BTG 78 - How to get off a Plateau

Hello and welcome to another episode of Breaking the Guard. On today's episode, we're just going to talk about one topic because I didn't find anything particularly newsworthy, uh, at least to me, that was remarkable. So, I want to talk about plateaus, how people get on them, and how to get off of them. Uh, one thing I will comment about which is something new that I'm doing is I've been following the carnivore diet for 11 days now. If I think I mentioned in the last podcast and I made a post talking about it, but uh just little progress report here. Still doing well. been able to do everything as far as training, uh, martial arts, jiu-jitsu, weightlifting, uh, light cardio, no issues. Still, I've been fortunate. I had somebody ask me, "Oh, but how how is bathroom time going?" Because if you guys listen to Joe Rogan and some other people that I know personally also, they were running to the bathroom after like a few days because I guess their digestive system was getting used to the new diet. Uh I fortunately didn't really have those issues. Uh like I said, I think it's because my diet was very carnivore adjacent. So it made it very easy transition for me. Right now I'm still eating the same macro amounts as far as over 200 grams of protein, 100 grams of fat. The only difference is there zero carbs now. Um so for me it was a very easy transition. Not hungry throughout the day. Uh, I'm only eating twice a day, 12:00 and around 7 8:00. So, it's made things significantly easier. Now, that's not to say that it does get a little boring at certain times because I'm just having meat, salt, and water. And if I need and I use beef tallow instead of butter or oil. So, I'm following a fairly strict uh version of the carnivore diet. So yeah, if you're not a big fan of meat, you could get bored of eating like a pound of ground beef and I try usually the breakfast I found I like doing is a pound of ground bison and then I mix up uh the dinner whether it's a ribeye, a New York strip, a skirt steak, ribs, you know, I just mix up the dinner one, throw in a bunch of eggs as well. Uh so that's been working for me. I did find that for me personally, having a very high fight fat content in a meal did make my stomach a little bit upset. Like I didn't feel very uh smooth, so to speak. uh when I lower that fat amount and I find that I'm functioning better at like 55% fat uh versus 45% protein on my ratio of calories, right? Which I know most carnivores are significantly higher like in the 70 80% fat. So I'm not sure it's just something that I'm going through or that somehow I'm different, but I found it optimal for me. All right. So, that's my update on carnivore diet. And I'll probably put another post a few days from now uh going more into detail. But in regards to plateaus, everybody who has trained the martial arts long enough has probably been on a plateau where they felt like they got stuck, where nothing was really changing. Maybe you have a plateau and it could be in many different respects. Some people feel like their skill level just plateaus and they don't get any better, they don't get any worse and they see other people around them improving. Or maybe somebody that they used to be able to beat soundly now starts becoming a challenge for them and they're not growing together. It's like one guy is getting better. is catching up to you and you're just staying put and you're wondering what's going on. Or you may have at times an opponent that both of you are just constantly deadlocked. You have a training partner that you just make no progress on and you're both always stuck in the same positions and no one ever really wins. So there's a lot of ways that you could be stuck in a plateau. And the main thing to realize is if you're in the plateau, chances are you're doing the same things repeatedly. And you know the definition of insanity as I understand it is doing the same things and expecting different results. Right? So there it's not to say that what you have been doing is wrong. Right? It's just that what you have been doing has yielded all the benefit that it's going to yield. and now you're stuck. Think of it like a gold mine. Maybe you're in there and the mine is fresh. Nobody has mined it yet. So, you're getting lots of ore out of there, but after a few years now, the mine's empty. Does that mean that you should have never mined it? Of course not. You've gotten a lot of value out of it. But at a certain point, there's no more value to get out of that mine. And if you were to stay there and to try to keep mining, you'd be crazy, right? If there's nothing in there, you're just wasting your time. It's the same thing that generally happens when people with that plateau. They're doing the same conditioning. They're not using new strategies. They're not learning new or or employing new techniques, and maybe they're not updating their recovery protocols or whatnot. So, they're getting the same results repeatedly. And if you're not happy with those results, then you need to shift things around, right? So, like I said, you it's silly to expect that you can do the same thing for your whole life. Much like if you've heard me talk about like the way you train when you're a teenager versus the way you train when you're 30s versus the way you train when you're in your 40s is all different, right? Because your body is changing, your experience uh levels and whatnot are changing. So, you're going to be doing different things the whole time. And that's something that we have to be constantly adapting. So if you find that you're stuck in a particular position that you're not making any progress in, you have to consider a few things. For example, either a I need to avoid getting into this position and employ a strategy that doesn't allow me to get in this position or uh b employ a strategy to escape this position and transition to another position or c find new ways of using that position. So it could become a useful for position for you and whatever you have been doing in that position you should probably stop doing in that position so that you can get different results. For example, let's say uh you find that whenever someone shoots in on in the takedown you jump for the gilly like Dustin Porier, right? You're going for that guillotine every time but every time you go for that guillotine you don't finish it and the guy ends up on top. There's a few ways we can approach how to fix this problem, right? One, we stop jumping the guillotine. We instead work to sprawl, get a front headlock, and then look, you know, to take the back from there or maybe go to anaconda choke or go to a dar choke. We do a different choke rather than that guillotine choke. This is again, we're going to avoid that position. Um B, we focus on tweaking our guillotine by learning new techniques, a different approach, different grips, different positions to land into. Maybe I don't drop into guard. Maybe I go into half guard instead so I can angle out a little more, right? Or maybe I try to sweep with the guillotine so I can get top position guilt for the mount, right? We think of a different way of using the guillotine. or we, you know, we just don't even think about going for guillotines at all. So, I mean, these are different ways of approaching that problem, right? And again, now we're going to change things up. We're not going to be on the same position anymore. And that's going to allow us to expand because maybe we're comfortable in that position that we know. And even though we're not getting better results, we're happy just being in the same place because at least we know how that looks like. We know how that game unfolds. But when we do something completely different now, we're not necessarily sure how that's going to end up. And maybe we're not that skilled in it because we haven't used the alternative yet. This means there's room for growth and that's what we're seeking, right? Because a plateau means no growth. So, if we're going to go into a new area that we're not good at, that means there's potential for growth. We can climb. Now, maybe it's a steep climb. So, it kind of sucks, right? That it's going to take you a lot more work to get good at it, but at least that means there's a path up. And in my opinion, that might be the better route. Now, if you found there was a path up that was a gentler slope, yeah, let's go down that way. That would be that's going to be faster returns. But sometimes you have to invest the time in in a harder climb in order to improve yourself. So again, there's aspects to this from the martial arts. What area of the game are you plateauing in? If you find that technically you're getting trounced and you're having a hard time, then we would assess what positions we have a problem with. And then what in particular in that position is it attacking from that position? Is it defending from that position? Is it escaping or is it controlling the position? You know, we're talking about submission. Is it about finishing it? And we can narrow down the details. Maybe I am doing a guillotine and I'm doing, you know, what I usually do, which is a ball and socket guilt, but that's not working out for you, then maybe we should think about doing a high elbow guilt instead, right? Like we can change things up from the same position to give it a different look and maybe that's going to yield us more results, right? So think we've talked about that position part quite a bit. Now another angle of this might be well I am gassing out really fast and I always have the same trouble point when people start putting a lot of pressure from top my guard wears out and then they start beating me up. So now here this is what I would consider a twofold problem. One, you might have issues with conditioning that you're not able to sustain output over time because you get fatigued. And two, it might be a mental perception issue. Like I said, like maybe you're a wrestler and you don't like being on your back. So whenever you're on your back, you're getting stressed out much faster. And as a result, you're getting worn down quickly, right, from anxiety more than the actual physical stress. So these are two things that we'd have to combat. And in that case, uh, one of the best ways of solving it, in my opinion, is exposure. Right? Rather than getting put to your back unwillingly and then having to try to confront this, we can willingly put ourselves in the back by forcing us ourselves to be there and then adapting. Obviously, we need to have some good technique and some goals as well. Like what would be my goal of playing off my back, right? like am I trying to get a submission or am I trying to stand up or am I trying to sweep? What's the time allotted that I should be able to do it in? And we can set up situational drills based off that where I might give myself a minute go and I should be able to escape at least once or maybe be able to score a sweep at least once. And now I have very clearly defined objectives and measurable results. And this could help combat an issue that you're having. Like I said, maybe you're plateauing in your guard game because you're just fatiguing too quickly or you're just freaking yourself out. The basic idea here is that we have to challenge ourselves and stop doing what we're normally doing, right? And this can also be from a a mental aspect as well. If you find that uh you're not learning as much as you were hoping from training, it might be either one, the source of your knowledge that you're you're you're supposed to be learning from is not delivering you the proper amount of stimulation. Maybe they're showing the same thing over and over again. So again, that in itself would be a problem. you're not going to learn anything. Uh well, you're going to learn less if you're seeing the same things over and over again. There's always fine points that we can improve on, but uh assuming that you've kind of leveled your way up significantly, then you have to supplement, right? Instead of just learning um from one source, start looking for other sources of knowledge, right? And nowadays, again, if you're you're coming to me, you're probably supplementing wherever you're training at normally. Uh so you're already a step ahead of that but you could find other places as of wealth uh books, audiobooks, you know, ebooks, lots of ways of supplementing your the sources of knowledge you have so that you can keep adding new content to your head and then you can bring that into your practice. So uh to summarize, to get out of the plateau, you need to change things up. You can't just do the same things you're doing harder, right? which is what some people think like oh uh you know I've been running five miles a day and I'm not getting faster now I'm going to run six miles a day you know at a certain point that's going to level off right if you went from one mile to 5 miles yeah that's a big jump and you're probably going to see some significant changes but at a at a certain point once you get to like 5 6 7 8 I mean like it's you're the diminishing returns on your investment of time right so instead of running maybe think you You know what? Maybe I need to start sprinting instead. That's a dramatic shift. Right now, we're rather than cardio, we're working on explosiveness. And that can shift how your energy systems are working. And you're going to develop more muscle and and power off of that, right? So, we got to really change things up. And like I said, this could be scary for people, especially if maybe you feel like you've plateaued off your top game or jiu-jitsu. you're very good at passing and whatnot, but off your back you're kind of stale, then my answer to you would be start forcing yourself to play on bottom all the time and start playing different types of bottom games. If you always play as closed guard, start playing butterfly guard, start playing half guard, start playing spider guard, you know, open guard, mix it all around and start giving yourself room to grow. Remember to to grow, you have to be putting yourself at the position where you're not at the top. Like I said, if you're the best at wrestling and you're the best at top passing, there's going to be less opportunity to grow from there, right? You're already towards the top of the mountain. You got to put yourself in positions where you're closer to the bottom. The lower you are in that position, the higher the possible gains from working there, right? So you shouldn't view the weak points of your game in a negative light like ah you know you should think of them as big opportunities right if I have a crappy deahiva guard that's good news that means I can develop a great dehiva guard and now I have much more potential for growth I'm not going to be stuck in the same spot I'm moving up now so you shouldn't see the weaknesses or the defic efficiencies in your tool set negatively. There are opportunities for growth. But if you stay only where you're comfortable, only where you're best at, you're going to have much more limited potential for growth. Not to say that you can't get better at something. I'm still doing kimoras like now like 14 15 years later but I know that there's much less room for growth in my kimora game as there is in let's say my plata game right so balancing those out is important and you might have heard me before like you might say hey this kind of contradicts what you've said in the past about specialization and I would tell you that's not necessarily true I am a big believer brand specialization, but I always tell people like you should be able to move on to something else to specialize in, right? So, if you specialized in one area, let's say Kimora, and you went there for a while, once you start getting diminishing returns, I might then move on to something else like, okay, now let's work on the saddle position and get really good at that. And then that's all I'm going to work on for the next couple months. And once I start getting pretty good at that, then I might shift into something else, right? Like I feel like specializing is going to give you the most exposure, which is what we've been talking about, to a weak point. And once we have overexposed it and we've gain a lot of information from it, once I feel like I'm not getting that much out of that position of forcing it that much anymore, I can shift to something else. And of course, it's never uh it's never a closed door. or I can always jump back into something I've been working on for a long time and try to squeeze a little bit more out of it. But whenever I want to try to get massive growth, I need to go into a place where I have a massive weakness. So those are my views on plateauing. And if you've experienced plateaus and this information is useful for you, let me know. Or likewise, if you have a unique way of getting out of plateau that I didn't mention, go ahead and share with me. And again, I hope you guys enjoyed tuning in. I'll see you guys next week.