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 2
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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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 I'm ready 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, let's talk about that more Plenty. But I guess the difficulty I mean obviously this is you know, your team, your approach, has produced a world champion. You know, has brought someone to the highest level of competition against the best in the world. So, man, that's great, that's fucking amazing achievement, right? That said, there, you know, obviously, you know we have a short time period, so it's like, but all that came before that, whether it be judo, wrestling, whatever it is, there is always a focus on specific instruction around technique nuance, for sure. What I wanted to ask you about is what do you see? Why do you kind of push that aside in terms of specific feedback and allowing people to learn ecologically? Like, what is it about that specific instruction that you feel is not applicable to the learning process?
Speaker 3:For sure. Let's talk on three ways. So the first way that we think about it is most athletes get better at their sport despite their training methods. Meaning most of the stuff that an athlete does doesn't have any transfer, Whether the intention is well-reasoned or not. Do you mean all sports?
Speaker 1:All sports, all sports Pitching, hitting with a bat. Yep Serving a tennis ball.
Speaker 3:Yep, literally anything. So I think athletes, what's that based on?
Speaker 1:Well, it's based on the complexity.
Speaker 3:What would bring?
Speaker 1:you to say that.
Speaker 3:Okay, so that's the second point. It's based on this idea of constraints. So constraints are just things that are ever present that affect the quality of behavior. A constraint limits options. So we can think about constraints in many different ways. We can think of someone's body, like the way they're shaped, as a constraint. It will basically funnel the behaviors that are possible. We could take time as a constraint. It could be like in training time, or it could be lifetime. Maybe I start training when I'm 35. That time constraint will affect the quality of my behavior. That comes out when I start training at 35.
Speaker 3:Culture, let's say a room with a bunch of guys who train really hard and, just you know, nose to the grindstone every day, that's a constraint that's going to affect the quality of behavior. So there are so many things going on in an individual and of an individual that it's hard to say what exactly is creating the result. So that's what coaches do. They try to constrain things or manipulate constraints. And we've done this since the beginning of time to try to determine which actions taken will affect the athlete in such a way that we create a positive growth in their performance. And so the traditional model assumes that drilling is what causes the change, or explicit instruction, detailed instructions, what causes the change? But they don't investigate it. They just assume. And so it's fine. We all start with assumptions, but to say that one thing causes another thing, we would have to do a deeper investigation to see if that's really the case.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah, I mean, look there's, there is a. You know there's so many variables, like you're saying, culture, the body type, all this thing. But I guess what I'm trying to get to here is that in the history of martial arts, whether it be striking, grappling weapons of martial arts, whether it be striking, grappling weapons, the repetition of a single skill over and over again, towards the idea of mastery, which is kind of unattainable, but it's this nice goal for perfection, right. It's almost meditative in its approach, it's almost like a religious devotion to be the fucking best, right. And you strike me as a guy who's about that. I am, you know, like, how, how do you come? Like, obviously you're going based off a degree of, uh, you know, sports, science, research and learning methodologies and all of this. But how does that sit with the idea that the highest level of skill is attained through precise and exacting, endless repetition?
Speaker 3:Like so, yeah, so when, when, when that very question was investigated about a hundred years ago, the repetition effect and the consistency effect that you're talking about didn't exist. So that was fascinating. So when the researcher Nikolai Bernstein discovered this, he was like holy shit, something's going on. So everyone knows the story, I think, but you can look it up if you'd like. A Russian researcher, nikolai Bernstein, was asked to look at blacksmiths' productivity, because they wanted blacksmiths to become more productive. So he studied the best blacksmiths' productivity, because they wanted blacksmiths to become more productive. So he studied the best blacksmiths in the area, in the industry.
Speaker 3:Whatever he was studying, and he noticed something interesting that the advanced blacksmiths, when they were swinging the hammer to hit the anvil, they never missed the iron, but their swing was highly variable, meaning it was not consistent. The original assumption was that the better you got, the more consistent your swing would be, but that was not the case. It was that the better you got, the more consistent your swing would be, but that was not the case, was actually the opposite. The novice blacksmiths had a lot of consistency in their swing, but not a lot of consistency in hitting the iron. But again, the elites were different. Again high variability in the swing, low variability.
Speaker 3:Hitting the iron meaning hitting it often. So that was fascinating. So then it came to a different question what is controlling movement? If repetition doesn't create consistency, then what is allowing the blacksmith to consistently create the outcome that he's looking for? And so this led to a line of thinking that there is a type of what's called reciprocity. Basically, all this means is like I am interacting with my environment and my inner environment is acting with me, and that relationship is connected and we both affect each other, and there's something going on out there and something that's going on in here that's communicating my ability to achieve that outcome of consistency in the face of variation.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, no, I see, Sorry man, I apologize. No, you're OK, man? No, no, I see, sorry man, I apologize.
Speaker 3:No, you're okay, man.
Speaker 1:No, no, sorry, no good, but relevant to that. That's one conclusion from a study relevant to a physical action, and I think of jujitsu and grappling as being some of the most complex physical action you can have, because it's not you versus a static thing like just a person lifting weights, it's you versus a human, which is the dynamic. Variability is fucking crazy. It's wild to be able to think that you can just replicate things in a set way. I guess what I'm trying to understand here is this there's a lot of people in jujitsu who would like to get really good. Yeah, and maybe they're never going to be a world champion, but they want to get as good as they can get and, and, and. You know, maybe they can train three times, maybe they can train five, six times, whatever the deal.
Speaker 1:What I'm trying to kind of get to the heart of here, greg, is if you've got someone who doesn't even know how to turn on the car they don't know how to use the clutch, they don't even know how to use mirrors, they have no orientation how is it that putting that person in live traffic in a car is the way for them to learn? Now, that might be too crude an analogy, but as is with chess, learn. Now, that might be too crude an analogy, but as is with chess, if you don't know how the pieces move, just telling them to play a game with somebody that doesn't seem like that's like specific instruction around how pieces move would be the first step in teaching someone how to play the game, surely?
Speaker 3:Well, I think you're confusing some things, but that's totally okay. So one is if you don't know, because the pieces represent something in chess, they're symbolic in nature. So knowing the rules of the game is not the same thing as telling someone how to move the pieces. So the direct analogy would be something like this Once they knew how to rules the game, traditional coaching would be like okay, when you grab the bishop, I want you to grab the top of it at 90 degrees to the head and I want you to squeeze with just enough pressure to slide it diagonally four places and then stop there. So when you let go of the piece, I want you to slightly let go, bring your hand back to your head, reach over and touch the clock. That would be more comparable to what, uh, traditional jiu-jitsu coaches are doing uh, not how the pieces move.
Speaker 1:So if you're going to play a, show about specific instruction, because it seems that like I get the I get, I get his point there though no for sure, but but I'm saying that like uh, I mean, talk, talk to me a little bit about allowing people to just learn without giving them any instruction from the go. You go, this is the. The idea is pin your man. They've never done jiu-jitsu. You're like, hold that person down to the ground. This is a game. You've got a minute, you have to pin your guy, and they don't know what they're doing. Uh, my question is why is that better than someone showing them how to pin them and then like why is it important for someone to not receive that specific instruction and just do the game?
Speaker 3:Right. Well, that's not what we're doing, so that's just a misconception. So we're not telling people play the game. Instead, what we're doing is we're constraining them to play the game. So what we're doing is we're picking a piece of the game, we're shrinking it down and creating a scale.
Speaker 3:Okay, so we would put a person in a situation, let's say, pinning chest to chest. Just put our chest on our partner's chest and we would give them a very simple task. Your goal is to continuously keep your chest on your partner's chest and not let them move. You're going to try to hold them down any way you can. You can move your body around however you'd like. Bottom player, your goal is to put your legs back in front of them. If you can put your legs back in front of him, you win the game.
Speaker 3:So, top player, as you're holding them down chest to chest, stay away from their legs, go, and then you let them play, and what they do is they start developing a context. So they're starting to receive information from the exchange, so they're attempting, or intentionally trying, to perform the action. Hold them down chest to chest and move around and stay away from the legs. That is the information they're going to use to make decisions, from how to move their arms, how to move their legs, when to move their arms, when to move their legs. But it's all related to what you're asking them to do. Same thing with the bottom player, and then they have an exchange and then a coach can see what the result of this exchange is, and then we can reconstrain them to give them a different experience that's relevant to what they would need to do to start making improvements.
Speaker 1:So when you say re-constrained, this is where you are going to be giving more specific instruction, or can you?
Speaker 3:So I don't want you to think of constraints as specific instruction. So what we're talking about is something called a task constraint. A task is just something to do, and we design these tasks in one way, to be opposing from one another. Because we're in grappling, we're fighting over something. So let's say, we know that pinning a body is easier and again, this is a generalization when we're away from the legs versus inside or in front of the legs. So we give them the task of pinning while avoiding that, and then we give the bottom player the goal of getting legs back in front so they can't be held down as easy, because we know that's the case. We have a historical record in jiu-jitsu, so we constrain them to perform specific tasks that, by their very physical nature, counteract each other in the game that we play. So they're essentially learning how to do the things that you would explain to them by actually doing them.
Speaker 1:I mean, you may have experienced that. I can't say that. I have experienced that. I've had a very mixed experience in terms of teaching, in terms of either giving a specific instruction or letting someone do you know, letting someone do a game, play a game of sorts with an objective. You know, I didn't call it a constraints-based game, but yeah, that was the approach. But even then, either situation people you know, whether it be a communication, what I said to them, how they interpreted it. People will go wrong many different ways, especially when it's early in the jujitsu journey, even if you've been quite clear in what their outcome should be, assuming that they're going to do the thing that they're meant to be doing is I don't know if that's necessarily the case Well, that's the thing because we don't use the things people tell us to move.
Speaker 3:So you're I mean that's supporting my argument.
Speaker 3:You know, like no matter what you tell people, they will respond to the demands of the task, however they interpret it. So our words have less explanatory and directive power than we think they do. There's this idea that our words are strong and they mean something. I mean in one sense they do, but in another sense they don't. Like when someone is pushing against you as hard as they can and you have no experience with that, and your coach gives you three detailed instructions how to solve the problem, but you can't handle the demands of the initial push. You can't enact any of those things that you were told to do, because the information that you would use to actually solve the problem isn't in what your coach told you. It's in how you're currently experiencing the demands of being pushed on relative to your ability to handle the push. And so initial learning should be centered at giving the student a problem to try to solve with clear directives as what you want them to try and accomplish, rather than what you want them to remember about the situation.
Speaker 2:That makes a lot of sense to me. I wanted to ask everything you've said thus far makes sense to me and while I see some of the, I also agree with some of the pushback that jt has mentioned, but but I think you've done a good job articulating there. Could you speak on the? Do you see in, say, not specifically within the ecological sphere? So if you look at other jiu-jitsu academies who are, for the most part, following the more traditional mold, do you see elements where they do, or have been over the years, using pieces of what you might call an ecological approach?
Speaker 3:No, because the ecological approach kind of bugs me a bit. I don't think people who are not studied in it should use that term, because it's very specific to a way we think about the human movement system and how perception functions. It's not about jujitsu. When you say the ecological approach, we're really just talking about human perception and how we think it works. So instead I like to talk about the constraints-led approach, because I think, even though the ecological approach underpins, or is a huge part of what underpins the idea of why we use constraints, I think we can start with an agnostic position on what perception is. I think we can just start with if we give tasks to players against resistance, they're going to have to, or those tasks are going to affect the behavior. So I think that, yes, in a sense, if we put two people in a situation like the mount and we give them stuff to do, that's close to a constraint-led approach.
Speaker 3:But the idea is that there's many things to constrain and in situational sparring typically we're only constraining the position itself. So here we're starting. Here are the outcomes. Go play, which is fine. There's nothing wrong with that. It's a great way to start people learning, get people engaged. But there are a lot of other things we can manipulate different tasks, different time intervals, different partner selections, a lot of different things and so if we're unaware of what a constraint actually is and how these constraints interact to form relationships, then we might not be sure as coaches what to manipulate when we are trying to solve technical problems.
Speaker 2:So, to that point though, and I guess to reiterate, do you see elements of a constraints-led approach that have already been used in some of the traditional systems.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, so sorry, I was trying to be clear about what we were saying. But yes, so time is a good one. So you know, a lot of schools are like oh, we do 90-second blasts where two players are asked to score and they have 90 seconds to accomplish it. That is a constraint. We are manipulating time. We know there's a relationship with time and intensity. I tried to have this discussion with Dr Mike Israetel but he was being willfully ignorant about that topic.
Speaker 1:The idea is that Dr Mike is willfully ignorant about many things.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we, I mean he's. Oh my God, I actually didn't know anything about the man until I went and started researching how people view him in the hypertrophy community and I really didn't realize what type of man I was dealing with.
Speaker 1:So either way I think he gets more love, but he might even get more hate than you, greg, imagine.
Speaker 3:Well, what's interesting is he gets hate from professionals. I don't get hate from professionals, I get hate from the people at the ground level, the professionals like me. So, like when I talked to you know, like this weekend, sean Mishka, who works with the NFL, he watched my seminar, he watched the way I was teaching and he gave me a lot of positive marks and so he's way farther ahead than I am. And you know Rob Gray, same thing. They've invited me on and helped me with my program design and they've been very positive with me and very supportive in what I've been doing anyway.
Speaker 3:But yeah, dr Mike was basically he didn't understand that the relationship I was trying to talk to him about, which was time and intensity. So if I had to perform an action against a resisting human partner and we're both competing over that and I have 90 seconds to do it, that's going to require me to move harder and faster to try to achieve the outcome and that's a manipulation of a constraint. So the way movement will come out when you only have 90 seconds to do it will look different than if you have five minutes to do it, eight minutes to do it, 10 minutes to do it. So there are coaches that are already doing things like that, but that's one way we can constrain the environment through time.
Speaker 2:Right. So would it be fair to say that in your view it's just a shallow sort of dip into the world of a constraints-led approach?
Speaker 3:Well, I don't know if it's a shallow dip, because there's no intention, so the coach doesn't know that he's using the constraints-led approach. I think that what we really need to say is once we're aware that it exists, should a coach look into it to see what other constraints they can manipulate to better inform their practice? And I think the answer is yes. I think, historically, coaches are very sensitive to their environments and very sensitive to their athletes and they have picked up on things that are real, that they've manipulated historically, that were correct and good ways to organize practice. But we can't always be willy-nilly about it. I mean, there are people who are researching this stuff, who are trying to understand how it works, and that we're coming to some strong conclusions, and I think that if a coach really wants to maximize their ability, they might want to understand what's going on at that level.
Speaker 2:Right. So instead of just having like a bag of cool tools or tricks that you can pull out in a class, it's more about being very deliberate about what tool you would apply and when.
Speaker 3:That's a great way to say it, man. I actually I really like that. Yeah, I would say that. You know, everyone talks about, like you know, oh, tla is just a tool. Well, yeah, everything's just a tool, but it's very important we understand the function, or otherwise we're just hitting everything with the fucking hammer.
Speaker 2:Could I ask another piece on that, which is a critique that I see from some of your aforementioned disciples, please, man? Yeah, which is that the and I'm going to have to use the ecological term here, because this is what's out there- oh yeah, dude, Say whatever you want, I'm just Right.
Speaker 2:But no, no, no, and I appreciate the definition in that way, definition in that way. But a lot of the critique about what you're a proponent of is that people are like, well, we already do a bit of that. We do a bit of the traditional thing, we do a bit of the constraints-led, slash, eco thing and we get this hybrid kind of thing. The common critique on that is, if you actually knew about the eco thing, it's not possible to hybridize them because it's a whole different paradigm on something. Can you expand on that for me, for us?
Speaker 3:Yes, this is a little more nuanced, and this is where we're going to kind of maybe get a little irritation from people who's listening, because in order to discuss it at this level why there can't be a hybrid we're going to have to understand a little something about the nature of information, and this is a debate that's going on in the larger community of skill acquisition what is information and how do we engage with it? And what's interesting is this argument was started a thousand years ago by Heredicles and Parmenides and they transitioned to like Aristotle and Plato. They were arguing about it, and it's like we've been arguing about this. One thing about information Is information direct or is it indirect? So all this means is that does our brain act as an interpreter for what's out there in the world? So the side that I come from suggests that the brain does not need to make sense out of the information out there, because it's already specifying. What it means is that when I want to act out and I have an intention and I go to do it, the opportunities are there and ready for me to interact with. I don't need to suck it in as sensory information, reorganize it into a meaningful picture and then act. We don't believe that's happening.
Speaker 3:On the other side of things, some people believe that information is indirect. What this means is that the stuff out there makes no sense it's noise and that when we take it in as sensory information, our brain reorganizes it into a usable picture, and it's that usable picture that forms the central control for how we act. And so it really can't be both, at least at the level of movement. Now, this doesn't mean that memory doesn't play a role. This doesn't mean that previous experience doesn't play a role. We think it all does, but we think it plays a role at the level of perception, previous experience, memory basically affects how we perceive what's happening, maybe where we look for it or where we engage with what we're trying to accomplish. So there can't really be a hybrid approach, because we don't see that happening.
Speaker 1:It's a way of looking at the world like consciousness, fundamentally different kind of viewpoint. You know, are we projecting it onto the world? Is the world projecting it into us? It's one or the other right.
Speaker 3:Well, it seems to be. There could be a mix, but we're not at that point where we can say that's a possibility.
Speaker 2:You've listened to us for long enough. Now you understand the importance of building a strong, robust body for jiu-jitsu, and this is exactly why we built the Bulletproof for BJJ app so that you can spend the minimum amount of time in the gym while maximizing your time on the mats, for both performance and longevity. Right now, you get a two-week free trial. All you need to do is go to the app store, download the Bulletproof for BJJ app and if, for some reason, you decide that you don't love it and you want your money back. We offer a 100% money back guarantee because we are so confident that it's going to help you and it's going to increase your longevity for jiu-jitsu. See you on the inside.
Speaker 1:If you can't actually say it's one or the other, then why is one correct and one incorrect.
Speaker 3:Well, I wouldn't say one is correct and one is incorrect.
Speaker 3:What I would say? That when we look at sports, specifically complex and continuous systems like a sporting system, like people playing on a pitch or playing baseball or playing rugby or playing jiu-jitsu it's complex and continuous and it seems like the way that the human movement system is affected by this complex, continuous system is very direct, meaning we organize our movement around the demands of the tasks that are happening right then and there and it doesn't seem like it's affected by these representations. So, for example, when you kick balls or a ball around a cone when playing football, you know proper football. When you're kicking a ball around the cone, it doesn't translate to your ability to kick the ball on the field. But when we kick the ball on the field around another player, it seems to have a better transfer effect in our ability to kick the ball around other people. So it seems like we need everything to be there, or at least most of what's there, to develop skill. We can't really decompose the skill and separate it from the environment in which we're using it using it?
Speaker 1:I, I guess, it seems, isn't, is that?
Speaker 2:it seems like. It seems that it seems as a conclusion, or possible it's. Is there not a base level of coordination like I'm just. You know, you actually sold me on the jiu-jitsu piece, but now that you bring in soccer into it, now you're fucking talking to my people, greg, but so I'm like holy shit man.
Speaker 2:As a kid I used to kick the ball, drill around the hats and all that, and then go out in the field and fucking rip it up, don't you worry. But my point is that seemed an important process to gain basic motor function. Do the drills, do the drills and then, okay, live environment, live environment, to the point where I don't need to go and run around the hats anymore. Is there not a period in that early stage of basic motor development?
Speaker 3:that's actually a really good question and a good point, um, but the way that people on this side view it is that you're building capacity. So just running around with the ball is just a good thing to do. You don't need to parameterize it like, oh, go around these cones if you were just fucking around in your house or your backyard. You're developing a capacity to do a thing that's required in the sport. So your interaction with the ball is is a thing. Let's look at it a different way.
Speaker 3:Imagine if you just stood in your room and kicked in the air and then expected to go grab a ball and be better at kicking the ball. That would be a better analogy for what you're asking about. But just by kicking the ball and moving it around, that's representative of what's required of you when you're playing football. You need to be able to do that Now. The next stage is you need to be able to do that in front of someone who's trying to take it from you. So dribbling around cones does not make you better at stopping someone from taking it from you or getting in your way.
Speaker 2:All right, so great, great point. But to that, if I've got someone who shows up to my soccer practice and they've never kicked the ball around their backyard, yeah, I could say to them hey, just run around the park and kick the ball, have a blast. But it may make a bit more sense from an organizational standpoint and for them to just get to go. Hey, see these hats, I want you to kick and dribble around these, might it not?
Speaker 3:I would say that if I had a choice, I would rather it be another person than the cones.
Speaker 3:I would say that if I had a choice, I would rather it be another person than the cones. I would say that in comparing dribbling around cones versus dribbling around a person, the transfer effect is stronger when dribbling around a person, and this is not what Greg Sauter is actually. This is studied. They do a lot of study on football and fundamentals and footwork and kicking the ball, and whether they tell people to kick around cones or they don't tell them anything, uh, the transfer rate seems to be about the same. So what that suggests is that the, the cones, are not acting as a significant source of information to change the behavior. Um, and so you're getting good just by moving around the ball and so, but if you want to get good at moving the ball around somebody who's moving, we would just need to have a way to scale that. So if you had an option and there was another body there, it would be better to have them practice around the body versus the cone, right that?
Speaker 1:makes very obvious sense. I don't think there's nothing that would suggest if you could just have it more applicable to the thing you're trying to do. Of course, that would work better. Interestingly enough, coming on that topic of perception, greg, I mean people have improved at doing jump shots just by visualizing. They didn't practice with a person, they didn't pick up a basketball, they just thought about shooting a basketball.
Speaker 3:And simply by spending time daily visualizing shooting a basketball, they improved their accuracy you know, accuracy without even shooting the ball so when you improve their accuracy from not shooting to shooting, and we, really, when we make these points, we have to be very sensitive to making these points, because we can't make them mean more than they are. So let's imagine, let's take, let's take that what would mean?
Speaker 1:that means less than you saying a cone to a person. Do you know what I mean? If someone can get without even practicing the skill I do simply visualizing the skill. Why is it such a significant jump out of the realm of reasonability versus?
Speaker 3:well, it's where, on the scale, we're expecting this, the skill to transfer. That that's really what we're talking about. So let's say we're talking about two kids and they're going to go shoot the basketball into a hoop and neither have ever done it. And you have. You give one kid an intention and you say I want you to imagine holding this ball and shooting it in there and you're giving him a focus. The other kid is aiming to and you say go shoot the basket. It's hard.
Speaker 3:The kid with the intention would probably perform better because you're already priming him to look somewhere to do something. You're basically taking the search parameter of possibilities and you're shrinking it. But that's a direct comparison to two kids who've never done a thing, giving one a focus and not giving one. Kids who've never done a thing, giving one a focus and not giving one. So in CLA we give focuses of intention and attention. Focusing somebody's search for information or the thing you're acting against improves their performance in searching for that thing. But the continual visualization. So if you took both those kids, you had one kid. Okay, you shoot three baskets. Go home and visualize and you take this kid and you're like all right, I don't want you to visualize shit. You're just going to try to shoot with this kid in your face and you have them do that training protocol over six weeks. The guy that's not visualizing and shooting against the guy who's just visualizing and shooting occasionally will get smashed, so-.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, the study was done between those who practiced shooting, those who didn't practice shooting and those who visualized, and the ones who visualized did improve. They measured how well they shoot. They did 12 weeks of visualization and they improved without actually practicing shooting. And these are not professionals, these are not trained individuals.
Speaker 3:Absolutely, and so, early in the learning stages, intention and attention have an effect on the initial acquisition of a skill. So we're talking about what's called the attunement and the coordination phase. Attunement is just basically getting your animal to look at something and intend to do something. We're learning how to pick up information. The coordination phase is our ability to coordinate our movement into something that looks like putting the basketball into the hoop. So early in that phase, against an untrained person, what we do to their intention and attention will have a measurable effect on their ability to build the skill. But over time that is lost. Something else picks it up. So once we attune, coordinate and control the movement where we can readily put the ball in the hole, we need to add more to the system in order to get it to change towards improvement. And so the mistake.
Speaker 1:I guess my question there, just on that have you defined at what point that is, or is it just relevant to the individual, or at what point are you? They it just relevant to the individual, or at what point are you? Are that? They've got the coordination, they've got the attention, they've got the intention. Now we increase the stimulus, like so I'm not where that is, or well.
Speaker 3:So when what we're talking about are artificial lines of demarcation that were used in the analytical process in a scientific model. So when car Carl Newell came up with that idea, he was just talking about what happens as a skill starts to develop into one. There's no hard lines, and so the thing is that the attunement, coordination and control are happening all the time. It's like you're not actually in and out of that phase. I mean, you're in the phase, but you can't. There's no line. The lines are something that's artificial.
Speaker 1:It's just you know I'm someone who is obsessed with learning, loves the details and the things you're talking about kind of it's a bit woo woo. You know what I mean. Like, if it's somebody who is not as well-versed in the science and doesn't know what you know, it's a bit esoteric, it's a bit hard to, it's a bit intangible, these ideas you're talking about when you're trying to tell somebody why they should do these games For sure.
Speaker 3:They're intangible even to the person that discovers them. So we're talking about how complex and chaotic systems organize. We're talking about trying to uncover what the human animal does when it builds a skill. We don't even know what we are Like, we don't even know what consciousness is or what's happening and why it's happening. So, fuck, talking about what's happening inside as we learn a skill, like we're all just poking around in the dark, everybody.
Speaker 3:But to assume that we are thinking at the level of rigor that some of these people who are dedicated in their lives to thinking at that level of rigor is a silly, silly thing. Like if we went back to like the 1600s and we were like, hey, it's not really demons that are in your head, it's actually these germ things. People get laughed off the stage because we can't imagine the world of the small in a world where small doesn't even exist. So when we're talking about how a complex system organizes, from picking up information to coordinating the million degrees of freedom present in the system to get a skill that we can now control, man, that process is non-parsable. We can't separate it to meaningful degrees and component parts like we want it to. There are no right angles in reality.
Speaker 1:Sure, but this level of complexity doesn't help someone who doesn't know jujitsu suddenly know jujitsu right Now. Sure you can-. Neither does showing them a technique. You can, no, no, no, I'm not saying showing them a technique. I'm not saying that. I'm saying that from this conversation, greg, because we have people listening. Not saying that. I'm saying that from this conversation, greg, because we have people listening. They want to know why what you know can help them. And when you start getting into these high level understanding of consciousness, perception, real-time learning, chaotic models, how the fuck's that going to help my mate jake do an armbar?
Speaker 2:you know what I mean in his defense, so I asked that question. Yes, yeah, yeah. So it's not going to help my mate Jake do an armbar. You know what I?
Speaker 3:mean In his defense, though I asked that question. Yes, yeah. So it's not going to help Jake do the arm lock. But if you're going to be a coach and you want to understand how humans learn, it's your responsibility to learn what that bullshit means.
Speaker 1:But if you don't want to we don't know what it means, based on human understanding of what you said.
Speaker 3:We don't know what's going on there. Well, in a way that you want to make it more salient than it is. So if we understand that the thing is very complex and that it requires interaction, then we start with that basic idea. So if we know that there are so many things present that are causing the behavior to look one way or another, we just get people to act. Because there are things we do know about learning that have nothing to do with the theory of mind.
Speaker 3:So what we do know about learning is, like I said at the beginning, the idea of scaling. So we know that when something is a little easier for someone to approach, they can learn at a faster rate. But then, as that learning starts to stabilize into something that they're able to do, we want to slowly start to increase that level of difficulty. So what a coach can take from this conversation is that if you want to use live practice and you want to constrain it and you want to get people to do certain behaviors, you're going to have to scale your practice without taking out resistance. So you're going to have to find what's easy enough for a beginner to do from a given situation to get them to start moving without it being too difficult or too confusing. But there is going to be some struggle and there is going to be some difficulty. We can't whitewash that out of the learning process.
Speaker 2:Could I ask a question specifically relevant to you know, to the non, like to just the hobbyist, right Grappler, that's like, okay, this is some interesting shit, fellas, but you know, give me something I can use here. So for someone who is, you know, they're a student at a gym, so they're not in charge of of the curriculum and whatnot Do you have some simple takeaways that someone could enact or or use as a way to start to dabble in some of this CL CLA?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So the yeah, the one thing that I've been trying to help people do is just what helped me when I first started learning about this stuff. So you have to understand that I approach this stuff just like all of you guys. It was crazy Like, just try it. Just go look up Michael Turvey and try to read one of his papers. I don't even know how I bumped into him first, but that's some of the craziest stuff you've ever read and I didn't even know what it meant.
Speaker 3:So what I do is I just kept at it until I found something that sounded like I could get it and I would just try to apply it directly and see what happens. So the big thing that I started with that really helped me is this idea of condition and effect. So when we look at a movement like, say, you look at like an arm lock and let's say I watched 20 videos of people arm locking people from the bottom position what conditions are present before the arm lock was achieved, during the arm lock usage and then when the tap happened, so what I noticed is there was some things that were always there I was like, oh shit, this is always happening. So if I focus my task goals around trying to do what's always happening. I should be able to create an arm lock, and that was my original assumption back in 2014 when I started messing with this stuff, and that's exactly what I got.
Speaker 3:So what I would do is I'd put my students in small slices of a thing, based on the conditions that needed to be present, and I would give them tasks that would help them achieve the final outcome and against live resistance, and it would always be very simple, like if, let's say, we were talking about, you know, in the bottom position, starting with our legs trapping a partner's shoulder, and their only job was to go from having that arm trapped over the shoulder to covering the head, and you won the game, and the defending player's job was to shove the shoulder back in or pull the arm out, and so they got to do something very simple and struggle over that condition that allowed arm locks to happen. And so my advice to you would be that, if you want to do it yourself and you don't want to copy somebody and you're very interested in a movement or a technique, go look at a bunch of examples of it, find the conditions that are always present and try to train yourself in those conditions as task goals themselves.
Speaker 1:I love that Very cool Fuck yeah, good times.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, here's the thing, greg. What I definitely respect a lot about you is your level of commitment to this thing that you're doing. I'm someone who cares about learning, cares about jujitsu, and so it's great to see somebody who is focused, obsessed and putting it all on the line. And you know whether that means you, you get the love, you get the hate doesn't really matter, I guess, as long as you're you know, achieving your outcome. And, uh, really, the, the, the whole, the whole point of this was like wanted to hear you get into, yeah, more, more of those details, without the, the friction of you know old school, new school, you know ecological or not, cla, what have you? You know.
Speaker 1:So we really appreciate you taking the time to be on here, brother, yeah, for sure, yeah, I mean, if there's people out there who want to learn more about this stuff, where would you advise them to start in terms of just understanding these really interesting ideas? And then also second part on that is, if somebody wanted to learn more about ecological jujitsu and CLA, where would you point them? If somebody wanted to learn more about ecological jiu-jitsu and CLA, where would you point them if they're in the States?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I mean, if you're in the States, you guys probably know who I am by now and you guys know that you can call me, you can reach out to me, you can invite me for seminars. I've been traveling everywhere recently trying to share this in real time with people to show my work, to show what I've been doing, to show how this is working for me, and I'm always open to that. Everyone can come here to my gym at Standard Jiu-Jitsu, we allow all visitors to train for free. We have people come out for a week a month to learn from me, to learn from our guys, and we don't charge a bit for it. So if that's something you want to do and you hear this, our doors are open. So that's one thing, that's from me. But if you want to learn the science itself, I always guide everyone towards Rob Gray's books. I think they do a good job at getting people started and giving them a base understanding of what's being said. If you want something a little bit more, you could go directly to the source from Ian Renshaw and Keith Davids. They wrote a book called the Constraints that Approach, and if you want to get right into the nitty gritty, that's what I would suggest you read, and it's shorter, it doesn't require three books to get to it, which is one, and so that's where I would start. You know Two things, and then we can go from wherever you can say our goodbyes. But something I want you to think about.
Speaker 3:You said something about friction, and I just want to make this point, and hopefully you guys can hear me. I once thought like this too. I once came from a different line of thinking. I thought differently about skill. I thought differently about training. I changed my mind based on the evidence that was presented to me by people who are trained to present strong evidence for something. In my life, there's no friction. My mind is open to be changed at any time. The only friction that I'm receiving is from people who want things to stay the same and want things to be how they've always been done. Is from people who want things to stay the same and want things to be how they've always been done. But I heard once that doing things how they have always been done is one of the most poisonous sentences to progress. So if there is friction, just make sure it's not coming from you.
Speaker 2:Oh, I like that, mate. I appreciate it. And second, furthering what JT said, like anyone that's trying to bring something new into the community of jujitsu, and with passion and with integrity, is something I really respect. So I appreciate you for doing that, and if you ever print a shirt that says I don't hate Greg Souders, I would wear it.
Speaker 3:Maybe I should get two. Right, I should get like the I don't hate Greg and I get the hate. You guys can just pick which one you want.
Speaker 2:That's right, you guys can just pick which one you want, that's right.
Speaker 3:Pick your camp for sure. Yeah, man. Well, guys, thank you for the opportunity. I appreciate you having me on your show and allowing me to share my ideas and you know you guys have a following and I hope this benefits your show and benefits you guys.
Speaker 1:Um, you know we appreciate you taking the time, man. Thank you very much and uh Thanks, man, cheers brother.
Speaker 3:Likewise.
