Tag Archives: learning

My Purple Belt Good Fight Experience

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lex-fridman-gold-purple-belt

Update: here are the videos of my matches with commentary.

I competed at The Good Fight ”Tournament of Brotherly Love”. I wrote exactly one year ago a post about how I’m happy to see the evolution of this tournament. It’s really has come a long way. It runs on time, runs well, attracts some great competitors, refs, organizers. It’s expensive (around $80), but it’s worth it. It’s still not on the level of IBJJF in terms of the number of competitors for purple, brown, and black belt divisions. My division (purple belt middleweight) had 8 guys. Some IBJJF tournaments will have less, but the bigger ones will have 30+ purple belts. Still, it’s growing, and the important thing is they keep providing a good experience

I definitely had fun competing. I won gold in my division with three tough matches (with two submissions). I ended up not doing the absolute division. The 2 hour wait killed me this time. I went to bed at 4:30am last night due to a paper deadline, so while the lack of sleep didn’t affect me during the actual matches, it did contribute to me crashing afterwards. I have to figure out a system for myself of something like taking a nap between divisions to get refreshed for the open. It’s tough every time to weather that 2-8 hour wait (depending on the tournament) between the weight division and the absolute division.

tim-hart-coachingI was reminded today how much I like being a purple belt. Everyone I went against threw a different technical game at me. There was no aimless aggression. Especially my first and third matches were against the type of guys who compete and win A LOT. They were relaxed, focused, and had a clear gameplan. I’m sure they are the ones who would rise to the medal stand in any purple belt division whether it be 8 people or 80 people. I had to come back from behind in both matches, and could have easily lost both. I love matches like that because it gives me stuff to work on, and still I get to enjoy the good simple feeling that comes from winning a match. I’m sure I’ll face both these guys again, maybe at the IBJJF New York Open next month, and I look forward to the challenge. In fact, one of the cool things about competing is going against the same people as they go up the ranks and evolve their game. In a way, we evolve together, responding to flaws that the other reveals.

I met a lot of old and recent friends, which is really the best part of these tournaments. It’s like a battlefield reunion. I caught the above in-action shot of Tim Hart coaching. He was intense and very precise about his on-the-mat instruction. Great stuff as always.

Thanks to everyone who teaches me, kicks my ass, and pushes me at Balance. Special thanks to Aldo and Marco for coaching. Marco was a man of a few words, but they were the right ones. Aldo is actually a brilliant coach. Before today, I thought of him as a competitor and knowledgeable jiu jitsu guy, but I didn’t realize that he was also the Sun Tzu of jiu jitsu coaching. The memory I’ll take away from this tournament is Aldo saying “You did good. Made me proud”. That made me feel like a Game of Thrones character returning from battle.

aldo-lex-fernando-tony

The Logic of Movement

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movnat-cat I saw the cat picture to the left on Reddit with the title “We actually had to help him down… Idiot”.

This immediately reminded me of the several discussions I had with Josh about movement (motivated by his work with MovNat).

There are many times in jiu jitsu that I have put myself in a position where I felt very much like the cat in the picture, wondering (1) how the hell did I get here and (2) how the hell do I get out of here?

Kinematics of Humanoid Robots

Relevant side note on my work in computer science: While I don’t build humanoid robots myself, a lot of the research I do brushes up against the immense challenges of programming the kinematics of movement. It’s always humbling to learn all the things that the nervous system takes care of without requiring active cognitive input from us. A lot of the stuff you (as a human being) take for granted (in terms of how you, for example, pick up a cup of coffee) is actually accomplished by an incredibly complicated system. Most of the details of voluntary movement are handled just below the level of consciousness. You just think “raise arm” and your arm goes up.

Learning to Walk Again

In jiu jitsu, we have to return to some of the same problems we had as toddlers when learning to walk. You have to once again actually start actively thinking about minute movements. You have to start thinking about where every part of your body is, and how to get from one point to another against a resisting opponent. Of course, if you have to think about it, it probably means you are going to move very awkwardly. After you solved a particular movement problem in your head many times, it starts slowly drifting below the surface of consciousnesses where it becomes more instinctual and less “cognitive”.

So, in the above example, the cat might put itself in that tricky tree situation a few times, and learn either not to go into that position any more or figure out a chain of movements that get it out of that situation in a safe and consistent way.

Practical Movement in Sport

The discussion Josh and I had that was particularly relevant was “arguing” about what sport trained you to be agile in the widest variety of practical movements. Gymnastics was the one we agreed on. I think that in jiu jitsu it can be easy to narrow your range of movement to just your particular “A game” and in so doing makes you less able to deal with tricky situations that your opponent might put you in by exploiting a moment’s error. Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way, if you open up your game (in terms of movement) when drilling and training.

MovNat and Ginastica Natural

I think MovNat is motivated in part by this goal of helping you train a wide range of practical movements that you might not always get to train when focused on a particular aspect of your jiu jitsu game. Of course, it has a few other philosophical underpinnings outside the scope of this post, like keeping the workout fun, interesting, and goal-oriented.

At one of Saulo Ribeiro’s seminars I attended, Saulo emphasized the effectiveness of dynamic movements outside the scope of your jiu jitsu game. His favorite approach was something called Ginastica Natural, but I think there’s probably a lot of different programs of that kind all governed by a focus on a wide range of efficient movement.

Training for Competition with Higher Ranks

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damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-dontOne of my goals in training for competition is to train as hard as possible with as little ego as possible. What I mean by that is, I focus on attacking aggressively with control and good technique, but if I’m caught off-guard by my training partner, I don’t use crazy spazzy power rage mode to get out the bad situation like I might in competition.

In general, I have a geriatric training style, where I move slowly with a strong focus on never putting any part of my body in a weak position. That’s good for not being swept, passed, or submitted, and it’s also very good for avoiding injury.

Now here’s the tricky part… There’s a catch 22 in training hard with competition-ready brown and black belts who are going at 100%. If I want to step up to their level and challenge them at least in some positions, I have to go 100% myself. But because they have superior technique, they constantly put me in vulnerable positions that threaten injury. So I’m less inclined to go 100% when there is a constant threat of injury. But if I go less than 100% then I have no hope of getting anywhere with them except inside a triangle or at the bottom of mount. That’s the catch 22.

I get a lot from rolling lighter with higher ranks, because they reveal the flaws in my game. But when I’m training for competition, I’m not looking at exposing the flaws in my game broadly speaking. I’m looking to pull every training partner (white belt to black belt) aggressively into my “A game” where I at least have a brief chance.

I’m not quite in competition mode yet, but these are the thing I think about, and have recently had conversations with a few fellow purple belts about. In the end, no matter what, I believe that quantity of training is important. You need to do whatever you need to do in order to get a lot of sets in with minimum risk of injury and with maximum mental focus on constantly improving your technique.

Side note: I’ll often write blog posts that I’m not happy about, because what comes out on the screen is a lot different than what was in my brain. I sound like a tunnel-visioned asshole, while I think of myself as more of a big-picture asshole.

Specialization and Mastery: Massage the Octopus for 40 to 50 Minutes

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I watched Jiro Dreams of Sushi while I was sick and found it to be full of simple wisdom on how to get good at anything:

  1. Do it every day.
  2. Do the same very select set of tasks.
  3. Keep trying different ways of accomplishing those tasks with the goal of finding a better way.

octopus_by_leovilelaJiro is a chef who narrowed his attention on just sushi. No soup, no salad, no noodles, no fish not in sushi form. For that matter, rice has to be part of it. And actually I think he only makes nigirizushi and not makizushi and temaki. Whatever. The point is he does very few “dishes”, has done it for 70+ years, every day, obsessed with always improving.

In jiu jitsu world, I would equate this approach to only working on closed guard bottom and submitting everyone from there. If you end up on top, you let the person sweep you right into your closed guard.

One of the most memorable, and perhaps absurd, moments of the film is when Jiro explains that he used to massage the octopus meat for 20 to 30 minutes in order to make it less tough, but now he does it for 40 to 50 minutes. Then, there was footage of an assistant hand-massaging octopus meat. I know very little about cooking, but that just seemed a bit insane.

Perhaps, that’s one of the best ways to know you’re on the way to mastery: you should be doing stuff that will seem insane to others. So, ask a friend: “Hey bro, are there things you see me doing that you think are insane?” If his answer is “No” then you need to step up your game and massage the f’ing octopus for at least an hour.

Giving and Asking for Criticism and Advice

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Created by John Tringham / Zappa blammaAs I progress up the ranks and my jiu jitsu slowly improves, I find myself in the more peaceful but less productive position of not being criticized, corrected, or given advice to nearly as often as when I was a white belt. I was reminded of this today when after rolling with a high-level black belt who I’m friends with (let’s call him Bob) he politely suggested that the way I was turtling up was leaving me open for back takes and crucifixes. This little suggestion means that there was a clear hole in my game, that I either have to close or be aware of and be ready to defend when needed. These are things that can take 2-3 years to figure out WITHOUT such advice. The power of a quick comment on a brain that’s ready to learn the lesson is incredible.

I was left wondering how I can get others to give such advice to me. This advice is not saying “I am wiser and superior to you in jiu jitsu”. The advice is just one diagnosis of a potential jiu jitsu malady that should be addressed. It’s a gift really. When I give the same types of advice to fellow purple belts, blue belts, or white belts, I often feel like an asshole. They may awkwardly nod back in appreciation, but it always feels as if they’re just being polite.

For many people taking privates is the clearest way to get this kind of advice. But does it have to be this way? Especially for people like me who train regularly and compete regularly?

Whenever a person gives me advice I try very hard to implement that advice in training right away and show it to them. I want them to know that every little word of criticism has a profound positive affect on my game, especially when it address a problem I was clearly having. I know that when I teach, it always feels good seeing others successfully implementing the things I taught. As a student, I feel it’s almost a duty of mine to learn well and make the lesson bloom into a well-defined success.

More and more, I’m realizing that what I’m searching for in jiu jitsu is not some secret detail but the rediscovery for the 100th time of the same old details I’ve been shown over and over since white belt.

So, all that said, if when you train with me an idea pops into your head based on a mistake or opening I left behind, please tell me. I will try my best to return the favor.

Theories on How to Lose Weight, Gain Strength, and Win Grappling Matches

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Theories about how to get good at a grappling sport are as widespread as theories on how to lose weight, how to pick up chicks, and how to win an argument. Probably the only ingredient that’s consistent among winners in competitive fields is that they have a singular focus and obsession with always improving. The specifics can vary drastically.

The Truth is That There is No Truth

The-Great-War-on-FacadesAny one individual who has achieved success will usually tell you a specific set of steps to follow so that you too can achieve success. Naturally, they base their theories on what worked for them. Or they will base their theories on some statistical arguments on “what works for most people”. The problem, of course, is that most people never rise above mediocre, so the statistics are less quantitative and more anecdotal  We might as well be using astrology to design your training program.

The following are some brief comments on different approaches and theories I’ve encountered. It is my sincere belief that you can use any of them and achieve success. You can pick one and stick with it. You can keep switching. You can spend 2 hours a day or 10 hours a day. There are no “right” answers, and if statistics tells us anything it’s that you will probably fail, eventually giving up and switching to another set of goals. If those goals don’t have to do with family, friends, and/or survival, then you’ll be fine. The only reason I recommend sticking to the same goal is because I believe that it’s ultimately the most rewarding path. It seems that the more time you spend working at something, the more you enjoy every little step of progress.

Theories on How to Get Good at Grappling

  • Scientist: Meticulously track how every change in your training regimen affects your development. The goal is to maximize improvement over a fixed (often highly limited) amount of time. This develops a great technician.
  • Soldier: Follow the training regimen prescribed by a coach without exception. The goal is to do everything you’re told no matter how difficult. This develops a mind that can’t be broken with a high-pace or any other mental challenges.
  • Free spirit: Follow no regimen at all. Simply live on the mat, and enjoy the hell out of every minute. Drill rarely, flow roll all day.

Theories on How to Lose Weight

The example diets below are just the shallow gist of each diet and are not intended to be all-knowing generalizations.

  • Stick to Your Kind: Eat only one kind of food, or restrict one kind of food. Examples are no-carb or low-carb diets (e.g. Atkins) or all fruit diets (e.g. fruitarianism, 30 bananas a day).
  • Portion Control: Count calories, and don’t eat more than a certain amount (e.g. Weight Watchers).
  • Healthy Rules: Basic rules to follow in order to avoid “bad food” and get more “good food”. Usually some kind of story is woven around it to make the rules seem very reasonable. Examples include Paleo diet, low-glycemic diet, raw food diet, volumetrics, etc.

Theories on Strength and Conditioning

The following are various approaches on improving strength and conditioning outside of doing the actual activity you’re training for (e.g. grappling).

  • Olympic Lifting and Power Lifting: Go heavy or go home. Focus on big full-body lifts that focus on “slow” strength such as squats, deadlifts, bench, rows, or explosive lifts that focus on power such as snatch, clean and press, jump squats.
  • Functional Strength: Put the fun in functional. Use just the weight of your body, and not much more for full-body endurance exercises that challenge your body in a way that’s more naturally applicable to the specific sport. Obviously this includes a wide range of approaches from yoga to Herschel Walker’s 1000 pushups a day to MovNat to kettlebells.
  • Interval Training: Do something intense (e.g. sprint) that takes your heart rate to 180+ for X seconds and spend the next Y seconds trying to recover. Repeat until you want to die. A good split for X/Y is 20/10.
  • None: Don’t do any strength and conditioning. If you want to be good at a sport, just play that sport, A LOT.

This was a long post, and you probably learned nothing. That’s the point. It takes a long time to learn anything in these endeavors and years down the line you’ll just might  figure out that you were doing it all wrong. Good luck!

PGL Recap and Words of Wisdom from Henry Rollins

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I competed in the Professional Grappling League 8-man middleweight tournament yesterday. I faced Garry Tonon first match, had a good round of wrestling and lost in the last several seconds via rear naked choke from a quick switch-type move against a double. He was a tough opponent but I could’ve done better. I’ll be competing this weekend and next weekend in both gi and no-gi locally to try recover from that match ;-) All I can do is keep at it… Congrats to Garry for winning the tournament and to everyone who fought very well and put on a great show. Here’s the video of my match:

A ton of people showed up to watch. The venue was filled to capacity (check out the picture below), and there was a lot of positive energy in the room. Everyone was cheering at the slightest submission attempt, takedown, sweep, guard pass, etc. For me personally, the whole thing seemed surreal: ring card girls, great choices of walkout music, live video streaming, commentators, judges, refs, tons of black belts as spectators (Noah Spear, Tim Carpenter, Rick Macauley, Brian Rago, John Hassett, Stevie Linton and many others who I didn’t know by name).

As I said before, I think the new Grappling Leagues events are great for the sport, especially when they are put together as professionally as the first two PGL events. I hope I get another chance to compete in one of these, and in the mean time I definitely will compete in the AGL. If you’re a jiu jitsu (gi and no-gi) competitor, you should definitely check out their next tournament AGL 3 on January 19th, 2013 and their next pro event PGL 3 on February 2nd, 2013. I’ll be there.

Now on to the Henry Rollins words of wisdom… I was watching competition footage this morning on YouTube and a video of Henry Rollins popped up where he interviews a senator from some (deep) southern state. And one of the things Henry says in the video is: “knowledge without mileage equals bullshit”. He was referring to the motivation behind his traveling around the country and interviewing political leaders, but I think that quote applies to all aspects of life: you have to challenge yourself, and for many people that means leaving the comfort of the academy and stepping on the competition mat. There are ways to grow in jiu jitsu without competing, but it’s damn hard, because growth requires you to be brutally honest with yourself. For me, the learning process is about lots of drilling, hard training, and regular wake up calls that make me question my approach (from small things to big things). Of course, every time I step on the mat, I’m looking to figure out better ways of training, but nothing serves as a better catalyst for that than tough tournament matches. All that is just a long-winded way of saying that while I’m very upset that I lost, I’m glad I was there and I gave it my all.

Some Techniques Make You Suck Before They Make You Better

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I am always on the look out for new effective techniques, guards, positions, details that fit my game and my body type. I am very selective, but try to remain open to new possibilities. There are no rules of course. Just because not many people play the turtle “guard” in high level competition doesn’t mean it’s off limits.

But I do try to follow a simple guideline. If I see a lot of top-level black belts (with a “style” that’s close to my own) using a certain technique, it’s worth investing in. Sometimes if I see just one black belt using it, it’s enough for me to believe it’s possible to make it work. I then turn off the skeptical part of my brain, and embrace the hope that one day I’ll be able to make it work.

Here’s the problem though… As the title mentions, some of the best techniques are ones that force you take a step back before taking two steps forward. Meaning: the learning process for these techniques will often involve losing position in training and just being generally demoralized by constant failure of the technique.

Alright, so here’s some examples from my own experience in jiu jitsu. First “technique” like  that for me was the butterfly guard. Forcing myself to play butterfly and look for the basic hook sweeps meant that I had very few ways of stopping my training partners from passing me. It was incredibly frustrating and the urge to play on top or play closed guard on bottom was really strong. But eventually I started to get the details that make the position work, and my game improved noticeably.

The same happened when I recentle started to drill the smash pass. I was avoiding it because the idea of defeating guard with the pressure of just my hips was very challenging to pull off against good opponents. But I watched far too many black belts pull it off in competition not to take it serious and begin the long journey of trying it over and over in training. Of course, with this one, I didn’t have to pay too much for failing because you usually don’t lose position from a failed smash pass, but still the process is very frustrating, and it’s always tempting to go back to what I’m comfortable with.

My project for the next several months (at least as I see it now) is to embrace the 1 legged x-guard ala Marcelo Garcia. I’m a big fan of the regular x-guard and always prefer that, but it’s often easier to get the 1 legged x guard instead. There are a million of options from there, and watching video after video of Marcelo preaching the power of this position has finally gotten me convinced.

This one will hurt though… because whenever I try it, I often get passed or fail to sweep or just get put in an uncomfortable / weak position. But those are the best techniques: the ones that make perfect sense for your game, and check your ego by making you feel like a first-day white belt.

This new journey, I’m sure, will be painful, stressful, and full of dead-ends, but I hope that it will make me a more complete and dangerous competitor.

“The More I Tap Out The More Unbeatable I Am”

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The quote in the title comes from Ryron Gracie (in the video below) who is scheduled to compete against Andre Galvao on October 14th. It refers to the fact that losing gives you an opportunity to learn the gaps and flaws in your jiu jitsu game. But it also is clearly something Ryron tells himself to help fight the ego that is an ever-present and at-times-destructive force in jiu jitsu and in life.

When I first heard the quote in the title I was put off a bit. That sounded like the opposite of something a top grappler should say before an epic superfight, but then the deeper meaning of it began to emerge. I realized that it came from a humble dedication to learning the art which is perhaps bigger than any individual competitive accomplishments.

I have tremendous respect for Ryron Gracie for going against Andre Galvao. Ryron’s competition resume is much smaller than that of Galvao, so he is a huge underdog. But given that he is a big-time well-respected instructor, the fact that he accepted this fight is truly admirable. I believe that very few people in his position would do so. That in itself is a victory to be proud of: a victory over his ego.

 

Learn From Failure by Blaming Yourself

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I’m rereading Wrestling Tough (great book) and the story of Kyle Maynard (pictured left) hit me again, like it does every time I read it.

Kyle was born with severely underdeveloped arms and legs. So everything that comes easy to most people, Kyle had to figure out how to do in a completely different way. Wrestling was just one of the examples of that. His senior year in high school he finished the season with a 35-16 record. To me, this makes him one of the most incredible wrestlers in the history of the sport.

His description of what he took from wrestling is one of the great lessons of how progress is made through rigorous honest analysis of failure:

“Wrestling, as far as character goes, is foundational for any human being. You have to learn failure on a basis where you can only blame yourself. It makes the rest of your life a lot easier.”

In my eyes, focusing on failure in a quiet analytical way is the approach that works best for me. Of course, you also have to honor your successes. They provide the confidence needed to carry you through the plateaus and long stretches of hard work that don’t bring immediate positive results.