BTG 67 - New Year’s Resolutions Done Right

Hello, welcome to another episode of Breaking the Guard and happy new year. If you're watching this on New Year's again, it's January 1st. Happy New Year's. I hope you guys had a festive uh New Year's and everything has worked out. We'll talk a little bit about resolutions and you know it's very uh of course typical to make resolutions but I will give you a different approach on how to do it which will actually help to create real results versus you know the typical I'm going to you know lose 30 lbs and then you forget about it a week later. Um I'll talk about a couple things they saw. There was a Fury grappling event where they had uh basically a UFC fighters and famous fighters grappling against grapplers and one of the headliners was Aljine Sterling um grappling and I forgive me but my memory is terrible with with his opponent's name but um mostly not that interesting a match. his opponent immediately sat to guard and it looked like Aljo didn't really want to engage too much on the ground. So again, I'm not sure what the strategy is for victory. It looked like he went for some passes and whatnot, but a lot of circling and staying on the outside. At one point, the the only really highlight clip of the match, his opponent locked on an arm bar. Aljo got standing and spun him in circles until the guy let go and he actually escaped that way which was entertaining but uh other than that not much to see there. Uh he his opponent ended up winning the decision which he was upset about and his whole complaint was that uh you shouldn't be allowed to sit to guard like that. You wouldn't do that in a street fight. People are turning grappling into like a mockery of the sport. And the origin of the sport was of course self-defense. And this is not something you would do in a real life situation. You shouldn't be rewarded for doing that in competition. And few valid things I can say about that. one, I I don't like people who train for like sport jiu-jitsu where your whole game involves utilizing loopholes in the rules in order to win. Of course, that's what most competitors are going to do though because it the rules tell the fighter how to fight to win. So, you can't blame someone for doing that. But at the same time, I mean, my initial motivation for training martial arts was self-defense. So that's always been in my brother and I's minds when we teach at our gym at the Freestyle Fighting Academy. Everything is has the angle of self-defense. If we do teach something that's like sport, then it's noted. And usually that doesn't really happen. When I teach things, even if it's sport, I explain like this is the particular application of this. You could use this in a fight if you, you know, do it in this fashion. For example, playing uh half guard. In grappling, playing half guard is a very popular strategy. In MMA, playing half guard, not the greatest strategy. It's a good position to ground and pound for the top position. Um, you have to know how to use it. Particularly if you're somebody who likes playing deep halfguard where you're just under the leg and you have your legs closed and you just have one hand open. Again, in a street fight scenario, if you're just chilling there, you're getting pounded out, right? So, you could use deep half guard of course, but it has to be the dynamic where I get into it and immediately I'm working for a sweep or I'm doing something. I'm not just waiting there, right? Um, so there is some valid complaints, especially if you're a guy who's an, you know, former UFC champion coming from the MMA world and then going to grappling and you're seeing like you're, you know, you're not playing the same style, you're not playing with the same tempo. U, so I could see that frustration. However, counterpoint, you know, the rules when you got into the competition. So if you didn't train properly, that's your own fault, right? that you know going in there. They're going to reward this, they're going to allow this, and don't act surprised when somebody actually does what's allowed in the rule set. Uh if you don't like the rules, then you shouldn't compete or just do your best to go around them. I've complained many times about ADCC rule sets. I've never liked them, but I've competed in them for like 10 years, you know, so I just learned to do my best with that rule set. Um but on a broader point I do agree. I think people who rely on the rules to save them. Um while maybe the sport rewards it not great for real life scenario. And I think most people who are training martial arts are doing it for a mix of weight loss confidence and of course self-defense. So, if you're teaching people to do things that only work in competitions with particular rule sets, you're doing them a disservice. Again, that's my take on it at least. Uh, but on the other side of news, I saw Conor McGregor announce that he's going to fight in the UFC International Fight Week, which rather than being in June, because normally it's around my birthday in July, the first week of July, uh, they're going to do at the end of June. and he says he's going to be fighting Michael Chandler at 185 pounds, which I won't hold my breath on that one. You know, he's been uh teasing this for so long. I kind of feel like it's it's kind of ruined a little bit of Michael Chandler's um career because it's I think it's been over a year if I'm not mistaken since he's fought. And it's because they teased this fight when they did the show because I, if I remember correctly, they did the Ultimate Fighter where they were coaching against each other and the whole premise was they were going to fight each other, but then they never did. And then they keep teasing this all the way through. So, it's a I mean, if uh Chandler doesn't get the fight with McGregor, h what a wasted gambit. pretty much he took a bet that he was going to get this fight and he's thrown everything at it, you know, and now they're saying they're going to fight at 185. I mean, he's going to have to bulk up a bit. I mean, I know they're not that far off, but they're both pretty juicy from the looks of things, but they're probably walking around around that weight. Uh, I don't know. I haven't seen them in person in some time, so I couldn't tell you for sure. But basically, I was saying like, you know, McGregor doesn't have to do anything at this point. He's, you know, I think he was like one of the highest paid athletes. Uh I saw a clip of him recently where he actually made more than Ronaldo and uh there was this whole thing that he told Ronaldo beforehand that he was going to beat him and then a few years later he did beat him. And as far as being the highest earning athlete so I mean he doesn't need the money. So, uh, if he's fighting, I'm guessing it's just for the game of it, you know, something to challenge himself and maybe, you know, people like getting more money, uh, and maybe setting some records or something. I I'm not sure. I think for Chandler, of course, has a money fight. He hasn't made the type of money that, uh, Chandler, I mean, that McGregor, there we go. Uh, that McGregor has. So, he I'm I'm guessing he's been holding off, you know, kind of doing like how Negano uh was hedging his bets that he was going to get this fight with Tyson Fury. Everybody called him a fool until he he got it and then now he's a genius, right? And everybody's applauding him. So, uh, Chandler's on that same boat, but it looked like his, uh, his payoff is taking much longer to reach, and I hope he does because otherwise it's pretty messed up McGregor to lead this guy on for so long and not give him the dance. But, uh, again, with his history of, uh, of issues, it wouldn't surprise me if the fight never materializes, but hopefully it does because it should be a banger. Uh, someone's getting knocked out, that's for sure. But it is curious that they would do an international fight week because someone had mentioned this, which is a good point. International Fight Week is super hyped. So, that card is going to sell out already. So, it's I'm not sure if you would stack this on top. I mean, you would definitely put it over the top, but it seems kind of a wasted fight because if McGregor is in a fight, it's going to be a, you know, a big event, you might want to use it for an event that doesn't already have a lot of hype going into it. So, so you have another very profitable event. So, again, this is McGregor pitching this and I think they talked to Dana White. Dana White says it's in the works. They're talking, but he didn't say anything about dates, times, weight classes, opponents. So, who knows what's actually going on there. Just more hype, which McGregor is really good at. All right, now let's get into the the topic of the day, which is of course New Year's resolutions. Typically, people pick out things that they want for themselves and uh goals that they've been putting off. And people will famously put off a goal that they could have done earlier in that year and they wait, okay, I'll like November, December, I'll just wait till next year and then I'll start to change and do all these things, which for a few people rarely does work, right? uh a different approach which I would suggest is reflect look back on the past year and measure your output. What successes and failures have you had throughout the year? You know, so if you were on a weight loss journey, then maybe you should be taking track of, okay, where where did I start the year at? what weight and what weight am I now? How did my weight fluctuate throughout the year? What was I doing? You know, was I dieting? What diets worked? What what diets didn't work? What fitness programs work fitness programs didn't work? You know, and I actually look at the data. Now, most people don't keep track of the data, so then they can't do that and they had to rely on memory, which is faulty. If you guys have been following me, you know I write down everything I do. I keep everything on the app. I use My Fitness Pal. I'll use a bunch of different things to track. I have the, you know, the Fitbit. So, I have all different sorts of mechanisms to be able to be accountable for myself and also know what things work versus what things didn't work. But hopefully you have some type of measure of goals that you wanted to achieve that are important to you throughout the year. And you can reflect on what you have done throughout the year and then think to yourself, well, did am I moving in the right direction or has my plans failed so far? And if so, was it the plan that was faulty? Or was it uh I didn't have enough discipline to execute the plan or uh maybe there was some mitigating circumstances that made it difficult to continue uh executing the plan. Maybe you know the plan requires you know a lot of time and you didn't have a lot of time or financial resources that you didn't have etc. Right? So I would first before you make any resolution, think about what you have done over the past year. I talked about before I do journaling. So I at least do it a few times a month. I'm I want to go into next year doing it much more frequently. Ideally daily, but it could be tricky sometimes because you get busy, you forget, and you know, but it doesn't have to be much. At least in my mind, I just need to be able to write at least a paragraph, a few sentences of what's going on that's important for me to keep tabs on and also something to have progress, right? Like I find now that when I journal, I'll write about projects that I'm working on. I'll write about how physically how I'm feeling. Like uh earlier this month I got sick. So I wrote down on my journal the day I got sick, how I was feeling. And then once the symptoms resolved, I wrote down that day as well. So I can kind of keep track how long was I sick for? What did I feel? You know, what did I think was the cause? And in my case, I felt the cause was overtraining, right? Like I I had just come back from a long trip, so I I wasn't on the mat for some time. So I felt like, oh, I got to double down and make up for lost time. And I trained uh pretty much twice in one day, then three times the next day, and then one really hard morning session, and then the next day I woke up wrecked, right? And I I got sick that day. So I know, okay, that was me being, you know, full hearty trying to make up for short maybe lost time and just double time, right? So, I need to be more responsible uh and train at a appropriate volume. And I know this at least from my personal experience. I have this Fitbit thing and when my recovery is not great, my resting heart rate starts to climb up. I normally I'm somewhere between 58 and 62 resting heart rate. And once it starts going above that, I know I'm running into recovery issues, right? like I'm starting to get a lot of uh strain on my my body. And on the days leading up to that, I was like 61, 62, 63, 65, 69, you know, and then uh that was when I was like at peak illness. So, there's ways for me to track that. And again, because I'm writing things down, I'm observing data, I can know better like, oh, you know, I should have been paying attention to that a little bit more. Right? So I could have seen the signs of this happening. Right? So again, that's where journaling becomes useful for me. And I also write down things that I learned like if I take a class, I'll take notes afterwards in my journal, right? Like okay, I learned this, this, and that. I did this in sparring. This didn't work because of that. Right? So again, just think of it as taking notes. I think sometimes people think of taking a diary or a journal as being a very emotional heavy or storyline, which it could be if that's what you need to work out. For me, it's more usually more objective. Uh I'm looking to record data so that I can use it at a later date because I want to be able to reference this at a later point. But if you do have uh stuff that you have to work out in your head, then a journal is a great place to spill it out, right? where you can just, you know, you have problems that you're going through mentally or relationship wise that you need to air out and vent, then the journal is a great place to do that, right? And if you're doing that, it's going to give you better data to reflect on because even if you never look back on that journal, the fact that you took the time to write it down kind of registers in your mind what's important to keep track of, right? Because you wouldn't write something down if it wasn't important. So, if you took the time to write it down, there's a there's somewhere in your brain, maybe it's not on a conscious level, but at the very least at an unconscious level that registers that event, oh, this is slightly more important than everything else because he took the time to actually talk about this and write it write it down somewhere. So when you go to do your reflection at the end of the year then you'll that will probably come up pretty easily for you like oh okay this is an event that uh had these results and maybe I was looking for this instead right so uh without going overboard on the reflection I think I kind of made the point look through the past year important events important goals and how they resolved or are currently trending And then you can ask yourself, are they moving in the right direction? If they're not, what should I be doing instead? What's the new plan? How I'm going to execute the plan? What is the timeline for that plan's completion? What's the result that I'm looking for at the end? And now you have something to make a resolution with, right? Because you have data, you have some results, so you can change course and then use that as your resolution. So rather than just saying the blanket, you know, oh, I want to get into a better shape or I want to make more money or, you know, I want to have a better relationship, actually have the data that you know what's transpired in this past year. So you could actually make a much more detailed plan. Because if you just have goals that have no definite plans, they're just dreams. They're a pie in the sky. they're not going to really materialize too well. But when you have definite plans with concrete steps and you better yet you put dates and times and schedules now the only thing you need is discipline, right? And discipline is basically the muscle that makes you execute the plan. But everything's already in place. But if people just say, "Oh, I'm going to lose 20 pounds in, you know, in the next 3 months." but they don't say how they're going to do it, where they're going to go, whether it's a diet or fitness. It's not realistic, right? So, I would advise you not to do that. Reflect, create a solid plan, put times, schedules, dates, objective, measurable data that you can get results from. Right? So, again, I use the weight loss one because it's a common one. It's also easy to explain, but your goals could be varied, right? But if I'm going to do a weight loss goal, then I should be weighing myself on a a regular basis so that I know, okay, am I moving in the right direction with this plan? Is it working right? Am I dieting enough? Am I exercising enough? These are the type of things that are going to make it easier to stay on goal because as you start getting positive results, that's only going to help you continue on the path. You know, people always talk about you all you need is discipline, which is true, but it doesn't hurt to have motivation help you. And when you start getting results, you're definitely going to be motivated to work more, right? You shouldn't rely on motivation. I think that's the message you want to get across because motivation is fickle. It comes and it goes, right? The best analogy I've heard of this, I think, was Brian Tracy where he says, "Motivation is like a cup of water that's filled that has a hole and it's leaking. If you don't do anything to renew the motivation, it's just going to drain out. And if you're relying on that, then you're gonna, you know, you're going to dehydrate, right? You're going to lose all your motivation and then your goals are probably and your plans are going to fall apart if that's what they're relying on. I like to think of using motivation as a booster, right? Like your your muscle is your discipline, right? That's what you want to rely on because it doesn't matter how you feel like, you're still going to do it if you're disciplined. Now, if you're motivated and disciplined, I feel like that's only going to make your results improve better, right? Because now you have some extra passion for it. So, you know, why not have both? And if you know how to cultivate both, then you're I think you're a rock star, right? You're someone who could really get stuff done and be excited about it versus just being cold and just again better than nothing, just being a pure discipline machine. But I feel like it's a little more rewarding if you're actually motivated to do it as well, right? So for your New Year's resolutions, you know, reflect on your past year, create plans, and then make your resolution to execute those plans and have a timeline for the results. All these things make it so much easier to get things done. With that said, for the new year on the martial arts and fitness side of things, I am going to be continuing to expand on the website, davidmma.com. Uh, we've been running it now for, I think, like 3 months, more or less, and it's been going well. Very few errors uh that users have experienced, like just oneoffs that I was able to fix quickly. I been putting in new content every day as to my promise when I launched it. I actually I am overd delivering. I think I was saying four to five pieces of content a week. I've been putting it daily. There's a new email, new stuff coming on. I have the new courses coming in. I do want to get more courses out. I've been getting about one or two a month, which is fine, but I I really want to get more in there for you guys. So, that's something I want to work on a bit more. Um, and yeah, just trying to continue to deliver higher content and I'm going to start I've been more focused on making sure the functionality of the platform has been working really well. Uh, not as I haven't really marketed at all besides to that initial group of people who if you're watching this, you're probably one of those people that I invited into there. Uh, this next year I'll start growing it. I'll start marketing it, make it a more of a community, get some more interaction from you guys. Uh so people, you know, engaging with the content a bit more regarding comments and likes and stuff like that, using the form a bit. Um that's my long-term aspiration for that. I want to make that the the site that has everything that I do. It's very it's much easier for me to deliver content there. uh maybe from your guys end you might not see it as much, but for me it's so much easier. That that's why I'm able to be a lot more prolific uh with stuff that I'm giving you. That said, I could always use feedback. So, if you guys are enjoying this stuff, let me know. If you don't like certain parts, let me know, too. You know, that's why in the website there's a thumbs down as well as a thumbs up, right? I can only improve with uh the feedback that I receive. But so far, it seems people are enjoying it, so I'm happy about that. Um, on the fitness side of things, I want to I've been doing a new uh weightlifting program that I saw I think they called the Mad Cow 4x5 or 5x5. Uh, it's reduced my time in the gym significantly. I used to do an hour and a half, two hours. Now I'm at 50 minutes and I'm squatting three times a week, which sounds brutal, but after the first week and a half, I got used to it. So, I'm happy about that. Uh, those goals for me, squat 45 pounds, bench 350, and deadlift 500 lb. I'm currently I could do 325 for two, uh, 365 for three. Um, I haven't deadlifted heavy in a while. I think the last time I did 415 for three or something like that, so not my best numbers. I think at best I did 445 for five. Um, but I'm kind of rebuilding a little bit. I had a little hamstring injury, so they kind of sidelined me for a little bit on doing heavy deadlifts, but not too far off from those goals. And I feel those are very doable. Uh, for me personally, the squat was the limiting factor. So, over the past year, I've been cleaning up technique, focusing on getting more depth, and keeping uh doing better bracing. And I I feel that has improved a lot. Again, using tracking tools. I got a what do they call it? Basically, it measures the velocity and the power that you're producing while you lift. You attach a tether to a barbell so that when you squat, it measures the range of motion that you're moving it, how fast you're moving it, and you could put in the weight. So then it knows the type of power that you're producing. And it again gives you another metric to understand how you're lifting. and knowing where your true uh one rep max or three rep max is going to be. So, I've been using that for the past few months now, and I've been seeing improvements as I've been cleaning things up. So, I think um because uh my deadlift was limited by my squat, now I wanted to do a program that was heavy on squats, uh which this program definitely is. And I feel that's going to help get me to my goal. And again, this is the resolution, right? I was looking at past data and made a new plan and I'm executing it now, right? So, uh that's it in action there. So, I'm looking to do that. Weight wise, I'm pretty good. I'm 20 I'm around 202 to 205 on a given day. I would like to get myself under 200 around 195 pounds. Between 12 to 13% body fat. I'm probably closer to the 14% body fat at this point. I think maybe not, but maybe somewhere between 13 and 14, I think. Like to get a little bit lower. I feel like being leaner for me is better given that I'm 5'9. Um, makes it easier on my knees, too. And uh other than that, just continuing to learn uh improve my skills. I want to focus on playing my a game more in training. The past couple years, I've been doing the the Hanner Gracie of keeping it playful. Um, but I think I've been doing that for too long cuz I'm not really pushing myself as hard in training since I'm just kind of flowing a bit more this year. I want to start going a bit harder. Uh, playing a more competition style game. So, like being very top uh oriented, a lot of more pressure. It's gonna be harder for me initially because I'm gonna have to use a lot more cardio, uh, a lot more energy that I'm normally used to. So, uh, I want to be able to overcome that, improve my stamina a bit as far as, uh, like we talked about conditioning the other day. So, I got to really test my lactic capacity work a bit more, uh, to be able to tap into that for wrestling. And, uh, also want to return more into shooting. I've been playing a bit too much uh conservative. I think I was just more tentative of shooting cuz I train with a lot of guys with great guillotines and also with counter kimoras or whatnot. So, it was just always easier to avoid going for shots. But, I think uh I need to go back into shooting. So, I've been going to focus on on that as well. try to play a more small man wrestling game plan versus just trying to underhook everybody. Um, so those are things that on the martial arts and fitness side things I'm going to be working on. Also been on a diet point I've been skewing more carnivore and I think I'm going to continue to do that focusing mostly on animal products. I already, you guys know, I already eat a lot of bison, eggs, you know, cheese, bacon, stuff like that. I'm slowly weaning myself more and more off breads and flour, you know. Uh although I have a sweet tooth, so it's a little trickier. I still have my sweets. I bake everything at home. I make cookies, brownies, magic bars, muffins, but I don't eat a lot of them. I usually have one or two a day at most. So, I can still make it. if I was trying to be ketogenic, I could still be ketogenic while while doing that. All right, so that's another thing I'm doing as well. All right, so those are my goals, my resolutions for the year. Um, you guys do what you got to do. Hopefully you have a great uh new year and uh I'll see you on the next