BTG 39 - Keenan Cornelius

[Music] hey guys what's going on this is David Avalon with my co-host Robert Drysdale for breaking the guard on today's episode we have a very special guest a longtime friend of mine he's a place second an 82 see he's just all-around stud he has just recently opened up his new school and I don't think I have to say anything else for Keenan Cornelius thank you so much for having me yeah thanks for having me guys it's a pleasure to be with you guys again to be reunited with Mike Kimura sensei David himself and Rob Robert a legend in the sport I respect you both immensely I'm happy here Thank You Man we we try to bring like people with good concept people have like ideas and things to say and that was really the goal with the podcast right that was always trying to make something like let's go beyond just talking about the average conversations that you know around fighting let's try to go in deeper later like what makes people move and why people are interesting and you're you're certainly a very interesting character Kia so we've always been on the radar for us you know but I know you think so yeah I've just been hustling over here trying to just get everything in a row to try and figure out how to run a gym I'm kind of just walking blind it's some brief actually I was actually Walker know it's funny because I was actually I have like an old file somewhere of Marcus talking about a Kids program and I was just watching it trying to get some refresh my memory of how the kids programs were working over there because uh you guys had a really tight ship well I remember when I came down to Miami we did that there was like an instructor training course to entero and we kind of saw all the different moving parts of the situation that was like one of the most defining factors of like how I teach and like how I do things and it was incredibly helpful and I still use a lot of those little tricks today like helping people on the mats I thought it was especially cool how you guys went into detail on a sh to a person-to-person communication not just like how to run a business but like actually how to deal with people from like almost a psychological standpoint but approaching it in a layman's term terminology that I could understand is a 19 year old back in the day yeah you're a very good instructor I've seen stuff you've been doing online and you've always you've got a very big following you know so you've learned quite well I'm probably doing better than then what we showed you back then but I think it is something that a lot of people don't do which is practice how to actually teach how to communicate because it's very different from knowing how to do the techniques yourself to being able to teach it to somebody else so it which is that's one of the things I wanted to talk to you about because you now have taken on the role as an instructor you're on your own Academy légion American jiu-jitsu and I found that at least for myself and I think Robert could attest to the saying that when we take on that instructor role that your technique actually cleans up a lot more as well as like your understanding just because you have to break things down to other people who might not get it like you do and then you start seeing like the moving parts yourself and a lot of you to expand on the technique I know when I was teaching Kimura trap and I was teaching you know I say you and the chasing and all that like I got a lot better at it and then I also learned from what you guys were doing and they okay and it kind of a it's a very like positive experience so I don't know what what's your take on that like how you felt now switching into that instructor role date yeah I think I definitely noticed all those things are talking about there's definitely something to be learned for as an instructor like you learned so much from the experience of seeing what people struggle with as far as the understanding of jujitsu things things that may come naturally for me that I didn't have to think about when I was a white belt it brings you an awareness of what people actually need if you're trying to impart knowledge for the sake of knowledge itself and not to take like someone who's talented and like sculpt their talent into something slightly better but like someone who's actually a total blank slate how actively can you teach that person effective jiu-jitsu and I noticed probably the the biggest changes and how I approach teaching come from teaching white belts because we I personally was kind of ingrained in this idea that you had to teach the traditional basics of jiu-jitsu like Gracie style stuff right like the closed guard stuff like the basic triangle stuff like we all saw that or I did at least in my generation of coming up through jiu-jitsu it's like I was exposed to a lot of those basics and personally I kind of skipped the basics I just went straight into like fancy stuff as a white belt in blue belt and well green belt actually went back in the day I focused a lot on the cool stuff I was all about flying triangles and not like anything wild that I could pull off I'd go for it and I didn't I didn't actually start learning actual fundamentals probably until around brown belt like I was just kind of just making it up as I went running some basic guards like spider guard stuff as a purple belt but then when I started actually really my focus at Brown and black belt I focused primarily on fundamental stuff and it's a whole different journey of discovery when you start trying to practice fundamentals of a sport because you start you take a path down through history and that's why I think it's so cool what Robert did with the new documentaries coming out with because I like that that documentary the whole premise of it was something that I was like kind of observing and I didn't really put it together and tell I start I saw that he was doing stuff with it I was like oh there's an actual story here and it did it wasn't just me that it didn't really make sense to because I thought there was a lot more going on in the early days of Jiu Jitsu and Brazil and Mike so I was basing a lot of my instruction off of that but as like I looked more into it and I started getting into judo more and like other grappling disciplines like wrestling in [ __ ] you can find a lot of fundamentals that kind of Ronna like a spectrum of these different arts and sports and you have to teach all of them still and so I guess I've been trying to incorporate that and I by no means have like a resolute system for teaching basics now but definitely the biggest learning experience for me is kind of exploring basics again over and over again with brand new white belts and I I find it very fulfilling because learning fundamentals feels new to me because I've spent most of my jujitsu career making moves up or just like kind of playing with really fancy moves that other people had seen so it's it's very refreshing you know I I think that we all start with a hierarchy right a fundamental goes first sophisticated comes later therefore fundamental is less and it's less functional than sophisticated right we make these associations and I always bought the example at the number one choke in MMA is a rear naked choke the number one submission 80cc is the rear naked choke and the only reason rear naked choke is not the number one submission and ghee it's because we have the bow and arrow which is a lot better right usually get harder to defend right but you said something about like fundamentals and I think that the fundamentals we should instead of hierarchy is my point you know we've seen Mike much too messy we've seen you with very sophisticated jujitsu and then we've seen Roger which is great bass yeah so I think the key is is the problem is like we can't not it's like we can't see techniques without setting into a hierarchy it's like the only relevant hierarchy is does it work that's the only yeah does it work right do you think the hierarchy comes about from the mythology that's kind of formed in jiu-jitsu I have a theory why that it's it's not gonna be a popular one but I think it has to do with the fact that as you get older it is harder to keep up with evolution and then what's old therefore must be more what I know is always what's most important no one that knows you just when teaches you gesso is ever gonna go oh what I know is less important than what you're doing it's always what I know best is what's what's real jiu-jitsu is always what I do best right I ever noticed everyone everyone's idea of jiu-jitsu is like always like what they do best right I think it has to do with a difficulty that we haven't accepted that the support changes and there's something that happens to the mind as you get older like for the same reason I suspect that people have a harder time learning new languages when they get older it is harder to assimilate new techniques I'll give an example I like I never had a problem understanding techniques that were shown to me when I was in my 20s it was like it was just like you meet up sometimes when I'm watching paalam y'all you know where Mike Monsieur masks it's like we even knew like sometimes you're doing left Houston like slow it down like it's harder for me to absorb that information my boat because it's new but because I think that something happens with like that mine it becomes it's harder to absorb new information I'm very sensitive to this because I've been indigestion my whole life but I think that the reflex of that is oh what's new is not good this is let's stick to what's old because that's the real jujitsu right and I think that just just to finalize my thought and let you guys jump in I think that the whole conversation is just misconstrued because when I watch you or polynomial or Mike or anyone who has like what we call sophisticated new modern jujitsu there's still far more of basics Jiu Jitsu then there is sophisticated the problem is that we have this hyper like focus whenever you do a cool up else we've no one's ever seen before that's the highlight when you walk through and your grip fight and you put that knee shield up or you put like a very fundamental grip on the collar which is all basic stuff it's thinking for granted it's like the confirmation bias right we focus on what we don't on what we want to focus on but I think that there's there's there's a lot more basic Jiu Jitsu going on it's just that we shouldn't put it either ahead of advance or of or behind it it's just a matter of like what works for you and that's what really matters yeah I totally agree I I I feel like I have kind of seen that as well and even in my myself like I just turned 28 and I've been doing jiu-jitsu for about 15 years now I mean not counting as a child like doing you know random little classes here and there but I feel the same way as new stuff kind of enters the scene I'm definitely a little bit more resistant to it I kind of have my like the tracks are set and I'm in those tracks you know and it's kind of hard to deviate a little bit and incorporate new things I think part of teaching fundamentals should be what you're talking about kind of putting that in the frame and being like okay listen things are going to change in advance and your best bet to stay adaptable and agile and you're thinking and learning ability is to try new things a lot I constantly try new things while working on your fundamentals and another impasse maybe that is part of the reason that fundamentals are difficult to teach it's because they're very micro movements like you can show a basic close guard position and sure the the macro movement of grabbing your legs around someone is very obvious it's like okay you can explain what that is doing but then when you start getting into subtle shifts of your hips like you move your hips two inches to this side and pull here and that that creates an entire entirely different outcome of how you're applying pressure that is not basic like like it's a part of the basic position but it's an incredibly complex thing to articulate or to even do like that there's a reason that Roger has the best clothes guard and my clothes guard sucks and it's because I don't have the same knowledge that he has from clothes car there's subtle minutiae in his body movements and his muscular application of gripping and twisting and creating weird little leverage points that I do not possess and I it's very difficult to observe them like it's one of the things that you can't analyze like I've been doing this breakdown show for flow grappling where I like draw on the screen and like try and analyze stuff but you can't analyze those movements it's all obscured by Agee or like clothing right you would need like an x-ray vision of there and and then like an alternating green red of like which muscles are activated and which aren't to actually be able to identify what is happening and I think I think that's a huge disconnect as well and something that made me circling back to fundamentals it made me appreciate it so much more because as I learn as I got into Brown and black belt and I started understanding pressure a little bit better because for a long time I did not have pressure like I could win matches but I would always lose the back I lose side control I would lose mount I didn't understand that idea of like these subtle motions an inch like movements that make huge advancements in your actual technical application and so it was enlightening for me to do it in reverse because it's like oh I learned you learned like half the basic move and then you get into the fun seats or the fancy fun stuff and then you have to go back to the beginning and then actually learn the advanced basics and it's it's kind it's confusing for people that enter into the scene because it's not articulated in a way that makes sense it's all it's referred to as invisible Jiu Jitsu right it's like that's invisible Jiu Jitsu well what is it yeah it's like you can't see it's hard the minutia you're talking about is just see I know exactly you're talking about yeah to me that's the definition of technique is like how intelligent you can use this my new show because it's hard to explain to to to to anyone really yeah I take I feel like just to understand that concept you need like five to seven to ten years of experience to be like kind of put this together that that's what your body is even doing you know it feels so natural out of the bat yeah that's why I'm gonna coin a new quote recently inspired from Plato which is only a master it can truly understand ignorant because one I I know when I used to teach the Camorra trap system and I did a seminar I could teach the whole thing in two days and now like the last time I do a camp it's six days and I still don't get everything yeah and and because I've been teaching it so much there's so many little details now that I've become aware of and when and you might have been doing them but then when you have that focus and you're saying you can consciously see oh this is something that's part of the move your understanding becomes much better and you're able to apply better leverage and control pressure but it's when you start doing that you realize man I'm so ignorant of so many things because I am all in just as one path and I thought I knew it in the bit I mean I made a course on it and like ten years later it's like man a the course initially he was so underserved because I missed like hundreds of details and this is just one thing now if I try to learn like your lapel guard I'm part of like decades back of all the little details and nuances of it so I feel like the more like I've perfected one area I realized how ignorant I am of everything else so those basics that you're talking about they're they're basic because I when I got to say with basics is that they're very powerful techniques because even with just the preliminary mimic of the move you will be successful but right you have mastery of that move your devastating you know I mean where as like complex moves or like fancy moves they only work when you really got them well you know but like a white belt doesn't do the flying triangle too good you know I mean but a white bucket do a basic triangle but you give that black belt a triangle and it's lethal so I mean that's why I think that got robbed says like even though we learn it first as fundamental in that hierarchy I think the reason why we choose and we label the basics as first because they're so effective even in the hands of somebody who doesn't really know what they're doing you know like I could teach somebody a guilty and even like one day wipe out they'll get it well they can tap somebody out but if I try to teach them you know flying omoplata it's gonna be a mess you know and yeah I told I totally see what you're saying and I completely agree with you it seems like they're sort of a repeating dunning-kruger effect as you go through jujitsu it's like of every single position if it works the first time you kind of are like oh yeah it works and I know this move now and then maybe five years later you start you you maybe roll as someone who enlightens you to a new grip or a new elbow position or a new little finger control difference that makes a huge difference and it your mind is experiences awe again the awe of how many options there are it's pretty insane to think about and the way you put it where it's like the the basic movement is so effective it's really interesting because I think that it's kind of what pushes people towards complex moves because they have the illusion of being highly complex but really it's just a longer sequence of those larger movements that are effective and I think that's like that's one of the biggest issues with lapel guard stuff is I can teach it to white belts and they get it and it works against blue belts like and that's not because they know that the minutiae of the movement but it's just because the just the larger grip switches are so blatant and big that if they just memorize them it works and then there's the whole other side of it that is kind of unexplored by most people except me which is the actual like more subtle subtle intricacies that you kind of discover and that sorry just one last thing that's actually kind of the entire basis of my website like I want to try and record like obviously I can never actually attain all the jujitsu knowledge that is out there but I think it'd be really cool to have like document my personal exploration of all those facets you know like if you could draw out a flowchart of all of your understanding of jujitsu and you could eventually start to see the blind spots that you have and then it become more and more apparent where you are missing that information and then I can actually go and address it and focus on that myself to keep my own learning progressing at a at a at a rate that I'm happy with because if you don't document what you know you're just like holding it all up in your brain and then like I meant you guys for sure experienced this you probably there's positions maybe a student asks you about that you haven't been in in six years because you just don't worry about that position anymore but the second you're in the position all of the the information comes flooding back and you're like oh yeah and then also this can happen and then also they can counter like this even if you haven't experienced that the movement forever and if they hadn't asked you that question you might have just left that information in dormant forever so I think it's really important for guys like us who have been around for a while and obviously you guys have been around a lot longer than me but I see this already so you guys are probably experiencing it on an even higher level is just like really taking store of what you know because the learning doesn't stop like that that's what keeps us doing jiu-jitsu it's like no matter no matter how sick of jiu-jitsu you are you've been doing it forever you're trained so hard forever when like you can not want to train but when you're actually in around rolling and there the pressure is on to win or to fight you forget all of that every single time like you always get pulled back into the infinite wonder of the possibilities of jiu-jitsu it never gets completely redundant and I think like that longevity is incredibly valuable not just as a sport that we do but as in our ability to monetize our information like you you we need to be able to document it and show people just how vast it actually is because otherwise they just default to the mythology like that has come to exist and it's just like Oh probably it's covered so much in Roberts documentary but I think it I think it's incredibly fascinating still to this day about that like the more I think about that and the more right teach the more I lose interest in the actual competitive aspect of jiu-jitsu and gain interest in the intricacies of it and trying to pursue that knowledge so that I can teach it better as well you actually touch on so many different know things that we just so many different ways we can approach this yeah I one thing that you you mentioned I just want to make a comment there is I I think that we should never we gotta be careful not to ever be in that position where we can lose that aw like the one you described yeah I think it's fundamental I think it's one of my favorites it's a problem in BJJ but it's one of my favorite things is the fact that jiu-jitsu does not [ __ ] the variety fergus in a while ago he mentioned the cannon at a judo has and judo has a fixed cannon it's correct and it's preserved in kata and I never thought of it that way but not that preserves it right and true so a judo is at its core because that is unchangeable and is not affected by the art and the sport right or by the sport in this case but in terms of jiu-jitsu it's so highly creative I like that I like the fact to me it's one of the reasons why it's always been so appealing to me is that it's open source right anyone can can go and tweak it yeah boy and I think if some of this is is you know it's just very ingrained in the culture of the sport so for example if you teach a white bow or a Blue Bell or there's something slightly different than what I do and what I taught I don't stop you know in fact the attitude is normally like you and if it's working you've given the incentive like I say this at least my speaking for myself I always say this is why I teach us if you do it different it works for you then that's that like this should not be like there's no yeah there's no right and wrong I don't even like to use the word turn towards right and wrong in jiu-jitsu because too often have I seen what is technically wrong work like not to cross my feet when I armbar I do it all the time it works better yeah that's a--that's a huge example of one for sure I crossed mine when I'm on the back I crossed my ankles all the time and it was a wild unitive full lock I just cross it by the belly I don't get full luck it's much better controlled I never slide off the back I stop sliding off the back as a black belt when I finally started crossing my ankle right it was because like Dogma has its power of like it just has such a dominant presence in the culture of the sport permanently and the longer it's been around the less question it is and the less question is holy now at this point because it's always been said right so I must be trained and it's it's almost like youuuu prevent a spore from evolving when you have that sort of mindset yeah okay yeah it's one of the benefits I think my Blair and I had because we didn't really have a sensei or an instructor when we were starting there was no way he's saying you're not supposed to do that for this reason right like so we were very self taught and so in one way it's slower growth but it's unlimited in the sense that we weren't told oh you can't cross your ankles behind the back you know like we learned everything you know like reinventing the wheel so to speak but there is something to be said about that approach because you gain more understanding you know you learn well if you cross your ankles and they're too low you're gonna get foot locked you know or if you do this you're gonna get this so you learn the reasons of why the rules are in place and then sometimes these can be challenged right I feel so you can't submit somebody from inside they're closed guard that's not true you can there's I know a bunch of ways of doing it okay but normally that would be taboo right I have instructor saw you trying to wrist lock somebody or Kim or someone from the guard to be what you're doing more or someone from inside they're closed card yes I've never seen that I need to see that on any of your instructionals or is that just a personal thing no no it's on the course everything I do is on there yet so it ends up becoming a guard pass because the key more pressure turns them sideways so like you slide out of their guard and then you end up inside but it starts it is a risky move it's not like I don't say go for that right away but if you have good wrist control you know like you're gonna pass the hand behind the back pass sometimes you can just jump right for the cue more from there and when you let your hips sag their hit their legs go from here to here you know so then I see your hips interesting I I think that's like those kind of moves I love those kind of moves because it actually gives us something to do when we're training with lower belts like I personally enjoy training with lower belts I think it's a lot of fun I don't I just don't do anything that I would normally do I try all the moves that I don't I'm not really comfortable with I try all the moves that I maybe don't even like or like visually are just repulsive to me and I don't want to train them because I disagree with them for some reason or another so yeah that's like that's a really really well put I totally agree and the the like the dogma that you're talking about Robert that's actually part of the reason I want like because I heard you guys talking about American jiu-jitsu in the in the past on your podcast briefly and that's part of the reason that I want to try and push it a little bit because it's almost like if you refer to what you're doing as BJJ not only are you going against the dogma or the religion at this point and people fight back against you but it also anything that you do contribute gets absorbed by that eventually and there is no different ation anymore and just like there's a misconception of how jiu-jitsu was like actually reached a revolution where all these new things were added in the 90s with like more with Ted a day and all those guys Marguerita and the whole the whole crew it's very easy to just get caught up in that and people forget and people don't know to who to attribute it to and it it's like yes it is super open-source and it should be which I have another point about that but at what at what point do we do we get to say that's my contribute my contribution to the sport you know and it's like I don't want to put you could you can do it how it's been done by putting your name associated with the guard potentially or like something to that effect like della Heba or something but I always felt that that wasn't the way to do it I felt that it's I call it what you want to call it you don't necessarily have to put your name on it to have it be associated with your contribution to to contribute to your personal legacy but you have to differentiate yourself some way and I it seems like the logical way to do that is just to associate it with your nationality because then you can kind of group what changes came from where and then the competition for that like having that movement attributed to you in some way whether it's just through association or by name it becomes a lot easier for people to digest in the same way that grappling arts have kind of like all grappling is essentially the same it's only it's just different rules being applied right like you can gain leverage and very unconventional ways in a wrestling match in a Samba match in a judo match the only restrictions that guide how the sport evolves are the rules and I think part of the reason that jiu-jitsu is so much more successful than all of those sports is you can take out all of the rules and just leave one rule submission and when you connect it when you can distill a sport down to a singular rule it allows you a yes or no at the end of it and the yes or no allows evolution to occur because it's it finally becomes very clear what works and what doesn't work because you can have an entire round trying all sorts of different crazy moves but if someone gets submitted there's a reason that they got submitted and you can kind of back trace that and understand how it all came to be but in Brazilian jiu-jitsu like let's associate with like the sport industry like IBJJF and stuff adding rules to that has created a lot of very sport specific things - jiu-jitsu which I'll which is a point of contention for people who train because a lot of people trained for self-defense a lot of people trained for nogi a lot of people trained just for AI BJ a lot of people trained just to train and you guys know as well as I that there are highly specific rules that completely change the way you grapple like to a point that you're very instincts get changed based on a set of rules not necessarily even a set of rules and particularly I'm talking about like maybe you get an advantage to make someone turtle or if you get an advantage for exposing exposing a passing someone's guard and they turn away and they would rather take the advantage than the guard pass and then an entire system of back attacks comes off of passing the guard because you know they're always going to turn away but they're only gonna do that because they've been trained to do that because they know that if they don't turn away they there's a there's an incentive to turn away it's less point scored on you and so that creates an entire subsection of competitive jiu-jitsu that is separate from what a lot of people recognize and I think I just don't think it's a bad thing to have subgenres just like in any other culture there are subcultures whether skateboarding or music or surfing or like and then subcultures within the subcultures like in music there's jazz and then there's blues and it's like that those things kind of came from each other and in some capacity and I think jiu-jitsu can be this the same but if you always encompass it back to the original defining thing of music or of BJJ when when Beach it is kind of a misnomer because it's more jiu-jitsu just just do Jitsu cuz I mean we see that through that what was available before it came to Brazil it seems constricting on the very idea of innovation that we're talking about so to unrestrictive ation you you need to allow the different styles to have their different names and it's not like American jiu-jitsu is not the idea of like putting a stamp over the B with an A by any means and it's also not to set eyerly as associate as a group of techniques that was developed in a culture of people the American culture of jiu-jitsu that has actually become quite substantial Eddie Bravo my stuff the Danaher guys your stuff like drives those stuff all of that is encompassed in some capacity as the American genre of jiu-jitsu and it doesn't is it's not trying to lay claim to anything else it only intends to be what it is which is a classification more than anything and then the secondary idea behind it would just be so I can actually represent my nation which i think is important it on it on a global field of competition I am NOT an american brazilian jiu-jitsu practitioner i'm an american jiu-jitsu practitioner right as far as like forward facing representation in who i am and what i represent and learn and who I've learned from like if you actually look at my list of instructors the only Brazilian that I got a belt from was my black belt from Andre but everyone else was American I got my belts from BJ Penn my dad Lloyd Irvin and I have learned the most from Americans as well JT Torres Andres Bruno Smirnoff's kiss and everyone that I've trained with throughout the years because there's just a natural separation of culture made due to language barrier due to cultural norm whatever that is in a jujitsu room where there's both cultures Brazilian an American or any other culture there's just a natural kind of like clique thing that forms it's almost unavoidable I don't speak Portuguese I would like to I just haven't to have the patience or drive to actually do it I think that would have eliminated some of that separation and I don't I'm still friends with all of my Brazilian friends as well but most of my influence is American and I I pay homage to those people that I actually learned from through that title does that make sense no yeah we were saying before which is two reasons one to me I know Robert and I don't want to speak for you but I know Robert would prefer glaybels just jujitsu I would as well but I don't think you could convince Brazilian Jujitsu to take away the label so it seems like the only you know what's ironic about this you you you don't know what in Brazil is that we called it Brazilian Jujitsu like when you're going China you don't ask for Chinese food I was in Thailand what's your story and I asked for Thai coffee and they made fun of me like we meet I'm like Thai tea you know like minty it's it's like the term Brazilian Jujitsu did not come into usage until the 90s it was only after the horrea n-- / ice gracie / you have sea revolution right like the second jujitsu boom the first one is early in the 20th century the second jujitsu boom takes place in the 90s and that's when a term Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is put into use I don't think it was for nationalistic purposes I really don't think that I don't see and I'm because I'm half Brazilian I feel like I can say this without being called erases but I don't think Brazilians are very nationalistic in general they're certainly not like Americans you know like I don't think it's something that they're like you know most Brazilians could not sing that the Brazilian national anthem to save their lives even though the Brazilian national anthem is very long in their defense it's incredibly long it's not easy one to say but in general it's not something that they're very passionate about for the most part so I think it was more to distinguish the term to term jujitsu there still were some Japanese styles right there vary dramatically from one another but they use a term digits they're left though they were not absorbed by Judah most jujitsu schools were absorbed by the onslaught of Judo of the 1956 is onwards but you know they they I think it was a matter of distinguishing like I wouldn't haven't I actually always preferred jujitsu cuz I I never liked it well that being said I do see today and I should change my mind on this fairly recently and it's not for nationalistic purpose there's nothing like that but I think that a martial arts go that goes beyond technique there's a certain cultural aspects they become very very important to the the perception people have that martial arts they go beyond its it you have an example when I when we've it is a close in judo school in in Japan for the documentary it was basically it's very traditional judo school so the black will show up like thirty minutes earlier class they sweep the mats the black coats sweep in the match prior to class I actually have a video it's a beautiful video of a symphony of the mats being swept at the same time it was and it was unprompted - it was like automatic it's not something that had to be told what to do right the keys were immaculately clean varied the bow was like a 90 degree bow and then you know a few days later we visit UConnect eyes gym and you connect I is the president of the Brazilian jiu-jitsu Japanese Federation of jiu-jitsu right yeah and I put it asleep just him watching my match he fell asleep next to my match in Japan back and saw the video and he literally had passed out I was like I'm not doing my my sport proud right now I put you keeping in the kinda sleep it was just like relax right like the whole thing of like sitting with your legs and cross taking your time particular fingers and people were late to class and there were aspects that I thought they were not Japanese Brazilian cultural hope being late thing not being a big deal right so for that reason like I understand like I could see why someone would use it be even though I still might kind of 50-50 on it but like the case of American jiu-jitsu like I I understand what you're saying in terms of like a general like it's or like you are an American representative you wanna make your country proud and most of your instructors as you mentioned we're Americans and I can see that but like I think is just a matter of like how people purse what American judicial means because it is not a different martial art right well yeah it's being Oh Mitch to the people who have taught you in the place you know some other sort of zip you're putting like a stamp on it like these techniques were developed in the United States and not Brazil rather Damon a Keenan guard all right what you could have done you didn't name it Keenan guard you named it you know lapel guard or warm guard or whatever and you know it's developed in the United States and you kind of put a stamp on it right I mean so I mean I guess it's like I think that when you name in American digits the way most people see it is oh you you're claiming it's a new style and it's not a new style and I'm thinking disagree with me here in the sense where it's a wildly different I'll give an example like that's a historian that I exchanged emails with like it's probably the most knowledgeable guy in all the history of jujitsu his name is Roberto big data his books are on Amazon I highly recommend them for anyone that wants to stand jiu-jitsu today not the past do you understand the present you got understand the history right and he calls jiu-jitsu a sub style of Judo Brazilian jiu-jitsu was a sub style of dude or a sub blue right and I go I agree with him to an extent but I think that today in this day through 2020 BJJ differs dramatically matically from mortgages whatever you want to call it from Japanese from judo that I can't set can't I can't like recognize the same or short like I think if you put Mike Musa Messi against like an Olympian judoka there's no communication there it's like yeah it just doesn't work right whereas like I mean when I see you in competition the communication works so what I see is even though I think you're probably one most sophisticated competitors out there I think that's fair to say and I and I you know I really mean that man like you you're doing stuff that I have a hard time keeping up with man I wouldn't I wouldn't go out to like ask paper privates but I would love to have a lapel or private with you one of these days because I have a hard time seeing what you're doing without having been explained to me like you know reverse engineer but at the same time I don't feel it's like fundamentally different from what's being done right so it is the same martial art you're just late if I understand correctly you're labeling it because you want to pay homage to your instructors and your country where you were born and living correct yes absolutely yeah if American jiu-jitsu was a new style and it was based around lapels that would be a very boring situation to watch already it's pretty it's frustrating to train with my students because some of them start using lapels on me and if I use them back it doesn't work there's this it just you just reach an impasse where there's no more opportunity and it just kind of destroys the entire thing so I would say let it's less of a new style and more of a highly specific counter to jiu-jitsu which also works in the acronym as anti jiu-jitsu so I'm willing I'm willing to concede the American and go to anti in the event that I am you justify it in that way so I relinquished the American in our situation isn't anti it's you have an argument against that and I've actually had this argument with I've did you have more times than I can count you guys got to stop the fight at that point and the session should be legal I totally agree because there's I mean I've had told me they're they're like 3040 pounds lighter than me and I can't move like there's nothing I can do it then like I want to punch him in the head at this point cuz I'm losing my patience right there's nothing you can do to I mean I'm sure there's like some there's some way of getting out there but it's such a rap all right and there's no purpose to it's like my cry tears anytime there's no purpose yeah we gotta do something to stop that any reason or if the purpose is to hold to not have purpose if the purpose is to not have purpose in that moment at all it's like that shouldn't be allowed to agree but I mean it's hard to it's hard to justify because like once you start taking away things you can't really put them back you know so if it's not like incredibly damaging I would be I'm more for less rules than more rules just because I think the second you start putting rules on it does limit future opportunity because from what I understand about lapel guards which are pretty much on the cutting edge of new I would say it's like there's so much map now I have counters for counters to lapel when people still haven't figured out the counters originally like I've taken it like more for like further and more abstract than it needs to be at this point I think what I've seen from like very tricky positions in worm guard spots that it should feel that you do normally feel very locked and like you can't do anything it's like well this doesn't seem fair because there's no option there are options usually they're just very they're counter intuitive they're counter intuitive to normal jujitsu functionality which is very lim based it's very like physical body on body centric but when you if you have to know gig eyes and you hand them both a rope and the Rope is tied around their neck like it changes the whole dynamic of grappling cuz now you're grappling with a weapon essentially and the what the two or it's a tool it's another tool that was not previously explored so in that regard it is very similar to jujitsu as you're saying but it's also very different and I'm not like I agree it doesn't necessarily but I'm also not sure how to fit it into the previous categorization you know because you're there ways to use this rope that multiplies the force I can put on someone I can use I can be more effective with less energy which is kind of like the that in that way it is very similar to what jiu-jitsu is because that's what Jesus is about it's you're optimizing the amount of energy output you're you're using with with maximum effectiveness so yeah I'm not super tied to the idea more than anything I just appreciate that people acknowledge it at all I like I would think that people just ignore that I even say it because it is it isn't really grounded on much it's it's a it's a seedling of what I intend the future to hold in the direction I'm taking it in the direction that I want to have like teach in which really just pushes the whole innovation point anyways like the only downside I see about traditional Brazilian jiu-jitsu is just that there is some limitation on innovation and the limitation comes from a psychological standpoint like you were saying people like just an old dog doesn't want to learn new tricks to the rule that limits innovation like adding rules to a position that kind of like we'll never know the actual counter because we met we eliminated the problem with a rule instead of with a counter and like I saw I did a breakdown on a match yesterday of Mara colony versus Philippe pana and he Philippe and I kept putting in Mira gali in fifty-fifty and I was like okay at 5050 it's kind of been solved now it's like a high level black belt knows how to get out of fifty-fifty pretty effectively it's no longer considered a super stalling position people will go for it but there's a pretty effective counter you underhook both the ankles and you bring it to the other side and the position kind of falls apart and I think 5050 went through the the biggest growing pains from a from a perception standpoint of the audience of jujitsu because it was really considered a stalling move and it was really killing the competition a watch ability for a while it was like what is this this is so lame and I was part of it because it was effective I mean I could submit people from there but most people are just using it to seesaw back and forth but you don't see that as much at least at the higher weights now bigger guys are able to deal with it so I think with any position that potentially can be restrictive also can potentially be countered and so in the match Mara galley was countering the 50/50 and Philippe was inverting through over his own face into what Ryan Hall calls backside 5050 which I'm not sure if your guys are familiar with because I just learned about it recently but backside 5050 sounds like a snowboarding move but it's it's it's the it's the position that Lachlan used to tap everyone out at a TCC it's like a weird inversion thing from 5050 you come out the back side and they can't turn either way and the heels exposed and so Philippe was using that same motion not in a noogie setting but in a ghee setting to counter the 50/50 counter and he did it like six times and I was talking in the match about how I was like oh yeah Philippe he has a very scrambling style like I wouldn't be able to identify his systems within the scramble but then we saw a system emerge and it was like oh that is the system it's like it's a scrambling thing that at first glance it doesn't look like it's functional but then he does it three times and it worked all three times I'm like oh well that's part of his system and so yeah I'm just I'm just a big proponent of just like like you're saying there's no wrong way to do things and I think that applies to know in not just in jiu-jitsu but in life and the way the way you want to present yourself to an audience so know what if you want is I think it's fine as well you know I'm sorry but I think what ahead so originally which I think still stands with American did you sue you know you're a young guy you're starting your own school if you want to name it Kenan Jiu Jitsu Cornelius you do whatever you want you're more than welcome to write like I think more power to you yeah I guess the question that Robert has and I do to impart is what I guess in the future how is American Jiu Jitsu as you are shaping it to be will be different like how Robert was saying that they when they brought brittle Jiu Jitsu into the graces rather into the u.s. they had to distinguish it because they didn't want to get confused for Japanese jujitsu which was very different stylistically they call it Brazilian Jiu Jitsu you know so now you're making America Jews are we saying in the future when I see a very different style maybe not as completely different but there's gonna definitely be a pattern kind of like right now we can look at tan juicer and you can usually see you know like there's a different way that these guys play you know they're still doing the same game but their approach is different yeah and not just with the pot smell yeah I totally agree Robert you wanna finish what you're saying before no no I think there's there's we have this thing where we go you know looking like the old and the new or like the Hassan fistic ated versus the simple right and I I just think that we should look at things I'm always from a point of view of perspective from effectiveness like that should always be the north like does it yeah that should be the guiding north no metal for martial with like a link towards the martial art end of the spectrum not just a I think the sport asks us pigs how we practice but you got to remember above all it is a martial meaning that we should be like working in a fight right that's that's I've always I've always liked lean towards that even though understand that there's a lot of things that just aren't gonna work and a fight in they're part of the sport and it is what it is there is a some things that I don't think for example I think that innovation should always be in the hands of the youth and I think that's a very important thing for any community to learn I think that you know once you get like the old dog that doesn't want to learn a new trick mindset you you [ __ ] the martial art right that cannon would that be inset I don't I think that there's certainly a lot of elements and they have like a very vocal presence of the community because they're often team leaders or they're known they're like they're fairly popular so they have a loud voice in the community so to speak but they're not the majority I don't think of the majority I think the majority of percentages of practitioners both United States in Brazil are young they're open-minded and they're wanting to learn and they want to improve on the score like I I've been recently started working on Hugh hooks in the gig because I think they're gonna become legal in a matter of time it's a matter of time before they become the norm so I'm like I'm ready playing around with your hooks in the game right cuz I it's it's an effort that I make to try to stay ahead of the curve and try it out like always you know be advanced in jiu-jitsu cuz I think that's our role is not to be it turn alized through our accomplishment is but really just to improve on the art for future generations I think the in as a whole that the realm of jiu-jitsu American due diligence whatever you want to call it Kenan Jiu Jitsu whatever the case it's we we are a JIT for the most part of community moving forward towards evolution and this is not American or Brazilian or Japanese or anyone we move towards a bush because we have a culture of open software now I am less familiar with other martial arts right but for my understand I think they're less open I think it's like your instructor teaches you how to do one thing and you kind of fall this is how you throw you know like I had boxing coaches of minded like know this is how you throw a right hand you know they were very strict on it I mean I'm not that familiar with boxing but I do see an overall pattern in BJJ for innovation right I think that the old dogs that don't want to learn new trick they're really the minority and they're a dying breed I think that you know younger generations but their generation is retiring now like my generation or at cyborg and Braulio I don't see these guys going ten years I know that I won't write like 10 20 years from now going oh no that's not real jiu-jitsu because I think they're open-minded enough that's the mature of the community so yeah I think that innovation is always should be that the guiding north regardless of what we call it or you know or anything it's just effectiveness and innovation okay so I totally agree with everything you guys are saying and there's just one more layer to the american jiu jitsu thing I want to get you're both of your opinions on so one of the struggles that I see that I didn't personally experience this at coming up through grappling through just happenstance industriousness being fortunate enough to be around people who kind of showed me a little bit behind the curtain of how sales work and like understanding that there's more to know than just like jiu-jitsu that helped me immensely in actually being able to make money with jiu-jitsu and I actually have a life like outside of jiu-jitsu you can't do it only with jiu-jitsu like you can study jutsu as hard as you want you can be the best guy in the world but if you're not applying your skills into another realms in some capacity whether through selling it or teaching which is also selling it or any sort of way to actually monetize it besides making money through competing that's an incredibly difficult thing for people to do for whatever reason whether it's just ignorant or they just apathy all of my peers that I grew up with literally grew up with training and competing searching for the same goal all of us have the same goal the same goal was black boat world champion plenty of my friends became black world champions I did not I'm a noogie world champion I don't count that personally I think the best I've done in key worlds is third place and the absolute I think I think I think I placed once in my division and in third series of unfortunate events I don't want to get into it it's too painful but yeah it's super inspiring to see some of the though the generation before me competing until they're 38 or 40 like it's so awesome like you just whose longevity I never would have suspected that that was how it plays out so there's a there's an unspoken struggle for young - Jitsu practitioners the innovators the ones that you're saying or are in charge of carrying on the torch they don't know how to make money with jiu-jitsu and there isn't a system in place to do that this the only system in place is the one that already persists which is you eventually open a gym but the entire process of learning doesn't involve any of the instruction you need to open a gym or any of the instruction you need to know how to market yourself or be able to sell your skill like you have a skill that no one else has you spent more time in the mat than almost anyone else and people want that information from you and these guys these 99% of these guys don't know how to sell it and so how can they there is no future for them in in you could look at it in a way that they do not have a future in jiu-jitsu that they will not the future it's not that they don't have a future it's that they could have a better one and I think it's very important that going forward there is some sort of and lloyd was doing this for us like we have he did this for us and I think a lot of us didn't understand that that's what he was trying to do because it feels counterintuitive to work on something other than Shi Jitsu while you're doing jiu-jitsu it felt like I personally didn't like it I want to just go back to jiu-jitsu but I was very I was grateful that I was put into the situation where I was exposed to that kind of work and understanding because it was immensely valuable I can't even put a price tag on that that year that I spent in the ICR like writing some for like doing SEO like like I don't use SEO in my daily life but just knowing that that exists has like opened up so much information for me on how to actually optimize my ability to sell my skill so Americans you just Brazilians I think that there actually is a competitive edge to calling it 'american jutsu if you are American and that's because how can you compete with a Brazilian who has better skills than you it might actually be better at jujitsu than you maybe they're not a better teacher than you but they might have better skills than you the sport is called Brazilian jiu-jitsu to anyone who enters the sport it is considered Brazilian jiu-jitsu and if there's a Brazilian jiu-jitsu gym on the street taught with a Brazilian instructor versus a Brazilian jiu-jitsu gym taught with an American instructor there's two sides to that coin one the guys Brazilian so there's a there's an implicit connotation that he probably Brazilian Jujitsu better and then the other side is that maybe the American guy it's English as his first language and what is more important the ability to articulate more effectively or the guy who is associated inherently with the sport and so regardless of if that is a large or a little advantage or none at all I think it it deserves concern for American grapplers that are that don't know how to monetize their skills and so I think and this is just a hypothesis that if there is some separation between the two based on if you're American or Brazilian there will be more success for some of these up-and-coming American guys that still don't do very well in competitions like to this day even though there's probably probably an equal amount of Americans doing jiu-jitsu Brazilians would you guys agree on that are we approaching a halfway point like you know this is actually I noticed right because coming from Brazil you know I know who's go over there Moke 90% of my competition experience was in Brazil so I know who's who and then watching some of these guys when they land here you know and it's like all of a sudden they're grandmasters I'm like I know who you are right no but but but they speak with an accent and it helps because you're right like I've had you know I think that it gives them a strike it's like you're from Thailand and you're teaching Thai box yeah exactly I would want to learn from a Thai guy that's because you're from Thailand does not make you a good Thai boxer just because you're American does not mean you're a good Thai boxer right yeah but like that the crowd does not have the ability if you're if you're new to this they don't have the critical thinking to be able to distinguish it would be like five six years before they figure it out and when they do now you have that loyalty thing right you've created yeah exactly as well as the the resilience still dominate the competition circuit like there are really good Americans for sure but there's more Brazilians on the podiums to the stilt so if you you can go and literally look at results right and the results say that the Brazilians are better and that could be true however that doesn't mean that we should be excluded from the potentiality of monetizing our skills as Americans and I honestly could have a zero effect but I wouldn't be willing to risk it you know when it comes to your actual potential of success and actually living comfortably and reaching your ceiling as far as I mean if there is a ceiling for you which hopefully there isn't reaching that point of where you're like feeling like okay I'm moving up in the world it's like I spent ten years on this skill and it's finally paying off you know if you spend ten years on it and then you wake up one day and you're like [ __ ] what do I do now which happened to a lot of people in coronavirus hit and a lot of people have been messaging me you're feeling that too right I think we all wear ear like damn like I mean I know I was I was like I just like sunk my life savings into this building that I don't own a second five-year it's none of the money that I just put into this building is going to be mine I was all a gamble based on hoping I can regain that that amount of money in five years that's like what the gamble is and can I do it probably but with coronavirus maybe not and it's like holy [ __ ] what am I gonna do so that was kind of like part of my my campaign let's say for American jiu-jitsu is to be laughs like well you know we should probably focus on how to sell this [ __ ] because if you don't know how to sell it what uses it other than your own personal enjoyment which is valuable but that that the hobby is not a career it's only a career if you can make money with it so what I do now is like as I kind of learn these things and learn about running a gym or like selling instructionals or I mean anything like learn learning about the stock market for instance like I have money now I can actually invest in the stock market that's a valuable thing for me to learn about or like understanding like what a mortgages or what it like an IRA is and or like what a 401k is like well I did all it is I didn't learn you that stuff I dropped out of high school I like they don't teach that in high school like how about how was I supposed to discover it except experiencing it on my own and so kind of part of my program which is essentially the whole fighter program that existed that I went through is I think it kind of follows the same ideas like try and give something to these these kids to love jiu-jitsu so much and you appreciate their love for jujitsu but then you also know the pitfalls that they're going to experience and the pitfalls of life that jujitsu who is leaving them woefully unprepared for and so the Americans you did to name also I would like to be synonymous with kind of changing that situation so what everything that I do now for the gym even though it's like I'm focused on the gyms profitability and it's like success and all of that I'm trying to present it or create it in a way that leaves an avenue of opportunity open for my black what is that opportunity gonna be well I mean there's a lot of different ways you can do it I can help them without them and needing to learn how to to fish let's say like you can open affiliate gyms with your students or help set them like do affiliate products with them the way they wouldn't really have to do anything you could set up a system that just lets anyone sort of plug their information in and you can help them with it or you can actually teach them how to build their own thing and in the process that that's what happened to me it's like I was helping lloyd build his things count whatever microscopic capacity I was able to at the time and learn from it in that small situation where I was helping build Lloyd's thing set the seed to help me build my thing and so if you're not incorporating that into your jiu jitsu gym for your students it you're I feel like you're just not necessarily doing all you could as an instructor if these guys if these up-and-coming students their goal is to make you to a full career and you're not providing the career opportunity or the career education in some way and then like how do you make that work there's like because it always comes into like the value given and taken like at what value are they bringing can you justify it can you take a hit in some way and still have it pay off and be mutually beneficial and that's all to remains to be seen but I'm gonna try that's kind of like what I'm trying okay so when you're talking about their I have a few questions for you one and I'm guessing you're looking long-term you're gonna start an affiliation and grow a brand all right and then like yeah and then the next thing which I think might be helpful for you as you were saying all the competitions are presented for the most part besides a tsetse or the EBI I think what would be helpful for you if you started an American to just a tournament circuit then you have and you can make a differentiation with the rule set you know whatever maybe because now you have a venue for American jiu-jitsu is a guy who practices a JJ but competes in BJJ because I could see that being a little bit confusing from like just a normal things like why are we doing this and yeah yeah the other rules say you know just something throwing out there do you think that is more valuable from like a function standpoint or like a perception standpoint like does the effort that goes into starting an entire new like if I'm gonna do it I would try and do it right and it's start an actual like an American jiu-jitsu federation or something and start a circuit and do the whole thing I just don't know if I have time from where you're at right now it's a long it well it's a long way off regardless but it's not something can't be disregarded I actually can sit like part of the reason I got such a big gym right off the bat was because I had the intention of somehow holding some sort of event in there I intentionally got a space that I can fit three by two IBJJF mats so I can have the full six mat layout I could have tables I have room and I have room for seating and that was my kind of my idea maybe to potentially work into like a small-scale version of what you're saying and already even with that set up even with eight not having to worry about a venue it's way too hard as it's like I don't even know where to begin yeah I would be I'd be open to that for sure when we open their school we have actually run tournaments to get the initial capital to start the gym oh really nice yeah was it profitable it was so we started man in 1999 and what we actually did that I started training MMA or nhb in 1999 and it might then the first few months of training I was already fighting but we're doing shoe fights you know and in Florida we did like three of them and then I came two thousand two thousand one they outlawed mixed martial arts that's when they coined it so we weren't able to host our tournaments anymore and that's when we switched to grappling because where they go we can't run these events anymore we got to change the event we okay we could do you know submission wrestling what we called it and then we did like a times like that and uh this is before the internet was a thing where you could like send out email blasts and you know had people look it up it was all through like paper flyers and emailing man what a weirdo so so much work you know and like when I was 18 my brother was 19 when we're writing these things but we made decent money I mean it wasn't like nowadays where you got like a thousand two thousand compells we had like three four hundred competitors oh it was good enough well we bought 90/60 web mats which is God knows how much it's pretty penny you know for like college kid and opened up the school but it's a lot of work you know and I think where you're at right now you're already it looks like you're doing pretty good with the gym and you're you're all websites are obviously see really well I don't know it's really worth it for you to go through that headache just yet maybe later down the road where you have things more established at least in this year and you're looking for a new venture that might be something to do but like and I'm sure that I beat you [Laughter] something real quick you mention about like training all these kids on how to market themselves and make money and like man like bread weight you've ever started one-on-one all that like let me know maybe it's not too late for me like I suck at marketing but like honestly to be honest it's not me I I just recognize what I don't know so I can hire people so I actually have a team of people but I'm not honestly I've made some mistakes I earn some people as well well you know because it is it's become such an important part of BJJ your rise the ability to make money because if you're gonna be you know doing this for a living in a highly competitive sport when there's like a new gym popping up corner of the other week you know you're gonna have to figure this Salomon question you is you think that we are reaching a point of saturation or have we will we reach that point because at least in terms of like social media and and and sales online sales and gyms and these seminars there's like every way of income that you know every way of making money when DJJ to me seems a little bit saturated already like I don't think we've kind of reached a ceiling there and this is maybe why the sport is splintering like it's going in all these different directions like we have all these new rule sets and new approaches to jiu-jitsu I think that we're talking about now and to me it's a par like maybe that's a it's a manifestation of the fact that the sport has grown so much they have we have reached ceilings and now we are looking for new ceilings right like what else can we do to be different because if I keep doing the same recycled recipe over and over I mean it's been done already it's not gonna right so I mean online I guess I I don't know if this if there's a room for everyone to make money online I think go ahead David whatever you want to say I think there is for sure plenty of growth available still online I I think we're just starting to tap into it now I mean you got guys I mean I think BJJ for that exist has probably done like the best job of getting their name out there and and capturing a lot of talent you know and from what I've heard of sales they were doing pretty good but it's still a lot more to go i I think the major shift for grappling that hasn't happened and I don't know if if it can happen is it for it to become a spectator sport because right now the money is made on partition practitioners and competitors like the people buying the DVDs are people who train and compete when you basketball is not made though it doesn't make their money that way all the people watching don't play basketball people playing football I mean watching football they're not out in the gridiron running you know 100-yard dash anything like that jiu-jitsu is still a practice a practitioner sport as to people who are paying for if there's a way and wrestling's the same thing right and I mean wrestling's been around since the beginning of time yet for some reason nobody can get people to frickin pay to watch it you know yeah good point so that's why I don't know if it's possible and is it because the sport is very complex and and as far as it's not intuitive to most people to understand although there's a sweep in the guard you know the guy in the guard is actually winning like this from an untrained perspective it makes no sense so like your average dude can't just pick it up and watch it which is why Emma made this better because at least they understand the striking and like okay we get it and people getting smashed you know you just do like if you show your grandma jiu-jitsu she's just confused like why are that guy in win with a triangle choke they don't know what happened yeah that might be the thing American she just has to solve teenage yeah listen I've put a little I've put a lot of thought into this when I'm not thinking about lapel guards I'm thinking about how to make money with jiu-jitsu those are the two things I think about and to answer Rob's question or yeah I mean it's not I don't really have an answer I would say but my opinion on it is that there I think the action I think the perception of what Brazilian jiu-jitsu is actually holds it back to I think the way that it's so it's so focused on like the first like imagine you're a white belt and I know from statistics of like surveys and some data that I have on my sites that so much so many of the people who sign up to my site and also come to my Academy are there directly because of jockle Jocko and Joe like they are the catalyst of the massive movement more so than the UFC it's it's these two guys that every single podcast they're on they talk about how awesome Jiu Jitsu is they have such a crazy reach like Joe Rogan's Reach is something insane like it's like astronomical numbers bigger than TV networks back when they were at their prime like it's like ridiculous how many people he can reach and how many people really trust what he's saying and if you watch it Joe Podcast he could be talking to a epidemiologist he could be talking to an economist he could be talking to a conspiracy theorist he tells them all to do jiu-jitsu it doesn't matter who you are he's telling them to do jiu-jitsu but that is not the approach that most people take when they talk about jiu-jitsu or when they're trying to sell their gjett suit they all revert to the same thing they revert to this is its self-defense it's like you don't you want to learn how to be able to protect yourself and like that's like that's what it's about it's like at its core for a new person and they think it's a self-defense thing but Joe and Jocko talked about it as a self empowerment thing it's like instead of being the victim you're the guy who protects people from victimization like that's how they present it that's what I think that's what young men are really looking for more so it's like I don't think any of us at 19 we're worried about how to defend ourselves we weren't walking through alleyways scared like if anything we're overly confident knowing that like no matter what happened that we were gonna win even if we do nothing about martial arts whatsoever I think a lot of that is tied to the traditional aspect of Brazilian jiu-jitsu the stuff that was carried over from Japanese jiu-jitsu and continues to exist in Brazilian jiu-jitsu a lot of the respect and the discipline and the bowing to the sensei's and all of that kind of perpetuates that idea because it's all connected it's this idea that like you're learned you started jiu-jitsu or got into it because you're you didn't want to be victimized and even though we all move away from that almost instantaneously and we no longer question that if that jiu-jitsu is actually functional in a street fight or not I think it probably gives people the wrong idea I don't think we're accurately representing what jiu-jitsu is and it's it's benefits I think Yoga does a much better job of marking in itself for what it actually is which is like a self-help exercise it's like it makes you healthier mentally and physically and emotionally and that's what jiu-jitsu does it is not the true value of jiu-jitsu has nothing to do with its ability to defend yourself in a street fight have you guys been any street fights lately I sure haven't I haven't been too used to Jitsu once since high school and that was back when I didn't even know jujitsu very well so it's like why are we basing the entire marketing campaign of jiu-jitsu around this use that no one's actually going to use and so sorry go ahead no no I just wanna okay oh I'm not done I got a long ways to go so basically that is one component I think I think from it like a saturation standpoint I think absolutely not we are not saturated whatsoever however to reach what Dave said about spectator sport being the potential future for more money into Jitsu we can't reach that with a sport like jiu-jitsu until everyone's training in jiu-jitsu it has to be so common in our culture that you can appreciate it because everyone does it and I think it has that potential jiu-jitsu has the ability to become the world's national sport because every single person can participate in it I have never seen a sport besides video games if you can consider that a sport which a lot of people do that is so expansive and everyone can participate there's something for everyone in video games and it is considered a sport so and I don't think Pete like any of either of you could go on an eSports website and you would kind of understand what's going on even if you've never seen the game before you would kind of you'd get why people are into it's like you watch the game for a second kind understand because everyone plays games and you get the basic idea which is just like it's essentially the same thing as jiu-jitsu it gives you a sense of accomplishment over and over and over again but instead of it being reality it's a team of coders that optimize it to give you that feeling of a conference event over and over and over again so I think it's playing off of some base human psychology that we're not taking advantage of as marketers of jiu-jitsu because that's really our job is to promote jiu-jitsu to the people not just to improve it as a sport which I totally agree with you there Robert on the open source aspect we all have a duty to improve it over time and distill the effectiveness of it as much as possible but I think we also have the duty to make it as accessible to everyone as possible and the only way to make it accessible to everyone as possible is to not let it be founded too much in tradition because tradition is constricting and systems are constricting and when you have a self-replicating system like jiu-jitsu which is essentially what it is we all get into Jitsu we open our gyms we talk about all the same stuff they then open their gyms they talk about all the same stuff they go through the history Oh the Gracie's blah blah blah UFC jujitsu self-defense it's like that's the same monologue that we all live with and I think if you take you there's definitely avenues to take jiu-jitsu in a different realm like not necessarily I'm not saying turn to Jitsu into Zumba but I'm saying maybe make it a little more approachable for people and not make it about having to defend yourself and like a lot of people don't even want to consider that they don't want to think about getting you know assaulted on the street and that's is not a primary concern for them what are people concerned about they're concerned about their mental health feeling like they're a part of a community senses of accomplishment and have been a useful skill right it's like jiu-jitsu scratches all the itches of what you need as a human the only one it doesn't scratches your need for money that's the missing piece it doesn't it doesn't give you money it doesn't guarantee you money so if you can fill that final gap and then also have an open mind of how you present it to a community and potentially change some of the incredibly embedded understanding of what it is and let it be what jiu-jitsu truly is which is this infinite expression of human movement which is like the most beautiful thing ever if you think about it all jiu-jitsu is is explore in every possible configuration that two bodies can have like that will continue forever and the goal is the same to win by making the other person give up and just the fact that it exists in that way is like it it's it's almost like a comparative to life and death like like the the entire functionality of our universe that we live on is like ordering chaos and like the rise and fall of things and it jus disa represents I feel light and into distilled fashion the struggle for existence to struggle to win the struggle to survive and you get to experience it in this incredibly visceral way and it is so much more fun to experience than it is to watch someone else experience it it is not fun to watch someone else experience this glory if you feel nothing when you watch stuff like you watch other people you're like that doesn't look like that much fun kind of slow and the guy's head is buried in the other guy's crotch it doesn't look it doesn't seem appealing to me and it's like okay the further you get a white building off the street who just heard Joe Rogan talking it up for 780 episodes and he's like wait a second like I'm gonna get beat up in the street if I don't know this I have to write like that guy's got to wrap his legs around my head to start like that doesn't feel very empowering to a person and I don't think it appeals to their psychology of what they want to do so the fact that jujitsu still is growing so expansively and explosively even under circumstances like this I got to know about you guys but I've sent out some surveys to my students and 80% of them are ready to come back like they want to come back they're not worried about the virus it's like they're over it like let's just train again which is fantastic news like I'm purse I was very happy to hear that it's like even if we look even if we lost 20% of our members it's like I honestly thought it's gonna be worse so I'm hopeful for the situation I'm happy for the situation and I think we don't necessarily need all of Judah's competitors to become extremely wealthy like I am I'm very fortunate my web site does fantastic my gym did fantastic right off this spot I feel incredibly comfortable I'm feel successful this is great but you don't necessarily need that level of businesses and like multiple business and multiple streams of income to feel successful with jiu-jitsu from a monetary standpoint there's plenty of ways to just have a comfortable livable income off of jiu-jitsu that just even that doesn't exist you can't even just get by with jiu-jitsu you have to have another job unless you are able to put in the time effort and energy to learn a skill outside of jiu-jitsu like running a business or like marketing or some sort of other facet of the world that you can apply to your jiu-jitsu so I think there's definitely ways to set up infrastructure that supports that so that these Jitsu practitioners can kind of just go into it naturally I think there are ways to teach people to like just teach them how to fish instead of just giving them a fish and I think there's a lot of opportunity in the the realm of just doing better at making it more accommodating to new grapplers because I saw an example of this I like how Rob always says I'll give you an example of this is provides perfect context I'll give you an example of this the example is so I have a white belt program and I do them in batches so I'll put out I'll we'll do some marketing will collect some emails and put them like on board them into our white belt program and the white belt program is a two is an eight-week course and it could just be a Fault in the the system that we set up I'm just testing it seeing how it works but one thing is for sure within a few days I can get 30 white belts to show up at my gym all at once and that seems powerful it's like what okay where are those white belts coming from I'm not that good at marketing the product is really good Jiu Jitsu is just naturally a incredible product but people don't know how incredible it is so what brought these guys in these guys don't know how good the product is my marketing is not that good I just put something in front of them they wanted to do it turns out they all listen to Joe Rogan and Rocco so I've got this this hunk of people this all this these people and fresh keys to work with how do I in eight weeks how do I convince them that jiu-jitsu is the best possible thing for their lives so first course only six people converted terrible is failure absolute failure I I don't know what went wrong exactly but I tried my hardest I set up a system of a curriculum I taught fundamentals I explained applications not just in jutsu competitive sports but in the street self-defense type applications I did all the things that everyone else does I didn't I didn't miss anything trust me like I did the normal thing six people out of 30 I can do better than that we can all do better than that and I don't know if other gyms do that in batches so maybe they don't see how many people actually drop off I know when I was training at Otto's I never saw a white belt make it over to the other side they all stayed on the white belt mat there was only one white belt there that ever made it to pass purple belt it was Abdi and he started as a white belt when I moved there and he kept he kept with it every other white belt did not continue they all came from other gyms there were blue belts from other gyms they they had some previous Jiu Jitsu experience it seems like most of the gyms are or not most but from my perception of being at gyms I haven't been to all the gyms obviously but from what I've seen we're not doing a good job of getting white belts to stick around and I don't think that is a personal preference on there you know why that is and is is one of my I don't like this aspect of it but it is what it is it's clicks it's hard to incorporate these white built into the culture and dynamics of him when they're not good so no one talks to them because we have we set these hierarchies in there we go oh you're cool you're successful you're popular you sit on there over here on the aisle you're a white build no one knows your name no one cares about you why would that guy come back he feels about our gyms the same way we feel about 24-hour fitness right here on oil tea right I I've been making an enormous effort to like remember the names of all my white belts and having a relationship with every single one of them and that right there is a very difficult thing to do because I'm busy like I work 12 hours a day there's only so yeah yes you know so for me to be able to I develop relation with all these guys is incredibly difficult unless you have very good training structures to do that one they're not exactly when you're not we're sure what is super hard to do then they're you don't have a problem in your hands and that's I think that's one of the main reasons why they leave is because they don't feel like they're part of something so all right what I do is I recommend gym owners do I partner them up like I break the clicks the second I see a click I split it apart if I see the Hawaiians with the Hawaiians I put the Hawaiians with the Filipino the Filipinos with the Chinese the Brazilians with the Mexicans I mix it all up right whatever kind of clicks I see in the gym I make an effort to split it because I want to make sure that every group is what is bonding with everyone else like every person is bonding with everyone else versus just like oh let's not talk to those guys over there because you know that's a nice new he's not good at jujitsu right so I think isolating the student is very very bad for the gyms culture you know and we all do what it's it's we all have our favorites you know it's very hard yeah and I tried I thought I would solve that problem by having them all start together and go through it together like some sort of experience that they feel accomplished from and I tried to provide some sense of accomplishment at the end of the course and all of that regardless it was it was a it was a failure and I totally agree incorporating a system into just the instructors and the other students to try and make people feel as welcome as possible is important yeah there's this I think this the ceiling that you're talking about I think there is just the ceiling is so much higher than we think it is just because of optimizations like that and I think you can apply those across the entire spectrum of jiu-jitsu and you can find ways to optimize exactly like what you're saying like that's one thing you could do that would improve the conversion of new people into it there's probably thousands more and if we could find them and test them and then systemize them and then somehow disperse that information to as many people as possible that would be good for everyone overall and then we that would have pushed us towards the the ultimate goal which is to somehow make jiu-jitsu a spectator sport which I'm not confident in but I think the only that what I know for sure that people who like to get to also like watching jiu-jitsu but not the other way around so it seems like the only option is to make sure everyone does Jitsu to get them to appreciate it so that's kind of my thoughts on that yeah that's a good way to that's probably the realistic way of getting adjunct to be honest because I don't see it going in the way you said like you guys got everybody yeah no matter rule changes is gonna do it it's just like all the rule sets are boring there's no configuration that is not boring like it's not the rules that make it boring it's just the fundamental nature of jiu-jitsu it just does not feel exciting to an outside perspective you have to be doing it to be in in the magic yeah I couldn't agree more I have a hard time watching I'm not gonna lie I don't watch it either yeah like I'm watching a match from beginning to end unless you know it's gonna be fireworks and it is works otherwise that lose my attention even if they're a world champion I remember I used to study ADCC videos all the time because I wanted to see what was going on with the competition how they used the rules you can't fall asleep faster than watching those things especially the older ones that had the tribal music in the background you know you're finished training you come back home okay I don't know watch these videos and studying the course but you sleeping like a big son of a [ __ ] it's just it's difficult you know these are and this is me trying to do homework you know I'm trying to I'm invested in this you know so yeah for the average person I think it's just it's a it's a tall order so you Keenen you do have that I think the right approach and this is that we just got to get more people into it but I think that's interesting that you did that survey and they came out so happy for Joe and Jocko and I guess that's a gravy train more people got a hop-on you know it's because it's like you said I mean well at least 100 million dollar marketing machine in your favor right exactly they're literally working for us and we just got to catch the fish they're throwing at us because it's huge and I think like who knows I think as more as jujitsu grows as we continue to push you to do to as many people as possible we're gonna have more situations like that where we have these highly influential figures falling in love with it like we'd have fallen in love with it and then they'll use the platform's to push it and we all directly benefit from that so it's in our best interest to to try and spread information and tell people how to get more people into their gyms and tell them how to make it more approachable and fun for everyone and share that information which I mean that's like how the masterminds kind of work right it's the same idea and I don't really know how those systems work but I would imagine that's a similar system yeah I think that's kind of our only option and ultimately even even if there is no way for someone to monetize jiu-jitsu without learning an outside skill which is probably how it is just having more people doing it presents hugely more opportunity over time and it'll it'll it'll kind of fuel itself because then you have like guys like Andrew Yang like there could potentially be a president in of the United States who talked about jiu-jitsu that would be the ultimate right like you have a president who's right it's so fast because I mean III know I can be like a nerd with this stuff because I got into it the last few years but it's we just relive in history man like it's when you look at jujitsu where it was what judo / you just early 20s and we just relive in it like the same discussion and it's it's more sophisticated I may be wrong like the whole thing everything's gotten better but like the PR the marketing like the the boom you know it's it's fascinating to observe let me ask you something really quick I'm originally originally asked you for an hour of your time we're in an hour 30 minutes can you keep going or you gotta go I don't wanna be rude yeah I know I got I got another half-hour let's say okay I got about half hour - Dave you good yeah I was gonna ask you one of the questions that I came into my head before you got here but now I can get is you've trained in a bunch of different places you said you've been with a BJ Penn your turban your train the Otto's excellent coaches and structures what lessons have you learned from each of these influences as far as like your jujitsu and how are you gonna make that part since you're you're big on America just how you're gonna make that part of the Americans just brand and and form it that way yeah that's an interesting question I would say that's tough most of what I learned training at different gyms was not technique focus because you can get good technique from anywhere and it all is a little different but ultimately we're all like Robert it's been saying it's the it's all comes from the same source like it's all functioning on the same rules right so hmm I guess I have to clarify is it more like from a technical approach like actual jujitsu movements or like overall everything that I've learned like your your approach to jujitsu or your approach to training you know I know you're you probably have aspirations of coaching athletes and getting them top levels like and these are guys who were top competitors or top competition teams you know what type of things that you pick up because I know I've gotta I've gotta to train obviously with lloyd irvin but I also got the train without tows a couple times out there so at least from my brief things they have a similar intensity in the drilling and all that which I was pleasantly surprised with I'm curious guys know that we had kid Dale here a while back and you know he's very anti drilling you know you have other people you know they're all in place so I'm curious to see where you're lying at now yeah so just they're definitely one unifying factor between all those place and I would say the the biggest indicator for success from a jiu-jitsu team perspective and doing well in a competitive setting is having as many talented guys on the mat as possible and letting them spar as much as possible the more sparring you can do with high level guys around you the the higher level the room becomes and it that seems to be 80% of the battle is just getting enough good guys in the room to where it starts to be a machine that fuels itself and it's just like all these guys are incredibly talented they're picking up stuff from each other on a daily basis they're sharing information on a daily basis they're adapting and challenging each other and pushing each other and they're all rowing in the same direction towards the similar goal that's an incredibly powerful thing not just in jiu-jitsu but probably any goal you're gonna pursue if you have a bunch of people going in the same direction hugely beneficial so aside from that I think the biggest difference between all the gyms is how they each approach the mindset and this was this is what makes me think that say Universal primarily and it seems like and from my experience as well the mindset that is suggested from these coaches doesn't necessarily work for me but it's a great foundation for me to start developing my own mindset on things and how like what works for me what gets me in the zone what gets me focused what keeps me motivated so yeah I don't I don't know I don't think that the mindset that they push in statists like specifics is very important but that again the mindset that it is unifying between all this gym success is hard work and I mean it's it's that seems obvious when you say it it's just hard work a talented room that's about all you need it's just like it's - it's yeah it's too simple it's just like you it becomes a snowball rolling down a hill you you put three tough guys in a room and they're all killing each other and then they go and do well in competitions because they have more tough trained partners than anyone else the fourth guy the fourth guy becomes one of the guys they beat that's like holy [ __ ] what was that guy doing why is it different Oh he just like they have a sickroom I'm gonna go join the room and then they're looking for the answer and then they've already put themself in the answer just by joining the room and that's what I've done it every gym that that I've joined a team it's because I recognize that they have a good room so building the room is the most important thing and so my approach to this this has been whatever the cost build the room if you can build the room quickly then the success for the competition will follow and I haven't tested that but I'm pretty sure like my room is good already like I have got a good room and it's enough to push me and I can train at a higher level than I can compete at like in the room that's where I thrive I'm a gym warrior like I I just felt like I analyzed people's games I specifically do techniques that are purely to beat their game and have no application outside of it whatsoever it's a it holds me back in competition because I do that instead of focusing on my a game that should apply to everyone but I think it provides it makes me a good training partner for a lot of people because I specifically will try and beat you at your game with moves that directly exposed ever attack the weaknesses that I see in people's jiu-jitsu so it's from a sport psychology standpoint I don't think I even understand my own so-call psychology well enough to coach other people on there so like that's been the biggest struggle for me just fighting against myself and my own weaknesses mentally for competing I think having having someone who has an incredibly strong mental focus around you kind of can help you get past your own mental blockades and I think that's what I felt it that Lloyd's the most was that everyone had an incredibly strong mind because Lloyd always pushed that very tough mindset and there's different facets to that like a lot of times that turns into like us against them mentality and it's like we're it's us versus the world it's this small group we're fighting against this bigger power and I think that was a hugely unifying thing for us at Lloyds was like they're gonna screw us so we're gonna go out there it's us versus the opponent and the ref and everyone else they're gonna be talking and you know Portuguese coaching against us and we don't speak Portuguese so we're gonna get screwed regardless we have to win we have to kill them you have to submit every single person or you're not gonna be able and that severity on the situation does it makes you train harder for sure and then it's like creates like sort of a unifying thing there are downsides to that as well because then we all kind of fall into the same track we and which is good for competition you all become robots and you just listen to what the coach says and like if you can let go of your your own mental gymnastics you have to do with yourself to talk yourself into or out of good and bad ideas or even just the things you have to do like competing it can be negative as well it can burn you out which i think is something we saw from that environment more than anything was the burnout because while I was there I know I was getting burned out I know JT was getting burned out I know Jimmy burned out and I know DJ burned out and there's a lot of burnout in that place and eventually we all come back because it's like you burn out you you get over it you realize that jujitsu is all you got and you go back to it you're like I gotta just accept this this is all I got so once once you're in the whirlpool of jujitsu and you you there's no way out of it because nothing compares literally nothing else is very fun for most people that get into that mindset so at Auto so it's a little different it's a little more open like there isn't as much guidance from like a coaching standpoint it was kind of just ittle it let the sandbox mentality thrive for me at least but there are some resistance to it because there is more like what you're talking about what what I do works like this is how you should do it this is the right way to do it not necessarily from a technique point but like showing up like to training and how the training has to function there was no flexibility and like letting people train in a way that works best for them so I understand that drilling is very beneficial for a lot of people I personally don't like drilling I don't I I don't repeat moves really like that's not my style like when I when I when I train or gonna compete it's very much just a flow and I I practice the flow more than I practice the techniques like I practiced the ability to transition to new positions that we are both unfamiliar with rather than practicing a specific technique that it's like if I can get there I understand this realm this frame of reference in this particular technique and I think there's different ways to for people to improve and one of them is to be a little more free-flowing with your training and you definitely disbar really hard I think hard sparring is the key like if you if you put two if you have two groups you've got one group that only spars and one group that spars and drills I think the group that only spars like that gets more sparring in is gonna kick the ass of the group that spars and drills like if you have a limited amount of time an hour to train and you choose how to use that if you spend a half hour drilling and sparring or the full hour sparring I think we saw that with the Sara Coast this gym and I think like they drilled a lot too but the emphasis was on sparring and they just drilled when they weren't sparring so it's just a ridiculous amount of training so it's not a perfect crossover analogy but I think the sparring is hyper important when I spent some time at John danaher's basement hence those gym John danaher's basement I've trained there quite a few times the previous instance I was there the longest they had they had a little bit of a different approach it was very much like this technical guru approach it wasn't as much about the crazy hard training it was about consistency and like really trusting that this guy has the answers on a technical level and that you just need to learn that the technical level things and if you do them just how he said you will be successful I don't think that's accurate because if you look at their team by Gary is good for sure he's very good at Jiu Jitsu but he never he doesn't reach the same level as Gordon and like Ethan's very good he never reached the same level as Gordon Nikki might reach the same level as Gordon from from a genetic standpoint like maybe Gordon's got some some something that the rest of those guys don't but it doesn't seem like the rest of the team can implement John danaher's techniques as effectively as Gordon and then that makes you wonder well how much of that is John and how much of that is Gordon and so that that's another style that I witnessed and then the final one that I would compare to because the only other place I trained that has really high level guys that I spent a significant amount of time out was Hama Lowe's Jim and I Homme Lowe's Jim it was kind of a mixture of all those things it was like Hama Lowe was incredibly knowledgeable but he knew what he was knowledgeable about and he didn't try and teach things that he wasn't knowledgeable about which at Otto's was not the same like Andre would teach lapel guards in class and it's like wow it doesn't really make sense for to me for him to teach it because he could focus on the things that he really understands like on a deep intimate level of that he's spent twenty five years practicing it's like I I think the instructor should focus on what they're really good at and kind of delegate to who to who actually knows the the positions even better like if the intention is to make sure that the room improves you know like I just think that it should be spread out a little more and Hama Lowe did that he was more focused on like this is what I know this is what I'm really good at this is these are the moves that I know will work for any of you and I know them inside and out and those are the ones I'm gonna teach and then if there was something else he'd be like oh this guy does that and he would always talk about how he like bought this guy's instructional and studied and he learned so much but he's not gonna show it to you you should just go look at it because he it's whatever he got is a copy of the copy and it's not quite as it's not a perfect regurgitation of the information let's say so that was kind of interesting as well to take that approach and a lot of a lot of all those guys seem to reflect that and they have a much more diverging styles all the styles that HA Mo's are very very different everyone has a very specific game it's like two to three moves that they're like super good at and none of those moves are something that you find in harmless game and like Gabriel are just has like incredibly technical but flowing style and plays a lot of like open guards and not very much spite he like plays open guard without using spider hooks a lot and he kind of Baron bolos but not really and it's a totally different style of like inversion game he plays it reminds me a lot of Jimmy Harbison's game actually and then you have Zane who's a really tough brown belt who just has a really great clothes guard and a one particular close guard sweep that he sweeps everyone with and then it's kind of all well rounded overall and so like you can kind of see the divergence in how the students grow and how they grow into their their particular jujitsu game based on these differences between the instructors so at johns it's everyone is doing Jon's moves everyone they're all doing it but not to the same success so that kind of goes back to what Rob was saying about how there's is no wrong way to do things you have to be able to explore the boundaries of something to see how it fits into your body everyone's got a different length forearm for a heel hook or everyone's got a different wrist control like everyone's hands are different maybe have a wrist injury or some sort of lack of flexibility or hyper flexibility that lets you do something slightly different and I think if you fit try and fit too much within the lines you're constricted and if you try and go too much out of the lines you're constricted and I don't think there's a perfect way to do it except to just be really like try and let your ego go as much as possible and really only teach the like show them moves that you truly understand and if there is a better resource for it being able to say there is a better resource for this you should learn it from this guy and like try and facilitate that engagement which I haven't really seen many people do yet but I think I would like to try try that approach maybe like focus more on bringing coaches in which I'd actually did that a lot cuz like I remember he would bring in guys for seminars all the time like you and I think Hoffa and Kiki Mendes came in for a while so I think he was kind of doing that same approach but it also seemed like he was very distracted with his other businesses and stuff it's like sometimes he was there sometimes he was in and a lot of it kind of a lot of the burden of coaching and that sort of guidance fell on JT I feel like back in those days so yeah it's just there's a lot of different ways to do it they all seem to be successful I don't know the best way I think if I had to choose though it would just be get as many tough guys on the mat and let them kill each other and I don't think you can go wrong with that I think people try to overthink things and that's it's a simple recipe but it's a hard recipe that's the thing that people don't like about it is because you know killing yourself on the mats is such a simple like yeah anyone like ok I got that but at the same time it's incredibly difficult for you to perform that way every day in the gym six days a week for years on end because it destroys your body man like I remember like pulling myself up while using the rail up the stairs like my legs had nothing left in them I didn't want to pick up my daughters oh yeah one one feeling like that before he continued that feat those feelings are like nothing I've ever experienced anywhere else in view to that incredibly hard training after a fact is so intense and there was that there's a point in time where I was training so hard and so often that when I finally got injured and I woke up after like two days of resting and I felt like I was high I was like why do I feel like an altered state right now what is going on and then as I continue to be injured I realized that was just normal oh this is what normal feels like this is me rested and I feel good and I thought I was act like I was high on drugs or something because I just become so accustomed to living as this starving dog type training where it's just I'd constantly be killing myself just begging for a nap at any turn it's already around you know you get used to being over trained and then you think that's the norm and I exactly you're talking about because like when I there's a few times where I've forced myself to take two three days off and I come back and I feel like Superman Mel she's happy again you know Michael smiling in the gym yeah cuz you could be in miserable but that's that's the thing you have to get used to being miserable and I think that is the the equation right but I think people are always trying to write just like let's find an easier way of doing it because this is too hard so that's where like a lot of like the methodology comes in oh it's the methodology that needs to change because if I find a better superior method that way I don't have to do all that hard work when the hard work what you're describing there that's 99% of the equation right there you know the other 1% yeah maybe maybe you drink orange juice in the morning and I don't but that's not why you're waiting that's like I really to me is like it's like cosmetics it's not that it's not important it doesn't work it's just that it's that it's not the common denominator you know we've seen way too many people win without ever drilling like I never drilled in my life Bouchet told me you never drill a day of his life you know so you know I think it's just one of those things where people are looking for a shortcut a lot of times when like they get stuck with this methodology kind of discussion and it really comes down to like it's just good old you know just train hard every day be consistent over the years and be competitive be aggressive you know about not just showing up yeah I think the the final 1% of that hard train if your goal is like ultimate competitive success it is 99% hard train and 1% self-study I think it's like well if you look if you train enough that is the most vast collection of information you can get you can't study harder than the amount of information you get from training hard all the time like being able to explore every little detail from training so hard and understanding your own body and really coming to terms with what you need to do to be more successful in this thing they are focusing so hard on that only comes with hard training but the up the the other side that is very important is just acquiring as much information as possible enough as much accurate information as possible so there's like this there's this an initial phase for me when I started taking jujitsu more seriously we're listening to the and I started studying and just looking at every single possible movement that looked like it had some validity and then just trying them all and I can I started doing that around 14 and I continued to do it to this day where I look I constantly look up new moves I try and spot new moves and then I when I see a new one I always try it so like tonight I'm gonna go try a closed guard Kimura like that's what I'm gonna spend the night doing like I don't necessarily have to see it but I see I see the idea and I'm gonna try and I'll probably discover some stuff on my own and kind of figure out how it works and that's just one more tool I have in in the toolbox and I think anyone can do that especially and that's kind of like where do just like that's where you can make money in jiu-jitsu you have a lot of valuable information that's can be presented through your personal lens which it's like we can all teach the same move but each of us is gonna teach it differently with different details and your twist that you put on it comes from your personal experience and that's valuable because that's one of the parallel paths on the flow chart of that movement that you can never really like you you can cut the thing in half infinitely and you're always gonna have half of what's left of the cut right that's the same thing with jiu-jitsu it's like you can break it down into as many little pieces as you want but there's always a smaller piece that diverges and that's why there's value in each person's individual experience and that's why I think that it's like online especially instructionals will be will to continue forever because you can never teach the same move twice right unless you're just literally it's a carbon copy of what you said last time but every time you go back to teach a new move and you teach it from your heart and from your head you're gonna implement changes that you yourself had implemented without you even realizing from just training more and trying to move more whether as a year ago or a week ago it's always going to change one thing you mentioned both you guys mentioned about the training rooms about the hard training right I guess I'm telling you right now I feel like hot dad because I got my first lift in since the quarantine I was using bands and you know like I thought well it's not gonna be the same but at least it'll be something well a good legs yesterday chess I mean I did like Monday chess yesterday and my whole body's in fly everything or it's pretty much sitting down like this is painful but it brings me to the point of the overtraining right because I came up on the Basking background also and you just train as hard as you can and I think even in high school we were doing like three hour practices every day Papa died on the weekends but go running and you get that feeling like you know Keenan probably you guys were talking about where you just swore all the time and I remember when I finished my final match of my season my senior year I sat down and I was crying because I lost like a mixed dates or whatever but then I just woke up and I just felt pain everywhere and I realized my ankle was like a watermelon it was swollen and my knee was messed up and I was like hobbling and like oh I've been living like this and this you know like for months and now that out of the competitive zone for a moment I can experience his pain and we were taught that way but I argued this is Robert - is that the right way of doing it it's just the way that we were put into it and just keep perpetuating it because I feel like as I've gotten all Gator I think that approach is flawed because we're essentially training week alright we're not trained it's like like now my fighters are doing this where they're fit year-round right they're never out of oh I got a diet and then you know do the big [ __ ] weight cut I mean they have to do the water cut but they're always you know lean whereas I remember like me and like old school fighters like once you would fight then you would like you know [ __ ] off for a couple of months get fat and there are I got a diet again and you know doing the seesaw battle so we weren't really living like the lifestyle of being fit year round which allows you to train a hundred percent because I wouldn't remember training and I was always I was getting beat by everybody because I was I was low on calories and I was you know deprived of rest because I was so hungry all the time and you can't train well and even when you're you're well eating well but you're training too hard you're not gonna train to the best really capacity and as a result to me that means your practice suffers your technique suffers and sometimes that results in injury because you're overextended absolutely yeah I think as a younger guy you can get away with that and you probably should because you need to push the limits when you can't right like you guys and their teens and their 20s you know you got to go balls to the wall so you you have that those gym wars so it's experiences because they're much more costly on competition but at a certain point there is like diminishing returns right because now when you do too many of those Wars you start getting injured mark and then you can't compete yeah so I feel like that's one of the things I look at now it's like the training doesn't stay the same forever right that's that should be kind of obvious but it isn't because even you have you know you your 30s and you're in the twilight of your career and you're training the same as you did in your teens you won't last you know unless you're taking some special vitamins it's not gonna really work out for you yeah let me cut in there because I experienced that last sentence especially brutally so this is this is what happened to me and my realization of that as well cuz I mean I'm still pretty young but I definitely don't recover as fast as I did when I was 22 or 23 I'm 28 now and around 26 I had to kind of slow the training and I think a huge part of that was training with people who are on the Special supplements and I couldn't keep up like if I continue to train how I did at Lloyds I would try but this time the group of people has around wouldn't I couldn't keep up I couldn't train as much as them so I I was actually that that damage to my body that you were describing it was happening on an even more intense scale because now not only was I training the same amount if not more but I was training with stronger people who do not get as worn down as I did so I couldn't actually compete on just a physicality standpoint so the only way that I could counter that to continue being able to train and not get get hurt and even be in it because for years I would say that there was an entire year where like I was dislocated my kneecap over and over again I had a herniated disc I'd like could barely Train someone grabbed my head in a guillotine and I fought out of it I wouldn't be able to train for two weeks cuz my neck would be so [ __ ] up and I just thought it would go away cuz it always went away before you know like I reckon back at Lloyds I used to walk around it felt like I had a knife stuck in my back all the time I never understood why and I it was just like a tight muscle that just never went away and it was so painful all I needed was a massage in a foam roller but I didn't have a concept of like how to use those things properly so I just suffered with it for like two years and then I started to realize though you actually can take care of your body and it helps and so I changed my training strategy it's just trained I trained when I felt good but not when I felt really bad like I didn't force myself to train when I felt really bad where I used to do it I would just like force myself and I'd be like it's good for me but it became just like what you're saying if I force myself I'm probably going to get hurt and it's gonna be counterproductive so I changed my strategy I was like well what can I do in my downtime that directly benefits this issue that I'm feeling and the answer is weight lifting of course because it's like well weight lifting it's not super cardio intensive it's just breaking down your muscle fibres which seems to be a different thing it's almost like jujitsu breaks down your nervous system on some level and like you you you feel it deeper than muscle soreness I don't know what it is but I walk around feeling like my eyes are like closing up and it's just I don't know what the feel I can't describe the feeling so I started lifting as a supplementary thing and that changed everything it let it let me be more durable because I had a little bit more muscle mass and I had been lifting throughout my entire career but I started taking it more seriously and I haven't been as much lately because I've been trying to run the gym but there was a time where I was lifting almost as much as I was training so I had an equal amount of lifting sessions as training session I would replace I used to train twice a day jiu-jitsu and three times a week lifting and then I changed it to once a day Jitsu once a day lifting so I would I would lift before I would train so I would trying to either train in the morning and lift at night or vice versa and that actually allowed me to become a lot better at Jiu Jitsu cuz like you're saying I was no longer fighting from this dilapidated state where I'm just like barely able to function but I'm just I can do it because my Jiu Jitsu was good enough but I didn't really know what I was truly capable of from a physicality standpoint until you do that when you're rested and you take the time to take care of your body and build strength and push yourself to a different potential so there's like your mental potential which is just train hard all the time and forcing yourself to do it which is important to do because you need to know how far you can be pushed before you break and then there's the other side of things where you can reach your physical potential by by disregarding that crazy mental strength that you need to force yourself to go train all the time and you can redirect it towards improving your physicality and recovery so you can be stronger and train more often which seemed to be what was allowed like that's the incentive to do steroids right is like you get to train more often and not get injured as much and so you'd spend more time on the mats in addition to whatever extra strength that gives you so I was trying to kind of try found a way to stop a minute at the cost of my the amount of time on the mats and I replaced that amount of time on the mats with more off the mat focus on Jiu Jitsu so then I started just thinking about jiu-jitsu more often rather than just training it as much as possible because I used to train so much that the last thing I wanted to do was think about to do two off the mats it's like once I stepped off the mats I would rush out of the gym I shower as quickly as possible just so I could shower first so I didn't have to wait there any longer and I would leave the place as quickly as I could so I can start thinking about other things and like not have to worry about Jitsu anymore and so when I started when I took a step back and started treating it more like okay I want to do this when I feel good and I'm gonna try and optimize my time better then I actually had the energy and the inclination to think about jujitsu off the mats and that most of my technical progress came from that period of time so that was when I started developing lapel guard stuff because prior to that I was kind of playing around with lapels but I I was more traditional I had a lot of spider guard open guard stuff and did traditional passing but when I was able to take that time off to really focus I'm like wow okay how creative can I get with this thing and like really put some deliberate effort into creating a new system and actually spending time thinking about it it's I was surprised with how little I was doing of that before like when I made that a priority to actually think about jiu-jitsu and like think about alternative paths of accomplishing the same goal whether it be a sweep or a pass or a submission using this new tool that I was I really liked because no one else was using it that led to most of my technical progress as well as my ability to substantiate a career and make money because I am that is unique to me it's very well thought out I can teach it to anyone from white to black belt level and everyone can find success with it and in the process of having more energy my brain was able to function better and it turns out my brain is my best feature if I can't use it I'm screwing myself over so my physicality was not like training super hard was not serving me anymore like beyond just like the mental toughness was acquired and once you acquire the mental toughness as long as you can retain the mental toughness which you can because you can work really hard off the mats you guys know how how hard you can work without killing your physical body you can work your brain much harder than you can work your body it lasts longer you know and it actually seems to gain momentum the more you work it's like you can work hard or longer longer and it doesn't burn out as much so that that shift and understanding for me was he like revolutionary to my life I stopped hating jiu-jitsu like I didn't hate it but you know you know the feeling you start to hate it at a certain point you're like anything that you do that much and you're forcing yourself to do it you feel like [ __ ] all the time you're gonna start to resent it so it eliminated the resentment it provided huge opportunity of growth mentally and technically and I was able to get stronger and bigger because I was burning less calories and that extra strength actually allowed opened up more of a game so then I could actually put pressure so I learned how to actually apply pressure because I had the strength to actually make it efficient so previously I was just really flexible and so I had this like this tree of moves I could do because I was hyper flexible but I couldn't do any of the strong guy moves on the other side of the spectrum so then I've kept my flexibility and I started adding strength and then the whole world of pressure and strength game opened up to me and that doubled the tools I was working with the air and at the same time I was able to focus on create a new system of the kind of little pail guard which I guess what kind of fall in between maybe so that was hugely beneficial so I totally agree that there is a certain point you have to change your prerogative yeah like you said me and Rob I've talked about it before but toughness once acquired rarely leaves you you know like you've learned the lesson of it and you understand the limits that you have and I think that's the primary value yeah hey guys I dis I could keep going for another I gotta call my daughters I don't call them to talk but like a Keenan man such a gentleman thank you so much I had so much fun I knew we would have a lot to talk about let's do this again at some point absolutely it was a pleasure thank you environment shirring Keenan before we let you off go ahead and let people know where they can find you online and your courses and all that good stuff yep I have you can find me in three places Keenan online comm lapel guard comm and on Instagram I'm keen and Cornelius at Kinnick relays next time you come to Vegas man definitely stop by I know you've been here before man next time just let's just do something together man let's just share that the seminar some rolls sit down grab dinner or something man be good absolutely really appreciate it thanks guys I'll catch up with you later [Music]