Bulletproof For BJJ Podcast
Discussions on improving your BJJ, navigating mat-politics and all aspects of the jiu jitsu lifestyle. Multiple weekly episodes for grapplers of any level. Hosted by JT and Joey - Australian jiu jitsu black belts, strength coaches, and creators of Bulletproof For BJJ App. Based out of Sydney, Australia
Bulletproof For BJJ Podcast
The Struggle Within: Why You Feel Stuck In Jiu-Jitsu
Are you feeling stuck in BJJ? Are you wondering why you don't seem to be improving? We highlight a couple reasons you might feel this way as well as some antidotes to said problems. Tune in as we tell all.
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A good martial artist does not become tense, but ready.
Speaker 2:Essentially, at this point, the fight is over.
Speaker 1:So you pretty much flow with the goal. Who is worthy to be trusted with the secret to limitless power?
Speaker 2:I'm ready.
Speaker 1:You suck at jujitsu, but you don't know why. Here's the thing We've all felt that way. I've felt that way. I feel like that very regularly. I suck. I've been doing this a long time. Why is it that I'm not getting better, faster? Why am I not learning these techniques? Why am I not absorbing the information? I don't know why I suck at jiu-jitsu. It's a very hard thing to unlock because it's very personal to unlock, because it's very personal person to person. But we do have a key insight or one or two to unlock this. But have you felt this way before, joe?
Speaker 2:yeah, of course often it's a challenging thing. Yeah, yeah, I feel like I don't absorb things. You might have a good session, you forget about it. Then you have a bad one or a bad role and you're like, oh fucking hell, I don't understand this shit, I'm gonna quit. I thought I should be better than that by now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's a tough thing to deal with is this idea that we have some imaginary timeline in our head for how good you can get. But that's like it's so arbitrary. We just made it up Like who's to say it only takes a week two weeks, three weeks and getting good is an arbitrary goal as well.
Speaker 2:What's good?
Speaker 1:compared to what. But I think what we can do is we can unpack some stuff which might be holding you back or might be making it feel worse than it is, and then go to the real key unlock amidst all of this, the real key unlock amidst all of this. So one of the things for me in terms of feeling like I suck at jujitsu is comparing myself to my rival. You know, I thrive off a rival. Actually, I think actually.
Speaker 2:I don't think anyone's surprised to hear that.
Speaker 1:It can be good, for I'm of the opinion that it helps to have someone you're competitive with, even if you don't like hate them. But there's a double-edged sword there. Having a measuring stick which is external can lead you to endless dissatisfaction in yourself because your rival, opponent, training partner that you're comparing yourself to, they might be having a really tough night and you don't know it and you think, oh, I've gotten so much better.
Speaker 1:Nah did you like? Maybe just your, your partner's just having a really tough night and you were just your normal average self. It's hard to gauge, right. In the same way, you might be having a great night, but they might be having an even better night, and so, upon reflection, you're like I never win against them. They've got my fucking number. And this is a common thing within um martial arts, mma jiu-jitsu, where somebody has a style or a type of jiu-jitsu that really brings you undone. It doesn't mean that you're not getting better, but they always fuck you up and that's what you remember, you know. You're just like oh god, tonight was fucked, you know, you't. You don't remember the good stuff, yeah, and so this is very challenging. I mean, as much as I've been motivated, I tend to have a especially when it comes to rolling fairly adversarial approach in terms of picking someone I really want to beat or do well against, and if I don't, that can kind of make me feel like I suck, even though I might've done plenty good in other situations.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that the um, like you have to compare yourself to your training partners because it's all you got. Yeah, that's just sort of the measuring stick, yeah, uh, though it is a really imperfect comparison because you just you're all there training together all the time, some people more, some people less, but you're all getting better. So if all things were equal, you would never know how good you are, because you're getting better at the same rate as they are.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:So it's imperfect. I've said before that you should really compare yourself to your friend who just sits on the couch when they get home from work every night and doesn't go train jiu-jitsu, because I can guarantee you you probably better than that person every fucking day, all day, every day, yeah, but you know you don't get to roll with them three times a week. So not a great measuring stick, right?
Speaker 1:No, just when you get together for the UFC and they're like stand them up and you're like I'm gonna sit you down, start grounding and pounding them. Yeah, it's, it's so tough in terms of you don't have an objective measure. So, for example, the gym is so much simpler from a head perspective, like managing your mind. Gym like weights, weights. Because when you go to the gym, even though you might have different levels of energy, motivation, whatever the bloody hell, gravity is relatively constant, the weight's pretty constant. And provided you maintain your technique, you say gravity is pretty constant, the weight's pretty constant. And provided you maintain your technique, did you say gravity's pretty constant. It can be.
Speaker 1:Perception's a funny thing. Yeah, right on, depends on how you bounce them deadlifts. But the thing relative to that is, even if you only improve by one rep, you can write it in your journal or put it in your phone. You can see Objective improvement. Yeah, you put five kilos more on the bar or you did a couple more reps, like and you know the bar's not fighting you so roll and set it 200 pounds is always 200 pounds, that's right.
Speaker 1:It's the truth right there. It's yes or no as well. Like you can pick it up or you can't. You can squat it or you can't, and so there's a very black and white truth to that. Jiu-jitsu is just absolutely so dynamic and so different. You can't know. And I think this is incredibly challenging, and I've said this before, I've had sessions of jiu-jitsu that made me want to quit, not physically, but just mentally. Nothing worked no sweep worked. My counters got counted worked no sweep worked. My counters got counted. I didn't submit like nothing, not that I got physically injured or beaten up. My jiu-jitsu didn't work. Everything I tried fucking failed and you just walk out of there not loving life as much as you can have those sessions where you walk out on just like euphoric. I've had times where I've just been like man, fuck Jiu-Jitsu, this is fucked. It just it kind of. If you're someone who's really focused on getting good at it, it can break your heart sometimes. Have you ever had like a session where you're like this isn't worth it?
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, I mean, yeah for sure I not many, Right, you know I don't put it as not as much on the in my like on the line internally for me, as I know there is with you or has been in the past, Right, yeah, but but yeah for sure I've had sessions where I'm like, oh fuck, this Like, and it's usually when I've like I probably shouldn't have gone to training that night. I was fucking tired and irritated anyway, you know, I had other shit sort of preoccupying me.
Speaker 2:And while sometimes jiu-jitsu is the perfect antidote for that, sometimes it's the absolute worst thing. It just gives you more fucking shit to deal with, more problems.
Speaker 1:Yeah right.
Speaker 2:Like I told you that story of the time I turned up training in that exact sort of-.
Speaker 1:Frame of mind, yeah.
Speaker 2:And there was a visiting Purple Belt who had a big fucking like big ego on him and the coach was like, roll that guy Joey, and we just went to war and I got the better of him. But I was like, oh man, I don't need this kind of stress on a Thursday night, no, you know. And so yeah, so totally, totally had that feeling much less these days.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and the difficulty here is not having an outside measure, just dealing with your own head. It is difficult to know where to place yourself, like to realize when you have improved at something, when it's so easy to remember the negative things easy to remember the negative things, and so, other than having feedback from your coach and for many people when they start they don't get a lot of feedback other than, oh, that was good or no. Don't do that Like you're not necessarily getting a chance to sit down and go. You know in-depth analysis and sometimes all it takes is a small bit of encouragement for someone to go hey, you did that thing really well and you go oh, I didn't even remember that. It is actually really hard to keep track of how well you're rolling unless you document it somehow, and just trying to remember is, I think, super flawed. The only really good way to know how you went is through recording your roles, like getting getting some video, and I know that generally most people don't do that. Only only usually very high level folks will record their roles, or a cheeky lower level blue belt might just want to highlight real you and go oh, hey, joe, you warmed up, I'll just we'll have a light role man, just camera in place, flying triangle what the fuck Shout out to a fellow friend of ours. But that's the thing. When you are unsure of how you are going with jiu-jitsu, you need feedback. This is what I'm going to say, one of the key things that is going to help you know whether or not you are sucking at jujitsu or not. Like, don't trust your head. You actually need either the coach to watch you or a higher level uh belt watch you and give you feedback or record it on your phone. So when you do get the opportunity, you can show it to someone or you can look at it and actually see what success looks like. And that's another thing which we're not defining what does success look like to you when you go to jujitsu If you don't go in there with some objective?
Speaker 1:I'm not saying crazy expectations like I'm going to submit everybody. I mean maybe. But if you've got a game you're working on, you're like I want to get this sweep, or I'm going to work really hard to not have my guard passed, or whatever that looks like, and some nights will be better than others. But if you don't bring a degree of intention, then you don't really have a measuring stick. It's just roles and anything can fucking happen. You might submit someone, you might get submitted, you might get smashed or you might not.
Speaker 1:But unless you have something like a project that you're working on or an objective you're trying to achieve, you can't really know how successful you were, because you just kind of as opposed to like say this might be a crude analogy, but like, if you have a swimming race, it's obviously not as simple as that, but even swimming laps, if you're like I'm going to swim from one end of the pool to the other and back and I'm going to time it, that's something you can observe. It's completely different than being like all right, just tread water for five minutes. How did you feel that went? Oh, yeah, I'm just, I'm tired. I didn't drown. Okay, great, come back, do that again. You're just like what the fuck does that build? Like it is.
Speaker 1:Even though it's difficult, it is really good for you to kind of settle on something that you're working on and now you've got something to measure. Yeah, was I successful? Did I get the outcome I wanted or not? Have you? Have you ever done this or have you ever? Maybe not super consciously, but you're like right, I'm really. I want to hit the arm bar. I really want to get this take down or something yeah, I do.
Speaker 2:Um, in recent years I've dabbled with setting more of an intention leading into a training session, which has given me a much better outcome in the training, like a much better return on the training process itself, whether I had success with the thing I was trying to do or not. Um, it was giving me sort of quality feedback versus just going in and you know whatever, rolling hard for an hour and then being like oh, what the?
Speaker 2:fuck happened? It was all a bit of a blur. I've tried writing shit down. I'm never going to film my roles, it's just not my style. I might film like I could see myself filming it, but watching it back I'm like I don't got time for that. Okay, you know, but writing shit down has worked Like. But writing shit down has worked Like. I can see the benefit in it, but I'm never able to keep it Right. So really I find like setting a bit of an intention for a period of time, be it like four to six weeks, and going hey, every session for the next little while I'm just working on this one thing that works really well for me, and then, once I feel like I've sort of juiced all of that, I'm like all right, let's move on to another thing. Yeah, you know.
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Speaker 1:Today, the thing for me which was really interesting was watching people better than me. Uh, kind of work, work, something you know, like you could see they're working something and they just they had a really like. Lucas Lepre is like the epitome of this, of just he's just going to do the same thing every role. Now, obviously he is a master and he has the ability to manipulate the role, but even when he's rolling people way bigger than him, he would always find a way to get to his knee, cut or like whatever he was working, whatever sweep. Like watching him roll, you're like you only had to really watch one roll and that would tell you what he's going to do every other role.
Speaker 1:He was turning the roles into a drill, of sorts oh wow, he, he's just so focused that I have to get this thing, this role. I wasn't really and once I was told this like someone's like oh yeah, lucas doesn't drill, he just treats his roles as drills. You know, I mean, that's some high level, that's some definitely high level stuff. But it was that he was so focused on doing the same thing over and over and over again. That that's that's how he did his skill practice and I was like all right, that's cool, I can adopt that.
Speaker 1:So for me, the thing that I've struggled with for a period of time a little bit better now not awesome, but once people get my back, I was kind of cooked Right. If someone got me in a body triangle, like from the back, I was like I don't know how to get out. I was like just struggling. So what I started to do when it came to free rolling was just going like just start on my back, I've just got to and we'll just keep rolling. But every time we reset, start on my back. You can put the body triangle on whatever. Like I've got to learn to know where I'm safe and where I'm not, and I just wasn't getting exposed to it as much as I needed to, and when I did, I just got finished and it was such a frustrating experience. So I think going to the places that you suck and spending time there is a good way to understand it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like, using that example, I've done the same thing. And I'm like fuck, I just particularly in no-gi. I'm like fuck if a half-decent grapp it. Yeah, like, using that example, I've done the same thing. And, um, being like fuck, I just in particularly no gear. I'm like fuck if a half decent grappler gets my back, like I'm getting finished or I feel lost.
Speaker 2:And then and you almost develop like a some kind of like fucking triggering sort of bubble around this thing. And when someone takes you back, like, oh god, I knew it, oh fuck, oh yeah, and you you've all like, whereas, when you start letting people go there, hey, start on my back, start on my back you desensitize, you kind of pop that bubble and you're like, well, it's just a position and actually, oh okay, yeah, I understand some good basics of the defense here. Oh shit, I can actually shut them down for a while and just hang out, yeah, and that like it's almost like shining a light on that thing makes it not scary anymore. That's right, but if you don't shine the light, it's always scary. Yeah, and I think that that's you.
Speaker 2:You could argue that that's maybe part of that old school of jujitsu. The old school say that gordon would always critique or would always criticize, whereas, like these guys have their game that they're just so good at. But if you take them outside of that game, they fall apart. Yeah, you know, and similar to why we saw some sort of the more classic jujitsu fighters wouldn't want to do EBI Right, because they're like you would never take my back, so why would I do a competition that's going to let you start on my back.
Speaker 2:And you're like yeah, but like what are you scared of?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Where's your defense? Whereas these new generation are like yeah, no, I'm pretty solid everywhere. I work there Like I trained the fuck out of that. Trained the fuck out of that. Yeah, Light's been shone everywhere.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think also we have a bit of a weird carryover from society which is don't want to look stupid because you're afraid of rejection and you want people to accept you. And this is a very ingrained human need, the need for acceptance. Especially when you get around like these tough people and they're cool, and maybe some of them, maybe Chido Vera, trains at your gym. You're like fuck, imagine if I could get a chance to train with Chido Vera. You know like amazing, uh, and you, you, you don't want to.
Speaker 1:You don't want to seem weak or stupid, but invariably we are in a lot of ways and the weakest, stupidest thing we can do is avoid what we suck at. It takes courage to say I don't know this and I know that I'm going to get smashed nine times out of 10, but I'm going to go here until it's only eight times out of 10 and gradually reduce it over time. And even though we always say and this might be a bit of a myth in jujitsu is the whole, leave your ego at the door like it'll humble.
Speaker 1:You Like we all got ego and we all have a degree of sense of self-importance, but when it comes to something you don't understand and you legitimately are not good at it and this is not just being negative on yourself you just don't have the skills. You got to spend some time on the thing to understand this thing. So wherever that is leaning in on the sucking is actually it's an upside, it's not a downside, it's just a different way to look at it. But this is what I'm going to say. My friends, this is the thing that I just really we've talked about it before, but it really hit me in the face the other day when this person is actually.
Speaker 1:This person is a writer, because this is not a podcast. They're a writer and they get paid a lot of money to be a ghostwriter by lots of high-level executives. They make a couple million dollars a year just writing as the voice of a person. And you're like whoa, he didn't name anyone, but he was like I work for these companies. You can guess who I write for or not. This is what I get paid.
Speaker 1:And he said do you know what the biggest bottleneck is on all these businesses in terms of their output. It's consistency, he's like nothing else matters. He's like of course there's an assumed quality at certain levels, but when no one knows who you are, the only way you can succeed when you're low level in this writing game is consistency. He's like, if you got me to look at a variety of creators, whether they be people on TikTok or whatever, the consistency in the volume of what they're producing is the single determining factor of if they will be here in five years time or if they will be significant. Determining factor of if they will be here in five years time or if they will be significant. He's like just think this like anyone say that you are a writer of sorts, you write one book and it's like the best book you ever wrote. But he's like the difficulty with that is there's just thousands of books written every year. So if no one sees the first book, then you never get a chance to write the second book. It doesn't matter. Your career is only as long as you are willing to put the effort in. And one brilliant book is not a career. In the same way, one great blog post isn't a career. He's like consistent volume is absolutely the bottleneck, and he was saying this not only for himself as a writer, but he was saying this for businesses that he's observed that them producing products, them fixing their apps, them doing anything consistency was the bottleneck. And as soon as you took something that was kind of inconsistent and you're able to get a cadence and a rhythm, that was the unlock that really broke through for the success. And he wasn't talking about sports, he wasn't talking about martial arts. This is just a high level ghost rider and I mean I've always thought this and we've talked about it plenty.
Speaker 1:But if you are looking at your actions, maybe you're at jujitsucom consistently, but there are facets of your life that are very inconsistent Sleep, diet, erratic love life and social behavior.
Speaker 1:You know, like all kinds of stuff. Like you might have family drama, you might have something in your life that is fucking up the equilibrium for you to show up to jujitsu in a consistent way. So it's not just that you're there, because I'm sure you are. Like, what I love about jujitsu people is the fucking dedication to the cause, that that that is a beautiful thing. So, yeah, you might be at the gym three times a week or you might be there five times a week, but how you show up. Are you consistent in how you present at each session, or are you dog tired, one day, dehydrated and fucked up, or the next day you're fucking stellar, or are you consistently always fucked up? Maybe that's not right, but there's two things here. One is the consistency with which you are in class and then how you are at the class. You've probably seen it yourself, joe, not just with jujitsu, but with like clients and people you work with, even myself from time to time.
Speaker 2:Oh.
Speaker 1:The consistency with which I show up Perish the thought.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, you know, I think that you should strive to have a standard that you hold yourself to in everything that you do, and so it's okay to have a low standard of some things. You know, you don't. I'm not trying to say you want to be a fucking world-class at everything, but yeah, I think it's worth setting a standard. Personally, I find it more satisfying and, and you know, whatever it makes you productive and it pulls the best out of you, um, at least for the things that you think are important. And so, yeah, for jiu-jitsu, I think you want to be consistently trying to be the best student on the mat.
Speaker 2:There's going to be times when you're not right, sure, but if you're always striving for that, like, what does the best student do? The best student lists what's the best student? They think about the training. They think about it beforehand, they reflect on it afterwards, they try to be respectful of the training partners. They fucking, you know, stick to the plan that they thought of before class. You know, like all that, all those little things, I think, yeah, like it's one thing, like you said, to get into the gym five times a week, but it's another thing to actually show up internally at every session or or twice a week.
Speaker 2:whatever frequency you train, it doesn't really matter, yeah.
Speaker 1:And the showing up like they talk about. Did you show up the intentionality? They talk a lot of smack about it, about sport, right, like whether it's in MMA or basketball or football, where they're like, oh, this guy just didn't show up, someone who's known for performing and then the moment called for Underperformed, underperformed. Then you're like what is contributing there? And invariably it is something off the court or it's something outside of the arena. They're clearly fit, they're clearly got the high level skills. That's why they are in that opportunity in that moment. But it's all those other things which underpin the ability to perform. And so this is where I wanted to just go to, just like a, not a sidestep, but something. When we think about what contributes to your ability to be good at jujitsu, we've talked about feeling like you suck, which can just be you being harsh on yourself mentally, but if we practically break down the things that make you good and enable you to show up, so if we look at consistency and habits, kind of sitting at the top of the tree, we've got to kind of work our way back, because it takes a certain level of determination to support that you have to be. It doesn't mean you're fucking telling Instagram about it every day. But you've got to be quite determined to go. You know what I feel kind of shit. But you know I'm going to, I'm going to drink my water and I'm going to still go and even if it's not a great night, I'm going to be there and I'm going to give what I have. That that takes a degree of determination, and to do that regularly, even when you don't really feel like it, that's that's hard. So it takes a little bit of courage too. And so if we look at what determination is, it's underpinned by energy, like if you, if you're exhausted or you're sick, it's determination is kind of like it's we're not even talking motivation here. We're just like if you literally do not have the energy to stand, you don't have the energy to do jujitsu, you know, like if you physically cannot do it.
Speaker 1:So if we look at what then supplies your energy is a degree of fitness or physical capability which is underpinned by health. So if we go down that tree and we go, are you being healthy right now? You know, cause we all do things that we know are not healthy. I recently have stopped drinking energy drinks. Ooh, imagine, uh yeah, no red balls, no monsters, none of that, not even pre-workout. I'm just keeping it on coffee. You used to drink pre-workout too. I'll be putting pre-workout in my monster bro, like give me all the caffeine I can handle. But why I'd be putting pre-workout in my monster bro, like, give me all the caffeine I can handle? Why it's exciting.
Speaker 1:I live a very boring lifestyle. I'm trying to have a heart attack and break my back at the same time. I crave that intensity, but I stopped. I read an article about, really chemically, what is an energy drink.
Speaker 2:I came to understand that drinking copious amounts of caffeine is maybe not the best thing to do. No, it's not the caffeine.
Speaker 1:It's energy drinks themselves are a particularly unhealthy way to consume caffeine. It's not that caffeine in and of itself is bad, but I also had a conversation with my coach, dan, my strength coach, who is an intense human, and he didn't make fun of me, but he's like what are you doing? And I was like, oh, this guy can squat like 350 kilos, like this is a huge, strong unit. And he was like what are you doing, bro? You're wasting it, you're wasting your adrenaline. Why are you having so much caffeine? For no reason other than just being buzzed Like he's like save your caffeine consumption for when you train and then just don't Just be tired, just yawn, cop it. It was that. And then, also reading this article, it made me go you know what? Yeah, I've got to get more healthy with this. This is my most unhealthy behavior. If I can be more healthy, that's good. So that's what I'm working on right, and the health is really the underpinning.
Speaker 1:Collective applaud from the bulletproof Don't, don't it's just me just fucking, you know doing something which I said I would do a long time ago and you know that's, that's fine. That's just me being trying to be more responsible, right, but the truth is we all have things we do which we know are unhealthy, whatever that looks like, like it might be, fuck, I just ate 12 fucking Krispy Kreme donuts.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, maybe jerked off in the service station toilets again Again.
Speaker 1:What am I doing? It's just the aroma it just gets me every time. But no, it's. We all have it as humans, for different reasons. We do things to compensate, to make ourselves feel better somehow, but it's not healthy.
Speaker 1:If you can identify doing things that will help you get more sleep, be a bit better hydrated, balance your diet out, things like this then that will enable you to get fitter, that will enable you to have higher energy levels, be more determined, and that will allow you to be consistent, show up consistently and get more from your jiu-jitsu, and then your jiu-jitsu is not going to suck. You'll win, you'll lose, but you will be getting better because of that support system, and that's what we're pushing for folks. There it is. That's the pod. Now, ladies and gentlemen, if you would like more information about health, fitness, all this kind of business, you can tap in with Joey and myself through our app, the Bulletproof for BJJ app. Go to the app store, go to the Play Store, download the app, get your 14-day free trial, get in the group, talk to us. We'll help you out.
Speaker 2:Fuck yeah, see you there, choo. Thank you.
