# In 96 Minutes I'll Rewire How You Think About Jiu Jitsu

**Channel:** Josh Saunders 
**Source:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Jqbs0wNaDY
**Transcript page:** https://www.withtranscript.ai/video/0Jqbs0wNaDY

## Chapters

- 0:00 — Dos caminos para aprender jiu-jitsu
- 1:44 — Por qué el enfoque único funciona
- 5:54 — Jiu-jitsu como sistema de decisiones
- 9:19 — Conectar técnicas con intención
- 14:03 — Estructura correcta de cada sesión
- 18:35 — Las cuatro fases del entrenamiento
- 28:12 — La escalera de habilidad progresiva
- 33:07 — Cómo estudiar jiu-jitsu con retención
- 40:22 — Entrenar poco pero con dirección
- 46:40 — Preparación mental para competir
- 57:02 — Regular el cuerpo entre combates
- 1:11:07 — Competir con enfoque y familiaridad
- 1:19:40 — Identidad, ego y progreso real
- 1:26:39 — Expectativas realistas y proceso
- 1:31:53 — Resumen final y llamada a actuar

## Transcript

**[0:00] Speaker A:** If you train jiu-jitsu, there are only two paths that you can be on. The first path is utter chaos. You show up to class, you do the technique of the day, you roll hard, and you go home tight. And you hope that somehow someway over time, this is going to add up to world class skills. The second path is structure. You know what matters and you know what doesn't matter. And you know exactly what you're building in each and every single session so that you're not guessing, you're not hoping, you're installing skills deliberately. Most people don't quit jiu-jitsu because it's too hard. They quit because it feels random. They feel like they're working very hard for very little in return. They feel confused. They feel behind. Feel like everybody else has got some secret manual that they must have missed. This course is that manual.

**[0:43] Speaker A:** What you're about to go through is a complete operating system for jiu-jitsu students. Specifically, if you're anywhere between 3 months and 3 years of training, whether your goal is to stop getting smashed, finally get your next belt, compete without falling apart, or just feel like you actually understand what you're doing every day, this course will give you the structure to do it. Not more techniques, not more intensity, not more grinding. Pause. Just clarity. Here's how this course is structured. Chunk one, we're going to go over why most people fail at learning jiu-jitsu. Chunk two, we're going to go through how to train correctly. so that you develop skills. Chunk three is going to be all about competing the same way you train in the training room. And chunk four is the mindset that's required to make all of those chunks work together. Each section is going to build on the last.

**[1:31] Speaker A:** Nothing here is random and everything links together. If you feel behind, overwhelmed, or frustrated, it's not a character flaw. That's a systems problem. Fix the system and progress becomes inevitable.

**[1:44] Speaker A:** So, let's start by removing the biggest source of frustration and confusion in jiu-jitsu. Once you see this, you'll never see the sport the same way ever again. Today, learning jiu-jitsu is harder than it's ever been before. There are more people doing the sport, and that means that there are more people teaching the sport, and that means that the on the internet that you are seeing is larger than ever, and it's harder and harder to sift through every single day. Thousands of techniques, thousands of options, thousands of videos hitting your phone every single day. You're lying in bed at night. You're doom scrolling next to the misses. You're pretending to give a about what she's trying to show you. And you're thinking, that flying armbar transition sick. But then you also have the internal thought of thinking, why does none of this stick for me? Why can I never apply the moves that I watch on Instagram or instructionals or wherever you're getting your information?

**[2:38] Speaker A:** this YouTube channel. Good job. If that sounds familiar, good, because this section is going to fix all of that. The reason jiu-jitsu feels this way for you is not because you're bad at it. It's because you're overloaded. Most students show up to class, they pay attention, they train hard, but at the end of that, they still walk away with very little to show for it. And that's not an effort problem because most people put in a good amount of effort. It's a focus problem. The modern jiu-jitsu student is trying to learn escapes, guard passing, submissions, takedowns, competition strategy all at the same time. And your brain simply can't do that. Especially when you're addicted to doom scrolling. You cannot multitask and you are not special. You're lying to yourself if you think you can. Let me prove it to you right now. You're watching this probably having a meal or taking a dump.

**[3:28] Speaker A:** And what that means is you're doing neither of them properly. Make sure you're white. Your attention is completely split. And jiu-jitsu is exactly the same. When you try and focus on everything at once, you miss everything. You leave training exhausted and confused. And the only thing you can remember is how tired you felt or how many mistakes you made. That's the real reason why people believe jiu-jitsu is so hard to learn. It's not hard to learn. It's just taught improperly. Here's the lie that keeps people stuck. They think that focusing on one thing is boring. They think that novelty equals progress. They think if they're not constantly adding new techniques to their game, then they're wasting their time. That belief is the trap because when you don't focus deeply on anything, you never give the techniques the time and the depth that they require to actually become usable.

**[4:17] Speaker A:** The best people in the world are still using all the fundamental positions that they've been working on for years. They don't just throw them out because there's some brand new armbar technique that's come alive. Not because they're slow learners, but because depth creates inevitability. And early on in my training, this was the exact same story for me. I would drill something. I would hit it once or twice, mentally stamped it as learned, and then never touch it again. genius, right? Fast forward a few months later, and I couldn't understand why nothing worked consistently. It would work for a couple of sessions and then it would stop and then I'd go to the next thing and it would work for a couple of sessions and then it would stop. It wasn't because the techniques I was learning were bad. It was because I never stayed with anything long enough for it to become reliable.

**[5:00] Speaker A:** Once I fixed that, ironically, everything sped up. Here's the single focus rule that you can take away and apply into your training straight away. One position, one week, one outcome. That's it. for an entire week. Your only goal is you focus on the single position that you've chosen. You aim for one specific outcome from that position and everything else becomes secondary. Not five techniques, not three positions, just one. When you can finally do this without getting bored or distracted, you give techniques the depth that they deserve. You notice details you never saw before. You start developing your own understanding and your rounds suddenly have direction to them. And here's the part that most people don't expect. Your motivation actually goes up because instead of chaos and exhaustion like you currently are training, you start to feel progress.

**[5:54] Speaker A:** So now that you understand why jiu-jitsu feels so confusing, we need to clear up a much bigger misunderstanding. Because until you understand what jiu-jitsu actually is, you'll keep learning it backwards just like everybody else. No matter how hard you train, most people think that learning jiu-jitsu is about techniques. That belief alone will keep you mediocre for years. Jiu-jitsu is not a laundry list of techniques that you collect and tick off a little notepad as you train. Jiu-Jitsu is a decision-making system under resistance. Techniques are just the tools. And jiu-jitsu is the logic that tells you which tool to use, when to use it, and why it works. If you don't understand that logic, every technique that you learn feels isolated, fragile, and unreliable. That's why a bunch of you guys say things like, "It works in drilling, but it doesn't work in rolling. It works on white belts, but nothing else.

**[6:49] Speaker A:** It worked once and then I never hit it again." That's not a technique problem. That's a decision problem. Think about it like chess. I'm sure a bunch of you autistic people love chess just as much as you love jiu-jitsu. So, this will hit home for you. A beginner just memorizes the opening sequence. An advanced player understands each of the positions. And that's why advanced players look calm as well. They're not confident because they're calm. They're confident because nothing surprises them. They know where they are. They know what matters. And they know what comes next. And jiu-jitsu is the exact same. The people who feel smooth aren't smoother humans, unless of course their whole body is shaved. Sure. They're simply making fewer, clearer decisions. Because when you don't understand jiu-jitsu the way that I've just been describing it as a decision system, this is exactly how it goes.

**[7:40] Speaker A:** You hit a move, you pause, your brain goes blank, you wait, and then you get absolutely smashed. The blank moment has nothing to do with your levels of fatigue or the fact that you don't know any techniques. It's a lack of direction. And most gyms accidentally train that lack of direction into you. And this used to happen to me early in my training when I first started the sport. I'd sweep someone, admire my handiwork, and then nothing. No follow-up, no consolidation, no ability to pin people on their back, no idea what I was supposed to do next, cuz I was just learning moves in these little chunks, isolated, separated, not focusing on my decision-m. So, as soon as I would do something and it did or didn't work, hesitation would occur. And the moment you hesitate in jiu-jitsu, your advantage is completely gone. Not because the sweep was bad.

**[8:34] Speaker A:** You probably did a really good job at that. But because the sweep had no context around it, no follow-up. Okay. So, here's the first major belief break of this entire course. You don't need more answers or more techniques. You need the next decision you're going to make. At any moment in any round, you should be able to answer the following. What am I trying to do right now? What problem am I trying to solve? What happens if it works? What happens if it fails? If you can answer those four questions, not only will you have more direction and guidance within your own training, you'll feel more calm, you'll feel more controlled, and likely more dangerous regardless of whatever belt level you wear. Because again, belts don't determine skills as much as everybody thinks they do.

**[9:19] Speaker A:** So now you understand that jiu-jitsu is about decision making, not just technique collection. The next problem becomes obvious. Because if jiu-jitsu is about decision-m, then collecting more and more techniques without linking them together isn't going to do you any good. It's actually making you worse. If you've been training for more than three to six months and your game still feels like a random assortment of techniques, this is why you haven't built any links between any of the moves that you currently know. Most students in most gyms around the world train jiu-jitsu exactly like this. Technique of the day, drill it sloppily a couple times, roll with no plan of how they're going to implement that technique and repeat every session that they've ever done over months and years. This creates a pile of unconnected techniques. You know what a triangle is. You know what a guillotine is.

**[10:15] Speaker A:** You know what a knee cut is hopefully. But under pressure, nothing connects. You don't know how to use them in sequence. So, whenever your first idea fails or you experience some sort of resistance, your game completely collapses and you're left not knowing where to go next. This is like learning an entire language by just learning random words like that stupid app Dolingo. You go on Dolingo, it tries to teach you what Apple is. I'm never going to say that in Spanish when I visit Spain. It doesn't make any sense, let alone form a sentence or have a conversation with somebody. And that's exactly what most people's jiu-jitsu looks like. Random words all over the place. No sentences and certainly no conversations. Here's what most people never actually understand. Adding more techniques actually makes you slower. More options equals more thinking. More thinking ends up in hesitation.

**[11:09] Speaker A:** Hesitation equals losing all of your positions. And this is exactly why higher belts shut you down effortlessly. Competitors look decisive while you feel like you're freaking out and your brain goes blank midroll. They're not faster thinkers. They're just making fewer decisions. Throughout all of my years of progression, my two longest belts happen to be blue and brown. But when I went from purple to brown, it took me about 20 weeks. The main reason for this isn't steroids. It's not steroids. It helped, but it's not the main reason. The real main reason for this was I realized this is exactly the way that I was training. I was collecting a bunch of options, but way too much information. So whenever I'd go into a round, I would hesitate, get overloaded, and I would just not get to the positions that I would like to or be able to execute the things that I was working on.

**[11:58] Speaker A:** It wasn't until I started to take things out and really decide on the depth and the quality of my decision-m that I started to make significant progress. Once again, the way that I climbed through the ranks was evidence of that. Didn't learn anything new. I just took what I already knew and I asked very deliberately, if this works, what am I going to follow this up with? If it doesn't work, what's my contingency plan? Two directions each move. That was it. And immediately, without even learning anything new, my game felt smoother and more cohesive. So, your homework, which is going to be in the workbook that you can download below, is for every single technique that you currently have, you must define if this works, I will go here. If it doesn't work, I will go here. For example, if I go to sumigashi somebody and they post out on their leg, I'll just switch to their legs.

**[12:51] Speaker A:** If I go to enter their legs and they stop me by sprawling, then I go back to the sumigi. So, if it works, I do this. And if it fails, I do this. You didn't even need to learn a new move. I mean, sure, for some of you white belts, sumagi and Japanese blah blah blah will sound like another language. That's because it is. But you do know how to sweep people. You do know what a knee cut is. You do know what a triangle is. You know what a guillotine is. You're only going to enhance these movements when you learn how to direct them properly. Because the biggest thing that removes confusion, frustration in your training is direction. So now you know exactly why most people fail at learning the sport of jiu-jitsu. They try to learn everything at once. They mistake techniques for understanding and they collect moves without any direction.

**[13:40] Speaker A:** And none of that is actually your fault. You don't know any better. Neither did I when I was in your position. It's how the sport has been traditionally taught and it's broken. But that's fine because in the next chunk, we're going to fix it even more. We'll install structures, phases of training, and systems that completely removes the randomness from your regular training. And finally, show you how to go from chaos to training jiu-jitsu properly.

**[14:03] Speaker A:** Once you start structuring your training sessions this way, something important starts to happen. You realize that even when you train with good intentions, things can still fall apart. You escape, then you stall. You sweep, then you lose control. You pass, but then it turns into a scramble and forget about submitting anybody cuz you can't maintain contact with them long enough. That's not a session problem anymore. That's a systems problem, which means we now need a map. And the four-phase system is that map. Most people don't actually train jiu-jitsu. They attend classes. There's a big difference. They show up, they follow along with the technique of the day, which is usually some random three-part that doesn't connect to anything, and then they roll. But however the roll unfolds, they don't have any guidance, no direction. They're just throwing at the wall and seeing what sticks. And then they go home tired, confused, having learned nothing or very little.

**[14:59] Speaker A:** It feels productive because you get tired, you get exhausted, you get a good workout in, you see your friends, it's no problem. But nothing concrete actually changes from week to week. Training is different than attending. Training has intention. Training has constraints. Training has a clearly defined outcome for every time you step on the mats. If you don't decide what the session's going to be for before you attend it, then the session is going to be decided for you and it's going to be random and chaotic every single time. Think about a weightlifting gym. If you walk in without a plan and bounce between machines, you're going to get tired. You might even get a pump, get a sweat up, and you'll feel like you did something, but your body doesn't change. And I bet you've seen hundreds of examples of these people at your gyms, so you know what I'm talking about.

**[15:49] Speaker A:** Jiu-jitsu works the exact same way. Rolling hard without a direction. It gives you the sense that you're training and you're doing something productive. But structured rounds are the things that actually build skill. They don't just feel like you might be. Here is how every single session should be structured. You limit your focus to one or two moves from one position. Anything more than that just adds more noise and more chaos, not more learning. From those one or two moves from that one position, you're going to start to positional train starting in that original position. Because if you don't, the likelihood that you spend a lot of time there in your round is very limited. Now, as a side note, if you train at a gym that's allergic to building skills and they don't present you with positional training or you have a training partner that doesn't want to start in top mount for some

**[16:44] Speaker A:** stupid reason, force it. Working pincapes is the easiest version of this because you can literally just lay down with your hands over the boys and let them pass you. Sometimes you won't want to be as obvious as that, but you can still try and force those positions. I do this all the time. If I want to play half guard, I just let them split my legs and then I go into half guard and then mentally that's where I start my round. Whatever you do decide to work on, and we're going to go exactly what to work on in the next section. So, keep paying attention. Decide how many reps is going to look like success. Typically, I say one to two reps each positional round. Not maybe reps, not halfass reps, but actual successful completion against a live resisting training partner. That way you can walk away from every single round knowing that you've made tangible progress.

**[17:39] Speaker A:** And once you finally give yourself a realistic time horizon, like a week of doing the same thing, I know it sounds boring. I know you're going to get distracted, but trust me, if you stick to this, you will see tangible gains in your skills. One week should get you off the first two rungs of the skill ladder. And if you don't know what the skill ladder is, we're going to cover that in a following section. And this will make sure that you're building these skills into your game so that they become reliable and usable over time, not just tricks and random techniques. And if your session doesn't follow this structure and doesn't allow these three things to happen, then you're not building skills. You're just throwing at the wall and seeing what sticks, hoping for the best. There's no hope on this channel. However, once sessions are structured in this format, another issue becomes obvious quite quickly.

**[18:29] Speaker A:** What the do I start to focus on? And where can I actually apply this structure so I get the best results possible?

**[18:35] Speaker A:** Lucky for you, I've already figured it out for you. Most people struggle to make sense of jiu-jitsu reliably because their coaches and the way that they're being taught is just the see whatever the happens approach. techniques are shown in isolation with very little explanation of how and why they are best used with the main part of the movement being what it actually is. And this leaves you completely in the dark because you know what a guillotine is. But if you don't know why to use it or how you're going to perform it, then you're left in the dark completely. When I first started coaching the sport of jiu-jitsu, I thought the solution was more content, more moves, just like everybody else. I filmed technique after technique after technique, and I had 900 videos ready and available to be accessed whenever my students needed. But the feedback that I got was still the same.

**[19:30] Speaker A:** I don't know where to go next. I escape and then I just get repinned. I sweep and I freeze. I do this and I have no idea where to go next. I still feel overwhelmed and I'm still confused after every session. That's when it became more obvious. More techniques are typically creating more complexity, not more understanding. And in understanding that, I decided to reduce the sport down to four key phases. These four key phases happen in almost every single round you will do in jiu-jitsu. And they are very good solutions to the most common problems. And if you can put these into your training, you'll be far ahead of most of your other teammates and training partners. Phase one is all about pin escapes. I have to separate that word because every time I don't, people say you're saying penis capes. The reason why pin escapes is number one is because it is the biggest problem.

**[20:24] Speaker A:** You'd be surprised at how many white belts, blue belts, purple belts, brown belts, and some black belts still do not have a reliable method to get out from bottom position. Therefore, they have no idea how to stop wasting hours of training time, stuck without a method of getting out. In phase one, you're going to develop one to two escapes using our structure for side control, mount, north, south, half guard, close guard, and the back. This is typically the sticking points for most people. One week per position with two options. And if you want a pro tip, these options have to work off one another. So when your knee elbow escape gets blocked from side control, you start to use other variations of escapes like near side under hook, ghost escapes, Marcela Garcia escapes. That way you have an if then scenario like we talked about in section one that allows you to generate success no matter what your training partner does.

**[21:29] Speaker A:** And there's only so many reactions that they can give you. So, all you're actually doing is matching the right solution to the current problem you're facing. We're not trying to jam square pegs and round holes here. I've done that. It doesn't work. And this is exactly how you're going to implement this into your training. The first half of the week that you do this escape series from this one position is going to be utilizing escape number one. The second half of the week is going to be utilizing escape number two. Then at the end of the week, you should be able to play them off one another and have success no matter what your training partner does to you. The second biggest problem after this is that you get good at escaping, but then you have to keep escaping cuz your partner just whips around the corner, gets your limbs out of the way, and then repins you.

**[22:20] Speaker A:** The most common example of this is, "How do I stop people from going to north south when I escape control?" Well, I'm about to tell you. Phase two is all about generating immediate offense. Now, what do I mean by that? I mean by not escaping to a neutral position. I mean escaping to where you're still connected to your training partner, but you have things available to you like high legs. You have open guard situations. You you gain access to reverse deaha deaha. The best example I can give of this is when you utilize a kipping escape from mount and you go straight into a rimshi. This is a very offensive position that your training partner has to respect and has to deal with before they can try and remount you. So you're not just escaping. They switch off into side control and then they remount you cuz that is a waste of time and it's disastrous for your skill building.

**[23:16] Speaker A:** You then want to think about two other options is whether you can start to sweep your training partner or wrestle up from these common escapes. For example, in half guard you've got the lower leg shift series where you can start to free their knee, turn it inwards and either sweep them and come up on top or you can wrestle up into the dog fight position. Both of these in your brain as where your escape is leading you to is the success of phase two. So now you're not just escaping endlessly to then reescape the same position again and again and again and again. You actually are thinking about where is this leading me? Where am I going to go? What options for offense do I have available to me straight away so that I don't have to go back to neutral back to defense. I can go from defense, semi-neutral, offense.

**[24:07] Speaker A:** If you can break the defensive cycle, you'll have way more success with your escapes. Now, phase three fixes the next biggest problem, and this is typically coming from the sweeping portion or the wrestling up portion. Whenever you're trying to get to top position, people usually forget the method of pinning that they're going to use after they gain top position. They sweep their training partner over, maybe their training partner creates a big section of distance, and then they just immediately come back and pass you and pin you again. This is a big problem. So phase three is all about maintaining top position. Simple things like keeping heels above hips when you sweep somebody backwards or keeping elbows from touching the floor are two of the best methods. But you need to develop this from every single offensive option from phase two. So you need to learn how to pin people from any sort of leg entanglement that you're using, any sort of sumagi or sweep that you're using, any sort of wrestle up that you're using.

**[25:08] Speaker A:** Even for instance from side control, if you end up using an plata or an plata variation, you're using that to sweep them and then get on top. But you need to know how you're going to maintain top position after you do that. And things like taking scoops in the back of knees, keeping their feet from touching the floor, and stopping their elbows hitting the mat are great ways to do that because if you're going to sweep somebody, you may as well consolidate it. And if you can't consolidate it, there's no point. So phase three is all about consolidating top position via penny, which leads me to the least important section of this, and I know this might blow your brain, submissions. The reason I say that this is the least important part of this entire phase structure is because everybody puts so much time and effort and energy into learning submissions, but they don't learn any of the things that we've

**[25:59] Speaker A:** just covered. I don't give a how good your triangle is. If you can't get out from bottom side control, you can never use it. It doesn't matter how good your kimora is if you can never gain top position and hold it. So if you keep that in mind and recognize that the first three phases the most important if you just spent your time mastering that submissions would start falling in your lap. It is that simple. So phase four is submissions and they only come by way of taking top position and dominating people positionally. Of course there are leg locks from bottom position. There are choy bars from bottom position. But these are exotics. If you really want to submit more people than you ever have in your training room, they are going to come from mount the back and as a lesser extent topside control.

**[26:49] Speaker A:** But getting to those positions, no matter where you start the round, requires you to master the first three phases. So now once you implement these into your training using the weekly structure that we just went through, you can go from bottom side control, use a sweep, maintain top position, mount your partner or take their back, and then submit them. So no matter where you start the round, you have a reliable pathway towards a finish or at least a completely different game to what you're currently utilizing. There aren't any more sticking points and there's no more confusion about where you're going to end up because you know where to go. You've got one to two options from each position on bottom, gaining top position, holding top position, and then submissions. Once these phases are completely understood, you have the freedom to roll freely. One of the biggest goals that most jiu-jitsu practitioners have all over the world, no matter what level you're at, is the ability to flow.

**[27:48] Speaker A:** This gives you the access to flow. These four steps, these four phases are the key to you doing that every single round. So instead of doing things randomly, being unorganized, having no direction and no guidance, you'll know what to do. You'll know when to do it. You'll know how to do it. And you'll know why you're going there in the first place, which makes you unbeatable no matter what belt level you're at.

**[28:12] Speaker A:** At this point, you're probably starting to feel some relief. you can see how your training is going to finally have structure and finally have a map to be able to follow. But then you run into the next frustration. I know what phase I'm in, but my techniques still don't work consistently. I can drill them, but they don't work in training. That's not a phase problem anymore. That's a calibration issue. So, if you've been training for a while and you've started to realize that your techniques only really work on people who are worse than you, it doesn't mean that your technique's bad. It could, but it means you're not using the skill ladder effectively. Most people try and bring brand new moves into their game by drilling it a handful of times and then jumping straight to the top of the heap with a competition purple belt or brown belt in their gym where

**[28:53] Speaker A:** they get absolutely dominated the first time they try it. They come away from this experience thinking that that move is a piece of and it doesn't work and never pick it up ever again. No wonder you're not learning anything. Makes sense. That system is completely backwards. No skill survives a pressure test unless the pressure is laid out gradually. And the way I like to describe this is low stakes environment versus high stakes environment. But let me explain. It's like when you first start lifting weights in the gym. I used to do this because I was a but I would try and max out every single session. And it wasn't until I stopped doing that that I actually started to develop some sort of strength gains because I was doing it in a low stakes environment first, building up my technique, and then adding intensity later, which

**[29:42] Speaker A:** came from more weight. In jiu-jitsu, it's using the skill ladder step by step. So, now that you know how to structure your training, you know what phase you're going to be using, and you've got a map of where you're going to where you're going to go, you need to start to filter the way that you're implementing these skills very specifically with very specific training partners. Like I was saying in the previous section, the first two rungs of the skill ladder is going to be somebody who is lighter than you and less skilled than you. That's rung number one at the very bottom. Then you move up one rung by going to lighter than you and at a similar skill level. Then the third rung, lighter than you and higher skill than you. Then you're going to repeat that same process as you move up the first rung.

**[30:31] Speaker A:** As you move away from lighter than you, you'll go to around the same weight as you. So you go same weight, lower skill, same weight, similar skill, same weight, higher skill. Then you go for the last three rungs. Heavier than you, shittier than you. Heavier than you, similar skill. Heavier than you, better than you. So now you have a reliable n-step process that you can filter your movements through as you're building the required pressure for implementing it into your game properly. And this, if you've been paying attention, allows you to actually track your progress with the moves that you're bringing into your game in a very reliable fashion. You can think about your knee elbow escape from side control in the first week of phase one. And if you can start hitting it on people who are heavier than you and at a similar skill level, you probably deserve the right to move on to something else.

**[31:31] Speaker A:** But at a bare minimum, you want to get through the first two rungs before you change your focus. The reason why each phase is a week long is because that's about as long as it takes from taking hundreds of people through this process. That's typically the average. Now, I know some person is going to say, "But Josh, I'm the lightest guy in my training room. I'm 4'11. How would the system work for me?" do it to the best of your ability. If I have students at my gym who are very small white belts still able to execute this, sure, there's nobody smaller than them. But is there somebody who's the smallest person of the options available that they can use? Yes, of course there is. You don't need to match it on perfectly. If you're at a decent enoughsiz gym, sure, you've got all the optionality in the world, but to the best of your ability, try and find somebody there.

**[32:26] Speaker A:** I can't use somebody better than me. and heavier than me at my gym. They don't exist. I'm the heaviest and I'm the best. That's just the way that it works. So, I have to develop my skills in a slightly different way. Are there guys that are heavier and at a similar skill level? Close, but not exactly, but you get what I mean. You don't need to do it exactly like that. But as long as you follow the skill ladder framework, you'll have a reliable way to progress your skills into your game by adding intensity slowly and deliberately and not abandoning those moves straight away because they do work. You just need to learn how to build them in.

**[33:07] Speaker A:** Once your skill ladder is correct and you understand how to utilize it correctly in each and every single session, the next failure point becomes obvious. When you study stuff outside of the gym, whether it be from me on YouTube, BJJ Fanatics, hopefully not Tik Tok and Instagram, it's full of rubbish. We already went over that. You don't know how to implement it properly because your brain just goes blank. Now, what we've covered already will help with that. But in this section, I'm going to teach you exactly how to study the sport so that you have maximum retention. Here's what most people do, and here's why it's completely wrong. You go to BJJ Fanatics. This is actually an improved step because most people just go to YouTube and watch rubbish. You go to BJJ Fanatics, you buy a Danaher instructional and you fall asleep within 10 minutes.

**[33:51] Speaker A:** It's too long. There's too much information going on. Even if you watch it at one and a half speed, it's painstaking. But what most people do incorrectly is they try and watch it as a form of entertainment. They're not writing notes. They're not gathering information out of it. They're watching it as if you were watching this video. Well, hopefully not because this video is very educational and entertaining. But no matter how much of the instructional material you watch, you never end up remembering it or how to use it when you finally get to the gym. And there's a couple of key reasons as to why. It isn't because you're lazy. It's because you're using the drinking from the fire hose method. You way too much information all at once, and there's not a high chance that you're going to retain much doing that. But there's a really easy solution for this, and it's the five to 10 step study loop.

**[34:40] Speaker A:** I know that sounds like a mouthful, but trust me, you're going to love it. Number one is choosing what you need to work on, not what is the most exciting thing at the time. Sure, there's a buggy choke craze that starts to come out. You think, I'm going to smash my teammates with this. They'll never see it coming. But then you're falling back into that same trap that we've already destroyed. Collecting moves, prioritizing submissions, not focusing on position, and you're ruining the whole thing. So don't do that. We've put a lot of work into you already. Pay attention. Stay composed. Stay focused. Lock the in, as the Tik Tok kids say. So choose what you need rather than what excites you. And this is going to pay dividends throughout your entire career. Cuz truth be told, getting very good at jiu-jitsu is not the most exciting thing in the world for the gross majority of your time.

**[35:30] Speaker A:** I had a business mentor explain this concept to me and it really clarified what getting good at something actually is. There's three countries that you have to think about in this analogy. There's devastation, mediocre and excit. Most people think that mediocre stand is this much of their experience when in actuality it's the main part of their existence. Exciter exciting things come around every couple of days or so. Devastating things are the exact same. They're about 10% on each end of the spectrum. Most things lie in the middle in the mediocre. So, in your jiu-jitsu training, stop anticipating that you're going to have an amazing, orgasmic, glorious session every single time. It's just not going to happen. On the flip side of this, don't beat yourself up too much. If you do have a bad session, they're not going to become the norm. The gross majority of any pursuit is going to be in the middle, in the mediocre.

**[36:30] Speaker A:** And this is very important into the study loop because you need to choose what you need to work on, not what excites you. because then you're only focusing on 10% of the puzzle and you're going to get results. It's just the way that it works. Step number two, when you decide what you need to work on, you are only going to watch at maximum 5 to 10 minutes of that study material. The reason that you do this is because you're not going to overload yourself with information. It's going to become clear and concise, and you give yourself the opportunity to actually perform the moves with depth by narrowing your focus. If you widen your focus too much, everything becomes chaos and you fall into the same trap of the shitty jiu-jitsu method. Number three, now you can take handwritten notes. These are usually the best.

**[37:17] Speaker A:** There's good neuroscience to back that up. You can take notes in your phone or you can voice note or even video yourself. It doesn't matter what modality you use. It just matters that you take things out of the study session because it's not what's taught, it's what's caught. And if you're not catching anything, you won't be learning. Number four is probably the most important part out of all of this, in my opinion, is do the first three steps as close to training as you possibly can. There is no point in watching 5 to 10 minutes of an instructional while you're eating your breakfast in the morning, going to work, having hundreds of things happen within the day along the drive. When you get to the office, your lunch didn't arrive on time. Your coffee was You got angry about that. You go all the way to the finish of work.

**[38:08] Speaker A:** You finally get off. You're like, "Fuck yeah, time to train jiu-jitsu. What did I study this morning?" Oh, that's right. You forgot. What was the point of studying? Try and do the 5 to 10 minutes as close to the start of your session as possible, and you'll be shocked at how much you can actually retain. Don't make the mistake of having a full workday in between your study and your application because you will never ever remember it. Number five is come in with the precontext that you're not going to be an expert at it straight away. You're going to be clunky. There's going to be failed reps. And truth be told, this doesn't happen all of the time. Sometimes you gravitate heavily towards something and you pick it up pretty quickly. But don't expect to be in exciter stand. lower your expectations and go in with the idea that you're going to be learning, not succeeding right away.

**[38:59] Speaker A:** And this will help you with your mindset, too. Once you do all that, once you've put it into your structure, once you've applied it within the phases, once you've gone a couple rungs of the skill ladder, rewatch the same segment. Don't go to a new 5 to 10 minutes. go back to the same 5 to 10 minutes cuz I guarantee you, you will have missed a detail or something in that video where you had a problem that you didn't know how to solve in training that can be fixed by re-watching that 5 to 10 minutes. Go back over it, reapply it in your next training session, and rinse and repeat that process until you fill all of the information gaps, not the application gaps. You're not trying to get all the way to the top of the skill ladder before you move on to the next 5 to 10 minutes.

**[39:41] Speaker A:** that would take way too long. There is a limit. There's a rate of diminishing returns. But you're trying to fill the information gaps. So, if you know what to do and you just hesitated and didn't do it, fine. That's okay. That might be a skill ladder thing that you need to address later. But as long as you understand what you're trying to do, what you're trying to accomplish, then you're in the right position to move on to the next 5 to 10 minutes. Then you rinse and repeat. You go through that same five to 10 steps all over again. And if you do it in these 5 to 10 minute chunks, I guarantee you build better skills and you retain way more information than trying to just belt feed knowledge into your head and none of it sticks.

**[40:22] Speaker A:** It's a complete waste of time. Now, up until this point in the structure section, you're thinking, "Wow, this is all fantastic, but I don't train enough." Well, you're wrong. Anything between one to three sessions a week applying training in a directed and structured focus has the potential to outweigh somebody who's training five to seven to maybe even 10 sessions a week that is doing it randomly and chaotically. It's an excuse when people say, "I don't train enough, especially when you recognize how to do this next step." Here's the most common understanding that people get wrong. They think that they need a ton of volume and a ton of reps to get anywhere near the good guys in their training room. And based on what we've already discussed today, and based on what we've already covered today, we're starting to break that narrative apart piece by piece.

**[41:11] Speaker A:** You don't need more volume. You don't need more reps. Yes, of course, if you were to apply everything we just covered with volume, that's how you supercharge your results. But I don't want you guys at home thinking that anything between one and three sessions a week is not enough to get good. It is. You just aren't utilizing them properly. This is the thing that keeps most people stuck. When you only train one to three times a week, something interesting happens. You can't rely on volume to cover mistakes because you don't have the ability to produce volume. You've got kids, you've got a busy job, maybe you run a business, maybe you fly in, fly out for your work all the time. And so that actually does a pretty good thing, which forces you to rely on clarity, systems, direction, and processes. You can start to break this belief in your mind by focusing in the right areas.

**[41:59] Speaker A:** Progress stops being about how much time you put in and starts being about how well you use the time that you do have because we want to get away from this idea that belt levels and skill level is about attendance and how many check marks you can put on a calendar. Cuz anybody who's done the sport for long enough knows that that's complete nutter So, if you are somebody working full-time that's watching this video who wants to get much better at jiu-jitsu than they currently are, the week of training, whether it be one, two, three, maybe even four sessions, should look very simple. Like we've already covered, pick your one position, pick something that you need and prioritize that for your entire week in session one, session two, session three, and four if you have the availability to do so. Session one introduces the movement to you through positional training.

**[42:47] Speaker A:** Session two reinforces the lessons from lesson one and then adds depth and quality also by using slightly higher resistance. And session three is just focused on using the things that you learned in one and two and then climbing the skill ladder of the difficulty in the application of your movement. Everything else in training becomes secondary. If you escape side control and you're presented with an opportunity that furthers the process, but that's not your focus for the week, go back to side control. If you're in positional training, you can say to the person, "Hey, I'm going to escape, and then as soon as I get back to an open guard position, put me back in side control." If you're in an open round or with somebody who doesn't want to do positional training, escape, let them pass you, and then escape again. This way, you're not just chasing time and rounds and volume which could be full of fluff anyway.

**[43:38] Speaker A:** You're installing a skill very deliberately. And this approach completely removes the mindset that you're behind or unable to get better because of a limitation that you can't really do anything about. Anyway, I get it. If you got kids, you got a busy business, you got a busy work life, just gets in the way. You want to get good at training, but you only have a couple of sessions a week to do so. This is exactly how you get as good as you possibly can with limited time. And now you can start to build confidence in your game because you know that every session is a stepping stone to better skills. And then when you finally start to add all these tools into your training, something really cool starts to happen. Not just in your results, but in how people experience rolling with you and what they start to say about the skills that you're developing.

**[44:23] Speaker A:** Every gym has one guy in it. Maybe you have a couple, but every gym has at least one that when the rounds start, you end up doing this. You don't want to make eye contact with them because they're a nightmare to roll with. It's not because they're bigger, stronger, faster, more athletic, or more flexible. Although they may have some of those attributes, it's something different entirely. And it's not because they're reckless or maybe you have banned people from training with you because they elbow and knee you in the face all the time. Completely okay to do so by the way if you are a lower belt. Just take that from me. Take that advice from me to you. You're welcome. Thank you very much. And it's not even because they're aggressive cuz most of those guys aren't nightmares to roll either. You just let them exhaust themselves.

**[45:10] Speaker A:** It's because the rounds that you do against them feel suffocating. Not in terms of just exhaustion, but also from your decision making. Every decision gets smashed as soon as you make it. You feel like you're backpedaling the entire time. They do a really good job at removing dead space. They pin you properly so that when you try and get up, you can't. They link moves automatically so everything has something behind. They're difficult to predict and they're hard to slow down when they get going. But here's the thing, they're not special. All they've done over a long period of time is train without randomness. They trained along enough without randomness so that inevitability emerged. They link every action to the next. They aren't one-dimensional. They don't rely on unnecessary movements. They control the pace. They attack the upper body and the lower body simultaneously. And they seek difficult rounds and challenges without avoiding.

**[46:08] Speaker A:** And that has very little to do with intensity like most people assume. This is structure, direction, focus, and guidance expressing itself completely. So, if you want to become a nightmare roll in your gym, just follow this entire blueprint that I just laid out. And I guarantee you start getting compliments from your training partner. Like, that was I didn't know what to do because you had an answer for everything that I tried to do to you. When I tried to do this, I just felt like I ran into a brick wall. This is what you can start to develop if you start training correctly.

**[46:40] Speaker A:** But if you keep doing the random you're possibly doing right now, you won't get very far. Okay, up until this point, everything we've covered is about gaining back your control. Control of your sessions, control of what you are focused on and why. Control of how you're installing your skills into your game reliably and predictably, and control of your time, your energy, and your decision-m. And if you apply this system consistently, like I've seen hundreds of times, your training will change and so will your skill development. You'll feel calmer in rounds. You'll stop freezing and you'll start recognizing patterns instead of reacting randomly. But there is one environment where structure gets tested harder than anything else. Competition. Because competition removes your comfort. There's no familiar partner. There's no friendly face. There's no reset when something goes wrong. And this is where most people's jiu-jitsu falls apart.

**[47:35] Speaker A:** No matter how good they are in the training room, competition just destroys them. Not because they lack skills sometimes, but because they lose all of their clarity under pressure. They abandon their system. They chase outcomes. They revert to bad habits. Sometimes even doing you don't do in training. Been there before. In other words, they stop doing the things. In other words, they stop doing the very things that make them so good in the gym. And that's a pretty shitty competition strategy. Chunk three is about closing that gap. It's about learning how to prepare without overthinking. Compete without panic and perform the same way that you train. Not by adding intensity, not by memorizing more techniques, but by applying the same structure, but by applying the same structure you already have under more stress. So now we're going to take everything that we've been building so far and pressure test it in competition.

**[48:25] Speaker A:** If you've ever competed in jiu-jitsu, then you already understand the extremes. On one end, competition can be absolutely incredible. You're calm, you're sharp, your reaction time is on point, you submit most of your bracket, and you end up standing in the middle podium, which is where everybody wants to be, and you execute exactly on what you plan to the night or the weeks leading up before. On the other end, it's a complete and utter disaster where you get walking arm. It's very embarrassing.

**[48:58] Speaker B:** you. You feel anxious. You completely abandon the game plan. You use techniques that you've never used in training. And you lose matches that you know you should have won. And the frustrating part is nothing changed about your skills. The only thing that changed was your ability to deal with nerves. Most people falsely assume that competition is about confidence, toughness, resilience, and gas tank. It isn't. Competition performance is about focus. Specifically, what you choose to focus on before, during, and after the event. When focus is scattered, anxiety spikes. When anxiety spikes, decision-making ability collapses. When that collapses, technique disappears, and you end up losing matches you probably should have won. So, if we want to fix competition performance, we don't start with hype or mindset tricks. We start with preparation. Most people think that preparation means perfection. perfect camp, perfect body, perfect confidence. That idea alone creates anxiety because it's completely unrealistic.

**[50:02] Speaker B:** Listen to any highle MMA fighter, jiu-jitsu, competitor, wrestler, and they're always going in with something going on. You can't completely separate life stress, bad from happening, or even injuries from your competition. So, you shouldn't even try in the first place. That's mistake number one. So, we need a different framework altogether. And this leads me to the next biggest problem that most people absolutely up. Because it doesn't matter how good your camp is and how good your preparation is all the way up if you don't nail this next piece. The reason why most people the bed in competition is because they don't do anything right on the day. The night before they've had a bit of a squeeze through their bracket and just completely destroyed themselves mentally. We're going to go through how to fix that in a later section. They arrive to the competition arena without enough time to get themselves into a rhythm, into a groove, and warm themselves up properly.

**[50:57] Speaker B:** And then they start with a massive adrenaline dump. And if you've ever competed in jiu-jitsu before, you know exactly what the adrenaline dump is. So, we're going to remove that for you right now. The easiest way to remove the adrenaline dump is by avoiding very, very common mistakes. Now, I learned this through my previous career in rugby league where I used to absolutely this process up deluxe and you get to learn from my lessons so you don't have to make the same mistakes. I would go into a match or a game, we used to call it a game, not in jiu-jitsu. After having drank one white monster, some preworkout, having no tablets, which is just caffeine in pill form, listening to hard style music for 2 and 1/2 hours, motivational quotes, highlight videos, you name it, I did it. I used to put Vicks Vapor up my nose and on my chest.

**[51:50] Speaker B:** I've done all of the stupid that you shouldn't be doing. And what I failed to realize that is what I failed to realize is that I was trying to pump myself up using external things to compensate for the nerves that I felt, therefore making them 10 times worse. You see, when you're trying to shove those nerves down by increasing things like caffeine that is going to raise your heart rate, you're doing the same thing as trying to pull out of a Chinese finger trap. The harder you pull, the tighter it gets or the worse it gets, the more fuel you feed that fire. Things didn't change until I started competing in jiu-jitsu, which is a much more relaxed environment by its nature. But I learned from those errors early on and stopped trying to pump myself up for something that was naturally pretty intense. I ditched the caffeine.

**[52:38] Speaker B:** I ditched the hard style music. I for a very long time, I didn't listen to any pumpup music whatsoever. And that was a significant help. I started warming up in an effective way that made my matches much closer to my training rounds than my prior competing in rugby league where I would just the bed, have no energy, I'd feel exhausted in the first 10 minutes and perform very poorly. So, the competition blueprint that you're going to focus on for competing to the best of your ability goes exactly like this. Show up at the venue with more time than you think you need. People make this mistake all the time where they show up an hour early, but their brackets's already been progressed 55 minutes earlier and they only have 5 minutes to warm up and get their mind right. That is a complete disaster. Don't do that to yourself.

**[53:24] Speaker B:** Step number one is show up with more than enough time to get a warm up in, get your mind right, and do all the things I'm about to teach you. Step number two is do not overcompensate with more caffeine, especially more than you have in a normal day. If you're having more than you are in a normal day, you're just trying to override the nerves that you're feeling and it's going to make everything 10 times worse. Because if you think about it, nervousness and excitement are the exact same physiologically. Your palms get a little bit sweaty, your heart rate elevates. They're very similar symptoms that you feel, just depends on how you label it. But adding fuel to the fire to either of those could make you over anxious or overexited, which both end up in poor performance. So you want to mitigate that risk as much as you can.

**[54:13] Speaker B:** Number two is make sure you get in a very good quality warm-up. Now what do I mean by that? I mean it's slightly counterintuitive to think about this, but you want to jack your heart rate up as high as you can only for a moment. The reason you want to do this is it depletes a lot of that nervous energy and that jittery energy that you feel when you start to get ready to compete. And you don't want to have that going through your mind as you're walking onto the mats. You want to have already dealt with that in advance. The way that you do that throughout the warm up is two to three matched paced rounds for warming up using the likely techniques that you're going to be using in your match. So, if you plan on wrestling, some wrestling, drilling, some hand fighting, entering shots, finishing shots.

**[54:58] Speaker B:** If you plan on playing guard, all of your guard entries, all of your sweeps, all of your leg entanglements, those sorts of things. You want it to be specific to the skills that you're going to be using and intense enough to knock off the cobwebs and all of that nervous energy. Most people think this is a bad strategy because they don't want to deplete their energy before they compete. that nothing is going to deplete your energy more than rocking up to the competition, not having dealt with that initial energy surge and depleting that anxious energy. So, warming up in this capacity is actually helping you, not harming you. Step number four, after that warm up, just make sure you have enough time for your heart rate to climb down so that you're ready for your match. You don't want to warm up and then go straight into a match with your heart rate all elevated.

**[55:43] Speaker B:** Usually, I recommend anything between 15 and 20 minutes or whatever time you have available, but around that window seems to be perfect. Not enough to get cold, but still enough to achieve the benefit of that specific warm up. Now, throughout all of this, number five is don't pick pump up music. Especially because of the nature of jiu-jitsu, it's intense enough. Maybe you need a little bit of a kick, like you're very low energy in your normal day-to-day life. Maybe you do. Maybe you're the exception. For the gross majority of individuals, some soft piano, some Mozart, some chop, or some general music that isn't necessarily fastbe and aggressive and trying to get you in the zone, but things that you enjoy listening to. Sometimes I just listen to nothing. I don't even take headphones to the competition whatsoever. Some of the time I take headphones and I dance a little bit in the warm-up in the back section.

**[56:39] Speaker B:** People look at me funny, but it keeps working. So, I'm going to keep doing it. The whole idea is that you're not trying to elevate yourself to a place where you need to be artificially. Competition is going to do that for you no matter what you do. So, you may as well not increase the amount of distance that it can go to where you deplete your energy and you put yourself in a deficit unnecessarily.

**[57:02] Speaker B:** Once you can do all those things reliably, you can add in your own customizations, whether you want to wear your lucky underwear or eat bananas or whatever you want to do. But that base foundation is the most solid. It works with me. It works with hundreds of students that I've taken through competition preparation and it's made such a big difference to dropping off that initial anxiety and experiencing the adrenaline dump which we all know is a disaster. Most competition anxiety doesn't come from a lack of preparation or from a fear of losing. It comes from focusing on things you cannot control. So, the first step in preparing yourself mentally for competition is very simple. The one thing I want you to do is get out a piece of paper and draw two circles. One on the inside and one on the outside. On the inner circle, on the inner circle, you're going to write down everything you have physical control over.

**[57:56] Speaker B:** things like your training schedule, things like how you show up for your training with the structure and stuff that we just went through in segment two, your warm-ups, your nutrition, what time you go to sleep, what time you wake up, your study, your effort, your decisions, not just on the mat, but off the mats in the leadup to competition, but also on the day as well. Then we're going to have a look at the things outside of your control. So in the outer circle, that's when you can start to write things like your opponent, the referee, the bracket, the weather for that day, the crowd, and what the crowd may or may not be doing, how good someone looks on Instagram. Trust me, people do this. It's stupid. Whether you're sick, whether you're sore, whether you're tired, or whether you might have a small, medium, or even a large injury.

**[58:48] Speaker B:** Then the trick to this is once you've written it down, you do not pay any attention to the outer circle. All that's going to do is drive up anxiety and nerves and fear and create tension between you and your best performance. If all you did was focus on the inner circle, you are focusing in the right area where you have the leverage to be able to affect those things. The truth is in in terms of the outer circle, you can't do anything about it. So, you may as well stop looking at it altogether. Put these two circles on the fridge, on your wallpaper, on your phone, on the back of the toilet door. That used to be a good strategy, but now run doom scrolls. So, maybe scratch that one and just put it on your phone. But revisit it regularly when you have a bad training session, when you have a good training session, when you're in week two of camp, when you're in week eight of camp.

**[59:43] Speaker B:** Wherever you are, remind yourself of the things that you can control and do things about and exclude from your focus and your attention the things you can't do anything about. Trust me, it will lower your nerves. It'll prepare you better than you've ever been prepared before. It'll make a massive tangible difference in terms of your competing the same way as you train. Cuz if you want to be a decent level competitor, you have to follow what the highle competitors do. They aren't calm because they're fearless. They're calm because their attention is narrow and specific, and they don't waste mental energy on things they can't influence. This does lead me to the next most common problem, though. Even if we focus all your attention on things you have direct control over, when you walk up to the mats, you still might be making these mistakes. So, now that we've sorted out your competition prep in terms of your mindset and then also your warm-up, the next biggest issue that you're going to deal with is in the match itself.

**[1:00:38] Speaker B:** And that typically is paralysis by analysis. This happens to be the most common reason why people compete way worse than they train. They try to prepare for every possible thing that may or may not happen, every possible grip, every possible guard, every possible scenario. And all this does is create mental chatter and noise creates hesitation. The fix is a little bit counterintuitive, but you prepare less, not more. The best way that I figured out how to do this isn't by imagining these elaborate 19st step sequences that are probably never going to happen. And truth be told, I prepared for a match not too long ago where I started to envision all of the different wrestling sequences that I was going to work. I put so much effort into the timing and the skill development, the preparation and all of that only for my opponent to pull guard in the first 30 seconds and completely ruined my game plan.

**[1:01:38] Speaker B:** That was my mistake because I tried to prepare for something that wasn't even going to happen. I narrowed my focus too much to be honest. But you you do have to prepare for different scenarios, but only in terms of your start. You can't control what happens after the start. that the the control no you can't control what happens during the entirety of the match and nor should you try to predict it. The only thing you have immediate control over is how the match begins. That's it. One decision from the very beginning and then you have a general funneling idea of where you would like to go. The decision is am I going to pull guard or am I going to wrestle and obviously the flow on effects from those things. But again, don't try and prepare very specific, elaborate sequences that might not come up based on what your opponent does or doesn't do.

**[1:02:29] Speaker B:** They may give you a completely wrong read, a completely wrong reaction, and you have to be adaptable in that moment. This is the thing that most people struggle with. If it's not pre-planned, they go game clean out the window, they go chaotic. You have to come back from that, reduce all the mental chatter before the match even starts and go, am I going to wrestle? Am I going to pull guard? And at least this gives you the opportunity to not do your nut in before you compete. Whilst you are competing, that's when you can start to adjust and analyze what's going on. But don't try and do it beforehand. It's a disaster. Everything else unfolds from that first decision. Trying to predict the entire match. It's like rehearsing a conversation that hasn't even started. You end up anxious for no reason. And the real conversation goes completely differently.

**[1:03:16] Speaker B:** So what was the point? And here's the thing. Competition clarity comes from simplicity, not complexity. There's one other thing before you even get to your competition day that ruins your performance like no other. And I know a lot of people that do this, even at higher levels. So, you want to avoid this mistake unless you're a professional competing against very well-known opponents that have segments of their game that are very dangerous and also a lot of film on those that you can prepare for and study. Bracket stalking is pure self- sabotage. Here's the thing. Don't look at your bracket the night before. It goes back to what we were talking about earlier with the two circles. It's out of your control. So, as soon as you put it within your focus, you're just increasing your anxiety. Smooth comp is great, but the stats that are displayed on the platform don't tell nearly the whole story.

**[1:04:16] Speaker B:** And Instagram highlights are even worse because they're only picking the best stuff which is going to make you think that you're worse in comparison. Smooth comp will show you how many matches they've won, how many submissions they have, how many losses, how many walkovers, but they don't really give you the whole picture because you have no idea who their opponents were. If they were competing in the back ass of Thailand in nowhere against very poor competition, then they're going to look like a stud on SmoothC. But here's the trick. You seeing them that way and you seeing yourself less than with incorrect or incomplete data is the thing that's going to make an impact on your performance and it's going to make you perform worse. Whereas, if you don't go stalking all of the bracket to get incomplete data to form an incorrect opinion about how good or bad they may or may not be, you just treat them as another person across the mat

**[1:05:14] Speaker B:** from you, which is 10 times better than the alternative because all you end up doing is inflating your opponent and shrinking yourself. Here's the part that most people miss that you can take away. Your opponent is probably doing the same thing. That's the funny part. So, let them do it. Don't do the same thing. While they're scrolling, comparing smooth comp records, looking at all the people you've beat, you're conserving energy and attention, and not raising unnecessary anxiety. That alone gives you an edge. But here's the thing. Even if you do everything I have just told you to the tea with perfect accuracy, competition still has one more trap, and it's what I call the roller coaster effect. Competition days are physical and emotional roller coasters. A win creates a high, but a dominant win where you finish with submission, you follow your game plan perfectly, use the moves that you've been working on, creates an even bigger high.

**[1:06:15] Speaker B:** And if you ride that high unchecked, a crash is inevitable. But this isn't a character flaw or something that's wrong with you. It's physiology. And it's quite simple. Your body always returns to baseline. It's called homeostasis. Learned that in biology in year 10. The goal isn't to eliminate the emotion or think that you can't celebrate a win or mourn a loss, some of you. It's to regulate it. This is where the physical part becomes very very important. And there's a couple of ways that we're going to utilize tools to make sure that we get back to baseline as fast as possible. And even this is where we can turn physicality into mental clarity. Everybody's had the experience of going through a stack tournament with big brackets and large divisions. You go through a match, you come off completely exhausted, wondering how you're ever going to produce the same performance in the next match.

**[1:07:11] Speaker B:** Well, this is exactly how you mitigate feeling for your next match. What you're going to do is very simple. Between matches, you need to deliberately bring yourself back to that homeostasis level. The best way that you can do this is through breath work, nutrition, and hydration. And we're going to do all three. The first and most impactful breathing exercise I like to do as soon as I get off the mats before my next match is from Dr. Andrew Huberman. You guys probably know who he is, but it's called a double inhalation and a physiological site. Goes exactly like this. It's a long nasal breath, then a top up,

**[1:07:54] Speaker B:** and then a sigh as if you're collapsing all of your body in on itself. And just doing this now, I feel less stressed. I didn't feel stressed before, but I feel less stressed now. This allows your body to come completely out of the fight or flight state that you've likely entered into as a result of the highintensity nature of competing. The faster you can get away from that and into rest and digest or the parasympathetic nervous system, the more ready and the more focused you're going to be for your next match. If that one doesn't work for you, I'd be very surprised if it didn't. Maybe you like a different flavor of breath work. Box breathing works incredibly well as well. Four in, four hold, four out, four hold. It's used by Navy Seals. Maybe it'll work for you. The last one that I've also had success with is a four in, a five hold, and an eight exhale.

**[1:08:51] Speaker B:** Typically, you want to exaggerate the exhale as much as humanly possible because that's the thing that's telling your body that you are calm and you are okay. But all of these methodologies work. You can pick one that works for you specifically. Now, let's get to the nutrition component. You don't want to be eating too much because you're going to take energy away from your body that prepares you for competing and towards your digestive system. And that's a disaster. You don't want a stomach going into a match because you're not going to perform to the best of your ability. Simple sugars and simple carbs are the best solution for that. I personally like honey with a little bit of salt or you can have lollies or some small handfuls of fruit. Again, don't go crazy. Portions are not important, but replacing a little bit of glycogen is very helpful.

**[1:09:39] Speaker B:** At least if it's only a placebo effect for you, it's still going to be better than if you don't do it. The last thing is hydration. Now, I kind of edge my bets a little bit. Have the honey and the salt together and then more hydration with salt, potassium, zinc, and magnesium. You can get that in a hydration supplement, which I drink every single day on competition day. It is absolutely essential because you're going to be depleting those minerals out of your body at an exacerbated rate because of the sweat, the intensity, so on and so forth. So, it's very important that you bring them back into your system so it functions properly. Gatorade and Powerade do not count. Yes, it is simple sugars, but don't think it's hydrating you. Get proper quality salt with some coconut water if you don't want to buy the little sachets of Element or Soda or Redmond Relight, anything like that.

**[1:10:39] Speaker B:** I would recommend those because they're already done for you. But you can pick your poison however you like. These three components are going to help you shift from fight or flight to rest and digest faster than anything else that I've ever used. And these aren't just extras that you can think about in the back of your mind and maybe do sometimes and maybe not do because if you want to perform at your peak, they are absolutely essential tools that you can utilize to help you compete the same way that you train.

**[1:11:07] Speaker B:** So now we've got warm-up, we've got premp preparation, we've got pre-match preparation, we've got what you can focus on and what you shouldn't be focusing on. We need to fix one of the biggest issues that I find in competing regarding your mindset because even with the physical regulation handled, one mental trap remains. One of the main things you get told when you want to be a competitor of any sort, whether you're at an amateur level all the way up to professional, is that you have to have your eyes on the prize. And this is honestly some of the shittiest advice that I have ever heard. And I'll give you a couple reasons as to why. Fixation on outcome, winning or avoiding losing pulls all of your attention away from processedbased actions, which are the only thing that determines whether you win or whether you lose.

**[1:12:04] Speaker B:** When you're obsessed with the result, you hesitate, you play safe, you avoid risks, you don't pull the trigger, and you stall instead of attacking or taking opportunities that are right in front of you. You stop doing the things that actually generate winning. The best competitors, however, don't make the same mistake. They're completely focused on their process. They focus on their pressure, their positioning, their leverage, their timing, their mechanics. They focus on minimizing the gap between deciding what to do and hesitating. They minimize the gap between deciding what to do and actually doing it, nullifying the hesitation window. And when they do all of those things, winning becomes a byproduct. Because when offense is prioritized over fear of what might happen, opportunities appear and your opponent goes on the back foot no matter how hard they try to stop you. However, on the other side of the coin, when fear dominates, even good competitors can collapse under pressure.

**[1:13:05] Speaker B:** I first learned about this concept of focusing on process orientated goals and getting out of your own way in terms of trying to analyze everything up here and be perfect from the book, The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Goway. The simplest way that I can explain this is when you're facing a very fast serve, your conscious brain does not have the capacity to be able to analyze everything that's going on as it's happening. And this is a common misconception, especially in jiu-jitsu. Jiu-jitsu is a lot slower than facing a very fast serve, especially from someone like Jovovic or Andy Murray or any of those famous tennis players. So we assume that we can think our way through things, but it still is fast enough that that's not true. The way that Timothy Goway taught his students to be able to overcome this was focus on process orientated things instead of outcomebased things.

**[1:14:02] Speaker B:** This allows what he calls yourself to or your unconscious mind to come to life because your unconscious right now even as you're watching this video is doing incredible things. It's pumping blood around your body. It's oxygenating your blood. It's building new cells. It's doing everything without you even noticing it. That includes jiujitsu technique under the tension, pressure, and timing that is situated within competition. Your conscious brain is not going to be able to analyze that much data all at once. Think about a crazy sequence that you've seen in competition from one of your favorite grapplers. it appears as though they react before that person even decided to make their move. That's because they've got their conscious mind out of the way and they can start to utilize their unconscious mind by focusing on the processes. The only way that you can do this is by getting out of your own head and into your body.

**[1:14:58] Speaker B:** The way that I've taught you how to do this already, if you didn't notice, was a thorough warm up so that you can move into yourself too more easily and more readily. But the kicker is the more that you focus on outcomes specifically within the match, if I do this, I'll win, if I do this, I'll lose, the more you take yourself away from self to and into your conscious analytical mind. And that is when you compete your worst, not your best. So to the best of your ability, get into that selftune mode. Don't try and analyze what's going to lead to victory or what's going to avoid losing. get into a process orientation, process mindset, and then you will perform 10 times better. Very similar to how you train. So, how do you make all of this stuff stick on competition day and link it all together in the perfect way?

**[1:15:49] Speaker B:** You make competition feel familiar. The biggest mistake that people make in terms of competition and having it be completely different from their training is mentally elevating competition into something that is sacred. They put it on a pedestal and they make it seem more important than it is. Now, I'm not saying that winning isn't great and losing kind of sucks. But you shouldn't elevate it to a degree that makes you nervous. Let me explain. You see, when something matters more, pressure is going to increase and we're going to go back into that analytical mind which is going to blunt your performance and we want to avoid that as much as possible. Instead, you should treat competition as training but with consequences. Same warm-up, same routine, same breathing, same focus as your normal training day. If you familiarize yourself with competition being the same as training mentally, physically, and using visualization, which we're going to go to in a second, you will stop putting it above yourself in terms of performance, and you'll start acting

**[1:16:52] Speaker B:** as if it's just natural to you. And the people who can compete naturally do the best by far. There is no difference between competing and training in terms of the skill set. Only that there are stakes on the line in terms of winning and losing. But the more you focus on that, the worse you're going to perform. So we need to learn how to familiarize it and make it as closely related as possible. The way that I like to do this with the most success that I've had in all of my competing is a very simple visual process. And you'll put this into your camp as well. Not just in the week leading up, but several weeks leading up. You want to even look at things visually, mentally, and all the affantasia people, just relax. Say it to yourself. You can't see images in your head.

**[1:17:37] Speaker B:** You want to see things visually in vivid detail. but everything. The way that you're going to arrive to the venue, what your warm-up sequence is going to look like, maybe the people that you're going to bring with you in terms of your coach and your training partners. See yourself watching all of the other matches that you're going to see in that day. Dealing with the noise and the chaos that ensues within competition. Even go into the depth of hearing other people's names being called over the speakers. Because the more that you can relive this experience mentally, the more familiar it's going to feel when you actually get to the competition date itself. And I know this might sound strange to some people, but if you read into the neuroscience, your brain can't determine the difference between a real experience and an imagined experience. Don't believe me?

**[1:18:26] Speaker B:** Ever had one of those dreams where you felt like you were falling and it legitimately felt real? That's what your brain does. It can't differentiate between what is real and what is imagined. So with that information, visualize yourself getting there. Visual visualize yourself warming up. Visualize yourself competing in the matches that you want to compete in and walking off victorious. Put all of that stuff in there and get familiar with it. That way you're not going to be surprised by anything. You'll be prepared for everything. And if you're prepared for everything, you'll have a much better time competing. And one last point on that, you're not trying to predict sequences in the matches like we just spoke about, but you're trying to remove the novelty that comes with competition. And if you've been paying attention, you'll know that that's the outside circle we spoke about before, because familiarity kills anxiety.

**[1:19:16] Speaker B:** At this point, when you can successfully do all the things we just spoke about, competition stops being something that happens to you and something that you can control. You control your preparation, your focus, your emotional state, your execution, and you no longer rise and fall with the outcomes. You perform the same way that you train. And when training is structured correctly, like we've already done, that level is already high.

**[1:19:40] Speaker B:** Next comes the final piece. Because even with perfect training and competition systems, none of this works long term without the right identity and the right mindset. That's where everything gets locked in for good. and you can actually live long-term progress instead of short-term chaos. Here's the thing. Most people don't quit jiu-jitsu. They just stop getting better. They keep showing up. They keep paying fees. And year after year, nothing really changes. Same problems, same positions, same frustration. That isn't a technique issue, it's an identity issue. Most practitioners unknowingly build themselves into identities that lock them into plateaus long term. They tell themselves stories like, "I'm just not that technical. I'm just not that flexible. I'm not built for this. I'm too old. I'm too busy." Competition just isn't for me. And once that identity is formed, every round becomes evidence that supports it. A bad role isn't feedback.

**[1:20:39] Speaker B:** It's confirmation. And once training becomes a place where your identity is threatened, growth slows down dramatically, not because you don't want to improve or want to get better, but because improvement becomes emotionally expensive. Two students lose the same round. Student A thinks, "Okay, my penis skate failed when he decided to block my hip. I'd need another option or a solution to that." Student B thinks, "I'm from bottom. I always have been." Same round, same outcome, completely different futures. One person extracted data and a way to get better. The other reinforced a incorrect story. That difference compounds over years. Here's the mindset rule that stops plateaus in their tracks. Your job in training is not to validate who you are or who others may think that you are. Your job is to collect information and build skills. Rounds are not verdicts. They're not written in stone.

**[1:21:39] Speaker B:** They are experiments. The moment training stops being about proving yourself, improvement accelerates exponentially. But here's the thing. Even when people understand this, they still struggle to stay consistent. Not because they're lazy. Some of you are, but not because most people are lazy, but because training feels personal. If losing a round, not that there is any winning or losing in training anyway, but if a bad round ruins your mood, if bad sessions make you want to avoid training the next day, if you only feel good when you're winning or submitting your training partners, probably trial class kids or three try white belts, your self-worth is attached to your performance, and that's a problem. Most people don't realize that they're using jiu-jitsu as a measurement of personal value. Winning feels like validation. Losing feels like being exposed. And this creates avoidance patterns, avoiding tough training partners, avoiding bad positions, avoiding new skill development, avoiding competition.

**[1:22:34] Speaker B:** Not that you have to compete, but if you know you want to and you're avoiding it, this is you. Not consciously doing these things, but subtly. And avoidance is the fastest way to stall your progress. You see it all the time in the training room. One of your training partners starts to work on a new guard that they want to develop. It fails a few times and they abandon it and go back to what makes them feel good. Not because the new guard doesn't work, but because failing feels uncomfortable and it starts to clash with who they see themselves as. If they're using all of their regular techniques and getting success, they're going to stick to that because they're intimately linked their performance with their identity. Here's the mindset shift and belief break that you need to understand. Training is a laboratory, not a courtroom.

**[1:23:16] Speaker B:** Your value is not on trial. Detach your identity from the outcomes that you experience inside training and attach it to behaviors. Did I focus on the right thing? Did I give my best effort? Did I apply my plan for my session? Did I collect useful data? Did I take something away from this session that's going to make me better tomorrow? If yes, then the session was a success. It has nothing to do with how many times you submit somebody, how many times you get submitted, whether you sweep someone, score on them, get scored on. None of that matters. Even if you get smashed, if you can focus on the little efforts, like we just explained, the session was a success, and you can stop feeling about bad training sessions, which there are no bad training sessions, so you're fine anyway. Once you start to identify with your process and your ability to follow that process with your effort, there's one sneaky little thing that might start to come and distract you.

**[1:24:15] Speaker B:** And it's a big problem in jiu-jitsu training. Here's the thing. Ego isn't just bragging about accomplishments or achievements. Most of the time, ego is stupider than that. It's refusing to tap early. Always playing your agame no matter what. Avoiding lower belts in fear of getting embarrassed or exposed, and never starting from bad positions. It feels protective, but it's actually completely destructive. The ego's job inside your own mind is to keep you comfortable, to keep you in normal land or mediocrity, what we talked about before. And growth requires friction. It requires you to go to the edges of where you're comfortable. Every time your ego protects you from looking bad, it also stops you from learning. And because jiu-jitsu is so brutally honest, most of the time, ego doesn't disappear. It just gets louder under pressure. Go back to what you know. Stick to the game plan.

**[1:25:14] Speaker B:** Bash the trial class kid. Don't do that. It's bad. Here's the thing. Everybody's seen this guy in their gym. Plays the same game every single round. Doesn't change for years, decades at a time. Wins some, loses some, never changes. Compare that to the person who willingly puts themselves in bad spots, gets passed, gets pinned, and keeps experimenting, refining, learning, and getting more clarity every single session. Who's going to be better in 6 months time? Doesn't take a rocket surgeon to figure it out. They're not even comparable. One protected their identity and one built their skill set. The fastest way to get a handle of your ego in terms of training is choose long-term inevitability over short-term combat. What do I mean by that? Tap often and tap early. No point getting injured if you're just supporting an ego. Start training rounds from bad positions. Look for challenges.

**[1:26:16] Speaker B:** Test yourself. Learn new things so you can get better. Some of you guys might think that this is very obvious information and advice, but some of you need to hear it. going into uncomfortable territory on purpose to learn and repeating fundamentals, even if they're boring. Ego just wants you to look good on the surface. Skill wants you to be dangerous forever.

**[1:26:39] Speaker B:** So, now we've got you focusing in the right area. We've quietened down the ego as much as we possibly can. There's still one piece that frustrates most people into getting stuck in their learning and development in jiu-jitsu, and it's usually because of their expectations. Most people quit mentally well before they quit physically. And the main reason for that is because they expect progress on a timeline that doesn't comply with reality. I've had thousands of conversations with people at this point in terms of getting better faster in jiu-jitsu and still I'm shocked at the people that want to get as good as possible to a high high level in 6 months. It's never going to happen. Especially if you think about it that way. Skill development is not linear. It does not go like this. It grows in steps. Long flat periods, hopefully not after you've watched this course and used it.

**[1:27:37] Speaker B:** Sudden jumps and then another flat period. It usually looks like a staircase like this. If you expect large amounts of visible improvement every single week, you're always going to feel behind. And the only thing that's stopping you from feeling like you're progressing is an unrealistic expectation that was never founded in any logic. Anyway, the people who last in the sport, they understand this principle. They measure progress completely differently. Remembering to have clear expectations is one of the biggest performance enhancers that you can possibly have. For a very long time, I never played off my back at all. I was allergic to it. In rugby league, we get taught always find your front. So, when I came to jiu-jitsu, that's all I knew how to bloody do until I got to my current gym. When I got to my current gym, my coach said something very important to me.

**[1:28:28] Speaker B:** He said, "You're going to spend six months on your back, and I don't give a how boring it gets, how frustrating it gets, how slow you feel like you're learning. Because if you never put this piece in now at your amateur level, you're going to find it extremely difficult to maintain it later or build it later as a professional. Through that time period, there was a lot of frustration. But because he set the expectation of 6 months, eventually that ended up waning. I just decided, well, he's given me the timeline. He's given me a lengthy period of time. I may as well get busy getting good at it instead of having this unrealistic expectation that I could develop any sort of guard as a heavyweight blue belt in a matter of weeks. When I shifted my focus of timeline to months and that I was prepared to actually do the work, that's when the results started flowing.

**[1:29:24] Speaker B:** About 6 to 8 weeks in, I started to find some footing. I started to find some groundwork, some foundations. Then those foundations got deeper in the next 6 to 8 weeks. But if I would have quit there and if I would have expected results much faster than that, I would never be in the position that I am today. So here's the thing. Change the way that you measure your progress. Stop asking, "Am I winning more?" Start asking, "Am I calmer in these sequences? Am I less confused? Do I know what to do next? Am I following my game plan? Am I putting effort into the right places?" And then make sure that you have a reasonable timeline for your skill development. Don't assume you can gain those attributes and qualities within a matter of days. Some people falsely assume that it takes a matter of weeks to build a skill.

**[1:30:13] Speaker B:** If you build skills in the structure that I taught you in section two, it's going to take a couple of months before you get to a free flowing freak in your training room. Maybe you become the nightmare role. Maybe you don't. Maybe you should think about decades, not days. And then you'll actually get there inevitably. Now, once timelines stretch, your ego is managed. One final shift locks everything together. Everybody says trust the process, including me a couple of minutes ago. Almost nobody does it because trusting the process means acting correctly well in advance of the results. And that's probably a mistake that you're making because outcomebased thinking only creates reactivity. Process focus creates leverage. When you chase wins in the training room, in competition, in life in general, you avoid risk, you hesitate, and you stall because you only want to fulfill the winning side of things.

**[1:31:10] Speaker B:** When you focus on execution, opportunities appear, confidence stabilizes, and performance becomes repeatable. Here's the thing that ties all of these things together, and it's a very simple rule to follow. We've talked about it a couple times, but I really want to hit this home. Judge sessions and matches or anything that you do in your day-to-day life by how you execute it. If you hold yourself to a very high standard and you always commit to those standards, the results will take care of themselves. If you executed the system, you won, even if you lost. That mindset produces more wins over time than any obsession with outcome or medals or wins ever will.

**[1:31:53] Speaker B:** So, let's wrap this thing up and let's tie it all together because we've gone over a lot of things today. Random effort creates random results. Structured effort creates inevitability. You now have a training structure, a learning system, a competition blueprint, and a mindset approach that supports all of it. This removes randomness, the true enemy of progression in any field. When training is clear, confidence rises. When confidence rises, performance starts to build. When your performance builds, your identity can shift. And it's all because you're following everything that we just covered. That's how people get good in a short period of time. Not because they focus on that, but because they do the things day in day out, every day. They stay committed. They stay disciplined. They don't get bored. They don't get distracted. Remember this. Structure beats intensity. Systems beat motivation. Clarity beats random effort. If you apply this system and everything we've gone through today consistently, improvement is no longer optional.

**[1:33:01] Speaker B:** It becomes your normal setting. Before you close this video, I want you to clearly understand the size of what you just watched. This wasn't just a random YouTube video. This was a complete jiu-jitsu operating system. Here's everything we covered start to finish in a short wrap-up. Section one, we looked at why most people fail getting good at jiu-jitsu, why training feels confusing for most people, why technique collection is a disaster. In section two, we covered how to actually train the sport properly, structuring your training sessions, the four-phase system, the skill ladder, how to study jiu-jitsu properly, how to get good at jiu-jitsu in one to three sessions a week, and how to become the nightmare roll of your gym. In chunk three, we went over everything to do with competing just like you train. Why people compete worse than they train, the circles of control, paralysis by analysis, why you should stop looking at smooth comp, the competition roller coaster effect, why focusing on winning makes you lose, and how to compete the same

**[1:33:54] Speaker B:** way that you train, and on the day preparation. And the last section, mindset. We covered why most people plateau forever, separating your self-worth from performance, how your ego quietly kills your progress, thinking in years, not weeks, process over outcome, and how mindset ties the entire system together. Now, here's the clarifying point. Watching this video does absolutely nothing for you. Understanding the system does nothing. Results only come from implementation. Don't just watch this video and do nothing with it. Apply everything and take massive violent action. If you close this video, skip away from it, picked up some nuggets, but you don't change anything in your training or your competition or your competing this week, nothing will improve. Same chaos, same confusion, same frustration. But if you do one thing, just one, pick one position, structure your sessions, apply the phases, everything starts to shift from then.

**[1:34:58] Speaker B:** Now, like I said, it's your turn to execute and take action. But for some of you, you've watched this and it still doesn't make sense to you. That's where I can actually start to help you. I do this every single day with hundreds of students. We've had 79 belt promotions and we've had over 128 gold medals won in competition. So, this is kind of my bread and butter. I do it every single day. So, if you don't feel like you can implement this on your own, there's going to be a link down below along with the workbook that goes along with this entire course to join the community. Some of you may have watched this the entire way through and thank you for watching this. I hope you genuinely got a shitload out of it. But some of you are thinking, "Fuck, this is a lot to implement and I don't know if I'm going to do it the right way.

**[1:35:42] Speaker B:** It's probably going to be too much for me to do on my own." And that's where I'm here to help. The system that I've created that you've just seen is what I help people implement every single day. So, you know the stepbystep processes with conviction, clarity, and confidence that you're doing it the right way. and you've got me guiding you through the entire thing so that results become the standard, not something you just hope for. If that happens to be you, all you need to do is go down to the description below, click the link, join the community, and we'll get started straight away. Even if you don't do that, it's been an absolute pleasure to produce this for you. Thank you for watching the whole way through. See you in the next one.