When I first found Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, I wasn’t even looking for it. At 16, I visited my local MMA gym to try Thai Boxing. My inspiration was Anderson Silva, not Demian Maia.

I had turned up for a Thai Boxing trial a little early, and an open mat was running before class. I saw some people rolling at an open mat and joined in just to pass some time.

My story from there is a familiar one. I got smushed by someone half my size, and my perception of my own physical toughness was obliterated. A 12-year fixation on the sport started there, which is strange to think about looking back now at brown belt.

While there was a lot about jiu-jitsu that confused me when I first started, nothing was more mystifying to me as a beginner than jiu-jitsu gym culture and etiquette. Starting jiu-jitsu as a white belt means entering an environment with its own very specific rules, politics, culture, and acceptable behaviour.

Especially as a beginner new to the world of jiu-jitsu, figuring these things out is like trying to read the label from inside the jar. Here’s everything I wish I’d known about etiquette at white belt.

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What is BJJ gym etiquette — and how is it different from jiu-jitsu gym culture?

First, it’s worth noting that culture and etiquette are not the same thing. Every jiu-jitsu gym has a mixture of both – and they’re connected — but it’s worth knowing the difference.

What does “gym culture” mean in Brazilian jiu-jitsu?

In jiu-jitsu gyms, ‘culture’ is the invisible glue that makes your members a community rather than just a random set of individuals who meet up to strangle each other each week. I’ve travelled between a lot of different gyms, and can tell you the culture is different in every one.

Part of what creates culture is natural and beyond your control, like the type of people who make up your membership base, and the unspoken beliefs and acceptable behaviours that bind them.

It’s the interaction among members that creates culture, and every new member will subtly change the culture — so culture emerges in ways that are difficult to predict.

That’s also why, once a gym has grown to a certain point, culture becomes self-policing. I’ve seen at many gyms that the members will often weed out someone who doesn’t fit into the established culture without the head coaches even getting involved. Even more reason to be aware of it.

This is why the word comes from the Latin root ‘colere’, meaning to ‘cultivate the earth’. Culture is not something you can force or impose control upon. You tend it more like you would a garden. Culture is something you can’t ever fully control, but cultivate.

What does BJJ etiquette actually mean?

The word etiquette comes from the old French word ‘estiquette’ meaning a label or ticket. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the French and Spanish royal courts began issuing physical cards, or “tickets,” to visitors, with strict rules outlining exactly how to dress, where to stand, and how to behave in the presence of the royalty.

In the same way, jiu-jitsu etiquette is more about the formalised, spoken set of rules and behaviour that flow from culture. There is some jiu-jitsu etiquette that applies to every gym, regardless of where you train (which we’ll get onto next), and some that varies depending on cultural differences between gyms.

So, when it comes to culture — some rules are universal, and others vary depending on the gym you train at. I’ll make it clear which is which throughout, and my personal opinion on the rules.

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1. Personal hygiene is a non-negotiable

No matter which gym you go to, no one wants to grapple with someone who stinks. You could be the best gym personality in the world, but if you don’t shower, it doesn’t matter:

• Have good personal hygiene: This should be obvious, as jiu-jitsu is a sport where you are in super close physical contact with other people — but you’d be surprised.

• Keep your gear clean: I used to roll with a guy when I first started (one of the coaches, if you can believe it) who’d train in dirty training gear. It was absolutely rank — don’t do it.

• Cut your nails: Maybe less obvious if you’ve never trained before, but if your nails aren’t cut, you’ll constantly be leaving little cuts on your opponent’s ankles and hands as you try to escape things. Especially when you first start out, you’ll reach out and grab with your nails without even thinking, especially if you’re defending chokes.

• Don’t walk around barefoot when you’re off the mats. Another rule that applies to every single gym you’ll ever go to. Make sure you always have something on your feet when you’re off the mat, so you don’t bring any bacteria into where everyone’s training. And no, socks do not count. Wear sliders or shoes.

• Don’t train with skin infections: If you have contagious fungal infections (like ringworm), do not train until it’s gone. Believe me, if you’re patient zero of a ringworm, or even worse, a staph infection outbreak — you’re not gonna be popular at the gym.

2. BJJ rolling etiquette basically comes down to “Don’t be a dick”

A weird thing about jiu-jitsu is that you’ll be grappling with people from all walks of life, different ages, physical attributes — and you want to take that into account.

Adjust for your training partner’s size and experience

You aren’t going to win any medals pumelling the smaller trialist.

If you’re 10 kgs heavier than someone and you know you could overpower them, use the roll as an opportunity to improve your technique. When you’re going against someone your own size or larger, go ahead and use your physical attributes. Simple.

And believe me, in any gym with a healthy culture, someone who beats on the weakest member is likely to be targeted by the gym enforcer.

I could easily shorten this rule to four words: don’t be a dick.

Here are a few other things I’d avoid:

• Not tapping or tapping late: I’ll hold my hands up. Especially as a teenager, I used to be really bad with this. I thought it made me look tough, but all it does is make higher-belt fighters worry about rolling with you. If you’re in a position where you can’t move and a submission is being applied, you likely messed up 4 moves ago. Just tap.

• Talking during rolls: The odd bit of banter here and there is fine. But we’ve all rolled with that person who has extended conversations when you roll with them about things that have nothing to do with jiu-jitsu. For me, it always felt like the roll can’t properly start until they stop talking.

3. When training with someone of the opposite sex, don’t be weird

If I could distil this advice into three words, it would be: don’t be weird.

This article is about things ‘I wish I knew’ before starting BJJ, but to be honest this has always been common sense to me. I shouldn’t need to write this stuff down, but given how many scandals there are relating to this in the jiu-jitsu world, I’ll spell it out.

When training with someone of the opposite sex, here are things that will make other members feel uncomfortable.

• Don’t make weird comments/sexualise the training while drilling moves or rolling: If you’re rolling with someone of the opposite sex, don’t make weird comments or compare what you’re doing to something more sexual. You might think it’s a joke, but you have no idea how it’s going to be interpreted and a lot of the time it’s going to really weird out your training partner and believe me: people talk.

• Don’t send weird DM’s about your rolls with someone: It’s going to make someone look at a roll they had with you (which takes a lot of trust for anyone) in a weird way.

I’ve said ‘opposite sex’ here for the reason that I’ve seen this happen both ways, but there’s no doubt that female grapplers have to deal with this so much more than male grapplers.

BJJ is an extremely male-dominated space, so the onus is on us to make it a safe training environment for the women that train with us.

The amount of confidence and trust it takes for a woman to get involved in jiu-jitsu is massive — so don’t violate that trust. Imagine someone building up the confidence to take their first training session, only to spend it getting hit on by their weird drilling partner.

So, outside of not doing the obvious that I’ve just already listed, make sure that if you have female training partners:

• Especially at white belt, your logic might be that if a female grappler has a higher belt than you, you can roll with full strength. Your logic is wrong. Don’t be passive, but be technical.

• Make sure they have a partner in rolls. I think this can be a big issue for a lot of female grapplers, who feel like they’re being avoided and overlooked and quit jiu-jitsu because they can’t get rounds in. Make sure you don’t have anyone sat on the sidelines.

• If you have a training partner that does any of the stuff from the first list, call them out on it. I’ve been at gyms where someone has sexualised a training session and sent weird DMs, and thankfully it was at places where it was immediately escalated and taken very seriously — so the member has either had to leave or apologise.

If you want to read some really good articles on what an inclusive gym environment should look like, I’d recommend these.

Both are really amazing articles about how to create a safer training space, the challenges that women face in the sport, and also the inevitable issues that come with sexualising Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

girly grappling with danielle

Jiu Jitsu Should be Safe for Women (and how men can make their spaces safe)

The jiu jitsu community on Substack has flooded me with support and kind words since I began writing here a few months back. Following my first few articles, Shoyo Jack, who is a huge proponent of that support, reached out with the concept for this article. We’ve spent the last few weeks working on it together, and in doing so, I’ve felt insurmountable gratitude …

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2 months ago · 12 likes · 6 comments · girly grappling with danielle and Shoyo Jack

The Punk Rock Grappler

Stop Sexualizing BJJ

I’ve been training Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ) for over fifteen years, and I’ve heard the joke a thousand times. Someone posts a photo of a tight closed guard or deep half position, and the comments roll in: “That’s gay.” “No homo.” “Sus.” We laugh. We move on. But we need to stop…

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8 months ago · 89 likes · 26 comments · Jesse Walker and Fighting Matters

4. How hard should you roll in BJJ? Sparring intensity and gym culture

This varies massively. Some gyms go hard every single session. Others have a more technical and playful approach to sparring. It’s why I’d say if you visit a new gym, it’s worth taking a week or so to adjust to whatever their tempo is.

Interestingly, I’ve found that gyms full of competitors tend to be more on the technical end of the spectrum, especially during the main class hours, since they can’t go 100% and still train multiple times per day, 7 days a week.

Ultimately, if you are increasing your training frequency, you’ll have to lower your intensity. Anyone who has trained 2 days a week, multiple times a week, will tell you this. And at white belt, you’re still conditioning your body.

There are still certain sessions during the week when you’ll want to increase intensity, but you can’t do that every day (assuming no Mexican supplements).

There’s probably one universal rolling rule:

The tap-bump rule: It’s when you slap hands and bump fists to show that a roll has started. This rule in particular is so entrenched in every jiu-jitsu gym that if you violate it (just jump straight into rolls), most people will think you’re unhinged.

5. BJJ gym hierarchy: How much should you respect the belt?

This will depend on how seriously your black belt or head coach takes themselves. I’ve had really relaxed instructors, but also some who have been called ‘Professor’ so many times that they’ve started to believe they are one.

Nowadays, you have a handful of hyper-traditional gyms like this, as well as others that are quite a bit more relaxed. The bonus of this current era of social media and the internet is that there is actually quite a lot you can look at to get an idea of the gym culture and their progress around hierarchy in advance.

Here’s how the hierarchy will vary gym to gym:

• Asking someone to roll: Some gyms don’t believe a lower belt can ask a higher belt to roll, or some just think the black belt shouldn’t be asked by any lower belt to roll. Others (like my gym) don’t care. If a white belt asks me (brown belt) to roll, I have no issue with it at all.

• Arriving late/leaving early: This one varies widely and is worth checking ahead of time. I once wasn’t allowed to leave a morning open ten minutes early (I had to get to work) at a gym I dropped in at because the coach said I was on ‘his time’. It’s rare you’ll run into anyone like this these days, as it’s hard to run a business when you can’t accommodate people with a life outside of jiu-jitsu.

• Bowing to posters: I mainly put this one in because it made me laugh. But there can be gyms where you have to row up to class and bow to some old fella on a poster, so maybe it’s not a joke? If you encounter this, it’s a good sign that you’ve walked into a hyper-traditional gym.

One thing I’d avoid: white belts teaching white belts: The main thing I would avoid as a white belt, which falls under the hierarchy, is teaching other white belts.

Fair enough if you’re showing them a move a higher-level belt taught you here and there, but everyone who’s trained a while has seen a ‘white-belt coach’ archetype who spends lots of time every session and open mat teaching other white belts the wrong things.

It tends to annoy higher belts and coaches not because of the hierarchy, but because of the inconvenience of having to go to the people the white-belt coach has taught and undo all their bad coaching.

6. BJJ Gi and uniform etiquette: Do you really need the gym’s branded gi?

Another thing gyms vary on is whether you need to wear a certain gym uniform or branded Gis to train. Some gyms will let you train in any gear you want, as long as what you’re wearing won’t cause injury or damage the mats.

For example, don’t wear:

• Shorts that have zips because they can tear the mats

• Earrings or jewellery because they can injure you if they get caught while rolling

Other gyms will make it compulsory that you wear a Gi or rashguard with their branding or school name, or you can’t attend classes.

Many will say this is down to tradition, or preserving lineage, or remembering that person in the poster you have to bow to every class. But honestly, I think it’s far more about business upside.

7. BJJ gym culture: Does your gym actually have a community?

The final thing to look out for is whether or not you have a community. For me, this is about how many members want to hang out outside of the gym.

Some gyms you go to won’t have this at all, and depending on what you’re training for, you might be perfectly happy getting your training in and then not hanging out with training partners out of training hours.

I see this a lot in city gyms, which can suit busy professionals who just want to get their training in and get out.

Other gyms are much more close-knit. People hang out outside of hours, or their core group of friends might be those in the gym. This is pretty common in gyms with lots of competitors, simply because they spend so much time together in the training room.

Thanks for reading!

Hopefully, if you’re just starting this sport or thinking about it, there’s some helpful stuff here to take the next step. Oss. 🙏

Related reading:

If you’re just getting started in BJJ or thinking about starting, check out these articles:

Since last year, I’ve written one essay every 8.5 days. That’s 43 essays in total since I returned with Weaponsing Simplicity after some life events forced me to take time off.

My aim was simple: write one essay every 7 days, and try to make each essay a little better than the last.

As is often the case for me, small habits spiral into daily compulsions, and when you factor in Substack Notes, there probably haven’t been many days this year that I haven’t published something on this platform.

When you’re putting a large quantity of hours into anything, it’s pretty easy to feel like nothing is changing and you’re going nowhere. So this post is about taking a step back to see what those incremental habits have added up to over the last year and — most importantly — thanking all of you for making this publication what it is.

In one year:

• We’ve gone from 46 subscribers to 660+ subscribers

• Those subscribers are now located across 46 states and 60 countries worldwide

• We’ve gone from 3,500 yearly views last year to 52,000+ yearly views this year

It’s bonkers to me that, over the next 12 months, we’ll probably reach 1,000 readers. Compared to some creators, I know these numbers are small, but to me, they’re genuinely mind-blowing.

You have to consider that I’ve spent about 9 years teaching jiu-jitsu, and I’ve taught in every type of room you can think of.

I’ve taught on roll-out mats in the back of pubs and working men’s clubs. I’ve taught on jigsaw mats at university society classes. I’ve taught in MMA gyms in the middle of nowhere. I’ve even taught in a couple of people’s garages.

The most I’ve ever had in a class is around 30, but I’ve also taught jiu-jitsu for hours to classes with only one or two people. Imagine how I feel now that I can share ideas with hundreds of readers each week.

When I think of this publication in that way, it isn’t just an email that goes out each week. It’s a virtual classroom of hundreds of people, or a giant weekly jiu-jitsu seminar.

I’ve also found I can go conceptually deeper in this newsletter and talk about the principles of learning and jiu-jitsu concepts that I wouldn’t be able to during my usual lessons. The fact that my own left-field interests have led to some of the best-performing posts is wonderfully unexpected.

Pre-warning: this post is going to be a bit more personal than normal. It’s partly about how small habits can compound over the course of a year, but also why having you all read week in, week out means the world to me.

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Where it all started.

In schools across the UK, we’re granted ‘pen licenses’ when teachers think we’ve become literate enough to graduate from graphite to ink. Ever since that day, I’ve been a compulsive writer.

Armed with my first pen, and around 7 years old, I’d fill notepads with stories that were suspiciously close to the plotline of The Lord of the Rings. I still think it’s a good job they were never published. The Tolkien estate might have sued me for everything I was worth before I got out of primary school.

When I went to high school, this habit evolved into non-stop note-taking. And when I started Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu at 17, these notes and doodles quickly morphed into sketches of diagrams and frameworks for breaking down positions and techniques. Writing became a tool to develop mental models that helped me get better at learning jiu-jitsu.

Close friends will always treat me with suspicion when they see me scribbling away in these notebooks. They always want to know what I’m writing and ask whether I’m penning journal entries or shopping lists.

When I say ‘neither’, it seems to bother them even more. They just can’t wrap their heads around why there would be any other reason to write things down.

They usually start pushing even more for why I write in these notebooks, and up until now I’ve struggled to think of an answer. All I know is it’s something I’ve always done, and probably something I will always do.

What my friends don’t understand is that there are much more exciting things to fill pages with than shopping and to-do lists. Mine are filled with frameworks, open problems I’m trying to solve, stories and, more recently, dreams.

But up until now, I’ve only had myself to share that writing with. So having a year to really share my ideas with people has completely changed what I thought was possible.

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The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius

Paul Graham’s ‘Bus Ticket Theory of Genius’ is the idea that to do great work, you don’t just need natural ability and determination, but also an obsessive interest in a niche topic.

Bus ticket collectors are the archetype Graham uses to describe those driven by an obsessive and hyper-specific curiosity – in this case, the minutiae of bus tickets. What gives these types an advantage is not only the fact that most people don’t care about the thing that fixates them, but also that they do it entirely for its own sake.

Because they care deeply about something most people consider inconsequential, they gain an information advantage in that area.

Graham says:

“They can keep track of distinctions between different types of bus tickets that would be hard for the rest of us to remember. Because we don’t care enough…A bus ticket collector’s love is disinterested. They’re not doing it to impress us or to make themselves rich, but for its own sake.”

If I were to put in a sentence why you reading so much each week means so much to me, it’s that you allow me to keep collecting my bus tickets.

My equivalent of these tickets are all the frameworks and curious notebook jottings I never thought would see the light of day. Things like the Segment, Sequence, and Systematise frameworks and the Longevity x Universality matrix now reach hundreds of readers every week.

The fact that this newsletter has allowed me to find others who fit in the ‘bus ticket collector’ category is even more valuable. Topics I thought no one on earth would really care about, other than me, have been some of the best-performing articles over the year.

A few articles have even passed the 1,000-view mark:

This was about 6 books I’ve read that have changed how I think about BJJ the most. The best thing is that none of these books is written about jiu-jitsu, but each has a transferable framework that has changed how I view the sport.

I didn’t have high hopes for how this would do when I published it, but it was awesome to see so many people respond and that they got value from the same books.

The white-to-blue belt guide was written to help with a problem many beginners face when they start BJJ: answering the question, "What the hell do I start with?"

But it was one of the first where the training plan was constructed using frameworks and mental models outside of BJJ. The training plan is as much about how to learn as it is about tactical advice to improve more quickly.

I think this was the first piece I wrote in which I realised there might be more appetite for frameworks and articles on the art of learning itself, which was a great surprise.

I think the best thing about this one passing the 1,000 mark was seeing how many people still value this old-school framework. So much in modern BJJ focuses on what the latest meta is, or who won the most recent ADCC - which obviously has its place.

But sometimes I think we get so obsessed with what’s new that we supplant old wisdom for no other reason than that it's less recent. Haueuter’s 4 Golden Rules have stood the test of time for a reason, and it was great to see everyone get so much from this one.

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Frameworks with far transfer

Throughout the year, people have shared my work, or written reaction pieces I never could have imagined. I wanted to say a huge thank you to all of you, but here are a couple of personal highlights I never would have thought possible when I started writing at the start of the year.

A real highlight was when one of my favourite authors — the only author to get two books on my top six list — interacted with my note talking about what his book ‘Range’ taught me about BJJ.

Highly, highly recommend David’s books ‘Range’ and ‘Inside the Box’. Both have massively shifted the way I think about life and jiu-jitsu, and he also has a YouTube channel now with tonnes of insights. As someone who reads loads of non-fiction, I think David is in a league of his own and a big stylistic influence for me when I write these posts.

As well as this, I’ve been deeply humbled by how many people on this platform have not only shared some of my frameworks but found applications for them outside of the sphere of jiu-jitsu.

I’m pretty obsessed with the idea that concepts from one discipline can lead to breakthroughs in completely different domains, so finding folks who share this lateral curiosity has been awesome.

One highlight for me was when wrote this amazing article in response to the Longevity x Universality matrix – a framework I developed to help people assess new and emerging jiu-jitsu techniques — and found so many other uses for the framework outside of jiu-jitsu, even finding ways to apply it to medicine.

Jørgen Melau´s Mixed Physiology

The Fundamentals Are Not the Basics

A few days ago I read a very interesting post on BJJ training. It came from a writer called The Lost Creonte, and on the surface it was about a problem specific to jiu-jitsu: with thousands of instructional videos a thumb-swipe away, how do you decide which techniques are actually worth your limited hours on the mat? I have trained BJJ for nearly two ye…

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3 months ago · 6 likes · 4 comments · Jørgen Melau

has taken articles like the one I wrote on how the Lindy effect applies to BJJ and has spoken about how the same theory applies to the gambling industry. I even joined him on the Straight to the Point podcast to discuss universal principles in martial arts and beyond.

More recently, has used some of my frameworks to break down the recent Ian Garry vs Islam Makhachev fight.

Highly recommend his breakdowns; they’re always really on point, and you can tell he does tonnes of research and reading, referencing loads of fighters and martial arts philosophies from Mike Tyson to Miyamoto Musashi.

Check out his full breakdown here.

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One last thank you

This is a reader-driven publication and genuinely would not exist without you.

As many of my earliest readers will know, I actually started this Substack in 2024, but had to pause it after a combination of random events, including a sudden ‘redundancy’ at a tech start-up and a pretty terrible knee tendon injury sustained after a five-day hiking trip.

I ended up jobless, living alone in a flat in London, and barely able to walk from the sofa to the kitchen.

I had to stop writing until I got back on my feet (literally) and into a job — but I couldn’t mute my curiosity. I was always thinking about what could happen if I reoriented my life around it so I could put more time into this.

9 months later, I decided to leave my full-time job and go freelance, so I could still earn money while freeing up time to focus on creating something of my own.

I moved back home from London and, in the time in between, walked 300 miles across Spain in 3 weeks, joining the Camino San Salvador route with the Camino Primitivo. I spent hours and hours walking alone, which gave me plenty of time to think. I was taking a bit of inspiration from Patrick Rothfuss:

“No man is brave that has never walked a hundred miles. If you want to know the truth of who you are, walk until not a person knows your name. Travel is the great leveller, the great teacher, bitter as medicine, crueller than mirror-glass. A long stretch of road will teach you more about yourself than a hundred years of quiet introspection.”

Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss

There’s a reason the Lost Creonte character is usually hiking in the wilderness.

After spending weeks on the trail, my thoughts always circled back to writing. Back to the fact it’s what I’ve done since day one, and about why I wanted to pursue it more.

On the last day of the Camino de Primitivo, I met a lady from Canada with a crazy life story. After retiring from her job as a copywriter, she wrote a series of hiking guides for routes aimed at hikers on the West Coast of Canada. Her name was Nicola Ross.

Amazingly, she had self-published the whole thing, using local hiking cafes as distribution points at first, until she sold enough copies to start selling them online.

To begin with, sales were small, but eventually her dedication to creating this amazing hiking series and approaching it as both a great writer and entrepreneur allowed her to sell 50,000 copies to date.

For anyone who hikes in the UK, it felt like I was meeting the Canadian equivalent of Alfred Wainwright, except she had done the whole thing herself, with no publisher; only passion and fascination for a topic and force of will and eternal persistence.

It felt fortuitous to meet her on that final day, and I took it as the last sign I needed to really pursue this. And one year later, here we are. So thank you, Nicola.

If you ever find yourself on any Canadian trials, here are Nicola’s books: Loops & Lattes.

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What’s next…

Originally this was supposed to be a one-year experiment. But now I’m looking ahead to year 2.

There’s a lot coming up, including podcast appearances and obviously so much more I want to write about week in, week out.

And on that, just a reminder: if you’re a subscriber, you can always message me if there’s a specific topic you'd like me to write about, and I’ll add it to the planner. Many of the best articles I’ve written have come from ideas you guys shared, so feel free to DM me anytime.

I also wanted to get your opinion on a few things that might be in the pipeline for the next 12 months:

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That’s it from me. Thanks millions again. On to year 2!

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One of the most important things I didn’t understand about jiu-jitsu as a beginner is the extent to which progress in this sport is non-linear.

When I first started, every coach would tell me the answer to progress was to ‘keep turning up’. Of course, this is good advice if consistency is your limiting factor. But what these coaches didn’t tell me is that even when I was training regularly and not missing sessions, I’d still hit long plateaus.

Implicit in the ‘keep turning up’ statement is the idea that if you just keep doing the same things, all you need is time and you’ll become a high-level black belt. Some things in life — what I think of as linear pursuits — abide by that logic.

The problem is, jiu-jitsu is far from linear. Consistency is vital, but if it were the only ingredient, then every black belt would have identical outcomes based on time served. What separates the good from elite black belts is their ability to evolve their learning over time in a sport where the rules never stop changing.

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Linear pursuits - progress through repetition

Let’s say you deposit £400 every month into an index fund that grows at an average yearly rate of 7%. In about 40 years, you’d become a millionaire.*

In this example, it is precisely the repetitive, unchanging nature of the dollar-cost averaging strategy that protects you — the hypothetical investor — from changes in the market. You get rewarded for doing the same thing over and over again.

And that’s exactly what makes it a linear pursuit. The rules never change, so you progress by repeating the same behaviours. You do not change what you do; you just keep doing it until you can reap a compounding return you’ve sown over decades.

*P.S: This is an illustrative example and not financial advice. I’m a dude who spends most of my time trying to get better at marginally better at no-gi berimbolos, not a financial expert.

Non-linear pursuits - progress through finding new ways of learning

Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is a non-linear pursuit. Unlike saving, you’ll hit a brick wall if you keep doing the same thing. What gets you to one level will not get you the next.

There are many nonlinear pursuits that work like this. If you learn a language, you can learn basic words using flashcards, but at a certain point you’ll never achieve fluency through memorisation alone. You must find a new learning tool, in this case by starting to have real conversations, to reach the next level.

These learning ‘tools’ help you cross learning thresholds, enabling you to learn more advanced skills faster. These thresholds are uneven and exponential, meaning learning is slow, then suddenly really, really fast.

Take learning to read. You likely started very slowly: from ages 5 to 7, you started with written letters and then connected those letters to spoken sounds (phonics). This allowed you to start to sound out simple, short words. Fluency develops around ages 7 to 9, when you started to read aloud with better speed and flow.

But once you pass this threshold and you can read, all of a sudden a whole universe of information opens up to you. Reading is a skill that allows you to learn much faster. You wouldn’t be able to digest this article without it.

Non-linear pursuits are full of these thresholds. They are ways of learning that come slowly at first but, once you master them, allow you to learn a whole load of other things much faster.

At white belt, you might feel like there’s a day you crack the code of learning, and that you’ll be able to progress at the same rate forever.

But anyone who has been in the sport for over 10 years will tell you that the skills, behaviours, and habits that get you to one belt will not get you to the next.

As you progress in non-linear pursuits, you need to change the way you learn. As I progressed from white to blue, to purple, to brown belt, I realised my learning went through three main phases of evolution.

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The three S’s of progress

In BJJ, I’ve found there are three main learning tools you engage with at different parts of your jiu-jitsu journey, each starting with ‘S’.

I’m calling them learning ‘tools’ here, because each is designed to improve learning at a specific stage of your jiu-jitsu journey.

Each learning tool in this framework includes a goal—how it helps you develop advanced jiu-jitsu skills—and a brick wall, which is what happens when that style of learning stops working, and you need to move on to the next tool.

Let’s go through each one and which learning style is best for each belt.

1. Segment:

Segmentation is the earliest type of learning you’ll do when you become a beginner of anything - and jiu-jitsu is no exception.

To begin with, this is the only way you can learn. You don’t know enough about the sport to interpret it as a whole. Instead, you focus on individual techniques before understanding how those parts fit into a larger system or jiu-jitsu game.

White belt

When you start at white belt, you’ll naturally start learning jiu-jitsu in segments or individual techniques. At that level, highly concrete, specific information is one of the best ways to learn.

A great thing about this level is that your lack of knowledge will put natural constraints on your training. Whether you want to or not, you’ll spend a lot of time focusing on defensive skills because that’s where you’ll spend the majority of your time anyway.

If you’re still curious about which segments are worth focusing on from white to blue belt, I wrote a full guide here:

The brick wall:

Segmenting alone is kind of like using flashcards to learn a new language. At this point, you’re learning jiu-jitsu by memorising isolated moves and techniques, and soon — probably halfway through white belt — you’ll need to start looking at sequences.

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2. Sequence:

Once you know understand parts better, you start to order them. You begin to learn that sometimes it makes sense to perform techniques — or the details within them — in a certain order.

You’ll definitely learn sequences at white belt, but the chances are there’ll be on a smaller scale. At this stage, your sequences will probably be confined to positions:

For example, teaching white belts to first get a 2-on-1 on the choking arm when defending back control before trying to escape hooks is an important sequence, but it’s still confined to one position.

Blue belt

I found that at blue belt, I started chaining techniques across positions, and this sort of sequential thinking really helped me go from thinking in terms of one technique to chaining my attacks together to progress the position.

I used to be really obsessed with front headlock attacks, but at blue belt I started thinking about how I could use them in a sequence; not just to get the tap but to open up guard passes and back takes when my opponent defended the choke.

The brick wall

The problem with sequential thinking past a certain level is that it makes the sport look linear in a way that it isn’t. It’s a useful way to organise information for beginners, but deferring to sequential learning will only get you so far for one reason.

Take this example of a sequential drill: you pass the guard, take side control, step into mount, and go for the armbar.

The problem is that jiu-jitsu does not work on straight lines like this. At every step of this progression you’ll face a multitude of options, choices and threats simultaneously. The way the sport works is highly non-linear, and which decision is ‘correct’ will change every second.

Once you realise this, it’s time to start thinking in systems.

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3. Systematise:

When you start thinking in systems, your thinking becomes more like a decision tree rather than a straight line. At this point, you aren’t just focused on learning the techniques but on studying the role each one plays. You constantly ask “Why am I doing this?”

Thinking of jiu-jitsu as a system is not just about understanding the parts themselves, but how they connect together and can be used in tandem to force your opponent into dilemmas. If you ever want to break down a jiu-jitsu position and understand the fundamentals that make it work, systems thinking is an extremely strong framework.

Purple belt

For me, the bridge between blue and purple belt was going from thinking in sequences to thinking in systems.

This coincided with a broader shift in the teaching meta at the time, in which John Danaher had popularised teaching jiu-jitsu as a ‘system’ rather than a random set of moves. Interestingly, the way jiu-jitsu has been taught overall has shifted from sequences to systems over time.

But I digress.

One of the first positions I really systematised for myself was the headquarters passing position. You can see from this example how different this mental layout looks to a sequence. Ultimately, a good system helps you switch between a finite set of options faster than your opponent can respond.

At purple belt and beyond, you want to obsess over the conditions that make one option open while closing another.

If your opponent’s knee is outside your hip, you attack the knee slice. If it isn’t, the next question is whether there is space between their knee and chest. If yes, you go for the smash pass. If no, the thigh-trap leg drag becomes the easier option.

Where you see the “dilemma” line in the diagram, the condition can change in real time. For example, you begin the smash pass, and the opponent suddenly opens their top knee. You can then immediately switch back to the alternate branch, in this case, the knee slice.

The brick wall

Systems are powerful because they codify complexity. A coach can spend months troubleshooting a position, then pass on a robust, interconnected set of techniques that students can reliably apply against resistance.

But the only way you can sharpen a system is through iteration and testing on the mats. At this point in progression, I don’t think there is any other helpful mental model - it’s about using all three to inform your live training so you can acquire skills faster.

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Iterative cycles

Brown and Black belt

Up to this point, I’ve presented the three learning tools as stages you pass through. But the truth is, when you get deeper into purple belt and move onto brown and black, I think you really improve by using all three in a cycle.

You’ll probably have to learn more about how to self-coach at this stage, especially if you run your own school, and running through this iterative cycle is a good way to do that.

I’m a brown belt now and have been training for 12 years, and I look at every new and old position through this framework. Even positions I understand well, I will still:

1. Segment: At this more advanced stage, the purpose of segmentation is to assess the role each part plays in isolation to identify the most important details to focus on in any position. It’s about separating the meaningless minutiae from the make-or-break details.

2. Sequence: Over time, you’ll realise there are a lot of sequences created solely for learning, and often the order you do things will shift in real time depending on what reaction your opponent has given you.*

   1. *With that said, you still find certain sequences and positional flows that always go the same way. For example, in rule sets like IBJJF, points force opponents to move in certain ways - creating predictable positional flows.

3. Systematise: Creating systems will always be about focusing on the connections between techniques, rather than the techniques in isolation. Again, your learning is shifting from learning theory here to creating systems that enable you to make better decisions in real time.

4. Subtract: While not part of the main framework, when you start iterating you’ll identify what the useless stuff is. Cut it out. Progress is about subtraction. The more useless stuff you remove, the tighter your systems will become and the faster you’ll be able to make decisions.

And then I wait for the next new position, or next time I come around to reviewing an old position. The cycle never stops.

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Thanks for reading!

This was a framework I developed during late blue belt as I was just starting to take a more systematic view of my jiu-jitsu as I neared purple belt.

It’s honestly awesome to have a list of people I can share frameworks with that I thought would never get out of a notebook. So thanks again for reading, and I hope you found something useful.

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If you want more writing on how you need to change your learning depending on which belt level you are at, check some of these articles out:

We live in a world that is optimised for abundance, but have brains moulded by a palaeolithic age of extreme scarcity. This leaves us with a simple equation buried deep somewhere in our grey matter:

More = Better.

In Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, this takes the form of the non-stop consumption of online content. As long as you just keep cramming knowledge into your brain and watch every instructional online, you’ll get better through some form of digital osmosis.

But that logic is flawed. Speak to anyone who has trained martial arts for ten or more years, and they’ll tell you less is more. This idea echoes from the earliest of martial traditions.

Legendary 17th-century Japanese swordsman Miyamoto Musashi claimed to have fought more than sixty contests without a single defeat. Near the end of his life, he distilled a lifetime of combat into a simple instruction: “Do nothing which is of no use.”

Hearing this as a beginner or intermediate isn’t just counterintuitive; it goes against your mental programming. There’s a whole cluster of mental biases discovered by behavioural scientists that suggest humans have a strong instinct to add and accumulate things.

Without pinpointing these cognitive biases, we can’t overcome them. Your progress will cycle through plateau after plateau - leaving you wondering how, despite learning more, you are progressing less.

This article is about challenging those biases and looking at the four ways the sport of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu has taught me that less is more. Each section will look at a mental bias that most of us default to, and how we can take what you might describe as a more ‘minimalist’ mindset to combat it.

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1. Keep it simple, stupid

Bias 1: The ‘additive’ bias

The human brain is hardwired to think progress comes from adding things.

A group of researchers from the University of Virginia coined the term ‘additive bias’ in a 2021 study to describe this psychological tendency to default to adding elements to solve problems rather than subtracting them.

If you’re reading this at white belt, let me explain in a few sentences what your jiu-jitsu evolution will look like if you choose to train the next decade and where that bias will come into play.

At white belt, you start with a huge knowledge gap, so you learn by adding things. Somewhere around blue belt, your game becomes bloated and disorganised. Here’s where you hit a brick wall, one you can’t overcome by just learning extra techniques.

Eventually you realise that to reach the next level of jiu-jitsu, you need to go through years of testing, failing and refining your game. Big strides will come from removing what doesn’t work and focusing instead on forming better connections among the techniques that do.

One day, you reach black belt and realise jiu-jitsu isn’t about using millions of techniques. It’s about using a handful of techniques in conjunction really well.

Addition by subtraction

To combat the ‘additive bias’, you need only look at how evolution actually works.

Jiu-jitsu practitioners talk about ‘evolving’ their game, but miss one key aspect of evolution. To believe in evolution is to believe in natural selection and ‘via negativa’. In short words, systems don’t evolve by adding things. They evolve by killing things that don’t work. What’s left, what survived, is what works.

Believing in evolution is believing that all progress is about subtraction. The strongest indicator that something has gone through decades of iteration is that it consists only of the absolute essential parts - having shed all its unnecessary ones over time.

The other day, an engineer friend of mine showed me this image. It shows three generations of SpaceX’s Raptors rocket engine - Raptor 1, 2 and 3 - side by side. ‘Raptors’ are the liquid-fuel rocket engines designed for SpaceX’s Starship/Super Heavy system.

They’re a pretty amazing visual representation of engineering through subtraction.

As we move from Raptor 1 to Raptor 3, you’ll see progress doesn’t happen by adding parts, but from removing what doesn’t work. With the remaining parts, the engineer studies their connections until he can arrange them into a more effective and efficient whole.

That’s why if you ever want a good heuristic for whether something is effective or not, look at how simple it is.

Note that when I say ‘simple’ here, I don’t mean reductive or dumb. Calling something simple is the highest praise; it means someone has found a way to integrate the most essential raw components into the most complementary and efficient configuration. This is a feat only the greatest craftsmen can achieve.

Conversely, extreme complexity or complication is usually a symptom that something hasn’t gone through that evolutionary process. It’s why I’d rather ride on a bog standard, no frills plane with tens of millions of flight cycles than the newest aircraft with all the bells and whistles but only 10s of thousands of flight cycles.

Before we get any deeper into my fear of flying, the next question is how someone can decide which parts to keep and which to cut. This leads us to the second bias: magnitude matching.

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2. Big problems are usually solved with small solutions

Bias 2: Magnitude matching

Magnitude-matching is a term coined by the late Sam Tatam in his book ‘Evolutionary Ideas’ and refers to the bias that large and complex problems require equally large and complicated solutions.

If you want to progress in jiu-jitsu, you have to make an important mindset shift: the relationship between problems and their solutions is not symmetrical.

The reverse of this bias is that small solutions or interventions often affect outcomes that are orders of magnitude larger. To find these small solutions with outsized impacts, you need to look for leverage points.

Look for leverage points

The polar opposite of magnitude matching is leverage. Leverage is about getting more (output) for what you put in (input).

Accepting that there is no symmetry between problems and solutions, leverage is how we harness the upside of naturally disproportionate causes and effects. In short words, it’s how we find small solutions to big problems, which is one of the core principles of jiu-jitsu and how it earned the name of the ‘gentle art’. (Note that the ‘gentle’ here refers to the inputs, not the outputs.)

In her book ‘Thinking in Systems’, Donella Meadows described these as ‘leverage points’; specific places in a complex system where a small, well-placed change can create huge changes in the entire system’s behaviour.

I’ve always thought this is the difference between an average and elite jiu-jitsu practitioner. Give them the same problem, and one will have a solution which is considerably smaller and more efficient. Instead of bombarding you with details, they get right to the crux of the position and can often give you a small detail that completely changes the way you approach that position.

An example in back control

For example, in back control, there are millions of details. To escape, you have a big challenge: break your opponent’s chest to the back position while they are behind you.

Finding the ‘leverage point’ involves identifying the detail that has the biggest impact on achieving this big goal. The only way to do this is to break down the position (for your opponent and for you) until you understand back control as component parts:

• A seatbelt

• A near-side hook

• A far-side hook

• Underhook side or choking side?

Once isolated, you can separate the function each part plays in controlling you. I won’t go into all of these, but in every jiu-jitsu position, you’ll find specific details that do much of the heavy lifting. Some minutiae are major and some minor.

In back control, I usually point to two main leverage points to my students.

1. The first is the position of their shoulders relative to their opponent’s chest: If at any point you can rotate your shoulders past the centreline of your opponent’s chest, you’ve escaped back control.

2. The second is the position of your hips relative to your opponent’s hips: If you can rotate your hips in to face your partner’s hips, it’s hard to maintain the position and will also make it easier to slip the shoulders.

There are at least 20 other details in back control I could fixate on, but really, finding leverage points is about separating auxiliary details from the make-or-break ones. Identify the part of the position that is most integral to control, and you have a leverage point to focus on.

If you’re interested in this framework for problem-solving, I wrote about it more in this article:

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3. Micro-improvements over time are the key to big leaps in progress

Bias 3: Present bias

Present bias, or hyperbolic discounting, is the built-in bias that leads us to give more weight to rewards we can feel in the present moment than to long-term payoffs. It’s one reason I think there’s such a cult behind short-term goal-setting across Western culture.

As a kid, you’re told to get into a good school. Once you’re older, that becomes getting a good job. Hit your numbers. We’re fed narratives that make us obsess over outcomes, whether it’s the American Dream or making the Forbes Under 30 list.

It means most of us are fixated on the destination, which paradoxically makes us less likely to arrive there. Similar to magnitude-matching, present bias makes us feel like we have to do something really big right now if we want to achieve a big goal in the future.

The reality is the opposite. Instead, it’s about making small, incremental improvements over a long period of time.

Kaizen

One of the greatest gifts jiu-jitsu has ever given me is the Japanese philosophy of Kaizen. Unlike Western goal-setting, Kaizen believes progress is made by inches, in the small, incremental improvements you make day in, day out.

To be clear, I’m not against goal-setting. I think there’s value in starting with the end in mind, just so long as it doesn’t stifle your progress over time. The classic example of this would be someone who gets in crazy running shape for a marathon and - as soon as the event is over - never runs again.

I think Kaizen is also a healthier process mentally. Any activity you do is made up of inputs and outputs, and only the inputs are ever in your control. Fixating on the outputs, or outcomes, which you can influence but never fully control, is mentally exhausting.

I always feel grateful that martial arts became a sort of gateway drug to these self-improvement philosophies, which I might not otherwise have encountered growing up in the West. I think it gives you an unfair advantage against those who try to achieve things solely by short-term goal-setting.

The best way to demonstrate this unfair advantage is to look at other Westerners in different sports who have also been influenced by Kaizen.

A great example to start with is Sir David Brailsford. He’s not the guy on the bike; he’s the one coaching from the car.

He’s the former Performance Director for British Cycling and led the British cycling team to Olympic dominance, winning 7 of 10 track gold medals at the 2008 Beijing Olympics and repeating that performance at the 2012 London Olympics.

At the Tour de France, as Team Sky's General Manager, Brailsford oversaw multiple victories by British riders such as Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome.

It’s even more impressive when you consider Brailsford took over as Performance Director just five years prior to the Olympics at a time when British cycling was in a state of severe, nearly century-long mediocrity.

So how did he do it? It wasn’t by setting off-and-on-again goals. It was by pursuing the aggregation of what he called ‘marginal gains’.

Aggregation of marginal gains

Brailsford discovered the philosophy while studying for his Master of Business Administration (MBA) at Sheffield Hallam University. At this point, Kaizen had become a business concept in Japan, meaning “change for the better” or “continuous improvement”, and filtered its way into Western thinking through business.

As an interesting side note, this is also why Jeff Bezos came into contact with Kaizen and altered several parts of Amazon’s internal operations to emulate Japanese companies like Toyota, which adopted the Kaizen concept to develop the Toyota Production System (TPS).

“The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improve it by 1 per cent, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together.”

Sir David Brailsford

I love this quote because I think it perfectly explains the huge impact that can be achieved by optimising lots of small things over time. Imagine the compound effect if you made 1% micro-improvements to every part of your jiu-jitsu game. They might feel little at first, but once all those parts come together, the impact on your game as a whole would be exponential.

To be clear, Brailsford sweated the small stuff. Really small stuff. He made improvements to things that seemed inconsequential at the micro level but created massive gains at the macro level. This included:

• Teaching riders surgeon-grade handwashing techniques: Brailsford taught cyclists specific handwashing techniques to reduce colds, so they wouldn’t become ill and lose training time.

• Painting the maintenance truck floor white: Brailsford figured if the floor was white, they could instantly spot hidden dust that could compromise bike mechanics.

• Carried a personal mattress and pillow to every hotel for each rider: This was so regardless of where they travelled, each rider would have consistent spinal alignment.

• Developed heated over-shorts: This was to keep rider thigh muscles at the precise optimal temperature between warm-up and racing.

• Used wind-tunnel trials to find which cycling suits were more aerodynamic: Brailsford found outdoor time-trial suits were more aerodynamic than indoor track suits, switching them permanently.

By focusing on small improvements most people thought were trivial, Brailsford broke a nearly hundred-year cycle of stagnation in British cycling. These incremental improvements don’t happen in isolation. They slowly accumulate until they’ve snowballed into something much, much larger.

Another Westerner you might have heard of who is inspired by Kaizen is John Danaher. He has a great way of describing how Kaizen is about making sure your days stack on top of each other:

“Most people live day to day, where the events of yesterday have no bearing on the events of today, and the events of today have no bearing on the events of tomorrow. This means your life will simply run on a flat line until the day you die. But if we make a concerted effort to build one day upon another, even if it’s just a small thing, and in most cases it will be. Over ten years, something remarkable will happen.”

John Danaher on Kaizen

If you want to read more about Kaizen, here’s an article I wrote a while back:

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Thanks for reading!

Before I go, I just want to leave you with one more important lesson from making 1% improvements, which I think James Clear described really well in his book ‘Atomic Habits’.

Clear describes our habits as ‘the atoms of our lives’, with each being a fundamental unit that contributes to our overall improvement. Similar to Brailsford’s 1% improvements, which he references in the book, Clear believes that habits are the smallest thing we can change that have the biggest impact on our lives - even if initially these changes seem small and without consequence:

“At first, these tiny routines seem insignificant, but soon they build on each other and fuel bigger wins that multiply to a degree that far outweighs the cost of their initial investment. They are both small and mighty. This is the meaning of the phrase atomic habits - a regular practice or routine that is not only small and easy to do, but the source of incredible power; a component of the system of compound growth.”

James Clear, Atomic Habits.

He makes the point that if you make enough changes to your habits and your behaviour, you’re also going through a process of identity change. It’s the difference between having a goal and becoming something. Some examples he gives:

• The goal is not to read a book, but to become a reader

• The goal is not to run a marathon, but to become a runner

• The goal is not to learn an instrument, but to become a musician

In jiu-jitsu, you shouldn’t train with the goal of just winning your first competition, or just getting a certain belt grade, or just beating one guy in the gym you couldn’t beat yesterday. You should make all the little changes to your habits and micro-improvements until you become a martial artist.

That’s the greatest example of how small improvements can add up to something much larger. By adjusting your habits day to day, you can become a different person than who you were before.

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Thanks for reading this article. If you want to go deeper into this topic, check out these articles!

When someone asks me how they can get better ‘faster’ at BJJ, my answer is usually: ‘the same way you get better at anything else’. There is no jiu-jitsu-specific cheat code. The answer is the same in BJJ as it is in any other discipline: get better at learning.

Learning, in itself, is a skill. Become an elite learner, and you’ll be able to acquire other skills faster. Most of what I write is really meant to help people get better at learning jiu-jitsu, rather than just providing instructional material or one-off technique tips.

It’s the old ‘teach a man to fish’ principle, which makes me much more interested in teaching people how to learn, rather than what to learn.

Remember, jiu-jitsu isn’t a videogame; it’s an art. I define ‘art’ as any medium of self-expression, and you have to practice your art for a really, really, REALLY long time until you can begin to express yourself through it. Learning is the skill that helps us close that gap.

Here’s what I see as the three most important learning principles for increasing progress in jiu-jitsu (and everything else).

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Principle 1: Feedback loops

Learning has certain ‘laws’ which are immutable. Like the laws of physics, you can’t change them; only discover them.

If learning had a root law, it would be feedback loops. Think of feedback loops as the underlying engine of any progress. They’re the ground zero of learning. If you’re trying to improve your jiu-jitsu and feel like you’re stagnating, the chances are your feedback loop is broken.

But let’s get specific. When I say ‘feedback loop’, I’m referring to what Donella Meadows describes as ‘reinforcing feedback loops’ in her book ‘Thinking in Systems’. In Meadows’ words:

“[A reinforcing] feedback loop is amplifying, reinforcing, self-multiplying, snowballing - a viscous or virtuous circle which can cause healthy growth or runaway destruction.”

Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems

Put simply, a reinforcing feedback loop is anything that grows by a fraction of itself over time:

• You practice guitar, which makes you better at guitar, which makes you enjoy it more, which makes you practice for longer.

• You save money, which grows your balance, which earns you more compound interest, which adds to your savings.

• I write this Substack because I enjoy having more people give feedback on my work, which means I write more, which means more people subscribe and read it, which brings more feedback…

And so on.

Start by Setting Up Practice Loops

In BJJ, the first type of feedback loop you want to build is one that allows you to increase your practice time.

When you first start BJJ, you won’t have the physical conditioning or technical understanding to train for too long, and you need to fix this before you can get into any deeper learning.

I’ve trained jiu-jitsu for a long time, but even for me, if I’m out of shape, the first step is to condition myself so I can train more often and start making the breakthroughs you can’t make on 1-2 sessions per week.

When I’m learning a new skill - like guitar - I need to take even smaller steps. My fingers aren’t conditioned enough for anything more than 15-20-minute practices at the moment. But if I keep practising simple two-chord songs for long periods, my fingers will become more conditioned, allowing me to practice more.

Practice begets practice. So, before anything else, create the conditions which allow you to practice more. Over time, the duration - or frequency - of your training sessions will increase, and your learning will compound.

Once you’ve got your practice loop whirring, the next stage is to make sure each practice is optimised so you are making clear 1% improvements with each session.

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Principle 2: Use Constraints for Deliberate Practice

In the 1990s, Swedish Psychologist K. Anders Ericsson assembled a bunch of violinists at Berlin University of the Arts. He wanted to see if there was something which powered elite performers beyond mere talent.

His famous ‘Violin study’ separated violinists into three groups: future music teachers (average performers), good performers and elite performers. Then he studied whether there was any difference in their practice habits. By the age of 20:

• Future music teachers averaged around 4,000 hours

• Good performers averaged around 8,000 hours

• Elite performers averaged roughly 10,000 hours

In later years, this study would inadvertently give rise to the 10,000-hour rule - but the point was never the volume of hours put in. Ericsson found it was even more about how they practised. He said that all the elite performers engaged in something he named ‘Deliberate practice’.

Deliberate practice has a few specific traits, including that the sessions are:

• Guided by a clearly defined goal

• Provides immediate feedback on performance

• Relies on repetition and refinement

• Pushes the performer beyond their comfort zone

• Involves continuously identifying and correcting mistakes

Like elite violinists, learning Law 1 means you’ve set the conditions to put in the hours. But we also need to learn from the way these elite performers went to every practice with something specific to work on and constantly worked at the edge of their ability.

Deliberate practice is about using voluntary constraints on your practice to tighten the feedback loop. You might hear the word ‘constraint’ and think it sounds restrictive, but its real function is to force you into more productive exploration.

David Epstein has a great book, 'Inside the Box,’ which explains how constraints can be used to boost creativity across business, sport and art. He has a great analogy, describing the constraints you set (he suggests many of the same as those Ericsson outlines in the violin study) as similar to the bumpers in a bowling alley.

Learning to set these guardrails is just as important as what you do in between them. Too much freedom, especially in a sport as complex as jiu-jitsu, can make it extremely difficult to learn.

Two Constraints you can use for deliberate practice

The feedback loop above illustrates some features of deliberate practice. Mainly, the value of two constraints in particular:

1. Having a goal:

Experiments are impossible to run without a thesis. Without deciding what you’re trying to improve or test, it is virtually impossible to see whether something worked or not.

Go to every training session with an intention or objective; something you are focusing on improving. By narrowing the scope of what you’re working on, you can accelerate your experimentation more than someone who goes to training without the same mental parameters.

Your goal or intention will set the starting point for the feedback loop. But then, as you can see in the diagram, your live training will validate or invalidate your thesis. Those errors become information that helps you to set the goal for your next session.

And so on.

2. Training at the edge of your ability:

Ericsson’s found that all the elite violinists spent more time training right at the edge of their ability.

I always think of it as the ‘edge’; the sweet spot between practices that are so easy that you’re stagnating and practices that are so hard you aren’t learning anything. Elite learners find this Goldilocks zone and start experimenting within it relentlessly.

One of the best ways to do this is by training with the right people, which brings us to the third and final law.

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Principle 3: Surround yourself with the right training partners

When you get to purple, brown and black belt, you face a real challenge that in many gyms you’ll probably be one of, if not the, highest level grapplers on the mat. It means you can go for years and only occasionally train with people who really push you.

A couple of weeks ago, I was reunited with some old training partners, and we had our first rolls in 6 years. Since I last saw them, many have won medals at the IBJJF brown- and black-belt Europeans.

The rolls were very hard, as you’d imagine with back-to-back brown- and black-belt IBJJF Euros medalists. But having exposure to very high-level training partners also felt like it completely changed what I thought was possible.

It brings me to the final thing to boost your progress: train with the right people.

Find a mentor

First, you need a mentor. This is something that becomes harder the more advanced you become, as you might be in a situation where you travel to gyms and are the most experienced on the mat.

As many of my readers will know, I spent nearly six years just coaching gym to gym with no coach or supervision. While I think there are great benefits for your coaching when you have this independence, the research around the strengths of having mentors to boost your progress is undeniable - in almost every domain.

K. Anders Ericsson, the Swedish Psychologist we referenced earlier, also said this was something the elite violinists had in common. Each had a mentor who could make sure they were always practising at the ‘edge’.

When you think of this logically, it makes sense. You often need someone much higher level than you, or someone who has trained other athletes to a really high level, to help you see where your plateaus are. It’s kind of like having a navigator shout the route down to you from the top of the mountain.

In Ericsoon’s words, this doesn’t just apply to violinists, but nearly every domain:

“These findings are consistent with internationally successful athletes, scientists, and artists, where [Benjamin] Bloom (1985) found that, virtually without exception, each individual had been trained by a master teacher, who had trained earlier students to an international level.”

In jiu-jitsu, don’t judge your mentors by the piece of fabric wrapped around your waist. During my travels, I’ve trained with plenty of black belts who have fragile egos and aren’t high-level in terms of skills. Perhaps these two things are linked.

Instead, judge your mentor on two things and two things only: their integrity and their skills. Believe it or not, it’s not the easiest thing to find people that fit into the middle of that Venn diagram.

But if you do, try and train with them as much as possible and make yourself as coacheable as possible. It’s amazing the leaps you can make in a short space of time with the right mentor. Don’t believe me?

• Mike Tyson went from being a 16-year-old in the Bronx to a world champion at 21. He had one of the greatest mentors of all time - Cus D’Amato

• Gordon Ryan won his first ADCC gold in 2017, also exactly five years after meeting his mentor John Danaher in 2012

• Georges St-Pierre met Firas Zahabi following his loss to Matt Serra at UFC 69 in 2007, and then went on a 12-fight winning streak that lasted over six years.

Obviously, these are amazing athletes. But I also don’t think any of them would have reached the point they did in the space of time they did without an amazing mentor.

Three types of training partner

If you want to progress quickly, you need three types of training partners.

1. People worse than you: The benefit of training with these people is that you can develop and refine new parts of your offence before you start using them against higher belts.

2. People at the same level as you: Training with these people is often the closest thing to competition because your similar skill levels tend to cancel each other out, making the way you apply your jiu-jitsu and your tactical decisions more important.

3. People better than you: This will force you to work on the weaker areas of your game, which is usually your defence, but if someone is miles better than you, you’re probably learning more about survival than skill development.

Now, there are a couple of caveats here.

Caveat #1:

I still think there’s a benefit to training with people who are much better than you. As you reach purple, brown, and black belt, training with people who still school you can raise your psychological ceiling by showing you what’s actually possible.

As I said, this happened recently. I’ve trained for 12 years, so rolling with people who can completely shut me down isn’t just humbling; it also reinforces that there are new levels to work towards.

In MMA and Boxing, this is sometimes referred to as “the rub.” It’s the idea that when you compete or train with an opponent much better than you, you might get beaten - but also something about their level ‘rubs’ off on you.

For example, Stipe Miocic fought a war against Junior Dos Santos, which he lost, but then went on a historic heavyweight run straight after it. I remember Daniel Cormier said he felt it was down to the ‘rub’.

Even if you train with folks who completely shut you down, if it raises your mental ceiling of what you thought was possible - it’s worth it.

Caveat #2:

Going back to Ericsson’s research, we know that training at the edge of your ability is essential to boost progress.

When it comes to training partners, people who are just a little better than you are probably the sweet spot if your goal is to accelerate your development. This is at least what I’ve found in my own development.

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Thanks for reading!

Hopefully these principles are helpful to you in your jiu-jitsu journey. Once you know them, the only extra ingredient you need is time.

Elite learners are also lifelong learners, and if you never stop being curious, you’ll go much further than you ever thought was possible.

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Related reading:

If you’re interested in reading more posts about the art of learning, Kaizen and feedback loops, check these out:

I got my blue belt a year and a half into training jiu-jitsu, and it felt like one of the greatest achievements in my life.

When I wasn’t in the gym, I’d carry the belt around my house with me, hanging it on my bedroom door or nearby chairs; anywhere to make sure it never went out of my sight.

Blue belt is the first time you take a meaningful step from being a complete beginner to someone who has a basic grasp of jiu-jitsu. You’ve gone through countless months of getting smushed, with no idea what’s happening, to a point where if a beginner enters the gym, you can handle them easily. You make a huge leap from zero-to-one.

When I reached blue belt, I felt like I had a faintly sketched mental map of jiu-jitsu. I understood basic positional flows and could demonstrate most moves fairly well. The thing I wasn’t aware of was that blue belt would come with its own set of challenges.

Once you get to blue belt, you’ve developed the basic skills which open up a whole world of techniques. Suddenly you have loads of choices you didn’t have at white belt, where your inexperience acted as constraints. It becomes extremely difficult to decide which parts of your game deserve the most time.

Every blue belt then makes the same mistake. I made it myself and then watched countless students make it. They start focusing on adding every tactic and technique under the sun without identifying the real problem in their jiu-jitsu game. Perhaps this challenge is why blue belt is a notorious quitting point.

Today’s article is about that problem, why I believe it happens - and how you can fix it using a mental model I absolutely love called the Theory of Constraints.

Let’s get into it.

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The Blue Belt learning threshold

When you’re awarded your blue belt, you pass a ‘learning threshold’. I first heard about this concept in an essay called ‘Superlinear Returns’ by Paul Graham - a computer scientist, venture capitalist, and one of my favourite essayists.

In the essay, Graham talks about how progress works in non-linear domains. He talks about how learning thresholds explain why, when you learn certain skills, you go through periods of plateau - where it feels like nothing changes - to periods where it feels like you’re making huge leaps with every practice.

I then cited this idea in my White-to-Blue belt guide because I think it’s one of the most fundamental patterns in learning. The idea is, when you pass one of these thresholds, new parts of your discipline become learnable that weren’t before.

In Graham’s words:

“Knowledge grows exponentially, but there are also thresholds in it … Some of these thresholds are akin to machine tools: once you learn to read, you’re able to learn anything else much faster.”

Paul Graham, Superlinear Returns

When Graham describes these as ‘machine tools’, he’s referring to tools which make other tools or parts. When you learn to read, you pass a learning threshold because reading is a ‘tool’ you can use to build your knowledge. Vast swathes of knowledge open up to you the moment you decipher the written word.

And if you zoom in on any discipline, you’ll see there are many micro-thresholds. Imagine a ladder that produces more rungs the closer you look at it. These thresholds mean every skill you learn is contingent on knowing its root skill.

If you’re interested in what I think these are, from white to blue belt, you can read that article here:

At white belt, you’re so low down this learning ladder that even if you want to learn something above your level - it’s probably way out of reach. Whether you like it or not, you’ll spend the vast majority of your time stuck in bad positions. You’ll spend hours slowly improving things like knee and elbow escapes.

By blue belt, your options open up, and that leads to the biggest mistake.

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The mistake: Trying to learn everything, all at once

When I was at blue belt, I would constantly learn new tactics without thinking about how they connected to a larger strategy. I was big into front headlock attacks, and would spend hours learning every D’Arce or guillotine variation and even more time on various neckties. The problem was all I was doing was adding tactics.

If you think of tactics as the things you ‘do’ and strategy as the overarching reason for ‘why’ you’re doing them, you can start to see the issue of focusing solely on tactics.

You might know a whole load of techniques, but there isn’t any strategic glue connecting them. Without being anchored in a goal or objective, you don’t have a system. You just have the parts.

Adding techniques, without connections

We’ve all met a blue belt like this. They know the names of every single technique under the sun, but can’t connect them into a coherent system. They know loads of moves, but have no ‘game’.

I liken it to having all the parts of a car engine, except they’re disassembled. Without understanding how they connect together, and for what purpose, they’re useless. Rather than assembling the engine, a lot of blue belts just add more parts.

This is the main difference between the two belts for me. By blue belt, you understand the ‘parts’ that make up jiu-jitsu, but by purple belt, you should know how to build a system with them.

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Treat your jiu-jitsu game like a system

“A system isn’t just any old collection of things. A system is an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organised to achieve something.

If you look at that definition closely for a minute, you can see that a system must consist of three kinds of things: elements, interconnections, and a function or purpose.”

- Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems

If you think of your jiu-jitsu game as a system, it follows that each part of your game impacts the other parts.

My side control attacks mean very little if I can’t pass the guard so that I can use them. If my wrestling is good, I may not need to rely on guard as much. If my wrestling sucks, I’ll need to improve my guard retention and sweeps from bottom position. Every part of your game is connected to, and contingent on, another part.

Instead of thinking of jiu-jitsu as a collection of techniques, looking at it systematically means understanding it’s a group of positional flows. Being good at one position allows you to transition smoothly to another and so on. This means that usually, the best place to focus is where this flow is getting blocked.

If that doesn’t make too much sense yet, don’t worry. This is where the Theory of Constraints is one of the best mental models to decide where to focus.

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The Solution: The Theory of Constraints

The Theory of Constraints (TOC) is a mental model which states that a system’s overall output is controlled by its single most limiting factor, or ‘bottleneck’.

Just like a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, the TOC posits that optimising any part of a process other than the constraint will not improve overall performance.

At blue belt and beyond, you’ll always have specific parts of your game which are hindering all the others. By identifying these, you can choose where to focus your energy in a way that benefits your game as a whole - not just one part.

Let’s say your guard-passing is solid, but your sweeps from guard are weak. You might keep optimising your guard-passing because it’s your strength and it’s where you find yourself naturally in training.

The problem is, no matter how good your passing becomes, your game will lag behind your ability to sweep. In this case, your underdeveloped guard game is the weak link, making the rest of the chain fragile.

Identifying ‘bottlenecks’

You can see the value of focusing on the bottleneck if you imagine a busy highway where an accident has reduced four lanes down to one. You can make the traffic flow faster before the accident or after it, but it won’t increase the number of cars getting through.

Every vehicle still has to squeeze through that single lane. Until the accident is cleared, the narrowed section is the constraint (or bottleneck), and it determines the maximum flow of the entire highway.

After blue belt, the TOC isn’t just a way to seal up one hole in your game. In the highway example, every other part of the road benefits from the bottleneck being cleared, and it’s the same for your jiu-jitsu. By focusing on your limiting factor, you also improve every other part of the system.

Example: The Theory of Constraints combined with Chris Haueter’s 4 Golden Rules

They’re also a good framework to combine with the Theory of Constraints because Haueter’s golden rules are less about techniques and more about positional flows in jiu-jitsu and how to maintain an offensive cycle once you have it.

To recap, the 4 golden rules are:

For anyone that wants to go deeper into these rules, I wrote a whole article a couple of weeks ago on why I think Chris Haueter’s golden rules are so good:

I’m currently prepping a bunch of guys and gals for a competition in September. When using the TOC, I look through Haueter’s rules and try to find - in a competition scenario - which stage constrains our gym the most. Put simply, which of the golden rules is our gym weakest at?

Before our last comp, the main constraint was staying on top, but then we spent months improving that, and now a new constraint has appeared. Most of my students have a great base on top now, but struggle - especially from sweeping positions - to take top position in the first place. Rule number one to ‘Get on top,’ especially from guard, is our main limiting factor.

The logic looks like this:

Once you’ve identified the bottleneck, you know where to focus your energy or that of your students. All of our games and competition sessions are focused on ensuring that our guys aren’t playing guard as a passive retention position - but using it to aggressively sweep and take top position.

This then cascades down into the specific games and training rounds we play during competition class. I’ve made sure my students are spending lots of time developing skills from aggressive sweeping positions like:

• Single leg-X

• Coyote half guard

We also focus on the ‘end-points’ of the sweep. In each round, the attacker starts really close to a finish, and then gradually works backwards from there, gradually increasing complexity for the attacker.

We’ll see how this goes in September. My logic is that, like when the cleared bottleneck on the highway improves traffic flow as a whole, my guys - who already have a really strong top-game - will now just have improved the skills they need to get the match there.

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Thanks for reading!

I hope you enjoyed this piece. On and off the mats, the Theory of Constraints has been so useful for me. Especially if you’re trying to improve a complex system, identifying the constraint or limiting factor is a great way to find places to focus.

That’s it from me this week; see you next time!

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Related reading:

If you want to learn more about this topic, check out these articles:

Last week, I had the chance to join on his Straight to the Point podcast. Steve is a highly respected and widely cited voice in the online legal gambling space, so I’d recommend his Substack if that’s an area you’re interested in!

It was my first podcast appearance connected to The Lost Creonte, so thanks to Steve for having me on and for asking some thoughtful questions while I got used to the new format.

Steve's newsletter usually focuses on the gambling industry, but since he also runs his own martial arts gym, I was one of his first non-gambling guests. Please have a listen to the podcast below and let me know what you think!*

Straight to the Point

Episode 87: What Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Can Teach You About Gambling with The Lost Creonte

“Past a certain level, the real skill in both BJJ and gambling isn’t just knowing the moves — it’s making the right decision faster than your opponent under extreme pressure and uncertainty…

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2 months ago · 1 like · 1 comment · Steve Ruddock

We covered everything from learning and coaching to the sport vs self-defence debate, including:

1. Why the best ideas in jiu-jitsu often come from outside the sport

2. How experts think in principles and beginners think in techniques

3. Why great coaches build environments for experimentation, not imitation

4. Why the first question should be: “What am I actually training for?”

5. Why your brain is designed to avoid thinking, and what that means for improving at jiu-jitsu

Rather than write a chronological recap, I thought it would be more useful to pull together the biggest ideas we explored. Whether you’ve listened to the episode or not, I hope there’s something here that’s useful.

If you do listen, I’d genuinely love to hear what you think of the format. If you’d like to see more podcast appearances—or more summaries like this—let me know in the comments. Here’s the link to the full podcast:

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1. Innovation Usually Comes from Outside Your Own Field

One of the first things Steve picked up on was that many of my articles don’t just talk about jiu-jitsu. Instead, they borrow ideas from cognitive science, systems thinking, evolutionary biology and other disciplines that help explain what’s happening on the mats. And that isn’t accidental.

I increasingly believe that innovation comes from cross-pollinating ideas between different fields. Every positional innovation in jiu-jitsu has come from merging different grappling arts, and learning from Judo, wrestling, and others.

I try to apply a similar principle when I write. Rather than searching for every answer inside Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu itself, I spend a lot of time looking elsewhere and asking whether those ideas help explain the sport in a new way.

During the conversation, Steve mentioned my article on the Lindy Effect, which he said is a heuristic that also applies to gambling. Afterwards, I realised I didn’t explain what it actually means and how I use it in a jiu-jitsu context:

The Lindy Effect is the idea that the longer a non-perishable idea has survived, the longer it is likely to continue surviving. In jiu-jitsu terms, techniques and concepts that have remained effective across decades of competition deserve more attention than whatever happens to be fashionable this month.

It’s not a perfect rule, but it’s an incredibly useful heuristic for deciding where to invest your time. If you’re interested in this idea and how it can be used to judge the BJJ meta, I wrote an article on it here:

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2. Be Clear About What You’re Training For

One part of the conversation I particularly enjoyed was our discussion of the relationship between sport jiu-jitsu and self-defence.

Steve made a really good point that every martial art operates within a different set of constraints. A Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu competition, an MMA fight and a genuine self-defence situation all reward different behaviours. The mistake is assuming that success in one automatically transfers to another.

For me, that’s why it’s so important to be clear about what you’re training for.

If someone walked into my gym wanting to compete under IBJJF rules, I’d teach them very differently than someone whose primary goal was self-defence. The fundamentals overlap, but plenty of techniques that make perfect sense in a tournament become poor decisions on concrete, against multiple attackers or when weapons are involved.

My first piece of online writing on jiu-jitsu ever was answering a Quora question on this topic. It exploded with over 70,000 views. It made me realise how much people care about this question. I wrote that answer in this article when I first started on Substack, and my opinion of the application of BJJ in self-defence hasn’t really changed.

We also discussed something I think is often overlooked in self-defence conversations: the best form of self-defence is usually to avoid the fight altogether.

Situational awareness, recognising when something feels wrong and leaving before a situation escalates are far more valuable skills than knowing one more submission. Martial arts are a form of insurance—I’d much rather have those skills than not—but they’re never a guarantee that you’ll be safe in every situation.

3. Beginners Learn in Techniques. Experts Decide Based on Principles.

One of the most interesting parts of the conversation was discussing how martial artists’ thinking processes change as we become more experienced. When someone first walks into a jiu-jitsu gym, they need highly concrete, physical cues:

• Get chest-to-chest.

• Control the wrist.

• Move your knee into the pocket of your opponent’s hip.

At that stage, specificity is incredibly useful because it gives beginners something tangible to focus on. But, as students progress, the way you teach them needs to change as well.

Past a certain level, students don’t really think in techniques anymore. They will start seeing the sport in more abstract terms, recognising overarching patterns that connect it. When they truly become experts, they think in principles.

I don’t think I explained this very clearly on the podcast, but the real shift is moving from thinking in specific techniques for specific positions to thinking in terms of principles.

Principles help you make decisions across a wide range of situations. That’s important because, past a certain level, I think what separates one jiu-jitsu practitioner from another isn’t who knows the most techniques—it’s who can make better decisions, more quickly, under pressure.

Instead of remembering fifty different guard passes, they understand concepts such as inside position, weight distribution, kuzushi, and timing. Those ideas apply across dozens of situations, allowing them to make decisions far more quickly under pressure.

I wrote a whole article on this mindset shift a while back, with examples from great martial arts thinkers like Sun Tzu and even from Napoleon on the battlefield, which perfectly illustrate the difference.

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4. Fundamentals Should Be Parameters For Experimentation, Not Prison Walls

Steve and I spent quite a bit of time talking about coaching, and one idea that kept resurfacing was how much freedom a coach should actually give their students.

I think every gym should have a common technical foundation. There are positions and concepts that have survived decades of competition because they consistently work. Those are the fundamentals that everyone should understand and also return to again and again.

For regular readers, these are the golden ‘Quadrant 1’ techniques; those which work across rulesets and have stood the test of time:

Where I think coaches differ is what happens next. Some gyms treat fundamentals as rules. I prefer to think of them as parameters for experimentation. Give everyone the same fundamental foundation, but don’t expect everyone to build identical games. Leave room for people to find their own personal expression of the techniques that stick.

In the podcast, I mentioned that I’ve coached students with almost identical physical attributes who developed completely different styles. Not just because of physical attributes, but also because of their personality types. That isn’t a problem to solve, but one of the most enjoyable parts of coaching.

As coaches, I think that’s something worth encouraging. The goal isn’t to produce clones who all move the same way. It’s to create an environment where different personalities can solve the same problems in different ways.

As long as you balance creating enough structure so students don’t feel lost, you can see huge leaps in the room’s level by leaving enough freedom for them to discover what works for them.

This reminded me of one of my favourite ideas from Inside the Box: creativity rarely comes from having no constraints at all. More often, it comes from learning how to explore intelligently within the right constraints. Inside the Box was one of the 6 books that has had the biggest impact on how I think about BJJ.

5. The Brain is Designed to Avoid Thinking

Towards the end of the conversation, Steve and I discussed why it’s so difficult to break old habits and develop new ones.

One idea that really captures this comes from cognitive scientist David Willingham, who writes:

“You may think your brain is made for thinking, but it’s not. It’s made for preventing you from having to think whenever possible.”

At first, that sounds completely backwards. Surely thinking is exactly what the brain is for?

What Willingham means is that our brains are constantly looking for shortcuts. Once something has worked a few times, it becomes our default response because it’s more efficient than analysing every situation from scratch.

That’s incredibly useful in everyday life—but it can become a problem when we’re trying to improve at jiu-jitsu because it creates a bias I referenced in the podcast: path dependency.

Path dependency is our tendency to keep doing something because it’s worked before, even when there may be a better option available. In BJJ, this means defaulting to your A game under pressure rather than exploring new skills.

In jiu-jitsu, it’s why people often fall back on the same techniques whenever the intensity increases. Under pressure, it’s much easier to rely on familiar habits than to explore new solutions.

That’s one reason I’m such a big believer in deliberate experimentation. If every training round is about winning, you’ll simply reinforce the habits (both good and bad) that you already have. But if training becomes a place to explore new positions, test different ideas and solve unfamiliar problems, you’re gradually expanding the number of solutions your brain can access under pressure.

Ironically, the best way to become more instinctive is to spend time deliberately stepping outside your instincts.

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Thanks for reading and listening!

Thanks for reading—and, if you’ve already listened to the podcast, thanks for taking the time to do that as well.

As I mentioned at the start, this was my first podcast appearance as The Lost Creonte, so I’d genuinely love to hear what you think. Did you enjoy this style of summary? Are there any ideas from the conversation that particularly resonated with you? And would you like to see more podcast appearances and companion articles like this in the future?

If you haven’t listened to the full conversation yet, give it a listen. Steve asked some great questions, and there were plenty of interesting tangents that didn’t make it into this summary.

As always, thanks for reading, and I’ll see you in next week’s article.

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Chris Haueter is a 6th-degree black belt, member of the ‘dirty dozen’ and bona fide jiu-jitsu legend. He’s the first American to submit a Brazilian competitor in a BJJ match and the first American black belt to compete in the World Jiu-Jitsu Championship (Mundials) in Brazil.

Positions like ‘Combat Base’, which are now cornerstones of jiu-jitsu, were invented by Haueter and are now the name of one of jiu-jitsu’s biggest affiliations, which he founded.

For more than 20 years, Haueter honed his skills in his Southern California garage, which he aptly named ‘The Garage’. Like the way he named his dojo, Haueter always had a great way of explaining jiu-jitsu with no frills or fluff. Ask him a question about jiu-jitsu, and he’ll condense two decades of lessons into a few sentences.

Need an example? Look no further than Haueter’s 4 golden rules of grappling. They’re super simple, and there are only four of them. In a modern era of jiu-jitsu where the universe of rulesets and techniques is ever-expanding, Haueter’s 4 rules are as true now as they were when they emerged from The Garage in the 90s and 2000s.

As jiu-jitsu has modernised, Haueuter’s rules might be more important now than ever. In a sport that continues to over-intellectualise and manufacture complexity, it can be surprisingly easy to forget what we’re actually trying to achieve when we grapple.

My students are getting ready for competition at the moment. When they ask me what to focus on, I echo Haueter’s rules because they’re the most practical distillation of what grapplers need to be good at.

Let’s get into it.

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Rule 1: Be the guy on top

Guard

One of the worst habits in modern jiu-jitsu is playing guard and settling for bottom position without a clear end in mind. Having a great guard is important (and actually is one of the rules). But, unless you’re a leg-locker, guard should never be treated as an end in itself. Rule 1 shows you must see bottom position as a means to an end - to get to top position.

You’d be amazed at how many gyms I have been to where the students have good guards but can’t use those guards to proactively sweep and take top position. They might be nigh-on impossible to pass from positions like low-knee shield but have little to no ability to get on top.

If you’re transitioning from hobbyist to competitor, this can become a massive problem. I’ve watched so many students lose two points on the takedown and be unable to force a sweep while their opponent just focuses on holding position until the clock runs out.

There’s a simple way to test if your guard game has become lazy and reactive. Do a three-minute round where your opponent’s goal is to just stay on top, as if they are the competitor with the points advantage we just mentioned. Your goal is to sweep, get on top and hold the position for three seconds.

You’d be amazed how much more difficult the sweep becomes when your opponent is just trying to keep their base and not engage with you. And it will teach you whether you have positions to sweep from.

Haueter’s first rule is essential because it shows that the only aim of the guard (outside of submission) is to get on top, where you’re in a position to weaponise gravity rather than become a victim of it.

Standing position

The other implication of the rule is that having a solid game from the standing position really matters. Great Judokas, Wrestlers, and other takedown artists will always be able to get this advantage early.

For those interested, I’ve written some fairly detailed guides on what jiu-jitsu practitioners can learn from Judokas and Wrestlers. I’ll leave those here:

What we can learn from Judokas:

What we can learn from Wrestlers:

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Rule 2: When on top, stay on top

Another big bias I see in a lot of students is knowing a lot of guard passes but really lacking in positional skills from the same position. Base and pressure are huge skills to develop in and of themselves, but require a deep understanding of the mechanics and balance in the positions you pass from.

If you can work on becoming unsweepable from your best guard passing positions, you can not only apply more pressure but also attack your guard passes with more confidence.

Strategically, a good way to achieve this goal is to break your guard-passing into two separate stages:

1. Eliminate your opponent’s options:

This is about understanding which positions you can get to that negate your opponent’s offensive opportunities. It means you have passed a tipping point, where your opponent is forced into a defensive cycle while you maintain an offensive one.

If you can find positions that do this, you immediately become much harder to sweep while being able to apply a lot of pressure on your opponent with little to no effort.

Some of the best positions to ‘stay on top’ in my view are as follows:

• Chest-to-chest halfguard: Probably the king of positions to just keep someone grounded. It’s why every great MMA grappler (who needs to contend with opponents who are better at just standing up) will go straight to this position once they’ve taken someone down.

• Headquarters: My readers will know this is my favourite passing position. Works well across multiple rulesets but is also great to fulfil the goal of ‘staying on top.’ I wrote about the value of this position in particular last week:

2. Then, and only then, start using passing dilemmas

Once your opponent is stuck in a defensive cycle where it makes it much harder to sweep you or enter into submissions, then you can focus on passing dilemmas from that position.

Because you separated guard into a two-step process, you’ll have so much more confidence and control when you start chain guard passing attempts against your opponent. Even your failed attempts will be opportunities to put your opponent under more pressure, rather than risking being swept.

What separates elite from average passers is their ability to fulfil the primary goal of maintaining top position while attacking a range of passes. Not only are they unsweepable, but they can apply even more pressure by chaining passing attempts against their opponents.

For anyone more interested in passing strategy which reflects Haueter’s rules and is a bit more tactical - this 3 step system has always been useful for me:

3. Build a game for those just trying to stand up

Sport jiu-jitsu led to the emergence of the ‘gentleman’s agreement’ in BJJ. This is a strange, unspoken rule in which one opponent would happily play guard and never attempt to stand up. The result is that jiu-jitsu has evolved many positions that don’t work very well against someone who’s just trying to scramble back to their feet.

The final step to making sure your game abides by rule two is focusing on developing mat returns and controls for those just trying to get to their feet. This can be just as important to develop once you’ve passed guard. I’ll write a more in-depth article on this at some point, but let me give you one simple example of how a position can change dramatically when your opponent is just trying to stand up.

In turtle position, you can see in the image below a good example of an opponent abiding by the gentleman’s agreement. They stay on their knees, and traditional jiu-jitsu chokes and back takes become available.

However, if that opponent just starts getting up to their feet, turtle changes to a position called 4-point, or Quad-Pod, in wrestling. It might seem like a subtle shift - the main difference being your opponent now has hip height and is based on his hands and feet rather than his knees. You can see in this image that the bottom player’s hip and body positions have changed significantly.

If you fail to see the difference between a kneeling and standing position, standard jiu-jitsu attacks will result in you losing top position. If you try and jump on a guillotine or go for a normal back take, you’ll likely slide off and find yourself back in bottom position.

Look back at the image and notice how the top player has switched to double-unders rather than seatbelt, and make sure his hips are in a position that makes mat returns like a spiral ride possible.

I think this distinction is a big part of the current meta, especially in No Gi, with more and more ADCC and No Gi athletes using this position to fend off back takes and out-scrimmage those who can’t see a distinction between turtle and 4-point.

Being able to adjust your position quickly against an opponent who is content to stay grounded, rather than one who will try to build back up to their feet, is essential if you want to use rule 2 to your advantage.

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Rule 3: When on bottom, have a guard that can’t be passed

When you’re in the bottom position in jiu-jitsu, you want to develop a guard that is extremely difficult to pass. Focusing on guard retention - making it so that, even if you find yourself on the bottom, your opponent struggles to get past your legs - is one of the most valuable skills you can build.

The only caveat is that you don’t want to stay in a purely defensive cycle. Instead, your guard retention should form part of a system that lets you transition quickly from defence to offence.

Your primary guard retention goal should be to use your retention to create opportunities to re-enter offensive cycles, allowing you to move into dominant attacks that threaten sweeps or submissions.

Great examples of this are folks like Lachlan Giles and Mikey Musumeci, who both have amazing No-Gi retention but use their guards to rapidly re-enter the legs and take back the initiative against their opponents.

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Rule 4: Don’t forget rule number 1

When Chris Haueter says, “Don’t forget rule number one,” it’s because, as you train jiu-jitsu - especially if you develop a really good guard - it’s incredibly easy to fall into the habit of relying on it and forgetting its real purpose. The guard isn’t the end goal. Its purpose is to help you get back on top, where gravity becomes your ally.

What I love about these rules is that they don’t just teach you a position or a technique. Every single one gives you a clear objective and gives you a direction to go no matter where you find yourself in a match.

Whether you’re learning De La Riva, butterfly guard, half guard, or anything else, you understand what you’re actually trying to achieve by using those techniques. The same applies when you’re passing. Whether you’re using headquarters, half guard passing, or another system entirely, you know the principles you’re trying to satisfy.

Thanks for reading!

Thanks for reading; I hope - like me - these rules show you why Chris Haueter is such a legend. I think these rules are the perfect distillation of more than 20 years of training and teaching jiu-jitsu.

In the modern era, where your attention is constantly being pulled in multiple directions, you can cut through so much of the noise by just sticking to Haueuter’s golden rules. If you’re getting better at any one of them, you are improving at grappling. It’s that simple.

Rulesets change, and the meta never stops evolving. But while tactics and techniques may change, the underlying principles remain remarkably consistent. Haueuter understood that, and it’s one of the greatest lessons we can learn from him.

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Related reading

If you like Chris Haueter’s 4 Golden Rules, here are three other articles I wrote that are a bit more tactical but still abide by the 4 rules.

Progress in jiu-jitsu follows a three-step arc:

First, you have your introductory roll as a white belt and, after getting completely smushed, start learning like crazy. Second - and somewhere around blue belt - you realise you overcompensated, adding so many techniques that your game is now bloated and disorganised.

Third - you begin the final stage of testing, failing and refining your game that will likely last the remaining 7 to 10 years of your jiu-jitsu journey. Eventually, you’re left with a handful of things that really work.

One day, you reach black belt and realise jiu-jitsu was never about learning millions of jiu-jitsu techniques anyway, but using a few, in combination, really well.

This essay is about the handful of things I’ve been left with after 12 years in this sport. Specifically, it’s about two positions that I think are absolute essentials for guard passing and guard play.

For both, I’ll give you some of my logic for what criteria I think good guard passing and playing position should have and then talk in more detail about the two positions that have had the biggest impact on my game.

One caveat before I begin is that rulesets shape everything in BJJ, and my game is no exception. When I was competing, I’d often need to transition between IBJJF and Sub-Only rule sets, so my game - and the positions that make it up - reflect this. Every core position in my game works well across both.

Let’s get into it.

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Guard Passing

Before I get into what the most important guard-passing position is in my game, I think it’s important to say how I judge whether a guard-passing position is good or not. I rank guard passing positions on two criteria:

1. It has to improve my ability to stay on top:

This sounds obvious, but not all guard-passing positions are created equal when it comes to what gives you a strong base on top. Whichever position you use, you want it to be a position from which you are unsweepable. If you want to get more granular, a guard-passing position should allow you to do two things easily:

• Prevent the re-guard

• Prevent your opponent from standing up

Thanks to jiu-jitsu’s strange ‘gentleman’s agreement’, where jiu-jitsu players developed an unsaid rule where one opponent would happily play guard and never attempt to stand up, a lot of guard-passing positions don’t work very well against someone who’s just trying to scramble back up to their feet.

2. It has to narrow my opponent’s offensive options:

Any guard passing position you play from should nullify your opponent’s offensive options, while opening up your own. This doesn’t just keep you safe; it also means you can keep your opponent in a defensive cycle while you’re in an offensive one. Strategically speaking, this should be one of your main positional goals, especially in competitive jiu-jitsu.

When I weigh up these factors, one position outshines all the others by far.

2. Headquarters

I’ll go to my jiu-jitsu grave talking about how amazing a position Headquarters is.

Inside and outside jiu-jitsu, a ‘Headquarters’ is a base of operations, where you can safely plan until you deploy your next set of tactics. It’s a position you can easily re-enter when things are getting dangerous, and wear on your opponent as you plan your next move.

When I was a mid-level blue belt, I trained at a gym with three very high-level black belt coaches. Each had their own brand of jiu-jitsu, resulting in real stylistic variety in the gym. Even then, one constant every student shared was a solid headquarters game. While jiu-jitsu varied widely from one person to the next, our coaches made sure we each had the same base of operations.

For those who have read the Longevity x Universality framework, Headquarters is the epitome of a Quadrant 1 position: it has high longevity (it’s worked at the highest level for a really long time) and universal (it’s effective across nearly every BJJ ruleset).

Broad Ruleset Application

The universal application of the Headquarters position was especially important to me because, during the period I was competing, I’d often have to alternate between IBJJF and Sub-Only.

While IBJJF is more points-focused and positional, Sub-Only’s incentives are built around submission, sometimes with no points at all. Not to mention the heaps of leg attacks and heel hooks that you have to think about in Sub-Only, which are illegal in BJJ.

For IBJJF, Headquarters gives so many options to pass, and in Sub-Only, it negates nearly any leg lock entry your opponent can make. This makes it a great position for anyone switching between these rulesets.

Nullifies opponent’s options

Providing your base is solid, your opponent only really has one option to re-guard from headquarters - by escaping their pinned leg. For you, as the attacker, it really reduces the amount you have to think about. Your positional goal in the position is to keep your opponent’s bottom leg pinned, while not loading yourself onto their butterfly hook.

Against Wrestling and MMA grapplers, it’s also quite difficult to get up without exposing yourself in some way. However, if you’re looking for a position to really hold someone down, I’d say chest-to-chest half-guard is a better option. There’s a reason every MMA grappler aims for this position and doesn’t even pass to side control.

Great for exhausting a more athletic opponent

I’ve never been particularly athletic or strong, so early in my jiu-jitsu days, I was used to getting bucked overhead in passing positions against strong opponents. Even worse, I couldn’t even tire larger opponents when I did get to these positions.

That all changed with Headquarters. It’s probably my favourite staging position to use against bigger, more explosive opponents to really tire them out. And the best thing is, you’ll be exhausting your opponent while you rest. It’s a position where your patience becomes pressure.

If you’re interested in how to execute the pressure phases specifically, one of my earlier articles here was all about the 3 P’s of passing (pressure being the middle P).

Guard playing

Guard is a bundled term because for me, it includes two skills:

1. Retention: Your ability to retain guard with the primary goal of being able to leave a defensive cycle and enter back into an offensive one.

2. Guard positions: The positions you actually play from once you’ve entered with the primary goal of either sweeping and coming on top, or submitting your opponent.

My favourite guard positions can be entered with a low risk of counters and, once attained, are high-leverage. By high-leverage, I mean positions I can exert maximum force over my opponent with minimal effort. This is especially important from a bottom position, as - without gravity on your side - you’ll make your life much easier if the guard position you play from is mechanically strong.

Not to mention, the higher-leverage a position is, the higher a ‘weight limit’ it will have. Interestingly, when you train BJJ for a long time, you end up with guard positions that are effective against those of a similar weight to you, but some you wouldn’t touch against a much larger opponent.

My pick here has many low-risk entries and, for me, has the highest weight limit of any guard position.

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2. Single Leg-X

Single-leg X is my favourite guard position for a few reasons.

Very high weight limit

There are some guards I love to use against folks my size or a little bigger, like Lucas Leite’s Coyote Half Guard. But against larger opponents, I avoid them.

That’s because to enter the guard, you have to get very close to your opponent and risk various front headlock submissions. Also, even if you get to dog-fight, I find this position can be challenging against someone with a significant weight and strength advantage.

By contrast, Single-Leg X entries are much lower risk, and if you get into the position, you can exert a lot of leverage over a larger opponent. When training, I find it’s still super-effective even against my heavyweight training partners. In both Gi and No Gi, getting a hip-under-hip position is the best way to exert leverage over a larger player, and Single-Leg X offers solid opportunities to do so.

Strong Sweeping position in IBJJF, Strong Heel Hook Entry in Sub Only

Similar to headquarters, Single-Leg X was a really important position for me as it helped me switch between IBJJF and Sub-Only.

Originally developed at the highest level of IBJJF by legends like Marcelo Garcia, Single-Leg X also inadvertently laid the foundation for the Danaher Death Squad’s leg lock revolution. I wrote an article on that here:

Whether you like attacking heel hooks from saddle, or outside ashi, most of these leg entanglements start with an entry into Single Leg X, or as Danaher’s followers would call it, Ashi-Garami.

Thanks for reading!

I hope you enjoyed this piece. At some point, I’ll definitely have a much more in-depth piece on how to build a jiu-jitsu game based on your own attributes and the ruleset you spend most time in. We’ll also have much deeper breakdowns coming for how to play from Headquarters and Single Leg X.

Until then, I’d be super curious if you have any jiu-jitsu positions that have really stood the test of time with you and have become a pivotal part of your game.

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Related reading:

If you want to learn more about some of the strategic and competition-tested concepts that helped me pick these positions, check out some of these articles:

When I first started BJJ 12 years ago, there wasn’t a huge difference between Gi and No Gi. If someone did Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, you could bet that their skills were evenly spread between Gi, No-Gi and self-defence.

Fast forward to today, and while both stem from the same jiu-jitsu language, Gi and No-Gi have developed their own dialects. Years of independent evolution under different rule sets have led us to the point where Gi and No-Gi have become distinct disciplines, requiring separate skills, strategies, and tactics.

Over time, this has made switching between the two much harder. In fact, that’s why a lot of specialised jiu-jitsu players see it less as a ‘switch’ and more as a ‘transition’ that needs to be carefully planned as they move from what feel like two completely different realms of jiu-jitsu.

I’ve had a lot of conversations recently about the differences between Gi and No Gi in modern jiu-jitsu, so here’s a short essay covering 4 major differences between the two.

Difference 1: Control-based and Movement-based

Gordon Ryan says that most jiu-jitsu games fit into one of two categories:

1. Control-based: These are jiu-jitsu games that focus on inhibiting and restricting movement.

2. Movement-based: These are jiu-jitsu games that focus on creating and using movement to gain an advantage.

Obviously, this is not binary but rather a jiu-jitsu continuum. Everyone’s game will have control-based aspects and movement-based aspects even if some people are extreme examples of one or the other. For example, Murilo Santana is the epitome of control-based jiu-jitsu, while the Ruotolo brothers are a prime example of movement-based jiu-jitsu.

I also think this categorisation says a lot about the core difference between Gi and No Gi. A few months ago, I was talking to a black belt who has spent the majority of his decades on the mat training in the Gi. I asked him what he thought the single biggest challenge was when transitioning to No-Gi.

He said in Gi, there is no movement you cannot mitigate with some sort of grip, but in No Gi, it is impossible to completely eliminate movement. That’s why Gi is more control-based. If a decent Gi player gets to their desired grips, you’ll have little to no opportunity to escape.

Conversely, No-Gi is more movement-based. You have to deal with the opposite problem. With very little to grip - and the grips you do have losing friction as your training partner gets sweaty - you aren’t able to inhibit movement anywhere near as much.

Even if you look to Mixed-Martial Artists with wrestling-heavy styles of Dagestani or Chechen origin (think the Nurmagomedovs, Machachevs and Chimeavs of this world) - their styles are built around the fact that even they can’t pin someone down to one spot.

The genius of MMA-wrestling innovators like Aldumanap Nurmagemedov is that they developed grappling systems that worked by giving the attacker different staging positions to follow, thereby exhausting their opponents during the scramble. They weren’t trying to stop movement, but instead were creating systems where they could use their opponent’s movement against them.

So, the transition from Gi to No-Gi is really going from the most control-based form of jiu-jitsu to a more movement-based one. While Gi players can control every inch of a scramble if they have a good understanding of how to use the Gi, No-Gi players have to become comfortable inside the scramble and learn to control through transition.

That’s why all-time great No-Gi players like Marcelo Garcia were said to maximise their time spent in the scramble:

“Marcelo’s training philosophy was to spend his whole jiu-jitsu life in the scramble. It was to the point that he would let opponents move so he could spend more of his training time in transition. It was all about maximising time spent in the in-between.”

According to one of Garcia’s first black belts (and chess prodigy), Josh Waitzkin

In Gi, all the extra grips delineate between different positions and also slow down jiu-jitsu. With fewer gripping options, No Gi has a much larger grey area. That’s why I love Waitzkin’s line about ‘maximising time spent in the in-between’. I think it encapsulates something all No-Gi players need to get really good at compared to Gi players.

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Difference 2: Leverage from bottom position

Recently I had a seminar from a Euros silver and gold medalist (brown belt Gi and black belt No Gi, respectively). He made a really important point about the difference in leverage between Gi and No Gi.

The visiting black belt made the point that in Gi, you can exert as much leverage from the bottom position as you can from the top. Whereas in No-Gi, especially if you’re against a good top player, the deck is stacked against you whenever you’re on bottom. Gravity isn’t on your side, and you don’t have many great gripping options from guard (compared to Gi) to manipulate your opponent’s posture.

I think it’s a subtle but HUGE difference that massively influences strategy in Gi compared to No-Gi. For example, when a match starts, in Gi it makes a lot of sense to pull guard immediately, whereas in No-Gi it might make more sense to wrestle to stay on top from the start.

I’m currently prepping a few folks for competition, and in Gi I’m encouraging a lot of them to have really aggressive guard games. But for No-Gi we stick to Chris Haueter’s 3 rules because it's much harder to generate leverage from bottom against good opponents:

• Get on top

• Stay on top

• Have an impassable guard

Big player vs Small Player

Leverage is also the force that allows a far smaller BJJ player to beat a far larger BJJ player. Braulio Estima put it another way when he said, ‘Every technique has a weight limit.' Out of the two, because of the leverage the bottom player can exert over the top player, Gi has a higher weight limit than No-Gi.

That doesn’t mean smaller No-Gi athletes don’t have strategies to defeat larger opponents, but their strategies differ from those in Gi. And when you compare all-time great absolute performances in the absolute division across Gi and No-Gi, you see how strategies tend to change because of this central difference in where leverage can, and cannot, be created.

In Gi

If you look at legendary small-man runs in Gi absolute divisions, they tend to involve a smaller player using an aggressive guard game because of the extra leverage the Gi affords them from bottom position. Let me give you two examples.

First, Mikey Musumeci. At the 2020 IBJJF European Championships, Musumeci competed against much larger opponents in the absolute, including a really close match against ultra-heavyweight Mahamed Aly. His strategy was to pull guard immediately. You can see this at the start of his match against Seif-Eddine Houmine:

Lucas Lepri’s 2019 Gi absolute run is another example of how the Gi gives opportunities for a smaller player to use a really aggressive guard game. Despite having good Gi takedowns, notice how in this match Lepri quickly pulls guard (against the same opponent as Mikey), gets straight to a sweep, then submits his opponent with a bow-and-arrow choke.

Or, in Lepri’s match against Kaynan Duarte on the same day, you can see how he goes from wrestling in a single-leg with the lapel looped through - but rather than finishing the takedown, he uses it as a guard pull into a really interesting deep half variation:

In No Gi

In No-Gi, the great equaliser for smaller players isn’t guard itself, but leg attacks.

If you look at Lachlan Giles’ legendary 2019 ADCC run, you’ll notice his strategy is quite different to the Gi examples we just watched. Even though Giles pulls guard, his main aim is to get deep into a leg entanglement. Without the leverage of Gi grips, No-Gi bottom players should have one goal against larger players: enter the legs.

There are two reasons leg entanglements are a great equaliser in No-Gi against larger opponents:

1. You have two limbs around your opponent’s one limb. This is mechanically strong but also provides much more friction than most No-Gi grips. Leg entry positions like Single Leg X are extremely hard to just power out of if the person in the position understands what they’re doing.

2. Perhaps more importantly - your hips are underneath their hips. In my opinion, this is the single greatest way to create leverage from the bottom position in No-Gi. Up until you get hip under hip, a larger opponent has a lot of power and movement they can use against you.

Notice in this clip of Lachlan’s finishing sequence over Kaynan Duarte that it all starts with his entry into the legs, allowing him to get his hips under Duarte’s for a nice heel hook finish.

Or, you can see the same strategy deployed in a different way in this amazing match between Garry Tonon and the larger Gilbert Burns. Look how Tonon actually goes from defending side-control to finding a really crafty entry into saddle from defending Burns’ dog-fight position.

While the entry is different, Tonon’s end goal is the same as Lachlan’s; enter into the legs and get under Burns’ hips. The interesting difference in this example is that Tonon finds an opportunity to do so during a defensive scramble. Tonon, like Garcia, was another master of the in-between.

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Difference 3: Diverging Specialisms and Meta

Even in comparing these examples, you’ll see that the strategy and tactics deployed across Gi and No Gi are quite different. This brings us to another core difference between Gi and No Gi. These days, they are quite simply different sports, with diverging specialisms and meta.

In the early 2000s, Gi and No Gi were much closer together. It’s why even amazing No-Gi players like Marcelo were multi-world Gi champions, and Gi legends like Roger Gracie won ADCC titles.

While there are still athletes who do both, it’s more common now to see elite specialist athletes needing to transition between sports. For example, Tainan Dalpra, Mikey Musumeci and Nicholas Meragali were all elite Gi-players before they made the crossover to No-Gi.

Training Gi and No-Gi today likely means training a completely different meta if you want to go deep into the sport. In Gi, you’ll likely go deep into sport-specific positions:

• Different forms of lapel guard

• Berimbolo and crab guard transitions

• Lasso and spider guard

• Keymaster and Matrix Back takes

The list goes on. Whereas in No-Gi, there is a different set of sport-specific positions you need to develop:

• Leg lock positions like saddle, outside ashi, backside 50/50 and associated entry guards, including reverse X and K-Guard

• Wrestling and scrimmaging is something that continues to become more and more important in No-Gi

• More niche front headlock attacks that are tricky to pull off around the Gi collar like the high-wrist guillotine

Now if that sounds like a lot of techniques that’ll make it difficult to choose what to focus on, I hear you.

Recently, I made a Longevity x Universality Matrix to help people weigh up which techniques are most worth their time, based on how long they have been used versus how many rule sets and scenarios they apply across.

All of the above fall into Quadrant 2: Specialist Systems. These are systems that have worked for a long time, but only work (at the moment) within a specific ruleset.

You can get the full framework here.

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Difference 4: Injury Risk & Longevity

Another big difference is injury risk. made a really good point on one of my posts the other day about how - due to the fast-moving, scrambling nature of No-Gi - there’s probably more risk for injury compared to Gi.

I think this is another reason why it's worth getting really good at training and understanding the in-between in No-Gi as we mentioned earlier. It’s usually within these scrambles or grey areas of jiu jitsu (especially wrestling-related) that people get injured.

That’s also why it’s important to have a good coach who can create a safe training environment in both Gi and No Gi. One thing we do at the gym I coach at is we flag common positions that cause injuries, so our students have really high awareness of where they are and what to watch for in each position.

We’ve even identified a couple of really ‘high-risk’ positions that we make sure all our coaches flag when teaching them. If you’re interested in what some of these positions are, I included them in this article I wrote on longevity in BJJ.

Longevity

And on the subject of longevity, we come to the final difference between Gi and No Gi for today. And that is that Gi is probably easier for those later in the sport, or in years, than No-Gi.

Again, I’m not saying No-Gi is a young-person’s game. There are plenty of training partners I’ve had in the 40-60 age range who were extremely handy in No-Gi. But I know from my own experience that - even despite being a No-Gi specialist - the older I get, the more I’m gravitating towards the Gi.

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Thanks for reading!

I hope you enjoyed today’s piece, and I know a lot of what I said is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the differences between Gi and No-Gi. There were also some really interesting contributions to this thread about the differences you see between Gi and No-Gi at your schools.

Thanks again for reading, and I hope you have a great week next week!

To some extent, we’re all hardwired to be drawn to things that are shiny and new - especially in combat sports. This ‘Recency bias’ is the human brain’s tendency to assign higher importance to the most recent information or experiences, often at the expense of long-term historical information.

The same way that MMA fans will write off a legendary fighter’s entire legacy if they’re coming off a recent knockout loss, jiu-jitsu practitioners will leave the fundamentals by the wayside for the latest niche leg entanglement they got from a YouTube short.

Walk into the majority of jiu-jitsu gyms, and it’s more likely that the latest viral technique on Instagram is being drilled at open mats, rather than the fundamentals that have worked since the sport of jiu-jitsu was in its infancy.

If there is an antidote to Recency bias, it’s probably the idea of the Lindy Effect. It’s the idea that, for non-perishable things (things that don’t go mouldy or curdle), such as books, ideas, survival is the best predictor of future success.

In other words, if an idea has lasted ten years, the Lindy Effect would suggest it will probably last another fifty. While recency bias is a preference for what is new, the Lindy effect shows the power of what has lasted.

This essay is about how you can use the Lindy Effect as a heuristic to overcome recency bias and realise the value of diving deeper into techniques and positions in jiu-jitsu that have stood the test of time.

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Where did the Lindy Effect come from?

One thing I love about the Lindy effect is that it didn’t emerge from academia, but from people gossiping in a deli called ‘Lindy’s’ in New York.

Actors who frequented the diner would gossip about the nearby Broadway shows, and realised that a Broadway show’s future life expectancy would depend on how long it had already run. For example, if a show ran 200 days, the actors would bet that it would run for 200 more days.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb then coined the term ‘Lindy Effect’ in his book ‘Antifragile: Things that gain from disorder.’ (Fantastic book by the way). Taleb tells the story of Lindy’s Diner, but also expanded the list of things that were ‘Lindy-compatible’ from Broadway shows to almost anything that could be considered non-perishable;

“Only the nonperishable can be Lindy-compatible. When it comes to ideas, books, technologies, procedures, institutions, political systems, there is no intrinsic ageing and perishability. A physical copy of War and Peace can age (particularly when the publisher cuts corners to save 20 cents on paper for a $50 book); the book itself as an idea doesn’t.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, An Expert Called Lindy

Like the physical copy of ‘War and Peace’, we are not Lindy-compatible. Without getting too gloomy, we obviously age and our time on the mats is limited - making what techniques we choose to spend our training time on even more important.

However, the non-perishable ‘book as an idea’ has a lifespan that increases for each extra day it’s in use. The jiu-jitsu equivalent is a set of techniques, knowledge, and know-how passed down through generations of grapplers.

So the real value of the Lindy Effect for a jiu-jitsu practitioner is using it as a mental model to identify which techniques are Lindy-compatible (those that will work for a really long time) and which aren’t (temporary fads that quickly fade).

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How to use The Lindy Effect for jiu-jitsu analysis

Like actors at the Lindy Deli making bets on how long Broadway shows would run based on how long they had already run, we can use the Lindy effect to examine which new techniques are more likely to withstand the test of time and which are cheap tricks. That is its primary function as a mental model: to separate temporary techniques from what will last.

That’s why the Lindy Effect is baked into a 2x2 framework I use to assess the potential longevity of new techniques and positions entering the BJJ Meta, which I call the Longevity x Universality Matrix.

I use this 2x2 to weigh techniques along two axes: how long they have lasted (which is really a proxy for how Lindy-compatible they are) and how broad their application is across rule sets and scenarios.

Focus on what does not change

“I very frequently get the question: ‘What’s going to change in the next 10 years?’ And that is a very interesting question; it’s a very common one. I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?’ And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two.”

Jeff Bezos

The first way to apply the Lindy Effect is to study the things that don’t change as much as you study the things that do.

Just to be clear, there’s definitely a lot of value in studying what’s new in the BJJ meta - but if you study that alone, all you’re really observing is change. There’s no way to separate the wheat from the chaff; what works today from what will continue to work in ten years.

If you add a Lindy lens to your analysis, you’re also studying the techniques and positions that haven’t changed. It’s a great way to work out which of the new trends have solid foundations and which are new but won’t last very long.

Tricks vs Fundamentals

Let’s look at an example with two techniques:

• The buggy choke of the early 2020s

• Position-based leg lock systems of the late 2010s

The buggy choke worked for a while when it first emerged because no one understood how it worked. But there isn’t really any part of the technique that is built on any positional logic that has stood the test of time. You often have to let someone pass your guard to even attempt it. Buggy Chokes for me are the best examples of short-term tricks that don’t work for long.

By contrast, the position-based leg lock attacks employed by the Danaher Death Squad were novel yet built on time-tested fundamentals. What has made them last so long is the array of leg-lock positions created, such as saddle and outside ashi, which themselves were built on positions like single-leg X and X-guard that had already stood the test of time.

For anyone who’s a real nerd and likes to learn how certain techniques evolved, I wrote a full article about the history and evolution of the DDS leg locks:

Combining the old with the new

That’s why any innovation in jiu-jitsu will usually be a combination of the old and new. I like to think of it as a new way of doing something bolted onto a lindy-compatible base that has been time-tested.

Take Gordon Ryan, for example. His style has absorbed many of the sport’s most disruptive innovations, especially in leg locks, yet the cornerstone of his game in recent years has been old-school fundamentals like chest-to-chest half-guard passing.

While there is plenty in his game that is ‘new’, Ryan builds it all on a foundation of positions that have never stopped working. Half-guard passing passes the Lindy test, as it has worked at the highest level since the earliest jiu-jitsu competitions and remains the preference of the sport’s best No-Gi practitioner today.

Focusing on techniques that have proven effective for decades is one of the best ways to future-proof your game. It’ll also help you distinguish between the Lindy-compatible fundamentals (a great foundation for your game) and what you can build on top (new tactics and techniques).

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Thanks for reading!

I hope this article showed how powerful The Lindy Effect can be to analyse jiu-jitsu trends and decide what is temporary and what is worth your training time. That’s all from me today. Thanks again for reading, and have an amazing week when it comes.

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The “10,000-hour rule” is one of the most enduring myths of modern self-improvement. It’s the idea that mastery is simply a matter of accumulating 10,000 hours of practice. The idea has become so deeply embedded in popular culture that the number itself is often treated as a proxy for progress. For a long time, I found the story convincing too.

In fact, I once spent weeks trying to do maths in a notebook to figure out how to allocate those hours across my entire jiu-jitsu game. I literally wrote ‘10,000 hours’ at the top of the page and then tried to work out - based on my training frequency - how long it would take me to pass that magical threshold.

My logic was equal parts simple and flawed; if I could put in 10,000 hours, mastery would be the output. The problem is that the initial premise behind the 10,000-hour rule is nothing like what it became known for after Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers was published. In the beginning, it wasn’t ever supposed to be a ‘rule’ at all.

This essay is about the truth and flaws of the 10,000-hour rule, and how by learning its initial purpose you can access a much more useful school of thought to improve jiu-jitsu progress.

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What is true

Now, of course, there is a kernel of truth behind the 10,000-hour rule. That is, it takes a long time to master anything. A really, really long time.

Let’s do a quick bit of napkin maths to demonstrate how long 10,000 hours really is. Subtracting the hours we need to eat, sleep and survive and working on the basis that each jiu-jitsu training session lasts around 90 minutes, here’s how long it would take you to reach the 10,000 hours:

• Hobbyist: 3 sessions per week: roughly 40–45 years

• Committed: 5 sessions per week: roughly 20–25 years

• Obsessed: 6 days per week: just over a decade

Most who train BJJ will never come close. Estimates suggest that 80–90% of beginners quit within their first year. Even if we’re optimistic and assume you’ll train for around 13 years - a common estimate for how long it takes to reach black belt - you’d still need to be training 6+ sessions per week for your entire jiu-jitsu journey.

In fact, based on the napkin maths, the vast majority of black belts in BJJ probably haven’t reached that number of training hours.

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Not about quantity, but quality

This picture is of K. Anders Ericsson. He’s a Swedish psychologist whose research led to the 10,000 rule. But to understand what his research was actually about, you need to understand that he has always been fascinated with one question:

“Why do some people become world-class performers when others with similar talent do not?”

At the time, the consensus in psychology was that what gave elite performers an edge was in their DNA. They simply had higher IQs or other genetic gifts that meant they were destined to be outliers.

Ericsson couldn’t accept that world-class talent was immutable and began to study expertise across many domains, including music, chess, sports, medicine, and memory. Rather than stopping at the genetic makeup of elite performers, Ericsson went a layer deeper, focusing on how they practised their craft.

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The violin study

Ericsson’s research would culminate in the 1990s ‘Violin Study’, which inadvertently led to the birth of the 10,000-hour rule.

The ‘Violin study’ focused on violin students at the Berlin University of the Arts, separating them into three groups: future music teachers, good performers and elite performers - to see if there was any difference in the way they practised. He found that elite performers had far more hours of highly focused practice than their peers. By the age of 20:

• Future music teachers averaged around 4,000 hours

• Good performers averaged around 8,000 hours

• Elite performers averaged roughly 10,000 hours

Now there’s a couple of important things to call out here. For one, the 10,000-hour number was never meant to be a rule for the average person. It was literally meant to quantify the opposite: elite outliers who deviated from the norm.

Ericsson’s research was popularised in the appropriately titled ‘Outliers’ by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell cited how outliers like the Beatles and Bill Gates ended up getting their 10,000 hours of practice through strange circumstances. For the Beatles, it was Hamburg’s marathon nightclub gigs. For Gates, it was a rare opportunity to spend countless hours programming on a computer years before the personal computer revolution.

Even though Outliers is a book about how people become the exception, not the rule, the 10,000-hours became a strange pop-culture benchmark that the average person began to aspire to. The idea was that, as long as you just put in the time, you can master anything. Quantity wins.

To put this in a jiu-jitsu context, the equivalent of the elite violinists in the jiu-jitsu category aren’t your average black belts. They’re world-class competitors, like Marcelo Garcia and BJ Penn.

Like the Beatles and Bill Gates, both would have had lifestyles that allowed them to train far more than the average person. BJ Penn was training virtually full-time in Brazil, multiple sessions per day, 6-7 days a week, to get his black belt in 3 years, while Garcia also spent most of adult waking hours teaching and training at Alliance Headquarters.

If you imagined a standard distribution of people training jiu-jitsu - with the complete casual on the far left and someone like Garcia and Penn on the far right - you’d see how small that far-right tail really is. These folks aren’t just very good at jiu-jitsu; they are complete anomalies.

Secondly, Ericsson himself always pushed back against the idea that 10,000 hours is a rule. For Ericsson, the bigger insight from his research wasn’t just that more total hours equals mastery but that what you do within those hours is more important. His most important finding wasn’t the number itself, but the difference in how these elite performers practiced compared to their peers.

So, accepting the flaws of the 10,000-hour number, let’s look at the real lesson from Ericsson’s research: deliberate practice.

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Deliberate practice: A more useful mental model for progress

In Ericsson’s violin study, he found that the elite performers’ 10,000 hours were not spent aimlessly playing the violin. They were spent engaging in what he called deliberate practice: focused training designed specifically to improve performance. According to Ericsson, deliberate practice:

• Is guided by a clearly defined goal

• Provides immediate feedback on performance

• Relies on repetition and refinement

• Pushes the performer beyond their comfort zone

• Involves continuously identifying and correcting mistakes

Ericsson had a very specific definition of deliberate practice. Here’s how I think you can apply this to your jiu-jitsu training.

1. A clearly defined goal

When coaches talk about coming to a session with an ‘intention’, it’s basically a training goal to anchor your practice. The same way no experiment in science can start without a thesis, it’s hard to test your skills without knowing what you are trying to improve.

I’ve been reading a great book recently called ‘Inside the Box’ by David Epstein. In the book, he discusses how constraints can sometimes be the best way to force someone into productive exploration. In a jiu-jitsu context, the first ‘constraint’ you put on yourself is a training goal or focus.

To borrow one of Epstein’s analogies, your goal for training sessions acts as the bumpers at a bowling alley. It narrows your focus just enough to accelerate your experimentation within those bounds.

If you want to read more about this book, and how it influenced how I look at BJJ, I did a full write-up on this as well as five other books a few weeks ago:

2. Immediate feedback

The benefit of BJJ is its very tight feedback loop. Minutes after you tap-bump, you’ll find out whether your idea or technique will hold up against any kind of resistance. One way to make this feedback loop even tighter is to have a conversation with your training partner during or after rolling.

There’s so much information that can be exchanged in a quick post-roll conversation that I’ve always thought it was odd that, in most gyms, people roll and then don’t say another word to each other afterwards.

3. Repetition

In the context of ‘deliberate practice’, I don’t think repetition is necessarily just doing the same thing over and over again. While I still think there’s a place for drilling in modern jiu-jitsu, I also think that once you can perform the basic physical requirements of a move, you’ll start to hit the point of diminishing returns pretty quickly if you’re repping something into infinity against a static training partner.

Instead, having training rounds against an active opponent that balance repetition with change can be really useful. For example, I was teaching De La Riva in Gi last night, and we used situational rounds to balance the two:

• Repetition: Every round had one student starting in De La Riva guard against another. The top player’s goal was to pass guard or disengage from De La Riva. The bottom player’s goal was to force the top player’s hip to the mat, or create back exposure. If either player achieved their goal, the round immediately reset to De La Riva.

• Change: The top and bottom player were free to use any tactic to achieve their goal, as long as it was within the constraints of De La Riva. Also, every few minutes, partners would change, so they would do the same thing with a different body type.

4. Working at the edge of your ability

In BJJ, this doesn’t have to be going against someone of a certain belt level that pushes you to your limits (although it could be). The only drawback of this is that you’ll probably default to your A-Game, or whatever helps you survive.

Alternatively, you can also train at the edge of your positional understanding against a lower-level training partner or with less resistance. Either way, you want your training to be at the edge of your ability.

5. Constant error correction

If you’ve set up your training to abide by criteria 1-4, it will be much easier to spot errors and fix them quickly, leading to a cycle of iteration.

Again, your training goal gives you focus, which serves as a parameter for experimentation. Within those constraints, it’s about trying as many things as possible against a wide range of training partners who will give you a variety of reactions.

Thanks for reading!

The reality is, not many of us have 10,000 hours to dedicate to jiu-jitsu. Instead of obsessing over quantity, we should obsess over how we spend the hours we do have.

Put simply, turn up to training with something you want to work on, and then train as much as possible to see whether your hypothesis holds up. It doesn’t matter if your original assumption was wrong or right; just that you experiment enough to find out.

That’s all from me today. I hope you found something useful and have a great rest of your week!

I’m a big believer that teaching jiu-jitsu improves your own jiu-jitsu.

Teaching is the process of turning your tacit knowledge - rooted in your reflexes, intuition, and combat experience - into something you can explain to another person. Much of what we do when we roll exists below the level of conscious thought, and that’s why, sometimes, our A-Game is the hardest to articulate.

As a competitor, I spent more time in Headquarters than any other position. Yet when I first started teaching it, I struggled to explain how the position actually worked. It took years of explaining the position and watching where my students struggled to boil down what I had been doing on autopilot to a couple of core details.

Teaching is the act of reverse-engineering your intuition until it unravels into something someone with less experience can understand. I’ve been teaching jiu-jitsu since I was 19, and have been teaching every week since we emerged from COVID. Not only do I spend a lot of time coaching, but also studying other coaches.

Lachlan Giles and John Danaher are by far my greatest influences. I’ve followed Giles since his early days on his first Absolute MMA St. Kilda channel, and now spend A LOT of time on his online platform Submeta. Danaher’s ‘Enter the System’ series has shaped the way I approach so many positions, but currently I spend a lot of time watching his instructionals aimed at older athletes because the fundamentals he teaches there work for every body type.

This essay is five tips I’ve learned over the years from my own coaching and from observing hundreds of hours of John Danaher and Lachlan Giles teaching.

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1. Start with your students and work backwards

If you don’t get this one right, everything else you read in this essay will be useless.

Long before you start scouring YouTube or, in my case, Danaher and Giles instructional videos, your focus should start on your students. This might seem really obvious, but you’d be surprised how many coaches turn up to a session with an instructional they’ve memorised and run through it without thinking about whether it’s useful for their students.

I’ve taught BJJ at five different gyms, and every room you walk into has its own unique culture. The overall level of experience can vary just as much. If you don’t pay attention to your students, especially at a new gym, it’s easy to spend time on techniques that aren’t relevant to the people in the room.

Rather than teaching coaching as an exercise in memorising instructions, be more student-oriented. Focus your attention on them and work backwards. There are two main ways I pay close attention to my students.

During classes

If you’re paying attention to your students during classes, you can quickly see where they’re struggling and adjust the constraints or instructions accordingly. Sometimes the smallest changes make the biggest difference. Giving students more time to work through a problem, or covering four techniques instead of the eight you originally planned, can dramatically improve how much they retain.

The same principle applies: if the room is more advanced than you expected, you can adjust your plans and raise the level of the techniques accordingly.

In-between sessions

For coaches who teach in blocks, paying attention to the specific mistakes your students make and noting them down can dramatically improve the relevance of your instruction when you return to the topic. It means you can tailor future sessions around the problems students are actually encountering rather than the ones you assume they’re having.

I noticed this while teaching the same Headquarters passing at two different gyms in different parts of the country. Despite there being no crossover between the groups, students consistently ran into the same problems: whenever they tried to pin the bottom leg, they would load their hips onto their opponents’ butterfly hook - immediately getting swept. After each session, I’d note this common pitfall so I could draw my students’ attention to it the next time I taught Headquarters.

By the time the next session came around, I already knew where students were likely to struggle and could spend more time addressing those areas. Every time I do this, the coaching becomes hyper-relevant because it is built around real problems my students face rather than hypothetical ones I dreamed up.

Once you’ve collected that information, it becomes useful in another way, which brings us to the next tip.

2. Show it wrong, then show it right

I watch a lot of Lachlan Giles and John Danaher before coaching and realised that while their styles are different, they both use one teaching technique repeatedly:

They show their students how not to do it, and then they show the right way.

Once you’ve collected the common mistakes mentioned in the previous tip, make a note of them. Then, in the next class, use them to demonstrate how not to do it. For example:

“If I do [insert the common error you’ve observed], then this will happen, and I will fail.

But if I change and do [insert adjustment/detail], I will succeed.”

Ideas like ‘discrimination learning’ suggest that the human brain learns through contrast. By seeing a common mistake and the correct movement side by side, students get a clearer understanding of the details that matter.

I’ve found this in my own coaching. When I revisit a mistake that repeatedly appeared in the previous session and frame it as a common pitfall to avoid, students not only make the error less often but also seem to remember the correct movement more effectively than if I had shown the ideal version on its own.

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3. Keep it concrete

Anyone who’s read my work will know I’m mildly obsessed with the Curse of Knowledge: the idea that, as we become more knowledgeable in a domain, it becomes harder to remember what it was like not to know it.

When we first start learning, we tend to cling to concrete specifics because they’re easy to visualise. In BJJ, that often means knowing exactly where to place a grip or position a limb.

As we improve, our understanding becomes more abstract. Rather than seeing individual techniques in isolation, we begin to recognise broader patterns. Instead of thinking about a specific guard pass, we start thinking in terms of concepts like inside position.

The challenge for coaches is translating those abstract concepts back into language that beginners can understand. I can remember one coach who became worse at coaching as he improved at jiu-jitsu, precisely because his teaching became more abstract. While his students just wanted to learn guard retention, he was lost in a long analogy about how your guard should be like a castle wall against a never-ending sea of tidal waves (true story).

One way around this is to use clear physical cues that help students orient their body in relation to their opponent. For example:

• Chest-to-chest

• Head over hips

• Chest-to-back

• C Grip, V grip, S grip

You’ll notice that, as well as being highly concrete, these terms give students a clear objective and a reference point they can immediately understand.

It’s the difference between telling someone to secure a cross-face and an underhook and explaining that the goal is to get chest-to-chest with their opponent. Terms such as half guard, underhook, and seatbelt are useful shorthand once you understand them, but physical cues provide something more tangible. They connect the technique to a position the student can see and feel, while giving them an objective to work towards.

This is one reason I think so many of Danaher’s students, past and present, have a very similar coaching style. Whether it’s Gordon Ryan, Garry Tonon, or Giancarlo Bodoni, they all teach using extremely clear and concrete physical cues.

4. Don’t overload the details

Arguably the most important part of instruction is separating the vital details from meaningless minutiae.

For any coach (and for me as a writer), it means constantly fighting against what cognitive psychologists call ‘additive bias’: the psychological urge to solve problems by adding new elements rather than removing existing ones. Research suggests that humans love to add things. Even when simplification would be more effective, people are far more likely to look for additive solutions than subtractive ones.

Everyone who comes to your class has extremely limited cognitive bandwidth. While jiu-jitsu might fill a large part of your life, it’s likely only a small slice of theirs. If someone’s working a 9-5, juggling work with kids, your job as a coach is not to overload them with details - but to give them the most important ones.

Something I’ve noticed John Danaher and Lachlan Giles handle this is by providing general rules from a position. These are often called heuristics: simple rules of thumb that are true most of the time.

For example, a useful heuristic for escaping back control is that the battle is won when you can get your shoulders past the centre line of your opponent’s chest. It’s effective because it simplifies a complex situation into a clear objective. Rather than forcing students to consider dozens of possibilities, it narrows their focus and gives them direction.

It’s also highly concrete. Instead of asking a beginner to think about something abstract like inside position, you’re giving them a physical cue they can recognise across a wide range of situations.

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5. Connect everything to the big ‘why’

If I were to pick one thing that would make the biggest improvement to most jiu-jitsu coaches, it would be connecting everything they teach to a larger ‘why’.

So many jiu-jitsu instructors teach students to do things without telling them why they’re doing them. The result is a jumbled assortment of details with no larger context or reason to group them together.

When teaching back control, some coaches will spend a lot of time explaining how to secure your hooks and seatbelt without ever explaining their purpose. Hooks and the seatbelt are simply two ways of controlling your opponent’s hips and shoulders. If your opponent can free either of those areas and begin to move, their chances of escaping increase dramatically.

Rather than simply showing students how to do something, one of the biggest improvements you can make as a coach is to ask yourself:

“Have I explained why they should be doing this? Do I even know why they should be doing this?”

If you don’t understand the purpose behind a technique, it’s difficult to explain it in a way that students will remember. Any BJJ position contains an overwhelming number of details, and details are much easier to remember when they’re connected to a broader idea.

For a moment, try to remember these acronyms:

XJZ, QPT, VNK, SWP, CMF, WZY

Now try to remember these:

FBI, USA, BMW, NASA, SUV

The second group is probably much easier to recall. Psychologists refer to this as chunking: the process of grouping individual pieces of information into larger, more meaningful units. Familiar acronyms allow the brain to compress and retrieve information more efficiently, helping us work around the limits of working memory.

The same principle applies to jiu-jitsu. Every position contains dozens of details, but those details become easier to understand and remember when they’re organised around a larger purpose. A student is far more likely to remember a cross-face and an underhook if they understand that both serve the broader goal of pinning your opponent’s shoulders to the mat.

Never forget the ‘why’. This is also something which separated John Danaher and Lachlan Giles as coaches for me whenever I was watching instructionals. Everything they taught laddered up to a clear ‘why’, which meant I could take the moves they were teaching and train them with more purpose.

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6. Get out of the way

The last thing, and arguably the hardest for a coach, is to know when to get out of the way.

Being able to take this step means making the transition from an instructor - a person who tells others to do things - to a coach - someone who knows exactly what information to provide to guide someone during their progression, without telling them ‘this is the way you must do it’.

The best coaches live in the Goldilocks zone, providing helpful information that serves as creative constraints, forcing students into more productive exploration. In this sense, ‘rules’ are only there to shrink down the solution space so students can experiment and find their own solutions.

The best coaches walk a tightrope between:

1. Structure: the parts of jiu-jitsu that don’t change very often.

These are the fundamentals that make it effective: techniques built on solid principles and a clear understanding of why they work. These form the foundation on which everything else rests. Admittedly, most of this essay has been about how to articulate the structure of jiu-jitsu.

2. Freedom: the parts of jiu-jitsu that benefit from change.

Once your students have the information, you need to give them space to build their own technical expression and to apply those same fundamentals in their own way. Any gym will be made up of a myriad of people with different personalities, body types and attributes.

If you impose your own style too heavily, you risk suppressing individuality and creating a room full of people whose jiu-jitsu looks the same. Great coaches give students structure to solve a problem while leaving enough freedom for them to develop their own game.

The best coaches I’ve ever had were prescriptive about principles but completely open about execution. They gave us a handful of rules that couldn’t be broken, and complete freedom outside of them.

And that’s why the best coaches know when to provide information, and when to get out of the way.

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The greatest dilemma in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ) is where to spend your training time. The challenge is that your attention is sandwiched between an abundance of online instructional content and your physical training on the mats, which is incredibly finite.

Pile on the endless instructional videos and technique reels, and it’s no surprise you quickly crash into a cognitive brick wall: what psychologists call the paradox of choice. Soon, you descend into an infinite doom-scroll through thousands of jiu-jitsu videos - each professing to be the one that will change your game forever.

Every great jiu-jitsu coach I follow says you should come to a training session with an ‘intention’. But it’s hard to pick your intention without being able to identify which parts of jiu-jitsu are, and are not, worth your attention. While thumbing through videos feels like a progress of some sort, your attention is left scattered so that when you finally arrive on the training mat, you have no idea what to focus on.

To help me - and hopefully soon my students - with this problem, I developed the Longevity x Universality Matrix. I know it’s a mouthful (and I’m very open to simpler name suggestions if anyone has one), but the purpose of this framework was to help my students weigh jiu-jitsu techniques and positions based on their efficacy across rulesets and how long they remain effective over time.

This framework was designed for those for whom time is a premium, or even those who just want to turn up to every training session with a clear focus.

Let’s get into it.

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The building blocks of the framework - Time & Rulesets

Accepting the challenges that come with unlimited options, let’s focus on the personal constraints we all have. As I see it, there are two limiting factors at play in anyone’s jiu-jitsu progress:

1. Time: You only have so much of it. It reinforces the lessons from the positions you spend time on while erasing the ones you don’t.

2. Rulesets: Where most sports have one ruleset, BJJ invents a new one every year. This leads to a second dilemma: investing time in one technique might be good for one ruleset, but a waste of time for another. For example, getting a mean inside heel hook might be great for Sub-Only, but not for IBJJF opens.

That’s why the Longevity x Universality framework weighs techniques across two dimensions that mirror the constraints of time & rulesets.

1. Longevity: Time tests everything. How long does a technique keep working?

2. Universality: Do techniques work across rulesets and contexts, or only specific ones?

Then I sort these into a 2x2 matrix. I like 2x2s because they’re a solid - and simple - visual decision-making framework. I basically take the dimensions mentioned above, and then divide them into four quadrants. Behold, the Longevity x Universality matrix.*

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Every technique falls into one of four quadrants

Quadrant 1: Fundamentals (long-term + universal)

People often conflate the ‘fundamentals’ with the basics, but they couldn’t be more wrong. Unlike basics, which are stages of learning you pass through, fundamentals are techniques that work across all rule sets and body types (universality) and have worked for a really long time (longevity).

Not only are fundamentals not to be treated as something you ‘pass through’ but should be the techniques and positions you return to again and again. They belong in Quadrant 1 because they work across rule sets and have continued to do so long after the information advantage has closed.

For example, most jiu-jitsu practitioners understand how these techniques work, but they’re still extremely difficult to stop:

• Rear-naked choke

• Headquarters

• Chest-to-chest half guard passing

• Single Leg X

• Arm-drags

All of the above continue to work even when everyone understands them, across rulesets and levels. These should form the foundation of your jiu-jitsu game.

One athlete who exemplifies this is Dorian Olivarez. Despite his athleticism, his style isn’t overly flashy. His game is built on rock-solid fundamentals. It means he does a few things really well and will refuse to fight anywhere else. His style is built on positional control and rear-naked choke finishes, while largely avoiding leg locks.

Quadrant 2: Specialist systems (long-term + context-specific)

In Quadrant 2, we have techniques which have stood the test of time but only within certain rule sets or competitive environments. This is why I have them down as ‘specialist’ systems.

For example, certain reaping-based leg lock systems have remained highly effective in the rulesets that allow them, despite emerging into prominence in the late 2010s.

These are things like:

• Heel hooks

• Saddle, Honeyhole, 411 (whatever you choose to call it)

• Outside-ashi

• Backside 50/50

I’m a little less deep in the Gi meta at the moment, but I imagine any lapel guard or things like worm guard would be equivalent examples.

These are all good options and might be something you have to learn if you are competing in these rulesets. But if you spend lots of time in this quadrant alone, you might end up with a style that is pigeon-holed for one type of ruleset.

I remember when the Danaher Death Squad and Sub-Only rulesets rose to prominence in the late 2010s, and a whole generation of white-belt leg lockers followed. While they’d often catch higher belts with their leg lock attacks, they’d be absolutely hopeless in IBJJF - and were quite fragile positionally.

Quadrant 3: Information advantages (short-term + universal)

Quadrant 3 contains techniques that work well across many rulesets but rely on catching people by surprise. Unlike the fundamentals in Quadrant 1, the effectiveness of Quadrant 3 techniques drops sharply once opponents understand how they work.

If changes to the BJJ meta come in waves, then ‘information advantages’ are kind of like the ripples. Innovation almost always becomes visible at the top, among the sport’s best coaches and competitors, and filters down from there. New techniques move slowly, from innovators to fast followers and eventually to everyone else.

The catch with Quadrant 3 techniques is that once this gap is closed, the techniques become dramatically less effective. For example:

• Early wrestle-up strategies seemed to be extremely effective for a short while, and once people became more familiar with them, they became far less common

• Early ankle locks (before modern iterations) also worked on a certain amount of surprise and led to the submission fading out at the highest levels until it re-emerged with new mechanics from the likes of Mikey Musumeci (in the Gi) and Mateusz Szczecinski (No Gi)

• Pretzel bolos were a great counter-meta to leg locks, but quickly faded out once leg lockers realised they could just shoulder-walk or shrimp their hips out to escape.

That doesn’t mean there’s no value to this quadrant. Even if you’re not the original innovator, there’s real value in decoding techniques in transit. Doing so helps you - and those you share them with - capture a share of the information advantage before everyone else catches up.

You want to bolt Quadrant 3 techniques onto solid fundamentals from Quadrant 1 so you still have a solid foundation when the information advantage fades.

Quadrant 4: Fragile tricks (short-term + context-specific)

I’d say this is the only quadrant to avoid, even though it’s pretty fun. Quadrant 4 consists of low-percentage techniques with a short lifespan that only work in a very specific scenario. Most techniques in Quadrant 4 also require you to sacrifice fundamentals while taking a bet on surprise. For example:

• Buggy chokes

• Wrist locks from bad positions

• Von Flue Choke

The buggy choke might be the most emblematic of Quadrant 4. To attack it, you must half-concede the guard-pass for a low-probability submission. The same applies for wrist locks from underneath bad positions.

The Von Flue is more solid positionally. You attack it from on top if your opponent holds onto a guillotine once you pass over to the other side. The reason it’s in Quadrant 4 is that it’s very context-specific and you’re most likely only hitting this on people who don’t know what they’re doing. I’d be very surprised if anyone blue belt and over is holding onto a guillotine for dear life long enough to get submitted by this.

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Closing caveats

Now of course there are a tonne of caveats to this framework. And also, if there’s a technique or one of the quadrants that doesn’t make sense - let me know. I feel like frameworks are most helpful when they’re pressure-tested. Here are a couple of caveats from my side.

The obvious one is that it’s just a snapshot in time. Techniques can move between quadrants as the sport evolves for a few reasons:

When a technique still works once the information advantage has closed

If Quadrant 3 techniques continue to work once the information advantage has closed, they’ll move into Quadrant 1.

An example I always give my students is chest-to-chest half-guard passing. This style of passing has existed since day 1 of jiu-jitsu, but even while most people understand how half-guard passing works, it has never stopped being used at the highest level.

In fact, athletes like Gordon Ryan, whose game has benefited from many of the sport’s most disruptive innovations, especially in leg locks, have seen his game come full circle in recent years, favouring old-school fundamentals like chest-to-chest half-guard passing.

When specialised systems become more generalised

Also, specialist systems like the berimbolo, once constrained to the Gi, can move from Quadrant 2 to 1 if innovators like Lachlan Giles and Levi Jones Leary find ways to make it applicable to No-Gi, thus making it more universal.

Focus on you

Ultimately, this framework is meant to help you gain a lens for analysing changes to the BJJ meta as they happen. But when you’re choosing what to focus on, a massive amount will depend on your personality, attributes, and body type.

Sometimes, following your curiosity is the best way anyway, if it gives you the energy and interest to pursue the techniques you enjoy and naturally prefer.

Anyway, that’s it from me today. I hope this framework serves you well and gives you more focus and intention in your training. Thanks for reading!

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I’ve been teaching the anaconda choke the past couple of weeks, and - even after 12 years in the sport - the finishing mechanics are difficult to pin down.

One reason is that it’s difficult to find consensus on the most important finishing details. As a coach, that makes it hard to do the most important part of instruction: to separate the vital details from meaningless minutiae.

Before the class, I watched a video with John Danaher explaining the core details of the anaconda choke finish. What was interesting was that Danaher actually traced the evolution of the submission, highlighting the three main breakthroughs that improved its finish rate over time.

Each iteration moved the technique forward, from a turnover used to score points in freestyle wrestling to one of the most powerful front headlock submissions in jiu-jitsu.

In this short breakdown, we’re going to look at how the three main iterations of the anaconda choke led to its 3-step finishing process: the Olympic roll, the figure-four grip, and the T-position.

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Iteration 1: The Olympic Roll

The origin of the anaconda choke doesn’t start in jiu-jitsu at all; it has its roots in wrestling with this guy: Dave Schultz.

Schultz was an American Freestyle and Greco-Roman wrestler who - to this day - is seen as one of the most decorated technicians in the sport’s history. Despite admitting he “wasn’t the greatest athlete in wrestling”, he became an Olympic Gold medalist through his unparalleled wrestling IQ.

In wrestling, points are often awarded for exposing an opponent’s back or shoulders to the mat, which creates a strong incentive to turn them over. According to Danaher, Shultz started doing two things from front headlock to achieve that goal, which inadvertently laid the foundation of the anaconda choke.

The first was the palm-to-palm strangle. Danaher notes that wrestlers such as Schultz used palm-to-palm grips to generate the pressure needed to turn opponents. While strangles are illegal in wrestling, these holds were primarily used as turnovers rather than submission attempts, so they occupied a bit of a grey area in the wrestling rulebooks.

The second was the Olympic Roll: Shultz used this grip to initiate what he called ‘The Olympic Roll’. If you’ve ever attempted an anaconda choke, you’ll recognise this move; it’s when you put your head into your opponent’s armpit and roll through.

In wrestling, the Olympic Roll is what Shultz would use to score on his opponent. But when jiu-jitsu practitioners like Danaher and others started to workshop it during the late 90s and early naughties, they realised there were opportunities to finish a choke once their opponent was flat on their back.

Once jiu-jitsu practitioners were using the Olympic roll to bring their opponent to what some call ‘reverse north-south’, they came across the second crucial iteration of the choke.

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Iteration 2: Figure-Four Grip

If the Olympic roll was the first part of the anaconda’s evolution, Danaher said the next big detail was shifting from the palm-to-palm strangle to a figure-four grip.

I’d say this is also the hardest battle to win with the anaconda choke after the entry. Finding ways to cleanly enter the figure-four position, especially if you performed the Olympic roll from a palm-to-palm grip, is far from easy.

Rafael Mendes had some of the palm-to-palm to figure-four adjustments I’ve seen for this point of the attack, which I’ll leave here for anyone curious. He essentially uses legs to keep his opponent’s tricep (that’s inside the choke) flat to their ear while he transitions from his palm-to-palm grip to a deep figure-four.

After that, most coaches I’ve seen say it’s just a matter of adding a squeeze. But there’s a final vital detail which probably has the single biggest effect on how high-percentage your anaconda choke will be.

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Iteration 3: The T-Position

Danaher’s says the last major innovation in the choke was the shift to the T-position. If you look at the previous image, Danaher’s hips are still 12 o’clock to his opponent’s hips when he’s locked up his figure-four grip in reverse north-south.

Instead, Danaher and others at Renzo Gracie Academy found that getting to a T-position - where your body forms the top of the ‘T’ and your opponent’s body forms the stem - massively increases the choking pressure.

As you can see, the T-position puts your opponent’s head at an extremely unnatural angle, which reinforces the choke as you walk your hips in.

Once in position, there’s one physical cue that always helps me explain to students how to apply the squeeze. Rather than telling them to flex their biceps, I’ll always say that they want to try and ‘squeeze their elbows inwards’. You’d be surprised what a difference this makes to choking pressure alone once you’ve got yourself in the T-position.

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Thanks for reading!

Exploring other grappling arts that have evolved under different rule sets and identifying the overlap between those sports and ours is where you’ll find whitespace ripe for innovation.

The anaconda choke is a perfect example. What makes it such a solid submission is that it’s an amalgamation of iterations and tweaks from different grappling arts.

I hope you found the piece useful and that you can take away details to increase your anaconda-choke finish rate. Have a great week (when it comes) and see you next time.

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Three things take up most of my time: Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, reading, and writing.

I used to treat them as distinctly separate activities. My degree was in English Literature and, after being force-fed a literature diet of everything from Wuthering Heights to Virginia Woolf’s Flush - a fictionalised biography written from the perspective of an English cocker spaniel - I decided I hated reading.

Writing became a mind-numbing follow-up chore. In one essay, I had to write about whether Woolf’s canine consciousness (the cocker spaniel) might be a profound critique of human intellect. I nearly lost the will to live. If you like those books, all power to you; they just aren’t my bag.

Back then, going to jiu-jitsu felt like an escape from an intellectual space without consequence into one where you literally learn by getting beaten up. That’s a strong way of putting it, but one thing I love about BJJ is that the feedback is immediate and doesn’t care about your theories.

No big idea you have will overcome a combat sport bound by the laws of physics. Creativity in BJJ isn’t about violating those laws, but about finding ways to experiment within them.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve fallen back in love with reading and writing by connecting them to jiu-jitsu, so I can learn from reality rather than by suspending it. All three are inextricably linked into what I hope is a positive feedback loop:

1. I read as much as possible to expose myself to new ideas and theories that might relate to jiu-jitsu. Now that I read about the stuff I’m interested in, rather than anything from the English literary canon, I love reading.

2. I write, as Flannery O’ Connor once said, “to discover what I know.” The trouble is, I often discover I know very little. This process has led to a lifetime of hoarding notebooks, which serve as paper ovens to bake my ideas until I have something close to a base assumption from which I can begin to reason up. I then use writing to communicate those ideas to others, whether it’s writing things like this or sketching out decision trees and games for my jiu-jitsu classes.

3. I train to pressure-test all of the above. The confines of combat act as perfect parameters for experimentation and separating what works from what doesn’t. I then leave training, usually with a brain that feels less crowded, creating headspace to start the cycle again.

Today’s post is about the books I’ve read that have had the biggest impact on how I see jiu-jitsu.

Each of these books probably deserves its own essay, but, in the interests of your time, I’ll be clear about what was so valuable about each book and the lessons from each that apply to BJJ. I’ll also be super curious to see whether you’ve read any of these!

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1. Becoming a Supple Leopard, Dr. Kelly Starrett

I’ve been in this sport for 12 years, and it’s safe to say I’ve put a lot of miles on the car. In fact, if I were a car, I’d be a mini-cooper that was poorly fueled and driven as if it were a Ferrari. And I’ve crashed it many … many times.

Before I stretch the car analogy any further, what I’m trying to describe is a belief that existed when I started BJJ that technique alone could conquer all, and you could get strong just by doing jiu-jitsu.

Some in the BJJ community would even discourage strength and conditioning. I was one of them. I wanted to be like Marcelo Garcia, who famously said he got strong just by doing BJJ. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the humility to realise Garcia is a once-in-a-generation exception, and not the rule.

I first heard about Dr. Kelly Starrett’s ‘Becoming a Supple Leopard’ listening to a podcast with legendary MMA trainer and BJJ black belt Firas Zahabi. Zahabi swore by the book, saying it had helped him regain mobility after he was getting knee pain just from walking up the stairs due to so much martial arts training.

I was at a time in my life where I was training in jiu-jitsu twice a day, 5-6 times a week and had taken insurance out on my bones and ligaments (true story for another day) because the risk of injury seemed inevitable. Finding this book set me on a new path of actually taking care of my body and thinking about how I could train in BJJ for the next ten years.

Application to BJJ: Principles of Strength and Conditioning

If you want to train BJJ for a long time and build strength and mobility, this is essential reading. The book is organised into distinct sections. I really like the structure because it starts with the first principles of strength and mobility and then works up from there:

1. Principles & Theory: Before Starrett gets into any categories of movement or mobility prescriptions, he goes into real depth about the principles that underpin his approach. It gives you context for all the exercises that follow, including spinal mechanics, the one-joint rule, and the laws of torque. This opening section really lays the groundwork for moving safely and effectively in life and sport.

2. Categories of movement: Working up from the principles, he then goes into the main exercise movements - like squats, pushups, and cleans.

3. Mobilisation techniques: For movements where you have a limited range of motion, this section provides mobility prescriptions so you can better perform specific movements.

I say all of this with a big disclaimer that I’m not an expert in strength and conditioning, but - albeit anecdotally - this book really helped me become more mobile, strong, and durable.

One thing I really liked was how this book explains the ‘why’ behind certain movements and provides an in-depth catalogue of exercises and mobility prescriptions. Since my first reading many moons ago, there are so many exercises and mobility prescriptions I’ve continued to use. I would highly recommend it if you want to build strength and range of motion for longevity on and off the mats.

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2. Thinking in Systems, Donella H. Meadows

The BJJ community has a habit of getting obsessed with buzzwords and then parroting them without understanding what they mean or the substance beneath them. The word “system” is no exception.

Type the word “system” into BJJ Fanatics, and you’ll get hundreds of instructionals using “system” or “systematically” in the title. Here’s a cropped version for reference:

If you want to really understand what systems are and how to deconstruct them, it’s hard to find anything that beats ‘Thinking in Systems’ by Donella Meadows.

I tend to measure a book’s depth by how many page corners I have folded to come back to. This book might be my most-folded - so dense in insight that I genuinely think I’ll return to it for decades to come. ‘Thinking in Systems’ is one of those books which you think will be informative but ends up going a step further. After reading it, I felt like I had a completely different lens through which to see the world.

Meadows has a superpower that is rare nowadays: the ability to explain incredibly complex things in plain English. The topic is complex systems, and the way she writes about it is fun to read and highly concrete.

Application to BJJ: Deconstructing BJJ positions & feedback loops

Meadows has a pretty clear definition of a system:

“A system isn’t just any old collection of things. A system is an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organised to achieve something.

If you look at that definition closely for a minute, you can see that a system must consist of three kinds of things: elements, interconnections, and a function or purpose.”

- Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems

One of the biggest lessons in this book is that systems are more than the sum of their parts. Meadows uses the digestive system as an example. While the teeth, enzymes, stomach, and intestines may be separate, they are connected by the physical flow of food and a set of regulating chemicals.

Every system has a similar wholeness or integrity. If you remove one aspect of the digestive system, you’re in big trouble, the same way that a car will grind to a halt due to small faults with an individual part. Every system is made up of parts that are interconnected in a way that leads to a bigger purpose.

Breaking down positions

Jiu-jitsu positions are exactly the same. Coaches tend to teach jiu-jitsu positions as a set of grips. But if you apply Meadows’ framework, those only cover the ‘elements’ that make up a position. These are the most visible and tangible things, but they only scratch the surface of how positions actually work.

Jiu-jitsu positions are exactly the same. Coaches tend to teach jiu-jitsu positions as a set of grips. But if you apply Meadows’ framework, those only cover the ‘elements’ that make up a position. These are the most visible and tangible things, but they only scratch the surface of how positions actually work.

Now, if you use Meadows’ three-step framework, you’ll see how you drill down from surface-level details to the fundamental levers that make the position work:

1. Elements: These are the visible and tangible parts of a system (things you can point to).

2. Interconnections: These are the relationships between the elements: how they interact, communicate and influence one another. These include flows (information/energy), rules (constraints and incentives) and feedback loops (cause, effect and readjustment).

3. Function or purpose: This is the overall goal or behaviour the system produces: what the system actually does, not just what it claims to do.

In all my time training, I’ve never found a framework as good for deconstructing BJJ positions from the ground up. If you want a concrete example, I used it to break down the collar and sleeve guard a few weeks ago:

Feedback loops: Creating virtuous, not viscous cycles

Probably the most common question I get asked as a coach is how to improve at BJJ faster. And the truth is, it’s by treating your life as a system and creating positive, and not negative, feedback loops. These are what Meadows calls “reinforcing feedback loops.”

“...amplifying, reinforcing, self-multiplying, snow-balling - a vicious or virtuous circle that can cause healthy growth or runaway destruction…. Reinforcing loops are found wherever a system has the ability to reproduce itself or to grow as a constant fraction of itself.”

These feedback loops can be as basic as ‘the more I practice BJJ, the more I enjoy training, which gives me more practice.’

One reason I’m thankful for this sport is that it gives me the discipline to avoid negative feedback loops. For me: ‘the more I drink alcohol, the less I engage in physical activities, which leads me to drink more.’ - which is, in itself, a reinforcing feedback loop, albeit a negative one.

If you’re interested in exactly how you would build these positive feedback loops, here’s an article I wrote about Kaizen - the Japanese philosophy of incremental improvement:

As I see it, building reinforcing feedback loops and avoiding negative ones is the best way to engineer Kaizen - so that you make 1% improvements each day that stack on top of each other, building compound momentum over time.

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3. Range, David Epstein

As far as I’m concerned, is the current non-fiction GOAT, and that’s why two of his books are on today’s list.

If you read any of my stuff, you’ll know how much I believe BJJ benefits from outside influence. One of the main reasons I write this Substack is to provide decent analysis and essays with all the bad bits of jiu-jitsu - hierarchy, politics & cult-like behaviour - cut out.

Apart from the obvious drawbacks of those things, the reason I describe them as “bad” is that all three prevent jiu-jitsu from evolving. I’m a big believer that you can learn a lot from cross-training at other gyms, but also from different grappling arts entirely.

Application to BJJ: Cross-training is the key to innovation

The big idea behind David Epstein’s Range is that generalists are more primed to succeed in a complex world than specialists, because of their ability to transfer their lessons from one domain to another.

For the same reason, the biggest innovations in BJJ come from cross-pollination between grappling disciplines. Exploring other grappling arts that have evolved under different rule sets and identifying the overlap between those sports and ours is where you’ll find the ripest whitespace for innovation.

That’s why I wrote about what BJJ athletes can learn from Wrestlers (Freestyle, Greco & Folk), Mixed Martial Artists and Judokas.

There are also some really awesome concepts throughout this book that have informed so many of the essays I’ve written on this Substack about why the best grapplers tend to be multi-disciplinary:

• Lateral thinking: In Range, there are so many examples of how innovation is created through importing ideas from one domain into another. There’s so much evidence of this in BJJ. For example, the Anaconda choke actually has its roots in wrestling, after legendary wrestler Dave Shultz developed the “Olympic roll”, which forms the main entry most people still use for this attack.

• Sampling periods: Epstein gives many examples of athletes who benefited from trying a wide range of sports before choosing a speciality. Roger Federer is one example of someone who tried many sports before channelling his energy into becoming a tennis legend. In a similar way, when you start jiu-jitsu, you should sample as many different techniques, positions and styles before focusing on specialising in anything and developing a more narrow game.

• Kind vs Wicked learning environments: BJJ is often compared to chess, but one big difference is that chess is a ‘kind’ learning environment where rules are clear, patterns repeat, and specialists thrive. BJJ is ‘wicked’, rules change (jiu-jitsu likes to invent new rulesets every day), and feedback is delayed or inconsistent (the sport literally never stops changing. What works today may not work tomorrow.)

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4. The Great Mental Models - General Thinking Concepts, Shane Parrish

“Remember that all models are wrong. The practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful.”

George E.P. Box.

‘The Great Mental Models’ by Shane Parrish is a book for anyone who wants to improve their problem-solving and decision-making. With that said, my biggest takeaway was how to teach jiu-jitsu to rooms full of people with very different levels of understanding.

A while ago, I wrote this guide on what people should focus on from white to blue belt:

In that guide, I talk about how, for complete beginners, teaching them the simplest positional progression can be a good mental model to get them started. And when I say simple positional flows, I mean stupidly simple: Guard → Side Control → North-South → Mount → Back.

You might think this is a reduction, and not representative, of the full complexity of BJJ - but that’s the whole point. The idea came from a mental model in this book called “the map is not the territory”.

Parrish describes how the whole point of maps is to simplify complexity. They’re not supposed to capture every detail of the territory, but to give you direction. That’s exactly why they’re useful for beginners. As Parrish puts it:

“The map of reality is not reality. Even the best maps are imperfect. That’s because maps are reductions of what they represent. If a map were to represent the territory with perfect fidelity, it would no longer be useful to us.”

Great Mental Models - The Simple Tools which Explain the World, Shane Parrish

Trying to understand the territory of jiu-jitsu directly means opening a Pandora’s box of moves, variations, and strange technique names. Most beginners try to memorise everything, without understanding how the techniques connect or what they’re actually for.

What you need early on is the opposite: an extremely simple map. A rough outline you can fill in later. It might feel two-dimensional, but as long as it gives a beginner some direction - that’s what makes it usable.

When I first started BJJ, having a rough mental map changed everything for me. Once I understood the basic flow of positions, the jiu-jitsu became much less overwhelming. And it gave me a foundation I could build on.

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5. Made to Stick - Chip and Dan Heath

As a jiu-jitsu coach and now writer, I spend a lot of my time learning about how to communicate ideas better. I see communication as a discipline in itself, which - regardless of your expertise in a given subject - determines whether your ideas “stick” or dissipate.

Made to Stick is about what you can do to ensure that what you teach does the former, not the latter.

Application to BJJ: Great for coaches & makes you aware of the ‘Curse of Knowledge’

If you coach BJJ, I think this book offers many interesting insights. But perhaps most important is the ‘curse of knowledge’.

It’s the idea that when you first start learning things, you cling to concrete specifics. These are tangible things your brain can visualise. In BJJ, it’s the idea of wanting to know exactly where to grip.

But as you progress, you start thinking more abstractly: you develop a big-picture view of the sport. Rather than thinking about individual guard passes, you start to see the sport in more holistic patterns, such as “inside position”.

The “curse of knowledge” is when you become an expert and can’t translate your abstract thinking into concrete terms that beginners can understand. Chip & Dan Heath explain it like this:

“The difference between an expert and a novice is the ability to think abstractly. New jurors are struck by lawyers’ personalities and factual details. Judges, meanwhile, weigh cases against abstract principles and precedent. Biology students try to remember whether reptiles lay eggs or not. Biology teachers think in terms of the grand system of animal taxonomy.”

This is why some jiu-jitsu coaches actually get worse with time, and why sometimes your blue belt is better suited to teach your white belts than a black belt. It’s also why whenever anyone tries to win me over to an idea with abstract scientific jargon and cannot describe the same idea in concrete terms, I start to question their credibility and expertise.

And for those who argue that some things are just so complicated they require complicated description, I’ll leave you with two quotes I like from men who were masters at explaining some of the most complex things imaginable in concrete and simple terms:

“If you can’t explain it in simple terms, you don’t understand it well enough.” Richard Feynman.

“If you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you probably don’t understand it yourself.” Albert Einstein.

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6. Inside the Box - David Epstein

This last one I’m still reading, as it was only released in May. As I said, I loved Range by David Epstein, and when I saw that he was writing a book about how “constraints make us better”, it seemed particularly relevant given the ongoing debate between traditional BJJ coaching and the Constraints-Led Approach (CLA).

The book is about the many ways that constraints can aid creativity and how unlimited freedom can actually be a bad thing. The paradox the book revolves around is that constraints are actually the best way to force you into productive exploration. He talks about how the brain has evolved to be a kind of shortcut machine, quoting cognitive scientist David Willingham, who says

“You may think your brain is made for thinking, but it’s not. It’s made for preventing you from having to think whenever possible.”

In BJJ, that means rolling alone will probably lead you to default to your A-Game out of cognitive convenience, even if better options exist. Therefore, Epstein sees creative constraints as a means of escaping this path dependency.

Epstein has an analogy for this I really like: good constraints are like the bumpers you see at bowling alleys. I’ve often said that I think great jiu-jitsu coaches are prescriptive about principles (the bumpers) and completely open about execution. That way, the fundamentals or ‘rules’ of the sport become parameters to experiment within, accelerating your ability to experiment, rather than restricting it.

As Epstein puts it:

“That’s a thing about constraints that spur creativity. They shut down many possibilities, but stimulate more varied and novel exploration of those that remain. As a prominent study of creativity put it, given complete freedom, our very strong urge is to follow the path of least resistance…Complete freedom, paradoxically, leads to conformity.”

So far, the book has only given a brief reference to the Constraints-Led Approach (CLA), with a brilliant section comparing it to the way Key & Peele set creative boundaries for their comedy sketches. All I’ll say is that I think promoters of CLA within BJJ would be much better served leading with the idea in the quote above than with technical skill-acquisition jargon.

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Thanks for reading!

I’d genuinely be intrigued to hear whether:

A) You’ve read these books, and what your thoughts are, and -

B) Whether there are books that aren’t on this list which helped you see the sport differently.

Hope you all have a great week, and thanks again for reading!

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Allow me to reintroduce myself

Hello there.

My name’s the Lost Creonte.

This Substack is about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. I’ve spent just over 12 years in this sport, and have gone through the full jiu-jitsu lifecycle - from hobbyist, to competitor and now to coach.

I started ‘The Lost Creonte’ Substack after COVID when, as a purple belt, I lost access to world-class coaches and training partners. The only way I could progress was by cross-training, which led me to travel around the country, going gym to gym, coaching BJJ.

This period made me realise there really is no difference between being a ‘Creonte’ and being someone who ‘Cross-trains’. In fact, if you’re the type of person who uses the former un-ironically, then this Substack probably isn’t for you.

I’ve always thought ‘Creonte’ was a term which encapsulates the worst parts of jiu-jitsu. Namely, a cult-like lineage system which prevents jiu-jitsu - and the martial artists who practice it - from benefiting from any sort of outside influence.

While my travels meant I couldn’t get promoted for a long time, being free of jiu-jitsu’s affiliation and belt system also made it worth it. I was able to cross-train between gyms and grappling arts with all the bad bits - lineage, politics and hierarchy - cut out.

I wanted to create a Substack that preserved some of that. If you like jiu-jitsu analysis and conceptual essays, without the weird traditions, this is the place for you. My academic and professional background is in writing, so I figured this was a good way to combine the two.

In 2026, I ended up returning home, earning my brown belt and head grappling coach at my home gym, and, as I’ve written about, it was bittersweet. As soon as the belt was tied around my waist, I felt like I had lost some of that freedom. That’s why you’ll see the character I use in this Substack always wears a purple belt and is usually found wandering through the desert.

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Modern-day jiu-jitsu

Everything I write about is to help people navigate the modern jiu-jitsu world. The sport has changed immeasurably since I first started. Here are three of the main challenges I think our sport faces:

Speed

Never in the history of martial arts has information been this abundant. While our predecessors needed to travel the world in search of techniques, an entire digital universe of techniques is now available in the time it takes you to type a search query.

Techniques that were once confined to continents now travel through the internet at close to the speed of light. Meanwhile, the human brain still operates on biological time. In the time it takes you to register the word ‘heel hook’, that same information could travel around the Earth several times through fibre-optic cables.

Scale

There are now tens of thousands of jiu-jitsu techniques and instructional videos on YouTube alone. Even if you watched five new BJJ videos every day, it would take you decades to see them all.

Compare that to the pre-2000s, when access to high-level information was tightly constrained. Unless you trained close to the founding generations of Brazilian jiu-jitsu or travelled to Brazil as a gringo, you were largely cut off from the wider technical conversation. The difference is night and day.

Now it doesn’t matter how niche your question. It could be about De La Riva details, Torreando passing mechanics, or the ever-expanding list of modern guards like Squid, Octopus, or Rubber. Take your pick. An answer is always a few clicks away.

What used to be the ‘I’ve never trained, but I watch UFC’ guy has morphed into one who believes they can learn jiu-jitsu almost entirely through YouTube or arguing with someone on a Discord server. I find it troubling that, when I browse Reddit now, I see more and more people asking how to train jiu-jitsu without a training partner.

Identity

If that wasn’t enough, jiu-jitsu is in the middle of an identity crisis. The speed and scale of the internet haven’t just changed how techniques spread. It’s forced the sport to look inward and question what it values.

Authority once flowed through a small number of families and academies, often carrying the surname Gracie. Now, the conversation no longer happens in Brazil, or even in gyms. It plays out online, across Reddit and Instagram threads and forums, in daily, polarised debates.

Like most conversations mediated by algorithms, the incentives matter. These systems don’t surface what’s most accurate or useful; they surface what provokes the strongest reaction. The result is a lopsided town square, where the volume of extreme positions is cranked up, while the nuanced centre ground is put on mute.

What follows are endless threads arguing maximalist interpretations of the ecological approach versus the oldest, most rigid versions of “traditional” training - as if jiu-jitsu has to choose between them.

And as if the most functional version of the sport hasn’t always lived somewhere in between, combining constraint and freedom, structure and exploration.

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So what sort of writing can you expect?

Cross-disciplinary approach

Anyone who’s read my stuff will know that I believe BJJ benefits a lot from outside influence. This first includes what we can learn from other grappling arts. I’ve written about what BJJ can learn from Judo, Wrestling, and MMA grapplers. Here’s the piece I wrote on what we can learn from Judokas:

My first coaching experience was helping Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu athletes transition to MMA, so I’ve always been interested in the grey area between martial arts.

I also think other schools of thought can help us better understand grappling. My main influences are:

• Systems thinking: Especially based on ideas from Donella Meadows’ book ‘Thinking in Systems’. I think Systems Thinking is one of the strongest ways to break down and understand any complex system, and jiu-jitsu is no exception.

• Evolutionary biology: I’m a big believer that the way complex systems self-organise in the natural world is very similar to how jiu-jitsu evolves - both on the meta and individual level. I’ve written essays about how things like the Red Queen Hypothesis apply to the BJJ meta.

I’m always looking for frameworks and principles from other sports that better explain the sport and show what the most recent research says about the best way to progress in it. For example, this article on how to build a jiu-jitsu curriculum, based on recent research on what is best for long-term learning:

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Types of essays

I’d say my writing falls into one of three buckets.

Timeless essays

As I said, I’ve been in this sport a long time, so some of my essays condense all of that experience into writing that I hope will be as true today as it is decades from now. Most of these will be big issues that I’ve mulled over for around ten years. Here are some good places to start if you like this sort of article:

• How to study the BJJ meta: the art of spotting technical trends as they spread through the sport

• Why principles matter and techniques fail under pressure

• Why competition requires a different kind of BJJ

• What earning a brown belt taught me about the BJJ belt system

• The dark truth about jiu-jitsu’s greatest outliers, and what we can learn from them

Training guides

Progress in BJJ is highly non-linear. I write guides to help you know what to focus on at different levels. The best place to start is my White to Blue Belt guide:

Analysis

I do technical analysis, breaking down how certain positions work and the games of the best athletes in our sport, including:

• Dorian Olivarez

• Mateusz Szczeciński

• Declan Moody

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Thank you for reading!

I’m over the moon to say that, last week, we hit 500 subscribers. Thank you so much to everyone who reads my work week in and week out. I can’t tell you how much it means to me.

For those who’ve just arrived to the party, I hope this essay has served as a good way to reintroduce myself and give you a flavour of the type of writing you can expect from me.

First off, for everyone who’s already subscribed, I want to say a HUGE thank you. I’m truly humbled by how much this Substack has grown and by everyone who reads each week and leaves thoughtful comments.

Please never hesitate to DM me with jiu-jitsu questions or things you’d like to see in articles. I see this as a reader-driven publication, so any of my subscribers can request topics whenever they like.

Anyway, that’s enough from me. Have a great week of training!

Last week, we spoke about how the only constant in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ) is change. New positions emerge constantly, and BJJ produces new jargon so quickly that even I get asked about terms I don’t understand - despite being a jiu-jitsu coach with over 12 years in the sport.

For example, a visiting white belt asked me about my thoughts on ‘shoelace ashi’ the other day, and I had to politely tell him I had no idea what he was talking about. If you’re obsessed with technique names and terminology, no matter how granular, I’d suggest you check out YouTube. There’s an abundance of that sort of content there, and this post isn’t written for you.

However, if you’re looking for a framework to deconstruct any position using first principles and systems thinking, then you’re in the right place. This article is written to give you a reusable mental model to understand absolutely any new (or old) positions.

It’s just 3 steps, and I use it for every position I’m trying to add to my own game or teach to my students.

Let’s get into it.

Step 1: Learn the grips and attachments - the elements

The collar sleeve guard is formed of four attachments:

1. Collar grip: With one hand

2. Sleeve grip: With the other

3. Foot on hip: On the same side as the collar sleeve.

4. Foot on the bicep: On the opposite side of the collar sleeve

While this might seem stupidly simplistic, treat it as an early mental scaffold. Even if you’ve trained for a long period, if you are trying to learn a position you’ve never tried before, there’s value in trying the position with no resistance to see whether you can perform the basic physical requirements of the move.

Also, grips and attachments are very concrete, and concrete is always better for beginners. Concrete things are tangible enough that you can instantly visualise them.

Always start concrete

If you read the words dog, lemon, gi, and mats, your brain will conjure up images, as each of these things is highly concrete. Now read: freedom, justice, love, balance, leverage. The chances are that when you read those, your brain can’t easily visualise or quantify them, and that’s because they’re abstract.

Shifting from novice to expert in anything means transitioning between concrete and abstract knowledge. That’s why, with complete beginners, this stage is often about teaching someone using concrete physical cues: ‘you have to put your hand here, not there.’

But, as you progress, you’ll inevitably move toward more abstract ways of thinking. You’ll start to see patterns among positions rather than individual techniques. Instead of thinking of individual guard passes, you’ll see them as different manifestations of inside position.

It’s why sometimes blue belts in BJJ are better at teaching white belts than black belts. A white belt needs concrete instructions because they don’t yet have the experience to see patterns, and a blue belt is more likely to still see the sport from a concrete perspective. Black belts, on the other hand, think in abstractions because they’ve seen the same situations repeat under slightly different forms hundreds or thousands of times.

The curse of knowledge

This gap is what Chip and Dan Heath, authors of ‘Made to Stick,’ call the curse of knowledge. Once you start to think in abstractions (which all experts do), it can be hard to communicate information in concrete terms that your students need.

I had one coach I can remember who became worse at coaching as he improved in jiu-jitsu, precisely because his teaching became more abstract. While his students just wanted to learn guard retention, he was lost in a long analogy about how your guard should be like a castle wall against a never-ending sea of tidal waves (true story).

As Chip Heath and Dan Heath put it in Made to Stick:

“The difference between an expert and a novice is the ability to think abstractly. New jurors are struck by lawyers’ personalities and factual details. Judges, meanwhile, weigh cases against abstract principles and precedent. Biology students try to remember whether reptiles lay eggs or not. Biology teachers think in terms of the grand system of animal taxonomy.”

So it might sound obvious, but with any new position, start with the basic attachments and grips. Very simply: how do you need to orient your body in relation to your opponent to play from this position?

Once you’ve covered that, it’s time to go a layer deeper.

Step 2: Focus on how your attachments manipulate your opponent’s body - the interconnections

Once you learn the grips and attachments that make up a position, the next stage is realising that positions are far more than the sum of their parts.

This is where you need to look not just at the set of attachments, but at how they can be used together to manipulate your opponent’s body. This is where we start to get into systems-thinking territory.

“A system isn’t just any old collection of things. A system is an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organised to achieve something.

If you look at that definition closely for a minute, you can see that a system must consist of three kinds of things: elements, interconnections, and a function or purpose.”

- Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems

In this quote, Meadows splits systems into three parts: elements, interconnections and a function or a purpose. Meadows defines them as:

By this point, you’ve probably realised my three-step framework is really working through these three stages. Note that as you move through these stages, you go from identifying things that are highly concrete to more abstract and difficult to see.

So Step 2 is about exploring the ‘interconnections’. In a jiu-jitsu context, this is about how different grips are being used in unison to disrupt your opponent’s movement.

To illustrate the idea of ‘interconnections’, let’s zoom in on the left side.

2a. Offensive considerations

In the image above, you’ll see that the collar and sleeve grip are used together with the foot on the hip to achieve a micro-goal: separating your opponent’s knee from their elbow. Without this knee and elbow connection, your opponent is unable to transfer any power from their hips to their upper body.

The knee-elbow separation is a way of deliberately breaking an interconnection that your opponent needs - something Meadows would refer to as a 'physical flow'. The collar sleeve guard stops your opponent from transferring energy from their hips (usually the source of power) to their arms and shoulders, as whatever force they generate is absorbed by your foot. To exert force over you, they need to keep that kinetic chain intact.

Even in this small example, you’ll see how this can take your own positional understanding (or teaching of positions) to another level. Instead of just saying ‘hold these grips’, you can teach your students how to use these attachments in tandem to achieve this micro-goal of breaking your opponent’s posture. It gives them a direction behind the controls.

2b. Defensive considerations

Once you realise you and your opponent are locked together in an interconnected system of combat, every offensive move you make will leave you exposed, even if it’s only in a small way. Look at which attacks or counters you need to be wary of as you make attachments.

Like we just saw, the foot on the hip here is not just offensively important (when the knee and elbow are disconnected, it makes shooting for triangles and omoplatas possible), but it also plays a defensive role. It takes your opponent's hips out of the game, meaning the energy that could be transferred into side-to-side passing or digging for an underhook ends up at a dead end (your foot).

Another example is when you’re passing half-guard; there are certain spaces that are important to fill - but they mean nothing if you’re not adjusting your base to account for your opponent’s bridge. It’s why the best passers know exactly how to manipulate their opponent’s body and apply pressure while also being aware of the direction in which their opponent can generate force. They spread their base accordingly.

Note that focusing less on techniques in isolation and more on how they connect is a huge mindset shift. This is usually the type of thinking I’d expect from students at late blue belt or purple belt. You’re making a shift from learning by segmentation to systems thinking.

Rather than memorising techniques in isolation, you’re beginning to identify the connections between them and gain a much more dynamic view of how the position works in live training.

Step 3: The ‘why’ behind the position - function or purpose

Donella Meadows describes the function or purpose of any system as the most invisible, but important part of a system. The whole point of examining the elements and interconnections of a system is to reveal its function or purpose.

In a BJJ context, this is about giving students an overarching goal or reason for using the position. I like to think of it as the big ‘why’ which links everything in the position together.

While that might seem obvious, there are so many gyms I’ve been to that teach a position without any context for why they are doing it. To keep to the collar sleeve guard example, this usually results in students just lying idly in the position. They know how to use it to control their opponent, but they become directionless because they lack a larger end goal.

Whereas, if you go through steps 1 and 2, you can see the big ‘why’ behind the collar sleeve: it allows you to use Gi grips to apply maximum leverage from the bottom position, while greatly inhibiting your partner’s movement. In turn, this allows you to be really proactive from the bottom, attacking submissions and sweeps with less risk.

In the simplest terms, the output from studying positions shouldn’t be just that you can point to the elements and understand the interconnections between them, but also that you then learn the larger goal that they both serve.

It should allow you to clearly tell:

“Here’s this position, and it’s really good if you want to achieve this goal, but maybe not so good if you’re trying to achieve this goal.”

No position is perfect, but by illustrating the function of each position as students improve, they can weigh one position against another based on what they’re trying to achieve.

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Thanks for reading!

I hope you found something useful in this post. As a side note, we’re nearly at 500 subscribers now, which is genuinely mind-blowing to me. I really appreciate you all reading my pieces week in, week out, and please, if you’re a subscriber, feel free to DM me whenever if you have any specific BJJ questions.

I like to write what’s useful, and most of my best pieces on this Substack have come from subscribers asking questions/making requests for articles.

Hope you have a brilliant week, and thanks again for reading!

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If you’re interested in learning more about how systems thinking applies to jiu-jitsu and which stage of your jiu-jitsu journey it applies to, check out these articles:

One of my old students just returned to training after five years out, and when I asked him how his body was adjusting to regular training, his response wasn’t what I was expecting.

He said his problem wasn’t that his once-quick reflexes felt lost in his muscle memory, or that every role would leave him heaving. In fact, his problem wasn’t physical at all. His biggest challenge, he said, was that the sport was unrecognisable.

The way he put it was he felt like the sport ‘had moved forward without him’. Certain techniques being used against him, like modern modified ankle locks, looked similar to something he had seen before, but worked differently. Other techniques he had built his old jiu-jitsu game around no longer worked. He said he felt like the sport had a new ‘right way of doing things’.

Most people see progression in BJJ as a straight line. They’re so absorbed in their own development that they fail to see that the sport around them is evolving too.

The BJJ meta, or the Most Effective Tactics Available, is best understood as the environment jiu-jitsu lives in. It’s the most current set of techniques, positions and tactics that emerge, usually to be showcased at the highest level of the sport. As my student found out, the sport will constantly evolve, whether you do or not.

This article is about reframing the way you think about technical development in a sport like jiu-jitsu, where everything from the rulesets to the techniques never stops changing.

We’ll look at how standing still is so dangerous in a competitive environment with Red Queen dynamics, and why they make jiu-jitsu a wicked learning environment.

Let’s get into it.

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The danger of standing still in a sport that never stops changing

The image is of two peppered moths perched on a tree somewhere in the north-west of England.

The light-coloured moth showed what they looked like before the Industrial Revolution. Back then, its white wings made it blend in against pale tree bark.

But with the Industrial Revolution came soot that darkened the trees. What used to make the moth invisible now made it stand out, making it an easy target for birds.

Decades later, the black moth appeared. This mutant belonged to the same species but had a new colour that made it invisible in the new industrial environment. As the century drew to a close, almost all the moths in Manchester were black.

In a world of constant change, it’s the adaptations best suited to the current environment that create an advantage. If you’re relying on traits shaped for a past environment, like my old student, that advantage not only disappears, but can even leave you vulnerable in a new environment.

Jiu-jitsu is no different.

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The Red Queen hypothesis

Most jiu-jitsu practitioners treat progress like a sprint toward an imaginary finish line, failing to recognise that the ground is shifting beneath their feet.

Like the white moth, they are oblivious to how the world around them changes - and like my returning student, feel a mismatch between what they know and what works in the new environment that time creates.

Instead, we want to be like the black moth: not seeing progress as an individual pursuit, but focusing on how we align with the competitive environment around us. To do that, we have to face the reality of how competition and selection work.

The ‘Red Queen Hypothesis’ is a theory in evolutionary biology that no matter how much you change or evolve, what’s trying to compete with, defeat, or kill you is evolving as well.

In this theory, progress isn’t a cooperative pursuit, but a byproduct of co-evolution between competing species. A parasite infects its host, the host develops new defences, and the parasite then evolves to find new ways to overcome those defences.

In a similar way, the evolution of the jiu-jitsu meta is non-stop and cyclical. Every year, new rulesets are created, and athletes find new ways to play jiu-jitsu to get an upper hand over the competition. The result is that new techniques are created, sparking counter-techniques and closing the loop - until the next disruption resets the cycle.

The hypothesis was inspired by a line spoken by the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s sequel to Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass, where Alice enters a dreamlike dimension where life plays out on something between a wild rural landscape and a vast chessboard.

Alice meets the Red Queen, a figure who moves through this world with an instinctive understanding of its rules. Alice notices that, no matter how far they run, they haven’t moved at all:

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else - if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”

“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”

Alice’s response shows how the white moths of this world view progress, and the Red Queen shows the reality. There is no finish line; just an eternal co-evolutionary arms race. You don’t evolve to get ahead. You must evolve just to earn the right to stay in the same place.

When experience teaches you the wrong lessons

So if you believe that Red Queen dynamics exist in jiu-jitsu, it must follow that you are participating in a sport that never stops changing. The rules and techniques are constantly changing as long as competitor A is trying to gain an advantage over competitor B.

Which raises a bigger question: in an environment that is constantly changing, how can you tell whether what you’re learning is useful or already outdated?

Robin M. Hogarth has a theory that certain learning environments can change so much that they can mislead even those with many years of experience. He is a cognitive psychologist and decision scientist whose work lies at the intersection of psychology, behavioural economics, and judgment under uncertainty. His work explores how changing environments can make these judgements harder.

In his book Educating Intuition (2001), he explores when experience sharpens our instincts, and when it misleads us, through his distinction between “kind” and “wicked” learning environments.

In kind environments, feedback is clear and reliable, allowing intuition to improve over time.

In wicked ones, feedback is noisy, delayed, or constantly changing, often reinforcing the wrong lessons.

In a sport like jiu-jitsu, where the rules are unstable and the meta is constantly evolving through competition, this creates a wicked learning environment - one where learning becomes more difficult.

The fascinating thing here is that, while experience in kind environments helps you make better decisions over time, wicked environments with lots of change do the opposite. These are environments that change so much that your experience - taken from past events - could actually fool you.

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Stable systems vs evolving ones

This is one thing that makes jiu-jitsu very different from chess, which I regret missing from the article I wrote about the structural similarities between the two a few weeks ago.

The big difference I missed is that while chess is a ‘kind’ learning environment, the non-stop evolution of the rules and players in BJJ makes it a ‘wicked’ one.

In chess, the rules and techniques available are stable. For as many years as it has been played, there have always been 64 squares, and the pieces can only move around the board in certain ways.

Because the system doesn’t change, patterns that worked before will likely continue to work. Over time, this allows players to rely on their experience to build reliable intuition, making chess a ‘kind’ learning environment.

Jiu-jitsu and wicked learning environments

Now compare that with jiu-jitsu. Every year, our sport creates new rulesets. Even world-class jiu-jitsu athletes will regularly switch between rulesets in the same year, with different incentives and routes to victory. This leads to a kind of Red Queen multiplication, as different athletes seek an edge across different rulesets.

To understand how wild this is, imagine for a moment that you’re an elite competitor. You have an ADCC trials match one weekend, and then a Polaris teams event the month after.

In ADCC trials, you’re matched with someone like Dorian Olivarez, with a wrestling-heavy style where he’ll barely give you an inch and fight every grip-exchange to ensure he can stay on top and work his outside passing.

You then prepare for Polaris teams, a Quintet-style setup in which each round is five minutes long and ends in submission or via double elimination. Here, you face someone like Mateusz Szczeciński. He pulls guard immediately, playing dilemmas between No-gi berimbolo and K-guard to enter into your legs with the sole aim of finishing you with an ankle lock.

Two completely different athletes, with two completely different styles. Each style has evolved in response to the demands of two different kinds of competition. This constant change in rule sets creates distinct competitive subcultures.

While experience is undoubtedly important, jiu-jitsu evolves so quickly - and in so many fragments - that even world-class athletes can be submitted by less experienced opponents who are better aligned with the current meta. In chess, by contrast, it’s hard to imagine a beginner using a novel set of techniques to beat a grandmaster.

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The problem with learning in motion

While kind learning environments can be navigated with intuition, if you try to follow your intuition in a wicked environment, you’ll end up being misled.

For a moment, let’s return to Through the Looking-Glass, because the world Alice enters is a vivid representation of a wicked learning environment that has evolved its own inverted logic prior to her arrival.

If she tries to navigate it using her intuition, she becomes more lost. Time runs backwards, text is reversed, and identity is unstable and shifting.

The one recognisable structure is that the world is set out on a giant chessboard. The problem is, while Alice can move square to square, the connections are obstructed and submerged by nature.

If you look closely at the image, you’ll see it has hedges dividing the columns and brooks separating the rows of the chessboard. From above, it has a clear structure. But from Alice’s position inside it, nature obscures that structure: her view is blocked, fragmented, and local.

When you first start jiu-jitsu, you’re also interacting with a system that is hidden somewhere beneath a long, co-evolved logic that pre-dates your arrival. For a newcomer having their first role, they’re faced with the residue of the arms race that has come before them.

And even as you get deeper into your training journey, that logic will continue to morph as the sport changes around you. It’s only by playing the game long enough, and adapting to those changes, that you begin to spot the chessboard structure between the hedges and brooks…

A framework for understanding change

A while ago, I wrote this article on how to spot and rank changes to the jiu-jitsu meta, which I’d recommend if you’re interested in how BJJ evolves through competition.

In the article, I see changes to the meta fitting into 3 categories, and I think it’s a good lens to look through if you believe the sport does evolve according to the Red Queen Hypothesis.

Type 1: Marginal - Technique-level innovation:

These are marginal gains made in certain positions.

• A tweak to the breaking mechanics of a leg lock.

• A new submission variation, like the buggy choke.

• Minor changes in guard play or passing.

While they can catch people off guard, they rarely reshape jiu-jitsu, and the information advantage fades quickly.

Type 2: Disruptive - Positional innovation:

This is when entirely new systems emerge, often sparked by a change in rules combined with ideas borrowed from outside the sport.

• The leg lock revolution led by the Danaher Death Squad is the clearest example.

Type 3: Counter-meta - Response innovation:

Every major shift triggers a reaction. These are the defences and counters that evolve in response to new positions.

• After the leg lock wave, for instance, athletes began using pretzel bolos and other back takes as counters to leg locks. For example, when Felipe Pena took Gordon Ryan’s back in the absolute final at the 2017 ADCC.

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***

You’ll note that this way of ranking trends works closely with a Red Queen dynamic. Even the most disruptive change will be followed by counter-meta, closing the loop until the next breakthrough appears.

To be an innovator: someone whose personal growth temporarily overlaps with the growth of the sport itself - it’s not just about getting really good at jiu-jitsu. The best innovators are those who understand the system deeply: how it co-evolves, so they can spot the gaps ripe for disruption.

Final thoughts

The secret of the Danaher Death Squad (DDS) heel hook revolution of the late 2010s wasn’t just that a group of guys got really good at jiu-jitsu by training every day in a blue basement. It’s that people like John Danaher and Eddie Cummings understood how the system around them was evolving.

They recognised that the rise of submission-only formats like EBI created new white space to develop leg-lock positions from established inside positions that had previously been used mainly for guard play and sweeping.

They had also likely studied greats like Marcelo Garcia in the same city, understanding the value of inside position - butterfly guard, single-leg X, and X-guard - while also zooming out to see that each of these positions could take on a new, more devastating application under changing rule sets.

What they understood is that in a system shaped by constant competition, it’s not the best techniques that survive, but the ones best suited to the current environment.

There’s a great line from Wayne Gretzky, a Canadian ice hockey player widely regarded as the greatest of all time

“Skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been.”

It’s a great description of how the innovators, like the DDS, see the world differently from everyone else. By recognising how the sport was shifting, they can become early adapters, developing systems that not only fit the current environment but also help create the conditions for the next one.

Oh…hello…I didn’t see you there. Don’t mind me, I’m just studying one of the greatest to ever do our sport: Marcelo Garcia.

When Garcia broke through in the early 2000s, jiu-jitsu followed the collective mantra of position and pressure. And while that forged the positional bedrock of Garcia’s game, what set him apart wasn’t his strength in one position, but his ability to transition between them.

From an early age, Garcia was allergic to rigidity. What drove a 12-year-old Garcia away from Karate towards Judo, and later BJJ, was the static nature of katas. He wanted something more dynamic - something that could hold up in real-life altercations.

At 16, Garcia decided to fully dedicate himself to jiu-jitsu - training four times per day and cleaning the mats. His training philosophy became one of fluidity; less concerned with holding positions, and more interested in the opportunities that could be created through perpetual movement.

That approach would go on to make him one of the best competitors and innovators our sport has ever seen.

Even while his competitive career was winding down, one of Garcia’s first black belts (and chess prodigy), Josh Waitzkin, said the following when asked how Garcia liked to train:

“Marcelo’s training philosophy was to spend his whole jiu-jitsu life in the scramble. It was to the point that he would let opponents move so he could spend more of his training time in transition. It was all about maximising time spent in the in-between.”

That last line stuck in my brain for about a week when I first heard it and became the inspiration for this article. In an era where “control” meant restricting space to shut down movement, Garcia often did the opposite, creating space to open up opportunities in transition.

To be clear, Garcia was also exceptional in position. Watch his training and competition footage, and you’ll see some of the cleanest chest-to-chest half guard passing on tape. But his ability to consistently find mechanically advantageous positions came from his willingness to spend time in the grey areas of jiu-jitsu that most people gloss over as “scrambles.”

This article is about what we can learn from that aspect of Garcia’s training philosophy, and why so many of the best athletes in the sport maximise their time spent in the in-between.

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Rethinking control: the art of the in-between

Jiu-jitsu is often defined as the “art of control that leads to submission,” but I think most people forget the “art” part.

For me, the art of control is the balance between knowing when to restrict space and when to create it to open opportunities for attack. To find that balance, you need to recognise two kinds of space:

The first type of space is what you focus on in position. If I’m passing half guard, I know there are specific spaces I need to occupy to control my opponent’s body, and ways I need to spread my base while I do it.

Empty space emerges in transition. In half-guard, your opponent gives you a hard bridge. A control-based player might force them back down into position, but the true empty space comes from allowing them to move to create an opening in transition.

This is how I interpret Garcia’s idea of maximising time spent in the in-between. It’s not an alternative to control-based jiu-jitsu. In fact, without good positional control to begin with, you shouldn’t be thinking about the “art” of control at all.

Rather, it’s the ability to flow between positions and to attack openings as your opponent moves through different phases of the game.

So different to the traditional idea of control, creating empty spaces is basically using distance and movement to create artificial gaps you can exploit. Garcia’s ability to turn the chaos of a scramble into a calculated position was unmatched:

• Instead of clamping down on top half guard or holding mount until an opening appeared, Garcia would give just enough space for his opponents to move, and catch them in his signature Marcelotine.

• Instead of settling for conventional back takes from turtle, he developed rolling crucifix variations so he could chase the submission as opponents tried to roll out of turtle.

• Instead of forcing the far-side armbar, he would often catch the north-south choke as his opponents tried to bridge themselves free.

• Instead of relying on conventional half guard systems, he systematised arm drags and inside-position butterfly guard, helping to pioneer single-leg X and X-guard (positions that now form the foundation of many modern leg lock entries), allowing him to move quickly from hand-fighting exchanges into deep entries.

You get the point.

In each of these examples, Marcelo didn’t just develop new positions. He identified openings that existed in the space between positions - areas most people didn’t understand and simply labelled as “scrambles.”

Here’s some early training footage where you can see him transitioning like this in the gi:

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So the question becomes: how do you actually apply this in your training?

I was thinking about this the other day while talking to a black belt I train with, who has spent most of his time in the gi. He asked me how to transition his game to no-gi.

We spoke for a while and realised the biggest skill gap when transitioning is learning how to move around your opponent when you can’t rely on grips to hold them in place. No-gi forces scrambles, which can feel pretty alien if you spend most of your time in Gi.

The reason is that grips in Gi also help jiu-jitsu practitioners clearly delineate between positions, even during transitions. In No-Gi, those moments are much less clear, so awareness of where you are in those in-between moments is extremely important.

The truth is, even if you’re extremely strong, it’s very difficult to hold someone still without those grips. Look at some of the world’s strongest Dagestani mixed martial artists and notice how even athletes with extreme physicality, like Khamzat Chimaev, are great at controlling people precisely because they know when to hold and when to move.

The first step to developing movement-based control is accepting that you won’t be able to hold someone in one place. Instead, you learn to move between an interconnected set of staging positions: positions that are low effort for you, force your opponent to keep working, and create openings in the in-between.

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Build positional depth before breadth

As I wrote in this white-to-blue belt guide, you want to make sure you’ve built a solid positional understanding before you start focusing on attacking in transition. For anyone at that stage, you can read the full article here:

Let’s say that, like Garcia, I want to get really good at taking the back when I pass the guard and my opponent turtles, catching them in a rear-naked choke as they roll away.

If you’re to chunk that scramble up positionally, you’ve moved from a guard-pass to turtle to a back take as someone rolls to their side. That’s three to four different positions with very different rules and routes to success.

The lesson here is that you can only become great in the in-between if you understand the positions on either side of the transition. Garcia is so amazing in transition because he has such deep knowledge in multiple positions. You need depth in positions before you can transition smoothly from one to another and increase your breadth.

Mixing control-based and movement-based training

But once you’ve spent a good amount of time becoming familiar with control from high-percentage positions, it’s time to add in movement-based training.

That’s why, at my gym, I make sure our live training includes both control-based and movement-based rounds:

Control-based:

In these rounds, students are balancing what they’re trying to maintain with what they’re trying to progress.

For example, chest-to-chest half guard rounds, where the goal is to free the knee line to pass while keeping the opponent’s lower knee and far shoulder pinned. These rounds are deliberately constrained to a single position.

Movement-based:

Recently, we’ve started running rounds in which students can’t hold pins for more than a few seconds and must keep moving around their opponent to control them.

For example, the top player starts in side control and has to prevent the re-guard from transitioning between staging positions (north-south, turtle, back, etc.). The bottom players' only goal is to get their guard or get their feet back in front.

***

I see these as two distinct, but complementary, training modes. The transitional side is far less emphasised in most gyms, but we’ve already seen clear improvements from adding it in. You built positional depth in the control-based rounds and began to identify transition points and opportunities in the movement-based rounds.

Learning how to transition makes people’s jiu-jitsu noticeably more efficient. The reason is that if you imagine two people grappling, and one is trying to hold onto a position for dear life, like a white belt clinging to side control, they might be in a dominant position but end up burning energy while their opponent rests.

It seems counterintuitive at first, but getting good at transitioning puts the burden of energy expenditure on your opponent, forcing them to move and re-guard in positions where they’re already at a mechanical disadvantage.

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Final thoughts

Jiu-jitsu is often taught as a game of positions. To start with, this is a helpful way to view the sport. Especially from blue to brown belt, as you start to dissect jiu-jitsu into positions to analyse.

But if you watch how the best jiu-jitsu players actually operate, their advantage rarely comes from holding a position longer than everyone else. It comes from how they move between positions and how comfortable they are in the grey zone as positions start to change.

I’m convinced the word “scramble” is often used as a sticking plaster for moments we don’t fully understand. Rather than study what’s happening in the in-between, even very good jiu-jitsu practitioners tend to move back to something more stable. But for those who spend time in these liminal zones, an enormous number of opportunities start to appear.

The magic of Marcelo Garcia was that he built his game around that idea. He was exceptional at controlling positions, but more importantly, he spent a disproportionate amount of time observing the transitions between them.

Watch him roll, and you’ll see how he eases off his control just enough to see exactly how his training partner escapes - so that the people he competes against don’t have the same luxury.

That’s also where the efficiency comes from. If you’re always trying to lock someone in place, you end up doing more work than you think. When you’re comfortable moving between positions, your opponent is the one having to do all the work, adjusting, and working to recover, often from positions that are already compromised.

Despite what a lot of instructors might want to be true, so much of jiu-jitsu happens in transition. And if you want to make the leap from good to great, it’s worth spending more of your training time there.

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