#87 - Adam Singer - Coaching is About Creating Environments, Not Teaching Techniques

Adam Singer shares his 25-year journey in coaching BJJ and MMA, explaining how ecological dynamics and the constraints-led approach creates more effective grapplers despite less technical instruction.

• SBG's "aliveness" approach filters effective techniques through realistic testing
• Traditional drilling methods often fail to transfer to live situations
• Ecological coaching creates environments where students learn through problem-solving
• Students become effective before becoming efficient in their movements
• Culture, environment, method and athletes function as one interconnected system
• Belt promotions based on effectiveness against peers rather than technical knowledge
• Students know fewer named techniques but perform better in live rolling
• Scaling drills through modified constraints allows mixed-level training
• Creating representative designs helps techniques emerge naturally
• The coach's role is primarily to create optimal environments, not to provide information

If you're interested in learning more about ecological coaching, follow Adam on Instagram @AdamSingerSBG where he shares insights and training methods from his ongoing exploration of coaching methodologies.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Adam Singer
• 6:51 SBG Training Methodology & Aliveness
• 17:47 Defining Different Types of Drilling
• 32:48 Transitioning to Ecological Coaching
• 45:32 Belt Promotions in an Ecological System
• 1:07:03 Creating the Optimal Learning Environment
• 1:20:56 Scaling Training for Mixed Skill Levels
• 1:31:45 Coaching Education and Final Thoughts

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:41

Adam, welcome to the podcast. How are you? Good morning, how are you guys? Yeah, we're good. We're good. It's good to catch up. We've obviously been chatting about bringing you on for a little while, so it's good to finally meet you and have a conversation about coaching and all things ecological and SBG and jiu-jitsu. So, yeah, I'm looking forward to it.

Speaker 2: 0:58

Yeah, I realize that I am a complete outlier type guest. I think your tagline on Instagram is like the world's greatest grapplers. That ain't me, and you know. I saw some of the people you've had on before, so I'm going to do my best, but I'm definitely an atypical guest of yours.

Speaker 1: 1:18

No, it's good man and we like to mix things up. We do tend to speak to a lot of athletes, but we do enjoy conversations with coaches and you know anybody involved with grappling and obviously we're in a space with grappling at the moment where there's a lot of discussions around ecological training or constraints-led approach to training versus information processing. You know instructors versus coaches. So I'm really interested as I'm kind of you know, the wrong side of 40 now and kind of leaning a little bit more towards coaching myself, I guess what the difference between instructing and coaching is and how does somebody maybe transition from just being a traditional instructor to being a true athletic or jujitsu coach. So I think it's going to be a good conversation. So very happy to have you, and I guess you know you're a man. As you say, you're a bit of an outlier, you're not a known athlete, but you are a man who has quite a large school, has been coaching for a long time and I've also been involved with some academic papers around combat sports and ecological dynamics as well.

Speaker 2: 2:15

So bring us up to speed with that my least favorite topic is me, so I'm not going to do it.

Speaker 2: 2:22

I've been coaching. I'm going to use the word coaching and I guess you and I will figure out what the difference between coaching and instructor is. I have some ideas, but you help me fill that in. I've been coaching for over 25 years, when my brother and I started in MMA and BJJ and I'm going to talk a lot about MMA just because it is the place I'm more comfortable but I've been coaching Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and mixed martial arts for 25 years. Yesterday we just made our 22nd and 23rd black belts. That's awesome, man. That's a lot of black belts, man.

Speaker 2: 2:57

But when we started in Georgia there was no coaching available. So there was one Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu school far away from us, and MMA was a new sport, so no one really knew how to coach anyway. So and my academic background is engineering, so coaching and learning how to coach was something I just sort of dove right into and it's been something that's really important to me. So, while most athletes have a goal to achieve some type of success on the mats or in the cage, my goal was to always to be the best possible coach I could be, and over the years that led me to meet some different people. But when I met Matt Thornton, who runs SBG.

Speaker 2: 3:48

I found sort of a kindred spirit, someone who approached BJJ and MMA as sports and not as martial arts, and so that jived really quickly with me.

Speaker 2: 4:02

And Matt had some ideas on coaching and how to run classes and things that we can get into later that for me really were foundational for getting into an ecological approach later.

Speaker 2: 4:15

You know ideas of aliveness, which pops up over and over, ideas on how to drill and the importance of drilling and we'll have to define that word later but the idea of a live drilling and the values of that and so I had a groundwork for a long time in something that was really close to what people now call an ecological approach. But you know, people do a lot of things and they do them well without ever knowing how or why, and so it's been like the last four years let's say maybe COVID, when I wasn't coaching as much that I really wanted to know why we do certain things as coaches and I think it got me close, it got me down this rabbit hole, if you will, and it's been really enjoyable to chase that and to understand that and hopefully I can just, if nothing else, share a little bit about that today and maybe pique some people's interest.

Speaker 1: 5:21

Yeah, that'd be great man. And I think you may have heard on the previous podcast that my first coach trained, not sort of directly, but was affiliated to Colt Handswell in the UK. Oh my God, yeah, yeah, so one of the old school guys in the UK for SPG. So I always trained with that kind of style of learning. So when the argument started first coming up around drilling, I was a little bit confused because for me drilling always had aliveness. There was always, you know, resistance. It was never just dead drilling.

Speaker 1: 5:55

And I often talked about jujitsu in the early days of me training, about why that's why jujitsu is so much better, because there isn't dead drilling like a lot of traditional martial arts, but you know so much better because there isn't dead drilling like a lot of traditional martial arts, but you know little did I know that obviously, widely, widely around the world, dead drilling was being done in jiu-jitsu. So so I'm quite familiar with spg and their, their approach to it. But maybe tell us a little bit about more about that from your perspective and what kind of initially kind of uh drew you in when you kind of saw Matt's methodology to coaching?

Speaker 2: 6:26

Okay.

Speaker 2: 6:26

So I would say there are two things that SBG that separated SBG, let's say, from the other organizations when I was coming up and looking. One was aliveness, and it was the idea that there was a filter that we can put on whether something is true or not. There's a filter that we can put on whether something works or not, and it's the same filter that we put on my day job as a scientist. I work in the pharmaceutical industry, and so there are methods that we use in science to find the truth. Well, aliveness is a very similar method. If I say something works and you say it doesn't, then one of us is right and one of us is wrong, and the only way to figure that out is to put it to a test, and that test should look like whatever the real sport looks like. So if it's Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, then the test is we tap hands and we go. And so the point about 25 years ago, when we found SVG, we were doing a lot of Jeet Kune Do, which I think is also big in England, and the instructor we trained with in Jeet Kune Do had this separation. He had this idea that there were things you trained for self-perfection and there were things you trained for self-preservation. And since my brother and I Rory, who owns a gym with me we were in our early 20s, mid-20s and we were in Athens, Georgia, by ourselves, we would train with Paul Dunach, but when we came back here, we had to find people to train with and those people were boxers and kickboxers and wrestlers and things like that. I'm sorry he wants to be involved. They were people like that and those people really only knew one way to train most of the time, which was touch hands and go. And so when Matt defined this idea of aliveness, it was something that was already something we understood already. We had wrestled in high school, we were boxing, we were kickboxing and that's what we really gravitated towards. We didn't really like the self-perfection stuff because it just wasn't as fun. And so the first thing that drew us in was this definition of aliveness, because it was something we were looking for but we didn't have.

Speaker 2: 9:02

And then training methodology you had something called the I method, which was introduction, isolation and then integration. So and I think we can talk about that later as what we will call representative design now but in that aspect, the idea was you had this, whatever your practice was going to be about. The idea was you had this. Whatever your practice was going to be about, you would start by introducing a move or a technique and the idea was to just do enough reps that everyone in the room could do it. So it could be two reps, three reps. It wasn't about super detail, it wasn't about perfecting anything, it was just get a couple reps and then, as soon as all the students were comfortable with those reps, you would immediately start creating drills, which was called the isolation phase, and it wasn't as sophisticated as it is now, applying the constraint sled approach. But you know, some of it looked like positional sparring, Some of it looked you know, still looked, you know, not great, looked not great.

Speaker 2: 10:08

But there was a spectrum and we did drills. We created them in random, Some were good, some sucked. The good ones we kept, the bad ones we got rid of. And then, over the course of the practice, we would put more and more of the aspects of the training in and we called that integration. So if it was a BJJ class, by the end of the session we were rolling live and the practices would be set up according to those three steps, or sometimes it would be iterative. We'd train a move, we'd drill it, we'd realize that we need to add another piece and we'd go through that a few cycles and I thought it was a really good training method and what it allowed us to do because we were by ourselves in Athens is you just put anything through this cycle and you find out if it's real or not. You find out if it works or not.

Speaker 2: 11:01

So I became really infatuated with this idea of how to create drills and I think what I eventually come to with the constraints-led approach and how to create drills is that just gave me an idea of why and how I was doing certain things, Because any coach that creates drills is using the constraints-led approach. Right, I mean, there are coaches who have been doing it for 20, 30 years, just without a name to it. But I wanted to get better at it. I wanted to understand why I would manipulate certain things, why certain things were valuable.

Speaker 2: 11:42

Like my students, I train mostly normal human beings and I want them to get as good as possible. I want my purple belt to be able to go into any gym in America and roll with other purple belts and not be angry at me. I don't want to be like why did you do this to me? Or feel like a fraud, or I feel like a fraud. I feel like a fraud already, so I don't need my students to feel like frauds. So they don't have a lot of time. So for me it was how do I get rid of any bullshit? If my students have two hours a week to train, then that two hours a week has to be the best two hours a week that they can get, and drilling just always fit that bill a lot more than anything else.

Speaker 1: 12:30

Yeah, so we've mentioned drilling quite a few times within the context of SBG's methodology of training and we obviously touched on the other definition of drilling, so maybe this is a good time to, I guess, define the two from your perspective. So what, like the I guess the non-resistant drilling might look like, and then what the type of drilling that you typically will build a practice around would look like?

Speaker 2: 13:04

I realize this in having these discussions with people, or having or listening to listening to, let's call them debates or conversations on this topic. As a scientist, I always want to be able to hold certain things steady, like I want to get rid of as many variables as possible. If we're going to compare things, the problem is the word drilling. Even if we're just talking about non-alive drilling, if we're talking about dead drilling, that has as many meanings to people as anything else does. So there is no apples to oranges. It's like apples to a lot of different fruits. So what do you consider drilling in a traditional sense? Both of you guys, because I bet you guys have a different idea of it.

Speaker 1: 13:53

Yeah, so I'll go first, because I remember I think it was Andre Gaval's Drills to Win book.

Speaker 2: 14:00

It was on my bookshelf.

Speaker 1: 14:01

Yeah, so that was basically just against no resistance but using a body, but obviously just doing movement drills for multiple repetitions, with this idea that when you know a leg pops up in front of you, you know to dive under it, to pass around it, for example. So that was my experience with, I guess, dead drilling, and then from a, I guess, a more traditional martial arts sense, so like I don't know like karate or something back in the day, walking up and down a hall punching and kiai-ing, doing katas, yeah, and that type of thing. So, yeah, kata is a good example of another type of drill. So that's both from a grappling and a non-grappling perspective for me.

Speaker 3: 14:44

I don't know about Danny, so from a grappling and a non-grappling perspective for me. I don't know about Danny. So if someone says to me I drill my coach drills I always think of, he'll be in front of everyone, he'll be showing I don't know a barren bowler from a certain position and then he'll be, you know, going through the position where to put your feet, where to move to what position you're going to end up in and where to go from there, and then typically people will go away, they'll practice that move and then they'll add bits to it. That's my understanding. If someone say to me my coach drills like it doesn't do eco, it doesn't do that. That's what I would think. What drilling is.

Speaker 2: 15:19

Okay, and it's funny because, danny, I think there are two different or two separate ideas in what you said and I think we'd agree. One is the idea of the instructor or coach giving you a way to do something right and not necessarily making a claim, but in a way they teach it, making the claim that this is the way we have to do something. It's taught in steps or it's taught with a lot of detail, and when you go do the repetitions, the goal of those repetitions is to get as close to mimicking that as possible, and we would then hear words like muscle memory or atomicity or something as the reason that we do all those repetitions to get to the perfect way. And even in other sports that maybe you've engaged with or that I've worked with, it's a very similar idea. Here is the way to swing the golf club and we have to find a way to do. Here is the way to swing the golf club and we have to find a way to do enough reps that every time you swing the golf club it looks like that. But I think you guys have talked to enough other athletes that if you said drilling, you would hear some less or more sophisticated I'll use that word forms of drilling. So you'd have one school that has their own form. They call it micro drilling, where they do like little pieces. Or another like Galvalo, speed drilling, like Atos those guys look amazing doing that speed drilling. Or there are some places where drilling is really still stuck, very old school, where it's three moves done for five minutes each and then they roll and so it's hard to even.

Speaker 2: 17:19

And then I guess the question, like I ask someone who's I'm like, well, how long do you drill the move? Like, what's the metric? Someone who's I'm like, well, how long do you draw the move? Like, what's the metric? You know if, if Kobe Bryant shot a thousand three pointers at the end of practice because he believed it, that's why not 2000? Or why not 500?

Speaker 2: 17:38

So anything that doesn't have a metric to me all already we have to question it. You know, is it question it? Is it until the students do it really well, like we see it, and it looks good? As coaches we know when something looks good, something looks bad, but all of your students are not going to be on that same timeline. And then when they roll and you're watching them roll, if they can't do, he's got to go protect the house If they can't do the thing? We just drilled for five or 10 minutes. Do we come back and do more reps? Is it because they didn't have enough detail? Like? It's very hard for me to see even how we go through that process and get to a place where we can make a measurement of it.

Speaker 3: 18:37

Yeah, yeah, I agree with that.

Speaker 2: 18:39

Okay, yeah. And if we say our students are good, like look, we're world champions, or all world champions do this, or whatnot, then we still have to drill down and realize they're not all doing it the same way. The only thing that they're all doing the same way is they're rolling. So if I were going to start a scientific experiment, then I would start with the fact that everyone who's ever won anything in jiu-jitsu or MMA has done a lot of live training and over time, I would say, even unless you're one of those really mega drillers I bet it's over two-thirds of the time is spent just live training.

Speaker 2: 19:27

Yeah, I agree yeah, and if you take it one step further, even in SBG, our early drilling I mean early in the sense of what you might do with a class some of that was very what we could call decomposed. It was taken out of, it was still in context, but it was shrunk down so far that it didn't necessarily have a transfer. And SPG had this idea that we had to drill with adaptive resistance. And what adaptive resistance means and it makes sense when you hear it is that while you're drilling the partners help each other get to some level of success. Right In the field it's called challenge point or challenge point hypothesis, but it's just the idea that if people fail too often then they will disengage, and if they have too much success they will disengage. One is because they're frustrated, the other is because they're bored. And so the idea was, if we started doing this drill, if I was failing too often then you would adapt your resistance, and if I was being successful too much, you would adapt your resistance. The problem is, as soon as you start using those concepts, you're not really training alive anymore, because one person or the other has to modify their behavior in such a way that it's not necessarily alive Because white belts and blue belts, like a black belt, can do that right.

Speaker 2: 21:09

I don't know what level belts you guys are, but I'm sure you guys are high-level practitioners. You can get with a white belt no me either. So we could all get with a white belt and train at their pace without having to change jujitsu or without faking it that's a better word. But a white belt can't do that with another white belt. A blue belt can't do that with another blue belt. They barely can do what they're trying to do. So even a live drilling can have these pockets where you're like that's not exactly what we're looking for.

Speaker 1: 21:51

So obviously you moved away from just that approach of SPG and that kind of scaling or that sort of adaptive resistance that you just said.

Speaker 2: 22:00

Yeah, let's not say I moved away. Let's just say I evolved.

Speaker 1: 22:05

Okay, yeah, that's a better word. So you evolved into what is obviously now known as constraint-set approach, or, I'm going to say, ecological approach or ecological dynamics. It's got several names that seem to be used interchangeably, but there's obviously this quite a clear stance from the people we've spoken to in and from looking at some of Rob Gray's books, where you know, obviously, that that adaptive approach doesn't seem to work or as well, and therefore people that are fully eco whatever you want to call it tends just to go like all or nothing but scale, obviously using the variability of the games. So when did you kind of make that evolution into doing that and why?

Speaker 2: 22:48

Well, so let's come back to scaling, because I think it's one of the most important concepts. I think it's really what solves every problem that a coach a coach that wants to be in this approach and where they flounder is not being comfortable scaling. So, coming out of COVID, that gave me some time to really read and research more and try and put some new ideas in. And we came in and I think just one day I came in I'm like let's just jump all the way in the water. I don't think it's much of a difference for anyone. It's maybe a 10% difference. But let's replace verbal instruction, let's replace the idea that I know all the information, I have all the ways. Let's replace that with trying to search for those things ourself. And so I studied the CLA especially in other sports, because it doesn't necessarily exist and Rob Gray's books. His first book had just come out and there's a lot of literature that's been out since the 2000s. I have been lucky enough, because of my background in MMA and because of some of the people that I worked with in MMA, that I can open a lot of doors and I found a lot of academics. A lot of practitioners love nothing more than to talk about this stuff, so it would be nothing more than an email. And all of a sudden I had access to some really good people in professional sports, in the academic world, and so I ran an experiment. So it's been about three years that we have just been running a full experiment. Before that, I've always played with the I method.

Speaker 2: 24:46

There have been periods in my coaching career where I was really excited about information. I was like, oh, learn how to do this perfectly and share this with your students, and biomechanics and things like that. I was really deep into deliberate practice and some of those ideas. There were periods even before that where I was like, every day, let's just come in, we'll tap hands and we'll roll and we'll see if we get better that way. So I've been in this long enough and I've had a lot of students and, being a scientist, I've done so.

Speaker 2: 25:26

We started very alive. The first five years of the gym it was just us training together. I coached by being everyone's training partner. So I was coaching Forrest Griffin and my brother and a lot of guys in the UFC. Well, my coaching was we trained together and I coached them while training with them. Coaching was we trained together and I coached them while training with them. So it was a very alive room, unsophisticated, more head contact than I liked, but it helped me develop some ideas about head contact over the years and then as information became more available in the world, then there was probably a period where I was teaching too much information, we were too much intro phase and then. So I feel like I've come almost full circle.

Speaker 2: 26:13

But now I know why I've come full circle and so I would say the last three years, maybe three plus, we have been every program in my gym, every student, whatever we want to call it ecological, whatever and I think you'll also start to realize that we're now approaching a point where the word ecological doesn't have any meaning either.

Speaker 2: 26:42

Right, because there are people creating their own versions of it, which is great, but it now becomes hard to say, you know, to debate or to have a conversation about method A versus method B. So I can tell you and I hope that I am being honest, I hope I'm correct that if there is a, I'm not zealotous, but I run everything now through that filter. So my practices are 90 plus percent alive and all of our drilling is run through the CLA and nonlinear pedagogy. I spend a lot of time on representative practice design. Nonlinear pedagogy I spend a lot of time on representative practice design and I'm willing to add or subtract and experiment, but I probably filter everything. I probably spent a year where I was overzealous or overzealotous, but I think that's necessary to figure out where to come back to.

Speaker 3: 27:46

I think the biggest thing for me is is what you just said, like, I find is you're either in the camp, you're at the camp and I think there's there's definitely some kind of middle ground and I think a lot of people got to find their own way there. But, like, do you, after you've been doing you've been doing this so long and you've seen every which way do you feel that your students are getting better from the way you're coaching them now, or do they enjoy it more? Or are they getting better because they're turning up and enjoying it more?

Speaker 2: 28:14

I think I think they're. I think everything you just said is right. I think, if we can, a coach a coach is. Generally what I have seen is first off coaches that have world champions and things like that are also very lucky that that person came into their room, because I have had two world champions in MMA and they were both the type of people that we could have put them almost anywhere else and they would have been world champions. So what I've realized over the years is much of what coaching is is don't fuck people up Like don't get in their way and create an environment that fosters their abilities. So fun, right? If someone comes in long enough, they get good Every person that walks in the door. If a person walks in today, if they stay around three, four years, they're going to be purple belts. If they're having fun, they'll come back more often. And they also came in and said I want to learn to grapple, and what I can promise them is they'll spend almost all their time grappling, and so I think fun really becomes a big part of that.

Speaker 2: 29:28

My students are better now than they ever have been before. We have our first group of purples. I believe that had never trained any other way and I just made a brown belt who I don't think ever trained any other way or maybe just had a little bit of a crossover and COVID screwed that up for a lot of people. But my students know less about jujitsu than they ever have before and I'm starting to. You know, I think less about the techniques that I think they need to know than I ever have before.

Speaker 2: 30:07

But they all can roll. They all can without you know beginners. They roll very robotically. You can see the moves they're trying. Before they do they get frustrated. Their brains are just going. My students just roll now and some of the like I might have blue belts who don't know what the hell a triangle is Like. They've been in that position before and they've finished people from there before, but they've never done repetition one of a triangle or a hip bump sweep, because I don't privilege any technique over any other technique. It's just that there are problems that we have to solve and we spend a lot of time trying to solve them. I don't know if that answered your question, danny.

Speaker 3: 31:02

Yeah, no, it did. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it.

Speaker 1: 31:04

Yeah, I was just going to ask Adam, just it's a slight, slight tangent because I want to go back to the, the scaling and get a bit more info on that. But, um, with, with that style of coaching and and when you're kind of assessing your students for, for belts, blue, purple, brown, I mean what, what's the kind of measure for you when you're, when you're making those decisions now, without kind of not saying they should be demonstrating techniques? But you know, you know what I'm asking.

Speaker 2: 31:29

Okay, so this is something I am completely uncomfortable doing. Right, if it were up to me, there would be no belts, which is easy to say. I, I am a fourth degree black belt, I think, at this point, and so it's easy for me to say I will throw my I'll at this point, and so it's easy for me to say I'll throw my belt away and convince other people. So I know people want belts, but I'm very uncomfortable judging other people. So I had this idea that when I was, we had our belt ceremony yesterday and the way we give out belts in our gym is you, ironman, everyone that shows up to the belt ceremony? It's not a test, it's a celebration. But we had 90 people yesterday. 13 people get new belts. They rolled with everyone to submission. That was there. It's about an hour and a half Super fun. People love it. It's way cooler than whipping each other on the ass that kind of shit. That's ridiculous.

Speaker 2: 32:26

But I give a little State of the Union before this, because I have everyone together and they're a captive audience. And I was thinking about this and one of the things I thought of is when my upper belts tell me someone's ready for blue belt sometimes, or a lot of times what they're saying is I like rolling with this person, like they're not wasting my time, they're not being spazzy, I'm getting something out of this Right, they're trying things, they're capable of doing things. If I give up my back, they know to get hooks and harness, like they're doing jujitsu, right, and they're starting to become effective. And I think that's a really important word in accepting this method is that we need our students to be effective before they can become anything else. And then for purple belt I realized when an upper belt says someone is ready for purple belt, it meant that that person could threaten them.

Speaker 2: 33:34

So if one of my black or brown belts or older purple belts is like, hey, this person's ready for purple belts and I roll with them, I watch them roll with upper belts, I realize that if you mess up they can get you. And then brown and black just sort of take care of themselves. I mean by then you know brown belt, you're basically ready for black belt at some point in the near future. So blue and purple are the ones. And so, because I don't have any, my only objective measures are like are they effective? Then I realize that if so much of what I do is create an environment. If that's really the most important thing the coach does is create the environment, then the environment sort of tells me when those people are ready for belts. And those are just like two metrics that I've seen over the last maybe year or so that I realized were happening.

Speaker 1: 34:32

Yeah, no I like that.

Speaker 2: 34:34

Yeah, I wish I had a better answer, but I think that if we really thought about it, if you roll with someone when they're newer, they're not ready for Blue Belt. They are spazzy, they are, sometimes they're fishy, sometimes they're whatever, but when they're ready for Blue Belt, it's because you can tap hands and six minutes later you were like all right, that was good.

Speaker 1: 34:55

Yeah, no, it makes sense and it seems a quite simplistic way of doing it. I think we've all probably experienced that guy in the gym that gets the promotion and we're like, fuck, like now we don't feel so embarrassed when we roll with them anymore.

Speaker 2: 35:11

So that would be a good indicator. I guess we call those belts fuck this guy Because I am. I am, look, I'm 52, right, and I'm not a competitive athlete. I try and take care of myself. I try and train five, six days a week. I love it, but at 200, I'm 200 pounds. A 230 pound, 25 year old purple belt needs to be a brown belt, so I don't feel so bad about myself. It's still a sport, right, it's still a sport and it still follows the rules of being a sport, which means an old man is not as good as a young man.

Speaker 1: 35:49

Yeah, very true, which means an old man is not as good as a young man. Yeah, very true. And do you care? Not for time on the mat and that sort of thing. If someone's effective, then they're effective, whether they've been training for three years or a year.

Speaker 2: 36:03

So it's a great question what is a beginner? Somebody who doesn't know jiu-jitsu? Danny, what's a beginner? I'm a beginner, mate.

Speaker 3: 36:11

You're a beginner, all right, he's not. I'm a blue belt mate, so I am.

Speaker 2: 36:17

Okay, looking at Danny's arms. Paul, I can't see your arms, but I assume Danny's just more jacked than most people.

Speaker 1: 36:23

He's got shorter arms, yeah, so they look bigger T-Rex.

Speaker 2: 36:27

Yeah, look at that shit Okay so tonight the two of you come into my foundations class. You might be beginners in the sense of never having done jujitsu before, but you are not starting in the same place, right? And so when we think about ecological dynamics, we think about ecology. We have to take into account that every person comes in with their own capacities, their own history, their movement history. You know, some kid comes in who was a breakdancer or a tumbler, right, like they are going to be much. Or if I have a female student who has two older brothers, she is light. If I have a female student who has two older brothers, she is light, years ahead of a female student who's never engaged with anything physical before. So, right off the bat, if we treat those two people the same way, we're doing one of them, or probably both of them, a disservice. We're doing one of them, or probably both of them, a disservice. So the methodology that we use where we are alive, right off the bat, allows people to explore sort of at their own pace.

Speaker 2: 37:42

Now, like every sport, I think time in the activity is going to be important for their ability to be effective and moving towards being efficient. So I don't know, there's not a set time, as we said, because everyone starts differently. But I think that that time component just shows up regardless. You know, there are people who will be a blue belt in two years, there'll be people who are four years, there are people who are one year. So I let the environment, I let the room sort most of that out. I don't care.

Speaker 2: 38:17

Occasionally I'll say to Rory, when Rory's telling me who is on the list for promotion, I'll say how long's that person been here. And sometimes they're like he's been here a year and I'll just be very surprised because I couldn't do it in a year. I couldn't get a blue belt in a year. If I started now, I certainly couldn't get a blue belt in a year. And then there are other people it's four years and so I don't worry too much about time and attendance. I think if you came once a week, trained alive for 12 years, and you just never missed a week and you thought about you just throwing your off time, you could.

Speaker 1: 38:52

You could be a black belt yeah, and then just just one other question, because I find this topic quite interesting as well. But just on what you said, where you don't people, people aren't starting in the same place, um, but we're talking about people obviously being measured on their effectiveness on the mat. So if you've got got a 20-year-old and a 50-year-old both starting jiu-jitsu I mean the 50-year-old before they're effective against some of the younger guys on the mats, it's going to be a very long time for them to become effective, if they ever are. So would you typically measure their effectiveness against sort of similar demographic or would it be the entire room?

Speaker 2: 39:32

That's a good question Early in their career. I talk about performance against peers, right, and so that would be the more important thing. But I expect that 50-year-old person, by the time he's a blue belt, to be able to roll against the 21-year-old person by the time he's a blue belt, to be able to roll against the 21-year-old, because the culture of my room is a culture of care, it's a culture of taking care of everyone, and that 20-year-old knows that if he's gearing up for something, if he's looking for hard rolls, stay away from the 50-year-old, but in a normal class, after we've been training for 45, 50 minutes from the 50-year-old, but in a normal class, after we've been training for 45, 50 minutes, if the 50-year-old wants to come get a roll, then get a roll, and can the 50-year-old roll with the 20-year-old? I don't expect the 50-year-old to be the 20-year-old, I don't expect the 50-year-old to even sometimes hang with the 20-year-old, but I expect, if they are both going to train in an honest fashion, they're both looking to get the same thing out of it, that that role looks like a good blue belt role. So, but I will judge them their performance level against their peers first and foremost.

Speaker 2: 40:45

You know, because, as I said yesterday and I think it's part of this beginner idea we all have our own journey. Because, as I said yesterday and I think it's part of this beginner idea we all have our own journey. We're all looking to get different things out of it. If you tell me you want to be a world champion, then you get judged differently. And then if you say, when I go on vacation, I like to visit other Brazilian jiu-jitsu schools and I want to be able to train at them, okay then your lifestyle, your training, the amount of time on the mats has to all be geared to that goal. Don't tell me you're going to be a world champion. And then you know, eat like shit or don't sleep well or miss practices or whatever. You know be drunk every weekend. You know that's just bullshit. So performance against peers, and then that evens out over time. But, like I said before, you know.

Speaker 2: 41:35

So I'm 52,. I've been a black belt. I've been in jujitsu 25 years. I've been a black belt for a long time. I am fine admitting that if some purple belt comes in tonight who's 23 years old and has been training since they were 13 and just wants to be a world champion, that I will not have fun rolling with that person. If they want to go at me, and I'd like to. I mean, I would say to that person and I'm very happy to say to that 25-year-old or whatever hey, I need to be able to turn my head after this and I need to be able to walk out of here. Other than that, bring it. I know what that's going to look like. And even a guy who used to be a black belt world champion at some point gets old and that purple belt is going to smoke them.

Speaker 3: 42:19

Yeah, we got a purple belt like that in our gym, mate, and he's very good and he's just smashing it. So, yeah, we know what that's like.

Speaker 2: 42:26

Yeah, and so even if we judge someone like your peers, change your goals, change who you are, changes and we have to accept that. It's difficult for people to accept that in BJJ I've noticed, but we have to accept that all this attention on detail and technique, then we should see again. Obviously there's an age that it won't matter, but we should see world champions into their mid-30s and I think the last time I looked at the IBJJF all the world champions were under 30 years old, and the same thing happens in wrestling and the same thing happens in the peak career of most athletes. So maybe technique and detail are not as important as we think they are.

Speaker 3: 43:23

Well, I think that's exactly right. I think that's the lie kind of people were told, and it is that the technique prevails over everything. It's exactly what I was told when I first started. And as you get better, you know, you do come across these people who are just physically, just animals, and you're just like, that technique doesn't work on them. It helps, but it doesn't fucking work. You know what I mean? Yeah.

Speaker 2: 43:47

I remember having a guy join who had just finished. He was a college wrestler. He was a college wrestler, he was a heavyweight, so he was also bigger than me. And the first time he put him in a gi and I rolled with him and his grip strength was so incredible that it was almost capable of shutting everything I did down and I triangle choked him twice because I had no choice. He didn't know any better, it wasn't because I wanted to, because I couldn't sweep him. I couldn't move him. I remember going in my car afterwards and almost crying. I was like I don't want to do this anymore.

Speaker 2: 44:22

A white belt first time in a gig. I'm not a collar choke guy. I probably would have been better off collar choking, but when he grabbed me we were different human beings, better off college joking, but when he grabbed me we were different human beings and we all have like a pipe fitter in our gym or a guy who swings a hammer all day, scuffled her yeah, yeah, right. And when they grab your gi or they grab your wrist, it's a different thing. But these are all things to me that are proof. I don't know if proof is proof. It's not the right word as a scientist that lead me to believe that the path that we're on, this ecological approach, is going to yield better results for more people, because we see these little snippets in the wild of how it works and I don't know why we're so resistant to it.

Speaker 3: 45:12

I don't know if people are resistant to it. I think it's because when people from that, even when I talk to people about it, they don't kind of understand it fully. And then you get someone like Greg who's quite polarizing, like he's quite aggressive in the way he talks to people and how he is. I don't know. I think people just think it is just quite literally rolling and there's no other coaching involved and there's no other aspect of it involved. Even top-level guys, if you speak to them about eco, they don't fundamentally understand what exactly you're trying to say, and I think that's the biggest issue. It's just there's so many gray areas and, like you said, there's all these spin-offs now happening of like kind of eco with some CLA and bits and pieces, and I think that's that's the issue that you've got and I don't think we're ever really going to come together in this one one way of like doing jiu-jitsu and training.

Speaker 3: 46:06

I think this argument is going to go on for the ages, to be honest. Yeah, and I think people will start going towards a more cla, ecological training because it's more fun. That's my opinion, I think it. Once people start training like that, I think people will see the benefit in it and it'll be more fun. I think as well, it's more fun from uh, if I was training twice a week and I was able to do like the more ecological approach training where it's really tiring physically, I'd prefer that than maybe going and doing some, some drilling just just for you. Just for you like getting a better workout. And again, if I'm getting a better workout, I'm getting fitter and I'm enjoying it more. And jujitsu, in my opinion, if you're fitter, is easier as well.

Speaker 2: 46:46

Yeah, I think that's a great point. Greg was a lot of help to me, helping me explain these ideas, understand these ideas. He was always very gracious. Still, he and I become friends over the last year and I'll listen to him talk or do a debate and stuff and I'll message him right away and I'm like you know, here's how I think you you could improve this and but he plays a role. You know he plays the. I think it's important he plays a role. It's sort of like not a gatekeeper in the sense of the information, cause he gives everything out for free. I think he's a gatekeeper, for are you willing to do a little bit of work? Yeah, are you willing to engage with some of these topics? And then there are other people Cal Jones is a great example, I hope myself. Scott Sieve-Wright, rob Kabir that can talk maybe a little bit more. Kian, that can just talk a little bit more to regular people, if you will.

Speaker 3: 47:53

Yeah, and I think that's the biggest issue you've got is that when people listen to him, they get more angry at what he says than what his actual message is, and then everything he actually says that's good People just kind of disregard and they're like no, he's just a knob, he's just this's.

Speaker 3: 48:11

It's such a shame because a lot of the points he makes are great and then it's just like over clouded. And I really like greg when he come on the podcast. Now he was really nice to us before and after he was, he was great and he and I kind of understand like he's I don't know if it's an act sometimes because he pushes back so hard on certain parts, but but he's, he's getting good clips, like when he come on this podcast, he's, he's, he's making moments which is putting eco on the map on the map and it is growing ecological training. So sometimes I feel like, cause I don't know him enough, I don't know if he's saying those things on purpose so that he creates more animosity towards him, which in turn, is growing what his message is.

Speaker 2: 48:56

Yeah, I mean it makes sense. So when he was talking to Tom DeBlas, when you summarized that conversation, they were really arguing about 10% of the training time.

Speaker 2: 49:10

Tom believed there was a small point, like an intro phase of his students drill certain things. Maybe it's a warmup. However he couched it and Greg didn't agree. It was 10%. Yeah, I agree. Right, and so now a follow-up discussion on that should be. Well, why just 10%? Or what? Do you think that, like steel man, each other's positions, know exactly what the differences are and then discuss them and not try and change anyone's mind? But you should be able to say what is your coaching philosophy built on? Why do you think this works? What are you looking to do? And those are the questions that I hope are being asked, and I want to be a part of those discussions.

Speaker 2: 49:58

Greg, you guys know Richard Dawkins is an example. No, I can't think of. He's an evolutionary. He's like the Pied Piper of evolution, modern evolution. He's written all the books, but maybe he's a bad example. I was just trying to think of a scientist who you would say is sort of closed-minded. Right, you would say that Richard Dawkins is not willing to engage with anything that is counter to Darwinian evolution. Right, he is a zealot, he is closed-minded, but not in the sense that we think of closed-minded. He's just. There are people that have to believe in something so strongly that they don't allow any room to, they don't allow anyone to misinterpret, they don't allow anyone to misinterpret, they don't allow anyone to stick the god of the gaps in there or create. You know, does that make sense?

Speaker 3: 50:59

Yeah, 100% yeah, and I think that's exactly what happens with eco.

Speaker 2: 51:02

Yeah, I think Greg has decided and it's his personality and it's his true belief to be that person. They say science sort of moves through the obituary pages Like someone's got to die because they have an oversized influence, oversized voice. They have to die for anyone to hear the other voices. But I think that's important. So Greg is willing to be that asshole. That is like no dead wrecks, no drilling, no information, not that he says that, but he's willing to do that or call people idiots or whatever it is, so that people don't misinterpret or look for gaps or create these hybrid models and things he wants you to.

Speaker 2: 51:57

If you want to prove him wrong, he wants you to go find it in the literature, because he has spent all that time reading the literature. So he doesn't want to engage with all the world champions. Do this Like are you better than Dan or her? Like that's not what he wants to engage with all the world champions. Do this like are you better than dan or her? Or like that's not what he wants to engage with. He wants you to say I have this paper that shows if you do a thousand reps every day, you are better yeah, I think I I completely agree, but the the overarching thing is outcome, isn't it?

Speaker 3: 52:27

like? That's why I was thinking, I was thinking earlier in the card. I always have these sort of thoughts. I was thinking, like you know, with Dana hair, you know he now with what he's created with, like Gordon Ryan, for example, he said earlier about someone walking into your gym and they're world champions before you really do anything. So, like, at that point he had Gordon Ryan and obviously he had a few champions. But now, legacy, he's got potential world champions walking into his gym every single day that you know from around the world.

Speaker 3: 52:55

You know, if you're really good and you want to go train at Kingsway, that's where you're going to go and train, right, but then that doesn't necessarily mean, does it, that every like Adam's style of coaching is any worse than what his is, because if Adam had those athletes going in, they might be even better than what john's are not saying. They are not saying they're not, but what I'm saying is it's like that, that thing that you can get caught up in, like they've got to be the best because they've got a world champion and that's that's it yeah, I, I I've made a joke in the past that ATT you know the MMA team ATT like if they don't have every belt, they're underperforming, and it's for the same.

Speaker 2: 53:38

It's the same reason. But if you strip away everything, we can strip away from Danaher's room what New Wave or whatever it's called. Now what you are left with is a very impressive environment. Right, because those people are coming and training there. My brother and I just recently worked with a football team I'm not going to name them, but helping them with some off-season training and doing some MMA with them and this is one of the best football teams in the country, and what you realize is part of the reason they are so good is because the guy you're practicing against is also amazing, and the guy breathing down your neck is also amazing, and that is an environment that brings out championships. It brings out the best.

Speaker 2: 54:39

So if the coach just stays out of the way more than he gets involved and doesn't worry about minutia and just let them compete with each other, then it rises and you have this. And so I'm not saying Danaher is not the greatest modern coach that we have, or Galval or any of these other guys, but none of them had one guy in a room full of housewives and hobbyists and gave them all the information they needed to be a world champion, like the coach doesn't have that information. The coach doesn't have that ability. The environment is what has that information and ability. So if you can harness that, which is what the ecological approach is about, then I think a lot of everything else is staying out of the way.

Speaker 1: 55:44

Yeah, I think that's great and let's talk about, I guess, the best possible environment for learning jiu-jitsu and getting to constructing that. So I guess, from like an aspiring coach's perspective, so they're, you know, they're I don't know proficient at jiu-jitsu technique. They've been teaching the traditional way, but they want to start coaching more and creating the best environment to produce the best possible sort of outputs from their room. We kind of scuttled over scaling a little bit, so I guess we can kind of weave in what that needs to look like maybe into this bit as well. But yeah, tell us what you, or how you create the best environment to produce the best jiu-jitsu practitioners.

Speaker 2: 56:25

So one of the things that I have been struggling on I've been trying to get really deep into the ecological, both academically but like modern papers, but also reading all the books that laid the foundation frauds in this space. There are going to be a lot of people that came into this space because they had failed in other spaces and this was a place that they could make a name for themselves or make some money or things like that. So I realized I needed to differentiate myself and I was going to be the most educated person in the world on this topic. I am struggling to do that but I am not going to give up on that. But one of the components that you find over and over in ecological dynamics is this idea that we think normally as human beings is cause and effect as in a very linear manner, and what James Gibson and people like that were talking about a lot is looking at things where you can't say one caused the other, you can't say they loop. You have to almost think about things happening at the same exact time and not separating out pieces. I'm coming to your answer in a second, but, as coaches, a lot of time we separate out pieces Right, and then we try and put them back together and as human beings, we separate out the mind and the body, we separate out this and that.

Speaker 2: 58:13

What I realized in my room is that the culture and the environment and the method and the athletes are all one system, and so all those pieces have to function congruently or everything falls apart. So the environment and the culture are one piece. So we have this culture of care, we have this culture of exploration, we have this culture of failure, we have this culture of failure, we have this culture of helping others, and that's what the environment reflects. And so you can, to train alive, you have to have a lot of trust in the other people. Right, you have to have a high level of safety. Safety is something I take incredibly seriously. My MMA practices have very low head contact, my wrestling practices are very safe, and so you build the environment and the culture at the same time with the method and with the athletes.

Speaker 2: 59:28

So a live training and a culture of care and a culture of exploration and failure, and an environment where people are looking for the same things all work together. So if you want to create world champions, the best thing you could do is have a world champion and then have them train together. If you want to create world champions, the best thing you could do is have a world champion and then have them train together every day, all the time pushing each other. My environment and my culture has never been about that in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, which is part of the reason I probably don't have a world champion, I've had MMA world champions because that was the thing that I really enjoyed and that was the people that walked into the room and were willing to train together.

Speaker 2: 1:00:21

Forrest Griffin walks somewhere else, then I probably don't have my MMA room and he's still world champion. So I've just started to look at these things as being all one thing and if I change and so dead training, repetitions, fake training, things like that that just doesn't fit in with that system I'm trying to build. I don't know, I think I did a terrible job answering that question.

Speaker 3: 1:00:51

I don't know where I went? No, it was really good. Yeah, I completely get it.

Speaker 1: 1:00:55

Yeah, so the original question was really just, I guess, how someone starts making that transition as well.

Speaker 2: 1:01:01

So, oh, so that's the thing. Right, we were there. We weren't that far away, I didn't have to make so if we were, let's I'll use the word traditional We've already established. We don't know what that means, but I think we have a picture of what that means. The straw man of that is warm up three moves and roll, and then there's some levels of sophistication that go along with that and also a room like Danaher's. I don't know what his regular classes look like versus his team training.

Speaker 2: 1:01:33

Most of my students train in regular quote unquote regular classes. I only have two sessions a week in my gym that are specific for MMA fighters and that is only for safety. And that is only for safety because I am not going to constrain intensity that much. I constrain head contact in my gym. I am a stickler. Even my mid-level MMA classes are all chest and shoulder contact. My friend, scotty C Wright, has been working with me on that for a couple years and got me fully to trust it.

Speaker 2: 1:02:17

So if, well, just, I know it may be a straw man, but if you were going from that to this, I think you'd have a really hard time. And I'll use and I've seen where it fails and I've seen what happens. So let's say we were a traditional school but tonight we came in and we are now fully ecological. We are hardcore, zealous, ecological One. People won't necessarily be conditioned for it, right, like you were saying, danny. So people won't be able to do an hour of practice. That is now an hour of training. So that will cause people a lot of stress. If you've been spoon-fed your whole life, if I take away the spoon and give you chopsticks or put a whole bunch of other things on a table, you will be confused. Bunch of other things on the table, you will be confused. But let's say you get through that. Let's say tonight you set up a drill and it's good, it's ecological, it's scaled properly we'll talk about scaling in a second and you run that drill and the drill was to escape from back mount or whatever the hell that was. And you run that drill. That drill is going to look so antithetical to what you're used to seeing that a lot of times the coach can't handle that messiness and thinks the best way to handle that messiness is to tell them what to do in the drill. Of that messiness is to tell them what to do in the drill. And now we have created some kind of weird hybrid. Now you say we're ecological but we also drill and what you mean? I'm sorry, we're ecological but we also teach moves and we also do repetitions, and a lot of that is because the drills you created were either not scaled properly or you weren't willing to accept that this may take longer to look like what you think it looks like.

Speaker 2: 1:04:22

I had a hard transition with striking because striking is my first love. I love boxing. I grew up and if you guys are, are you guys boxing fans? Yes, so then you know how beautiful boxing should look. Right? I mean, two guys boxing moving To me, it's so aesthetically pleasing, it's dancing. But beginners in striking don't look like that. They look horrible. They look like white people at a bar mitzvah. They are just like all over the place, like they, no idea what they're doing.

Speaker 2: 1:05:02

As a coach, I always wanted to step in there and fix that. You know, do this, do this Because I thought if they didn't look like, the right thing. But then you see MMA and even the best strikers in the world. They don't necessarily look aesthetically pleasing. They have their own styles. Over time I realized people will get effective and then efficient, and efficient looks cleaner than effective. But you have to accept that that's going to take a long time.

Speaker 2: 1:05:34

And so a traditional coach they first have to deal with their students being uncomfortable.

Speaker 2: 1:05:39

When are you going to teach us moves?

Speaker 2: 1:05:41

I don't know how to do this.

Speaker 2: 1:05:42

What do I do?

Speaker 2: 1:05:44

Then they have to accept that the drilling is going to look messy, it's going to look sloppy.

Speaker 2: 1:05:49

They have to really figure out what effectiveness looks like and accept it. And then they have to avoid the voices in their head when they watch students and they want to tell their student to do this or do that. Now I'm not saying there's no place for that eventually or later, but I think a mistake we make, even in a traditional model, is we give too much information too soon. And so if I could just get some coaches to hold off on that, to start with the context, to start with letting them just experience this, then maybe later you feel like you have to give them some information, you have to guide them somehow. I bet they'll be more receptive of that and they'll understand it more. Why front load it? You know we teach people 30, like foundational classes, they have 30 moves. Everyone has to learn or something you know. There's some organizations that have more than that. I'm like how the hell are they going to learn these moves when they don't even know why? They're on the ground with some dude between their legs? I do.

Speaker 2: 1:07:06

Because it's fun and it's Friday night, but generally they don't understand the context of what they're doing. Some people came in for self-defense and now all of a sudden you're doing this, which looks ludicrous. Yeah, some people came in for self-defense and now all of a sudden you're doing this, which looks ludicrous. So I think it's difficult to go from a traditional model. I think it would have to be a slow process.

Speaker 1: 1:07:32

Yeah, I think you're right. I completely agree.

Speaker 3: 1:07:34

I know Paul's talked about this before. How do you tackle higher belts in your gym when you're you know you're teaching, you know you've got your game, it will set up and everything. How do you do you? How do you stop your higher belt, kind of guiding your white belts in certain positions, because we've had that sort of issue before, like where they're struggling to get out of mount, for example, and then they're pretty much coaching them instead of actually giving them proper resistance. Do you pull them up on that and say, could you stop that?

Speaker 2: 1:08:03

Yeah, so I'm not against just telling everyone to shut up. Right, there are some drills and some days I will not allow upper belts to train lower belts, because if we're talking about the environment, having the information, then a black belt has different shows and gives different information than their fellow white belts and I don't need them to solve black belt problems when they need to learn how to solve white belt problems. Now, there are some black belts who are good at that and some who aren't. So I keep them more away from the lower belts. I will tell people to shut up. So I keep them more away from the lower belts. I will tell people to shut up and I'll also make sure that.

Speaker 2: 1:08:43

Look, we have a rule in our gym that's called no sideline coaching and one of those aspects is just shut up, use your body. If you want to help them, use your body. Don't use your mouth, because they don't understand what you're saying anyway, they can't repeat it and it's just as bad as if we just dead rep this. So my upper belts understand that Maybe. Earlier it was definitely a problem and I see it in open math sometimes, but I'm not against telling them to shut up.

Speaker 2: 1:09:24

Shut up and scaling can take care of some of this also, where the white belt only has to accomplish a small number of things that are easily accomplished to be successful, and the upper belt has to accomplish some more difficult things to be successful, and we can start in positions that are closer or further away for either side.

Speaker 2: 1:09:44

A lot of times we'll do sort of a progressive set of drills, where you start on the back with two hooks and then you have one hook and then you have no hooks and you have to be successful to be able to move along, and so we ask the upper belt to solve more difficult problems. So they don't have time necessarily to run their mouths. The white belt just has to get on their side, which is sort of easy for them. You don't have to help them do that, you have to try and stop them from doing that, and the black belt's got to get under both elbows or something, and so a lot of times we can avoid that by making sure that the drill is scaled in a way that they can both get something out of it, and proper partner pairing is really important for your culture and your environment to make sure that the right people are training with the right people.

Speaker 1: 1:10:36

Yeah, I agree, yeah, I think it's, and this is where obviously being a very good coach is so important, because I say I do a bit of coaching.

Speaker 1: 1:10:45

I do one class at our academy but we've got a coaching staff and a head coach who isn't ecological and I just kind of do the one session a week is the fundamentals class and I, where I can, will try and use this methodology, but I, you know, I've got other things going on so I don't have the time to create all these different like scaled versions of of sort of tasks or games. So I really struggle to to really get anywhere with this, purely because I don't have the time and maybe the complete autonomy to be able to implement what I want. So I think for a lot of people maybe that's the barrier for them to even start training this way. I think you know, whatever I do because of my experience with SBG and everything else in my approach to training full stop, I think you know I'm told by the students that it's an effective class and they seem to enjoy it and they seem to improve.

Speaker 3: 1:11:39

This one's busy. Yeah, it's busy as well. Which?

Speaker 1: 1:11:41

says a lot. It's important. I'd like to be able to do more of this, but I just I seem to struggle because a problem that we've run into, or I've run into a lot, is exactly what Danny just mentioned, where I'll have a although it's a fundamentals class, I'll have a complete mixture of people, from day one beginners to brown belts and you know, trying to organize that room in a way, because it's only an hour session where you know people with the right people, where we've got multiple sort of versions of a game or a task. It is incredibly challenging to get right. So I struggle with that, so I don't know what I'm really asking.

Speaker 2: 1:12:18

but that's my problem. Yeah, so let me see if I can help you with that. So, when you think about scaling, what does that look like? What does a drill scale mean?

Speaker 1: 1:12:28

Yeah, so pretty much what you said, and I'm not saying that I know how to do this, but my understanding is exactly what you said really, which is you have a problem or a task and for the white belt it's maybe far easier to achieve with less steps and with a higher grade or a higher sort of ranked person it's. You know, there's maybe sort of more steps required to achieve it, to achieve a win condition or whatever it is. So that's loosely what my understanding is.

Speaker 2: 1:13:03

Okay, it can be that it can be making a progression within the drill where you go from. You know, like I said one that I just used the other day you know your hooks and harness and then your one hook and then your no hooks. You know, so you're one hook and then you're no hooks. So you're making it more difficult, but you have to be successful to make it more difficult. One thing that I picked up from Greg is making you have to repeat the same task some number of times before you can move on to. So that allows two people who are differently skilled to be on a little bit of a different time horizon, which allows more chance for them to be successful before the other person quote unquote wins. So that's a way you can do it. Another way you can do it is put. So there are a lot of times where you're focused on one side or the other.

Speaker 2: 1:14:05

Right Now, all training is uncooperative, but sometimes you want to work on escaping. Let's say, now the person that's pinning. They have to really be pinning, but if we want the person to have a better, if we want the person to explore escaping more, then maybe we start them closer to something that we would deem successful. So just the difference between being on their side with an underhook on bottom versus being flat where the person on top has the underhook, can change everything about how that drill looks. Yeah, yeah, so you can, you can use. You can use things like that. Or you can make, let's say, a group of three where there are two lower belts there's a lower belt, a middle belt and upper belt. That's the way each person gets closer to their challenge point the lower belt gets the middle belt, the middle belt gets the upper belt and everyone just gets.

Speaker 3: 1:15:17

Some reps are easier and some reps are harder and with that as well, I was just thinking with just jiu-jitsu in general. There's a lot of fodder in. You know, when you're drilling in bits and pieces, there's a lot of technical moves that I find 99 of people never need. Like you know there's. There's certain aspects of jiu-jitsu, like I don't know crab rides from certain positions and you know a lot, a lot of stuff that probably you don't need a lot. Do you with your ecological approach, do you target the more like fundamental movements, like whenever people are talking about this, always talking about, like a game from mount, a game from back or a game from, like you know, passing guard or wrestling or whatever. But obviously there's those small elements of like really technical bits that again, I'm not sure if it's needed or not, but I just want to know your take on those, those specific parts.

Speaker 2: 1:16:13

So I don't know what I couldn't coach what crab riding is? I mean, I've seen it.

Speaker 2: 1:16:18

I know it's part of the meta. I know it's part of the meta, I know it's part of. So one way these things happen is our students watch videos and they watch tournament footage. And if they are ready I'll use the word ready for things like that, then if I just stay out of the way, if I have a student who is good at back control, then they can watch a video of some guy doing crab ride. And then all of a sudden I see them the next time they're rolling, live playing with crab ride, or saying to their partner because this is our culture, hey, can I start in crab ride for this round? I'm going Crab Ride for this route. I'm going to try and do this. You just play your normal game.

Speaker 2: 1:17:07

So the greater environment, that's larger than the room, is a way for information to make it into the room. Or when I see a student, I'm going to use inside trip as an example, because it's one that I have fresh in my head. If you allow your students, if you are good at creating drills and constraining drills and the clinch and the wrestling, then an inside trip will probably emerge at some point. Right, if you have them attacking in the middle or the knee. I'm sure Cal Jones has a way to make an inside trip emerge. The problem is, while they are exploring the inside trip, three or four people have their ACLs blown out. Where people have their ACLs blown out, so I may not have the, I may not have the time or the needs to allow people to explore inside trips. So I say to myself what are the pieces that I need to see? What are the I'm going to use the word precursors because I don't have a better word what are the conditions, the precursors that I need to see? What are the I'm going to use the word precursors because I don't have a better word. What are the conditions, the precursors that I need to see, that I then feel comfortable sharing an inside trip with them and I'm not stealing from their creativity. And so at that point I might break out a crash mat and show them an inside trip and say, hey, get a couple reps of this. I don't detail it and I don't watch them and correct it. I just look for an effective inside trip that's not going to blow on anyone's knees, and then they take it out in a while and then they take it out in the wild. So that would be how anything could sort of be brought into an ecological approach.

Speaker 2: 1:19:08

Now, maybe a zealot wouldn't like that, but a zealot would definitely admit that their students watch competition footage. And if you watch enough competition footage, your student might come to you and say, hey, what is this? I keep hearing about a crab ride. And I am honest and be like all right, well, how's your back control game, how's your, you know? And I can see that crab ride. And I can say, okay, here's where I see that happening from right.

Speaker 2: 1:19:39

Maybe back with harness and no hooks and do a drill where I say, okay, you're not allowed to put your hooks in, you have to control them, you have to keep your harness, but you're not allowed to put your hooks in. And then I say, hey, where you're talking about crab ride, where do people put their hooks Behind the knees. Okay, let's get some reps, let's see what happens, right. So I don't privilege anything for them, like I was saying before, like I don't care if they know a triangle or a hip bump sweep, I don't care if they know any of that stuff, I'll put them in. We'll do a lot of rounds where one arm is in, one arm is out and their legs are crossed and they know that if they can get the arm and the shoulder and they can choke someone. But there's all kinds of stuff that could happen from there.

Speaker 2: 1:20:35

We all have students that will never be able to triangle anyone. So what happens when they show up to that foundations class tonight and you're running triangle repetitions all night? You're entering into it, you're locking it up, you're doing variations, whatever the hell it is, and I have a student who can't do a triangle. That's not cool, that's not good coaching. So things emerge, either because you put them in positions where they can emerge, or they see that in the real world. And as a coach I don't have to tell them how to do the crab ride. Go watch the crab ride. But I need to understand where that crab ride emerges from and then I'll push them down that path and then they can put those things together for themselves.

Speaker 1: 1:21:24

Nice, yeah, I'll see what you mean. Yeah, that's good. And you kind of mentioned earlier that if you've got somebody for maybe two hours a week, you want to try and make the environment as effective for them in those two hours to be as good as they can be. I mean, if someone's only training a couple of hours a week, I mean, where do you sort of Do you have a foundation program, did you say or not? I do have a foundation program, yeah, so maybe we can touch on that, because I'm again running like a fundamentals or a foundation program myself, or a session at least. Often the question in my head is like where, like where do I start? You know where's the best place to start for these people? Um, you know, if they're only training a couple of hours a week, like for them to cycle around a number of positions or games would take about years and maybe that's just the answer. But yeah, what do you do?

Speaker 2: 1:22:20

Okay, so the question I ask you is what do you want those people?

Speaker 1: 1:22:25

to get out of it. Well, I'd want them to enjoy the session and keep coming.

Speaker 2: 1:22:30

First and foremost, so that's, I agree with that 100% right. Retention is a foundation's coach's number one job, and then culture is their next job. So you, just you basically laid that those both out, Okay. So now they go from foundations class to a general class.

Speaker 1: 1:22:52

Is that correct? We've got on all levels and then an advanced class, both of which are primarily um sort of more detailed with technique, and then, uh, those sort of scaled resistance and then sort of isolation, sparring and sparring.

Speaker 2: 1:23:05

So you have an insurmountable task, Because in my foundations class I just want them to be able to come into the all levels class and have some type of shared experience and vocabulary. So tonight I think we are working escapes. I don't want to have to explain what the mount is to them and I don't want to have to show them how to get into mounts. I want them to have at least done a couple classes where they were in the mount or mounted and if they were mounted, they were trying to push the other person off them, keep their elbows down. If they were in the mount, they were trying to play with their hips or keep the other person's hands off them.

Speaker 2: 1:23:57

Very simple, fundamental ideas, not movements. Now, when they get into the all levels class, they can engage with more of jujitsu because they have a little context and they have some shared vocabulary and shared time, and they have some shared vocabulary and shared time. So my foundations class is, then, congruent with my all levels class. My foundations MMA class is all built around movement and relationships between two fighters the movement and the relationship between two fighters, and some hand fighting and some cage work and a little grappling with striking, just so now when they come into the all-levels class. They've engaged with that, but you are sending them from your environment into a different environment where, if they go to the all-levels class and they are working on combinations from the triangle if you have not gotten them ready for it, this is the first time they see that there's an issue. So you are really trying to do something very difficult.

Speaker 3: 1:25:18

I think it's two different things, isn't it? Yeah, you know effectively either. Yeah, I think, if anything, it would be you would have to change the way you're doing your class to fit in with the club rather than the other way around, because they're our head coach and you know what I mean.

Speaker 1: 1:25:35

So in that scenario where the state of play is what it is, am I doing those students a disservice by not preparing them correctly for what's next, or am I doing the right thing by trying to kind of teach in this way?

Speaker 2: 1:25:49

Well, it's funny because your students are probably more prepared to go to an open mat, right? Your students will be more prepared to go to an open mat than if all they did was repetitions, like they had 30 moves to learn and they did repetitions and they quote, unquote, learn those moves. Then you put them in an open mat. They'd have no idea how to roll.

Speaker 3: 1:26:11

They do do rolling, though it's like I don't know however long, and then they rolled on whatever in the, in the, in the advanced classes.

Speaker 2: 1:26:18

Yeah, so that part of the class Paul's students would be more prepared for than they would be if they're asked to do repetitions of something they may never have seen before. Yeah, so you, yeah, you. I think it's great. The coach doesn't? The head coach doesn't seem to care right.

Speaker 1: 1:26:42

No, he does, he does and he is open-minded to exploring it. But I think he's just again done things a particular way for such a long time.

Speaker 3: 1:26:52

And he's very successful. That's the other thing. It's one of those things, isn't it? He's just won the British Open, for example, for the 10th time at Black Belt. He's got a student who is, you know, quite possibly at some point going to be a world champion or up there with some of the best in the world. Wow, it's hard. It's hard to not argue but put in different ideas when he and you know he's again his student, where he is, his son. Now he's, you know, he's bringing from nothing to becoming very, very good. So it's, you know, it's one of those things, isn't it? It's like that. It's methods, you know they, they do work. They're different.

Speaker 2: 1:27:36

Well, they're not different, they're more traditional, but he's, you know it works and I would never try and argue with you know that head coach, because I do. I do have a hard time arguing against scoreboard right. I have a one of my best friends is a coach in a different SBG and we've been together for 25 years and he runs very traditional SBG but his striking classes have a lot of hitting the pads. My fighters don't hit pads, right, they hit a little bit of bags because it's just the only time they could really lay into something, but they don't hit pads. They hit people, say again pads. They hit people, say again. So they hit people. Right, but I don't allow them to hit people that hard. So that's my challenge, but that's for a different podcast. But I'll say that if I try and engage him about hitting pads like why are you guys hitting so many pads, he'll say two things. He'll say one people like to hit pads. Like why are you guys hitting so many pads? He'll say two things. He'll say one people like to hit pads. So business-wise it's a good decision for him. Okay, I can't argue with that. Two, he'll say scoreboard, like I've put my guys do very well on the local scene and I have guys making their name on the national scene and I've had UFC fighters. So scoreboard. And in MMA I can counter back with scoreboard, but in BJJ I can't counter back. I have a small group of guys that compete occasionally and they do well. They're always no one's outmatched, no one's outgunned. But I don't have a future world champion on my mat. If I did, I would raise him up. This way I could point to other sports that are using this. But there are other sports that are fighting the same battles. Right, I have friends who are high up in professional baseball organizations and they were hired to bring these ideas into those organizations. But they still spend a lot of their time fighting with the traditionalists, the dogma, and I can imagine the better the organization is that you're trying to convince, the more difficult it would be, because why change what's working?

Speaker 2: 1:30:04

What I see a lot of the times is that coaches start with an amount of time that they think practice should last. They're like oh, this is scheduled for an hour and a half and it's hard to do a live training for an hour and a half, so they write in the amount of live training they're going to do and then they backfill everything else in. I see this when I work with a football team, I'm like, why are you doing anything that's not alive? Well, one is safety right, and the other is because they have two hours of practice scheduled and they can't beat on these guys for two hours and that's a traditional practice time. So, like you're dealing with so many things, what I try and do with coaches who are very traditional, who are very scoreboard, who I have a hard time.

Speaker 2: 1:30:52

I just work with them to try and increase the amount of time that's alive, and I don't care if they take that out of the warmup, I don't care if they take that out of the warmup, I don't care if they take that out of the dead drilling. I'm just like, where can we squeeze more aliveness? And I've helped some do that slowly over time and they've been able to move more towards. Or I'll challenge them about when and how and who they give information to. I'm not telling you, don't rep things. If that's your thing, if that's your, but who is that valuable for? And so, yeah, you're in a tough situation, but you got to open your own school, then Maybe that's next.

Speaker 1: 1:31:41

Take the podcast and open your own school? Yeah, maybe in many years, but, mate, that's been really helpful and we'll wrap up shortly. But I kind of mentioned, when we were messaging just before the podcast, like is there anything you know that you're kind of like seeing or getting frustrated by when you see the conversations that are happening around coaching that you want to discuss, or that you're kind of like seeing or getting frustrated by when you when you see the conversations that are happening around coaching that you want to discuss, that you think is worth mentioning before we go?

Speaker 2: 1:32:03

Well, so I think in all sports there there's a dogma. You know, in boxing it was don't lift weights, and baseball it was don't lift weights, and other sports you know it's it's the repetitions or or speed ladders, or cone drills, or shooting a thousand shots and things like that. And I would just ask coaches to spend a little more time understanding why they do those things and what they expect those things to give them. Like professional baseball players are still hitting off the teeth and I just I would ask them why. You know, and I'd like coaches I know a gym owner is a coach and a businessman and a marketing director and the head of the culture and a bartender and a psychologist, and sometimes they're a financial planner.

Speaker 2: 1:32:57

I get all that shit, so it is hard, but I challenge every coach out there to spend some time learning their craft. No matter how good you got, your coach was still working off a dogma that he learned from his coach all the way back to somebody who was like hey, who was in the military probably, and they learned that drilling was the best way to handle 20 people at a time, and so they drill things and if you go back far enough, you'd be hard pressed for anyone to tell you why. And so one thing I see in the whole coaching space is a lack of coaching education, and so, since that doesn't really exist, I'd like to see coaches spend more time engaging with material. It doesn't have to be ecological, that's not always an easy way to jump in, but if someone hasn't read, someone doesn't know Anders Ericsson is in deliberate practice, or learning how to communicate, or just there are all kinds of pieces how practice, or learning how to communicate, or just there are all kinds of pieces how to rehab, how to prehab, how to warm up, whatever it is.

Speaker 2: 1:34:06

I want more coaches to engage with that, and I think if they did slowly, I think you would see people move more towards an ecological approach, because I think it is the most parsimonious way to start coaching people. So that's one. Two, there are a lot of frauds and phonies and hybrid methods and this and that, and there are going to be people making money that are doing more harm than good. And I'm a capitalist Make all the money you want to. I'll never do it, because as soon as I record something, I feel like all the fraud just seeping out at me.

Speaker 2: 1:34:48

So I'll never make any money doing it and I don't begrudge anyone, but there are a lot of people. You got Star Wars fans yeah, a little. So there's a scene in Star Wars where Luke Skywalker says to Han Solo he's like you don't believe in anything, do you? And Han Solo should have been like the thing you learned about ten minutes ago. That's now, that's everything to you now. And that's exactly what's happened in ecological space.

Speaker 2: 1:35:16

People saw Greg do something and it was cool and they're like, oh, this is awesome, I want to try this. And then all of a sudden, they're experts at it and that's all they believe and everyone else is wrong. And I'm just like you're not helping anything here, like you should shut the fuck up, read about 40 books, run about 1,000 sessions, get some people from white to blue to purple just doing this that are good, and then you should speak, and so like I almost don't want to be a part of well, I don't want to be a part of anything, but the way I'm trying to distinguish myself is I am going to learn everything I can about this, even if it breaks my frigging brain, which I've hit. I've hit that point now when I'm trying to dig into ecology and direct perception and things like that. Where my brain hurts yeah, my brain always hurts, mate. Yeah, I get it. I get it. So it so. And I think, as I think we also have to accept as coaches like your coach and other coaches who are traditionalists that coaching is coaching and movement is movement and developing skill is developing skills. So we might have to look outside of our own sport to learn a little bit more right, we can't if we just do scoreboard and then so everyone believes the best way to get the scoreboard is a traditional approach. Then we can't evolve as a sport.

Speaker 2: 1:36:53

Someone has to take a chance, someone has to, and we have to be honest that making a world champion is a lot of times. There's luck involved. Right, who comes into your room? I have a lot of MMA fighters. I've coached a lot of MMA fighters over the years and most of them have achieved what they were capable of achieving. But I know I've had guys who would win a fight and then promoters, managers, they come up and be like that kid's going places, he's going to be in the UFC one day, and I always say the same thing. I said maybe or maybe tonight he meets a girl, or maybe he gets a DUI and he can't train anymore, or maybe he steps wrong and he's never the same athlete again. So that's luck. So if most coaches stayed the hell out of the way and let the environment do more of the work, then all of their athletes would reach their full potential.

Speaker 3: 1:37:48

Yeah, yeah, that was good, that was a good summary.

Speaker 2: 1:37:50

I didn't say anything. That's going to make anyone mad. I didn't say anything, that's right. No, you did well, mate.

Speaker 1: 1:37:55

Mate, that's been great. I know you're not big on socials or anything, but if people did want to reach out to you or potentially work with you, how do they do that? I'll tell you.

Speaker 2: 1:38:07

And I would like people to reach out to me. First of all, I can't seem to get a thousand followers on Instagram.

Speaker 2: 1:38:10

I've been stuck in the 800s and I'm putting out stuff. I just can't do it every day like people tell me I have to do. I'm AdamSingerSBG on Instagram. I am happy to help or work with any coaches that want to get involved with this. Just from a conversation, to book recommendations, to whatever Follow me so I can get to 1,000. I don't know what happens when I get to 1,000. You guys have a lot of followers. What happens? You get rich, right? No, nothing happens mate.

Speaker 2: 1:38:44

You know you get these goals and you think, nothing really fucking changes.

Speaker 3: 1:38:47

It just becomes numbers, doesn't it?

Speaker 1: 1:38:49

It's like oh yeah, you stall one in 2,000.

Speaker 2: 1:38:56

That's what happens, mate. Good contact, no, I love people. Instant messenger me. I like to talk to people. Like I said, a lot of people have helped me. I've been in a lot of rooms and I've gone to a lot of places and I've asked a lot of questions and it's very rare that someone has not been gracious or helpful. I do think you know Greg wants people to have done their homework before having these conversations. I'm happy to help people figure out what the homework is.

Speaker 1: 1:39:26

Yeah, well, thanks. That's been helpful for me and I think Danny enjoyed that as well. I think he's getting a bit sick of ecological conversations, but he seemed to enjoy it.

Speaker 3: 1:39:33

No, I'm not. I actually really enjoy it.

Speaker 1: 1:39:35

Yeah, but yeah, appreciate your time, dude, and yeah, I feel like we'll probably do this again at some point. Thank you, thank you guys, appreciate it. Cheers mate, cheers man.