BTG 194 - Off Day

Hello and welcome to Breaking the Guard. I'm going to keep today's episode short but concise. And the topic of today is going to be off days. A day that you're not doing well, you underperforming in every metric. It's something that frustrates anybody who's a high performer, right? If you're a competitor, you're a business professional, and you're just dropping deals left and right. When you are off, the thing that's on your mind is getting back on. Right? You want to be back to what you used to be, and that's the trap. And I'll explain that because it's one thing if it's just a one-off bad day, it's another thing if it's a repeated like it becomes a streak, but not a winning streak, a losing streak. So, let's talk about the two circumstances. If you just have a one-off, like you went to practice today, and you just got wrecked by people you normally beat, the first thing is you don't know if that's going to become a losing streak yet, right? You and you might make it a bigger problem than it actually is. Okay? And you could just I've had an off day. You know, maybe you slept bad or you didn't eat right or whatever happened, you know, you just didn't perform well. You need to be able to detach yourself from a bad performance and isolate it to just that particular event, right? Don't allow one bad performance to redefine your whole life. Right? You can, for example, in other instances, we can usually make that distinction. I get into a car accident once because, let's say, I forgot to look to my left and I, you know, clip somebody on on the highway or whatever. That shouldn't translate to now I'm a terrible driver and I'm a menace on the road and I should never get behind the wheel again. Right? You made a mistake in judgment that you need to own up to, but that can be corrected and it doesn't destroy 30 years of driving. Right? Same thing when you're training or you're competing. You compete and you go to the local Naga and on your first match, you get armbarred in 15 seconds, you know, and you're like, "What the hell?" Now, that doesn't mean all of a sudden you suck and you should never train again and your family should disown you. A lot of people do take it that way. I'm going to the extreme, but you'd be surprised. There's some people that they just totally rip themselves up. And that shouldn't be the case. You're allowed to make mistakes. You will make mistakes and sometimes those mistakes are costly. Sometimes they're minor. Right? I've had plenty of them go in each way. So, I've had the 15-second armbar or I think it was shorter than that, actually, when I was doing a my only ghee competition. I think my first match was a like within 15 seconds I got caught in a armbar. And why? I'm not familiar with the ghee and the guy just held on and pulled me right into a very easy armbar. Uh so, it can totally happen, you know? I I went the next week and then I beat Pablo Popovitch, you know? So, it's like things you don't have to let them redefine you just by making one bad move. So, it's important to understand why you're off if you can. Sometimes you might not know. But, when there is something discernible, you should discern it and learn from that. So, if I went uh this is from one of my fighters had a have a spicy chicken sandwich like 2 hours before your pro fight in MMA and then you throw up all over the place right afterwards, that should be a good indication I probably shouldn't eat a Wendy's spicy chicken sandwich just before a big fight, right? It's not the best move. He still ended up winning that fight. Uh it was Jorge Masvidal. He was like I think one of his like first five fights. But, it was it was hilarious because when they raised his hand, I had a or I think my brother may have been the guy, but we had a bucket underneath him and he was throwing up as his hand was being raised. >> [laughter] >> So, he still managed to get away with it, but pretty sure he wasn't eating any more spicy chicken sandwiches after that, I'll tell you. Um but, we should be able to learn from these things. So, if you go into training and you didn't sleep well and then you train and you perform terrible, well, that should tell you get better sleep or be ready to have a bad performance. And sometimes you might not be able to change that, right? Maybe you're busting your butt and you don't have the the capability of having optimal recovery before training session, but you still want to get a training session in. Well, now that you know that, your expectations can be lowered and also your training goals can be a lot more realistic. Like, if you know that you're exhausted, maybe you're just going in for a technique session and rather than going against your top rival for a death match, right? Like, maybe we hold off that death match until another day. Maybe we just go for the easy one or we go for just um drilling and doing technical work rather than doing something that's going to put you in a place where you're going to feel like a failure. Cuz you shouldn't be setting yourself up for failure. Let's be clear, especially when we're talking about competition. Definitely shouldn't be doing that. And even in training, we shouldn't be doing that either because failure usually implies negative hurt or just going backwards in skill progression. We don't want to get that type of failure, right? It's okay to lose. Right? As especially when you did everything right and you lose, there's going to be some learning opportunities there. But, I shouldn't going in with structural problems, right? Like, you don't want to fail when you're putting up a bridge, right? There's going to be severe consequences. So, in training, I shouldn't be putting up myself to a failure where I could get my arm broken. Right? Or, you know, I could get knocked out or slammed. Like, that's not the type of failures that we should be looking for. And if we could prevent those by being properly trained and properly rested and also properly matched with our the level of challenge that we can accept at that time, we will experience less of the catastrophic failure that we want to avoid. That doesn't mean that you should never go into a match that you're going to lose, just to be clear. Like, some of those you want to get. Like, if I know I have to go against, let's say you're a white belt and you you have to go against your instructor who's a black belt. Like, those are the matches you want. You are going to get beat up and that's expected, but you're going to be learning things as you do. The another thing, if you're the black belt going against a white belt and you have a half your legs hanging on my ligaments like strands and you're going to go in and try to grapple with them or whatnot, that seems like you're putting yourself in danger now because you really shouldn't be training to begin with. So, that's kind of what I'm talking about. But, even when you wouldn't know anything's wrong in your training and then something's clearly off, then I would just do a assessment of that day. Like, what was my nutrition like? What was my sleep like? Am I dealing with any, you know, higher-level stress, maybe at work or a relationship or whatever it is that it's distracting me or is it draining a lot of mental energy for me? Um cuz again, sports is very psychological. So, it's not always, "Oh, I just didn't sleep well." I say, "Well, maybe you're just over stressed and you're just not able to perform or maybe you're frustrated and or you're anxious and that's also not making you That's not allowing you to make proper decisions. Now, let's say that this one-off event and just to be clear, I had a bad day at training. I own it and then I let it go. That's how it should be. Right? And you should be able to even laugh it off. Right? Like, maybe you get worked by somebody that you don't feel that you should get worked Like, "Oh, okay. I really screwed that one up. Uh and then I can talk about to myself, like, okay, what went I what went wrong? What should I do next time to not allow this type of thing to happen so I don't underperform. Now, let's say this isn't just a one-off where you're now on what begins to look like a negative streak where you have a bad day on day one and you laugh it off. And then day two is also bad and then day three is also bad. Right? That's when now we know this is not a one-off, it's repeated. So, there is some stressor or some source problem that exists that needs to be excised, right? This is where you can get into the trap of oh, I got to go back to who I was. Because maybe the problem is who you were. And you need to become something new. I've talked about this before in the context of championship fighters who were untouchable, suddenly lose one fight, then they lose two or three or four, and then it's like they can't even win a fight. And you could hear them in interviews, oh, this is back to how it used to be. Like, how you used to be was the guy that lost the first one. So, it's not how you used to be that you need to be trying to get back to. What you need to do is grow into something different. And in the case of having a bad spell, I feel the same way. Uh unless you have completely changed your routine, maybe then going back would make sense. Uh but if you haven't really done any massive changes in your or any changes really in your routine, then perhaps your routine has now no longer useful for you. Right? You've grown out of it or perhaps you aged out of it and you need to develop a new routine to allow you to get back into having great performances. So, uh I say this because as you get older, training gets harder and it changes. Uh and if you keep trying to do what you used to do, I will tell you right now you're going to run into a brick wall. It's It's not going to work. You won't be able to handle the volume and at certain intensities might just not be achievable at the same volume. So, you have to be able to grow and learn how to adapt to the shifting environment that is your body and your recovery ability. But this can also happen when tactics go obsolete. If all you do is straight ankle locks, and maybe you're highly effective for a few months doing it, but then all of a sudden or maybe years, and all of a sudden now you can no longer do it. And might not be like, oh, like you changed, is that everybody else changed. Right? Like they all adapted, they learned your tricks and you caught them so many times that they finally they grew. Right? They may have been the one who felt, man, I have a losing spree. They learned from you and now you're trying to play the same game and it no longer works. And that's when once again, well, the problem that might be is not that I didn't change, is that I have to change now. Right? I have to grow so that I can continue to be effective because the whole environment now has uh evolved while I stayed stagnant. So, uh I find when you're suffering losing spells, that's usually what I think is the problem. Right? Where you just haven't shifted. You haven't grown and you need to make that growth. The growth is not without going pains. Often times when you do a shift of strategy, particularly something you've been doing for a long time, you're probably not going to be that good at the new thing. Right? Let's say you went from being a guillotine master or an ankle lock master, now you're going to shift to guillotines. You're probably not as good as in the guillotines. So, when you start doing guillotines, you're not getting good results. Maybe you're doing worse than you were before. Right? Just because you haven't learned how to do it yet. And that might make you think, "Oh, no, I got to go have to stay where I was before." It's like, "No, you have It might be that you have to suck for a little bit, maybe worse than you feel like you're doing, and then you'll peak. You'll start to grow. Right? At least that's how I see it. You You have to be able to accept that when you change paths, that there's going to be a learning curve. And the learning curve might feel like you're going to go down in skill and before it starts to climb up. That's usually the case. And at least for me in most things. When I shift gears in something, it's usually not pretty the first couple times, and then as I start doing it more, it starts to get better and it gets better faster over time until there's another plateau at a certain point, right? Like growth curve, maybe I started here. Like, "Oh, my Kimura game's great." And then I shift into berimbolos. Woof, I'm going to go drop way down and maybe I feel like I'm really low for a bit, and then I'll start to build build build build build build build. And then at a certain point it starts to plateau again. And for me, when I start reaching plateaus, that's normally when I start trying to shift. Right? Uh cuz I'm trying to learn as much as I can and get really good at it and then move on to something else. So, those are some insights there. Like I said, I was going to keep this uh one short. But, when we talk about having an off day, right? And just to summarize, don't let it define you. Just accept it for what it was or what it is. You just had a bad day. Learn from it, assess what went wrong, and then the next day, don't repeat what what went wrong. Do what goes right and hopefully that abolishes it. And if you're on a losing streak, then you need to assess what's going wrong or what hasn't changed or what changed and fix that. If you guys have any opinions, questions, feel free to ask me. I'm always here to help you guys out the best I can. Thank you very much and I'll catch you next week.