BTG 174 - I need a taste of my own medicine

Hello and welcome to another episode of Breaking the Guard. On today's episode, I want to talk about curriculums. And the thought occurred to me because I was talking with my buddy Alvin about getting back together for drilling because I haven't done a lot of drilling or technique work lately. have been doing lots of situational rounds, which has been good for cardio, uh, and just getting back into the swing of things for wrestling, but I realized I was not getting a lot of technical work. So, while I do play around a lot when I'm doing situational rounds, I still feel like I'm not like op I'm not optimizing technique. So, I was writing down a list of things to work on on our training session and it occurs to me that I'm not following for myself what I would tell students or perspective, you know, gym owners and teachers to have in theirmies, which is a curriculum. And you might think, well, Dave, you've been training for, you know, almost 30 years and you write curriculums. Why would you need one for yourself? And I think more so for myself to keep me on task and focused on certain things for a period of time and then rotate the curriculum. I am doing it in a sense, but it's not as organized as I would make it. And I do make it for my own gym. And since I'm not at my own gym, you know, I'm remote, I'm not actually participating in the curriculum doing it myself, which would also benefit me. And I know I do this for working out. I switch the way I lift every few months. Right now I'm doing more of a strength focus and then I'll switch back to a power focus or actually I'll probably go into endurance and then go into power and then come back to strength. So we're rotating those out. But for martial arts, I really haven't done that in a while. I usually pick something I want to specialize on for a while. But I really should have the whole year mapped out and know, okay, I'm going to work on this and then then for a month and I'm going to work on this and and switch it out. That way I have a wellordered system of growth. And especially I think for someone who does have a lot of experience and quote unquote knows what they're doing, it should be even easier to prepare that curriculum because you more often than not are refreshing your memory or sharpening the sword. And believe me, everything can get dull over time. If you have a weapon that you haven't picked up for a long time, it's going to get rusty. You're going to need to polish it up a bit so that it's nice and sharp. And I know that, for example, for my wrestling, it's still like that to be honest. Uh, it's got a lot of rust on there. And I've been taking layers of it off, but it still has more work to do. Uh I hadn't done a lot of wrestling in a few years just because uh some of the training partners I had just couldn't uh had any injuries or whatnot. So we just worked a lot on the ground. But now that I'm working with a lot of MMA guys, there is a lot more wrestling involved at wall wrestling and I been wanting to sharpen it up quite a bit. So I am proposing again. I'm doing a podcast for myself now. I'm just reminding myself of things I want to do, but maybe you're in the similar situation. It could benefit you. I want to have and I will have by today the whole year mapped out as far as what do I want to work on in martial arts and I'll also put in for my lifting and strength and conditioning schedule as well. There's no surprises. I know what I should be doing. Does that mean that I can't deviate? Of course not. But I have a direction of where I'm going to be going and goals. And those goals will have measurable metrics that I can see if I am gaining ground, losing ground or staying the same. For example, uh one of the things I wanted to do is I wanted to tighten up my reverse seat belt from bottom half. Uh one of my students back home was asking me about how I use it and I realized I'm not really using it from half guard too much. I use the reverse seat belt a lot from bottom side control. And normally I when I have the opening, I let go of my half guard so that I will go into bottom side control and use it from there because I'm a lot more mobile. However, that's not always the best way to play it. It's just how I've been having a lot of success doing it. So, I want to revisit playing it if I'm half guard again and especially with people who know how to defend it and still scoring sweep smoothly or moving into submissions or whatnot. So, that's going to be on the agenda for this month, right? Uh for stren conditioning this month, I'll still be doing the same lifting because it's only I think it's been a maybe a month. So, I still need to go another couple months before I would make a switch there. Um, wrestling wise and wall wrestling wise, I need to work more on explosiveness, it's hard to play wrestling going slow, and I have still a bit of that in me. I've feel like I've gotten significantly stronger because I can hold positions like static positions for a long time, but it doesn't mean I'm advancing, right? Like I can hold a single leg and I can see people could try to fight it for a long time, but I'm kind of stuck where I'm at because I'm not transitioning quick enough. So, for the wall resting aspect, I want to get better at bringing people down efficiently, particularly off uh single legs, double legs, body locks. I want to get good at those positions off the wall being able to finish them every time because it's trickier once people know and again these are you know good MMA guys so they know how to defend and use the wall to their advantage so it becomes a little harder when people don't know how to use a wall it's very easy to take them down but when they know how to use the wall now it's like an asset to them so it becomes a little trickier and one of the things I might have to learn is how to lift people better. And it's funny because I tell you all the time like the the area where I feel I gain the most benefit from lifting is pushing. I don't feel that much from pulling, I don't feel that much from squatting. Uh I think I would say especially from squatting, I really don't feel it translate that much. Even though, you know, I'm squatting 300 lb for reps, you know, and I'm not grabbing anyone that's 300 lb right now. Everyone is it's around the 210 or so. Uh I'm 195, so pretty close, but lifting dynamic weight is a lot harder, especially getting the right leverage points to lift people. And even though I incorporate zer squats from time to time, it doesn't feel the same to me. It feels a lot more difficult to lift somebody. And it could be a technique issue. So I something I want to see if I can nail down because I should have the anatomy and the strength to be able to just hurl people around like well maybe not like DC but uh a version of that at least because it's very rare where I lift somebody up and uh it's something that I would like to be able to do because it's always it makes things a lot easier. So from a wrestling perspective, there's that. On the ground, particularly bottom half, I want to work on the reverse seat belt sweeping and transitioning top position. I'm doing pretty well with top position. I still could use work on having a more systematic approach to guard passing or you know what, not really even the passing. I know because it comes in MMA. I want to be better at pinning people down. Guys who are good at standing up can be particularly tricky to hold down and I want to be better at doing that. I know the elements that are required but it seems to elude me from time to time. So that would be the area that I would focus on. Yeah. And then another area I could always be better at is maintaining the back, which again I've gotten better at, but I could still be a lot better at it just because I feel like the anatomy I have is not ideal. It's very hard for me to get body triangles and I got big hips. It seems like it's easier for me to get dislodged uh and finishing re naked chokes or finding reneaked chokes for that matter. Not finishing, but just getting into them. I I could still be better at the hand fighting. I I've I'm good at transitioning into other submissions from there, but just getting the classic renegade choke is not something that always comes easy to me. Uh, so those are things that I can think of to work on and I would plan out my curriculum based on that and I can do a much more extensive deep dive, but I'm just giving you off the top of my head things I know that I want to work on. So the way I would organize it, I I would pick up maybe three I would think no I think three is good. three things to work on in a month and just develop those and ideally those three things have a synergy to them which they can all relate to each other right so if I was doing reverse seat belt that's you know getting up wrestling style position maybe I would also work something about the the counter you know keeping them down so if I'm working with a partner I can play both sides of Right. So, something that has some synergy. If I have three moves that are completely separate, it still works, but it just doesn't have you're not going to get as much crossover and repetition. Whereas, if the three things that you're working on all happen in the same area, they're going to be built almost at the same time. So, you're going to get a lot more reps in, which is going to obviously create a lot more uh opportunity for growth. Now once we know the things that we're trying to learn, the next thing is measuring improvement for these which are, you know, we're talking about takedowns, sweeps. These are all scorable things. So it should be pretty obvious if we're keeping track. If you're using a journal and you're writing down what happens after training sessions, which I do, then I could say, "Okay, today I got into the reverse seat belt four times, and out of those four times, I swept twice." Okay. And as the training sessions go on, maybe if I started at one, and then I finish at like two or three, I'm like, "Well, that's 50 to, you know, 75% improvement. That's pretty good, right?" especially over uh the month. So, we can measure by success rates, right? Which could be offensive or defensive. Likewise, if you're working on not getting your guard pass and you're like, "Well, my guard got passed got twice today and the next day only got passed once." Okay, we're improving. So, we can measure like that. We could also measure by video, which is something I'm also going to work on doing. uh getting back into filming myself, not just in sparring sessions, but just in normal training. I think it's important to be able to observe yourself and see the things you're doing. One thing one of my training partners remarked on was that I use a reverse seat belt to counter front headlocks. And he didn't know how I was doing it. And it's something that I've been aware of for a while now, but I really didn't teach this before. It just started happening and I've been going with it. And when I taught it to him, I got a lot more conscious awareness of how I'm doing it, right? Which I'll make a video of that next since I've used it because it is a pretty good counter. Doesn't work every time. It's not for every situation from a front headlock. But if you have a front head lock that you've based out of pretty well, like your shoulders are wide, but you're still somewhat, you know, you're still stuck in it and you have to respect it. What I'm doing is if my right arm is stuck, I'm going to shoot the right arm across the far hip as I turn. You're giving a bit of a back exposure like you would with a reverse seat belt and then swimming over the far hip and wrapping around. So the front headlock has to be somewhat loose. If the guy has the elbows pinched in, tight, chin, and he's really squeezing it, you're not going to do this. But it's more like you've kind of defended uh the submission threat. And the guy now is thinking of how he's transitioning or maybe he's just resting before he goes again. So, it's in those lols and the action of front headlock where I'll just boom, scoop in. And since I'm on my knees, I generally win these scrambles because I'm able to reverse. I usually go for that tight waist, high crotch as I call it, to turn him over. Or at the very least, he's going to have to let go and then I'll break free. Won't be in the front headlock anymore. So that that's something that I've been doing, but I just recently achieved conscious awareness of that move. I was just doing it, right? So, uh, if I was filming myself, it would have become immediately evident on the first viewing because I I I pretty much do it at least once every training session. So, it would be very apparent right away. Oh, look, that's a move I do. Let me see uh what the details are. What are the main levers of this? How can I make it more effective? What are where are some more use cases that I can apply this same concept? Right. So, filming yourself in training situational rounds, even just drilling, like I was telling my friend, this was common practice for my brother and I when we were coming up. We remember that my brother and I didn't have uh instructor, sensei, master as for most of our time. Obviously when we started we we did uh when was training with Randy which was our first Balotudo NHB MMA coach. I only had about a year or two with them. My brother had an extra year over me before he moved. So at that point we were working a lot on our own. But even then, we did have the habit of filming training and reviewing what happened during the training. And you might think, man, it takes a lot of time. If you're an amateur or hobbyist, probably it's going to be something that you wouldn't want to do all the time. However, if you're a professional, I think it's doing your homework. And there's an easy time for it. After if you're filming yourself doing training, you finish training, you go home, shower, you eat, and generally what a lot of athletes are going to do is they're going to rest, take a nap, right? They need to recover. That's the time that you watch. And [laughter] I can't tell you how many videos I've watched with my brother or, you know, fight reels that we watched or or on training. And that's usually just about before your nap is going to take place. And it makes for a great nap, too. And you might learn things subconsciously while you're sleeping or just before you're falling asleep. But that's a good time to watch it. All right? So, if you're with your training partner, you pop it on the TV or your phone or whatever it is you're doing nowadays, and you sit back, relax, watch, and when something catches your attention, you can stop it, rewind, and play through that again, and break it down whatever it was that caught your attention. So, to me, that would be the optimal time to do this to be able to review it. I know uh lots of gyms would have the head coach do this. I think Danaher actually has like a weekly thing where everybody shows up to I think it's at Gordon's house or whatever and they sit down and Dan and her reviews video that he was reviewing throughout the week that he felt was urgent to share with his students and talks about how they can use this and stuff. Again, I'm not 100% clear on how it's done, but from my understanding, there is a weekly video review session that the team does together, which is wonderful. Right? If you have the luxury of having a head coach that is as invested as Dana, that will do it for you, great. I didn't have that. So, my brother and neither my brother, so we did that for ourselves. I think there's a certain value and discipline in being able to do it for yourself. Uh but having a second pair of eyes or a coach doing it as well can only help you exponentially gain. So you don't have to delegate it to somebody and not do it yourself. You could, but I'm just saying if you have the 30 minutes to spare instead of watching, you know, Netflix or whatever garbage media company, watch your own stuff. Watch for growth, right? Try to build yourself on your free time instead of just the brain rot as the kids call it now that is streaming through most people's uh platforms. So, that's another avenue that you can use for advancement. And I think I'll leave it there because now I'm probably running a bit long. But long story short, didn't read everything. Design a lesson plan for yourself, curriculum, whatever you want to call it. Doesn't have to be for the whole year. If you don't think you can do that, at least 3 months. I feel like after 3 months of having organized instruction for yourself, you're probably going to realize the benefit of it and then want to do it continuously. Have metrics that you can measure to see if you're making improvements. You're going to need uh training partners to work with obviously that are are drilling things with you that are bouncing ideas back with you so that you can improve better. Film your training sessions so that you can study them afterwards. And if you have a coach that is willing to review that as well, that will help you even more because they'll be able to see things that you may have missed. And if you do this with your fitness routine as well, that's going to add another layer to your planning. And again, if you can measure things, like if you seen me, I write down every lift, what I lifted, when I lifted, how much I lifted it for, it lets you know if you're on the right path or not. Again, if you just went outside and ran for 10 minutes every day, it would be hard to know if you ran faster, if you ran for longer distances. you're just going by feel. So, you want to measure things. That's how you know if you're improving or not. And the more you measure, generally the quicker you will improve because you'll realize quickly on days that you did really well and what happened that was different versus days that you did very poor and know to avoid those things. Anyhow, I hope that's helpful for you. Like I said, this podcast is more for me, [laughter] but uh but perhaps if you're in a similar situation to me, that it will help you, too.