Ep. 381: What's My Game Again? feat. Josh "Kintanon" Wentworth

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Hey everybody, welcome to BJJ Metal Models Episode 381, I am Steve Kwan, and BJJ Metal Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent Jiu Jitsu approach. And today we've got a returning champion, one of my favorite guests because he makes my job super easy. I've got Josh Kintan and Wentworth on the line from Apex MMA in Covington, Georgia. How's it going buddy? Well, first of all, I would just like to mention that I am everybody's favorite guest, not just yours. That is true. I am doing great, Jim's going great, it's building, a lot of new students, we actually got sheep on our farm recently, so that's been a fun adventure. We just wrapped up last month the annual BJJ Metal Models camp down here, which is related to the topic of podcast today. But generally speaking, I'm doing great. How have you been doing Steve? How's the podcast been going? I will try to stop clapping my hands back here and making random noises that I know are going to show up before you tell me to stop doing that. I will do my best. That's how I know that you've been on this podcast before because you already know to, you know, not talk with your hands or stuff. It's hard, man. People don't understand super hard. We do so much talking with our hands and moving our body and these podcast mics. They pick up every single weird noise and it sounds like there's an explosion going off in the background. It's a man's audio is something else. It's way harder than I ever thought. But anyway, to get to your question, doing good, can't complain, especially because of the topic here, we're going to talk about game planning. Now this came up because of a series of conversations actually leading from one of the camps that we had, but you I'm sure have been sitting on this and stewing on it for a while. So I will just turn it back to you. Let's let Jesus take the wheel here, man. Tell me what's going on. Yeah. So this all kind of came together almost two years ago. I want to say was when I really started to think about this and started to realize that this was something that was close enough to being too unique to the way that I think about Jiu-Jitsu. And I know it's not actual unique because I got it from other people, specifically the Mendes brothers and AOJ and how they approach their programs. But for whatever reason it has continued to be largely limited to what they do. And when I start talking about it, everybody who's listening to this, who is familiar with their program and with their athletes, will immediately like they will realize yet they're like, oh yeah, that's exactly it. But it's that the idea of having a consistent, applicable path of your Jiu-Jitsu that leads from standing through to the finish every time it's reproducible and that you always are going for and it's always the same thing. And that's something that doesn't seem to exist in a lot of parts of Jiu-Jitsu. And but if you look at AOJ and you look at their people, they all have exactly the same game. They're like super world star, you know, world champion kids all grapple exactly the same. Their adults all grapple exactly the same all the way up until they get to that like defining tip top moment when like they are multi-time world championships. And then you can see their games start to like diverge a little bit and become a little more personalized. But for the most part, if you see an AOJ athlete competing in an event, you know exactly what is going to happen. And start to finish from like every position and they are one of the most dominant teams in the world in terms of just consistent output of successful athletes at every level. And so that started me thinking several years ago about like, well, why why doesn't everybody do that? Why don't more people have this like consistent practice method for going from point A to point B. And that came down to like the way that Jiu Jitsu is taught in general, which I've complained about before and things like that. And like the instructors themselves aren't putting a consistent image of Jiu Jitsu out into their gym. The AOJ guys, Hoffa and Gwee, Gee, Giemendez, the Mendes brothers, they put their consistent vision of Jiu Jitsu like into their students, like enforce it into them and like that's what everybody does. And not most gems don't do that. They're just kind of showing whatever the thing is that is going on. The whole move of the day, learn three moves blah, blah, blah. They're doing that. And then they kind of expect people to sort of figure it out as they go. And so you get to this point where people are purple belts and don't really have a consistent view of what their Jiu Jitsu is. And I started to realize that when I started to talk to people because I had as a blue belt under like Cabrini's influence and things like that, I had realized I have very minimal training time. And so I need to focus on my Jiu Jitsu as much as possible because I had a full time job that would keep me out of training a lot and stuff. And so I started to develop like, what is my game? What's my game plan? What am I going to do? Where am I going to spend my time? What am I going to focus on? Because I don't have time to learn all of this Jiu Jitsu that's happening. So I need to mostly ignore my instructor and focus solely on the stuff that I'm going to do. And so I built a game there. I was doing it, but I didn't realize that I was unique in that until much later. When I started to hear instructors answer questions when people were like, well, how do you sweep? Right? Oh, well, you know, just whatever they give me, I just do. I'm like, what do you mean? Whatever they give you, you just do. You just hope they're going to make a mistake and then you, you're going to notice that and capitalize on it. That's how you're doing Jiu Jitsu. Damn, I'm not good enough at Jiu Jitsu to do that. I need a better plan than that. And so I started to think through that and like analyze how I had done Jiu Jitsu when I was successful. Like my highest competitive success zone was purple belt. And that was when it was very clear when I was competing that I had a consistent, repeatable plan to go from, you know, ABC to get where I was going. And a lot of my opponents didn't. Many of my opponents were actually like better than me at grappling overall. They were more athletic. They were bigger than me, stuff like that. But I had spent more time in my zone than they had spent in my zone because they were just doing whatever. And so that led me then when I opened my gym to want everybody to be able to do that. And that, you know, the reverse classroom we've talked about that and stuff like that. And so I kind of wanted to kind of make an environment where people could do that. And then as I continued to talk to people, I realized that still into this day and age, years and years later, people don't have games. They don't know what a game is. I had asked, I asked a group of people at one of the camps a few years ago before we did, I think it was actually made in the first camp. I was like, Hey, so what's your game? When we were talking about what techniques people wanted to work on or something, I don't even remember it was one of the workshop things. It's just like, what's your game? And they were like, what do you mean what's my game? Nobody had ever asked them. Nobody had ever explained to them that they should have a game. And in fact, even then when I got into conversations with people and I read and like read it conversations and stuff, there's a ton of this idea in Jujitsu of when you are grappling, when you are rolling, you just take what the other person gives you. Well, the thing is, if the other person is good at Jujitsu, what they are going to give you is their absolute best technique that they are the most successful at. Why the fuck am I going to let them do that? Where I have to be able to beat their best technique, that's terrible. That's a terrible way to do that. And there's plenty of science about this as well about how your decision making loop, right? When something happens to you, there's an amount of time that it takes you to recognize what's happening and then react to that and then implement your reaction. And if the other person is the one initiating that, your loop where you recognize it, interpret it and then act on it has to be short enough that they don't just beat you immediately. And if you just keep giving them opportunities to do that, which in my gym I refer to it is letting them ask the questions, well eventually you're going to get an answer wrong and then you lose. Because you're on the back foot. You're the one having to come up with an answer for their best stuff because you're just letting them throw their best stuff at you. And that then continued to lead into me starting to put together like game planning workshops. And that was this last camp that we did was fully about game planning. It was a fix your game full week of, okay, well you're standing up. What are you going to do now? What grips do you naturally take? How are you going to get this to the ground? How do you want to get this to the ground? Are you going to guard pull guard? What guard are you pulling? Are you going to a take down? What take down are you going to get? All right. And if the answer is, well I'm just going to see what happens, you're going to lose. That's just always going to, that you're just going to lose a lot unless you are like an order of of magnitude better at Jiu-Jitsu than your opponent, you're just gonna lose, because you're waiting on them to make a mistake that you recognize in time to capitalize on and have the skills to capitalize on. Because if the mistake they make is an opening for a technique that you're shit at, she's like, oh yeah, they kept giving me this butterfly sweep opening, but I'm terrible at butterfly sleeves and I kept fucking it up, so they just passed my guard. Well great, you screwed up. Like you gave them chances because you were gonna take what they gave you and what they gave you wasn't something that you knew how to do anything with, so you ended up stuck under mount for three minutes and then that was it, game over, go home. All right, and so we wanted to get away from that and establish the idea in people's heads that you should be attempting to force something to happen. You should be the one asking the questions and you should know what questions you're gonna ask. You should know what grips you're trying to get. Don't worry about your opponent's grips. If you get your grips, they're not gonna get their grips. That's just the way that's gonna work. You don't need to be on the back foot fighting grips if you're on the front foot attacking grips. So if you get your grips and you go for your take down, get your take down, awesome, move on from there. Get your guard pulled. Great, awesome, move on from there. What sweep do you want, what pass do you want? Okay, what position are you trying to get to? Why are you trying to get to that position? Do you just like that position? Can you control from there? Do you know any submissions from that position that you're good for? Good at, how are you gonna then proceed from that position? Cool, you do have a submission, awesome. You don't, okay, well, do you need to go to another position that you do have a good submission from? Or do you need to learn a submission from here? Or are all of your submissions from bottom of guard and being on top is useless to you, right? And how are you gonna deal with that? And so we had these whole big long workshop classes of letting people figure out what the hell they were trying to do in Jiu-Jitsu, and by the end of it, people were significantly better than when they started at just knowing where to focus their game and knowing where to focus their Jiu-Jitsu and knowing where they wanted to spend their time. And it made us, it just makes us substantial difference because it also then informs your practice when you go into the gym to work and train. You know, okay, I'm in the gym today. It doesn't really matter what we're drilling, right? I'm in a traditional gym, we're doing move of the day, there's gonna be three random disconnected techniques, then we're gonna roll. Cool, I'm gonna practice these random disconnected techniques to the best of my ability because, hey, practice, it's fine, but all the, while that's going on, I'm gonna be thinking about in my roles, what are my goals, what part of my game am I gonna be able to work on today? Am I gonna be, are we getting to start from standing today? So I can work on my grips and my guard pull or my take down. Are we doing guard work today? So I'm gonna be stuck, you know, starting from bottom of guard and then I have to work on funneling back to my guard. Just another thing we talked about, this is gonna be a little disconnected. I didn't take a lot of notes for this one because it's something that I just talk about a lot. So some of this may be back and forth, feel free to interrupt me and ask questions or stuff or direct me in random places. But we talked also about, one of the things about that is funneling. When you are in a bad position or you're in a position that you don't like or you aren't good at or whatever, a lot of people just stay there and fight it. They'll just be like, oh, I gotta fight from this position. You don't have to fight from that position. You should know how to get from that position back to a position that you like, right? Like I can get the butterfly guard from bottom of side control because butterfly guard is my primary attacking guard. So I worked on being able to get back to butterfly guard from there and get to butterfly guard from every bad position. There is no bad position that I cannot end up back in butterfly guard from. Even if somebody has my back, I can end up back in butterfly guard because that's the funnel that I built. I want to go back to butterfly guard so that I can attack because butterfly guard is my attacking position. I'm always gonna be attacking the over-under sweep, right? So where I've got an over hook on one side under hook on the other side, tilting in, I'm gonna attack that sweep over and over and over and over again. There are a few points where if somebody is blocking that in a specific way, I will do a different attack, right? Like I'll go in for my sweep and I get them elevated, but they're able to get their hand free and they're posting or whatever, but their leg is elevated. And I'll go into a cutback calf slicer and I'll use that to put their hip on the ground and I'll come up, right? But primarily I'm continuing to go back to this same set of attacks. Why? Because I've spent tons of time in that position. I know all of my opponent's potential reactions. I know what they can do. I know what they can't do. I know what they're most likely to do. And I've spent time preparing for those use cases, right? Because I spend all my time here. They definitely don't spend 100% of their time defending against butterfly. They're doing other things. They're spending time working their own attacks. They're spending time defending other positions and stuff like that. So if all things are equal, we both have the same amount of training time that we've spent. We both are at attribute parity. So if I have spent all of my time working on getting from standing into butterfly guard, sweeping from butterfly guard into a position that I can submit from, right? So they'd call it neon belly. We'll say we're in the key and we're doing neon belly baseball bat jokes, right? Neon belly baseball bat joke. That's where I've spent like 100% of my time. It won't be because I've been working on escapes and shit like that. But the majority of my time has been spent doing that line and they have spent their time equally spread across four or five different guards and a multitude of different guard passes and a bunch of random weird submissions and stuff. I'm going to win that engagement so often because at that point, I have an enormous experience advantage. And I think that gets very much neglected and I think instructors do their students of disservice by telling people to take what your opponent gives you because your opponent's gonna give you their best move. And the chances that you are gonna be able to beat their best move if you guys are at approximate parity and skill is not good, right? Okay, I've kind of run out of steam on there so you're gonna have to ask some questions, move this thing along. Steve, dude, job is a podcaster. (laughs) All right, well, I mean, there's a lot to dig into there. I think we definitely can cover this and probably go a full hour easy. I actually think as you and I talked about, we're gonna shoot some more content about this and expand on it deeper because the topic of game planning is just so big. But the first thing I want to ask you when we were talking about this with students, one of the things that came up was some people had never had the idea itself explain to them. It's one thing to say, "I don't know what my game is." But that has the assumption that you even know what this terminology means. And I can understand why it would be confusing because no one talks like this in the real world. When you're, you know, when you are an accountant, no one asks you what your accounting game is. But in Jiu-Jitsu, this is just language that we all have picked up and used and sometimes maybe we take it for granted. If you were to explain to your aunt what a game is in Jiu-Jitsu, how do you explain this to someone who's completely unfamiliar with the language? - That is an excellent question. So in Jiu-Jitsu specifically, your game is the tiny subset of Jiu-Jitsu that you are actually attempting to apply on a regular basis to your opponents. These are the things that you actually are trying to do. And it's one of those things that people will often when they first hear about this concept, they almost always will start mind mapping and they will start saying like, well, what's my game? And then they will put down every technique that they know or every technique they ever heard of in this incomprehensible wall of nonsense. That's not a productive way to do this. So when I start people out building this, I tell them you're drawing a stick figure. This is the like three to five actions that you consistently take by default when you are rolling. And everybody has them. Anybody who is like, oh no, no, no, I just, I do totally different things all the time. You're a liar, right? Or you've never actually watched yourself roll. If you're the kind of person who listens to BJJ mental models, you probably are recording your roles on a semi-regular basis. You're probably recording your competitions. If you go look at those, you will find that there are a good handful of things that you are consistently attempting and doing, right? You won't always succeed, but you're consistently attempting them. Whatever that small group of consistent techniques is consistent actions that you are attempting, that's your game as it exists now. And they're generally like, there are three types of games that people have. The first game that they have is their unconscious game. This is the one that you get like, you'll towards the end of White Belt most of the time that is just now you kind of know how to do Jiu Jitsu. And it's the unconscious, you don't think about it, but you're just trying to do some stuff. And it tends to be the same few things that you kind of have a handle on. That's your unconscious game. Then you kind of develop your conscious game. And this is usually most people start to develop this at Purple Belt, where now you know like, oh, I'm good enough to actually impose my will on something. And this is the game that you kind of do to Blue Belt who can fight you, but you want to beat them and like you're throwing your best stuff at them 'cause you don't want them to win, right? You want to beat up the Blue Belt 'cause you don't want them to think that they're good. So that's like you're actually consciously thinking about like, oh yeah man, I'm gonna get in here and I'm gonna hit my single leg and then I'm gonna knee-cut pass this guy and then I'm gonna mount it in Triangling because that's my best stuff and I don't want this Blue Belt talking shit at me later, right? That's kind of your conscious game. And then there's your deliberate game. This is the game that you'll see that high level people have. And there can, You can see good black belts that don't actually have this, and these are the guys that like they're a solid black belt, they can be better than most people, but they are not top tier competitors. And a lot of times this is why they're not top tier competitors. It's because they don't have a deliberate game, and the top tier guys always do. Because if you look at the top guys in every division across the sport, and you watch their matches, you will see that they are doing the same thing, like 90% of the time. Every match that they win almost all looks exactly the same, and that's the deliberate game. That's the one where you took and you said, okay, this is my best take down. That's the take down I'm gonna get. I'm gonna make sure that all of my engagements lead me into this take down or guard puller whatever, right? Like, I'm gonna pull directly into this guard because this guard entangle me is my best guard entangle me. This is where I'm gonna hit my leg attacks from. This is where I'm gonna hit my sweep from whatever it is. And then, okay, this is the sweep. When I'm sweeping, I know I need to get under this like we see it with the word zensky, right? Like word zensky is incredibly good at funneling people into his best sweeps, right? His absolute best sweep over and over again. And it looks the same every time. And that's when you have that deliberate game. And that's frequently the difference between just like a good fine black belt. Somebody who is like really they're performing in that top 10 level, but they never break into that like, oh yeah, they're consistently top three in the world. And it's solely because they aren't deliberate in their game. They believe too much and they just give your get, you know, take what your opponent gives you. But that game is just that subset of jujitsu that is yours. It's your jujitsu that you're best at that you like most and that you're always trying to apply in every role all the time. You said something important there. You talked about how a game is not the jujitsu that you know. It's the jujitsu that you do, which is a huge distinction. People sometimes look at jujitsu as this collection of stuff you have to absorb and just get equally good at. But part of strategy is identifying what works for you and having a way to get there. This is a concept that you see from judo and other martial arts in judo they call it Takui Waza and the idea is it's like a what's your your signature move, your finish or move, you like your professional wrestler like what's your stone cold stunner. How do you end this thing? And even though a good judoka will probably know to some extent most of the moves in the judo canon they're likely going to laser focus on two or three that they used to end matches. And although they might only be using two or three specific throws they might have dozens and dozens of entries into those throws or counters into those throws or ways to get from any gripping sequence you can think of into that throw. And that is what a game is. How do you funnel into the things you want to do? It's more than just what do you know it's what do you actually do and that's an important distinction because it's so easy into jujitsu to just get paralyzed by the sheer amount of stuff. I was just talking to a coach yesterday at class and we were talking about how the crazy thing about jiu jitsu is it's just one sport but you can have people who do completely different variations of this sport. Their games can look so different. It's almost like they're training a different martial art but they all work under the rule set and they all get results in their own way. And that's one of the things I love about this sport but I think it can create overwhelm for beginners because they feel like they must be good at everything equally which is just not how you build a game plan. Right. And it is one of the weird things about our sport because our rule set is so open that you can come in as like a black belt judica and effectively make like four changes to how you grapple and be fine. You can come in as a high level like high school collegiate wrestler and make like four changes to how you grapple and be fine. And those two people will look entirely different. They will both do just fine and they will both look entirely different from somebody who is a home grown jujitsu player who's just optimizing for the rule set. Right. They'll all look very different. They will all be very successful under the rule set and they all will have very effective juditsu games even though they're based on different things and that's kind of a I don't want to say it's a bad thing about our rule set but it's a pitfall of our rule set that it is so open that there are so many ways to play it that it's very easy to get lost in the weeds of all of your options and get decision paralysis about what you should do and then you add that into like the gym environments of like what your coach is going to have a particular kind of jujitsu and when you start your coaches just going to be infinitely better than you in ways that you can't even comprehend and a lot of people attach that ability to those techniques like oh my coach is really good and he does these things. Therefore I should do those things if I want to be really good. So dude your coaches my size 140 pounds and 5 7 and you are 6 foot 2 and 260. I don't think that's going to be a good path for you necessarily or the opposite is true. Your coaches 6 foot 5 and 270 pounds and you're 140 pounds right and 5 foot 4 or something right like that's you can't just imitate them at that point it's like well what is my source of information to build my game and because a lot of coaches and a lot of coaching environments in our sport don't cater to the individual in a way that will like your giant coach is like oh yeah you're tiny well here this is how this works for tiny people like they'll do their best to modify that for you can kind of give you some ideas but they don't necessarily have the expertise the experience or the the desire even unfortunately in our sport a lot of coaches don't have the engagement with their gym and their students to dig in and be like okay well at your size these things are going to be better for you right this is it here's a person who is closer to your size that kind of does the same kind of stuff I've seen you doing in the gym I think you will benefit from looking at them and kind of taking inspiration from them and so we get into this scenario where people just are lost in the enormous sea of options that you have in jiu jitsu where there are so many styles that you could have and then we lose sight of why are you doing jiu jitsu what is your goal we see this again this is I'm going to keep referring back to the reddit threads because this keeps coming up and we have people who are like well I only look at this stuff that world class like world championship athletes are doing and I'm only going to do those techniques I'm only going to do those things okay well you're stupid right you're not a world class athlete right almost 99.99% chance you are not a world class athlete if you are looking at them and doing that and thinking that right you don't have the attributes you don't have the time to spend on the mats refining that style things that they are doing you will never be able to do so chasing that is not a good way to build a game is just not right when people when these like random three stripe white belts and one stripe blue belts and stuff are just obsessed with the modern competitive meta and you're like well how often do you compete oh like competed once at white belt and I'm going to compete again at blue belt eventually well why are you chasing the modern competitive meta that has no relevance to what you're doing in jiu jitsu at all why aren't you building your jiu jitsu that you like doing and it fits for you and that is accessible to you and gives you success in the environment that you're operating in and it's because again we run into this situation where our professionals in our sport are alongside our random hobbyists and so these people are looking at those games as if that's the game that they need to they must emulate which is terrible that's not a good way to build your personal game it's not a good way to enjoy jiu jitsu either right if you're holding yourself to this standard like I watch guys like we're just talking about my current project is getting to this smash pass position from a bunch of different places and glee mendes has a really really smooth way to get there against knee shield half guard where he like scoops the bottom knee up with his knee and just like pivots over into the smash pass position and it is buttery smooth when he does it and I've been working on this for like probably eight months now and my version of it is not that smooth right it is not like him but it's still incredibly effective at my level as a black belt who's you know beating up brown belts and purple belts and stuff in my gym and you know rolling with visitors and stuff like that like that level of execution is incredibly powerful still because I'm not going up against world class competitors and neither are most of the people who are looking at this and who are looking to build a game and so you will have much more success if when you come in and decide like what jiu jitsu am I going to do you just pick the shit you like like hey man I really like homo plot is well these top level competitors have told me that the homo plot is an viable submission at the top level and you know like oh it's nice and then like oh well the current meta is an homo plot is you shouldn't be doing close guard stuff like well yeah but I like close guard and I like homo plot is good do that get good at homo plot is be the best homo plot a guy in your gym if you're going to compete be the the best homoplata guy in your state. Make everybody in your state fear homoplata's. And that's it, you're done, right? You could compete three times a year, which is more than the average person does by a substantial amount. 'Cause most people who train the sport don't compete at all. And every time you join a division, all your opponents will be like, "Ah, damn it, it's that homoplata guy again," right? That is a great goal for most people, right? To have to be that, that puts you a head of the curve in the Jiu-Jitsu population, much less the regular people population that can't grapple. And it will make you enjoy Jiu-Jitsu substantially more. If the thing that you're chasing is the Jiu-Jitsu that you want to do. And the current conversation about like, "Oh, guard pulling us," right? And you go, "I'm anti-guard pulling." I'm like, "No, you should be taking that, doing takedowns and stuff." But I only say that because I believe that guard pulling should be a choice. You're pulling guard because you want to pull guard and you like doing that. And you think that that's the best way for you to play Jiu-Jitsu, not because that's your only option because you don't know how to do anything else. So if you are like, "Well, you know what, I'm older, I have bad knees, I don't want to wrestle," right? Or I'm a little bit smaller. Everybody in my gym is big. I don't like getting thrown by these big dudes. Pull guard, that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that being your game plan. But do it consciously, do it with intent, do it into a position where you can immediately attack from and that you know that you're going to that position so that you have a chance to pull guard, immediately get a sweep, get on top, and then not be stuck under these big young people who have a lot of energy and are gonna smash you, right? Just like execute meaningfully, and the clearer your game is, the more deliberate you are in putting it together and knowing how you're gonna execute it. The more often you're gonna be able to have success with it, and the more enjoyable all of your roles are gonna be, and the more limited the subset of Jiu-Jitsu that you're gonna have to interact with is. 'Cause that's another thing. When we talk about how much Jiu-Jitsu there is, if you are constantly doing different things, you're gonna constantly have to deal with a new different subset of Jiu-Jitsu, the way that people defend things is gonna be different because you're attacking them. You're asking them a different question so they didn't give you a different answer. But if you're always asking them the same questions, you're gonna start to learn what answers come back to you. There's gonna be two or three answers that you always get. Every once in a while, somebody will throw something out of left field that you have to deal with, but for the vast majority of the time, you're gonna get the same two or three answers for your question. And as you get good at that and learn what those answers are, you're gonna develop new questions for those answers. And suddenly, you're limiting the interactions that you have into ones that you are comfortable with and familiar with. You're not ending up in these weird positions that you have no experience with or don't know how to deal with or don't know how to get out of because you're always repping through the same stuff. And there's an argument to be said, like as you get to black belt, we're like, "That, that's boring." And it is boring when you get to like, most of your partners being white belts and stuff where you can kind of do whatever you want. And that's fine, right? When it becomes boring, it's boring only because you're good at it and you can just do it whenever you want. That's the result you're looking for. That's when it's time to branch out. Find a plan B, develop a second game plan so that when you run into somebody who is good at shutting down your first game plan and you're like, "Oh man, this person is just not letting me get into my stuff." You got a backup plan. That's fine, but get good at the first one first, right? Get away from the idea that you have to wait until your opponent makes a mistake until they give you something because when somebody tells you that, right? Oh, I just, I take what they give me. What they're saying is, "I wait for my opponent to make a mistake and then I capitalize on it." And waiting for your opponent to make a mistake will only take you so far because at some point your opponent's stop making obvious mistakes and their mistakes are all very small. And if you haven't spent a ton of time in whatever interaction you're in, you won't notice that mistake. And then you're just, you're constantly just getting smashed still. I think that that's another thing that like, people that you talk to at Purple Belt or Brown Belt who are like, "Yeah, you know, my Giu-Jitsu is still just bad. I just, you know, I just keep getting, I'm always just getting smashed by all these people." And it's because they're not the ones asking questions. They're just letting their opponent do stuff and they think they've been swindled into this idea that they should be able to just take whatever happens and capitalize on that, right? No matter what. And just like, take what they give you and then do this super flowy, smooth Giu-Jitsu. And that's a lie, right? That might be true. That is true for the people that train their whole lives. And now they are doing that to white belts, right? Like, I can do that to white belts. I can just be like, "Whatever dumb thing you throw at me." Yes, it's gonna be so bad that I can take advantage of it and do stuff. I can submit you with dumb things, I can sweep you with dumb things. And it's because you're just terrible at Giu-Jitsu. And as I, you know, I've now been doing this for 20 years. So most like purple belts even. It's just like, yes, Giu-Jitsu, I have spent more time in all the positions than you have. So I know more tricks than you everywhere. So I can just kind of take whatever you give me and do something with it. And that's fine. And then if you're actually like a world class black belt who's really good, those guys can do that to me because they've spent more time in all of these positions and the openings that they need are much smaller and the things that count as mistakes are much broader, right? A small adjustment in where my weight is that is not a mistake against like black belts at my own level is a mistake against black belts that are that good. But those, like, that's not the audience for my Giu-Jitsu and that's not the audience for most people's Giu-Jitsu. The audience for most people's Giu-Jitsu is themselves. And I think people lose sight of that. In the competitive meta mindset and all that bullshit, your audience for your Giu-Jitsu is you. You should have fun doing your Giu-Jitsu. You should have success in the environment that you're applying your Giu-Jitsu. And for most people, that environment is just their gem. It's their home gem and maybe a couple of open mats that they go to, that's their environment. And then for sort of dedicated hobbyists, it's the two competitions they do every year. And then for serious hobbyists, like the four competitions that they do a year where one of them is an IBJJF open. And those levels of competition don't require that you be chasing the modern competitive professional meta. You will get so much more success out of them if you simply make your stick figure game plan that says I'm gonna get these grips, I'm gonna pull this guard, I'm gonna do this sweep, I'm gonna get into this position and I'm gonna do this submission from it. And if you just practice that a bunch, you're gonna have so much more success and so much more enjoyment from Giu-Jitsu than if you're chasing this weird meta or if you're just doing random stuff. And a lot of people that it's weird, those are the two dichotomies that I see. You see people who are chasing specifically this high level competitive meta and people who are just doing random shit. Now like the happy medium there is do your shit. Chase your meta, the things that you like doing and like narrow everything down to that practice. And your success and your joy and your happiness in Giu-Jitsu will be much much much much much greater. - I really like what you said there. This touches on a vibe that I have felt quite often. When you hear people evaluate themselves in their game and they're Giu-Jitsu often they try to hold themselves to this world class standard. You'll study what all of the very best are doing and try to duplicate that. As if they are preparing for a match against that person and I always find it interesting when people talk about hey, this is what Gordon's doing. I want to study like Gordon. I want to work on what Gordon's doing. Look buddy, no matter how much you train, no matter how good you try to get at Giu-Jitsu, it doesn't change the fact that you're a 45 year old software engineer who just discovered you Giu-Jitsu last month, right? Nothing you do is going to work against Gordon Ryan. That's not to say that you shouldn't look at a high level to see what works, but we have to understand what our own actual goals are and train accordingly. And the older I get the more I realize how important this is, I know a lot of people will push back and try to talk about this like it's some sort of science and they'll say, well, we got a money ball this and we got to do what works at the highest levels. Look, the stuff that you do at the highest levels will absolutely cripple your body and destroy your health. And most people don't train Giu-Jitsu for that purpose. So it makes sense to come up with a game that represents your personality. Our mutual friend, Rob Bernacchi has talked about this and how Giu-Jitsu, it really does have this artistic aspect to it. You know, we call it an art, a martial art. It really does have that. Once you get to Black Belt especially and you have a good inkling of all of the techniques and this doesn't feel strange and crazy anymore, you can start to express yourself through the type of Giu-Jitsu that you want to do. I find most Black Belt. If you sit down and ask them, why do you play this? They'll have an answer beyond just, well, this is what works at the highest levels. They'll be able to tell you why they do it because they have certain goals in every role. They have a certain way that they engage with the sport. They have risks they are and aren't willing to take and they build a game accordingly around that. And that kind of self-reflection is part of what makes a good game. I super agree with that. And a lot of times the answer to like, why do you play like this? It's just, well, it's fun, right? I've been doing this long enough that I'm play. for fun and I think more people should approach it from the beginning and I think that you don't have to wait until black belt to have that understanding. If earlier on you're willing to just relax, pick the stuff you like and spend time on the stuff you like and one of the things about that in I'm not going to call this do doubt because he's a white belt that sent me a video to review of a couple of competition matches and in one of them it was very very obvious that he had watched Joseph Jen's J point camping passing video and it was equally obvious that he completely lacked all of the fundamental underpinnings of like control of his own body and weight management and pressure and stuff like that that would make that work. So people are looking at this stuff and it's like yes, that is a great technique I love Joseph's passing. I think it's very accessible to people from an attribute standpoint but there's still this massive underlying layer of skill that informs that that you don't have and you don't see if you're just looking at that technique like you just watch him pass you only see the end result of the past like oh he just try pods up and then people's guard falls apart and then he's passed cool I can do that but under that is all that invisible jujitsu shit that we make fun of which is just his weight management and how he's fighting the hips and things like that that you don't get from just watching the video and people will get that thing and then it's like oh I do that and like my jujitsu is still terrible and it's like it's so frustrating because you could just be starting from grabbing people's legs and throwing them over to the side right like starting from the basics in the fundamentals and enjoying jujitsu more because you're doing something that you are capable of with your current skill set that is also effective against white belts because you don't need Joseph Chen level passing to pass white belt guards you don't so like yes I get it like if you get good at that now yeah it'll carry you along but like you're gonna be really frustrated now because you're not learning the underlying components you just be doing things that will lead to that kind of passing later but that also give you success now because they work with the tools that you currently have and that's that whether that's probably another different episode about chasing the meta and how it's bad for people it's just bad for most people you should not be chasing the competitive meta unless you are planning to compete in that meta like that's and most people aren't you should be chasing your jujitsu and again it comes back to this whole like do your jujitsu which is the theme of my whole gym and like everything I've done in jujitsu over the last like five or six years has been getting people to embrace their personal jujitsu instead of random move of the day or your instructor's Instagram fetish or the top level competitive meta that doesn't have any relevance to what you're doing get your own jujitsu that you are going to like that you were going to enjoy and then just get good at that because if you like something as you spend time in it it will work and I don't care how dumb it is I have some students in my gym who have gotten attached to some of the dumbest shit oh my god just the dumbest Instagram shit you can imagine but because they really like it they spent time in it and now I have to worry about it it becomes effective because you spend time in it and you decide you want to be good at it will they ever ever use it against a world champion successfully no they don't give a shit they have no intention of competing at that level or some of them at all they're doing it because it's fun in the gym and they've put in enough time that now it's also dangerous in that they catch people right like if you come in and you don't know that that's their dumb shit that they like to do you're going to put your hand in the wrong place and then you're going to get a Americana with somebody's foot and you're going to be like what the fuck was that and we like yeah Dalton loves that dumb shit man just don't put your hand there he'll get you yeah I know you're in top side control doesn't matter I know I know it's stupid but he's going to get you with it and it's just because he liked it and he spent time setting it up and figuring out all the bits and pieces and so now he can do it to people and he enjoys that jujitsu and that means his jujitsu is better than the dude who is chasing the competitive meta at the same level who's just equally shitty as a blue bow I think he's a forced right white belt whatever they're both equally bad at jujitsu overall but Dalton's having fun and you're not so who's actually better yeah I like that a lot you know this man leads into a topic I wanted to talk about a long time which is the difference between a macro level understanding and a micro level understanding there's so many people who talk about broad strokes trends in jujitsu and what works at the highest levels with the highest percentage and that's important to understand but two things first of all as you said that doesn't mean that is something that you need to do or should be doing when you get more experienced in jujitsu it becomes very important to have a skeptical filter over every new piece of information that you see because there's so much stuff you're never going to run out of new techniques to learn and to study and to practice and not all of them are going to fit cleanly into your game maybe they just don't work for your attributes or the type of opponents that you want to deal with or the rule set or whatever so often when you see these these new things come in you have to have a critical filter and decide okay is that something that I need to really get good at or is it sufficient that I just get good enough at defense that I prevent them from doing it to me because of the bare minimum that's what you need the second thing I want to talk about is mistaking macro level trends from micro level trends so as an example we could say that on average the average man is probably going to be bigger than the average women and so a lot of people will draw these like big extrapolations out of this about how men and women should train because the size differences here's the thing though there's no such thing as the average man or average women by definition these are aggregates of a bunch of data points any individual person you meet could be completely different from that stereotype I mean on average maybe they're more likely to be like the average but that's no guarantee right I mean if you get jumped in a dark alley by Gabi Garcia you can sit there all day long and preached to her about how on average I need to explain to her that I am actually bigger than her because the numbers right the math says I am bigger and stronger than she is I'm sorry that's just the math I guess you need stop hitting me because the math says I'm bigger than you are unfortunately reality disagrees with me yeah so people get so hung up on the macro level trends that they often forget look for any given match that you're in against any given opponent all of that becomes irrelevant because statistically speaking you know whatever opponent you're going to wind up with well once you've wound up with them you may find that they are dramatically different from the average and although there's a lot of people who are you know within that average there's also a lot of people a lot of people who are not they're on the outlier spectrum right and so to assume that all you have to do to get good at you Jetsu is duplicate what on average works in high level competition I think is really demonstrating a lack of critical thinking and it basically means you don't have a game your game is just kind of plagiarized from other people and that's only going to get you so far because it means you're not thinking critically about what's going to work for you and what won't that's also like there's a substantial misunderstanding in our sport of what the meta game actually is and why it's useful and I'm going to nerd the fuck out right now and talk about magic the gathering for a second because magic the gathering is a a game where the meta is substantially studied and the thing is if you look at the meta game for something like the world championships it's always really fucking weird because the people who are going to worlds know each other they all know each other they know what their trends are they know what kind of decks they like to play they know what decks they've been playing and the meta game is them trying to develop a strategy that works in this really narrow field where everybody is kind of a known entity and so when you talk about meta gaming it's the meta is the subset of things that is in this current active narrow zone and so if we look at the meta game for like the current no key ADCC people and those are all the same dudes right it's like the same 50 people they've all competed against each other multiple times they've seen each other compete they know each others games to a degree they know what their preferences are they game plan against each other so if you're looking at like well what wins in that environment that's going to be totally useless to you just like if you take a deck from the world championships of magic and you drop it at your kitchen table it might get fucking steamrolled it could have won the world championships but it's the wrong deck for this environment because it's a totally different set of players totally different set of decks because you didn't know to exactly theory craft your fucking shit for this environment the way the world champion folks know to exactly theory craft their stuff for their environment and that's the same thing in our sport where these dudes know each other they all know They know who's a leg locker, they know who's going to wrestle, they know who's going to hunt the back, they know these things. And so when they're training for that environment, they are training in that direction to deal with those people, to run those specific scenarios. So looking at the meta of that kind of thing, that's not an accurate representation of what the overall game of Jujitsu outside of that group of 50 people looks like. And so if you're planning for that and you get really good at the things that those people do, and then you go and compete at your random grappling industries, and some dude is doing some like 1995 closed guard over hook, Ezekiel choke bullshit, you have spent zero time practicing against that. So you're going to get slept by some dumb shit. Hey, I'm not going to allow you to sit here on my podcast and disparage the Ezekiel choke, the greatest submission of all time. Look, man, it doesn't work. The meta, how many Ezekiel chokes have happened in ADCC in the last 10 years? Come on, zero, right? Therefore, it doesn't work. But here's the thing, right? And I think you bring up some good points about the meta. I mean, obviously I'm joking about these skills. Yes, yes. I think you bring up some great points about the meta, right? The meta does not mean that something is definitively absolutely better. It just means that the current state of the competition ecosystem is optimized around a particular thing. Something else might come out that people are not ready for, that could completely disrupt everything and then shuffle the meta around again. A very good recent example is stuff like the Wage Lock from Chris Wowjick, which really changed the way that a lot of people thought of heel hook defenses, because a lot of the things that you would do in the past to try to escape your heel, to block a heel hook, now sets you up to get into the Wage Lock instead. So just because something is in the meta doesn't mean it's definitively better. It means that it's better within the context of what your opponents are likely to be ready for. And that can change on a whim, right? And that's in a narrow group, too. Like when you say opponent, it's a narrow, known group of opponents, right? Because the meta, like we only actually know the Jiu-Jitsu meta for the publicized like videoed popular competitions. The meta in like Wisconsin's Jiu-Jitsu scene, at their like the Naga-Nubri events in Wisconsin, may look totally different. So if you're training in Wisconsin, it's like, oh yeah, 90% of the people that are training here are actually like competitive collegiate wrestlers. None of them do any leg locks, right? The meta killer is guillotine, right? We're just 10 finger guillotineing everybody, right? So that's your meta in your local zone. At least that would be something that is worthwhile for you to know. Knowing what the meta is at ADCC trials, unless you're going to go compete at trials, is pointless for you. It doesn't mean anything to you. Here's a question I got for you. You talked earlier about AOJ as an example and how people there might all be patterned under the same system. And this raises interesting questions of, to what extent does your game evolve directly from the lineage of your coach? And you will see different things. Some gyms are almost like a cookie cutter system. Everyone there plays the same guard, they do the same thing. And that system, it's like a McDonald's, right? The predictability allows them to get a consistent degree of results. Then you will also see gyms that focus on free expression. And you will have wildly diverse games in the gym. I don't know which is better or worse. My feeling has always been, I prefer the free wheel approach. But I also understand that at a certain scale, you might just get the best results by puking down and saying like, this gym is optimized for this game. This is what we built our curriculum on. This is what we know our coaches are good at. This is what if this type of game works for you, this is the place for you to train. That doesn't mean it's the only game. There might be other things that could work better for you. But within our walls, this is what we do. How do you feel about that relationship between the coach and the instructor? Do you think it's better to be in a gym where the game is kind of defined from the top down and everyone is similar? Or do you think it's better to have that more chaotic approach where everyone has a very diverse game? So I think my personal view on this is that it is better for the sport overall from like just a holistic developmental approach for everything to be a little more chaotic. I think the sport grows more when we have more chaos, more people kind of pursuing their own paths and stuff. And I think that's a more a better growth environment for the overall sport. I think that if you are a coach who is looking to create world champions, that you're going to have better results with a cookie cutter gym where you can refine your approach down. You can select for athletes that that approach works for and then you can optimize those athletes. And I think that is going to overall result in like a more individually successful gym while not being as good for the overall development of the sport. And you're going to self-select for people for whom that style works really well, which is fine, especially if you are a like larger gym that's attracting a lot of people. You don't have to worry if like 40% of the people that come in or like I can't do this, right? I cannot invert. I will go train somewhere else. And you're like no problem. Enjoy. We have we have 312 year olds that can invert and you know, 40 of them are going to win Pan Am's like that's totally fine. And so I think as a as a gym, if you are hunting for competitive success, because you can really refine that game plan amongst everybody and you can really zone in on it and you can all get a trillion reps in on it. I think being a cookie cutter gym like that is probably a faster, better route to consistent competitive success. But I think that it is not as good for the individual athlete and not as good for the sport as a whole in terms of growth, right? If every gym were like that, I think it would be bad. I think having like a decent chunk of high level gyms be like that to ends up being really good because you can see a really like deeply refined version of a particular path come out of those gyms consistently, which I think is a good way to elevate that particular line. Having several of those that have different lines that have all been elevated like that, I think is good. I think most people shouldn't train like that. I think most people should train more chaotically, more organically looking to develop their own path because again, most people aren't competing. Most people who compete aren't competing at the level of like Pan Ames and Worlds. And most people who even compete at like Pan Ames and Worlds have no real chance of hitting the podium because their training volume isn't going to be high enough to deal with the people whose training volume is in that top 1%. So I think both approaches are good and valuable from different perspectives and different sides of like what you're trying to accomplish as a gym and as a student. I also think that people benefit more at White Belt from a consistent, mapped more cookie cutter game plan and then learning how to expand that game out. So like our gym has kind of a cookie cutter White Belt game plan that's just like single leg Torriondo, neon belly, mount, arm bar and like all my White Belt look the same. But by the time they're you know, four months into Blue Belt, they've generally diverged because I encourage them to then explore from that and so on. So I think that a little bit of that direction at the beginning is always going to be good if people are going to compete because it's going to give them more confidence to compete. It's going to give them more success because they're putting reps into this path that they're then comfortable with. But overall, I don't want them I because like my gym is not focused on building a specific cookie cutter game plan. I don't want them to spend all their time in that. I want them to graduate from that into something a little more personalized and more dynamic as soon as possible. But if your goal is we are going to turn out world champions, then I think that cookie cutter approach is probably more successful at doing that because it does just to give your whole gym so many more hours in the more narrow focus, which means you can troubleshoot all of the things that can go wrong within that focus. You learn how to funnel back into that focus and you have then if you and your opponent both have 500 hours of jujitsu your 500 hours is so much more targeted and so much more valuable than your opponents 500 hours. And if as an entire gym, you've got like the whole collective doing that, then that 500 hours is even further refined. And so I think that is definitely an incredibly effective way as a gym to build world champions if you have like all the ingredients for that. And a lot of that is just the number of people that you can pull into your gym and process through it because a lot of times if your gym is like that, you're going to fail because people aren't going to enjoy it. And the number one thing that will keep people coming into the gym is that they enjoy being there. And so you have to make sure that either your name or your reputation or something about your gym is keeping enough people coming into it that you're able to filter out the people for whom your system works really well so that you can keep them doing that. Otherwise, you have three dudes in your gym who like that and then you got a business. Right? So I think the other approach is the Lamar generic approach. It's easier to just get your regular people in the gym who are gonna have fun But you are never going to be as successful as a gym doing that as you are if your whole gym is laser-focused on one path. Well, that's all great, man I really appreciate this and like we talked about earlier This is something we're gonna dig into a lot deeper. I think we'll probably have some more content coming up on this soon Tell me what you're thinking in terms of putting together some game plan and content I wanted to give a little bit of bonus content at the end of this one So for anybody who has heard this whole thing and is like well, I don't have a game plan What do you do? I thought this was gonna? Where's my game plan? Here's how you build a game plan and then I'll talk about what I'm gonna do to help everybody continue to get build game plans So the first thing that you do in a build a game plan is determine what you do now without thinking So just go into the gym next time grab a partner walk up to them take whatever natural grips that you want to take Do whatever your next action is be it pull guard or go for a take down proceed in to going from wherever you land there to a Dominant position either passing the guard or sweeping figure out what dominant position that is Locate a submission that you can execute without any further transitions execute that submission do that again Do that a third time and if you feel comfortable with it That's your new game practice that for the next three months, right? So that's how we put together a stick figure shell of a game It's just what do you naturally do from this and we'll talk about kind of building from that later on probably in more episodes now as Terms of like content that I'm gonna be doing we've talked about this with some of the folks in the discord and there is some interest So I'm gonna start putting together some mini game plans. So these are little it's just like my $15 Instructionals they're gonna be little 45 minute to an hour things that start from a specific hub position The first one's probably gonna be from single leg X guard and it's gonna be no-key focused and it's gonna be how to get to that position from Standing how to get to that position from various other guards how to recover to that position from bad positions How to sweep from that position and then how to follow up that sweep into a guard pass and a submission And then how to like continually funnel back into that line and it will have Techniques demonstrated will explain the funneling and stuff like that and I have that plan for several other positions and positional hubs that will bring you in and out of these particular zones Regardless of what your opponents do and I'm intending to put together through four of those right now And then if as I get requests for new positions or new hubs We're gonna put together more of them, but it will give people a good stick figure example With how to deal with common responses to a lot of the things that are gonna happen in these from just some of the The games and the positional hubs that I've used and taught over the years that I think people will enjoy and find useful Nice amazing man. Well as always I appreciate it if people are in the Covington, Georgia area And they want to train with you how do they do that? So the easiest ways to show up at the gym on any of our scheduled classes which our class schedule has expanded So we have some midday classes and stuff like that now But if you hit our website at apexconures.com you can see our up-to-date scheduling our up-to-date pricing Everything's right there on the website feel free drop in anytime and train with us We love visitors. There is no drop in fee ever So we we would love to have people you can also come and just talk shit at me on Reddit I am Ken Tanen obviously. I am still occasionally doing free reviews if you hit me up on Reddit every once in a while too But most of that stuff now goes through the min-to-models now that I've got my stuff for a while my system was broken in my It kept freezing when I was doing reviews and I got that fixed finally anyways We also have our Instagram and stuff the more important Instagram now is the dog would hollow sheep Instagram where you can see pictures of our sheep Sounds important. I mean if your gym doesn't have farm animals Is it really a high-class jujitsu gym? I mean no Obviously it's at best to be minus gym absolutely amazing man Well, I will link all of that in the show notes. I'll also link to our stuff. It's all at bgjmentalmodels.com podcast is free full-length episodes like this plus many episodes plus our newsletter So do make sure you get those and if you want to gain a level with us at bgjmentalmodels premium That's the world's largest audio library of educational jujitsu content your first week is free I'll save you the whole pitch But that's all at bgjmentalmodels.com So again links to all of this in the show notes But Josh my friend as always thank you so much for this. I thought this is a cool chat really interesting topic I think people of all levels will get some value out of this for beginners because they've probably never heard this conversation before But even for more experienced people it's always cool to get an extra Philosophical look at what is a game plan in jiu-jitsu. So thank you as always for doing this. No problem I enjoyed it. I feel like I could keep talking about this one for a lot longer really because it's just one of those things that isn't Addressed very often in the sport. Yeah, last time we talked about game planning It was so extensive. We actually made a seven-part course for it I think on our premium service. I'd love to actually explore that with you as well So that's probably something we'll do at some point But thanks as always man and thanks to the listeners as well. Appreciate you too. Talk to you soon