Ep. 408: Intention-Led Jiu-Jitsu, feat. Rob Cole

Have you ever wanted to know more about the hidden history of Jiu Jitsu in America, including details even most experts don't know, if so you should sign up for BJJ Metal Models Premium. Hi, I'm Jeff Shaw, I'm a professor at Western Washington University where I teach a history of martial arts class, and I'm also the head instructor at Bellingham BJJ. BJJ Metal Models Premium will give you access to my course, this is why we fight a history of Jiu Jitsu in America, which is 12 classes, including a bunch of research that you can't get anywhere else. You can get it for free for the first week and start learning right away, plus you'll get access to a bunch of other amazing courses by people like Emily Kwak, Dominika Olinita, Stefan Kesting, and other experts that I learn a ton from. So if you are interested, BJJ Metal Models Premium is your way to go. Hey everybody, welcome back to BJJ Metal Models. Hi, I'm Steve Guan, and BJJ Metal Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent Jiu Jitsu approach. And I'm here today with a first timer, but one who comes with a reputation, he's been recommended repeatedly by folks in our community, so I'm glad to finally get him on, I've got Rob Cole on the line. How are you doing, Rob? Good, Steve. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Happy to have you here. Now, we've got an interesting slant here, I think, for a topic, and we'll get to that in a second. But before we do, do you want to give everyone a quick intro? Yeah, name is Rob Cole, I've been doing martial arts for 35 plus years now, grappling focused for 25 plus of those, did a lot of martial arts over the years, karate, jikundo, all that stuff, and then I got into MMA, submission fighting with Frank Shamrock, then got my purple bell from Eddie Bravo, then I finally decided I want to learn some key stuff, did that for about five, six years, got my black belt and that. Now I pretty much exclusively do no ghee again, I just kind of go back and forward to try to learn as much as I can, and I coach at our Ascension Appletics in Connecticut. And I follow the ecological dynamics framework, and that's how I design and run my practice. So yeah, that's pretty much the fast, the fast, the boring. Thanks, Rob. That's awesome. Well, where people might know you from is your work on the eco stuff, especially what you've done in that community. I know that you're an advocate for the ecological approach. And you've got a specific angle that you like to talk about here. You call it the intention let approach. And I want to spend the episode talking about that. Before we do though, I think we've got to bring everyone up to speed. Now most people who listen to this probably are at least acquainted with eco. I'm presuming they have heard the term and probably have some cursory understanding of what it is. We've done much more in depth chats specifically about the ecological approach. And I'll put some links in the show notes to some of our earlier episodes with Greg Sodders and Rob Gray, if people want to check that out and go it more in depth. That's not entirely the focus of this conversation though, but I think we'd be doing a disservice if we didn't give a quick primer. I know that you give a lot of eco made easy seminars for people. And that I think is something that the world is probably much in need of. How do you explain eco from the made easy standpoint? Like what is eco and how do you bring it into a light where lay people who are hearing about it from the first time can understand it? Yeah, it's just a ecological dynamics to make it simple like what I like to talk about this. It is a combination of ecological psychology and dynamical systems theory. Those are the two main frameworks theories that we're following. So which basically means for us coaches or people involved in this is you have to kind of make two assumptions or two beliefs when you view practice. So from the ecological psychology framework is that perception is direct, which basically means the information is provided in the environment. It's not being from the top down from a coach telling you this is what you need to know. This is how you do it. It's like persons in front of you, the information is already present and we're going to work with that. We're going to work with that information we're perceiving directly, right? It's when two buy, you know, you can't do grappling by yourself, you know, I'm sure you could try. But you want to go against another person. So you're going to get that information and people talk about affordances. You'll hear that. So basically opportunities for action. So we're perceiving affordances. We're perceiving opportunities for action when we're engaging this grappling sport. So that's this on that side easy that that's just perception is direct in directly mean, you know, from the traditional side or information crossing the side. We're on the coach providing you with information. This is what you need to do. It's kind of like, you know, interface that your brain's like a computer and where you're having all these things in our head going on. We're just talking about the information's in the environment. We're going to perceive that directly and then we're going to act upon that. And then the other side, which is the dynamical system theory as you kind of have to believe in self organization. So that means everybody has all their different strengths of weaknesses and you're, you know, you put something into the system. It's going to organize around what you are on shorter, somebody's taller, longer legs. Maybe they're better up putting triangles on this way. They have different, you know, everybody talks about their details and it's not the same for everybody. So when you look, when as a coach, if I'm looking at a practice and I'm looking through that lens, it's just the theory, like ecological dynamics, so that it's just a science, how they explain movement. That's just so you could say everything is ecological. That this means how science, that scientist trying to explain it compared to how information crosses an approach would explain it. I'm looking at a practice through that lens. If I think perception is direct and I believe in self organization, that's going to help me guide and design my practice. So it's like my starting point, our starting point is over here through that lens. We're looking perception is direct information in the environment and we look at self organization, you know, people interacting and your body organizing around the task and goals and all that stuff, compared to information processing, which looks at a practice differently. They look at perfect technique, this is how you need to do it. So that's why you'll get into these debates between these people arguing about that, but they're arguing from two, they're two contradictory theories. So I'm just looking at a practice through that lens. And if I have that as my lens, I'm going to design my practice way different than somebody who views it from the other side. So that's kind of where the split is. It's just you're looking at it completely different. So you have to make those assumptions. So now that kind of explains the logical dynamics part. If you have any questions on that, I like what I'm trying to say on that. I'm sensitive to the fact that when we talk about ecological dynamics, there's a lot of new terminology that gets presented here and it's easy to get lost in the reads. I think sometimes when people hear this, they just think there is this massive amount of assumed knowledge that you need to have. So I've always been interested in coming up with a way to explain this that strips that away. The way that I like to explain eco to people is basically think of that scene in the Matrix where Neo downloads or uploads Kung Fu into his brain and suddenly he learns that basically what eco tells us is that doesn't work. And I think we all intuitively know that, right? You can't just download ideas from someone else into your brain and then immediately be able to turn that into a motor skill like Jiu Jitsu, it just doesn't work. You have to actually do the thing. That's how your body learns and operates. And the old metaphor that people often use and you brought this up is the brain is like a computer and that's where all of the thinking happens. And so when you learn that all happens in your brain and it's a very deliberate cognitive activity, however, what ecological dynamics teaches us is that the body has a part in that too. It is ultimately you doing things and experiencing the world around you. That is how you learn. Like I can't just sit here and I'm aware of the irony, but I can't just sit here and talk to somebody about Jiu Jitsu and then have them go and become a black belt like the next day. You don't learn that way, you actually ultimately have to go and do it. And this matters because although it probably sounds non-controversial, you know, a lot of people will listen to this and think, well, of course, that makes sense. If you actually look at the way that a lot of people teach, they don't teach like that. They still devote a substantial amount of their class to everyone sits around in a circle and listens to the instructor Prattle on about where to put their leg and where to put their arm and the 10 steps to do the perfect triangle choke. It is intuitively how we communicate and it makes sense and it's not a complete waste of time, but the reality is you simply cannot actually learn to do a triangle choke properly by sitting there and listening to someone. So the goal of an ecological dynamics class is get the body more involved, get more reps in, make sure the body is doing the learning in addition to just hearing the concepts. Is that a fair way to explain this like a completely 101 level or have I missed anything important? Like we're just saying, there's knowledge about which is all the information if we want to sit and talk about this, we're talking about Jiu Jitsu, we're talking about movement. That's knowledge about and then there's knowledge of what can you actually do? Can you take this stuff and use it against another person that's resisting? So there'll be things, oh, don't watch instructions, don't watch this, you can never watch anybody do a movement. No, that's all fine. That's all knowledge about, you know, I'll still watch stuff and do this here and there. Now I kind of look at it a little differently when designing something, but there's still information to get. But if we have people showing up to practice, I need to get them doing that stuff and engaging in that, you know, like a lot of instructors, you know, I've done it in the past. We all have, we all really came from that. We want to talk about our knowledge about and then we think, okay, my knowledge about, I will take it, I will give it to you and now it's your knowledge about it and now you go apply it. And then it's just, if you're looking at that lens of information processing, I'm just going to give you as much information as I can and I'm going to tell you to go do it and do it just like that. Where if I look at it from the other lens from the ecological dynamics lens, I'm going to say, okay, my knowledge about is for me to help me design to get you engaging in this stuff. my knowledge about my understanding of grappling, my understanding of jujitsu, whatever you're wrestling, whatever you want to do and I'm going to design these environments for you based on that and then I'm going to get you engaging in it and I'm going to get you to get that knowledge of and we know people can be really good. Without knowing any names, any of this, not saying they don't need to learn that, they could go do that on their own time. They could go do that scrolling Instagram on YouTube and all that stuff. But if you show up to my practice, I'm not going to give you all this information all the time and just take away that live movement. You know, we have people that are so good and they don't understand anything about all the terms and the names and and all these different things we throw around the five different names for a saddle or a Aussie and all that. That's irrelevant when you're grabbing another person, but you know throughout history, the traditional information processing approaches, I'm going to give you the names, the more I give you, the more you'll know, you'll understand it better and then it'll apply in practice. We're saying, don't look at it through that lens. Let's actually get people involved. Let's have some context. Let's have some them understand that. That doesn't mean you can never tell anybody anything or showing anything. Why do they want to know that? Why would they do that? And how are we going to actually apply that in a practice? So it's just looking at classes very differently and that's why I kind of don't, you know, this will be my controversial take. I don't really prescribe to there's a, you know, Ed quote, hybrid approach where you're combining both because there are two completely contradictory theories. So what's your starting point? So if your starting point is ecological dynamics framework, you won't default to the things that the information processing people do. And if you have a traditional mindset approach or information, that's your starting point. So you won't go to the other side and I'm not saying they're wrong. I'm not going to sit here and go, the Mendez brothers don't know what they're doing. Data her and these guys don't know what they're doing. They obviously produce really good people. We're just looking at it differently and say, hey, this works also. Let's explore this. We've done the exploration and all that other stuff. We can do it on this end, too. And, you know, people can get good just like that. They can understand that. And to me, it's more fun, it's more live, it's more engaging. And that's why it's like through myself and completely that way, once I started trying this. And I'm like, okay, I've been doing grappling for 20 years at the time. And I was one of the earlier adopters, like five, six years ago, whenever something like grain came out of Rob Gray talking about it, I'm like, all right, this makes sense because this kind of how I kind of thought without any a framework and it kind of meshed in perfectly. And I'm like, all right, let me go all in with that. And I'm going to start reading. I'm going to start trying. I'm going to mess up my practices. I'm going to do everything I can to try to get this. And then it's this going to keep for progressing. It's not something you just get from a DVD. And you go, all right, I got it. I'm ecological dynamic coach. I got it. I'm in. It's a process, you know, as coaches, if we expect people to go through that trial and error process to learn, we're going to have to go through it also in my opinion. I think people get led astray with eco is it feels sometimes like the different camps are talking over each other and not really addressing the root of what's being said true eco proponents will often say that it's eco or bust and everything is eco. And that's just a way that it is and other theories are invalid, which understandably triggers and upsets other people if they feel like they're on the receiving end of that. And then you also have people who will attack eco and say that well, you can't teach, you know, if you're not allowed to watch instructions or explain techniques or anything, well, that's also not what eco is saying either. The way that I view it is that look, you need both of these approaches. They're just not for the same job. I mean, it should be intuitive that we need to be able to talk about jujitsu, because if we banned people from talking about jujitsu at all and said, okay, full true quote unquote eco, you have to learn it all by yourself. The whole instruction provided, of course, it's going to take forever for people to learn anything if they do it all. But on the other hand, we should also intuitively understand that if you just sit around watching instructions all day and you never train, you'll learn a lot about jujitsu, but you won't be able to actually do it. And these two things are different activities. The whole point of watching an instructional and talking to people about jujitsu is idea exchange. And the whole point of training is building those skills yourself. And really the job of a coach is to translate from one layer to another. And that's ultimately, I think, where the skill of the coach comes in is, how can they take this massive influx of information that's out there and turn it into something in the classroom that actually provides skill? Because if the instructor is just parroting talking points from an instructional that they saw, then what's the point of the class? People could just watch the instructional. A good instructor is going to be able to take that knowledge and turn it into actionable games. They get the body involved so that people can actually do this stuff because that's where the skill development comes into play. And that doesn't mean that talking about or understanding the concepts is useless or lacks value. It just means that while you're in the classroom, you're not going to learn fine motor skills by talking your way through the problem. I think, again, with jujitsu, a sport that attracts so many analytically minded people, we often want to think our way out of things. We want to perceive this as being a sport for intellectuals. But at the end of the day, it is still a sport and you learn by doing. So I feel sometimes like when people say things like, well, ecological dynamics cannot coexist with a classical method. Like sometimes that's sort of needlessly provocative because people will interpret that as meaning you can't talk about or teach jujitsu or watch instructions. And that's not really what it's saying. It's just saying this is how we believe the body internalizes movement and lessons. I think these things can coexist. It's just that people kind of misunderstand how they fit together. That is at least how I like to look at things. So yeah, when I'm looking at stuff, like I can talk to you jujitsu all day with people, I go to the Globetrotter camps and this and that, we'll just talk and talk and talk about stuff. And then in the practice, but my question is always I, you know, if you're a concept person, if you're this, you're that. My thing is always I'll look at these long posts from somebody and I'll go, okay, that's great. Sounds great. But how do you train it? That's always my question. How do you train it? Like I said, I don't teach a class. I run a practice. I want people to engage in this. And if you want to do the extra work of learning about it, talking about it, doing all that. Do that. Yeah, outside of the classroom, you know, like we're going to, you showed up to train and we're going to train. I don't talk about any of this stuff while I'm coaching people. I don't explain all the theory and all this other stuff. We get in, we have the way we're going to go for me, you know, maybe to be, I'm seeing as more of a purest, you know, if you want to call it, because that's what I follow. I believe I make those assumptions and perception and self-organization. And then I'm going to go with that and that's going to be my starting point. And that's kind of kind of be my guide. So I'm going from that perspective. So there's a thing, you know, I won't say you can mix and match them. You know, they might, and people may disagree and that's okay if they do. For me, I am not doing that because I'm following what I believe works for motor learning and how to design practice. And then we take that ecological dynamics part, which is just the lens, the lens of which we look to me, the only thing that makes a practice in quotes eco is how the coach views practice. The science behind it, how people learn, how people move. There's a lot of smart people trying to figure that out on the information processing side and the ecological dynamics side. I want to run this practice and I want people to get better. So they want to come to me and learn how to grapple. They're going to be grappling and we're going to learn it. And then we have methods to get there because the methods are the most important part. We could talk about the science all day, but the method when you show up to my class, what are we going to do? How am I going to run a practice and how am I going to get you engaged in grappling and we have a couple methods to do that. And then that's, and they kind of align with the other way. So if you, you have ecological dynamics perspective, you're probably not going to dead drill things. It just doesn't work that way in my opinion because I'm looking at it completely different. So when we get into the practice room, what are we going to use? We're going to be trained when approached mostly. We're going to use live rounds. We're going to use maybe an intention-led approach as supplemental. We're going to do stuff like that. And we're going to always engage in that practice based on through that lens of how the coach views learning guides practice and decides practice. Well, Rob, with the explanations out of the way, I think we can probably get into your unique take on things. You talked to me about the intention-led approach. And I would love to hear your explanation of what that is and how this comes across when you're teaching. Okay. So, yeah. So first, you know, just to break it up, we have the constraint-led approach because it's good to know why we're going down this process. Because everybody always talks about what tools are we using? How are we getting this thing? So the constraint-led approach is currently the main way people are designing practice. You know, the constraint-led approach, very simply, it has four main principles. You know, you can actually, you know, read about this, you know, keep David's, Ian Renshaw, they have a book to constraint-led approach. Awesome book. Go read it. It breaks it down. It's not too crazy. It's just talking about training method, the training method of the constraint-led approach. And there's four main principles. There's session intention, which is just what do we intend to do with this game? What are we going to do in this practice? Then we have representative learning design. Does it mimic the live environment? Does it look like what grappling we believe to be? And then you have constraint to afford. Now, that's the key when to look out because it's the constraint-led approach. So, constraint to afford just means we're breaking down an environment and we're kind of getting you towards an attentional focus. We're constrain attention where you're going to look for this search space to afford. which just means opportunities for action. That's all that is. We're constraining to afford, and then we have repetition without repetition, which is just we're in that. We're doing it over and over again, and it's not static wrote repetition. So that's the constraint-let approach. That's the main way people are designing practices and their activities. Now, what I've been playing a bit more recently as a supplemental process is I heard, there's a new ecological dynamics for sport book by I could really name the Steve M. Smith, and he had a little blurb, and he mentioned constraint-let approach, intention-let approach, and affordance-let approach. I won't get into that one much 'cause I don't really think it's different, but the intention-let approach, so I was looking at that and I was like, "Huh, what does that mean to me running a practice "as a grappling coach?" And, you know, for a couple years now, I've made some reels about, do you consider pass or sweep a constraint-let approach? And then some people believe that it isn't, and some people do what it does. And I go, "Okay, well, let's look at pass or sweep." Very simple, all judges who coaches know this, one person's passing, the other person's trying the sweep. And they go, "Of course, that's a constraint-let approach "because you're constraining the environment." Yes, it has constraints. But are you constraining to afford this different search space? All you're doing is guiding attention in that, in my opinion, in pass or sweep. So, what would an intention-let approach be? It has session intention. Very simple, one person's trying the pass, the other person's trying to sweep, or come up on top. Is it representative learning desire? Yes, 'cause it mimics what we do in grappling all the time. And it has repetition without repetition. There's no right way to do it, where we're playing in the live environment, and we're going. But to me, it doesn't constrain to afford. That's to me more of a shell game. It's intention-let, and then we could take that and go, "Okay, so what else could be intention-let?" If we're just playing a take-down game, I'm trying to take you down to the ground, you're trying to take me down to the ground. I have intention, and that will, that intention will lead to attention of how to get that person down. Not telling them where to look for it, but it's there. Whereas a constraint-let approach is more if you give them their attention, and it leads into intention. I hope that we can distinguish between attention and intention in my word sometimes, maybe my accent or something. I don't want them to sound the same, 'cause they're different. But it's just a different way, 'cause we're always in that loop of, I have the intention of getting doing something, and then I have focuses of attention. Then it leads to a tendency, it's like a loop, like the perception acting coupling, we always talk about an ecological dynamics. There's always that interplay. So a intention-led activity, intention is the driver, where constraint-let approach, the constraints are the driver for the learner, if that makes sense. - I think so, and I've got some thoughts to add on it, but I'm just mindful of the fact that there's a lot of new terminology here. Do you want to just once again recap, give us a quick explanation of attention versus intention, and what these two mean differently. - So, high set, let's make it simple, say, pass or sweep, right? Have zero to top player, you're trying to pass my guard, right? You're trying to get by my legs, you get to my chest, or whatever, complete to pass. That is your intention of passing, some of you have your intention of passing. Now, I gave you no attention. I didn't say, keep the feet away from me, I want you to, you know, pin the, you know, control the knees, I want you to maintain control the hips. Those are giving you focuses of attention. So, if I told you, hey, we're playing this passing game, and you can't put your knees on the mat, that's gonna force you to not pass on your knees. You're gonna look to go around, or gonna go look to this. If I tell you, once you get inside the leg, I want you to maintain control at that inside space, with your shin, or try to get your knee to the mat. I'm getting you focuses of attention, which lead to the intention of passing, where if I play something like pastor sweep, the other way, I'm just giving you intention. It works better for more people that kind of have been playing for a while, but that's just like a very generic way. I personally don't play pastor sweep much, 'cause I feel it lacks a lot, but I just make it easy for people to understand to try to differentiate between intention and an attention lead, between intention and constraints. - It's more broader. - An attention lead would be more broader. - I see. So would it be fair to say that when we're talking about intention, we're really talking about goals. Like what is your goal, and how do we achieve that? Whereas attention might be more about the specific descriptions and the details. - What is your goal? What is your direction? How are you trying to get to that end goal? Like, and I've been throwing this throughout my head as if we've been going through this. The last couple I've been going deeper and deeper into the intention lead stuff. And I'm always trying to look at sports, how things be merged, how the different styles come out. And basically, they're always, and I put this question on my Instagram another day, I haven't responded with the real yet. And I said, throughout human history, in sports, what is the number one driver of behavior? And I wanted to hear people's answers. So in every sport, what drives behavior? 'Cause that's what we're trying to do as a coach. We're trying to drive behavior, change behavior. From any, from eco, or if we're in diakita person, when you grab the wrist, not that wrist, the other wrist, they're trying to get the behavior of, what do you do when somebody grabs your wrist? That's all we're trying to do as a coach. So what is the number one thing in sports throughout history that drives behavior? It's the rules of the sport, right? That's why sports exist, 'cause of the rules, the constraints. And the main rule of any sport is winning, right? For people who play sports, you wanna win that game. That is the number one driver of intention in sports is the win condition. So if we know that, and we're trying to get people to that behavior, we're gonna have to put that into the games. We're gonna have to make that a thing where people are have a direction to go. What is the end goal? What is the win condition? These are intentional drivers, and then attention will come from that. And then we can attack it from a multitude of ways. We could go intention led, we could go constraint led, we can play all different types of things. So I've just been developing a whole bunch of different ways to get through that. That may be a little CLA, may not, but they all follow that ecological dynamics umbrella. They fall under that. So I'm glad we're talking about this because I've been trying to get a discussion going on the topic of intention for a while. It's something that so many coaches talk about, the importance of training with intention. And intuitively, I think we understand what that means, but once you start trying to dissect it, it's actually hard to come up with a consistent definition for what it means to train with intention. And I think you bring up a good example. It is basically training with a goals focus, rather than a details focus. This does manifest all the time. Specifically, this is my main criticism with the so-called traditional approach to teaching class. And for people who haven't heard me speak much about this before, I simply mean the standard practice of when you go to class, your coach has three moves of the day and they sit down and for five minutes, they walk you through step by step, all of the moves, all of the steps of the move, while you sit there and you watch, and then you get like two minutes each to go and practice it. And then you come back and he gives you the next move and he explains it, and then you get two minutes to practice it. And what lines up happening, at least from what I've seen, is the sessions devolve into people trying to pair it and mimic. And they're just so focused on trying to get the individual steps precisely like the coach said that they sometimes distract from the goal. And I think we've all seen this where, I mean, as an example, have you ever tried to put a triangle on someone? And it feels like you're doing the steps exactly as your coach taught you, but you know you don't have the triangle. And the other person can easily post you out and pass you, even though you quote unquote, followed the steps perfectly. I think that's a good example of where maybe you got so focused on the details that you forgot the big picture goal, which is like we're doing this to break the person's posture. We're trying to keep them down. And sometimes it ain't gonna look pretty. It ain't gonna look exactly like the coach said it was gonna look, but you have to adjust based on the things that your opponent does. You have to react to them. And that means it will never truly look exactly the same. So I think that's the distinction, at least to me, between following the steps, doing things at an attention level versus focusing on the broader intention, which is you've got the goal. You're moving towards the goal, but how you get there, the steps you take might vary a little bit each time. - Yeah, if you're an ecological dynamics coach or information processing, if you wanna make people better, you're gonna make them train intentional. It's like you look at the Mendes brothers and you look at their practices. You're like, oh man, that is some intention. Any coach, when they're training athlete, you look at wrestlers, you look at this. That coach is getting them to train intentionally. That is your, even if I do a lot of strength and conditioning stuff also. And you know, the person, oh, I go to the gym two, three times a week, they do their same amount of reps, their same amount of weight all the time. They go through the motions. They're not training intentionally enough. That the lowest return, this is why I have a problem with static drilling and wrote repetition, especially done in a traditional way. You say the three technique through this and that. It, the return on the investment on that of just going through the motions is so low. That's why a lot of the ecological dynamics people like, oh, drilling is useless. Yeah, the majority of drilling, yes, is pretty crap. You know, it's not great 'cause it's not intentional at all. And I remember I was at one of the Gluttrotter camps and one of the coaches there. He ran like a drilling class 'cause he came from a wrestling background. And he had these people working, right? They were going, going, going. I go, dude, we completely disagree in theory 'cause he follows like Andrew Syriksen, peak that type of book, deliberate practice. I go, but what we do is we meet at intention. And that is such a strong thing to do. If you could get people to train intentionally, that doesn't mean go as hard as you can and let's crack each other around and break. No, that's not it. Are you intentional? In your mind, move it. That's what you're going to get the most bang for your buck when you show up to practice. So a lot of times, you know, a lot of people, you know, hobbyists generally are not going to be good as competitors, right? Because competitors are training more, they're probably training more intentional. But in that hobbyist practice, you can still make the practice very intentional and have people learn, have people have fun. It's just you have to know how to structure that practice. You know, I've been a part of so many practices in the past, like you're saying, three techniques, you start doing some leg drags and then you're kind of going through the motions and then you see people talking on the side, this and that. There is no intention in that. So how are you getting better at anything at that? What are you really actually doing? And everybody's like, oh, I'm kind of tired of us. You go, all right, guys, we're going to start rolling and everybody perks up, right? And they all want to start going because it's intentional. It has some type of thing we could do. So it's such a huge driver of behavior that wire. So if we know that, let's leverage that and use that in designing practice. Then we have intention and then the half and focus of attention. Our focus of attention is through the constraint, let approach where maybe the information processing is the attention of all the right details, which I think you lose a lot when you do it that way because when we're doing like these dead reps and this and that, to me, that's just a whole bunch of false positives. So you get a new person, they drill that arm bar 50 times and it works and quotes every time again, somebody not resisting. And then we take them, throw them into sparring at the end. And then they just did it 50 times in a work and now they can't pull it off once. So all those false positives became real negatives. So let's try to get there with people and have them actually engage, go through the trial and get those real reps, that repetition without repetition, get that success, get it intentionally. It's sticky. It goes with them more and then they can actually do it in the live practice because they've already done it all clustered at the constraint, let approach or the intention let approach, whichever one you're you're using at the time. But intention, huge, huge impact on people's training. Something that you mentioned was that this isn't inherently anything to do with eco. And that definitely jives with my practice. I know coaches who don't like, purport to follow the ecological approach at all. In fact, I know coaches who don't even know what eco is and they still use intention based training. It's really about goal setting in psychology in a lot of ways and focusing on the big picture objectives like you said about what we're trying to achieve when we grapple versus the individual specifics that might vary. And I know that this probably sounds like one of those well duh moments. But if you look at the way that most people teach their classes and you were to actually dissect and try to figure out, okay, what percentage of this class is actually being taught with intention? It's actually remarkably low. And again, I'm going to pick on it again. And maybe this is just me setting up a straw man. But I think most people can relate. If you think of the way that most jujitsu classes are kind of run, it's probably broken up into three parts. You come in and you do some degree of warm up. Maybe it's jujitsu related. Maybe it's just jumping jacks and calisthenics. Then the instructor sits around and shows moves and everyone practices for a few moments. And then you roll afterwards. And how much of that is really with the deliberate intention of teaching whatever the instructor wants to teach because my experience has been that the stuff in the warm up usually has nothing to do with the techniques being shown. In fact, in many cases, a lot of it has nothing to do with jujitsu at all. The last time I dropped into someone's gym, they had me warm up by running up and down the mat and it's like, Hey, that's great. Get my workout in for the day. It doesn't teach me anything to do with jujitsu. Then when you actually do the show and tell portion of the move where the instructor sits down and walks you through stuff, first of all, a tremendous amount of that is just dead air, right? That's a lot of time when the athletes in the room are sitting there doing nothing. And as a coach, you always want to minimize dead air time in the room when I watch wrestling practice. This is one of the big things I notice about them. They try to keep dead air to as little as possible. Man, I've seen this with my kid. I remember when she did soccer. I was frustrated because they had it organized in such a way that only one kid could do stuff at a time. And so as a result, most kids were spending 80, 90% of the class just sitting there waiting for the turn, complete waste of time. And then even when you do get to do your rep, it's against a non-resisting opponent a lot of the time or not a not an authentically resisting opponent. And that means that you're not really getting true training. And then afterwards, you get the part that everyone actually wants to do, which is get live rolling. That's great. It's fun. But if it's not specifically tailored around learning the lesson of the day, people are just going to drift off into whatever they want to do anyway, right? So, okay, cool. We came in and we wanted to learn omopladas today. Well, if we open roll and we never have a situation where the omoplada manifests, what have you actually learned? Maybe you have broadly improved your Jiu Jitsu here and there just by luck by having got reps in and doing some practice, but you certainly haven't worked on the stuff that you were supposed to do today. So that, I think, is an example of how even the most standard, obvious way of structuring at Jiu Jitsu class, yeah, there's stuff happening. And I'm not going to say you don't learn, but it's not optimized around trying to get the instructor's lesson through to the students. Whereas an intention-led class, even if it is not ecological in any way, shape, or form, as long as you're constantly driving back to the lesson of the day that you're trying to teach, I think your students are going to be better off. Well, just look at that example you gave, right? So, tradition, you know, everybody says, all that never happens. No, these classes are still running strong and like this, the warm up to this, not touching another body, not doing anything, maybe Jiu Jitsu, there's no intention in that, right? There's no focus of attention or intention. All right, now we drill, now we do our things, no intentional focus whatsoever. This and that, then you go roll. The only people that are really rolling with intentions are the ones that want to do it that way. And some are just kind of messing around. They're kind of playing this and that's like, okay, if you want to do that, that's great. And you're just showing up to have a good time. But you probably won't get better that way, at least at a rate that you want. And to me, you know, and then no thing is like, oh, man, I just want to show up and train and have fun. Where is getting better or not with having fun? To me, if people are getting better, they're sweating and they're having fun, you can make it fun for them. They're going to learn some stuff. And once more fun, then learning stuff and actually getting better at the thing you're showing up to do, it's just like, we can leverage this as coaches. And I've been, you know, had a lot of coaches and people I've gone classes and they're just mailing in, right? And then sometimes there's people that are really like, they're dialed in this snap, but then they still talk way too much, show too much, go too much. It doesn't have that focus. And then now let's apply that. And then now how you view practice, whether you're a traditional coach or ecological dammit next coach, you're going to go based off that intention that you want. And I think it's easier for the person who follows this framework to do it because it's already baked in. The constraint let approach has intention baked in. It's constraint led, but the session intention moves there. The intention let approach intention is the main driver. So when I first started going down this path, like a lot of people, they took games from other people and that's a great way to start. And I'm not knocking it. But students, I started doing that in the beginning. And I'm like, I'm not going to use anybody's games. I'm not really going to do it. I did a couple of firsts, just understand. And I'm going to try to figure out what this is. And then, you know, people started talking a little, what's your framework? How are you going to, you know, I hear these people talking different coaches and I go, OK, I want to understand what grappling is. So I said, OK, I need intention. And to me, what is grappling, but intention based? So how can I make that in leverage it? So that's when I kind of came up with stall from wrestling. I watch a lot of wrestling. If you want to get better at grappling, stop watching jujitsu. Watch folks style wrestling, freestyle, Greco, all the different arts because we're all just grappling. And they're really good at doing their stuff. I was watching a lot of college wrestling. And I'm like, OK, they have neutral top and bottom. So we have the neutral phase, which is standing. And you can even have a neutral phase, say 50/50. Nobody has the advantage. We have a neutral phase. We have a top phase, top or behind or bottom. We always have intention in each phase. And that's how I started deciding my practice. So everything is grip fighting. Everything is hand fighting. You can't grapple without grabbing people, right? So that's already part of it. You never see classes led by grip fighting very rarely to throw away people get bored and this and that. Show me the move. Show me this. No, we should always be grip fighting. We should always be battling over that because that's what's always happening. That's why wrestling is really good with that. They're always grip fighting. So we have the neutral state. And what are we doing when we're grip fighting in any hand or foot? We either looking for inside position or a superior angle. That's all pretty much grip fighting is. Even if you're playing Dalai Hiva on the foreground, you're looking for that inside position or you're trying to get that angle to maybe go to the back, go underneath. You need that angle. You're not playing flat on your back. So inside position or superior angle, an arm drag, inside position to the superior angle. You get behind them, superior angle. So that's the neutral position. Then we have the top position or behind. What is the intentional job of that top person? Stay on top and hold other person down. That's it. You can't pass anybody's guard if you can't not stay on top. All the passes in the world are going to fail if you keep getting put on your butt or you get getting swept over. So your intention on top is to remain the top player and hold that other person down. Now as a bottom player, I don't distinguish guard, side control, turtle or whatever has anything different. It's just the bottom position. What is the intention of every bottom player to become the top player? That's either sweep, reversible, whatever you want to do or get back to neutral standing. That's all that's ever really happening. When we take submissions out of the thing, this is just a grappling framework. So I bait a neutral top bottom to me as my guide of intention and then every game I design, those jobs, those intention of each of the neutral top and bottom states, those are always happening. If we're in a lake, we're in a lake. If we're both playing 50/50, we could have a shoe doll and rip each other's heels off. Or, say you watch somebody like lack of a giles, he moves to 80/20 or 90/10. That's actually a top position in the leg and hang on there. Because he can raise his hips and other person can't. So there's always neutral top bottom in every state of grappling we do. So that's why that made me help design my practices suit at. So I had to strip down all the grappling I knew, all the techniques I knew and said, let's start from this, let's start from this base of intention. And how can we dole from there? And then that's when everything started coming back together. I think that's fundamentally what the job of the coach is. How do we take the knowledge that is out there in the world and translate it into something that people can do in the class that will help them develop those skills? They might not even know exactly what they're developing. But you as the coach have the job of converting all of that knowledge into an actionable guide that people can follow in class. If you just come in and you just represent the information that's already floating out there, then you as the coach are not really doing all of the legwork that you could be to make the class a productive learning environment. Now maybe tell me a bit about what your class looks like. We've already brought up the counter example of the traditional method and sort of poked holes in it. But what would your class look like? If I gave you say an hour or an hour and a half to teach, walk me through the whole process and what the students wind up doing. Okay, so first thing I do is I got rid of all the warm-ups and all this and that because I want the gains to be part of the warm-up. I want us always to be interacting, right? So I generally start people standing all the time. But we don't go down to the ground. Like a lot of people get scared of wrestling and taking people down to that. So I take that out of the equation. All we're going to do is hand fight. We're just going to hand fight and I'm going to give you some attentional focus. I'm going to say what we're looking to do here. Put more hands on them that they have on you. We're trying to get into an under, inside position or a superior angle. So we'll just start warming up with that. I have a couple different gains I could do depending on the person or what we want to do. Because those people are moving their feet now. They're actually getting warm. They're actually learning out of balance. These are all the things that are important. The technique side is so the last thing I care about is I want these people moving, understanding balance, understanding pressure. So what we do is we put people together usually connected. I could have say you must maintain a collar tie. The other person must maintain one collar tie each. So we're always connected. Now what we're trying to do. I want to either try to get your hand to the mat. Get behind you or get a foot off the mat. We're not taking anybody down. We're just playing in that space. So now they understand and then I'll give them match head height. Use your eye. You know, look straight forward. Try not to look down at the ground because your head's going to get snapped. You could all start learning that as we play. So they're just getting warm. They're moving around. They're hand fighting. They're grabbing. They're grown for different things and all this. As they're doing it, I'll never correct anybody. I don't correct people. All I do is remind them of the attentional focus of the game. What's the intention? What's the focus of attention? I'll throw out those reminders every now and then. Because a lot of people, a lot of gains when they're developed. There's so much that it turns it to this free sparring. That's not what we're doing here. We're constraining it enough to where they could do it. So get people warm. Get people moving. Get people grabbing. And then we'll work on that just to get them going. And then maybe we could go from there and then it depends whatever I want to work on. And I'll try to. I usually like doing stand up games because I think that's the lowest hanging fruit in jujitsu. The majority of jujitsu people just can't wrestle that well because they just don't do it. And so I'm going to get people moving, hand fighting and just hand fighting, just trying to get these conditions. I coach towards conditions. Can I get your hands to the mat? Can I get a foot off the mat? Can I get behind you? And that's all we're going to do first at first. Maybe a couple minutes like that. Then we'll go into another standing game. Then maybe depending on the class who's there, we might work from a single leg. Or we might, I have a game where I have people get down on all fours. And now they'll do that same hand fight on that. And they're trying to get in onto the knee or the foot, get the hip on the mat. So you're teaching takedowns without people actually getting taken down from higher up. We're already down low. I call it takedowns from the ground up. So we'll play from there. So I have them up top doing stuff. Then I have them doing the bottom. And I don't have to worry about people getting slammed around, you know, and getting hurt in the warmups. So then we're doing that. And we'll do some stand up games depending on the room. And then I kind of take that from what I heard with Greg Sauders usually talked about where we're going to work something from standing. We're going to work something from passing, pinning or whatever. And then maybe I'll bring it down to the ground. And then I like to work from, you know, turtle a lot or the bottom. And I do different games like I take a lot from folk style wrestling. I'll do conditions like the top players, not a lot of the locked your hands. So what does that do when I take away your ability to lock your hands? It makes you use your hands and bit for grips. And then you get all the claw rides, the Nelson, the thigh prize and all that stuff from wrestling because you kissed because the grip of grabbing around and locking your hands is so strong. You actually took it out of folk style wrestling because people are just holding on. Then they said, hey, when the people on the ground, you can't hold your hands. So I go, oh, that's a constraint. So let's take that away and let's see what that gets people doing. So now you get all these different things. And then we work a lot of pinning. And then the other person will have to hand fight and we could do passing situations. I'll put people in in different passing situations, not past or sweet, but intentionally focused one you have. And both players have to have jobs. They both have to have intention and they both have to have a tension. It's not just like, hey, let's put somebody in. Hey, get out and escape. That's not enough. They need to know, hey, I need to keep my shoulder off the mat. Hey, I need to keep one hip down, you know, something like that. So we're always cycling through the different ways. And I may have a pre-plan of what I'm going to do, but depending on who's there or how they see it developing. And then I might just go, hey, guys, we're going to try experiment right now. Let's try this and let's work through this. I want them to actually be engaged in the process to sometimes, you know, or say or somebody wanted to go, hey, can we play this game? Because they played it enough. If somebody's asking you to play a game, you know, you probably got a good one. You know, and I'm like, oh, we could go run that. So we'll do that for the whole, you know, we'll do that like 30, 40 minutes. And then maybe we'll free spar or maybe I do, I do some more intention stuff like just first point sparring. Because that's an intention led activity. It's not full sparring yet with everything, but it's not so constrained where they have to stay in that parameters. They're just going based off what I feel a first point is. If somebody's getting ready for competition or whatever. So maybe a pass a win that take down a sweep or whatever type of things and I have a couple other things I do, drawing from other sports, those win conditions. And then we throw that in and then maybe we get the right, we'll always get the roll live at the end. Because that's what people come for. But they're doing that the whole class. And then it's like so easy for them to be getting to the full situation. Because they went through their constraint led approach. They added some intention led stuff. And then now they're full sparring. It's system on multitude of different ways, but I want people engaging in all the phases of grappling, neutral top bottom, standing, passing, pinning, all that all the time. Because they need to engage in that all the time. And then that's where the stealth organization takes over. This is I teach a very general practice. I have kind of like in the striking edition of the role they call it a GPP general physical preparedness. I call it GGP general grappling preparedness. If you have a general class, why are we teaching stuff specific all the time? Why are we having delihiva month? Why are we having all these just things on that? And that's all they're learning for that month. No, you're going to learn something from all areas of grappling. And you will organize and people at longer legs might like the spider guard more if you're a key player or trying to listen to that. The short stocky guy might like butterfly. Who knows, but I'm going to put these into situations. And you're going to start figuring out your own game. It gives you that it's a very empowering thing for the students. I was having a conversation with somebody about this. This way is very deep powering for the coach. It kind of takes the way that I know everything you may listen to me blah blah blah. And it gives the power to the learner. And the learner's like, oh, I have some agency in this. I actually have, it's not just a coach is going to tell me what to do all the time. I can figure out my own game. You'll see these reddit posts all the time. You know, I'm trying to figure out my game. How should I play? It's like, if you're not engaging in that, how are you ever going to figure out what you need to do? Or how are you going to figure out what you're good at? So that's kind of like one of my practices. If I didn't go too far off with that one. Not at all. I like how you brought up the importance of taking the fear out of something. One of the things about Jiu Jitsu is it is so broad and vast that it is completely possible to get decent at Jiu Jitsu without ever touching large areas of the game. And we know this and we see this because there's a lot of people who can be pretty proficient all the way up to black belt. Without ever really being great at certain things like takedowns or what have you. On one hand, that's one of the beautiful things about Jiu Jitsu is just the massive diversity of what it offers. But the flip side of that is we need some degree of intention if we want to develop new skills because otherwise we will just gravitate back towards whatever we've always done in the past that makes us comfortable because we're comfortable there and we feel strong from there and we know what to do from there. And these are all good feelings and as human beings we gravitate towards what makes us comfortable. Whereas to learn something new we have to be willing to put all of that aside and try something that is scary and challenging and new and outside of our comfort zone so that one day it can become something that we're comfortable with. Stand up is a great example of that and I like the example you brought up about putting some constraints around it so that you're not even fully doing complete stand up. You're just doing the grip fighting aspect of this. I am a huge proponent of grip fight only practice. practice. I think then if you take an average room of people and you don't just want to give them one thing, just one thing to make everyone in the room immediately better. Come up with some sort of game or practice where they do nothing but grip fighting. And they will get a crazy workout in, way better than they expected, and they will learn a ton, and they'll get a ton of useful practice. Because in Jiu Jitsu, it's so easy to steer things into the area where you want it to be. If you take away their ability to do that, and you just make them fight in the hotspot, right? In the pocket, then they're gonna get way more practice in that most difficult area. If you take two Jiu Jitsu people and you make them stand up within five seconds, one of them is gonna have pulled guard and taken it to the ground. Because like you said, they don't wanna get thrown. And okay, I understand that, right? I mean, it's not that we wanna steer away from the scary stuff in the sport, but we have to acknowledge human psychology and that you can't just snap your fingers and make people overcome that fear. Okay, so that's a great opportunity then to create a game. You focus just on the grip fighting, on the pummeling, take away the throws and the takedowns completely, and once people realize that stand-up isn't actually that scary, then you can start adding those other layers in. My friend Josh went worth, does the same thing when it comes to leg locks, because a lot of gyms, especially key focused gyms, tend not to give people many reps in the deep and advanced leg lock positions, and it's hard then to get advanced practitioners to start doing that, because they're so good at the rest of Jiu Jitsu that it just feels almost intoxicating to gravitate towards your strong suit. So how do you force people to go into the pocket and fight from the area that, and practice from the area where they're not strong? Well, you create pummeling games, right? Take out the risk of submissions altogether, just create leg pummeling games, and then once people realize, oh, this actually isn't so scary, now you can start adding in a few of the submissions here and there, but a lot of that is just understanding incentives, right? And that's, I think, the big thing that you're talking about here. It's not even about ecological or not. It is about how do we understand human psychology so that we can incentivize people and help them overcome their fears, really, and overcome the things that are scary. When someone starts Jiu Jitsu for the first time, everything is going to be new to them. So everything is a level playing field, but once you get a bit of practice, now intention matters, because you have to deliberately steer people into the areas you want them to focus on, and that will often be the opposite of what they intuitively want to do. Yeah, my most watched Glow Trotter video was my leg lock one. So when the first time I taught at Glow Trotters through the ecological dining and constraint led approach, was with leg locks. I remember going to the camp because you put up your four or five classes you want to submit into and then the campers vote on them, and they picked leg locks. And I go, okay, this is great, but it was scary. There was like 60 people. I haven't trained with so many of these, and I go, how am I going to teach leg locks, heel hooks through the constraint? I know how to teach, I go, how is it? I go, this is going to go really good, or really bad, because I haven't done it at this large of a group yet. So I did it, and it went so well, that people afterwards are like, man, I was so afraid of leg locks. I was so afraid, and this one lady came up to me, she's like the next day, she's like, I'm a purple belt, never did leg locks, and I escaped the heel hook today and opened that. And I'm like, that's awesome, 'cause what are the things I say with when I was in that class, I had like a Darth Vader shirt on while I was training, and I said, where are my Star Wars fans? You know, what is fear leads to? Fear leads to hate, hate leads to anger, what is anger leads to blown off knees? 'Cause that's what's gonna happen when people are afraid of leg locks. They're gonna get hurt, 'cause they're, they never play in it. So of course you're gonna get hurt in leg locks, if all you ever doing is the other parts of Jiu-Jitsu, and then you go no ghee one day, and you go with somebody as a good leg locker, and you don't know what you're doing. Yeah, you might get popped, you might get this, 'cause you have no idea, 'cause you are afraid of it so much. So the same way when I teach wrestling, I take away all that fear as much as I can, and it's the same thing. So if I know, so if I could teach a room of 50, 60 people, wrestling, my other way of wrestling made easy, no takedowns required. That's how my glove charter, glove charter thing. Also, if I could teach wrestling, and I could teach leg locks and heel hooks, in a safe way, man, the rest of Jiu-Jitsu is super easy. Like, that's like the easiest thing to do. Passing, sweeping, pinning. Ah, that's so simple, if I could teach all the other stuff, and take away that fear, 'cause if they're afraid of stuff, it's just not gonna, you know, it's not gonna stick with them. So, but if I put them in these leg lockers environments, if I constrain it so much, if I take off the heel hook, if I display, hey, we're playing for a false grip, we're just playing for a grab, we're just playing for this. Man, they get so used to it, and I kinda, before I even got into the, constrainment approach, a couple of my buddies were key players, and I was always a no-gee guy, and we were playing in the basement, during lockdown and all that stuff, where no gyms were open, and it's like, hey man, I'm a brown belt, and I wanna get good at these leg locks finally. And all we did is like, all right, let's start in a leg lock position, and I'm gonna put you in double trouble, in the worst possible spot, and all we're gonna do is I'm gonna try to hold you here as long as I can. You're just need to free your ankle, turn your to do all these things, and then he started freeing himself. He was still getting leg lock. Then, hey, no, I wanna learn how to like escape out now, so we just kept progressing and progressing and progressing, and then he's like, oh, this ain't that bad. And then he became really good at leg locks, and while we were doing this a couple times a week, just playing in these things, you know how many reps, real reps we were getting in these games, and then the whole ecological dynamics, constrainment approach, so I'm like, oh man, this is stuff I'm doing all the time. And like, I follow a lot of, during lockdown, a lot of pre-mickelson stuff with his defensive juditsu, and why was just in the middle of my living room with some mats, and my daughter was like 12 at the time, and she just started doing it like six months before that, and then we had lockdown, and then we're sitting there, and I just had her attacking me, and all I was doing was covering my underhooks, going through Panda, and running man, and all these different things, and I was teaching myself defensive juditsu, 'cause you can't really wrap it out. It threw that, and then I would go roll up my buddies, and I'm like, huh, this is actually working. It went from a 12 year old, who barely knew how to train to an adult, and they were having problems submitting me. Basically, 'cause I constrain myself, I was playing using the constraint-let approach, just on these rules that somebody like was giving people, protect your underhooks, turn towards the choke, all these focuses of attention, and then it kind of built from there, and then I'm like, oh, okay, this makes sense. So it all started coming together when the ecological dynamic stuff came out, I started reading more books, started understanding constraint-let approach, went through the process of trial error myself, and I'm like, oh, this is why that stuff works. This is why we're getting better, and it started all making sense. So if I could put people in that and make them feel safe, have fun, sweat, man, they're gonna learn a lot, and it's just, and even through the information processing side, when people learn stuff kinda discovered on their own, it makes it stick for them. It has a better that of me showing you how to do it. So it all lends into that and it all start, 'cause I used to read like peak and the talent code, all these information product, make it stick, all great stuff. But it started making sense when I started going down this path, and I started understanding it more, and how do we can apply that to practice and make people better? - I think the thing that holds people back from trying stuff like this is the feeling that Jiu-Jitsu is taught all or nothing. What we're talking about here is giving people examples of how to take out some of the stuff that might sound like the goal. If you wanna teach people stand up, and we tell them to take out the takedowns, that's counterintuitive. Or if we wanna teach people leg locks and tell them to take out the leg locks, that's counterintuitive, right? All of this stuff is counterintuitive, and I think that's what holds people back. But I think that comes to a fundamental misunderstanding of how to teach people. You cannot take someone from zero to perfection in a single class. As a coach, you have to be able to break things down into more actionable incremental steps. If you take someone who has never done leg locks and is terrified of leg locks, and expect them to become a black belt level heel hooker within the context of one class, you're failing them and you're failing yourself. It will not happen. So the question then is, how do you break things down into actionable chunks where people have a discrete intentional thing they can work on in each class that helps them get measurably better? And that might mean that at the beginning, your goal is not to turn them into this expert heel hooker is just to get them comfortable with these positions and take the fear out. You talked about my friend Preet, and this is another thing too, where I feel sometimes people misunderstand what he's trying to teach. They look at his stuff, his defensive jujitsu stuff, and they say, well, this would never work at the highest levels. You absolutely cannot pull Panda and blah, blah, blah, and go and win an ADCC World Championship. Well, Preet's not saying that you could, right? That's not the goal of his stuff. Where his stuff comes into play, it has a very specific purpose, and I found especially for beginners who are probably terrified of the idea of jujitsu in the first place. If you give them a few low impact ways to keep safe so that they can develop a degree of confidence from a defensive position, it's easy to build on top of that, right? You've set a foundation now where now, once you've psychologically gotten a buy-in from the customer, you can teach them, okay, here's how we can actually be effective from here. But it's not all or nothing. You don't just take defensive jujitsu and say that is the entirety of my game. And I think that as coaches and as communicators, we should always be looking to decompose our ideas and give people more small actionable things to get them one step forward, rather than expecting them to be immediately comfortable in like a saddle or something, right? When they've never seen that position before, it takes time to work up that comfort, especially if they know that there's danger in these positions, right? but you get that comfort and you learn to work with that danger by getting practice, and that means you've got to break these big scary things down into smaller, more digestible problems. Well, yeah, it's like I was talking about earlier that lens and how we view things. So if you look at one of my practices, and then you go look at the more traditional minded practices, what they see as a successful practice looks much different than how I see it. They like, oh, they're doing the moves the right way, precise in this and that. But people are not learning in one class. We view learning as non-linear. We never know really when it's going to click or when it's going to happen. It's going to look messy. I like the messiness. I like this. I don't want wild. I don't want out of control. But it's going to be messy. So I look at that practice and I go, hey, they may or may not learn something at that time. But I'm not teaching you grappling in one day. You got to be here for six months. You got to be here for a year. You know, you're not going to do it. This is not like a self-defense course. Many teach people in a week and expect them to go fight off a mother. Obviously, that does it work. I've been a part of martial arts a long time. That's not the way people are going to defend themselves. So look, you look at the practice, you go, okay, I want you to come in. I want you to work hard, train hard, have fun. And guess what? You're going to come back. And then you're going to come back again. The only way, you know, people can say whatever they want, technique, you know, that you will only get better at pretty much anything, strength and conditioning, your diet, your health, your grappling, consistent effort over a long period of time. It takes a lot. I seem somebody opposed today on Instagram. They go, people are never understood to him how much practice it takes to this bead mid at Jiu Jitsu. And that's true. Like, it takes a lot of effort just to be able to grapple and go against other people. You know, if you're not training a weird world champ, you're just going to be, you know, good at grappling. And that's okay. And that's enough. I've been in this for a long haul, I'm 51 years old. I've been training for a long time. I just like to train, I like to get in there, I like to mix it up and keep training. But it takes a long time. And one practice is not going to get you there. Like if you go to a seminar, a two hour seminar about the most precise technique you learned from all the world champ, did you really pick up anything? Then they're like, oh, if you can pick up one detail, it's worth it. To me, it's like, really? Did that detail actually work then? Is it going to work tomorrow? Is it going to work against somebody who's 200 pounds and you're 180? Is it going to work against this? We don't know. We have to keep. That's why I don't even like calling it skill acquisition. Like, hey, you have acquired the skill of guard passing. No, it's skill adaptation. It's always adapting by passing right now. It's always going to adapt how I'm feeling that day and my weaker that day and my stronger. Do I have a little injury in my knee? Do I have this? Who am I going against? We're constantly adapting it all the time. We're trying to become resilient. We're trying to become adaptable and we're constantly doing that. If you want to be a part of this and learn to grapple, it's going to take a lot of effort. Some people don't like to hear that. They want the magic thing and that's why people are always looking for shortcuts here and there shortcuts and tricks. That's short-term solutions or fixes or not long-term solutions. It's just not going to work that way. You have to keep doing that. If you count to my practice, you're going to get some work and you're going to do it again and do it again and then if you start getting better, you feel good. You put some exercise. It's a lot of effort. A successful class is going to look different depending on what lens you use. If you want to see a pristine, precise technique that you taught, you might see that as a good practice or do you want people to become adaptable, flexible, resilient grapplers. That's how I want to view people. Awesome, Rob. Thanks so much for sharing all of this. One of the things I love about the Jiu-Jitsu community is people are so accessible and they always love volunteering their time to chat, meet new people, help people out. If people want to follow you or ask you questions or connect, how do they do that? Easiest way is Instagram, that's where I'm the most active liquid underscore Rob. I put some reals, some stuff, maybe some memes here and there just for fun, a lot of wrestling stuff, a lot of different things, this, all that type of stuff. Try to keep it fun. I was going to ask why liquid Rob, where does liquid come from? So that is, I got that nickname in the late 90s. I was training at Frank Shamrock, AKA back in the old 90s and it has a dual meaning. It was supposed to be, you know, I kind of like to think of it because I rolled and I was very smooth when I rolled flowed like water, but also I really sweat a lot also. So it kind of works together. So this started calling me liquid, smooth flowed like water and also I sweat a lot. So you know, my favorite thing about you just in nicknames is they're always insulting, like they, they're always has to be some sort of diss or shot taken at someone built right into it. Yeah, mine I like it because they hear liquid and they think it sounds cool and then I'm like, it's not too much of a diss, it's not like completely, but it, it has a little behind it too. So, and I have a, I have another guy trained with, he sweats as much as me. So we're rolling. It's like, it's as bad. And that's, you know, then I always say, well, you know, and maybe with only two work and hard. So all of that. So yeah, well, I was hoping it was a Metal Gear Solid reference, but getting a nickname from Frank Shamrock is arguably cooler. Yeah, it's not too bad. Yeah. So I will throw a link to your stuff in the show notes that people want to follow you. Definitely, I think they should just go into the show notes. Rob's Instagram will be there. It'll make it easy to find him. I'll also put a link to our stuff. Everything we make lives at bejigementalmodels.com. Feel free to check out all of the episodes of the podcast full length ones like this plus many episodes for people with a bit less time, all completely free. Our newsletter has well over 15,000 subscribers. That's also free. And you probably want to be in on that as well. We've got some great thought pieces plus summaries of episodes and occasional freebies that we throw out there as well. Again, all of that at bejigementalmodels.com. And do consider leveling up with us and joining bejigementalmodels premium. If you like our approach, you'll probably love that. It is the world's largest audio library of Jiu-Jitsu master classes. A lot of discussions on concept, strategy, and tactics, things that don't tend to fit well into regular Jiu-Jitsu instructions or classes. A lot of people say it kind of is the missing puzzle piece, the training that they get. If what you do in the classroom in Jiu-Jitsu is like being in a lab, then think of our stuff as the lecture that goes along with the lab. People tend to love it. We also offer direct coaching service from some of the world's best black belts and even professional support. If you're running a gym, you need help with marketing or getting your reputation off the ground, we have a pro tier for people like that. You can try that all for free and you can just shoot me a message and ask me questions if you want to know what's the best fit for you. You can check out bejigementalmodels.com. I would love to hit 800 subscribers by the end of the year. So if you want to be one of those, you can get your first week free. Again, I'll put a link to that in the show notes as well. But Rob, thank you so much for doing this, man. Fantastic chat. I'm glad that we finally had a chance to get you on here. People had been asking for a while and I think you had some cool ideas to share, so thank you for your time. Awesome. Appreciate it. Thank you so much for the listeners as well and we will see you next week. Talk to you then.