end of the day, it's about reps. And if you're overthinking Jiu-Jitsu, that's going to lead to you hesitating and that's going to lead to fewer reps and then it becomes this like downward spiral where you're just not getting quality practice because you're overthinking and because you're overthinking, now you're not getting quality practice. Speaker 2: You're even going backwards in your Jiu-Jitsu sometimes. One of my favorite quotes when I sometimes say in teaching is like, making Jiu-Jitsu hard is very easy and making Jiu-Jitsu easy is very hard. Like we tend to be over I love you going on the the Danaher topic and like over extended on details and exact variations and I think it's really good for a teacher to be specific. Like not saying I grab his arm or I grab his leg or I no. But the downside is of being like, I'm going to take this scoop inversion grip on his tricep or no, even better. I'm going to take his femur tibia away from his lateral collateral ligament and whatever, you know. I think it's really good to be specific, but we're also like overcomplicating something. And sometimes I think also some people that listen to this podcast who've been doing Jiu-Jitsu, maybe for a couple of years, might struggle more in doing Jiu-Jitsu with a trial classer than someone who's also been doing Jiu-Jitsu for a year. So imagine this, like I don't want to use belts like white belt or blue belt, whatever, but if you've been doing Jiu-Jitsu for a short while, in comes a wild trial classer who moves unorthodoxly. I don't know when the last time you roll with a trial classer, but just play along with me. Jiu-Jitsu gets harder than when you're rolling with someone who's exactly moving the way you're used to move. And making Jiu-Jitsu way simpler, that's what I also love about MMA. Like 99% of Jiu-Jitsu techniques, I'm not saying don't work at MMA. I I don't want to get quoted on that, especially not here on the podcast, but 99% of techniques, Jiu-Jitsu techniques in MMA are just straight out of the window. It's just simple. Take him down, pin him, get chest to or get a good pin and then get to strike. And if you're the guy on bottom, well, don't be the guy on bottom and get up and get frames and et cetera. But it's way more simpler at sometimes. And if you take that back to just Jiu-Jitsu or grappling, sometimes instead of all these techniques and these small steps, take a grip, take a grip, okay, what's my goal here? I want my partner to like imagine I'm the passer, I want my partner to carry my weight and make myself heavy into his frames. From there, I need to clear these frames and get a chest to chest connection to take away his movement and his guard, maybe get his shoulders on the mat or a chest pin with his head and from there, I'm settled in a pin. Okay, how do I go about this? And what games can I play and what ways can I drill to deal with these frames? Okay, and sure, then it's good to enter some techniques. Okay, we enter like for instance, we're pushing into his frames, we learn a row drag. I've been doing this technique recently. It's really nice technique, so it's on the top of my head. But that's really important to get technique there. But there's 2,000 other techniques we could do to deal with frames, right? But at the end of the day, the main goal is I have to make him carry my weight. Don't overextend, so he can't lift me or disbalance me to a side or enter for my legs. If he can go and to carry my weight, be heavy and from there clear these frames and get a chest to chest connection. That is my main goal from here. Or if we're back to the same example we were using with the guard player, my goal is to keep my feet in between me and my partner at all times. If he passes my feet up till my knee line, I have to try and get my feet back into the equation. If he's from my knees to my hip line, I have to get my knees back into equation at least and maybe get back to my feet. And if he passes to my hip line, I have to maybe do an unorthodox move, as you said before, like some moves are pretty some moves go really hard against our basic instincts to get back to my guard. So, some of the things that go very hard against basic instincts, so going back to like a trial classer, like moving away against force is so unorthodox for a lot of people. Like we always want to fight towards the person we're fighting. So especially in the beginning of Jiu-Jitsu, you learn Jiu-Jitsu, you're either on your feet or you're on your knees, you're on top. Then we love to teach you one of the most famous things in Jiu-Jitsu, which is the guard, the Gracie selling point. You learn to fight from your back. Well, that's beautiful. And then after a while, you learn to fight upside down. So you create this whole third dimension of Jiu-Jitsu when you learn to invert and play Jiu-Jitsu upside down. But some moves are so counterintuitive, like when you have an arm bar, the first time you have to learn a hitchhiker to to like really turn away and back into them. While someone is yanking your arm, that's your first instinct is to just curl it back very hard, right? Someone's pulling your arm, you just pull it back. And then just limp arming that and twisting with them, that's something so unorthodox for people getting started in Jiu-Jitsu. Same goes if you have ever seen, well, I know you've seen more wrestling than I have in my entire life because I assume everyone from the American the beautiful city, the the beautiful states of America grew up wrestling. If not, don't crush my dream. Speaker 1: I presume we're talking about professional wrestling, the true sport of kings, right? And not that amateur stuff. Speaker 2: Yeah, of course. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Real wrestling, like the South Park episode. Speaker 1: Exactly. Speaker 2: You haven't seen the South Park episode? Speaker 1: Oh no, I have seen the South Park. Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, that that's that's wrestling. But when you see a wrestler, well, I've seen wrestlers flip over while they're falling and they're never really falling and bridging, you know, like a wrestler like he he gets reversed or he gets taken down, he bridges over, turns back upside down, bridges into him. Or here more common, we just got one of my students just got the national championship for Judo again. Uh falling, when I see the Judokas falling, they don't fall. They like twist their neck and chest in all kinds of ways. I'm actually here behind my laptop like imitating it, but you can't see it, but that's really funny. Twisting their body in all sorts of ways not to land flat on their shoulders. And there's a lot of Jiu-Jitsu moves that we have that are so up against our true instincts. A trial classer when he gets passed to side control, they just turn away and give their back, right? It's one of the first things you learn in Jiu-Jitsu is, well, don't give your back, don't turn away. But it feels so natural. It feels so natural even if you're passing like to really lean forward and lean in, well, you just get swept by someone doing Jiu-Jitsu. And we have to like tell people how to of learn people and teach them how to move again within certain frames to improve their Jiu-Jitsu and go against their instincts. So I think it's full circle back again to filtering content and filtering information. It's also filtering how your body moves and works in a functional pattern or in mechanical patterns, if you want to keep it in the mechanical concepts, so that we better understand Jiu-Jitsu and can better apply Jiu-Jitsu. One of the most common things when someone sweeps someone for the first time, they try to get back on their feet. So imagine this, we're back in the guard. I do my first sweep. I sweep my partner and I try to like base my hands behind me and work my way up to my feet. Are you picturing this? It looks ridiculous. That's very normal. I see white belts doing this every day. Then you have to teach someone like, hey, you have to like roll your shin and do these like kind of shin pommeling pigeon yoga moves to easily get up on your shins and build base. Well, for us, that makes a lot of sense. This is how I get out of bed in the morning. Yeah, I roll over my shin. It's very basic. Yeah. But for people who don't do Jiu-Jitsu, it's very hard to like for this to click. So if you go back to your first days of Jiu-Jitsu, you were also like basing your hands on the floor. Someone takes you down. The first thing you do is you base your hand. And then you have a coach telling you, man, you shouldn't do that. That's not smart. But how do you learn these things? Either by information or by learning the hard way and getting swept over and over again or getting taken down and breaking your arm. So these movement patterns, if so to call it, or these mechanical concepts, will be so much more important and combining them with these insights, like these concepts that we just talked about before. And we haven't really inserted a lot of technique yet. And I think you can do a lot of growth in Jiu-Jitsu and offer classes and develop your Jiu-Jitsu with just implementing concepts and mechanical moves within these concepts. So for instance, playing the dirty feet game, okay, that's a concept, right? The game is very simple. Keep my feet pointed towards my partner all time. If I then teach you the mechanic of like pommeling your legs or the mechanic of reverse pommeling or the mechanic of inverting, the game becomes way more fun, right? So we need mechanics to improve the concept. So, well, I think I went down a big rabbit hole there, but what I'm trying to say is having the right insights, having the right concepts on how to approach Jiu-Jitsu, that's cool. And then having the good mechanics and the body control to implement techniques is way more important than just giving them the techniques. If I give someone technique on how to sweep and tell them, well, put your foot here, put your head there, it's just based on remembrance and then drilling and well, maybe they get a hang of it in one technique. But if you teach them the concept and how their body moves and when to apply the technique, well, they can then implement several sweeps from there on. Speaker 1: Yeah. I think where beginners especially get caught up is if you look at the world through the lens of techniques and specifics, you can get really screwed up because sometimes it looks like you're getting conflicting information and it can make it hard for you to understand what's what. A common example that a lot of beginners get caught up on is if I am in your guard and you want to arm bar me from the bottom, one of my easiest defenses is just to stack you. So I move in, I take away space. On the other hand, if you want to triangle me, one of my easiest defenses is to posture up. So I'm kind of creating space. And this can be a bit of a trick for brand new beginners because you're doing an opposite thing. And so in a very short period of time, you've got to assess, oh, is this an arm bar or is this a triangle? Or what if it's an arm bar triangle combo, right? Now you got a real problem. So how do you make decisions when you're looking at the world through the lens of specifics? I find that if you start thinking of things conceptually and just, okay, how do I keep my limbs safe and how do I break their alignment at the same time? It becomes a little bit easier because then you can just think of, okay, what's the immediate problem that's facing my body right now and how do I stay in a position where my body still feels strong? Like it's less about doing an individual technique like stacking the person or posturing, but it's what could I do here that would make me feel like I'm strong? Like my limbs are still safe and what can I do that will make the other person feel not so strong at the same time? Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Especially if you look at the closed guard. It's funny that you bring that up because it's one of the most common positions I see in a lot of beginner tournaments here. When we coach the white and blue belt divisions, especially at local tournaments, we see a lot of closed guard. Now at high level, I don't see a lot of closed guard anymore, right? If you look at at some high level competitions, how often do you see closed guard, Steve? Speaker 1: I mean, amongst the specialists, you'll see it quite a bit, but closed guard is actually a very context specific and difficult guard to play. Many people now are advocating that closed guard should be thought of as an advanced technique and that we should get beginners started on open guard. So, it's one of those moves where you'll see it a lot in the gym because it's taught and trained like a fundamental. But in a real roll, closed guard either requires you to be a tremendously good closed guard player or it requires a degree of cooperation from the opponent to want to sit in your closed guard. So, in an actual sparring situation, you don't see it as much as you would think based on how frequently you train it in the gym. Speaker 2: That's interesting. That's really interesting. But on topic of the closed guard, you brought up the arm bar and the triangle. For instance, a good example on how we go about drilling this because I see it happen so much at local competitions and especially for the beginners, the bane of everything is closed guard. Imagine this, you have your first competition, it's only like what, three minutes? Two minutes for a local match, whatever, and you get caught in a closed guard for a minute and a half. That sucks. You get frustrated, you start pushing her, you dig your elbows in his knees, boom, you get arm bar triangle. That's you like one of the most hit submissions I see in local tournaments are arm bars and triangles from the closed guard. So I think it's something everyone can relate to at any level. So, let's take this for example. Maybe, like you say, how do I know when I posture up or when I posture down, et cetera? Like a fun game I really like to play is when people on bottom try to break your posture, which is obviously very important, like control the posture of your the top player, get them chest to chest or break their posture in any way, get control of their arm. And for the top players to imagine, while I'm a big fan of standing up in the guard, especially these past period, I've been doing a lot of stand up passing, especially in the closed guard, but that's another topic, talking No-Gi mainly here, because just for the people listening, that does change a lot of things in the closed guard, especially adding lapel chokes and the control and the grips. Yeah, or the transition to spider guard, et cetera. So just keeping it a little bit No-Gi just for the fun of it. But what I try to imagine is that my partner on bottom has a cube just on top of their their chest and abs. Okay, so imagine this. As long as I'm either in front, above or completely underneath the cube, I'm pretty safe. But the real danger zone, the real danger zone in closed guard is when my limbs, including my head, enter that imaginary cube. Are you still following me? So imagine me having good posture, my arm's good. And then I ask, we're just going to play a game, okay, bottom player is not allowed to break posture and can just throw arm bars and triangles. Go. And on the platas. Well, you can imagine that's going to be a hard time for bottom player. So now top player is going to be leaned a little bit forward or you're allowed to first pull their arms in, break their grips, get two on ones, get arm drags, get their posture down a little bit. And then apply arm bars and triangles. It's not about the defense afterwards, but it's more about, okay, when they're in this danger zone, it's easier to enter an arm bar or a brother plata or a triangle or whatever, any submission from closed guard. And then we're going to like go all the way down, frame on their armpits or take away their ability to control the cube in the middle of us. Okay, now if I control their limbs, I can safely lean in a little bit and then like stand up in the closed guard. There's a few Gordon Ryan has a really good video on on a very easy way he likes to stand up in the closed guard and there's one of them I really like from Lachlan Giles. Just giving a shout out, I'm a big fan of Lachlan, but the way he passes closed guard and standing up and some techniques from there. But it's about who controls that space between me and my partner and who controls the posture and the limbs in between that space. If we understand that way better, then we can implement some passes. What a lot of people do is like like force the guard open, get their head or get one of their limbs too close to the bottom player and then they're cooked, get their back taken, get submitted. So these are fun ways to engage the closed guard and also for the top player to relax because what I see a lot of people do is when they get caught in the guard, they feel like they like they're trapped. They want to pass, they want to fight, they want to escape, they want to move, all their movement is taken away and they overreact. So they really start standing up too fast without good control of the grips and it's frustrating because once you like control the grips, you start implementing your pass or getting your base, boom, one of the grips slips out. You have to you have to start all over again and the bottom player is just well, looks like he's having an easy time. I'm just focus mainly now on beginners, but I see a lot of frustration mainly in the top players. They lean in forward, they try to smash and they get like arm barred or arm dragged or swept. Most sweeps will occur by breaking your partner's posture first, right? So anytime if my partner is seated up, if you can imagine this cube in front of them, if he's seated up all the way behind there, has his grips in, it's going to be pretty hard to sweep them. Yeah. Unless you're you get the space to really get up and like hip bump them all the way back over, but most sweeps have to break their posture down. Same thing goes like with these arm bars and triangles or guillotines or any submission from here. You first have to control the posture. So maybe one of the first things you could implement when engaging the closed guard is not like where do I place my hands or whatever, it's just, okay, first off, you need to learn posture. It's one of the things you learn, I think most beginners learn in Jiu-Jitsu. And then like, okay, I have to keep my frames tight and away, keep just stay away from this imaginary cube in between me and my partner and don't let him get break my posture down or bring himself chest to chest. And play around from there. And then we can again implement different variations, like different constraints. Okay, we're going to do the same game, same drill, but I'm only allowed to put my hands not only on his hips, but maybe two hands in his armpits or inside biceps control. Or I'm going to have one hand on his body and he's going to have one hand on me. Another game I really like to play is for the bottom player is like a hot stove. Like I'm allowed to break my partner's posture, but I'm going to imagine he's like like like a hot stove or a hot pan. I'm just allowed to hold him there for a maximum of one second. And then he's allowed to break free and we're going to do the same thing again. Just find different ways to break their posture. Time and time again. It's not about holding them there for five minutes. It's just about finding ways to use my grips to break their posture, using my legs. I think one of the the coolest seminars I ever had in my life was with John Jacques Machado and he just taught me, he took five minutes to explain one detail in closed guard, how to really use your hips and legs to pull someone in. It sounds way too obvious when I mention it now, but it was such a cool detail in the seminar that it stuck for me with me for over 10 years. But bringing my partner's posture to me and using grips and then using my legs, especially in the closed guard, okay, and from there we can implement different games, like we did before in the open guard and different constraints to understand better, okay, what is it that I try to achieve as a top player? And what is it that I try to avoid as a top player? And where then do I implement what techniques and what body mechanics? Speaker 1: I love how you explained how when you're training with JJ, the things that really stuck with you were some of the just bonehead basics that you never thought about. And that has been my experience as well. Sometimes when we chase techniques and new details, we look for things that are novel and complex. And it's easy to fall into this trap of thinking that if something is complex, it's more valuable. What I have found though, similar to what you've said, is the real big breakthrough moments that I've had in Jiu-Jitsu, they're usually dumb things. Just little super simple details that just kind of escaped my purview before. I just never noticed them until someone put them in front of me. And for this reason, I actually find even at black belt, one of my favorite classes to attend is the fundamentals class. Because if I attend an advanced class and the coach is intent on showing these really complex, intricate sequences, you know, odds are that first of all, you're talking about things that might appear in less than 1% of Jiu-Jitsu matches and they require a lot of practice because they're so fine-grained and complicated. Whereas if someone can share a little detail about framing, right? That makes me a little bit better in very common situations and is easy to understand, I get way more value out of it. So, I actually find talking about simple things in Jiu-Jitsu is more valuable to me at least. And this touches on what you discussed earlier. You talked about how it's easy to make things hard and it's hard to make things simple. This comes up a lot in the world of design. You know, before doing this full-time, I used to work in software and user experience. And a big part of that is like, how do you make a complicated tool simple for people to use? So they don't have to sit there and read a manual to figure out how to do this. And what you find is that anyone can make like an interface or a design that's complicated. It's not that hard to do. But if you want to make something simple, you have to spend a lot of time really thinking about it and crystallizing the idea and stripping away what isn't really essential and finding out a way to resolve edge cases if that's important. And this can be frustrating because sometimes when you show people a really simplified idea, they won't be impressed. They'll say, well, that's just a really simple detail. So yeah, it is, but a lot more thought came into explaining that simple detail than it would take to make things complicated. And that's important to think about when we see those crazy Instagram reels that you talked about because showing something in a complicated way is like the easiest thing to do. Showing something in a simple way requires a lot of thought and experience and practice and understanding of what you're talking about. Speaker 2: Yeah. I couldn't agree more, man. I was uh I just came back like two months ago from a trip to Thailand, training Muay Thai, MMA at a very big gym, Bangtao Muay Thai. Nothing but uh but good words about that gym. You know the main class I took for grappling there was the fundamentals class. And I I had the exact same thought also on what I really wanted to click and roll and I did some of the advanced classes as well because I I like the teacher, he's a really cool guy, Alex Schild. Um but also the fundamentals class. I thought it was really cool and take these details. One of the best details I learned last month was with a very good Gi athlete, Dennis Chuquito from Fortaleza. Really good. He just won Europeans, a very good and and Brazil national, whatever, he's a very good competitor. He doesn't speak any English, so it's really cool because I speak Portuguese, have some good vibes with him. Really cool seminar by the way. Shout out to Dennis Chuquito, but he showed me a detail. We're in seated North South, right? Doing a Kimura. Something you can imagine everyone listening can imagine, right? And this guy, he has a Kimura, like, okay, cool, we can do Kimura, we can I thought, oh, cool, he can do a Tarikoplata, Brabo Plata and thousands of variations. But what this guy does, he opens the jacket of the other player, wraps it around the Kimura and grabs it. That's it. I hope you've seen this a thousand times before, like, bro, Toom, you just learned about this now. That makes it even funnier. But he shows this. And I'm there with two other brown and purple belts and we're all looking at each other like, why haven't we ever thought of this? I've man, I've been doing Kimuras from that position in the Gi for God knows how many times. And only I was 30 years old, a month ago, when I saw this guy take the final point of the jacket, wrap it around the wrist, grab it. He let go of the Kimura with one hand. The guy was completely trapped just with one hand and the lapel. And he could then just walk him up, get a bow and arrow choke, move him around, all the positions, et cetera. You've seen this? Speaker 1: I remember the first time someone did that to me, it was my brother and I remember thinking, this is such BS. How can you're allowed to do this? And you know, it's one of those things where again, if you think of things through the lens of what what's common and expected, we start developing blind spots to new ideas. Some of which are actually quite simple. I mean, we've been trained since day one that a Kimura is a figure four grip on the arm. That's kind of how it's explained to everyone. And that's an example of where you can get overfocused and fixated on a detail rather than on the goal. The goal of the Kimura is not to get a figure four on the arm. There's no benefit to having a figure four on someone's arm by itself. The reason we do it is to twist the arm behind the back and rotate the shoulder internally. And if you think of things conceptually, then you realize there might be other ways to do this. Maybe rather than getting that figure four, I can use the kimono to immobilize the arm. And so you achieve really cool other options by thinking of things through the concept rather than through the specific configuration of where your body part should go. Speaker 2: Exactly. And this was what hit me like the shitty No-Gi player I am. I haven't been doing the Gi that much. We've been doing Kimura traps, T-Kimura positions, also the huge irony of us today is talking about concepts and ways how to use technique. As on the other side of the coin, I'm just pumping out technique videos out there daily on Instagram and YouTube. So I love the hypocrisy in that and the irony. Because it's so hard to translate concepts or harder to translate concepts on video as it is in a class. Our classes are so differently structured from our videos. But that's that's not the topic. I've been doing so many Kimuras, Kimura traps, teaching people the foundations of using the Kimura to not only do a shoulder lock, but to use it as a trap, to move myself, to move my partner, to invert from, to make sure they cannot turn in one direction, et cetera. And here comes this guy in the Gi, and I've been training in the Gi for a long time, who just opens the jacket, grabs the lapel and I'm like, I'm like, that's it. I'm driving home. You know, I was I was so I was so happy to seeing that, but I was also like so like, why did it take me so long to learn this stupid detail? And this is just the first one that's on the top of my head and there've been so many more even for the just the short period of time. And I love having these moments because it means I'm learning, I'm growing. Anytime you don't have this, anytime you're not learning techniques and having these these completely flabbergasted moments like, oh, what the fuck, man. Um, well, you're not really learning Jiu-Jitsu, are you? You should find these these moments and sometimes they occur in the in the wildest moments, like a random fundamentals class from a purple belt or in my case, going for a John Jacques Machado seminar, thinking I would learn all these crazy moves and he just shows me one technique. Same thing, two weeks ago, I had a seminar with Victor Estima, Gracie Barra. And I've trained with him before and he showed some concepts on guard passing. I'm like, man, this makes sense. And the thing I took home that day from a two-hour seminar was just one or two concepts. Not a new technique, not a new fancy drill or a cool submission, just one or two concepts in passing. I'm like, man, that makes so much sense. And that's also what I love about Jiu-Jitsu because I think most people can agree if they're listening and they do Jiu-Jitsu that the first time you saw Jiu-Jitsu, you fell in love. Like it hits most people like a virus. Like I think most of us listening are like, wow, the first time you roll with someone or the first five classes, 10 classes, you're like, holy shit, I want to learn this. But man, for me, even after 15 years of martial arts, I still have these moments, well, maybe not on a daily base, but frequently. I can swear, Steve, I and I think you have these too. Still after all this time, even all the experience you have with Jiu-Jitsu or with the podcast or anything around that, there's still going to be moments like you're like, damn, that's sexy. Speaker 1: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And as you get more experienced, it can be harder to find those moments. First of all, because you're just less likely to encounter something new and novel, but also because you do kind of get stuck seeing the world through the lens of your own experience and it gets harder to have that fresh perspective because you come in with so much assumed knowledge about how things should work. So, the thing I love about doing BJJ Mental Models and related stuff is it allows me to talk to people who might challenge my assumptions. It's the same reason why cross-training in other gyms is valuable. If you only train at the same gym all the time, you're just training with the same people who bring the same style and you're seeing the same stuff. And that's not bad by itself, but when you go and you train with somebody else, you're going to get exposed to all of this new stuff that you haven't seen. And that kind of pokes holes in your Jiu-Jitsu that you might not have otherwise realized were there because you just weren't in an environment where that gets exposed, right? It's uh just kind of like the diversity of an ecosystem. The more diversity you get, the stronger the immune systems of everyone involved. And so I think with Jiu-Jitsu, as you get more experienced, it becomes more important to start going into situations that challenge your assumptions. But it can also be harder to do because you get older, you get more set in your ways and so you've got to be on guard about that natural tendency of us to kind of fall into old habits and be become resistant to new ideas. Speaker 2: Yeah. It's funny because every time like I feel like this conversation is like a Groundhog Day. Every time you start mentioning something, I was just about to think of or say. I was just about to get into the topic of cross-training. So I love you bringing that up and I think it's really cool to see that's why I love about seminars. I've been doing some more seminars and traveling abroad. Like I just mentioned, I went to Thailand, I'm going to Greece in a few months, I'm traveling to seminars locally, I was just in Germany or Belgium, whatever. And when I train with the people there, I roll with the people there, it like it's like a reset button for my Jiu-Jitsu. Like I roll with people every day and then when I go abroad or go to a different gym or especially somewhere like in Thailand where you don't roll only with the local people, but it was a place where people from I roll with people from all over the world there because it's this famous gym where everyone goes to train. And I love how this like opens new, well, let's say mirrors, it mirrors your Jiu-Jitsu. So you're like, oh, cool, this is what I've been there's a there's a gap in my game here, there's a gap in my game there or wow, this is working really good. And even sometimes let's just stay optimistic is you will find out some things that might not have worked for you recently in your gym because all the guys know this move or everyone knows you move like this. And then you get to travel somewhere and this just you just surprise everyone with the same few things that haven't worked for you in a while. And that's also beautiful to notice on Jiu-Jitsu. So I'm also a big advocate on that on like cross-training, going to seminars, rolling with people from different sizes, different skill levels. I also see this a lot when black belts only roll with other higher belts. I love rolling with white belts or beginners, well, unless they injure me because they're they move like crazy bulls. But besides that, I love rolling with blue belts, purple belts, anyone, everywhere, wrestlers, Jiu-Jitsu guys, Luta Livre guys, MMA guys, Judo guys. I don't really care. It's just everything opens up a new game for me and it's a new pathway in my own Jiu-Jitsu. Or beginners only rolling with other beginners. Speaker 1: It's great how you brought up that when you cross-train, it doesn't always just expose weaknesses, but it can also expose latent strengths that you might have forgotten. When you're always training in a room with the same people, they develop a resistance to your style of Jiu-Jitsu and that can make it feel like what you're doing doesn't work or that you're not getting better. But you're measuring yourself relative to a moving target because the people you train with are also getting better and they're getting better at defending against you. If you go and you train with someone that you've never trained with before, stuff that you might have felt like dead ends because they don't work against your regular training partners, might suddenly start working and you might realize your stuff is actually better than you thought it was. It was just that you were testing against people who had built up a resistance to your type of Jiu-Jitsu. And then when you go into new territory and try it against someone who doesn't know your game, you might realize, well, this actually works better than I thought it did. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, exactly that. And that's also really good for the confidence in your Jiu-Jitsu. And then having people sometimes show you a move they're really good at because it opens up, you get first degree experience on their Jiu-Jitsu. So sometimes I roll with someone, I was rolling with someone who has a great wrestling background. We don't have that a lot here in the Netherlands. Wrestling's getting way more popular. We have a wrestling program at my gym with two two Olympic wrestling coaches, et cetera. But it's not the same as, well, I don't want to be a stereotype here because I've mentioned it five times in this podcast alone, so I should really question that, but a lot of guys I know from America, they just really good wrestlers. Point, period. It's just what it is, Steve. I'm sorry. But they have really good wrestling backgrounds. And when I roll with someone with a good wrestling background, it just I see like, oh, wait a minute, you do it like this, you do it like this. It's not how I do it or like BJJ does it or I don't want to like put it into like BJJ versus wrestling, whatever, it's not that, it's all grappling. But it opens up. I get a first-hand degree experience on their game. I'm like, hey, man, show me how did you do it? Why do you do this? How do you do this like this? And I'm I always love this white belt mentality that wherever I go, even if I'm rolling with someone way less experienced or less time on the mat, I couldn't really care less. If they can show me something new, I'm all ears. I'm really happy to have them explain to me what they do. I even had a move, I think a while ago, one of my my own students did something on me and I'm like, oh, cool, how did you do it? Show me again. And I really wanted them to explain it because I'm I'm interested in the thought behind it and I'm like, hey, cool, maybe this works for me too. And that's so cool by rolling with people abroad or different gyms or competing or any form of rolling with different people. You can find the gaps in your game, find the strengths in your game, like you just said, the latent strengths in your game, but also find a first-hand experience in their game and get really good direct coaching sometimes from a random guy you roll at at the open mat where you don't even have to buy a private. Speaker 1: Awesome, man. Well, thanks as always for coming by and doing this really fantastic talk. Any closing thoughts, Toom, that you wanted to share before we wrap? Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it's really important or I think it's really cool to we talked a lot around concepts and mechanics and how to approach maybe to give people a more exact go about from here that at the end of this podcast, for the guys still listening, to reward them with like some specific tools to engage, like say, hey, maybe take a look at uh for instance, what helped me a lot is looking at these mechanical models. Like you said, these cues in your game instead of techniques, like just finding a few cues. Okay, I need to get control of this inside space. Well, I think the word inside space got thrown around a lot, so let's use a different one. I need to find any way to put weight in frames, clear them and get chest to chest connection. I need to find when I do a submission to control three thirds of the limb and when I get like a limb control, get two thirds of the joint. That's something like this. And you have a lot of these already on your website, right? On the on mechanical models. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: So maybe it's really cool to give people some material to go from afterwards. Like I love to redirect them to my YouTube channel, which is ironically enough, a lot of technique. I do, however, in most of those videos really go over what if this, what if that and what's the concept behind this video, but it's so hard to translate that in a video and also have to understand that most people really like to watch techniques and show them. But I try my best, but I think to be honest, Steve, and I'm not just trying to be a fanboy here, but I think you on BJJ Mental Models with BJJ Mental Models by itself on the website, but especially with the database you have in the premium, there's a lot of stuff for people to when they finish this podcast to get started on how to get started, right? Speaker 1: I hope so, man. I mean, we try to we try to put together something that's a little bit different and a bit more digestible. There is, as we've been talking about, just no shortage of quality content out there. Sometimes it's hard to separate the signal from the noise and so I think it's on folks like us to try to make things simpler. So I do appreciate the kind words. I love your stuff too and people should definitely give you a follow. If they want to talk to you or follow you or check out your work, Toom, remind everyone, how can they do that? Speaker 2: Well, the thing I like most is people nowadays visiting my gym. That's the best. Guys, if you ever have a chance, I even had a guy, he was out in Thailand. He just sent me a message last week, he's coming to visit my gym through the fact that I met him all the way across the world. I get more and more people visiting my gym, taking pictures with the logo, training with me or sending me DMs. Just you don't have to send DM, guys. You're always welcome at my gym. We have several gyms, main location in Nijmegen, the older city in the Netherlands. Once again, if you don't know what Netherlands is, it's Amsterdam, but there's a country surrounding it. Everyone is welcome at the gym. I think that's the one I like most. But if you're across the Atlantic Ocean and you don't have the means to travel or you hate planes and it's a far way to bike, we also have a digital gym and it's all for free on my YouTube channel, Energia Martial Arts. Or on my Instagram, Toom Energia, or my BJJ Fanatics instructionals. But I think the YouTube is best because it's free. As much as I love to sell instructionals, I'd rather have people have and share the passion for Jiu-Jitsu. It's all out there on the YouTube channel, guys. We obviously have a Patreon, I have a Instagram, we have a members program on YouTube, blah, blah, blah. But you'll find that anyway if you're really interested. For now, just check out my YouTube channel and best yet, if you're ever close or ever see me somewhere in a seminar, just say hi, tell me you listen to this podcast and I would love to meet you or have a roll with you. Speaker 1: Amazing, sir. Well, I will link all of your stuff in the show notes. I'll also link our stuff. It's all at BJJmentalmodels.com. You can find the uh database of concepts that Toom talked about there. We have what I think is one of the world's largest databases of Jiu-Jitsu concepts. So if you're looking for a place to quickly study up on the ideas behind Jiu-Jitsu rather than the specifics, check out BJJmentalmodels.com. You can also get our newsletter there. Plus our mini episodes and full-length episodes like this completely free. And BJJ Mental Models Premium is where we ultimately want people to go if you would like to level up with us there and get access to the world's largest audio library of Jiu-Jitsu content, plus access to our amazing community. Check out BJJmentalmodels.com to learn more. But Toom, thanks as always for coming by, man. Always a great chat. I think this is a fun episode. I appreciate you, man. This was a good one. Speaker 2: Thank you so much, Steve. Likewise. Well, thanks for your time and if you are ever in Europe, swing by, man. Speaker 1: Thank you for the invite and thank you to the listeners as well. We will talk to you soon. See you later.