Bulletproof For BJJ Podcast
Discussions on improving your BJJ, navigating mat-politics and all aspects of the jiu jitsu lifestyle. Multiple weekly episodes for grapplers of any level. Hosted by JT and Joey - Australian jiu jitsu black belts, strength coaches, and creators of Bulletproof For BJJ App. Based out of Sydney, Australia
Bulletproof For BJJ Podcast
How Greg Souders Is Revolutionizing Jiu Jitsu Forever Part 1
World Renowned jiu jitsu coach Greg Souders joins us to talk about coaching in a completely different way which eliminates drilling. We talk about him being a heel in jiu jitsu, chess, injuries, his coaching approach and much more.
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Check out Greg's gym here: https://www.standardjiujitsu.com
IG: https://www.instagram.com/standardjiujitsu/
His IG: https://www.instagram.com/gdsouders/
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A good martial artist does not become tense, but ready.
Speaker 2:Essentially, at this point, the fight is over.
Speaker 3:So you pretty much flow with the goal.
Speaker 1:Who is worthy to be trusted with the secret to limitless power.
Speaker 2:I'm ready.
Speaker 1:Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another Bulletproof for BJ podcast. I'm JT, I'm here with my partner, joey, and we are here with the man of great repute, greg Souders, ecological king. How are you, sir? I'm good sir, how are you guys? Very good, very good, very pleased to have you here.
Speaker 1:I got to actually meet you briefly in person amongst the chaos behind the scenes at the ADCC. You were there with DeAndre and I just took the opportunity. Cc, you were there with deandre and, uh, I just I just took the opportunity. I mean, obviously you guys were in in mode, uh, you know, getting ready to take on the biggest competition, but, uh, what I what? It's funny.
Speaker 1:It's not that it surprised me, but you know, you were very approachable and very friendly and deandre is obviously a lovely guy and even though you guys were like very focused, you're still like, oh, hey, man, how you going? And you know you weren't taking up a lot of math space. You were, you're very welcoming. You're like, oh, come train, come train. And it's because I feel, um, you know there may be a perception of you from the internet, which is, you know you're a very passionate man and you know you have very strong opinions about certain things related to jiu-jitsu, that maybe you're not a nice man and you have very strong opinions about certain things related to jiu-jitsu, then maybe you're not a nice guy. I mean, look at the shirt you're wearing. There's some genuine dislike for you on the internet, brother, which means you must be doing something right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, a famous coach, john Wooden, once once said a reputation is what people think you are, your characters, who you actually are. Right, it truly is. I think I represent that well. Uh, even gavin. Indeed, they think it's hilarious. They're like nobody dislikes you in person, so we don't know what this internet thing is, but I think you hit the nail on the head. Uh, I'm trying to be professional. I'm a passionate and serious person. My whole life is consumed with coaching and trying to understand jiu-jitsu. Um, and I think oftentimes I talk with that level of excitement and that like just desire to to really try to share with my passion and my ideas. Sometimes they can come across pretty aggressive, pretty disagreeable. Um, yeah, I mean, it happens, you know, and the internet can clip you out however they want. They can take their little thing about you, they can rage, bait it and then go hard, but nobody really knows anybody on the internet. They just know the clips of the people and they make their judgments with limited information.
Speaker 1:Yeah, totally. And look, I am someone who's comes off as aggressive and opinionated, because I am not not not for any misperception at all. Uh, you know whether that be a pro or a con, but I think the thing today that you know, we know that we have big fans of yours, uh, in in the Bulletproof audience and they've asked us you know, why don't you get Greg on? Get him on.
Speaker 1:And actually, um, my first interaction with you was just in a comment section or something, and I hadn't, I hadn't so much disagreed with you, has, just doubted you, and you were giving me some very long responses on you know, like you know, a lot of information relevant to why you have your beliefs, your teaching style, everything, and you know, and I, at the end of the day, I was like, look man, you care about this. Possibly you know a thousand times more than I do. I just wanted to kind of not even play devil's advocate, but just, I guess, question it or, or, um, I guess impose a certain amount of doubt, to say I don't know if this is the one true way or this is the way. Yeah, and and and, uh, you know, for whatever you know and it wasn't that what you were saying was like particularly aggressive, but for sure the responses were detailed and you know I can respect that because I'm happy to get into some essays in the comment section.
Speaker 2:Could I ask, just to frame it for the less initiated listeners why is it that the internet has a view of you, greg? Can you tell us? Give us the landscape.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I'm trying to change the coaching paradigm and I'm trying to change the way we view the sport that we do. I'm trying to take it out of this like traditional mysticism, authority-based kind of crap that we have, and I'm trying to bring it into popular sporting culture. So what I started to do when I became a coach was to look into what other sports were doing to teach their sport. What I started to do when I became a coach was to look into what other sports were doing to teach their sport and, in comparison with what I was discovering versus where I came from, what I was currently doing as a coach, I realized, oh my God, I didn't know what I was doing and that we were probably headed in the wrong direction as a community from these other communities these volleyball coaches, basketball coaches, baseball coaches and how can I apply what they're understanding to be what causes and create skill versus what we were doing?
Speaker 3:And I just tried to apply that to our community and in doing so, I had to basically shit on some traditions and say that, man, we're wrong, we don't know what we're talking about, we're not doing things efficiently, effectively or correctly, and that just makes a lot of people angry. A lot of people are very connected to their beliefs and they feel very emotional around why and what they're doing. And I think I just I rocked the boat a little bit and people didn't like that. They weren't ready for my level of aggression and confidence with saying what I was saying.
Speaker 2:And to that point, have you found, uh like, obviously there's been people detracting from your message, but have you found um a great deal of support as well?
Speaker 3:Oh, absolutely, it's incredible. Like, uh, the. The interesting part is, I got a lot of support from higher ups, like, not the, I mean the ground level. I got a mix. I got, you know, a bunch of people like, oh, you know, I've been feeling like this for a while. I knew something was wrong, but I didn't know what it was. And, oh, thank you so much for bringing this to light.
Speaker 3:Now I sort of I can name the thing that I knew that was wrong.
Speaker 3:And then you have the other side of things, like, oh, there are so many champions out there doing things this way, so you can't be right. But then, like I said, these people from the higher ups, these phds, these researchers, these people that work in skill acquisition, uh, that work in psychology, early childhood development, I guess, who did Jiu-Jitsu too started to reach out to me and they're like oh, my God, I can't believe you're bringing this in our community, been waiting for this, because a lot of them are just like blue belts and purple belts are not coaches. And so they were very supportive in trying to help me get my message across and trying to be a better speaker, a better communicator, to understand the research and science better, as I was trying to apply it and share it with the community. So I got a mixed bag, but I think I got exactly what I was looking for. I got the support and the guidance from people who knew more than I did, so that was good.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I mean, look, I think you have some very passionate dedicated disciples of the ecological approach To a fault. Yeah, and man, they'll die for you, and I think that's that's a, that's a sign of a, a leader who has uh, you know, you've engendered a lot of belief in people um, I know, I mean I don't mean to interrupt you that swings in both directions and that's actually something that kind of irritates me, like I'm a.
Speaker 3:I'm a skeptic by nature and I'm a man of reason. So, you know, I even tell the people who are supportive and who adopt these methods, like, don't just listen to me, do your research, do your reading, talk to other people, because I'm only sharing my perspective, my understanding, my interpretation of the science and of the research, and I could be 100% wrong, just like all of us. I mean, again, there's nothing special about Greg Souders, except that I'm trying to do this. So it annoys me on both sides. You know the, the ignorant naysayers and the ignorant supporters are equally wrong. Um, so, you know they, they both kind of get under my skin.
Speaker 1:I guess what I wanted to do, greg, is I wanted to try and uh kind of go back a little bit in the the jujitsu journey. Um, because you, you know, uh, something that maybe a lot of folks don't know about you is you're, you have a very high degree pedigree actually in chess, and so you, you, you are a very high level, or have been a very high level, highly rated chess player and uh, it's interesting to me how that might cross over into your kind of critical analysis and your thinking, strategy and position and all these things relevant to jujitsu.
Speaker 3:and I mean I mean I think honestly we can talk about the chest thing, but it says more about my personality. Like I'm the type of guy that when I get invested in something I really commit um and I give all my time to it, even even young. You know what I mean. Like I've always been a very obsessive reader. I read a lot. I even read, really read, and spoke very early as a kid. It was like my first skill um I my mom jokes because I was babbling and saying words in little sentences before I could walk, like I refused to get off the floor. My mom was like you would scoot everywhere. You didn't even stand up until you're about a year and a half old. So I've always had this sort of obsessive personality.
Speaker 3:I learned how to play chess in ninth grade. I was actually staying the night at a friend's house we're having a sleepover and they're like, do beating both of them. So I was like, oh man, I might be pretty good at this game and I actually. It was my ninth grade year and I was just about to go to high school and my high school was brand new. I was going to be the first four year like a you know ninth, 10th, 11th and 12th grade and in my second period class it was my, it was an art serendipitous. I was like, oh my god, because I just learned how to play, like three days prior, um, and I joined this thing and then for the next four years it just became, I became obsessed, like I played like crazy, um, and I, I played up to my senior year and uh, and again, this is again.
Speaker 3:Someone got on the internet the other day. I was like, why are you bragging about your chess thing? I don't even play chess anymore. But when I was competing in high school, my, my rating was 1705. That was the highest I ever got. But what people don't know about chess is you go up and down, like you know. You go to a tournament and let's say I'm, I'm a 1700, I'm playing a 1200 and I lose. I could lose 60 points right there. You know what I mean, and so, anyway, yeah, what are those points?
Speaker 3:What are those points based on? On, just for the initiated, how you're playing. So let's imagine that my rating is playing, another rating, uh, if I win, uh, if there's a ratio that goes like if you should or shouldn't win, and then those numbers are compared by some math and you get like a little bump or a little decrease, or sometimes nothing.
Speaker 2:Um, so it takes time to accumulate that high rating.
Speaker 3:Correct and I played a lot Like. Our chess teacher was amazing. His name was Mr Youngblood and he took us to open tournaments all over the United States, so and our chess team was huge. Most high school chess teams don't have a lot of practitioners. We had 52. And because he was also a track coach and a tennis coach and a basketball coach, so he had this large pool, all the kids loved him. He was such an interesting man and he just was very supportive and drew everybody in. So we had, like you know, top tier football players playing chess on the offseason with us. So it was a very cool experience and, honestly, you can look it up Our high school Northwest High School in Maryland in the United States we were the best chess high school in the United States for years. We have more world champion medals for chess than any other sport at our school combined. So our teacher did a really good job, man. He just really created a cool culture and pushed us all towards that thing.
Speaker 1:That's very interesting. I want to circle back to that chess thing relating to jiu-jitsu, like eventually. That's why I wanted to bring it up, because I used to go to chess camp when I was a kid oh jeez, twelve years old, I think my parents were just looking for cheap daycare. You know what I mean.
Speaker 2:My dad loves chess.
Speaker 1:So, anyway, I'm a fan. I'm a fan. I wouldn't say that I'm anywhere near your level, but I do appreciate what being a good chess player does for your thinking and problem solving relevant to strategy. But speaking of Marilyn, you know, for me I think there's an interesting piece of context. You know, you trained from white belt to brown belt under Master Lloyd and it was at a time when there was, like he was producing, producing some of the best jiu-jitsu competitors in the whole world, and a good friend of mine and previous like training partner nemesis, but now very good friend, ben Hodgkinson. Yeah, no, ben Hodgkinson. Yeah, he trained with him.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he trained with al jermaine or I, you know I got the shit beat out of me by tim spriggs and you know, like all the you know that's when keenan and jt, and like you know this is this is really at a time when I think tli was really shaking up the nogi world, uh, in jujitsu, and really like being a non-brazilian based team. You know, on the podium, uh, on the top, I think they I please you, you would, you would know this, excuse my ignorance uh, tli might have won nogi worlds as a team or they got second I don't know if we ever got first place as a team, but we did have.
Speaker 3:we have a bunch of second and third place as a team, you guys have to understand that A small team but with a lot of talent, incredibly small. Yeah, you know, regardless of what you think about Lloyd and whatever, and I'm not going to discuss Lloyd- no, no, no, we don't need to get into that.
Speaker 1:I just wanted you to speak to what it was like to be in that place. I'll tell you all the good stuff but I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not fishing for that, I wanted to just get uh, because the thing for me, from from just a very third party position, it seemed like uh, master lloyd liked to drill and he also had a big emphasis on fitness for repetition and, for sure, just really big on that whole paradigm. So can you speak to that right?
Speaker 3:yeah, for sure. So it was funny, Ben. I don't know if Ben remembers me, but Ben got beat up by me too.
Speaker 1:I'm sure he did. I'm just teasing.
Speaker 3:No, ben was great. I remember when he first visited with the Australian crew. They all came through and Ben was a long, tall guy like me, like very lanky, and Lloyd put us together all the time. I don't know if he remembers, but because I really at that time I was just going through an injury when he came through, like I didn't know how bad my injury actually was and it was the time I had broken my neck and my left arm was starting to atrophy and not work and I didn't really know what was happening. And that was the time I was right around the time where I actually left Jiu Jitsu for a while.
Speaker 3:But no, lloyd did a really good job at creating a serious culture. Like he taught us, like black and white, yes or no how to be professional, how to take responsibility for the things that you said you were going to do, and he created a very professional schedule. Like we had a two hour session in the morning, a two hour session at night and then drilling session in the afternoon. And he did a good job at bringing a bunch of motivated guys together who all had the same goal and just kind of, let us go at it. And so, no matter what method he used, whether he drilled or not, we did a ton of sparring, a ton of highly specific situational rounds based on scoring and, um, you know, trying to get better at the things we were doing. Um, and our whole culture was was geared towards that, and so, uh, it wasn't just drilling like there's a lot of stuff going on there. Um, that was, uh, that made the team good no, for sure, for sure.
Speaker 1:I mean you get a concentration of that many good guys killing each other. It's remarkable. When you have someone like a disciplinarian, like Master Lloyd, it's a big deal. Is there a bloke?
Speaker 2:Todd, is it Todd Schaefer? I?
Speaker 1:can't remember his last name Todd.
Speaker 2:He's a black belt under Lloyd. Do you know Todd Magolis? Todd Magolis, that's the one. Yeah, not Schae, sure at all. Yeah, I trained with him in, uh, in Columbia at his Academy there.
Speaker 3:He was. He was there for a while. He's in South America for me. He's actually back here, he lives he lives about 30 minutes from me.
Speaker 2:Ah, no way, Okay, cool Fuck. He was a lovely guy, he was super welcoming.
Speaker 3:Yeah, he built a little school in his backyard.
Speaker 1:So he's got like some property out here and he he has like a steel shed and he runs a school out of his like backyard office property. Awesome, awesome. Ladies and gentlemen, you know me, I am a big energy guy. How do I get that big energy? I get it by staying hydrated also caffeine, but the key thing is you need the perfect mix of sodium, potassium and magnesium.
Speaker 1:What am I talking about? I'm talking about the perfect blend of electrolytes which keeps the water in your muscles so you get energy to roll and choke people. Now today's sponsor, sodi, brings you that perfect blend and when you go to sodicomau and use the code BULLETPROOF15, you get 15% off. That way, you can stay hydrated and have big energy for jiu-jitsu. I think the other thing that I observed, I guess early days like I can't remember what it was I think it was like the jiu-jitsu blueprint, which is something Master Lloyd had put out, and a lot of the marketing with like Ryan Hall and then also Dr Ryan Gore, and I remember cause this is kind of prior to the BJJ fanatics days there were like DVDs and you you know like order off the back of the magazine kind of shit, yeah, and that's how.
Speaker 3:that's how I came in, Like I came in during the fat, the end of the Fowler area era.
Speaker 1:Oh, Mike Fowler.
Speaker 3:He era. Oh yeah, yeah, mike fowler. He. He was the first the jujitsu guy that I ever saw, because I was reading grappling magazine. It was 2004.
Speaker 3:I was a brand new white belt and there was this guy on team urban and mike fowler's leopard printed hair and I couldn't wait to meet him. I thought he was a superstar, like I would always read about him these magazines. The very first time I talked to him was after one of my first tournaments. We were all going to like a like all you can eat place and we're all hanging out and I, he, he was a purple butt at the time and I kind of snuck up to him and I tapped him on the shoulder and I was like, hey, man, I'm a huge fan because he just beat like Halleck, gracie or something like 10 to nothing. He like smoked him or it was some crazy match and shit like that. And it was really exciting Cause he, you know, he beat a Gracie and I and still chat occasionally to this day. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And then Ryan Hall was next. He and I started similarly at the same time. He was a blue belt when I started but we worked a lot together. I actually lived at the same house where he was living and you know we spent a lot of time training together. I actually learned quite a bit from Ryan. I spent some time with him in 2013 to 2014.
Speaker 1:I spent a year at his school Amazing, yeah, I know.
Speaker 1:I mean like obviously you know JT, Torres and Keenan, and there was like just a team of competitors which was just wreaking havoc on the scene and I was, you know, I, you know, this is me. At that time I really wanted to be a like a top level competitor, so I was paying close attention to what was going on and I guess the reason why I wanted to ask about that, um, in terms of informing the way you are now, where you are now and how you feel about jujitsu education and all of this, you know, you've seen a lot, you've trained with, you know, such high level guys and actually before I go there, I, we, we kind of skipped over it, but you were talking about your neck injury and I did want to ask you about that because I've also had, you know, I've bulged C2, C3 and had to have traction and couldn't do anything for months at a time. Could you just speak to really quickly about kind of your rehab, your journey with the injury and coming back to jujitsu?
Speaker 3:there. That shit was bad, like. So you know, the whole thing about me is like I get obsessed. When I get obsessed, I don't care what the sacrifice had to make, like I'll sacrifice my body, my mind, my whatever, uh, to to reach my goals.
Speaker 3:And I was young at the time and I'd come up on a single leg on this guy I was training with and he jumped guard and my head was like locked to the side and it's like I fell backwards and he landed on top of my head, like when my head was twisted and it was horrible. It was like boom and it was crazy because my arm just stopped working and I actually thought I dislocated my shoulder because all the pain was referred and I couldn't move my arm and so I was like rolling around on the ground like screaming, holding my arm, and actually fowler was there and he like came over me like you all right, I don't know, matt. I was like I think my shoulder's dislocated, is my, my shoulder out? And he's like, no, it looks fine. And I was like, fuck, I was like it's burning, I can't move. And then eventually my hand started to twitch and I could close my hand again. I was like, oh, I think it's back in and I'm like moving my arm around. So that was it. I you know it hurt like crazy. I went back to Like I was losing my grips for no reason, like I'd be squeezing and my hand would just open and I just, I just was so focused on my goal. I really didn't take it seriously. I was like I was like having muscle spasms. My left side I was twitching. When people would pull on my head I would go numb from at my arm and my left arm was all the same size From my wrist to my shoulder it was the same size and I was like what the fuck is that?
Speaker 3:And then I competed in 2009 World Championships and I lost the fourth round. I submitted my first three guys and then I got submitted by Lucas Hosho. He took my back and strangled me and Lloyd was like hey, you need to go get your arm. You get your arm checked, something's going on anyway. Long story short, get my neck checked. I ruptured my c5, c6 and tore the ligament on the left side and I damaged my spinal cord. So when they were looking at my mri like nerves glow white on an mri and all the nerves at that space and going out were black. They couldn't see it. And the guy was like your neck is broken. You need to see what's going on right away. Got a nerve study done. The guy was like yo, after these results I would have thought you were a 75 year old stroke victim. Your arm barely works. You're getting no motor unit recruitment. Like you can't go back to training. So I didn't take him seriously. I went back to training anyway.
Speaker 3:I got slammed in my head classic yeah I got slammed in my head by a training partner. I had full body spasms for like a week and I knew something was wrong and I just like, without telling anybody, just disappeared. I didn't even go back, I just went home and just stayed in a depressed stupor for a year, like looking at the floor. It was horrible. But in the meantime I started going to the gym and I couldn't even do a pull-up. Man, like I couldn't even do one pull-up. I had to get like a little knee support to help me like do one pull-up. It was so bad. So I just literally kept going to the gym.
Speaker 3:I saw three different surgeons. I didn't like what they were saying. I didn't want to get surgery. And so the last guy I talked to was basically like look, your spinal cord is damaged. If you take this injury again, you could die or lose function of your legs. But you know, if you don't want surgery, that's fine, but if you can't feel your hands, come back to me and we'll do surgery. So I decided to go the physical rehab route and there's a lot of strength training for about a year and a half and then my arm came back a bit. I still have about a 30% strength loss in my left arm and my left hand, but I'm fine now. Like all the nerve pain went away, all the twitching went away, and so and that was, I was 25, that was 15 years ago, bro. That's remarkable.
Speaker 2:So strength training and not rolling for a period was the answer.
Speaker 3:Yeah, because basically my neck, I didn't have a ligament anymore, so it was very unstable. So when somebody would push on my head, my bone would literally slide over and it would touch the nerve root. And so what the doc said was basically like it was like a banana, like I was hitting the outside of a banana and then when you open it up it's all black and bruised. He said that's what's happening to you, you. And so there was so much swelling in the area. Um, that's what caught was causing my arm to die, because I I was taking, like my head was getting pulled every day and twisted every day, uh, and it was just wrecking my spinal cord and my nerve root. Um, and he said you're lucky you didn't lose function of your legs and arm because you were. You were experiencing something called lermitte signs and those are the beginnings of paralysis. So, yeah, I almost, I almost was fucked so did this?
Speaker 1:did this change? Did this injury then, other than obviously the immediate change and you couldn't train and you messed up? Did this change your attitude towards like strength and conditioning, or rehab, or like what did that? What was your takeaway from that experience?
Speaker 3:I'd never done strength conditioning before. This was my first foray into it. I learned what strength training was. I learned about volume, intensity and frequency. I started learning about it because I had all this free time that I was like, okay, well, I might as well go down this road. And so I got into it, pretty healthy. For a while. I gained 30 pounds. I was all big and strong now. I'd never been big and strong before.
Speaker 3:So I it was helping me. It gave me something physical to do, but also it was healing me. Um, it was letting my muscles do. What muscles do you know? Um, and since I wasn't getting my head wrenched around, I started healing from it. And so, yeah, it really made me realize that I am not unbreakable Like I thought I was. Like you know, it's funny, all the people at Lloyd's used to call me care of myself and I was ignoring all my pains and aches and this and that. And, uh, I learned that you can't do that and so and it changed me also too, because I really encourage my guys to take their sleep seriously, take their hydration seriously, take their strength conditioning seriously, take their recovery seriously, because training doesn't mean shit if you can't recover from it.
Speaker 1:And so here at my school we have a strong culture of paying attention to ourselves and taking care of ourselves. Right on, like to hear that and so, look, it's just sidestep, uh, a friend of ours. Uh, I may not. I, I, you know, I see, you, you're on the main idea and yeah, I saw, I saw a good, good sound bite from you and, uh, I wanted to just just unpack it a little bit. Yeah, let's do this idea of the hobbyist versus the professional. Yeah, you're, you're a commitment guy, I, I'm, I'm similar, I'm, I'm a kind of all-in guy, 100 guy, and you had said you don't, you don't like the hobbyist approach because you feel it's uh, it's a limited mindset. Can you get into a little bit of the idea of the hobbyist versus the professional? Yes, absolutely.
Speaker 3:So, no matter what you do, you're trying to get better at the thing. So training is for performance. We're trying to increase our abilities through training, and that's an important thing we need to understand. No, it doesn't mean that you can't go to the gym and roll around and have fun with your friends. It can't. It doesn't mean that, but, but. But.
Speaker 3:Getting good requires a certain level of effort, a certain level of commitment, a certain level of focus, intention, and it requires something from you. And it seems like when, when people call themselves hobbyists, they're, they're trying to skirt that responsibility and take that away. So if training is about improving your performance and getting better, then whether you're a two-day-a-week guy, four-day-a-week guy or six-day-a-week guy or whatever, you should strive to become better relative to how much you're training. So if you're a two-day-a-week guy, you should be, I think, trying to be the best two-day-a-week guy, at least in your gym. You know what I mean. Whether you reach it or not, I think having a strong, strong, intentional goal helps make training make sense. You know what I mean, because otherwise you're just rolling around, which is fine, but you're going to be very limited in your ability to get better.
Speaker 1:Just rolling around, you know um, do you think that there might be a difference on what you consider good versus what? Some random guy you know what I mean like obviously you've seen jujitsu to a very high level, you've experienced it yourself, your level of commitment is unquestioned. But if you've got a guy he's got three kids, has a job, loves jujitsu like loves it with every fiber in his being but literally could not physically do more than three days a week yeah, Then he can't.
Speaker 3:He can't get any better than that will allow, and that's okay, Like that's the thing. I think we just need to be honest. So good is just a spectrum. We have the best guy in the world over here and we have the worst guy in the world over here. The guy maybe doesn't get any better and whatever, put whatever metric you want on it, we all fall on this scale somewhere. So a good is an is an objective measure. Good is your ability to go out there and fight other good guys. That that's what good is. So we're all less than that and that's okay.
Speaker 3:But there's a relationship between the intentions we bring to practice, the frequency at which we train, and our ability to get further along that spectrum of good. So even if your buddy who has three kids, one training three days a week and loves it with all his heart, he can't get good and that's okay. He can get good relative to the demands he places on himself. So if he limits his intentions, his focus, his commitment to his craft, it's going to reflect the expression of his skill and again, that is okay. If he loves it, getting good doesn't matter. Then he's having a great time, he's in shape. It releases his mind. It's a good cultural practice. It's awesome, but that has nothing to do with getting good.
Speaker 1:Oh, but I'm saying that it sounds to me that your expectation of good is actually excellence, because it sounds like a little bit condescending to say that guy can't get good. I would say, actually that guy could be very good. I'm not trying to get kind of picky about this, trying to. I'm not trying to get kind of picky about this, but to say someone can't get good at three, three days a week seems like what? What is your standard of good? You know what I mean.
Speaker 3:Like yeah, so let me, let me say that differently. Then he can be better than his previous self, sure, and that that that's that's all that we can expect, unless we're pushing to be better than somebody else. And so what I mean? Let me define that too, because this is something that this is an irritating cultural thing like oh you know, we don't try to be better than everybody else. Yes, you do.
Speaker 3:If you're a competitor and you're going out there on the world stage, you're trying to be better than that other person. Now it means that you have to be better than your previous self. Of course you have to know your strength, you have to compete with yourself each day to become a better version of who you are. But you are ultimately taking that version of who you are and you're comparing it against the efforts of somebody else doing the exact same thing. So good is only a measure of that point of excellence. But it doesn't mean your friend can't be better than his previous self, because he can. He can be stronger, faster, smarter, more technical version of who he is. He can, he can keep, he can be stronger, faster, smarter, more technical version of who he is. But if you know, compared to the world stage. Good is not in his um should not be in his vocabulary well, this is, this is your take on what good is right.
Speaker 1:This is the greg's correct, of course.
Speaker 2:This is my thing, man. This is your.
Speaker 3:I hate greg souders I heard greg souders hates greg souders look at this I do. I hate me more than you guys do.
Speaker 2:Just on that. Do the students in your gym? Are they all on that competition end, or do you have sort of general population in there too?
Speaker 3:We are general population. I mean our competition team is very small. I mean I can tell you the guys at our gym who compete trying to go to the world stage. We have little Alex, but right now she's focused on her career, so you know she's not doing it yet. We have Romero, noah, sid, deandre, gavin, felipe, brian Guevara. These are we have eight people that are really pushing to try to achieve these goals. Brian's a purple world champion now. Sid's a purple world champion now. Alex is world champion at Juven two purple and black. Uh. Gavin, second place, d, third place at black D's, you know, won the 100k. So these and Romero's that just got his purple belt, so he's just starting. He just entered the advanced division this year. He's already won all three of his advanced division entries in the ADCC opens. That he's done. Um, so that those are the guys in my room that are really pushing. Everybody else is student. All 90, 100 other people are just regular people having a good time trying to be a better version of themselves each day. Okay.
Speaker 1:And I mean I guess this is the stay with me on it that the more people participating in jiu-jitsu whether it's kids, parents, young men and women trying to be world champions that the more people we have doing jiu-jitsu then we've got a bigger pool to draw from in terms of competitors, of competitors, if competitors are the one percent. We do need to grow this base of general, like the general population and general adaptation of jujitsu.
Speaker 1:I agree, I mean the base feeds, the one percent, right, right so do you feel like there's anything you've said that could have alienated or maybe discourage anybody who might not have your standards? You know what I?
Speaker 3:mean, I have two opinions of this. For the great, if anyone is going to ever be good, discouragement isn't in their vocabulary. There's never been someone who's good at anything who felt discouraged in a way that took them away from it. If they did, they weren't meant to be good, because you're going to face discouragement by trying. When you go out there and you touch the first guy, that's the guy and you go to beat him and he smashes you into the earth. If you don't have the emotional wherewithal to get back on your horse and try again, you're not going to make it.
Speaker 3:Because I think that greats have a stronger litany of failure. So greats fail more than the regular people succeed, because that's what it required of us to push ourselves to that level. The people really pushing fail more. That's just how it is, and so you got to be robust to that. And no, I think the thing is is not to listen to what I say and meet my standards. I think the goal is to be honest with yourself. What does it really mean for us to practice and try to improve ourselves, and what are we comparing that to? Are we comparing it just to our former selves? Good, I think everyone should do that. But if you're trying to compare yourself to what's possible and you only train twice a week, don't do that. You can't compare yourself to that thing, you'll never be that thing and that's okay.
Speaker 1:Okay, that's, yeah, fair enough, I mean it's. I guess the interesting thing for me is, uh, you know you've said a variety of things relevant to you, know how people learn and that the way you view and you know this, I'm paraphrasing right, this isn't a direct quote from you, but I've listened to probably 15 different discussions with you talking about ecological, the current system, why you believe it's not working. If you were to explain to somebody who doesn't understand the nuance of the ecological approach and also doesn't really even understand the nuance of the current system, how do you break that down for people in terms of how you view constraints-based games and segmentation and all these different things? How do you tell someone who doesn't know who's just started Jiu-Jitsu why ecological matters and why you believe it's different or superior to the current system?
Speaker 3:Okay. So let's try to simplify this just as much as we can, maybe not even referring to it. So let's start with this. Skill is only expressed against resistance. So all of our training should be such that by doing it, we get better at playing the live game, where you start on your feet, shake your partner's hand and try to go all the way to submission. So training is to improve our ability to perform skills in that environment. Our current model has portions of our training. We are developing movement and movement patterns separated from resistance.
Speaker 3:The school of thought that I'm coming from is that we don't do that. We always learn in the face of resistance, no matter what. Now the issue is and I think the problem with people trying to understand how to apply it, and what I'm saying is this idea of scaling. So a scale is very simple, easy to hard right and everything in between, all markers in between, something that we can do easily, something that's very difficult to do. A regular round you do with somebody for the first time is very high on the scale. It's very, very, very hard.
Speaker 3:Doing a movement against someone who's not moving is very, very, very easy. But if we look at those two ends of the scale and we add in resistance. We need to ask ourselves what can we do? That's easy enough for a beginner to do with resistance present without taking it out. And that's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to create a training protocol where we're always facing live resistance in the real environment, but at a scale so that we can lower and heighten the difficulty based on the capacities or the abilities of where the performer currently is. Now the old model does not have good scaling. It has static, which means there's no resistance, and it has resistance, but it doesn't have this measure of going in between. It's just static to resistance, static to resistance, and everyone's trying to add the resistance in, but we're just keeping the resistance and just getting better at scaling it.
Speaker 1:I mean, look, I hear what you're saying. I don't know if I entirely agree with this idea that's static to resistance, because there is plenty of people out there who would say that specific training is a form of constraints based situational training, without trying to get into semantics of it, that an element or something similar to what you're talking about has been practiced, maybe under another name or with a slightly different approach. Can you, like I I know you've talked about that-
