Learning to Fight - Matt Thornton - Episode 13

Learning to Fight Podcast — Conversations in Combat Skill

After a year-long hiatus, the Primal MMA Coaching Podcast is back—Rebranded, and refocused as the Learning to Fight Podcast: Conversations in Combat Skill.

Your hosts are:

Adam Singer — Co-owner and head coach at SBG Athens, BJJ black belt, long-time MMA coach, with years of developing novice to elite level fighters. Student of Matt Thornton and SBG's philosophy of 'aliveness'.
Scott Sievewright — Co-Owner at Primal MKE, MMA skills coach and obsessive student of how humans learn to move and fight. 

Together, we dive deep into the art and science of coaching, training, and skill development in combat sports.
 Expect honest conversations about MMA, striking, grappling, practice design, contemporary research, traditional approaches, ecological dynamics, and the messy realities of learning under pressure.

No gurus. No dogma. Just two coaches trying to understand fighting a little better each week.

Same curiosity. New lens.
Learn how to learn.
Find your own style.
Thrive on the mats—and in the cage.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Matt, this is Scotty. Scotty and I are on this journey to figure out how best to train athletes or fighters. This is a learning to fight podcast. Um and so we both are into science and research and testing and all the things you're into. Um and Scotty has a even no matter how deep he gets into this study, he always has a really good appreciation for some of the things that SVG had been doing for a long time. So um he's a good friend. He's working on his master's in he sounds a little like Carl. His master's in skill acquisition, and he's probably from the same same part of the world as Carl was. Scotty, this is my coach Matt Dorton, and close friend of mine for 25 years, and I think um it will be it would be very cool to ask him some of the questions we'd like to ask and get his answers and stuff. So cool?

SPEAKER_02 1:01

Yeah, thanks for having me guys. I normally have a better microphone. I was trying to hook it up this morning, and for some reason I can't, so hopefully the audio is not too bad.

SPEAKER_00 1:08

Well, Scotty didn't record one episode and he couldn't hook his sound up for another, so we are a very young podcast. Okay. But Scotty, Scotty's Scotty's good with the uh he's good with putting stuff out, so that's probably the most important thing. Perfect. Um so here's here's what I wanted to say before Scotty, you introduce yourself, because I this is this is my introduction. Rory and I were doing all kinds of martial arts stuff in the late 90s. Um G Kundo was the main driver, but the coach that we had in J Kundo said that we should go kickbox and box and do jujitsu. And so that's what we started doing. But every time we trained with him, 90% of everything was like a pattern and reps and body mechanics and woo-woo. But the 10% that we were getting to train for real was a lot of fun. So we kept doing it. And then I was looking through Black Belt magazine and there was a full page ad for it, Straight Blast Gym Productions. Right? It had it had Matt, um Burton Richardson, in a way, I think you had all the the whole big set on Black Belt magazine, whole page. But there was one that was titled Aliveness. You know, you'll learn how to fight, or you'll know how to fight, or something like that. It was awesome. So I borrowed a bunch of money from my wife. I never paid it back, but I borrowed a bunch of money from my wife because they were fucking expensive, man. And they were VHS, they were VHS tapes. It was like almost 500 bucks for the whole thing, I think. Um but I bought it and I we watched this, I watched it. The first one I popped in was the liveness, and I watched it, and I'm like, this is it. This is this is all I want to do. And so I sent them an email and he emailed me back. And there was just one thing I was unsure about because when you watch the videos, it does look like a white supremacist training camp. For sure. It's it's Portland in the 90s, so it's like, are these guys Nazis? But I took a chance. Um Matt was coming to Florida and um he was doing a seminar, and I said to my wife, let's go on vacation to Florida. Um, and then I could do this on Saturday. I met Matt and it just it clicked. It was like, this is we're gonna do some cool stuff together. And we've been together ever since. But I want to start after you talk or do it, everyone. I want to start talking about a livingness. So, Scotty, take it away for a little while. Matt, talk about it.

SPEAKER_01 3:37

So, Matt, I've I've I've referenced you many times over the years. I started a podcast about six years ago, the Primal MMA coaching podcast. Um, just a bit of a background. I always characterize myself as a bit of a Johnny come lately to martial arts. I didn't start until my late 20s. Got into coaching early. Um, really fascinated. I just wanted to take it seriously and do the best job I could do. And I went down there, I thought I'd get into the books. I went back to school to do a coaching, bachelor's, and whatnot. And first, it doesn't really matter. I've told this story a bunch of times. Somewhere along the line, I I fell into the kind of alternative idea of uh ecological dynamics and uh the variability in training and all this kind of stuff that maps on to um the uh uh SVG and and and the iMethod. And then I can't remember exactly how it met Adam. But and again, if it seems like I'm whopping you up here, there's there's a little certainly a little bit of that going on. I first met Adam and we had a couple of back and forths, and Adam came on to do a recording with me on Primal, and I called it um standing on the shoulders of the liveness giant. So I just want to get that out of the way. A lot of the stuff that you talk about are not new ideas when put in the context of SBG and I method. So I'm interested to ask you questions today about what was your origin story about coming around to this? And I think what Adam and I talk about a lot is that initial I, the introduction stage, and how it fits with maybe our perspective, what we're trying to do, how that's evolved over time, and maybe how do you think it's been because there's SVGs all over the world? Has your vision uh is it morphed? Is it changed? Has it has it been uh adopted with kind of fidelity across across all the networks? I'm just interested in stuff like that. How is the iMethod? How did it come around? How is it implemented back then? And how do you see it in its present form, not just in your own dojo, but across can do me a favor though.

SPEAKER_00 5:20

Put a pin in i method and start with aliveness, because I think it tells the story the same way that we do, Scotty, with ecological dynamics, constraints-led approach, representative design. I think. So, what what's aliveness? How did you come up with that?

SPEAKER_02 5:34

Sure. Um, by definition, when I explain this, I'm gonna be talking about stuff that I've talked about many times before, and you already are well familiar, Adam, but I'll I'll uh go through it for the audience. Um, ever since I was a kid, I was interested and attracted to martial arts. And my reason for being interested in martial arts, the thing that interested me about martial arts was what works and what doesn't work in a fight for various reasons. That's always what I've been interested in. Um, I started karate and doing a little bit of traditional martial arts as a kid. I didn't really like that. I had decided that uh what I thought was the most functional at that time was boxing, kickboxing. So I've been focused on boxing. And then when I left the military, I started to look into what was called Jikoto concepts. What I liked about that was the fact that they talked about fighting at all four ranges, fighting on the ground. I'd been in a few fights where I've been taken down and it looked like uh, you know, UFC one. And I realized we need to be able to fight everywhere. And taking a dialectic approach where they took in what worked and what didn't and fought at all the different ranges seemed smart to me. So I started in that culture. I became an instructor, uh, moved to Portland, Oregon, started looking around uh for other schools. There really wasn't a Jeekundo school in the city at the time. I met up with a friend of mine who was at the time who was a Anasano instructor, and we opened up a school together. He opened up the school and I taught for him. And so at that time, I was doing boxing five days a week, just amateur boxing, and then teaching at that school. And I was there for about two and a half, three years. And over that time, I got to meet a lot of the JKD people that were pretty well known, you know, Burton Richardson, Richard, all the guys, um, take seminars with them, listen to them, talk to them. Um, and I started to become a little bit disillusioned because what they talked about doing and what they actually did were often two very different things. And what bothered me the most about it was uh there was a certain amount of deception of what they would say behind closed doors about what worked and what they would say in front of their students, which I didn't appreciate. And I was still thinking about what works and what doesn't work in fights. And right around that time, Fabio Santos put an ad in the newspaper here offering people 50 bucks if you could come beat them up. And like, I get beat up every day at the boxing gym, I'll go do that. And that was Fabio's way of getting students, and again, took me down mount. I rolled, got a choke. I immediately started taking privates with them, fell in love with jujitsu. I went back to the school I was teaching at and tried to explain this to everybody. They didn't really seem that interested. You know, you don't want to fight on the ground, uh, it's not a place you want to be. How are they gonna take me down? They had all these different uh excuses for it. And that whole time I was teaching at that school, I had basically one night a week where I could do whatever I want, which was Friday nights. And uh, and that was basically just MMA sparring. Because when I had first moved to the city, I had kind of had an envision in my head of how I wanted to train. And so I was left to my own devices on that night, and that's what we did. And my experiences from that over and over again told me actually the hardest thing to do is not um is to stop someone from taking you down, right? It's actually quite easy to take somebody down if they just come in and tackle you, especially these guys didn't have a lot of power behind it. So all these myths started to pop for me. Um, I started to get a little cynical. I started to think about the arts that work and don't work. I would make a list and write them all out, and it became apparent pretty quickly that all the arts that work that I thought were functional, this was all before the UFC, were combat sports. Um, so what is it about combat sports that separates them from the other arts? Well, they spar, that's true, but it was the training method of aliveness. And I don't remember the exact time or day that I thought of this part or thought of that part, but I do remember that it kind of hit me all at once. I saw right away what it was. The name seemed obvious to me, the elements, the components, the three components of it seemed self-evident to me. Um, and that was it. So from that point forward, I was gonna kind of make that the epistemology of what I was doing. Right about that exact same time, I met Hicks and Gracie for the first time. I've told this story a bunch, but uh, he was obviously super impressive and wrestled with a room full of judo black belts without using his hands, and uh, and I was completely hooked. It was like, here is finally a martial art that is the real thing. They can actually do what they say they're gonna do. I went back to the school, told everybody about it. Well, my peers there just did not seem interested. And so I opened up a school. I opened up a school about 30 miles away because I didn't want to compete with my former partner, and my only reason for opening up a school was to get training partners. I honestly had no real interest in doing this for a living or teaching, but there's nowhere else to go. There was no such thing as there was no jujitsu schools in Oregon or anything like that. And that became the first SBG. And then uh the training method we adopted right away was uh the IME that introduced isolated integrated.

SPEAKER_00 10:01

Pen it right there. Penn it. I think aliveness is too important for us to just skip over that fast. Okay. Um, what you said there were three things that there were three things that made up aliveness. What were those?

SPEAKER_02 10:14

Timing, energy, and motion. You know, and I've I've thought and people have come to me at different times and to replace those words with something that would be more um accurate, and I'm perfectly I have yeah, and I'm perfectly willing to do so, and I'm happy with people phrase it however they want.

SPEAKER_00 10:29

But I I think when you figured when you came up with those three words, I think they were partly a product of who you were talking to. It was 100% a product of who I was talking to. Right. But now on the aliveness tape, you actually have a functional definition of aliveness. Do you remember what that was?

SPEAKER_02 10:48

Uh timing, energy, and motion.

SPEAKER_00 10:50

No, that's that's your triangle. But on the tape, when you're describing the drills that we're seeing, you say um this is an uncooperative opponent.

SPEAKER_02 11:00

Right, right.

SPEAKER_00 11:01

I think you even and you mentioned it's unscripted. Unscripted, yes.

SPEAKER_02 11:05

That's the timing aspect of it.

SPEAKER_00 11:06

So I think those two words are uh they're really functional for just even looking at your your drill you just put together.

SPEAKER_02 11:16

They are, but they still require the other two components. If you only go with those two words and you don't put the other ones in, you could very well end up with something like Systema. And part of the reason why I think people think Systema has something to it, even though it's transparently stupid, is the fact that it's unscripted.

SPEAKER_00 11:30

Yeah, but it looks co-op it looks cooperative. Looks cooperative, but and it doesn't look like it's in context of a file.

SPEAKER_02 11:35

No, I mean you and I can look at it right away and see that, but the energy is wrong. This is not how somebody would actually do it. I gotcha. But um things like the I method and describing specifically how I would teach something, a lot of that stuff evolved. Uh it was evolving in my classes and in my gym, but explaining it evolved because people would ask me questions. You know, does that just mean well you can't just throw people in the water? You can't just put gloves on people and have them beat each other up. How do you train this? How do you learn this? And then I would break it down for people. And it's those breakdowns of explaining it to people how what we were actually doing at the time, um, where things like the iMethod came came from.

SPEAKER_00 12:10

Is is it binary? What do you mean is it binary? Is something alive or dead?

SPEAKER_02 12:17

Uh yes. Yeah, absolutely. I think so.

SPEAKER_00 12:23

Is there skills of aliveness? No, it's binary. You said it's binary. It is it's alive or dead.

SPEAKER_03 12:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 12:31

And I do think, and I still think this is that it's the most important piece. I mean, the moment you remove aliveness, everything falls apart. And you know, you could have something super functional like Brazilian jiu-jitsu is obviously a very functional delivery system. But if you took out aliveness within a year, two years, or even less, you're gonna wind up with something that looks like Japanese jujitsu. And so that piece is it's one part of the game, but I think it's the most important part for sure.

SPEAKER_00 12:54

Okay, so now walk walk backwards with me for a second. So the aliveness is the most important part. The training method, the epistemology, yeah, the answer-seeking method. Right. Testing, the experimental, the scientific method.

SPEAKER_03 13:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:09

Okay. So we back up, and you're like the closest, the thing that is most alive, the thing that looks the most like the sport is sparring. Which you call the integration phase. Which I believe has a s has a scaling or or more representative or less representative as you get into the drilling phase. The drilling phase looks less like the whole game, it's more controlled.

SPEAKER_02 13:31

And that's a piece that a lot of people, obviously, you understand this quite well, but a lot of people do not understand till to this day. They'll think they'll equate aliveness as being synonymous with sparring. And you know, sparring is by definition alive, but that doesn't mean that aliveness is sparring. You can train in perfectly, you know, 100% alive ways and never do anything that's really would quote unquote be considered sparring.

SPEAKER_01 13:50

I think that was my question. I don't disagree. There's a there's a cutoff here, and it's between dead and alive. I'm asking how would you characterize that aliveness and can that be on a can that be on a spectrum? You talk about scaling all the time. I think you just alluded to that, Matt. Aliveness doesn't just mean open sparring. So we agree there's cooperative, uncooperative, um, dead and alive, but uh I was curious about within that alive space, um, can we scale up and down there?

SPEAKER_02 14:14

Sure. Yeah. You know, one of the things that's really important to me is that what I'm always interested in is what's true and what's not true, and that remains the same to this day. And I want the main concepts of the organization and that I follow to be as broad as possible, to leave as much room as possible within them for people to play around and experiment and do different things. And the umbrella of aliveness is encompasses, I think, everything, any any type of functional training you could do. But I have I can teach a room full of 85-year-old people how to do something using aliveness and not get hurt, and uh, and technically not what you would call sparring, but it does have the element of timing, energy, and motion. And as long as it has those elements of timing, energy, emotion, then by definition it's alive. And to some degree or another, they're going to be um developing some level of timing. And so skill acquisition is created there.

SPEAKER_00 15:03

So, Scotty, what we would call uh representative practice design, where we believe that that is a scale, right? Uh I think that's where that maps onto the through the I method. And so I'm just working, I'm working backwards, right? So we have aliveness. We know sparring is the most like, you know, that's the representation of aliveness is full, is the is, I would argue it's in the arena in front of people or on a street for saving your life. And then so we work back, we have like maybe positional sparring where you just play one piece of the game, but you have everything. And and somewhere in that spectrum we get to what you call the isolation phase. So tell us tell us how you use the isolation phase to for whatever reason you use it. Sure.

SPEAKER_02 15:52

So I'll step back for a second. Big picture for performance. I said aliveness was, I thought, the most important piece, and I still do, but big picture, you need basically three things. We'll go back to a trial, but you need a good group of people you can trust. In this case, people that um you're comfortable being physically vulnerable around, so culture and you can't do it by yourself. And then you need a certain amount, or you're you're importing one way or another, a certain amount of information or technology that you want to acquire. This is something I want to acquire skill in, whatever that happens to be. Um, that I think, then this is a different topic, but from my perspective, the more, the simpler that is, the more what I would call fundamental that is, uh, the better, because the more fundamental it is, the more freedom is left for the athlete to do things however he or she is best suited to do them. But you have that aspect of it. Okay, we'll call that information or technology or curriculum, whatever you want to call it. And then you have the training method that you use to acquire skill of that information technology. The training method is you have the group, the people, the training method is aliveness, and then you have the information technology. Introduction stage is you're taking whatever skill you want to work, and the thing about aliveness is it's universal. So, for example, um Andy Ryan says, you know, how would you use aliveness to teach shooting? It's like very simple, it's very easy to explain. I went a few years ago and trained with one of my black belts, Ray Price, who's a really good uh firearms instructor, and I wanted to see how he would do that, and he spent a day with me using iMethod. Now, in this case, the fundamentals we were working on were, you know, things like trigger pull and grip and side alignment and things like that. But it was still that same three-part process. So you take a little piece of whatever this thing is we're doing, we'll use jujitsu to make it simple headlock escape. The problem is someone is holding your head this particular way on the ground. How best, and by best, I would say efficiently can we escape that position using as little as possible attributes so that we can compensate for people who are bigger and stronger and faster than us if we have to. And so you take a little piece that's really important and you show it to the group where they work it. Now there's a million different ways to bring in the introduction stage. Okay, uh, it doesn't have to be a lecture, it doesn't have to be a talk. You can do that through an inquiry method. So it's broad, keep it broad, okay. But I'm using a verb, but it's dead. Well, at that moment, yeah, you're showing a skill. We're not we're not doing anything with another human right now. Okay, I'm showing it this position. You're in this particular position. I would like you to do this with your neck, or I would like you to do that, however it is. That's the information in the technology. I have to have that. There's no way you cannot smuggle that into the room. So you know, we can get creative about that, but one way or another, I would argue it has to exist. Otherwise, you're reinventing wheel. We take that information technology, I show it to them. Usually, if we're talking about jujitsu, it doesn't take more than a few minutes for the room to be able to do it mechanically correct absent resistance.

SPEAKER_00 18:33

If it takes more than that, let's clean that's you're using a lot of words I know Scotty wants to push back on.

SPEAKER_02 18:38

That's fine. Let me finish though, so that I can explain the process and then you guys can do whatever terminology you want. But I make sure that the room is demonstrating whatever it is I wanted to show. In this case, if it's Ray working with me with a firearm, my particular grip or side alignment, or if I'm working with jujitsu, this, whatever it is. And once I've seen that they can do that, now we want to start developing skill in it. Now we need to bring in aliveness, and now we're gonna create some form of drill. And there's a million different ways, well, five technical categories that I think drills fall into, but there's a million different variations of those five categories. And one of the things a good SPG instructor should be able to do is look at anything and be able to create an alive drill pretty quickly. And so now we create a drill and the students work it, and the drill is gonna be alive, and by definition, there'll be some element of failure to it. And I explained to them, failure is not just okay, it's it's a central part of that process, has to be there. Uh, the resistance is adaptive, right? Sometimes it goes up or down depending on what the people are doing. And two people who really know how to train together really well can take this and and they can get a lot more out of you know, three five-minute rounds than than people who don't understand that. So you don't you don't feel you don't feel like being able to dial that up and down becomes really important. All right. So that'll be the pay on that'll be the of the I'm not taking notes. I don't know. And then at the end, usually, but again, it doesn't have to be this way. We could reverse it or move things around. Then a lot of times then we'll go to integration. Integration is where we actually play the game of whatever it is we're doing, and you know, that's strategy, gamesmanship, all that kind of stuff is is learned and and that aspect of it. And that's the cycle. And we go back and repeat, and it you can move things around, you can do things different ways, but it's always going to be incorporating one of those three elements. Um, and most of the time, if I'm working with a competition team practice, we might be doing a lot of integration. If it's someone's first ever day at jujitsu, we may not do any integration and we just focus on isolation and some introduction. If it's a regular group class, like I teach it, uh the majority of that class should be isolation. So if it's an if it's an hour-long class, I would want 30, 40, 45 minutes of that class to have been alive drilling and five or 10 minutes integration and three or four minutes introduction. And again, those things can move around depending on the group you're working with, your goals, the the whatever technology you're working with, but one way or another it has those elements. So that's how I would define it, just so you we understand, you know, the terminology from my perspective.

SPEAKER_00 21:08

Um when you're introducing something, you're introducing it in what at that moment in time you consider the best way to do it. Is that correct? Um Do you feel that adaptive resistance is messing with aliveness? And I ask do you feel like the idea of adaptive resistance is messing with aliveness? Messing with it? Yes. I'm not sure what you mean. So you are asking a both sides, I assume, have things that they are trying to accomplish, right? I mean, it's a drill. When you ask a person to adapt their resistance according to the other person's success or failure, but each repetition is a brand new repetition. Um are you asking people to not be fully alive?

SPEAKER_02 21:59

No. No, there's nothing there's nothing about aliveness that means full contact or No, I didn't say that.

SPEAKER_00 22:04

I didn't say that.

SPEAKER_02 22:07

No, let's assume that there's nothing that says it has to be a certain level of resistance to be alive. It just has to have that element of timing.

SPEAKER_00 22:13

Yes. Okay. Right. I agree that we can go outside and go for a jog and and we can or we could run or we could sprint. I get that. But asking someone to turn an imaginary dial from repetition to repetition, the repetition is already different every time. And so you are asking people to modify their behavior in a non-alive manner. Because instead of just doing what they did the previous rep, they are now effectively putting the brakes on a little bit or pressing the gas a little bit more. But they're not, they've sort of left just letting the rep do the work. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_02 23:00

No, I don't think that uh messes with liveness at all.

SPEAKER_00 23:03

I can I control for resistance by how I constrain the drill. All good. So the rules, the rules of the game create the resistance and the outcomes and how much movement there is, not the athletes. It's it's them.

SPEAKER_02 23:21

Go back to the case. What do you think of that? At the beginning, there's I'm giving you one example, um, which I think is a super common one, but there's an infinite amount of ways to make this happen. And different coaches bring in different things all the time. And I and I think that that's great. I don't have any problem with it. But one way or another, training partners have to be able to work with each other, you know. From a practice standpoint, if I have an athlete on the mat who's uh very good at jujitsu, and I say, you know, I can I can have them work with this 65-year-old person who had a knee surgery seven months ago, and they're gonna be fine because they understand how to work it, and they're still gonna be able to get something out of that engagement and they're gonna be able to help that that person. Or I've got somebody who just like every time you put somebody with them, it's it's the world championships and he's tense and he's squeezing as hard as he can. And those are two very different animals, and I'm trying to create the first animal. Um, and the more self-aware people are about their use of force and what they're doing with their body, the better, which is one reason why. Usually, of course, if we want to have somebody work with a brand new person or somebody that maybe needs a little help physically, is not that uh doesn't have that great of a constitution. The higher level they are at jujitsu, usually the better they are to match with them because the person can regulate their force and adapt it up and down.

SPEAKER_00 24:34

I think you're using that that idea in two different manners. But that's uh that's it's okay. It's not um could you so if I'm building this backwards, right? Aliveness is yes or no, um, sparring, positional sparring, whatever we call drilling, however you make drills. They're alive. Could we just stop there and by the way we design the drills, get those points across, those things we think are really important?

SPEAKER_02 25:09

I'm not sure what you're asking.

SPEAKER_00 25:11

Do we have to eliminate the integration stage? No, I'm eliminating the introduction phase, but I'm not eliminating anything. I'm just saying, can we change can we use an alive method to encompass the intro phase? Can intro phase be alive?

SPEAKER_02 25:26

Yes. Provided someone in that room, in this case, the person that's creating that drill, has that information and technology. Has to be present. That's what I meant by smuggling it in.

SPEAKER_00 25:37

Yeah, but you think uh yeah, I I maybe we'll talk about that after.

SPEAKER_01 25:43

No, I think I think it's I don't think there's much daylight between my my position and the uh uh and the other the the alive the the alive stage. There's there's we're very, very close here. I'm I'm curious, Matt, because uh I feel in the kind of coaching community, especially in the academic space, they've they've gone past the the debate of rote repetition and muscle memory and you know this kind of stuff. It doesn't seem to be a robust debate in in scale acquisition now. What there is, is this kind of and I think it maps on really well to the I method, uh, that there is a time and a space for for this this deadness, if you will, for this introduction uh space. Now, what I feel it's coming down to, a lot of the uh pushbacks on uh a full live ecological experience or approach to coaching is it all keeps coming back to motivation for me, motivation to athlete, keep an athlete engaged, having them not be discouraged or lost. And I agree that can that can be a real challenge, especially with newer students, right? If we were to come in and try and eliminate the introduction part altogether and start with some kind of aliveness, that can be very, very challenging. So, like we said with the dials and the knobs, that is a craft for me as a coach. How do we manage to m maximize the the alive portion? You mentioned time and pressure and energy. I think that maps well on just to dynamics, right? And you mentioned uh epistemology earlier. I think there's there's two, you know, that there are different ontologies, the information process and an ecological approach. And so it's a really interesting question to me. Because I don't I don't actually find myself disagreeing with the introduction stage. And I think if you look to my practices, there'll be a little bit of that. There might be a small rehearsal. There'll be, let's try this, maybe look for that, maybe demonstrations. So I can't push back at it too hard because I use it myself. But I'm curious about the value of it, I'm curious how much of we need of it. I'm curious that if we sanitize too much of the you already alluded to mistakes, errors are feature of learning, not a bug. And I do think that's a real critical stage for the coach and the athletes of how we navigate that space. Because I think once we get into the life, the the alive portion, so long as it's scaled and it's relatively safe and it's meets the challenge of the participants, I think we're gonna be okay. We're just gonna let the dynamics do what they do. So the introduction part is really something I sp uh I'm I'm curious about, I'm super interested in, and I don't have a lot of answers. How broad that is, how many, what is the value of a rep? How much detail do we show? How long do we spend on that? So it's really I'm really curious. And that was my question, you know, how is that evolved? How is it interpreted by other SBG coaches? And Adam and I are probably maybe it's a little futile, but maybe we'll never actually completely get rid of that introduction stage. But we're, I think it's fair to say, Adam, we're trying to squeeze that into an increasingly small space and get to the alieness as quick as possible.

SPEAKER_00 28:15

Can I point out what I think is the the arg of the argument? And then like I'm gonna moderate for a second, just so we're clear. I'm gonna steel man both approaches. Matt believes and Matt understands um posture and pressure and connection at a very high level. And Matt believes that there are certain parts of that that we should teach a person to do this way from day one. And the repetitions are um until they can do that, and then it's alive. Whereas I think you and I, if there is a dead introduction phase, it is very broad, it is very external, and it is it is allowing for a lot of self-organization. It's just like, hey, it looks like this, get a couple reps to feel it, go. But no instruction really past what's needed for safety.

SPEAKER_02 29:14

Yeah, what you uh so two things here real quick. First one I'll explain this. I don't I haven't um read much on the ecological uh uh training method. My the the majority of my uh information on it comes from talking to you, Adam, and some other coaches. So uh I'm gonna avoid getting into the terminology on that. I'm just gonna use the terminology that I would use, and then you guys can interpret that how you want. I don't I don't want to speak for that or what what you do or don't do, or what they do or don't do, but I'll just talk in broad terms. The second thing I would say is um I had a guy about speaking to what you were talking about, Scott, I had a guy came come from the from the Navy about no, this is probably about 10 years ago, and he was very he he trains with uh uh the SEALs there, and he was one of the trainers, and he wanted to come down and see how I drilled. This is before I even met Andy, and they had heard about liveness and all that, and and he wanted, can I just follow you around for a week and watch what you do? And I'm gonna take notes because I really want to get this epistemology method down. He asked me a lot of questions, they were good questions, and I said, sure. And after about the fourth day, I could see he was so frustrated and he left, he got up and left. And I and I asked him at the end, I'm like, What's wrong? He's like, Well, and yesterday you had him working for three minute rounds, and then this time you had him go six minute rounds, and then in the other class you explained it this way, and I'm and I I looked at him and I said, This is to a large degree what we do with science, but there's also a certain level of art to it where everybody's a little bit different and every situation's a little bit different. And I'm I'm not you're if you're looking for this, this, this, this, this down to the minute and down to the second about how you're gonna do it, I'm not the guy to give you that. I'm gonna give you the broad concepts. Every time I teach a class, it's a little bit different. So he got a little bit frustrated with that because from his perspective, he wanted to have it nailed down. I don't know if he ever achieved that, but if he did, it would I would suggest he he went the wrong direction. But um let me talk about it in in um create a thought experiment, and I'm gonna go very broad. And and so if we have a one hand, no, one of the coaching books that I recommended even in the early 90s when I first started teaching was Coaching for Performance by John Whitmore, which I still recommend. It's a great book. And in there, he has a kind of a what what I what I referred to back then as the inquiry method of coaching. And he has a uh an experiment, if I remember correctly, they were tennis coaches who were brought in to teach uh Olympic ski ski uh skiers. And the whole point was the skiers didn't know that the tennis coaches know nothing about skiing, and they just thought that they were other ski coaches, and they come in and work with these guys for a couple weeks and see what the results were, and the team did great, and they were trying to reverse engineer and figure out why, and they realized because the tennis player coaches had no idea about anything related to skiing, that every time one of the athletes presented them with a problem, they basically used some kind of Socratic method to work it out with the athlete, and the athlete ended up solving their own problem, and that was great. And I use that as a I've used that still to this day as an example of how we should try and work with our our athletes on a fairly regular basis. The thing you remember about that experiment, though, was those were Olympic level skiers. He didn't bring in tennis coaches to teach a bunch of people who've never put skis on before how to ski. That's a slightly different thing. So if we have, imagine you have two groups, and in group one, you have the best, most fundamental technology for jujitsu that we can think of. Let's say Hogger Bracie's jujitsu curriculum. Hodger's there to teach it himself, great information, and he shows everything he does, he shows every movement he uses, and he works with these this room full of 100 people for a year, but there's no aliveness. Everything is some variation or another of an introduction stage. They might even do a bunch of reps. So he shows the movement and then they do a thousand reps an hour, whatever. But there's never the opponent process, there's never that element of failure. Okay. We have a clones of those same hundred people across town in another warehouse, and they're working with a ski coach who knows nothing about jujitsu. All he's been given is a list of the positions and the and the various goals. This is guard, you want to get around guard and get to cross sites. This is mount, it's on bottom, it's bad, you want to try and get on top. That's all they've been told. And all they do is a live drilling. And so, this other group, they're just constantly playing with the live drills and they're figuring out how best they can make it work for themselves in theory. At the end of the year, you have those two groups meet. I would predict with a high level of uh confidence that the group that never worked with Hodger and all they did was a live training, but have never actually seen proper jujitsu will wipe the floor with that first group. They'll just completely smash that first group. Okay, that's how important aliveness is. But there's a third option, and the third option is you have somebody with Hodger's depth and level of understanding of jujitsu, and he is the one that is now guiding those drills. And he's capable, let me finish. He's capable of putting it together and bringing that information in. Now you say, well, did he bring it in this way? Did he just show them? Did he create a drill where they figure it out? You can, there's a million different ways you can do it. And then we have to start talking about uh time and a cost benefit because most people only have so much time. So they're really in what is the fastest way in some cases for me to achieve this goal? But set all that aside for a minute, and he goes basically iMethod, and he'll show the very fundamental things and then they drill. And I would submit to you that that third group will wipe the floor with both of them, we'll crush them, both of them. And that third group is basically what we do. And you need that level of information and technology in the room, right? It doesn't mean you have to stand in front of them and give them a lecture or spend 15 minutes showing exactly where your left pinky goes. I mean, but they do have to have a high level understanding or should have a high level understanding of what I call fundamentals. And then here we're gonna get back into what I think now these days, after aliveness is the most misunderstood thing in jiu-jitsu, which is people having a hard time identifying what a fundamental is and getting very dogmatic one way or another about it. But what I would say is it is the we want to strip it down to the thing only, the absolute things I think people need to know. And with jujitsu, that's always structural, it's always very simple, and it's related to base posture and connection. It's not movements, it's not two or three steps, it's not you put your hand here, he goes here, you do that, it's never that. But it's some structural piece that the moment someone sees it and then they implement it, immediately their game is completely different. And I like to imagine that I'd be able to figure it out because every time you see that kind of jujitsu, it's always common sense and hindsight, and you wind up slapping the top of your head and saying, Why didn't I think of that? But I didn't. And you know, I've been in rooms with black belts who've been doing this art for 30 years, and all of a sudden we'll see something like that, and nobody else has ever thought of it. That's amazing, it's super simple. You mean I just put my shoulder here and it's that much different? Yes, now that information technology comes back with me, and I give that to my athletes. And my athletes start out here, where I was way down here. And so, by definition, every generation of athletes that comes forward is better than the one that came before because they're building on the knowledge that I have and adding to it rather than having to reinvent it.

SPEAKER_00 35:59

Can I ask two questions?

SPEAKER_02 36:00

Yeah, that is the process that I would suggest, speaking broadly.

SPEAKER_00 36:05

Two questions. You did you mentioned that Hodger's group would get better faster. So at a year, Hodger's group beats the a live training where they had to figure out how to drill. Maybe they just played the whole time with very simple goals. Do you think that that gap increases over time or does it cross at some point? I'm not sure what you mean. So at a year, Hodger's methodology, his I method with the best technology, beats the alive training with very simple, what you laid out is very simple goals and positions. Okay. Do you think there's ever a point where the alive group catches up to Hodger's group?

SPEAKER_01 36:50

I thought you said the other way around. I thought you said the alive group smokes Hodger's group.

SPEAKER_00 36:54

No, the new Hodger group, the iMethod Hodger group. Oh, okay. That beats, that wins at one year, but does what is the what does the rest of this time look like in your mind?

SPEAKER_02 37:06

No, I think they would be dominating them the entire time.

SPEAKER_00 37:08

Jiu Jitsu's not simple. So one more one more. And I'm not trying to I like these are these are really good questions and answers for us and our audience to see where I'm trying to let our audience see where the daylight is so they can just see both sides. Not one is better than the other. Because the deeper that Scotty and I have gotten this and then read every book and spent time with professionals, we know less than we did before. So I want people to just hear the daylight. So, second question. You said that Hodger, that when you see something new, you're at a seminar and you see a new thing and you just go back and you put it in. You're able to make this, you're able to see it, and something about you and how you work and how your jujitsu is, you see it and you're like, that's better. And then you just do it. And I get that. And I get that. But where I don't think we agree is that you can then just hand that to a beginner. Second, what? I don't believe that you can just hand that to a beginner that doesn't have all the context or any context.

SPEAKER_02 38:04

You can't hand it to them, they have to earn it. But at least I know where they're going. I wouldn't be able to even guide them in that direction, um, absent that knowledge.

unknown 38:12

Right?

SPEAKER_02 38:12

In fact, I might I might be guiding them in a direction that's inferior to the way I'm already showing. It's not about how the introduction stage is taught. It's just the fact that one way or another, that that information technology is an essential part of that triangle, and it has to get smuggled in.

SPEAKER_00 38:28

We can use another example. Maybe though. Wait, don't you can't, that is, that is a daylight between us because we agree that there are certain things that have to be taught. But I I think we might disagree with how and when and who they are taught to. I think that would be the biggest daylight there.

SPEAKER_02 38:45

I'd be very unlikely to disagree with anything related to how it was being taught, provided the information is present. I'm not dogmatic about that. I have my own ways of that I think are are best in a like whenever I'm whenever I'm teaching a group, by definition, I'm trying to teach the best class I can, right? Sure. That's my that's my job. I take that um very seriously, and that's what people pay me for. If I thought there was a better way to teach something, or I find a better way to teach something, I'll I'll adapt and do it. So by definition, I'm doing what I'm doing when I'm teaching is what I think is is best. Um, but that doesn't mean I'm dogmatic about it. It just means that I that that has to be present there. Let me use another example. Um, we talked before about shooting, right? Um I could not come up with great drills using, I'll call it inquiry method, but however you want, 100% alive to get people to shoot well, because I don't know what I'm doing. But Ray can. Ray can folk can because he understands those fundamentals of grip and side alignment and trigger pull or handy for that matter. They understand that deeply. Now they can translate that and either guide me or directly show me. There's a time and place for all of it. Sometimes you just need time, you got to show them. It's funny because in Ireland, uh uh last summer, Kavanaugh was telling a story where he was in Scotland in the early 2000s, and this is when we were doing a lot of uh experiments with the inquiry method. And I was even teaching some seminars that way, actually, when I'd gone over there. And so John was teaching a seminar for these guys in Scotland, and he was using the inquiry method, basically Socratic method and bringing them back in, and it was almost 100% alive drilling with questions that he would give to the audience. And the questions all steered towards defense of this particular thing, and there were different answers that came up, and they were all good, and everything was great. And then at the end of the seminar, one of one of the fighters came over to him and was like, Coach, I'm fighting Saturday. Can you just show me how to solve this particular problem? And he's like, Yeah, and he just showed him.

SPEAKER_00 40:40

Or to give you another example, um, I was like, you think that you think that'd work on Saturday in the cage?

SPEAKER_02 40:47

No, no, that's not my point. I was a good question. I was in Ireland a couple months ago, and again, I was with Frankel and Cavanaugh, and John has this other fighter, very, very good. He'd gotten very, very good at uh crucifix position, and he was killing everybody with it, and nobody was able to get out. And that particular gym, you've got some of the best fighters and jujitsu people from all over the world wind up going through there because everybody that comes to Dublin goes through there. And John had pretty much thought he'd seen every conceivable way to get out of that, and nobody had come up with a good solution. And this guy was just dominating them. So we went back to the gym, brings the fighter out, fighter does it good. He obviously holds the position well. And uh Franco looks at it, he's like, put me in it, and then escaped in like three seconds. And John looked at that and I looked at that, and that's brilliant, and now we know what to do, and now he has that information and he can drill it. But my point behind that is that guy's been doing that for like six or seven months at one of the best MMA gyms in Europe. There have been who knows how many hundreds of black belts and MMA coaches that have come through. Nobody had the solution that Frankel had to that particular problem. And now that he's shown it, John can pass that on to Brad, and Brad knows what to worry about or what to train for in terms of defending it. Sometimes, sometimes, just showing somebody an answer is a good thing to do when we want to save time. Does that mean I'm always gonna do it that way or it's better than this way, or no, I'm not gonna ever be dogmatic about it. I don't think that's that's an example where the information technology was important, you know, and uh and sure level of jiu-jitsu was a big help to them there.

SPEAKER_00 42:14

Yes. I I think that what I'm I'm pushing for is that how much information do we give when? What does that information look like? And I agree that later, when someone has a lot of context and they understand just internally how this all works, then we all have students that watch a video and come in Monday and do the move. And they they never did a rep. They just saw it and it just fit with their and it just worked immediately. We've all seen that before. So I'm not I'm not implying that now he can do it. He has to drill it. He has to drink it. No, no, that that's not that's not my point. I'm just uh I I agree that there are there are certain things that and there are different reasons for it. One reason might be safety, one reason might be because they are so goddamn close. And sometimes they they keep going, they just can't so I get I don't think there's I'm not arguing that with you anymore. We're just having a discussion about how much information, what that information looks like. The the in wait, can I say this? Right, right, one sec, it's important. From an ecological approach, okay, and I think that's important for to explain to you. In an ecological approach, the idea is that the information we need to move is provided by the environment. So the environment being everything connected, but mostly mostly our opponent. Right? There is there's all other stuff, but let it's most our opponent. So by teaching our ourselves and our students where to look for that that information, where to see it, where to really understand it, let us self-organize to solve problems better. And the idea is to guide that through the drilling so that it's not too big and it's not too small. So there are the fundamental. Difference here is how we look at what information is. We both agree that there are things that everyone has two legs, everyone has two arms. Efficient jujitsu is generally going to look the same. But how we get that information, we believe it's from the environment, and you believe some portion of it is handed down, and as and that's the best way to do it.

SPEAKER_02 44:25

No, I don't necessarily believe that's the best way to do it. And I wouldn't say I believe that some portion of that handed down. What I'm saying is I know that level of information and technology is a has to get smuggled in one way or another. You can't, it's very difficult. So let's rephrase it another way. You could come in and create a drill that really, within a few minutes, allowed a room full of 20 people who've never done jujitsu to best discover, probably mechanically, physically, how to get out of a headlock. You could. Someone who doesn't know anything about jujitsu if I just gave them the goals and objectives. And there's a one of the other problems that I have is we don't always want to be working for goals or objectives either, but that's a that's a different issue. But someone who who doesn't have your level of understanding of jujitsu, let's say none, walks into the room and they've been given where you want to wind up. This is where you start, and this is where you want to wind up. Do I believe that doing a lot of drills, the people in that room will eventually discover the a very efficient way to escape a headlock? Maybe over time, it's is it going to be anywhere close to something that Hickson would show in 45 seconds? No. And most people only have a couple nights a week to train, you know. So we have that whole issue of time as well. What is the what is the best people are aren't just paying me for the information, they're paying me also for the skill acquisition. And they only have two hours a week that they can train or three hours a week. Those are very precious time for them. I could create something that guided them in a particular direction, or I could maybe come around in a different way and do it. Now, does that mean I'm saying the best way is always just to show someone? No. But what I'm saying is, no matter what, someone with that information technology is present in the room. You have to smuggle it in one way or another. And so it brings you back to iMethod. What you're talking about isn't whether or not it's iMethod. What you're talking about is how you structure the introduction stage, how you how long you do it, and the manner in which you do it.

SPEAKER_00 46:14

Well, no, I'm talking about what do we believe, where do we believe information comes from? I think at the core fundamental, that's the discussion we're we're having right now. You and yes, the coach shapes the environment, right? So, in in my estimation, my number one job in my room, other than culture guide, is to shape the environment. The culture's part of that. And everyone can, I agree that everyone can educate culture, yeah. So my culture has to match the methodology, and part of the methodology is the environment. So I think that's that's a place we're not going to um you allow for information to come from anywhere, and we are being a little more restrictive about where we believe information comes from. That's all. What we do with that information, there's no daylight, you gotta drill it. And the drill has to be alive. I think the constraints led approach offers a little bit more of a sophisticated manner to create the drills, you know, and I've seen that through work and all kinds of professional sports and amateur sports and stuff. And so I think that's a boon. I think that's something I'd love to bring more into SVG.

SPEAKER_02 47:25

Yeah. I mean, with the level of knowledge I have now, let's say about talk about something I don't know really well of shooting, and I was given a group of 10 people. Could I create an environment where they were able to shoot really well in such and such amount of time using drills? Maybe would they be, in my opinion, anywhere as close to as good as they would be if it was Ray creating that environment? No, because Ray knows those fundamentals. I don't. And there's so many things in jujitsu that just still happens to me this day, which is the reason why I love jujitsu. And so it's actually one of the only things that's kept me interested in jujitsu all this time. Um, is I still see things that I, you know, I'm like, why didn't I think of that? That's so simple. It's not a complicated thing, it's not a multi-step thing, it's not some new submission, but it's just a structural detail of usually of adjusting your skeleton and and your base and connection to the other person such a way that just dramatically improves everything. And uh, this has been my only job for 33 years now. Is all I've done is teach this. And I think a lot about training methods, and I never thought of that. I never came up with that. Nobody I know has ever come up with that or thought of that, and yet here I go, I see it, you know, whether it's Hickson or whoever shows me this detail. And now I have that, and I can go back and I can pass it on to my students, and that makes everybody better. But that information technology is important and it plays a role.

SPEAKER_01 48:50

I got a couple of uh a couple things to I've taken a bunch of notes here. So um I I don't generally disagree with anything you're you're saying. That could be because I'm just uh very, very agreeable generally. But uh you're you're speaking about the time there map and uh being able to give this kind of explicit knowledge. And one thing I'll I'll mention too that if you give an instruction to or a tip or show a move or something, that is still that is an informational constraint on our system. So that's for me is still coming from the environment. So I don't necessarily you know reject that as being part of uh any college approach. What I think we do as coaches sometimes, I think it's a mistake we generally make is we we look at these uh students, and I know us three don't particularly do that, but in discussion, we look at these like these passive vessels, right? That we want to impart our knowledge onto. Um, and you spoke about time. I think you're probably correct. And I think we were speaking about a study last week on explicit instruction versus implicit learning and whatnot, and and I'll generalize that in a little bit in a minute. So I don't disagree that you might get that initial group in the moment over a short uh short period of time to improve quicker in that particular position or situation. My question would be if we allowed a if we viewed development on a broader time scale, would trying to foster this kind of discovery and um you know uh curiosity within the room, within the athlete themselves, would it would they eventually create a more robust problem-solving game? I think it's a really interesting question. And it comes back to there's a lot of there's a lot of study. Uh one of the professors I spoke with uh Nicola Hodges, she does a lot of work on demonstrations and whatnot. And she implored me to be kind of sparse and vague when we come to demonstrations and shown given information and technique because it's actually that learning process is in filling in the blanks for the students, it's in that discovery and that exploration stage. So I'm not sure if I totally agree that or I think what what I'd be what I would say is that yes, giving the information and the answers early on could provide some short-term gain. I'm not sure, and I think it's a really interesting question. If we remove some of that or held some of that back, would it make a more adaptable and curious and robust athlete in the long term?

SPEAKER_02 50:53

Yeah, well, if I understand what you're saying correctly, um, there are two things I would say about that. So the first one was if we go back to what I was talking about with John Whitmore's example, the level uh the of the people in the room matters a lot. So if I'm teaching a room full of people who've never done jujitsu before in their life, they have no idea how to do anything, and it's their first day. Uh, by definition, I'm probably gonna wind up using a little more introduction stage than I would with other people, um, and talking a little more than I would with other people and creating you know very specific, very refined alive drills for them to help them get better. And then we fast forward and later in that afternoon, I'm working in a competition team practice with a room full of brown belts and black belts, and 99.9% of what I do might just be inquiry methods. So I'm gonna be creating drills for them and then dealing with whatever issues arise, probably in a more Socratic manner than anything else. And so there's a huge you know, room for variance depending on the level, uh, the skill level of the people that you're that you're dealing with. So that would be one aspect to it. Um, the other aspect is what that information technology actually is becomes important. And people who I think Adam understands this, but people who've not trained with me, even some people who have, I think this is this this is the second most misunderstood thing, and I think that I try and explain, and I think it's the most misunderstood understood thing now, is what I mean, just in particular myself, when I talk about a fundamental. And when I talk about it something being a fundamental in jujitsu, I'm talking about very broad, very simple, bare bones, absolutely need to know stuff. And if it doesn't fit that, then it's generally not something I want to spend a lot of time on or even necessarily teach. And then within that, there is a huge amount of room for variation. So that's the difference between a delivery system and a style. When we boil down jujitsu just to the core posture pressure connection pieces that I think are necessary, I'm always trying to simplify it. I'm always trying to take things away. I'm not trying to add things and take things away. And generally, when I see something that's really awesome, like I mentioned, you know, seeing something from Hickson, for example, what makes that awesome is it allows me to take things away. Like, oh, we put this, and now that solves all these other problems that I was running into before because I was missing the structural piece. So it's a process of elimination and leaving just the bare skeleton, if you will, and then letting the athlete fill in the gaps, how they put it together, what combinations they like, what to do. Totally. So in a room like that, by the time people get to be, for example, purple belts in jujitsu, every single purple belt in the gym looks completely different. Like they look, and none of them have my quote unquote style because I don't teach my style. Nobody does what I do. Whereas when I go to a gym where it's a heavy emphasis on the introduction stage and way too much, too detailed information. Um, and then you wind up trying to create, clone yourself. You have a room full of purple belts that all basically do the same thing, are doing the same type of guard pass, they play the same type of guard as the coach because the coach teaches what the coach does, which is very common, unfortunately, in jujitsu. That's the opposite of what I am constantly trying to tell my coaches to do. So, you know, if we look at something like a headlock escape, what are the things that everybody absolutely needs to know how to do so that they don't get hurt and they can survive in this position? Boil it down. It shouldn't be more than a few things. That is what I want you to pass on to the students. And then as they drill alive, they'll figure out how to make it work for themselves and they'll all do it a little different. They're all going to do it a little different. But what they have in common, the thing that they all have to do the same, that's what interests me from the standpoint of information. And that's what I call a fundamental.

SPEAKER_01 54:19

Go ahead, Scott. No, I mean, uh, again, I find myself uh noting here. It's similar because I'd and my trying to take the discussions more towards um the the striking side of things. And you mentioned smuggling. I I love it because in my foundations practice, uh, we do striking. So just to let you know, Matt, uh, for my foundations striking class, if you come in for the first day, we're putting gloves and shins on you and you're going right into a sparring game. Now we take head contact off the table, it's usually just a bit shoulder tag. Maybe someone's trying to land a low kick and I I uh give them a quick idea how you might deal with that, turn the knee towards the check or toe your leg way, blah, blah, blah. But actually, what I think I'm smuggling in is what I'm really trying to build the foundation of striking on is that that postural kind of footwork and that distance management. Yes. And I don't need to talk about the feet, I don't need to talk about trying to stay in this range or that range. I let the games uh elicit that behavior that I'm looking for. So, first and foremost, and I consider fundamentals to be the rules of the game, and that that's a that's a really interesting question too. We we throw a lot of words around in coaching, right? But they're illly defined sometimes. But your point about variation, and I see this in striking gyms. If if we're generally teaching a jab across and hoop the same way, so this very idealized technique, and we're trying to sanitize these movements from this variability, and I'm like, we've got that all wrong. I want my students standing in front of uh a myriad of different opponents throwing strikes in different kinds of ways because there's a common structure in all these strikes, and that's what I want to pick up on. That's when I think the skill in the coupling comes along. So again, I I think it's uh we might be using different words, different um, you know, terminology and whatnot, but I I think I think it's very, very, very, very aligned. But uh, and the last point there again is where the the what I'm finding now, four or five years into this, is that there's a crackle in the room, and I've I've really made a group of young people that are very, very curious and explorative, and they're starting to build this kind of through this and kind of just learning implicitly. They're starting to build their own kind of explicit rules and heuristics and whatnot. And and that's really what I want. Um, I try not to give quite I try not to give answers to questions no one's asked. So again, I'm jumping all over the place here. Your point, uh, you wrote the uh the about the crucifix thing, right? There was a little aha moment there. But that was clear. That was meaningful.

SPEAKER_02 56:26

Yeah, that's a good time to do it.

SPEAKER_01 56:28

That's a good time to the IT.

SPEAKER_02 56:29

You said you you try not to give answers to questions people haven't asked. I think that's very important. And I I phrase that a little different, but I don't create problems that haven't arisen naturally on the map. And I think that's very important as well. I'm not gonna sit there and show a room full of people how to counter something if nobody's actually pulling that move off on each other yet, right? So there's a time and place to bring that information in. And I want it, I want the information that I'm imparting, I want it to be as little as possible. So I I I think that that uh is very similar to what I tell people to try and do. Yeah, I don't want to create problems that don't even exist yet.

SPEAKER_00 57:02

So what I'd like I'd like you to just think about or consider is Is what? Uh no, I'm gonna I I want you to consider something.

SPEAKER_03 57:09

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 57:09

Not not as a not to, I don't want your stamp of approval or a dislike, I just want you to think about it. Okay. Um, so let's say we agree on for exposition, we believe that these are the fundamentals in in the vocabulary we use, we usually call those invariants. Like physics, you know, there are things that are invariant. They have to happen. Um you're talking about shooting, like there are there are pieces that have to happen. And those um so we agree on those things. You think the fastest way and the best way is to generally tell them that very simple thing. No, no, but in general, on average. How does that? You like that word. On average. And all I would ask you to think about is can we convey that by creating an alive situation where they get to sort of discover that on their own? Because I'm gonna make one argument and I'm gonna shut up. I bet if we took the group of people that trained alive from day one with the tennis coach for a year, and then we added somebody that understood the rules of the game, the strategies, tactics, whatever you want to call them, I bet you would have students who were more skilled. And when I use the word skilled, I mean adaptable, that they would be able to go into any place and train and be competitive versus any other type of person. So that's that's all. I consider how you can convey those things maybe alive, because I I think that we can still get more out of letting them discover, be creative and curious, and just play than we can telling them certain things. Because a lot of times with athletes, it just goes like Scotty and I, no, no, I'm sorry, Scotty and I have gotten to this point where we're really questioning what our athletes even can be told to do. Like, how much value is there to telling someone to keep their chin down? You know, or whatever, turn your cross over, whatever those things are. Like, we don't know how much value there is in telling them those things. So, yeah, I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_01 59:22

But I think that was good. Yeah, and that's a craft I'm interested in. And it's not just to be z zealous to the approach, but I I do fundamentally believe that if a solution is discovered by the actual with guidance, that's going to be a richer, stickier learning experience.

SPEAKER_02 59:41

One of the problems with that with jujitsu, first of all, I don't I don't disagree with anything you're saying whenever possible, that's what I do, assuming for time. And the time part is important because we go back. So, for example, we have students joining my gym. They most people can only come two nights a week and they're in foundations class. That's the only time they get to come. They only get that hour, hour and a half. What's the quickest way for me to impart this information to them? Still, probably the the majority of that introduction stage is still taught in a somewhat experimental way in the sense that they always, at least at the very least, get to feel it and see the difference for themselves. Um so it just goes back to what I said before. I'm not dogmatic about it. It just becomes like a question of what I think will be faster or more practical in the in a given time. But one of the problems with jujitsu is just because something works and even works really well for you doesn't mean it's necessarily good. Shitty jujitsu works really good against other people who have shitty jujitsu. So if I have two white belts and I put them on the mat and I have them start sparring right away, and I just have, you know, I want you to escape from Mount, odds are pretty good. One of them's gonna figure out how to escape from Mount. Odds are also pretty high, it's gonna be a kind of a dumb way to do it. Um, and if they continue doing it, they're gonna get smoked by a purple belt or a brown belt or anybody else their size who has more skill because they're making mistakes. It's just that the level, uh, the partner that they have at that time doesn't know that they're making mistakes and isn't capable of capitalizing on it, which is one of the reasons why they pay me money so I can be there to help make sure that doesn't happen. Uh, and so I have to guide that process. How do I guide that process? Do I create a drill to show them that's a mistake? Maybe. Do I just sometimes just tell them don't do that because it could happen? Sometimes depends on how much time we have and what I think is going to be the most effective way to do it. Um, but I have yet to see anybody who I create a really great drill, and then all of a sudden, over time, they create the structure that we use now to uh uh to escape headlocks. Like I and I'll use myself as an example. I've been doing jujitsu for 35 years. I've been a black belt for 26 years. I I've been doing headlock escapes for 35 years successfully. I don't think I've really had anybody at being able to hold me a headlock for a long time. I've taught thousands of people all over the world how to do headlock escapes successfully. I got an opportunity to train, I reconnected with Hickson. I hadn't trained with him since I was a blue belt about 10 years ago and brought him up to Portland and I was working with him, and he showed me a detail on the headlock escape related to connection and where he how he structures his body that I'd never seen before. Not only had I never seen that before, nobody like Frankel and all the other jujitsu coaches, many of whom have been training almost as long as I have, they'd never seen it before either. Instantly made what I was doing twice as efficient. So, in all that time, in those 30 years, and however many hours of a live drilling and thousands of students, we hadn't come up with it. And yet there it was. Now I have it. Um, now every student that goes through the foundations class, one way or another, has access to that information and gets it right away. And they get to start way up here with their headlock escapes. Do I think that that's the ultimate be-all? And I'll never find another detail about headlock escapes. I I doubt it. I mean, I'm I have to stay humble about it because this that particular incident is not rare. That's happened to me a lot in jiu-jitsu. That's why I love jujitsu. That's why it keeps me so interested. And it's very likely that someone else will show me something, but I didn't find it, I didn't create it, none of the athletes created it. And right now, maybe it wasn't that important.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:00

What if it wasn't what if it just wasn't that important?

SPEAKER_02 1:03:03

Oh, it's important. It's important. It's a detail that keeps you from getting manhandled and smashed and flattened around. And and in hindsight, when I look at it, it's like I should have thought of that, I should have come up with it, but I didn't, and nobody else did either. And that's happened to me a lot with jujitsu. That's why, again, that's why I love jujitsu though.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:18

Um, what if people what if what if everyone you told that secret to already had a bunch of context? What if what? What if the people you taught that secret to, or whatever you wanted to call it? Did you call it a secret? I don't want to put words in your mouth. Detail. Detail. Detail. What if everyone you talked that detail to already had some context? Already had some what? Context. They've already been in a bunch of headlocks. They've already had someone squeezing their head. They're already found a couple ways to get out of it. Uh, probably a bridge and roll, maybe a push, you know, come out the back door. Um what if you told those people this detail? But let them let them have some context. Which do you do you think would be stickier?

SPEAKER_02 1:04:06

Oh, everybody that I've shown it to has had that some level of detail so far.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:12

I guess this is where we're we're getting to, you know, my my interest in how do how do I foster uh a culture of uh curiosity and exploration? And it that's really important in my culture. I'm starting to see the dividends now. And I'm learning stuff just watching two new white bells going at it on the first day because I I start, you know, I'm always watching the interactions. Um I give an example, you mentioned the the the mount coach, Matt. Like if I'm teaching uh uh two people come in on the first day, I'll put them in the mount and say, you know, that's try and get out of it, try and bump your partner off or get your legs back in between. And I'll let them struggle with it. And then I might say, now try, or I might start them off, now start with your hand on your armpit or maybe even an elbow above the head. Now see how you get on with that. That's for me, that's meaningful. That's how I try and get meaning into the room. Uh so I want all the kind of warts and all and all the failures and the ugliness and the frustration there. And then then we're identifying problems. We've got that frustration, we're not quite sure what to do. Why does this keep happening? Then that's a good time for me to put my fingerprints on it. Try this. And again, I'm I'm I'm jumping back to the exploration in the room. I'm seeing we maybe have 40, 50 guys in the room, and they're all figuring stuff out in real time. And that's taking a lot of that's really freeing up a lot of my bandwidth to be more specific with certain athletes. And so, again, for me, just to round off there, I know it's a balance, and it's not uh one of the critiques of the the or the strongman's ecological approach is ah we just you know set the clock and let everyone figure it the fuck out. That's not what we do, but there is an element of that, and it's an element I think valuable, and I'm not prepared to give up, so I'll defend it.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:39

That's that's the critique you used to get, Matt. That's the critique you always it's just spar.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:44

Yeah, you know, and to be clear, I'm not saying that that's what you do in the I you know that's why I said in the very beginning when we started this conversation. Oh, not you. Yeah, familiarity with it comes from you guys. So not you. Um can I ask you a question? I understand, and and I and I see the I see a great value to that. As well, you know. Um, there's a there's a great value to when people discover something for themselves, they're far more apt to remember it. And what's even more important to me is the means of discovery be becomes something that becomes more self-evident to them, and then they can problem solve on their own. Ultimately, what I'm trying to do is create athletes who can solve their own problems, who don't come back to me all the time and asking, and they learn how to fix it. Um, and one of the ways they learn how to solve those problems with jujitsu in particular is they start to understand how jujitsu works in terms of structure and base and leverage. And and um, that's why also when I'm teaching, I I try and put a heavy emphasis on the principles of jujitsu as opposed to just the movements. The principles are more important to me. Once they start to understand that, then they can they can do exactly what you're saying. There is things to be careful of, like I mentioned, uh shitty jujitsu works against shitty jujitsu, and people will come up with things that work well for them that aren't necessarily good ideas, especially especially strong athletic people, you know.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:52

Do you think that they could very quickly adapt from that point, though? Like so you said the per do you think that they could adapt? So you said they're doing bad jujitsu and it's working, it's working, it's working, and then it hits a wall. Yes. What I have found in my room is that that may then get messy for a little while, but the the person comes up with another solution because they're they are adaptable, they are creative. So they may run into a failure where it stops working, but doesn't that happen to all of us all the time as we get older, as we get weaker? Like even our best jujitsu starts to that's also what they're paying me for.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:25

So um in in if you get a guy like, for example, I have a student that uh I love trained with me forever. He was one of my first students. Um trained for 20 years and he's a blue belt. Okay. One of the reasons he's a blue belt is he's freakishly strong. Freakishly strong. Um and he can throw pretty much anybody who mounts him off until that person gets to be a kind of a high-level brown belt or black belt. And with those guys, he gets tapped. Pretty much every time he gets in mount, he gets tapped. Because for him, this is the bottom line on that on that particular situation, beating his training partner was more important than learning jiu-jitsu. And so the emphasis to me is not on escape. I don't want you to escape. My emphasis to me on him was how it's occurring. Yeah, you escape, but you're not doing it in a good way. Now, if they're smarter and they're more interested in learning jujitsu than they are just quote unquote beating their training partner that day in the gym, then they will adapt and they will come up with different solutions, 100%. But at that point, how many hours or minutes or whatever of flight time do they have doing something mechanically inefficient?

unknown 1:08:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:38

So we would have better had I presented that solution to them earlier so that they could spend that those those hours and months or whatever minutes doing something more efficient. I would argue yes. That's why they pay me.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:50

I I don't I don't know if we would I don't know if we would necessarily agree on that. But I I see your point, but I don't know if I don't know if we'd agree on that. Um but uh one thing you sort of said that I I really liked about the I method, even the way that I apply it, is the iterative nature of it, either in the short term or the long term. And I I think if the I think the coach if the person is creative and that's your environment, then I I think we can keep them evolving towards efficiency. Like they become better at solving the problem. Part of that is efficiency. And and I think and I feel just in my own the best way to get to that efficiency is in a more alive environment. Can I switch gears though? Can I just uh I think you'll like my question. Okay, yeah, no, I did that I didn't want to miss it, but okay. Okay, just put one sec. We'll see which one he wants first. Taking everything we've talked about, we're all pretty much in agreement on how best to help athletes become skilled. Why the why do you think it's so difficult to see this in striking gyms?

SPEAKER_02 1:09:50

Why do I think it's what? I'm sorry. I'm gonna go. Yeah. Um that's a good question. I think it's just because the nature of striking and the contact that comes with that lends itself to in many, this is one reason. There's multiple reasons. But one of the reasons is it lends itself to people getting emotional and overreacting, and everything starts to ramp up in a way that's not productive. You know, John Kabanaugh told me the hardest thing he did with his team was getting them to be able to spar in a safe, a lot fully alive, but manner that they're not gonna get hurt and get brain trauma using those little gloves. And but it it took time and they had to work with each other, but he created an environment where that could happen. And he's real careful of bringing other people in that don't have that uh because he doesn't want his athletes to get to get hurt. So I think it, I think it's hard, harder to do that. Jiu-jitsu, it's a it's a little easier because of the just the nature of grappling versus the nature of striking. I think that's one reason. Another reason is a lot of the coaches aren't nearly as versed in striking as they are in jujitsu. I mean, we have people like Whittier and yourself who've got a really solid background in it, but a lot of the jujitsu instructors maybe haven't invested the same amount of time in the in those arts as they have in grappling. So I think there's a few reasons for it. Um, but I I love seeing more and more aliveness brought into it. I think that's really important. I've always wanted to get rid of the focus bits and the tie pads as much as possible. I hate the the robotic combinations, and it's it's always been boring to me. So when I see people play those alive games for striking, I really, I really like it.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:26

You know, if we go back to your uh original example of the the Hogger Gracie, the room that did nothing but repetition and dead stuff. I keep going, we have this control group in striking. We have it. There's cardio kickboxing gyms all over the world. And if if that's if that's what someone wants to do, I'm all for it. I mean, it's fun in the pads, it's great, you can be part of the community without getting hurt. I'm all for it. But we have that control group. If you have you have guys who just spar and it's always alive, you put them against a bunch of cardio kickboxers, or you clone them and they just did pad work in that, there's there's no argument to be had there for me. What interesting discussion is how much how much do we take or how much do we integrate both sides? And I think where me and Adam are coming from, I don't think we put much value on on that one side at all.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:12

I don't either with striking. Um, I view striking a little bit different, you know. Um there are definitely fundamentals to body mechanics, to distance, to things like that um that have to be imparted, but there's such a huge variance in how people strike best, quote unquote. You're gonna have somebody like uh Mike Tyson, and then you're gonna have somebody, you know, like Sugar Ray Leonard, and then they couldn't be more different, you know. And when you're trying to make one boxer box with the other one's style, is always a mistake. The example I've always used in my seminars was uh Marvus Fraser, Joe Frazier's son, who was more of a stick and move heavyweight boxer and was working his way through the ranks and doing very well and fought more like had a style more like Ali than he did his dad. And then he fired his trainer and started training with his dad, and his dad started teaching him to try and fight like his style, and he lost, I think, two or three in a row and quit boxing. And so somebody like Connor McGregor to use an example. If he'd walked, there's a lot of MMA schools or even boxing schools when he walked in as a young man and he'd been boxing already for quite a while when he was younger. The coach would have told him your hands are too low, your stance is too sideways, they would have tried to adjust them maybe to look more like a Muay Thai fighter or who knows what, and it wouldn't have been him. You know, he needed the environment to be more open than that, so he could figure out how best to make things work. The flip side of that is I think striking doesn't age as well. Striking is a far more attribute-based game. And the thing about jujitsu is the closer you get to the other person. So, for example, when when you're further when there's more space like guard, open guard, there's so many different ways you can play open guard. There's a million different kinds of open guards, there's a million different styles of open guard. When you get down to a position like Mount Bottom or a headlock, it's a very fixed position where you and your opponent are both kind of locked into a particular place, and so the variables become much more limited. And when the variables are much more limited, then the structural foundation of that is is going to be easier to impart and less attribute-based. And the more space there are, the more space there is, the more scrambling comes into play, the more youth will matter, the more explosiveness will matter, the more speed will matter. And I think so in that way, striking is more like the open guard than it is like a headlock or a head and arm escape. Um the parts of jujitsu that I love the most are the fixed parts where we can eliminate as much as possible the scrambles, because then you can create a style of jujitsu or style of playing that will age better, where you can compensate for somebody being 15 years younger or who knows what. Um, so and for a lot of different reasons, I think it's easier in some ways. Um, there's less introduction that you have to pass on with striking than you do with with grappling. So each of those fixed positions in jujitsu, there is a certain amount of fundamental knowledge that people need to know. And there's a lot of different positions you can find yourself in and that are fixed. So it's just if I was writing down a curriculum of fundamentals, my curriculum for fundamentals for jujitsu would be however long, and for striking, it would be a fraction of that. I think that's one of the other reasons. But I think the main reason is the contact.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:12

You're describing this idea that we have in in ecological dynamics where we have stability and then metastability and then sort of instability, let's say. And you like to drive everything towards stability where you have the most control, you may have the most time, you have the you may that may be actually when so we believe like perception and action is is drives everything, drives all movement, drives all self-organization. But there are places where we're so stable, maybe there's a little bit of and so it's fine. I I appreciate that you you understand that intrinsically. That's that's uh yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:48

You could watch somebody like uh Gordon Elson example. I watched him fight uh years ago. He was in a fight, you see, I can't remember who he was with, but he was in a weird sort of half-guard position. His leg was trapped in a way that I hadn't seen before. And you can stop, you can watch in the fight, and he stops and he looks at it and kind of thinks for a minute, you know, moment, and he solves it the way the way you would solve a math problem or a puzzle. You know, he kind of unties himself. And uh I don't think that happens as much with with striking, of course.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:15

I think you meant you mentioned and this is uh this is where um I'm going to disagree. Um you you like these kind of fixed positions uh to work around in jiu-jitsu. I'm not gonna speak for the other, but we talk about the in-betweeny bits, right? I'm actually fascinated with the other side, the transitions and the scrambles and the joking proposition. And that's why I focus on earlier on before we get to these fixed positions. And the reason I use uh the rules of the the rules of engagement as the the fundamentals, if we look at striking, and this is hear us all the time, the MMA striking shit, right? Well, from a dynamics, uh dynamical systems perspective, where if we take a phase space or state space, that's just in this interaction, there's with the degrees of freedom and all the different ways we can move our body, it's very, very broad in MMA. When you bring it down to kickboxing, it's a little of a narrower, smaller space. You bring it a boxing, it's even more narrower. So it's unsurprising to me that boxing is going to look a little cleaner than kickboxing and then MMA, because MMA is so wild and dynamic. Um, so and this this is why this is why I think the fundamental, the the real fundamentals are the rules of the sport, because you change the rules of engagement, you change your behavior. And your um your comment about the this blue belt who just muscled his way out and used his strength. I think we can map that onto brawlers in striking. And can you make a brawler a smart kind of counterfighter, um, an intentional counterfighter? I'm not so sure, I'm not so sure about that. But it's also, and to I like everything you were saying about Kavanaugh because he's started before me, but he's his endeavor was to create the same room that I'm trying to create, and Adam's trying to create, where they can spar and get that game speed up as high as possible and reduce the amount of force and impact as much as possible. That takes a long time, it takes a lot of trust. I didn't let my guys throw head kicked for the first few years until I knew they had a duty of care for each other. So I really appreciate what you were saying about that. Uh but brawling and spazzing out on the mats in jujitsu are hard problems to solve. It's especially hard and striking. How do we prepare for brawlers? And I speak to Adam all the time. I have an amateur team. We go to these amateur teams fights all the time with these uh early debuts and whatnot. That's a really fucking hard problem to solve, where you've got a 45-second storm of just brawling. And I'm not sure how I can prepare my guys from that, other than being careful and getting them in that letting them experience it that as much as possible in competition early on.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:28

So, Matt, Scotty and I have really focused our fundamental striking programs around the relationships that are formed between the two fighters.

unknown 1:18:38

Right?

SPEAKER_00 1:18:39

So between the two fighters, the two and everything generally in our foundations class is used to manipulate how that relationship evolves and moves and changes. And then they start to slowly and we're going chest shoulders, and even at my highest level, I have the my head cut where we make contact, not impact. And that's a culture thing, just like you said. I mean, the contact, not impact. And and Scotty says speed up power down. And the whole point is the the uh for it to be valuable, it has to be alive, but it has to be safe.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:18

And so early on, we we create it, we create about not about hitting and defending, more about the relationships and the movement. And then as the as they they naturally are seen to get better at all the components when that's the foundation. Yeah, distance management and all those things, the relationship, when that's the foundation, everything else seems to build on that really well. I like it. So you know, I'm seeing guys that are they're just training for like a year, chest shoulder, all of our drills. And then when they enter where there's head contact, they're they're hitting the chest and shoulder? Yeah, chest and shoulders, body, they're kicking the legs and stuff. Um, they're not making head contact. And even my most advanced guys, I set up drills where the counter has to be fixed chest so that no one's car crashing.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:04

Um I think that's great. John calls it updating the uh hardware without damaging the software or updating the software without damaging the hardware.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:12

Exactly. And so when they start, when they start training with the better guys, there is a period where it's messy and the the new guys are you know maybe getting touched a little more than they had, but they adapt to that very quickly. And and we've had we've had a couple of guys go from just chef shoulders to three weeks of sparring to winning a kickboxing tournament to winning an MMA fight. Because every every step where the training gets a little more variable and and a little higher level, they they're able to adapt to that because we built it.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:44

I love it. I remember uh years ago I was with Carl in the UK, and we were watching uh one of his guys was running a competition MMA competition team practice, and he's like, watch that guy right there. And I watched him for a minute. I saw he was awkward, but I didn't notice exactly what he was looking at. And Carl was like, You see how he's flinching every single time? And once he once he um pointed it out to me, I did, it became obvious. And then he was like, That guy's been ruined from a bad coach and too much. It's like it's gonna be so hard to go back and fix that.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:11

And uh I don't think it's fixed. I don't think it's fixable, by the way.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:15

It might not be fixable, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:16

I mean, you see you see what do you do? Your dog, my dog, my dog has lived in the lap of luxury for three years, and all the things that happened to it before are still stronger than yeah, yeah, yeah. So as much as we can avoid that, I'm all for it.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:30

You you mentioned Connor with his hands down, and uh I I got I got a guy in at the moment, um Paul Cows his name is, and he's playing around with his the hands are down, he's dipping the head, he's moving around, he's no business moving like that. But fighters have made that work. I think of Ben Whitaker right now, I think uh Nazim Hamed, okay? So instead of me chastising him and trying to fix this into some kind of structure that pleases me, I'm letting him play with it. And it's three to six months in now, and there's glimpses of him becoming effective with it. And as long as I keep him in this space, we're doing two things. He's finding something that's uniquely meaningful to him. And not only that, when he's going against one of my other students, they've got a whole new problem space to deal with, which is providing adaptability in the room. So I I like what you said about Connor. I think if we take guys even the top-level UFC right now, Herrera, I talk about often, he's he's he's stable. But if you look at his mechanics, I think almost every purist boxing coach and kickboxing coach is gonna have a field day with that. Because he doesn't look that fluid, but he's effective. And that might be uh way to start round off. We do we care about we care about effectiveness, right? Adam and I talk about it all the time. Coaches, we we in the room we we have this you know, we're looking for this idealized movement or idealized technique, but no, no coach gives a fuck about that on game day. We care about effectiveness. We may, if you lost, go back and and and attribute it to bad technique or whatever. But what we care about is were you able to adapt and effect and be effective and and and win that competition. So I I let I let I let that variability be very, very broad in my room.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:12

Yeah, and Scotty, I gotta, I gotta tell you, last night uh uh uh Tuesday night I walked into my high level room and all my fighters were back in the room. We were all together and they just I said three things the whole hour. I was like, hey, if you haven't, if you haven't been, if you haven't added some shoot boxing, maybe think about adding some shoot boxing. Ten minutes later, hey, if you haven't been on a cage at all, let's see if we can get some cage work. Ten minutes later, if you haven't been on the ground, maybe start pinning each other on these takedowns. And they and there was no clock either. What do you call it? Shoot boxing. Shoot boxing? Yeah, in in shoot, as in wrestling. So basically, in the stand-up phase of MMA, it's it can be a mutual kickboxing or a mutual shoot boxing, but mostly it's the shoot boxing versus kickboxing. One guy wants to stay up, one guy wants to go down. And so we have to organize our striking around that threat all the time. Um but and I just watched them. And now granted, they're a high-level room, but like they were being playful and they they went for an hour straight and they organized the practice themselves. Like I so I don't know how much. And I walked around and I was more mostly just like motivational. Like if they were struggling, I'd I make a joke. But I so much of what they need to learn and get just comes out of going with eight or different, eight or nine different people in a night. And just keeping a very open mind and having a very safe environment. Yeah, no, I think that's good. I gotta I gotta show you because um my foundation's MMA class, like and my foundation's rapping class are basically 100% alive. Now there may be we could quibble over a little bit of information um because they you can't do nothing. So there is a little bit of, but it's not do it like this. It's more like hey, it it looks like this, something like that. Um, but I'd love to show you maybe oh, we're we'll be in camp in April together. So I'm gonna teach uh I'm gonna teach a very good constraints-led lesson gear scale to my audience, but I'd love to spend some time with you showing you how we do a live MMA in foundations because it hasn't hurt our retention. BJJ is easy, it's 100% alive. It hasn't hurt our retention, and people are getting better faster, they're really enjoying it. And you because I want to wrap up my final comment. You had said that people have an hour, you know, two hours a week. And so I think where we differ is if a person only has two hours a week, I think the best use of that time is maybe you know almost 100% alive. Um because that's really I think what they come for. Maybe they come from my coaching, they come from my good looks or my humor. But I think at the end of the day, if they really enjoy it, they're there to grapple. So anyway, that's my final and I have one final question.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:54

Um something we're working on um in uh school right now, Matt. We have to make a designer framework that's personal to us in our coaching uh perspective and our coaching philosophy. But with that has to become it has to become an assessment tool. An assessment tool, like an assessment criteria to to assess uh either development, transfer, or skill. I am really fucking struggling with this. And and I I I'm putting the question to you, how do you assess skill, given it's always relative to the interaction? I'm really struggling with this. Because then the old system, the traditional sorry, just to uh you know, add on to this. The old system we have a curriculum, you can either demonstrate some explicit knowledge or some details of a move, you can show the move or whatever, then we'll we'll map that on to now you're a blue belt, now you're a purple belt. I'm not saying that's what you do. I'm saying that's typically how we've assessed uh competency in the space.

unknown 1:26:46

Right.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:46

Given that I'm charged with making an assessment tool for development and the level of skill in my athletes, I'm completely fucking lost.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:57

Okay. Um, well, I guess I would answer that. The probably the easiest thing for me to the way to answer that would be how I evaluate people for belts, because that is the closest thing we have to an assessment tool at my gym. Uh, my criteria for belts, what I always tell my black belts when I give them a black belt or when they're brown belts, is a few things. Is number one, never use yourself as a yardstick ever. Uh that just becomes a big ego thing of how well people are doing or not doing against you. Um, one or two competitions are not necessarily a good metric, depending on you know the division and who they went through went for. Plus, I don't really care about anybody else's standards. I don't care about whether they beat brown belts at this other gym. I sort of expect that. The criteria is are they able to perform jujitsu technically against their peers that are wearing that belt in a competitive way on my mat. So the criteria that the performance standard is my mat. And when they're rolling and they're rolling with the other purple belts and they're going back and forth and they're doing their thing and they're using jujitsu, they're not just like some crazy strong guy throwing people around, and uh, then they're that belt, and they kind of know that. And I kind of know it, and the other coaches know it, and then we give them the belt, and the belt is just a physical representation of that tangible skill that they could couldn't pretend to have anymore that they could pretend to speak French. And that's the standard I use. Um, and so when my instructors go out and they open up a new gym and they have their first gym, the thing I always tell them is make sure that your first crop of blue belts that you produce are really good because they're gonna be the standard everybody else kind of measures themselves by. Those are the guys that are gonna have the targets on their back that all the white belts are looking for. So, you know, don't give it early, make sure that they're solid and then build from there. And that's generally how I do it.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:34

Performance against Pierce.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:35

When I travel to another gym, that's easy for me at my gym because I see these people all the time. My black belts, and everybody sees them, and they'll all, you know, the way I do it at my gym is they they will nominate people, they'll talk about it, discuss it, they give me a list, and then I'll decide at the end of the day, and we'll give them a belt at the Iron Man, which is always a surprise to them. But when I travel to other gyms where maybe the coach is not a black belt yet, and they and I'm awarding belts because the coach is, let's say, a brown belt, it's a lot trickier because I only see those people maybe once a year. In those types of situations, what I've always done is I'll have them set two hours aside sometime that weekend, and I'll get a clipboard and a list of the various positions, close guard, guard passing, mount bottom, cross sides, and I'll have them do five-minute rounds and I'll have the coach of owner of the gym match them up with people that either already have that belt or they feel are close to it, and I just watch what they're doing. How are they technically escaping? Uh, how are they technically holding it down? Are they doing jujitsu to that level? And then I'll make notes on this person's here, this person's there. And at the end, I'm what the way I say it's an evaluation, it's not a belt test. And what they should care about is what I tell them they need to work on. That's how they should look at it. The belt is almost secondary in that sense. Um, and that's how I would award the belts. And after two hours of watching somebody work from pretty much every position, I think I have a pretty good handle on where they're at. And I there's been times. I mean, one one time I went to a school in Ireland where it was a lot of really big, strong guys, and they were doing okay on everything. But when we got to the bottom, they were just throwing each other off. Their headlock escapes were were pretty ridiculous, their head and arm escapes was just pure muscle, and I just failed all of them, even though some of the other things that were doing good, because this is not technical jujitsu. You want to get the belt for me, um, you're gonna have to tighten this part up and actually learn how to do jujitsu here. Of course, they left the organization after that, but um, that's how I do it.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:19

So it's when I'm Scotty, Scotty, let me sum it up for you. Yeah, he knows it when he sees it. Yeah, yeah. Just write that, just write that down. Yeah, just write that down and hand that in. They'll appreciate it. You you'll get an A. Just a one-laner, right? That's it. It's parsimony. Matt loves parsimony, it's one of his favorite words. Um, you know, what's what's been cool though, and it's been very helpful to me all these years is um aliveness and the I method were a very good substitute for having a local coach, right? They um we we've I I like to say we fucked around and figured it out. I think that's really not find out. I want to fuck around and figure it out. And I think the i method and aliveness really gave us the tools to do that on our own. And then we were able to see you a couple times a year and and and other SPG people. Um, and it always gave us a detector of what was bullshit or not.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:14

You know, when we would and and so um, yeah, we what you and Roy were able to do in Georgia, calmly as well, Alabama, and for sure, basically be on your own and create these high-level teams of athletes is super impressive. And it's a testament to uh to how much thought and effort you put into it. And it's like it was similar with me in Oregon. I didn't have a coach, I only had Howder who would come up a few times a year and stay for a while, and that was it, you know. Uh the the plus side of that is all of this came out as a result of that because I had to make it up as I went along because there was, you know, I wasn't modeling off any other instructor. There are things that I've taken from couture and from wrestling and from boxing coaches, and you know, put it in there, and we had to kind of create the epistemology for it. Um now it's fun for me at this stage of the game and to go back and to pay a little more attention to some of those technical details that I might have had more access to had I lived in LA but didn't, but I still wouldn't trade it for being up in Oregon on my own and and doing it the way we did it, because I think it created a lot of value there.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:17

I think that that I think you that is a strong point that we have been talking about this whole time. I think you you by being there by yourself. And you know, the the thing about you and I is we sacrificed a lot of years on of our life, Scotty as well, we sacrificed a lot of years on our life to make sure that we were part of the testing. Right? It wasn't just watching our guys get better, it was also applying it to ourselves and being a part of that and transferring a lot of that information by grabbing them and scoring with them and training with them and stuff. And I'm glad that we've all gotten to a point that now we could just do this for our own enjoyment and the environments and the athletes we've set up to keep it, keep it rolling. Scotty on the last podcast asked me, like, what would happen if you don't show up to practice tonight? And I said, they'll just train the right way. They'll they'll take care of each other, they'll train the right way. Uh, I'm there because I give them comfort and I can like they're comfortable because I'm there. They know nothing's going wrong, and the environment and the culture take care of so much of it. But uh having that methodology, the I method and aliveness was was um was very important.

SPEAKER_01 1:33:23

Last question for me, Mar, where was your where was your greatest pushback from the community? Was it the dog dogma coming out from the the Grazies and the J the Brazilians? Where was the where was the greatest source of pushback when you were introducing your ideas? Or did you just not give a shit?

SPEAKER_02 1:33:38

Historically or historically or now?

SPEAKER_01 1:33:40

Uh historically, because I'm sure it's the same pushback we're getting, but historically, I mean, given that you're you know considered to be a pioneer of aliveness in this space back then in a in a uh I would imagine a sport that was before social media and all that was very, very kind of dogmatic and traditional.

SPEAKER_02 1:33:55

Well, as what Adam was mentioning before is I happen to have come from the JKD community, as did a lot of the first generation of SPG coaches like Adam and others. Um Paul Sharp, Chris, Paul, Rory, all of them. All of them. And so a lot of what I was describing and explaining, I would describe and explain in relation to that. So by definition, I think a lot of them felt that I was uh trying to tear them down. And I was always very careful to say, you know, what I want to what I want to do is I want to talk about training methods. I'm not talking about individuals, I'm not trying to insult Dan and Asano or this instructor or that instructor. I want to talk about how we train and try and apply some science and common sense to it. But no matter how many times you say that, they would people, especially with martial arts, your identity a lot of times gets very wrapped up in that, and they were very insulted and uh upset by what I was having to say. And you know, I figured out right away that when you say something that's not true, some people will get mad and you might get a little pushback. But if you say something that's true that other people don't want you to say, then they really hate you. And that's kind of what happened, but it was it was nothing came of it, you know.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:02

Let me let me tell you what happened.

SPEAKER_02 1:35:04

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:05

There was there were forums at that point, and there was a Jeekundo forum that someone hosted. And Matt was uh very stubborn, and Matt is a writer, he he's written a book, and I've seen, and that book is probably half of the amount that he wrote for it, if not more. He's a he loves to write.

SPEAKER_01 1:35:21

And it's a gift of violence, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:35:22

Yeah, the gift of violence. Yeah, hopefully he has one to show us. Um I have a signed copy that I'll sell. Um so Matt would be on these forums and they were asking the same questions and having the same arguments, and Matt would not, he would never, he would keep explaining himself. He would keep explaining himself. And then I would be like, I gotta go to bed. And I go to bed and I'd wake up the next morning and I'd refresh it. And it is 25 pages long, and Matt is writing thousand-word posts. It's like just nobody could deal with the amount of just writing that Matt was doing. So people just gave up or they just were being willfully ignorant at some point. They're like, I've always this is the way we've always done it. This way we're gonna keep doing it.

SPEAKER_02 1:36:01

The the big pushback at the beginning was aliveness, which is the most important thing. And and people either didn't get it or pretended not to get it, or just could not differentiate between aliveness and sparring. To this day, a lot of people think aliveness just means sparring within that community. And so I would do my best to try and explain that. And then the next wave was, well, you know, how do you just teach people if you're just having them spar? You can't just throw people in the pool. And that was when I would explain, well, that's not actually what we do, here's what we do. And in explaining what I was doing, the I method came, the terminology of the i method came as a result of me having those conversations and explaining to people how we were passing along those skills. Um, and so forth and so on. And so, my first initial travels, I was always trying to really get across the message of aliveness. Later on, as I started to travel around, I was trying more to get people to pay more attention to the specific the specifics of the i method as a way of them not a lot of them, myself included, were trained too hard, like there was too much contact. And uh, and so you know, it doesn't need to be rough or that hard for it to be alive. And so that became kind of the thing that I was trying to focus on a lot. Um, and then it then it starts to come down to well, what exactly, which is the conversations we're having now, like what exactly are you teaching? What is the curriculum? What is the information and technology? And for me, it's the word I use constantly is fundamentals, but trying to explain to people what I consider to be a fundamental in the art of jujitsu um is difficult. And I think a lot of people have a hard time with that and struggle with it. And they think of it in terms of technique, or is this technique a fundamental? Is that technique a fundamental? Um so I, you know, I just have at this stage of my life perfectly comfortable with the fact that there's gonna be a lot of people who aren't really gonna understand what I'm talking about, which is fine. It's I'm gonna do the best I can to explain myself as clearly as possible with the intention of being understood, you know, and that's all I can do. And there's a lot of great coaches that out there who do get it, and people like Adam and other people around the world who who understood it, and that's more than enough for me. Uh so I'm I'm happy, but I will continue, probably up until the day I die, to continue trying to articulate my vision of what I think these things are. But I think the big one now at this point in time really is is uh is defining a fundamental and defining what that information actually is. And there's a lot of people who are you know dealing with that question at the moment. So it's good because it means we've gone past the aliveness part, which was the most important thing. I think that argument conversation, I think hopefully is over.

SPEAKER_00 1:38:20

Well, there's there's an irony right now that brings us full circle that I remember people wanted to put in an SVG class.

SPEAKER_02 1:38:27

An SVG what?

SPEAKER_00 1:38:28

They wanted to just put in an SVG class. So they would have all their dead classes, and then Wednesday night at eight o'clock would be the SVG class. And we're seeing that now, we're seeing that with gyms now that either are putting in one class to do this approach or doing like, or one program will do this approach. Um, and then the second is the straw manning of what aliveness was is a very similar straw man about the ecological approach.

SPEAKER_02 1:38:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:38:52

So I think it's it's interesting. All right. Hey, Matt, thank you so much. This was uh this was awesome, really awesome. So I appreciate it. Nice being.

SPEAKER_01 1:39:01

Yeah, I appreciate it too. And uh I'm not speaking for you, but if I were in your shoes and I've been talking about this, these concepts and philosophies for many, many years, I would have a sense of validation that that a lot of these ideas map on to this kind of new ecological approach. They're very, very aligned and they're starting to get a lot of traction within the sport.

SPEAKER_02 1:39:16

So I appreciate that. Thank you. I look forward to seeing you.

SPEAKER_01 1:39:21

All right. Well, Daniel, the daddy of a line. We're still recording. We're still recording.

SPEAKER_00 1:39:29

You don't know how to do it. No, I I can't say anything that's being recorded now. We're done. All right. Well, you guys have a good day. Oh yeah, go ahead. Um What are you teaching a camp?