BTG 164 - Private Lesson Mastery

Hello and welcome to another episode of Breaking the Guard. On this week's episode, I want to talk about the private lesson student. Uh, I see Derek Moneyberg pop up all the time and he would be, I guess, the epitome of the idea that he could become a black belt solely by training private lessons, not doing any group classes and be legit. In my opinion, I don't think he is. But that is what I would believe would be the goal of somebody who thought they could just private lessons their way into mastery. Not to say it's impossible. It's just very unlikely. And I'll give my reasons why. When you train in a private lesson, it is usually a very targeted session, at least the way I have taught them. And we're mainly focused on technique. We're trying to build new skills. We're trying to troubleshoot problem areas, but everything is technical in nature. We're not looking to develop cardio or to develop strength. uh nothing like that. It's all about technique for the most part. So if you're just doing private lessons, you will collect a lot of technique. And if you're smart and you know you are very quick to memorize things, you could amass a large amount of technical information. But you will lack the execution of it if you never practice with resisting partners. Now, you can of course spar in a pirate lesson and you could drill in a pirate lesson. It's just not that common. If you're sparring in the pirate lesson, which is which does happen, of course, normally the instructor is kind of carrying you in this practice because obviously he's got a much higher skill level than you. So, when I'm rolling with somebody in a prior lesson, I am trying to either a show the move that I taught them during the session or try to get them to use the move that I taught them during the session. I like showing it from both ways because when they actually experience the move that you taught, they're like, "Oh crap, this actually works because he just did it to me." and then try to give them the opportunity to do it back to you, right? So, it's not like I'm playing my a game, you know? So the the student is not getting what I would call realistic resistance when you're someone and again I've never met him so I I couldn't say this is accurate but just from other types of people like this that I have met that just want to do private lessons and technical instruction. You're like the student that reads lots of books, but and maybe like you read a lot of travel books about, you know, world history and different parts of the world and you know geography really well, but you've never traveled anywhere. Do you really know a lot about the world? Probably not. You know a lot about what's written about the world, but you've never been around the world. You've stayed in your room your whole life. Similar to the private lesson student who just exclusively I'm I'm talking about exclusively doing private lessons. You know a lot of things about martial arts but you don't actually practice martial arts, right? That is my opinion on it. So if someone told me, oh this guy, he only trains pirate lessons. my initial snap judgment is going to be like he's probably not very good. Now, I could be wrong, but that is what I would gather from that because you just don't have any competition or training experience of live combat. And if you guys heard of me talk about the four phases of learning, the prior lesson student pretty much is only doing two of them. And there's four, right? There is observation, practice, drilling, sparring, and when you are in a private lesson, you're just doing the first two most of the time, which is you're observing and then you're practicing. Very rarely, you're drilling because just as an instructor myself, I don't want to be doing the drilling. [laughter] I can tell you if you know what drilling is in my terms, it's difficult. And I'm not trying to get crazy tired uh if I'm teaching pirate lessons, you know. Uh it's different if I was training for a competition or something like that, but uh yeah, I'm not normally drilling for a pirate lesson student. Uh sparring I might do. And like like I said, it's not 100% or you know, even like a normal class sparring. It's just me going through the motions trying to get them to learn new things. more of a flow roll, if you will. So, their learning curve is stunted in the prior lesson paradigm because you're just observing, practicing, observing, practicing. And if you've heard me do this breakdown before, in my opinion, most of the skill development is done in the drilling phase. This is where you build your speed, your power, your technical precision, your timing. Everything gets built in that drilling phase. The sparring phase is the feedback. It's like once we've created a great model of the technique from the drilling, we test that model now against a resisting opponent and see how it holds up. And then we observe that in our memory. Did it work? What didn't work? And then we practice out the mistakes. And then we redrill the new iteration of this model. So to me, a private lesson exclusive mode of training in a sport like mixed martial arts, which requires feedback constantly and a resisting opponent, isn't realistic or desirable. That's not to say that prior lessons have no place. In fact, I think they have a great place, but they are a supplement, not the main course. It's the the side item, the desserts, if you will. It shouldn't be the main thing you're doing. The main thing in my opinion is going to be doing good amount of drilling obviously with sparring life situation rounds and stuff like that. Uh those are going to be the things that you get mostly from a group class because you need more people involved and you need someone overseeing it as well. The prior lesson should be used as a great way of fine-tuning things. If I notice during my group sessions that I'm having problems in a particular area, that's when a private lesson can come into play because I can go to the instructor, get a private on that particular issue and resolve it, right? Or at least get better at resolving it. That is how I would and I do tell people how to use them because some people just come to me for a private lesson without any idea what they want to work on. And if you've done lessons with me before, you know I usually want you to have things a list of things you want to work on. I want to know what I'm going to be teaching you. Not like, oh, let me just grab something out of, you know, the top of my head to teach you. That's unplanned. It's uncoordinated. It's not going to be a good use of our time in my opinion. I mean, don't get me wrong, I can do that and with just about most people, I'm going to teach you a lot of things, but that's not specific to what you might need, right? And when I'm teaching a private lesson to you, it should be tailored specifically for what you want to work on. And that's only something that you would know because you're you and you should be observing what's going on when you train. That's why if you're doing it in a group class setting and your instructor and you do private lessons with your own instructor, it makes a lot of sense because they're able they know what you do right and what you do wrong and they would probably even if you didn't know, they could probably get it for you. But I am a big believer in you knowing your own faults. And this is why I've talked about before filming yourself. So even if you can't know what you're doing wrong when you're training, hopefully by watching it, you could. Right? In any case, that's to me the use case of private lessons, not as a replacement for group training, but as a supplement to group training in particular to focus on problem areas or to acquire perhaps a new area of learning. Maybe your school doesn't do any leg locks and you feel like I want to learn leglocks. Okay? And you go to a leglock specialist like Dean Listister or something. Okay, that makes sense. That's how it should be used in my opinion, not just like, okay, this is the majority of my training or this is all I'm doing. I feel that that's not going to result in the greatest benefit of and use of your time or money. Similarly, this is how online lessons and like online instructionals should be used because obviously you guys are on this watching this podcast. It's hosted on my website, which is an online learning platform. Sometimes I get messages from people like, "Oh, like how am I going to get better at, you know, martial arts doing this?" Like, if all you did was watch my my website, you wouldn't get better, right? Just obviously you wouldn't. You're just learning things like conceptually, you're not even doing them. The whole point is it's a supplement, right? like you have to be training somewhere and now you're using my website and me as a training aid. You know, maybe there's something that I'm doing that you want to be doing, but you already have a place that you're able to train and get feedback from. Or maybe you're having a problem, you know, inspiring and you send me a question on the forum or you you send me an email or make some type of request and then I can make a video to cover that, right? Like that's how online training and like on courses in particular are supposed to work in my opinion. It's not like, well, all I got to do is, you know, watch YouTube videos all day and I'll be an expert. Like clearly that it doesn't work that way. You could learn a lot of things, but you're not going to get amazing proficiency just by learning by watching something, right? Like to learn it, you actually have to use it and use it against resisting opponents. So to me, whether it's a private lesson, a DVD or online course, these are only giving you two parts or in some cases only one part, right? Like the videos and stuff, it's only observing. you're not getting anything else out of it. At least this the prior lesson you're getting, you know, some practice involved, but they're not going to give you the full taste of the learning cycle. You need to get the drilling in and you need to get the sparring in. And in my opinion, you you can temper these things a bit, right? Because you might say, well, what's the optimal mix of uh group training or or you know, drilling versus watching instructionals versus taking private lessons. The majority of your training, in my opinion, should consist of well, that's important because it's going to depend on where you're at in your your journey. If you're just starting, you're probably doing a lot of practice, a decent like a good amount of drilling and a decent amount of sparing. So, I would say you're doing a lot of observing, a lot of practice, and then some drilling, some sparring. The reason I say like that because when you don't know anything, you need to watch a lot and you need to practice a lot because you're going to be clumsy. you're going to need to drill a little bit and then when you spar and everything gets messy, you're going to go back to observing, practicing, drilling. So, I think in the beginning, the front end is going to be heavier. The first two steps, there's going to be a lot more of as you get more experienced. There is less to be observed and practiced and there's more to be drilled because now we're moving into a territory like I would say like blue belt levelish. We start going more heavy towards three, right? Where now we're trying to drill a lot. We're trying to build a lot of proficiency. We have a pretty good model. We just got to work on it, you know, and this is like the chiseling of the stone of trying to make that perfect sculpture, but it takes a lot of work. It's very difficult. And just to be clear, when I say drilling, most people I see in jiu-jitsu do not know how to drill. They are talking. It's conversational. It's very easy to do. That's not drilling to me. That's practice, which is fine, but don't confuse the two. They they they serve different purposes. Drilling is 100% execution. Full power, speed, technical, precision. It's exhausting, especially if you're drilling something like a takedown because now I got to fling a guy's legs over if I'm doing a double leg or I got to do a full back arch if I'm doing a lateral throw. Right? So, it's a lot of exertion. And that's why I'm saying like if I'm the instructor doing a private lesson, I'm not drilling with you, right? [laughter] That's a lot of work that I'm not going to be doing, you know, for hours at a day. Uh so, that's something that you have to do on your own time, right? Or some with somebody who's also coming up the ranks and wants to uh compete or whatnot because that's where your your skill level is going to develop the most. So drilling I feel like in the middle phases becomes very important. I think towards the end of the career you probably are not going to want to drill as much where which is where I'm around at right. The idea of going to the gym just to drill for an hour is not that exciting to me. It never was. That's to be clear because it's difficult. But I knew it was necessary. Once you're very experienced, I think it's a little easier to pick up on things. Not to say that you don't have to drill anything, but you're a lot more familiar with many different positions and techniques and movements. So, it doesn't require as much to gain the proficiency you're after. Right? So, this is where I feel sparring comes in. Like I like right now, just being honest with you, I'm just sparring in situational drills every time I train. between two to three times a week. The past month I've been getting in sometimes four uh for martial arts and they're all sparring sessions and I've actually been able to increase my volume now. The other day I did 45 minutes uh nine five minute rounds going over my rule of 30. But uh didn't hurt myself so I was okay. But as far as conditioning wise, I've leveled up a bit because it's not that difficult to me. And there's some practices I've been doing now that are two hours long all wrestling and I'm doing okay. So that has helped a bit. But point being, I'm able to get a lot out of these sparring sessions because I'm also playing in them. And I've talked about this where most people when they spar, especially when they're young and they have an [clears throat] ego and they're selling the proof, they're trying to win every session. And by win I mean like they want to win by a judge's score card, right? So they want to if it's a jiu-jitsu match, I'm trying to win by points. You know, if it's MMA, you know, I'm trying to control the positions, land more strikes or, you know, obviously get a submission or knock out. Well, in training, we shouldn't be knocking people out, right? But you get the idea. To me, the purpose of training is getting better. So, to win in the training environment, it's about learning new things or getting better at at at things. So, I'll go into training sessions where I'm like, okay, I'm going to focus on trying to sweep somebody instead of just trying to stand up, right? Because a lot of the training sessions that we're doing, they're all like wrestling based for MMA. So most of the guys are just trying to get up to their feet, which has obviously good value. And I do that as well. But there was one guy I was rolling with who good wrestler, very strong base. I'm like, I'm going to try to just focus on sweeping this guy because if I can sweep him, I'm going to be in a good spot because he's very difficult to sweep. So, I probably would have lost that round because I didn't score as much, but I was learning things because I was doing shoulder crunches that they were just off and my foot placement on the on the hip was too high. I needed to get closer to the knee to be able to get that uh elevator sweep. So, there are certain technical things that I picked up on that I could have done better. And I'll do these type of things all the time. So the training environment now becomes what I believe it's supposed to be for everybody, which is play testing, right? Let's grab an idea or a technique and test it out in many different ways without worrying about the consequences of victory or defeat. We're just trying to learn something from this move. If you're able to do that, you're going to be able to learn a lot faster. Most people struggle with that because they're trying to win the rounds, like I said. And the problem with, now don't get me wrong, it's important. If all you did was play test, you then lose the idea of being competitive because now I'm just trying to learn all the time, which is useful, but at a certain point, you have to train for competition, which is I need to win. So, I need to play the a game. I can't, you know, fumble around with techniques. I think that's what's different about where I'm at in my journey versus where I was at like 20 years ago. because right now I'm not competing. So that doesn't matter to me right now. I'm just trying to learn as many things as I can and get better at them. So it's not really important to me to win every round. But I every so often I will go into a round like, okay, a game, demolish this guy, right? Uh just so that I still have the instinct and to stay sharp. But being honest, most of the time I am play testing. I'm always trying new things. I'm always working on something. Like uh I feel in the past couple months I've gotten a lot better with the shoulder crunch. I used to struggle with it for a while. And I think I've talked about this. One of the guys I've I've trained with a lot was Jake Shields. And he's a very good grappler. Really hard to sweep. And I've been able now to score sweeps on him and other people. And it took many, many months. I remember I was doing the shoulder crunch in training probably for over a year and not getting anyone with it. I I train with a lot of good guys, so it's not like, oh, I suck. But I definitely felt like I sucked at the shoulder crunch. I'm like, man, what am I missing with this thing? I'm not getting anyone on this. Right? like I would get I would able I was able to control it well and people would get stuck but I just couldn't get this sweep and it like I said probably took me about six seven months of doing it until I figured out what I was missing right and in my case it was understanding it's not so much um trying to like tilt them and I think this is a common mistake people have because I was having that issue which is like, okay, I'm trying to turn them, you know, let's say I had their right arm and I have my elbow under the chin. So my whole thing is, okay, I'm trying to turn them with this elbow and the chin and pulling the shoulder down, but like there's only so much you can turn before you lose the grip, right? and realizing it's not so much about that as it is about getting really tight with their shoulder and more sitting up with them than trying to fall away from them because you really collapse that shoulder in more and they and I've swept people now in both directions. Sometimes I get the shoulder crunch so tight that they just roll over on the way that you normally wouldn't be sweeping them. Because normally, at least for me, I try to sweep them towards the side I have crunched because I'll have that butterfly hook on the opposite side. So, if I'm shoulder crunching their right shoulder, my right leg has a butterfly hook on their left leg. So, I can tilt them that way and that would lead nicely into an arm triangle type position from the mount. But when you're able to sit up into them with that shoulder crunch, sometimes they're going to fall over the other way because the pressure on the arm is severe. And uh once I kind of figured that act out, now I hit shoulder crunches very often. And uh it's becoming one of my go-to moves. And it works really well, especially in an MMA context because it's easy to catch. MMA guys are still not that savvy in that position. So, uh, but that's something I've been playing a lot with. I also like it cuz they can't really hit you too well, right? Like you already took out one of their arms and since you have that shoulder completely jacked up, the other arm is going to be what? Like, you know, just kind of hammerfisting you and the ribs, not that big a deal. you know, they can't really hit you in the head too well because your head's usually pretty close to them when you're shoulder crunching. So, I think it's a good sweep or position in general to work in MMA. And um like I said, I've been doing a lot of MMA practices now and it's been working pretty well. So, I but again, this is something that was play tested a lot, right? I had to do it in jiu-jitsu practices and and fail for a long time before I was able to get it to work and now I'm get getting it to work everywhere else. being critical of myself. I probably could have gotten a lot better at this if I would have had somebody uh who was an expert at this give me a private lesson and then have a partner to drill with. I would have gone through this faster because I had a particular hiccup that I wasn't getting across. There was a you and it took a lot longer to self-solve for me. And this is the value then of having a prior lesson with an expert. I could have like if I could have found someone like, you know, well, hang Gordon Ryan. If I could have flown over to Austin and just, hey, you know, show me this real quick. What am I missing? That would have been a much quicker solve, right? Uh but you know I I didn't do I I wasn't that pressed to learn it or I I had fun learning it in my own journey. But if we were talking about speed or efficiency that's where you know a private lesson would be a lot faster. I would have learned the the missing link much sooner. In any case, that's my opinion on the use of private lessons and by extension instructional courses or anything like that. It's a supplementary training. It's the side item, the dessert. It's not the main course. The main course should be group training because you're getting the most feedback. You're getting lots of different resistance levels. uh you're going to develop a lot more experience and anybody who's actually serious about getting good at martial arts should be training in a group environment. You're also going to get more out of the martial arts experience because it's going to be funner. You're going to socialize with more people, learn uh new viewpoints. It's one of the cool parts about group training, right? Like if you're just doing pirate lessons exclusively, you're missing out not only on being a and my what I would consider a real martial artist, but also on the experience of it.