BTG 77 - Experimenting in College

Hey guys, what's going on? David Avalon with another episode of Breaking the Guard. Let's get started with the news here. The first one item I wanted to cover was, of course, UFC 299 was yesterday. I tuned in to watch the fights and uh some pretty good matchups. So, I'll run down the list of uh some of the matchups I watched that I thought were interesting to see. Starting from the the top, there's a newcomer I man, his name is a mouthful, but Roelis Despain versus Josh Parisian. And I'll just say that I'll go with the first name, Rebelis, right? Cuban guy who's a Taekwondo Olympic uh bronze medalist I believe huge 6'7 261 pounds just enormous guy and apparently hasn't had a fight last longer than 10 seconds which is insane so a lot of hype going into it and he lived up to it right he ended up getting a knockout in 18 seconds so this was his longest fight in his career here, which is insane. Uh, very weird. It looks like a very heavyweight style fight of just I'm big enough to hit you and I can put you down at any moment cuz he he looked like he threw a high kick, slipped, and as he was coming up, his opponent tried to rush him and at that point he just counter struck and instantly took his guy out. So, impressive start. I'm sure he'll make uh a lot of interesting fights in the future for the heavyweight division. Uh, moving forward, Pedro Munoz and Kyler Phillips is another interesting matchup. Uh, Kyler is known as the Matrix as his fight name. Very fast, lots of combinations, you know, he worked everywhere really well and, you know, outclassed Pedro Munoz, which is not an easy task, you know. So, he's a real deal. uh particularly his combinations were very impressive because he was just throwing everything. So it was really really technical uh matchup. Uh so I'd like to see more from him in the future. There's Rafael Dos Sanjos and Mateesh Gamro. Uh again is known for being a very good grappler. Uh not a phenomenal striker. So, it was interesting to see this matchup because with Doanos, he he's dangerous everywhere, but uh it proved to be the case in the beginning where it looked like Gamerock got rocked a few times by Dos Angeles who was doing desperation shots, but he started to find his groove in the second round and was able to score a quick taked down and get a little lot of ground control and likewise in the third round and he ended up winning uh the decision just again to outgrapple do those anos is not an easy task and he kind of made it look easy after the the the first round was a rough round for him but once he got into the second and the third it was just smooth sailing for him. So next matchup that we had was Almeida versus Curtis Blades and uh again another matchup of two really massive heavyweights. What was interesting was uh that Curtis Blades was having kind of a rough time in the beginning of this fight. Helton was actually out grappling him. Uh which I guess was kind of unexpected. I was expecting uh some striking from him because you know Curtis Blaze is known for being a guy who takes people down and starts elbowing them to and grounding them. But Yelton was able to take him down. uh not do anything really significant yet, but he was getting the ground control. In the second round, it looked like he got rocked a little bit, try to go into a shot Yelton and Curtis Blades was able to stuff his head, sprawl him out against the cage, and he was still trying to finish the single leg, had his head buried under Curtis Blade's stomach, and it starts hitting him with hammer fist to the side of the head. And you normally people see this and think, "Oh, that's just like scoring points. you're not doing damage, but when you were dealing with a heavyweight like Curtis Blades, it's serious. And he ends up knocking him out unconscious simply through those hammer fists. And it looked like I didn't respect it at first because he just stayed there. But then he ate like two, three, four, five, six, seven, and then you could see he starts to collapse and just completely falls apart. Which goes to show you you have to respect all strikes, especially in the heavyweight division, right? If you're a lightweight, you know, you don't have as much mass on you, so maybe those are not going to do much. But whenever someone can repeatedly strike you and you can't do anything about it, you're in a bad spot. And you don't have to be a power striker to put someone down. If I can repeatedly hit them consecutively, right? Like remember like a concussion is when your brain slams into your skull, right? Now, one hard blow can cause that vibration to take place, right? Right? Because remember your brain also has uh fluid surrounding it. So like it's not touching your skull, right? So there's some barrier of protection. But if you get keep getting hit repeatedly, that thing's going to start to shake around a little bit and they're going to start adding up, you know, so ultimately you will get knocked out and put unconscious. So you even if it's light strikes, you know, or like these weren't light by any means, but not heavy, you know, one punch KOs, you can't allow someone just to hit you. And I think the idea that particularly um when you're shooting in on a double or single, we've seen time and time again, especially again in the heavyweight division where people can throw elbows to the side of the temple or punches. That's a real threat and you have to respect it because Yel made a big mistake in not like even trying to defend it and cost him the fight, right? So, good job on Claire's Blades for getting that one. Uh then we had Yadang Song and Peter Yan. And uh this was another good match. It started off pretty rough for Peter because Yang Song was very fast, explosive, and was taking control of the first round in my opinion. But then as the fight wore on, like in rounds two and three, looks like Peter Yan found his rhythm and he also started mixing in uh takedowns and uh was able to control on the ground a little bit, but mainly from the the boxing really. And you could see that song started to slow down quite a bit. Uh it looked like maybe he thought he was going to finish this fight in the first round, so he was really letting out it, but he definitely slowed down a bit where now Peter Yan was starting to find his rhythm, scoring body shots and whatnot. Very good fight for Peter Yan gets him back into winning form. This next fight was also a really good one, which is Gilbert Burns and Jack Dad Delana. Uh, Jack's known for being a very good boxer. Uh, Gilbert's good everywhere, but I would say his grappling is his main uh, asset. And in this fight, it was a close fight. Depending on how you scored it, the first round, it could have gone either way. Um, I would say that Jack probably had a little bit better of the standup, but then Gilbert got a takedown. didn't really do much with it, but he did score it at the end of the round. So, it's one of those things like, does that score enough in the judges minds to give him the the win of the round? I don't know. The second round was all jack. Uh, he did a really good job controlling the stand up and scoring some really good shots. In the third round, um Gilbert got a taked down. A lot of good ground control, but didn't really do too much damage. So, going into it, you can make a case once again that I've seen it both go both ways where like you could score it for Jack or you could score it for Gilbert. But it looked like Gilbert thought he was losing because he started going really hard uh after Jack escaped his back control, got back to his feet, and he lunged in immediately for a double leg and Jack caught him with a beautiful time knee. And then from there it was all over. And uh some of the Gilbert fans like, "Oh, he blew it." You know, he was he could have won if he coasted to his decision. I had the feeling he would have lost the decision. Uh because damage-wise and the effective aggression, it was still on Jack's side despite all the ground control because uh Gilbert never really unloaded um on the ground for good ground pound in my opinion. Whereas, you know, Jack was landing good shots and obviously he was able to finish the fight which showed that he was accumulating damage. So, it was a good match for him. Then we had Kevin Holland versus Michael Paige. And th this was an interesting matchup. This is Michael Paige's first fight in the UFC and he's fighting another tall lanky guy right in Holland. Both of them are showboats. But it was interesting to see that uh Holland was outshined by Paige in showboating. And uh you can see they were talking crap to each other, laughing a lot. But what was very impressive is how quick Paige is. I mean, I've seen him fight a Bellator, but uh in this fight, he looks phenomenally fast. Like so fast that he would trip over his own feet sometimes because he's doing the karate style stance where he's standing very hor u very bladed, right? So he's sideways in his stance. And um he was able to blitz just going in and out. And he would come in so fast that sometimes he would just sweep. like not sometimes, quite a few times he would sweep Holland and just let him fall and then back away. And um Holland never really got any good bites on him. Um no real good strikes. He did get to his back a couple times, but Paige did a good job of getting back up to his feet, fighting hands, and escaping. He still and he even admitted that as well that he still has a lot to do to become a top tier fighter. He ended up winning a decision against Holland. But I think what he needs to do is add a grappling uh to his game plan. And the reason I say this because he was able to take down without really trying Holland probably like five, six, seven times just by coming in with a blitz. And if you guys seen like Leoto Machita, who's also another, you know, has a similar strategy as far as blitzing and fighting from the distance. So he would come in and get behind Holland's hips. So let's say Holland's facing this way. He would strike, get in. So his torso was in front um and his legs were behind and to just push him over. And he was just so fast in doing that that he was able to sweep Holland many times. And a lot of times he was also able to get to his back just because he would come in circle around but rather than try to attack the back he would just push him away. So that would be something to add to his game because right now he's seems apprehensive of fighting on the ground. The one time he did get taken down from the half guard, he was kind of a mess. Like he was under hooking the wrong side, he wasn't doing the right defensive things from a ground guy. He He looks like less than blue belt level of grappling. Probably white belt. So that's a big hole in his game that he needs to patch up. He was able to stand up pretty well and escape the back. So he's probably been doing more counter grappling. But a guy like him, if he can work back at takes and, you know, actually taking advantage of grounded positions, especially being how tall he is, he could do a significant amount of damage for ground and pound if he had the confidence not to get stuck in a ground game and getting submitted, right? Uh, but it'll be interesting to see how he develops in the UFC. Then we had Dustin Porier versus Benasing. Denise, I hadn't seen much from Benois yet. So, it was interesting to see him fight against uh someone as tough as Dustin, and he was, you know, being the bricks out of Dustin early in like the amount of pressure that Ben was doing was insane. A lot of in your face, grimy striking. And mind you, he was getting clipped every so often and dropping down, but he just kept pushing forward and uh getting takedowns, getting to the back, but once again, a lot of ground control, not a lot of damage, right? Like the best thing that he was doing as far as damage was wearing out Dustin because it was so fatiguing just to watch the fight with the amount of pressure that Benois was putting on him. So again, very effective in keeping pressure on him, but unfortunately for him, it looked like uh in the second round, he started getting tagged a bit too much where he was getting forced to do desperation shots time and time again. And one of those he ended up getting clipped pretty hard and getting KO'ed by Dustin. So it was another good win for the Diamond. But I will say there was a major lost opportunity for Benois that I felt that he could have probably won the fight, which he had Dustin down, belly down, both hooks in, postured up. Now, instead of ground and pounding there to soften up the choke, he was just trying to force the choke the whole time. And by doing so, he gave Dustin some time to try to roll off that position and and work into a back escape. If I'm in MMA and I got a guy belly down and I'm sprawled out with the back mount, hooks, even the greatest like BJ Penn, if he got you there, he was ground and pounding the hell out of you. It's a very strong position. You got leverage. You got the back. Your opponent has no way of defending these shots other than covering up. and you're not going to cover up that well. Even if you got your glove here, you're still going to get some of that blow transferred. And you do that for long enough, especially in modern MMA, they're going to call a TKO because just putting up your hands is not going to be considered enough of a defense. So, I felt like that was a one opportunity that could have easily turned into a TKO or, you know, at the very least done some damage because other than that, um, I thought that was a shame because he was doing so well, but he ended up losing in the second round. Finally, main event, Shauna Mali versus, uh, Marlon Vera. This fight, Maron, um, looked very tentative. He was using a high guard and shelling up a lot. Uh it was surprising to see how quick Sugar Sean was. He looked like light years ahead of him in speed. He was able just to move in and out in and out very quickly. and uh he was kicking him a lot, punching, coming from different angles, just doing a really phenomenal job of and pretty much all five rounds he won unanimously. I'm not sure what the game plan was for Marlin because he never went for a takedown clinch. So, it was clearly not supposed to be a ground fight, even though I think personally that's where I would take this fight um uh against somebody like him, but never really tried to close him in or box him in. uh he was seemingly thinking I guess he was going to strike with him but he he didn't throw much and he let um Marlin I'm sorry um Sugar Sean control and fight at distance and he was just able to snipe him constantly if I was the corner I know the corner did say to put pressure because there was a few moments I think in the fourth round where he started to connect a bit and it was when he was pressing him forward, right? So, he was able to put a lot of pressure and you know, Cheeto has a chin so he's got to take advantage of it since he's so much slower and get into a slugfest with this guy and he only did that a few times and when he did it was a it was good exchanges for him. So, I'm not sure where his head was at or what the strategy that was worked on, but it was really a terrible strategy because he was sitting back more and really guarded. And I hate when people in MMA rely on a guard for a long time because uh you're going to get body shoted. You're going to get hit quite a bit and uh it doesn't allow you to really work well, especially if you're doing that against a guy who's much faster than you. They're just going to tee off on you. You know, you have to use head movement level changes. I felt like for me, I know I'm a grappling stylist for MMA, but Cheeto is a good grappler, you know, and he should have taken advantage because he's I if I remember correctly, he is a better grappler than Marlin. So, it's surprising that he never tried to take it to the ground. And furthermore, even if you don't want to fight on the ground, by creating the level changes and even just fainting, you know, for the the takedown, it's going to create an additional variable to think of. But he never once hinted at going for a takedown and surprisingly didn't use low leg kicks at all, which he won his first fight with him with leg kicks. So very confusing. like I feel like this loss was poor game planning or poor followrough of a game plan because I don't know how he expected to win in that fight. So, kind of disappointing because I was rooting for Cheeto, but uh Sugar Sean did an amazing job. He he looked fantastic and kudos to him. Now, another event that happened while, as you guys might have known, I was traveling quite a bit for the past couple weeks. So, I was in Miami at my home gym of the Freestyle Fighting Academy, teaching classes there and visiting family. Then I went to Honduras to go scuba diving. Uh, so I unfortunately I couldn't cover this event which is uh UFC 5 Pass Invitational number six. I watched it on online. Uh, great show. It looked like it definitely improved as far as the athletes understanding and taking advantage of the rules. I remember it because they changed the rule set I think in in the fifth one which was rather than doing 10 minutes no score and then EBI overtime they do 10 minutes no score then they go into like a five minute but scored but in the 10 minutes you can get penalized and those penalty points will transfer into the the scoring period in that the fifth one there was massive amount of penalties being thrown around everywhere kind of a mess. It looked it didn't and a lot of overtime matches didn't go out that well in my opinion. This time I don't think anybody got a penalty point in the regulation and there was matches getting finished. Uh maybe a couple decisions if I recall correctly. So a much better execution of the rules. So I was happy to see that. I think it's a lot better doing it that way versus the EBI over time in my opinion. Now, as far as the matchups, uh quite a few. The ones I'll go into that I felt were the most telling. One, Mason Fowler and Pedro Mourinho. Again, uh Mason Fowler undefeated in UFC fight pass events and his streak remained against Pedro Mourinho is just and he was able to get him with an arm triangle if I remember correctly. Just uh absolutely fantastic. you know, he's just a solid grappler and and that fight pass on UFC fight pass cannot be touched and he called a shot against Nicholas Maragali. U so that's an interesting matchup as well. I always like seeing Mason because I didn't realize how heavy he is. He's 230 lbs or something. So he's a the unit of a of a dude. I think he's around my height, maybe like an inch taller. So he's definitely stacked a lot of weight, but a a very good match from him. There was Nicholas Maragali versus Mate Denise. And Nicholas crushed Matas, lots of pressure. If you watch him from standup, he's just collar tying the whole time. U just pulling his head down, pulling his head down, pulling his head down, fatiguing him. And then once he got him on the ground, he just melted him, got into the mound, pressured him, and uh he had called out doing an arm bar before the match and looked like he wanted to get an arm bar, but he ultimately got to his back and got into a renegot. I mean, he's definitely looking like a very difficult uh matchup for anybody. And it'll be interesting if they do. I believe they have that match set now for Mason Falder versus Nicholas Maragali. So, that's a very good matchup. It'll be very interesting to see. Uh, I would definitely like to see that. But, if you guys want to model like a good game plan, I think Mary Gi has it. He's very active. Lots of pressure for the standup. Doesn't take any big wrist takedowns. He's not shooting in that much. Uh, he's definitely not dropping to his knees or getting his head under his opponent. It's all snatched single legs or collar ties into front headlocks. Uh so these are very lowrisk uh takedowns that don't cost you anything. He does do also likes to do a lot of uchimas and uh yeah and then from the ground is just pretty much like Gordon lots of heavy pressure just weighing on the guy collecting their arms getting into that Smount and forcing the arm bar the back exposure. So it's a simple game plan but obviously it works really well. The next match was Nick Rodriguez versus Roberto Himenez. I believe this was like the third time meeting and uh they did have some leglock exchanges, but nothing that anybody could score on. Ultimately, this match was won in overtime when uh Nick got to Roberto's back and was able to score from there. So, he ends up taking that last match in and getting a W. Nothing super impressive that stood out to me here, but Nick's a hard guy to beat. He's got great wrestling and his understanding of the grappling game has significantly gone up quite a bit. His his passing game is very strong and very good at attacking the back, very good at escaping the back. Again, he's always always going to be a major problem for anybody that faces him. Final match was Craig Jones versus Lovado Jr. And uh it's crazy to see how easy Craig Jones made this match look. Okay, because Lovado is a monster. But Craig Jones did what he does to everybody when he's significantly better than them, which is he just pulls guard, goes into a ZG guard or knee shield from half guard and just plays there a little bit. He'll then go into that far side leg lock, pull them over, finish them. And that's exactly what happened here. What was interesting and later on the week I do a breakdown of it so you guys can check it out on the website davidmma.com is that when he does his role rather than going into the saddle he went to an inside ashi but rather than having like the game over position where the leg that's threaded over would go under the far leg he left it like a triangle over the top of his hips and lobato tried to stand up to get out of it. So he had this top triangle covering both his hips was able to square a back sweep off of it. But then the bottom position when I saw that like oh this is devastating because you have no easy way to escape. There's no easy bump to hip over. So you really get entangled. So that was my takeaway of the day that that setup and that uh finishing position was really really strong. I'm surprised that I really haven't tried doing that because it's easy to do, arguably easier than doing it the the classic way I learned the game over position going under the far leg cuz sometimes, you know, you have to kind of maneuver it in. But going over the hips is very easy. So, uh something to play around with. Again, it'll be on my website in the coming week. You'll be able to see that breakdown. But, uh yeah, uh as far as grappling news, that's that. On a closing note here, I would tell you guys if you're not testing things out, you're missing out. You're not growing. And what I mean by that is it pays to experiment doing new things in your life, whether it's your your diet, your training, education, if you just do the same thing over and over again, you're not getting new stimuli. You're not growing. I mean, you could be growing, doing the same thing, but it's going to be uh much slower, right? Cuz you're basically specializing. So, at a certain point, you're on that plateau. It's not a lot of gains versus when you move into new territories. For example, I just started playing around with the carnivore diet. Currently, I'm 4 days in. Uh I'm doing a strict carnivore diet, all meat and eggs, and that's it. I'm doing my bison cuts of ribeye, New York strip, ground beef, skirt steak. And uh so far it's been pretty good. I eat twice a day, 12:00, 7:00. Uh eating about a pound, pound a half of meat per meal. So about two pounds at least per day. No, zero carbs, no fruits, veggies, grains, anything like that. Um, so, uh, why would I do that? Because you guys, if you've seen, I already have a page here on the website about diet, which I've gone into quite a bit, and it's been a diet I've been doing for the past six years, and has yielded good results, great results, really. Well, because I want to know if there's something more I can get out of my diet. And I read the book, The Carnivore Diet by Sean Baker. It kind of made me think, oh, you know, there's a some good logic here. Uh, if the research they're saying and the anecdotes they're they're sharing are true, there could be some significant benefits that I could take part of. I I'll make a post about it later so I don't dig too much into this. But the main thing is what I'm trying to say is always be open to trying something new that maybe contradicts what you're currently doing, right? because it's good to understand other viewpoints and other approaches, other strategies, even if you have a winning strategy, right? You know, there's a lot of people that come from the school of if it ain't broke, don't fix it, right? And yeah, there's some truth to that, but at the same time, maybe what's working for you that yields maybe this amount of results, right? there's another approach that makes this amount of results, right? So, while this is working, this is working better, right? But you won't get here if you're like, "It ain't broke. Don't fix it." And you just keep doing the same thing for the rest of my life. Right? There's nothing stopping you from trying something and then you're like, "Oh, you know what? This actually sucks. It got less results. Let's go back to the control." Right? whatever you're doing that you can reliably get good results would be like your control and then we can experiment by doing different things and then we can see did it work did it get good results do we do we switch and do something new or we go back to what we're doing before right so you have to have that variability in I think many things in your life right so especially when we're talking about jiu-jitsu or MMA this could be just strategies if you've been a guy that forces half guard hard and then passes from like a like maybe you have a slow and tight passing philosophy. It would then pay to say, "Let me try doing some fast and loose passing, right? Because it could be hard to do the same strategy over and over again, especially when your training partners know what you're doing, right? For example, if I know like uh me and Jake were talking about this the other day, like we grapple with each other all the time and we were starting to get like stalemated quite a bit because I knew the strategy he was going for, he knew the strategy I was going for and we just stalemated. And what was funny, uh the next time we rolled, we both opened up our games at the same time, you know, and afterwards we laughed about it because he's like, "Oh, you were doing a lot of new stuff." I'm like, "Yeah, because I realized we still made it the past like three training sessions. I'm like, "Okay, let's just do something different now." Right? Uh and it was a much funner role. We both got a lot more out of it, right? And I learned some things that I can use that were effective, right? So, this only happens if you're open to doing a new path, right? And you'll find, like I said, especially with people you train with often, if you do the same things, they'll eventually counter it or at least nullify it. So, you have to kind of expand your game and move into different things. But that only comes with experimentation. And again, that requires a degree of humility because you're going to have to let go of something that you know works to try something else that may work and realize that you may fail as long as you could limit the circumstances of failure. Like I wouldn't tell you try to do an experiment when you're about to compete or do something entirely different at work that you've never tested before when all the the lights and cameras are on you. Like no no like experiment in the lab. All right? And then once you can prove it works in the lab, then we can try it out in the real world. At least that's my take on it. I hope you guys uh get some value from the idea of experimenting with new things. And uh I'll see you guys on the next