BTG 59 - Good Coach vs Good Student

Hey guys, what's going on? I'm David Avalon and welcome to the Breaking the Guard podcast. And uh yeah, it's going to be just me for now. I decided rather than uh recreate a new podcast. I already have everything set up with the old one with Breaking the Guard. And traditionally I did it with my co-host Robert Disil, but he's been very busy and I understand and it's been hard to get him here. So I'm just going to continue the podcast without him and if he decides to join back in, we'll have we'll be happy to have him on board. But with that, let's go ahead and get into the news of the day. The the first thing I wanted to go over was the next grappling card. There's we talked about one in December which is going to be the UFC 5 pass invitational 4, but there's also another big card coming up which is the who's number 121 at the end of the month of November 30th just after Thanksgiving. Uh looking at my phone here for the notes, right, the main event, it shouldn't surprise anybody. Gordon Ryan, he's going to be defending his heavyweight belt against Lucas Barbosa. Personally, not an exciting matchup for me. I feel like we've already seen this and uh I'm much more excited for the Mason Fowler match that he has like I think a week or two later. Even though a lot of people think that that's also give me at least it's a different matchup and especially under the who's number one rules. Gordon has seemed pretty unstoppable as of late. So I'm going to favor Gordon on that one. The next matchup, this one I find more interesting, which is going to be Pedro Mourinho versus Rafael Lovado Jr. And uh I'm gonna I don't know which way to go with that, but my heart is going to go with Lovado. He's, you know, I think he's like a year younger than me. We've competed a few times and uh I like seeing the the old salty dogs still maintain top position, you know, and he's looked really good as of late. uh he doesn't has hasn't shown any signs of slowing down. So uh hopefully he can keep it up. The next matchup is another good match up. Mika Gaba versus Cody Steel. Again, I think Ma is probably one of the top guys. So I'm going to favor Ma in that matchup. Uh then this the Baby Shark Diego Race versus Diego Pata Olivera. I'm going to go with the Baby Shark. We have Tyan Dalp versus Troy Russell. I'll go with Tyan. And then Helena Crabar versus Julia Mallay. I don't know Julia, so I'm gonna go with Helena on that one. And then a final one, heavyweight bout, Luke Griffith versus Roosevelt Sosa. I'll go with Luke. Uh having trained with Luke, his back taking game is ridiculous. And he's put on a significant amount of size. So now he's not just tall and long lived, but now he's looks much stronger than I remember training wi with him like. So that should be a good match up. Again, the Labato match is probably the one I'm looking forward to the most and probably Luke Griffith because I've trained with him. But that should be a good card. And uh we also have uh going over an event the 1FC that passed as far as grappling related news. Tyroulo uh ended up capturing I forget the weight class designation. It might be middleweight. I'm not sure what they call it over there, but he won the grappling championship there against a solid grappler. Um I don't know him too well to be honest. It's a European ACC trials champ. But I feel like my issue with 1FC is that they have some stud grapplers like, you know, Mike Messi and of course Tai, but it's just one in the division. I would really like to see them give these guys who they want to make stars and it's good because they're both young guys and they're they're very, you know, they're cool people so easy to fall in love with them. But we need some real challenges in those divisions. So, I feel like they need to keep bringing in more talent because right now, like they keep feeding Musa Messi just about anybody. And I mean, to be fair, he could probably beat just about everybody. But I feel like they could be putting them against bigger names, you know? So, if I was in charge of 1FC, I'd be trying to find another big name, you know, like if they could bring somebody, you know, for example, we were just talking about Mika Galao in there, that would spice things up quite a bit, you know. Um, but it seems like it's been a lot of mismatches for the most part, especially from Musa Messi, which again could just be because he's so good. It's hard to get somebody who could face him at his level, but uh I I feel that they could be doing a better job of that. Let's put it like that. Um, other side news which I thought was a little funny, Elon Musk was once again on the Joe Rogan podcast and Joe Rogan had asked him about that matchup that he was claiming he was going to do with Mark Zuckerberg and he threw Mark Zuckerberg under the bus saying that Mark Zuckerberg backed out because he wanted to have a big promotion and he wanted to the fight to be in the UFC where apparently the the coliseum the the in Rome offered to host the fight. And honestly, to me, if you really wanted to fight, that would be the most epic place to fight. Um, but apparently, according to Elon Zuckerberg, didn't want that. And then the fight kind of fell apart. But he went, if you listen to the podcast, it's hilarious because it's clear that Elon doesn't respect Zuckerberg's fighting ability at all. And I think like as they that study goes that most American men overestimate their fighting ability by 4,000%. I think Elon does as well. Uh sounds like he's put no real training time or at least that's what he claims. And he says that he's just too big for Zuckerberg to do anything and that he'll just lay at him like a walrus and Zuckerberg won't be able to do anything about it. So you could tell Joe Rogan is like seeing the same thing that any trained martial artist would see. It's like you're not respecting this as much. You don't realize that, you know, you can be beaten by a smaller man who has a lot superior knowledge on leverage. And he makes some references to arm bars, but he's talking about more like a keto style arm block where you're just going against one side versus doing a con what we know as a conventional arm bar where you're using your hips to apply the leverage. So, uh, it didn't look too good for Elon after that. Like I would be siding for Zuckerberg because it's clear that he's taking it seriously, but perhaps too seriously because the day after that podcast was released, Zuckerberg has a picture of him getting a knee surgery. He had an ACL reconstruction because he tore it during sparring. So the timing for him is horrible because now looks like he just he just backed out after uh Elon just doubled down on this challenge. Uh, but if he I I don't think he I mean the the podcast is released. I guess he could be making an excuse, although it seemed it would seem pretty elaborate. Uh, it's more likely that Zuckerberg's probably taking MMA training a little bit too seriously and tweaked his knee and unfortunately suffer some damage there. And normally I hate these freak show type matches, but I'll make an exception for this one. Uh, it seems somewhat comical that the two most powerful men in the world, the two richest men in the world want to fight each other in a cage match. Preposterous, but entertaining nonetheless. Right. Um, now with that out of the way, the topic that I wanted to go over today is what is more important, having a good coach or being a good student? There's a lot of people who, you know, don't have access to world-class coaches, right? Like, you know, a lot of people are now moving like, for example, to Austin to be able to be close to the guys like John Daner, Craig Jones, and you know, the Sanjay Hiro there. You have a lot of talent that has moved over there due to the Joe Rogan effect, right? But not everybody can just drop what they're doing and move to like a mecca of jiu-jitsu, you you might go to San Diego, you know, or or what that, but I feel that's overlooking something that's far more important. And in my opinion, being a good student definitely outweighs having a good coach. Uh, I can explain this very simply because you could go to any of those world-class gyms and you're going to see their students that quit. And if you're not a good student, you could have the best guy in the world there and you're still not going to learn. Now, what does it mean to be a good student? Well, to me, it's one somebody who's dedicated and disciplined, right? They kind of go hand in hand. Uh dedicated in the sense that you come in and you don't make excuses for not showing up to training or whatnot. You always show up. You could have a bad day at work or, you know, you're not feeling super great, but you still show up. And maybe you can't even train at full capacity because you're injured. You still show up, take notes, and you learn, right? So, that's one aspect of being a good student. Uh, just again, just showing up, you know, it's like the old adage, you know, a black belt is just a white belt that did it, never quit, right? You just keep coming and eventually you're going to you'll learn through osmosis, you know, unless you're really stubborn, right? The the second part of being a good student is in my opinion having humility right and what I mean by that is one on one hand if you're not humble you're not going to learn the lessons that you're going to need to learn from training and most of those are going to come from sparring sessions or or any type of competitive type work where you lose if you don't have the humility to accept that you were defeated did or you made mistakes and then to work on overcoming those mistakes, you're not going to get enough from the the training experience to grow at a rate uh that's going to, you know, allow you to meet your goals. The second part of humility is also being humble enough to learn from somebody. And if you think that you're better than your coach or that your coach doesn't know what they're talking about, you're not going to be able to learn from them, at least not well, because you're going to second guessess everything they do because you don't have trust. It's an important part of the student coach relationship where there is trust on both ends. But particularly from the student side to the instructor because you have to be humble enough to say, you know, as a man, you know, like I even though I feel like I'm talented, I'm young and I'm athletic and all that, I don't know as much as this guy and I'm willing to accept whatever this professor is teaching me and then be able to implement it myself. I've seen usually when you have people who are like young studs and they they grow very quickly, the ego grows just as fast if not faster and they get to a point where they look at their instructor, particularly your instructor's older and not competing or whatnot, you might think, man, you know, coach is a little behind on the times, right? He he doesn't know the new stuff and you know, I'm watching YouTube videos and stuff like that. I I know more than him now. And when you fall into that type of situation, there's only two ways that was not work out. Either A, you're gonna probably quit and go to another gym as a student because you've outshined the master, or B, you're gonna be a disgruntled customer and you're going to end up partitioning and like pulling people into like a little sub faction inside that gym where you don't train in the classes that he normally teaches or you try to like make a little subculture. And I've seen these things happen all the time. So, it works out to be a disaster for both parties. Uh, that being said, if we go back to the coach side of things, a lot of people credit, you know, oh, if you have the best coach in the world, that's the key to being the best. I mean it definitely helps but I could bring up a coach of a fighter that or I could just bring up a fighter for example Fedor Millo and if I asked a common person to name this coach they wouldn't know who he was right I don't even know the name and I'm a big fan of Fedor I don't know the name of the coach right clearly his coach was excellent right he's not a famous superstar guy but he was an excellent coach coach because he knew what it took to get Fedor to that next level and to that world class level. Now, I'm not talking about the end of Fedor's career. I feel that was a mismanagement from the agents or whatnot of trying to get the biggest money fight possible instead of keeping him active. You know, when you put somebody on the shelf for too long, that's a mistake in my opinion. You want to strike while the iron's hot. But in Fedor's prime, unstoppable, trained out of the middle of nowhere, you know, in Russia, there is no famous coaches on his side, but he still wrecked just about everybody. I feel that there's something more important than just being a superstar coach is just having a good communication with your student coach and having trust for each other. When you have that, that will supersede a lot of things. And especially if you have a specialized game plan that's working out well for you, you don't need to know everything. If you have a game plan that's proven to work and nobody can overcome, which was kind of what the Fedor camp had for his time in his peak. Now, that being said, obviously, if you have a superstar coach who is very and not just superstar by training, but he actually is a phenomenal coach, that's going to help, right? And if you two are compatible, which is again like I said, all because you're an excellent coach doesn't mean that you're going to be compatible with the athlete. It's a relationship and like all relationships are different and that relationship has to be harmonious. If you have somebody who likes to be very negative as a coach and maybe you're too the other person's very self-conscious and gets offended by negative coach that you know it's not going to work out and he's going to need somebody else. Doesn't mean that that coach sucks. It just means that that coach wasn't compatible with your personality. Right? So even though you might have somebody who's very technically uh superior and you know has a proven track record, you two are just not compatible and you can't form a good relationship. Uh and you remember like if you're a pro alete, you're going to be training with that coach for many hours, hundreds of hours, thousands of hours. So if you guys are not jelling, it's not going to work out well. I feel it's more important in that situation to find a coach that's more compatible with you where your relationship's very sound. You could always supplement learning technique especially nowadays just by online. You you get online courses, you know, you can buy books, DVDs if they still exist. I think everything's online now. At least that's the direction I see it going. But you can find out a lot now where in the past that was very hard to do. Now it's very easy. So, and if your coach is not, you know, very rigid, he'll obviously be open to learning and he will probably be learning on his own, right? At least that's how I would see it. Like, I'm still watching videos and breaking things down and trying to improve my understanding of the martial arts and of the the human body because I want to achieve mastery. a goal that's impossible, but I'm gonna work towards it. Then I I feel any athlete or coach feels the same way. They're they're always trying to get better, always trying to see what's the new trend or what new methods of victory they can employ. Uh but ultimately, if I see a student that is struggling to progress, usually it's not the coach's fault, right? It's a student. Maybe they're not that uh committed to the martial arts because they have other responsibilities, which is fine. But it's very easy to put the blame on the coach and say, "Oh, you know, the coach sucks, you know?" And if that coach has never produced any talent, maybe there's a point there, right? But if that coach has other stars that are being developed, it's hard to trying to paint that picture. You might not be in a relationship that's compatible or you know you might have to shine the light on yourself and look in the mirror and realize maybe I'm the guy at fault here. Maybe I'm not being a good student, right? Maybe I'm not coming in. I'm not being humble enough. I'm not putting in the time or required and having the right mindset in order to progress the way I need to. And you know, like I said, it's not always the student's fault, but I feel more often than not the student is not truly committed to it. So like if I had to say what's more important having the best coach in the world or being the best student being the best student because the best student can learn from anybody, right? They don't need to have a superstar coach. I tell you this because I feel I'm one that's more towards the best student side of things versus having a great coaching because I never really had a lot of coaches in my career for a long time. You know, I had my wrestling coach, you know, TSO balls, who was the right coach for me at that time, which I need to develop toughness and a lot of endurance and mental fortitude, and that's what he provided. I don't feel I learned a lot of technical knowledge and again I'm not putting the finger on him because I probably wasn't there yet but he created the mold for me for being mentally tough and that's what I really needed at that moment in my life. You know my other coach Renie Ibera he was great. We just didn't have him I didn't have him for much time. Only had him for a year. Uh like a little bit over a year I think. So after that, it was essentially my brother and I learning on our own, watching videos. Every so often we would have another we would go attend a seminar or we' watch uh we'd have people come in for openmat and we would learn from them, but we never truly had like a or sensei or a master for a long period of time, right? So, I've had to learn by being a good observer or what in my opinion being a good student, finding information wherever I can and then recreating it and experimenting and working with my brother on it a lot. And we're essentially our own coaches. Like my brother would essentially be able to tell me things I needed to work on and I would tell him things that he would need to work on. So we work together but we're really kind of working from a a very small pool if you will of our existing knowledge and even so I was able to ascend to a world class level and be you know uh place third in the world beat multiple world champions beat an abs multiple absolute champions so uh I feel that's a great achievement for my part now if you would have given me a coach of a high level like if I would have been connected to someone like Danaher as a young guy, arguably I would have done a lot better, right? Cuz I would have learned a lot of things much quicker. But I feel there is value to learning the quoteunquote the hard way in the sense that you have to recreate the wheel. Uh because you have to learn and understand the principles behind what makes moves work much better because I didn't have anybody spoon feeding it to me. In math, it's kind of like you have to create your own formulas versus just using a formula your professor gave you or that that you read from the book, right? Like I had to do the proofs and myself, you know, by experimenting and, you know, doing trial and error and training and, you know, messing around in order to find out what actually works and why it works. But in a sense, that also gives you a lot more creativity in being able to twist moves around. I feel like that's one of the reasons I was able to create the Kimor trap system because the way I had to learn moves was to, you know, stumble upon them and then explore them into the full limit. Nobody told me that's not possible or that can't work. You know, there was no one there to say that, you know, whereas many people they might have had professors say, oh, you know, you can't do a guillotine from half guard or you can't do a kimura inside someone's closed guard. I didn't have that. So I was able to explore things and in fact yes I could do both. So again in my opinion if you ask me what's more important being a good co having a good coach or being a good student I'm going to pick 99 to 100 being a good student. That's my take on it. Uh you guys can let me know in the comments what you think about it and uh see you guys next week. Again, like I said, um I'm open to having guests here if anybody wants to be in there, but for the most part, I'm going to be doing this solo. So, if you are used to watching Breaking the Guard podcast and having my co-host, sorry to let you down. It's more than likely going to be me most of the time. Although, I'll definitely be welcome to having uh people come on the podcast with me. Thank you guys and I'll see you next