Greg is a good coach, and he’s probably the guy with the best people out there using this method. Kit is trying to use it to scam people into buying his instructionals, but Greg is the best IMO.
That being said, the champions he has are guys who got good under the old system. I’ve heard tales that he has up and comers blues and such who have been learning exclusively with this ecological approach, but time will tell if they have the level of success that the Corbre brothers have.
This is true. High performers often succeed in spite of what they do,not because of it.
It goes both ways though. I see a lot of people riding this train because of Jozef Chen and I can tell you, having trained with Jozef, he has incredibly deep knowledge of explicit transitions/positions/counter/attacks. I don’t think it has to do as much with his ecological approach as he thinks it does
Agree, time will tell. It also depends on the individual athlete as well
This is fair.
I don’t know if guys like Gordon and Keenan would have done well with it. But there are some people who will certainly reach a higher level ecologically than under the model @AntonFig asserted (which is how I teach my students), mostly because I think they’d find it too tedious and quit.
Think of how reliant you are on your coach in this scenario. What if a new situation arises that your coach hasn’t covered with you? The ecological approach is much more based on teaching a man to fish, rather than giving him a fish . Making people problem solvers rather than repetitive robots
Almost 100%, especially as a lower belt.
People can become problem solvers at black belt. Whatever they come up with before that will be a poorly implemented version of something someone else did or complete bullshit.
“The most dangerous thing in BJJ to a person’s growth isn’t failure. It’s succeeding when doing the wrong thing. False positives”- Eddie Cummings
A coaches job should be to minimize false positives and false negatives in their students, be it positional sparring, rolling in the gym, a grappling match, or a fight. Ecological approach is the way I would do it if I wanted to maximize false positives
I guess the question then becomes, who decides what a false positive is? And how do they decide?
The way I think Greg Souders would describe it is there is an outcome you are looking for e.g. an armbar and there are certain qualities of an armbar that are always present, known as invariants(immobilizing the shoulder joint, isolating/separating the arm from the rest of the body and extending it). You focus on achieving those invariants and let your body organise itself based on the environment (specific situation, opponent, etc) to achieve the outcome. If you achieved the outcome he doesn’t care about the minutiae beyond the invariants.
Have you ever done exactly the same armbar twice? There will always be some level of variation in the angle of you hips, the exact spot grip, the amount of force you impart.
Any technique that works only because your opponent is deficient in
Or because they are tired.
Sort of. The angle of the hips should be the same within a given technique (it varies across armbars because it’s different for side juji gatame, spider web, double torso legs, head scissor, te gatame, ect). The exact grip spot also should not change. There is an optimal grip permutation that balances control, breaking mechanics, ect for every given armbars variation. Force will and should vary based on the resistance you are overcoming
Those minutiae could very well be the difference between tapping a shitty blue belt in the gym and a skilled opponent hitting a hitchhiker and beating you unconscious in an MMA fight or self defense scenario. Or if you want to be less dramatic than that, it’s the difference between finishing someone in the gym and a skilled grappler escaping in comp and beating you on points. Either are unacceptable to me.
Learning to do things correctly is important. Smarter, harder working people than us have spent hundreds of hours finding solutions to the problems. Thinking an 18 month blue belt can come up with an equally viable alternative is madness to me. It’s far harder to unlearn bad habits than it is to learn them. This is something every striking coach knows well. Don’t let people build and reinforce bad habits. You might get them hurt
Sorry you guys are getting dumped on with long rant responses here from me lol.
This is probably the single thing I’ve thought most about in the past 4 or 5 years
That’s the definition of a false positive but I’m saying who gets to decide what a false positive is and why are they correct? Does it have to be John Danaher or Eddie Cummings? Or your coach? Or my Coach? How can any of these people know that a technique works only because of the reasons you listed?
The last line I completely agree with and that is what I’m saying. Now apply that to everything else that goes into an armbar, it all varies every time due to the environment at that particular point in time and space. Even though there seems to be an optimal grip for an armbar, there are never any two situations where every part of your hands’ surface are are in contact with exactly the same parts of your opponent’s hand/wrist. We may feel like we are gripping in exactly the same way because we are unable to consciously perceive the difference, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t variation. As GB_Dave_Jr mentioned above, with a batter hitting a pitch there are too many variables going into that in such a short space of time for us to consciously be aware of them all, let alone teach them all to somebody else. When one or more of these variables changes, it affects how we organise ourselves to achieve the task.
Those minutiae are important, but the question is whether we can really observe/feel all of them in every possible grappling scenario and then teach them to a student in a top down approach and how do we go about doing this? The things that we think we can observe and feel are a small percentage of everything that’s going on in a specific grappling exchange. So, why are we teaching in a way that assumes we are all knowing (direct instruction from a coach and repetition of static drilling), rather then focusing on the things that we can say are true every time and putting ourselves in situations where we can repeatedly practice trying to organise ourselves to achieve the invariant features of a position/move against live resistance (the conditions that we ultimately want to be able to perform under).
The ecological approach isn’t about leaving two while belts in a room and telling them to recreate jiu-jitsu from scratch. It’s not saying there aren’t effective ways to do jiu-jitsu, we all know there are. From my POV it’s more about how we are defining what effective jiu-jitsu is and the best way to go about teaching that to students.
Haha, no problem. It’s a fun topic to talk about and worth discussing.
This is the most difficult question in the whole of grappling (and all of fighting to a lesser extent) in my opinion. The second hardest being deciding if mount is better than the back.
It’s hard to know. I would say there are unfortunately not very many high level coaches capable of this. Danaher, Nicky Ryan, sometimes Eddie Bravo, Roger. There are more but not a ton more.
My short answer would be coaches should be watching as much high level comp and instructionals.
If you have shitty coaches though, my opinion is very bleak. I think you’re just going to have to watch instructionals from those high level coaches
I agree with this. I think during the process of repetitive drilling and positional sparring it gets committed to the subconscious. The thinking all has to be done long, long before the fight or competition. Something something “empty mind” lol. But yeah, I don’t think you can actually consciously hash the number of variables at the speed of high level comp. This is extra true in boxing. You don’t think “why, he’s throwing a jab. I do believe I should slip my head to the outside and throw a counter”.
True. I strawmanned it a bit there. It’s just too many false positives for my liking, unless your partner is a high level black belt or the coach is micromanaging every exchange.
I can’t count the number of people (including myself) who got good at some move and killed everyone in their gym with it only to go somewhere else and realize there’s an easy counter to it that just completely invalidates it.
I think in the ecological approach, a coach is important, but not as an all knowing dispenser of knowledge, more as someone who can design a training session to direct their students into focusing on the right things while attempting to reach a particular goal against live resistance. It’s a much more optimistic viewpoint, as you don’t need John Danaher as your coach or the DDS as your training partners.
I think training partners are important as you have alluded to before, as you need to experience the things a high level black belt will throw at you to be able to learn to deal with them, but I think this is a separate issue from the method of instruction. Also there are examples like Roger who got to be the best in the world, training mostly with lower belts and being the head coach at his gym.
Right, but I think this also ties into the training partners point above. With the ecological approach, there is much less focus on getting good at a particular move and much more on becoming a problem solver and immune to novelty. So, in the scenario you mentioned, the player would have a much better opportunity to react to whatever the higher level opponent is doing to counter their game. Even if they fail, I think they are in a much better position to learn from that failure.
I think the alternative you are suggesting is for the player to have been pre-taught all possible moves and counters by their coach beforehand (already tough due the to extremely variable nature of each grappling engagement), somehow get all of that info committed to unconscious memory via a combination of drilling and sparring and then the desired behaviour will come out when a particular situation arises (please let me know if this a strawman).
Just from personal experience, I don’t find I learn well this way. I have always found there to be massive gap to bridge between learning a technique, drilling the move and then pulling it off against a fully resisting opponent. That’s why what Greg Souders is saying spoke to me so much - if our ultimate goal is to be effective against a fully resisting opponent, why are we putting so much time into repetition of a move against a non-resisting opponent?
I would encourage you guys to listen to as many of Greg Souders’ interviews as you can. He’s the guy spearheading this method in BJJ and his answers to the questions people throw his way make a lot of sense to me. Here are a few examples:
I don’t think you have much to lose by diving into learning about this approach and trying to implement it in the way you train/teach (even if just in some small way at first). I am at the early stages of this myself but it just makes a lot of sense to me and makes me more optimistic about my own learning.
Being told what to do (e.g., where to grab the arm) and problem solving on your own are both critical components of growth and development in BJJ. With that said, one can argue that the teaching you receive in the early stages of your training is most imperative because it allows you to develop a foundation that promotes future problem solving. I’ll use myself as an example. For those who don’t know me, I’ve been training BJJ with one arm (my right arm is fully paralyzed) for close to 30 years. I was beyond fortunate that my first BJJ teacher was Julio “Foca”, one of Carlson Gracie’s best black belts. For the first two years I trained under Julio he made a concerted effort to figure out and show me a one-armed variation of EVERY single technique he showed the rest of the class. Without his teaching I would have been completely lost. Yeah, I may have eventually figured out some things on my own, but the direct guidance i received from Julio rapidly improved my learning curve and gave me that necessary foundation. Now as I progressed through the ranks I had to become a proficient problem solver, but the instruction i received was still invaluable. Even if i wasn’t able to execute a technique the way my instructors showed the rest of the class, it was still important to see how and why they preferred to do something a particular way. I would then use that imformation to adapt my game accordingly. Bottom line, I’ve been a problem solver my entire BJJ career but i still benefit tremendously from sound instruction.
Not sure if ecological training is legit or beneficial but Greg Souders comes off as a person thinking he is smarter than he actually is.
That’s all I got.
How am I going to start a BJJ cult like Lloyd, Heath, or Danaher with this model?!?
Healthy discussion so far.
Yes, Greg has a personality. I think he is just passionate about what he is doing, and as a result he has a tendency to be abrasive, nothing wrong with that. He does use “jargon”, which is a common point of contention with this theory, but having a problem with jargon is not really a valid way to debate the merits of a new theory that is being proposed.
The one armed versions of techniques is an interesting situation. I mean no disrespect when I say this, but how much of an authority can someone be on teaching one armed techniques if they themselves have two arms? Did he really teach you how to do the techniques just using one arm, or did he simply show you how to problem solve and do the same technique using one arm? My point here is, it’s possible that he thought you more about problem solving than he did about the actual technique. In this case, you might have been successful in spite of the traditional teaching method because you had exposure in how to adapt to the scenarios at hand. Adaptation is the critical 4the element to the ecological theory.
I’m still on the fence by the way for all this. I still see a good point to the traditional model, because someone has already been down some of the roads that require the problem solving. So passing down this knowledge would presumably help the person learn faster etc. But, I think there is a way to still pass down this experience without having someone focus on doing techniques.
What I’m starting to recognize is that what is most important is, the underpinnings of what makes the technique successful but not the individual details of the technique itself.
Take a near side underhook half guard pass for instance. Is it really important to focus on where your head is, where your hands are, and where you trapped knee is? Previously I would say yes, but now I say no. What I would say now is that what is most important is that you ensure there upper back is fully pinned to the mat, their near side arm is trapped such that they can’t regard on that side, and that you point their knees away from you. If you can achieve all these goals, then freeing the trapped foot become easy. How you do this is unimportant though, as long as you can get it done reliably in the wide variations of the live scenarios that you find yourself in.
I think the down side of the traditional model in the above scenario is that you are taught to focus on where to place your body (“internal focus”) to achieve a goal. But if you are getting strong resistance from an opponent, it can lead to brain fog or frustration if you cannot achieve that goal. As a result, the practitioner runs the risk of getting overly fixated on that one part of the technique that they are struggling with, and in a live scenario they will quickly run out of time to problem solve. They start to think, “…Wynn’s my technique not working?”
The traditional model guide us to focus on the solution to the problem, but the problem is always changing due to the live nature of combat. Instead, it is better to focus “externally” on what you need to get from, or do to, the opponent. Which is now a “problem” centered focus.
So really it’s less about how to do a technique properly, and more to do with the underpinnings of what the technique is designed to do and focusing on that.
I highly encourage you to try the open guard passing games that Greg had put out on his videos. The first one is getting past the feet, advancing to the opponents knee line, but do not get chest to chest yet. Top player just holds the position that they advance to. Bottom players job is to prevent the opponent from getting past the feed and recover the front facing guard if they lose it.
What I have noticed from that game is, top player has to ensure that the bottom player never establishes grips on their legs, otherwise they will not advance to the position needed. Top player also has to learn to balance them selves on top of a resisting opponent, which is hard because using your weight is the primary means of keeping them from moving (along with your grips). Bottom player then has to make grips and post their feet on the opponent (or some equivalent scenario), and then the top opponent can’t pass. To the trained eye, you will notice that this is essentially teaching a torrreando pass, without having to actually teach it. BUT, now the bottom person gets to benefit from the drill now too, not just the top person. So in reality, you are teaching/guiding both players and using the universal truths instead of the specifics of a technique that may only apply in limited fleeting scenarios.
Whoa, that was long. Sorry….
I would say early on that it was Julio who was doing 100% of the problem solving for me. Over time I had to take on more of that responsibility myself. Julio does not have a disability like I do; however, his understanding of jiu-jitsu is so deep that he was able to come up with great alternatives. Had I had a less competent instructor early on that didn’t know how to teach me what to do, I’m not sure I would have been as successful. Now, has my execution of techniques I learned from Julio as a white and blue belt improved or changed over the years as I’ve became a better problem solver? Of course. But that is true for everyone who trains jiu-jitsu long enough.