The Importance Of BJJ Fundamentals by John Danaher

is it library yep life well I cool so again it's real life here on my school just finished a very long day of film here if you John Joe is doing all this food a mentos series right so today for example he finished filming the half part of this year's of the fundamentals and I also did the one part of the clothes girl and guys today we're gonna discuss and try to discuss here a little bit of how important is the fundamentals of Fugit so for every single BJJ practice you're in doesn't matter if you're

a beginner or advanced ed and then what do you think about that we were just talking here then I had a mess with life let's let's first up guys apologies I have a heavy cold so please excuse my voice it's even worse than normal but yeah we're just having a fascinating discussion about the nature of the fundamentals did you did so one of the great cliches are the support we all grew up with this idea that the fundamentals everything so often you hear this you know without fundamentals you'll never amount to anything and we're very

much in agreement with this is a student who lacks skills and the fundamentals of the support is always going to struggle so often as a coach I see people who have very very talented in certain niche areas they have you know for example it's great leglocks or a great armbar a great triangle but weakness and the fundamentals are the support weakest or things like their their escapes at Sarah Sarah means that they never really get more but you need to use those moves and those skills that they have as a general rule when you lose

in jiu-jitsu in the majority of cases you lose along the lines of your weakest skill sets so when you're weak in the fundamentals I hate to say every tend to lose a lot because that gets exposed very quickly very easily so there's a sense in which you have to first cover your weaknesses and learning the fundamentals as step number one in that right direction but of course it's never enough just to not lose all you want to go out and actively beat do you want to go out take control of majors take charge of them

and then to as a set of fundamental skills as a general rule we make a distinction between the fundamentals and your advanced skills okay most coaching curriculums have built around this fundamental distinction you got your fundamentals over here you learned when you first come in did you did too and you've got your advanced skills you learn over here and often classes are divided along those lines this creates it's not wrong to do this but there is a potential problem here that potential problem is that many students carry within them a mistaken way of looking at

the support they tend to see the fundamentals as a phase that you must pass through so they say okay I'm gonna begin I'm a wipeout so I've got one of these fundamentals and then as soon as that so we're gonna get into the exciting stuff we're gonna blue purple brown belt black belt skills and then I'm gonna forget all about my friend Amir Docs you cannot have that mindset okay the fundamentals are the bedrock the foundation upon which your entire game is based indeed your ability to learn advanced skills is directly proportional to how good

you are at fundamental skills six-time world champion one of the greatest fortunes of his era and at no point in your career did you ever make use of a key gourami based leg locks yeah very good he's a Gotama you're very strong there but actually broadly based leg locks was never really part of the game when we filmed the into the system leg lock DVD within two days Bernardo was effortlessly hitting heel hooks on his training partnership with him now why was it so typically I couldn't just grab a guy and say hey two days

later you hear walking by belt it's not gonna happen but for someone who already is strong in the fundamentals it's so easy for them to build additional skills on top of that within two days in co-working black belts that's a direct result of the fact that he's strong in the fundamentals someone who's strong the fundamentals is very very easy to teach new skills someone who's weak in the fundamentals it can be a nightmare so just fast progress in the sport overall and the ability to add new skills as you develop over time it all begins

with the fundamentals so we've got to get away from this mindset if the fun middles it's a phase that you pass through no you never pass through the fundamentals the idea is this when you go to make progress over time in jiu-jitsu there's two ways you do it you must refine the the existing skills that you already have usually fundamentals because that's what you start with so with regards fundamentals there's going to be a process of refinement for the rest of your time in jiu-jitsu as long as you're doing jiu-jitsu you must be looking to

actively refine and improve the fundamental skills you already have then is the addition of new and more advanced skills so the way I see students making progress is in two different directions there's refinement of existing skills and is the addition of new skills typically the addition of new skills concerns more advanced technique so in the case of Bernardo Faria he added a sheet arabiya based heel hooks to his already substantial skill set and it was easy for him to do so because he was forming the fundamentals but that doesn't mean that he just stops learning

with regards his fundamentals even now having been in the sport for a long time both of us spend the majority of our training in research time getting better at the small improvements with regards fundamentals and to be honest with me I get more joy even now at 53 having been in the sport a very long time with a small improvement and say for example my elbow escaped then I wouldn't discovering a new leg lock even though one is supposed to be a far more advanced skill I'm I know I'm gonna use that elbow escape movement

or refinement a lot more than I'm gonna use that new leg lock and so I get excited about the fundamentals when there's improvement there I'm gonna use that every single day as opposed to a new and exotic move that I might use once every few months or every few weeks so always make sure let's make sure that we don't walk around their attitude of the fundamentals is something you just do for a short time it's kind of boring you have to do it it's a phase you have to pass through and then you get on

to the exciting stuff no that's not the way it works the fundamentals with the majority of your attention has to be for them for the entirety of your career and always there's this act of continual refinement of the fundamentals over time right now you might have a good elbow escape but we're not interested in you having a good at work scale we want you to have a great elbow escape and when you get a greater escape we want you to have an excellent elbow escape when you get to an excellent elbow escape we want you

to have the best goddamn elbow escape in the Academy and maybe one day in the world okay that's the goal constant refinement over time and it never never stops it's never that end of the fundamentals where okay I've mastered the fundamentals now it's time for my advice no you never master the fundamentals this refinement over time that's the way that you want to think about fundamentals training yeah enjoy your just mission like how can you get better who never escaped get better get better get it better better and I forgot some points that happened that

you can even start please forget it true fundamentals techniques really because while you are saying that for example one of my favorite escapes from them all is mixing up the bridge duo with the AB escape so I used two of the most basic fundamental escapes we have and I put them together and it works like now let's talk about the idea of fundamentals ok people talk about fundamentals like techniques are fundamental but understand something these things out there much more fundamental than moves or techniques the most fundamental things in jujitsu the real bedrock upon which

the entire sport is based it's not techniques its body movements and concepts that underlie the techniques they're the true bedrock the techniques have built on top of those for example no one could perform an elbow escape if they couldn't first perform the basic body movement their shrimping they couldn't perform at uber if they couldn't first perform the basic body movement of bridging here I've mounted on top of Bernard that's when we became in this direction if an item just wait for an elbow escape they just went live from here there's many things I can do

to frustrate them I can move my knee inwards I can shift my body weight and when he goes to finish that on Westgate it's mostly awfully difficult but bananas point is that he can start by off-balance me with an uber for example I'd react to it now suddenly no more scape is so easy for and the combination of two basic modes works in Krita loafer let's look at recently Chancellor sound I noticed you doing this when you're training these targets for exams I tried to do the album's cape and it just doesn't work right let's

see how I can stop it when he goes in he's trying to get inside position with the elbows back to him my knee and was I frustrating is that inside position when I put my weight on the right knee I'm taking my left knee off the floor now bring the camera back it brings all the focus that's for my weight to my right knee when he tries to move it a very difficult thing to do in same time many times I try to do the bridge as well and it doesn't work for exact control disarm

from Joyner and he puts the other arm over there or he move this way and there is no way to do it so one example here of compare combining two of the Philomela toes I can try to do the bridge and then the bridge didn't work and now I go to the AB escape and I bring my lag or lagging in that kind of stuff and I recover the guard so exactly was what was John was mentioned in the beginning like how you can make one position better better better better better and then you can

even put that together and that kind of stuff I think like a psyche control something like control right I could try to just recover the guard like this and if it fails guys one thing that I was very impressed with you John last time we shot a video was rather I was telling like how disposition is one of my favorites like hip escape and turn they need to recover the heart and then he was showing me one detail that I used to do this detail for like forever and I didn't know that I use is

we're gonna show that good that was awesome this goes back to what we said only about how people think the techniques are fundamental they can be but underneath 50 knees is something much more fundamental the body movements and the concepts that underlie them understand that all the escapes have one concept in common it's the idea of creation of space from your opponent's perspective he's looking to get is tight you as possible the reason why benardos combination of uber or no escape works so well is creating a huge amount of space as I reacted to the

uber space was developed which made the elbow escape possible the more space we can create the easier the various case become now when we first start off with a basic body movement might repeat itself had an imaginary opponent out to my right-hand side I formed my frames and I want to create space between my hips and his lower body if I just plant my foot it puts a limit on how much space I can create with shrooming what if I first took this this foot of mine and simply planting it I managed to plant it

further out that would mean that the distance covered by my shrimp will be dramatically increased and the question is how am I going to do that or what if I combine two body movements kipping and shrimping if I use a simple Kippy motion where I use the momentum of a moving lower body to kick and take my hips out I can move much further away and plant my foot so much further away from my opponent that when I do go to shrimp now massive amounts of space open up between us and now I now have

the option of an elbow escape on one side or the knee escape from me let's contrast this and visualize it according to these lines on the map okay if we bring the camera right here you see this line goes through the tatami on the mat I'll put my centerline on that line I hit my damn a generic pulling out to my right-hand side I want to maximize the distance that I create away from him to facilitate my escapes if I just plant my foot I can only move so far away from the in line I

described however if I start with a Kip that throws momentum in my legs in a given direction and enables me to plant my foot so much further away that now when I shrink you will see I'm much much further away from the line on the man and as a result if I just plot my foot I just want it we're gonna try my shrimp I only moved so far away from Bernardo but if I start with a tipping motion that takes my hips away from my opponent so that now only shrimp is a huge amount

of space between us and I can take advantage of that space turn up to my knees and into a strong female situation to put my foot down to the floor simple movements like this will you take what seems like a basic skill wonderful technique make a huge difference performance all right I remember one day watch me roll with your students and we still gonna draw always been held on bought it with sign control no one could hold you for more than a few seconds and you were doing exactly this movement yeah interestingly you were doing

it unconsciously that's one of my favorite moves and it's very very very fundamental and yeah but yes I wanted to show it this one because I guys many times when every time Joe comes here he films here and then I sit over there just made a point that already I see you over there watching you John teaching and then John was teaching that and I was like hah that's one of my favorite moves and I was just think like do we do that and then just play around and imagine that someone was passing my guard

and then I notice that every time someone tries to add my guard I kind of bend my leg and then I go for it so I was like man I never realized that so that was also you know so just again instead of just escape like these that I don't have too much share go I do this and then I go and the position works much better so those very little details I think it's what makes one of those very interesting right no they make a difference in performance okay if you don't do that it's

gonna be a lot harder to escape but when you do do it you notice immediately hey guys that I couldn't previously escaped from I'm getting out there's no ambiguity you can see in your wife's powering isn't working or not and it's such a satisfying feeling when you take a fundamental move like that but you struggle to work on certain opponents and suddenly it's working this like oh man yeah already if anybody asked any questions well although maybe if we ask if anybody has any questions they can guys feel free to ask any questions gonna keep

going here me and John but if you guys have any questions let us know that was like going off the ideas of the life but John and there can you talk a little bit about the Caesar suit yeah you know it's a whole question here you know what are the fundamentals of Judaism at some point you gotta ask this question like you want to teach fundamentals what are the fundamentals what makes this mood fundamental and that movement vast I think one of the best ways to to look at this question is to understand how many

other moves are affected by that fundamental move okay let's say for example flying about the beautiful but in all honesty if you learn to fly now it's not going to help you to learn more about the moves it's pretty much a single train there's only a small set of moves closely allied to are flying out about where if you learn to fly now by other moves will be easy to learn there's alamos like or even movements like shrimping where if you learn there you can adapt better faster so that's the more foundation of a more

fundamental one when you look at a move like the scissor sweep it's often taught as a foundational move in this fort used to go to beginner classes around America and Brazil and you're often see a scissor sweep taught in the basics curriculum one of the beauties of fundamental moves is that very often they illustrate body movements and concepts which will have a trickle-down effect and permeate throughout your entire jiu-jitsu game the scissor sweep is a classic example interesting even if you actually look at world championship like what competition this is a sweep does not figure

very prominently I know that it was laborious this week but even even for laborious it wasn't like that was his main method of scoring but that's going back a long ways so these are since with Ted sword it's supposed to be fundamental around the fundamental is so sweet once we use every single day well sometimes a move can be fundamental not because it's used a lot elite level competition but because it illustrates important concepts body movements which will be used a lot in a V competition let's look at the sweepers good examples okay he's on

two knees at my close god one of the most important concepts that we're gonna work in the go for the fastest series is the idea that when we go to sweet people from God there's always a good step process okay let's reach their process is very easy to understand first you've got to get a grip on your opponent okay if you don't have a strong working group on your opponent nothing's going to happen so for the case of this is weak there's a bunch of good course we can use I'll demonstrate from a fairly standard

grip where it goes through and I take a good cross lapel grip on my training partner then we take a four finger cuff her up here and I take my wrist and I cover my training partners wrist so I put good control by treaty partners hand now from here we're gonna open up our guard behind his back we're gonna shimmy our hips out and we're gonna take Omni throw it across and put on knee on top of our own wrist if I put my knee underneath my wrist like so it's very easy but harder to

press it down stripped my two knees together now I'm nervous asleep anyway so we put our knee when I'll own a wrist like so now I Bernardo tries to pressure my knee down his own ghee prevents it from happening okay my knee is held in place ultimately by his geese through my cross grip now from here I'm gonna put our foot on our training partners hip and we're gonna to something very very interesting we're gonna load up all of our ponents weight onto one knee what I want to do is I want to break my

opponent's balance these two key elements the first is to bring his head forward if Barnardo's head moves away from me straight back very very hot recently no his weights on his knees and you feel like he feels my mountain but if I can bring benardos weight forward it's gonna change let's bring the camera this way watch my left foot this one I put my shoelaces right here at the meros lap muscle so I can use my left leg to bring benardos weight forward now let's bring the camera back this way once benardos kid comes over

my chest now we play a trick without lately I'm gonna take my left leg and I'm gonna put all up another's weight over his left knee just like so now let's bring the camera on this direction watch Barnardo's right niche it's coming up off the map so a hundred messina Barnardo's weight is always left knee now let's bring the camera back this way I'm gonna ask you guys a question if a hundred percent of Bernardo's weight is on his left knee and I took his left knee away what's gonna happen I know he's gonna fall

it's just physics okay so I find the loaded leg but I put all of his weight on and now I employ this is a sweet and it's a hundred percent effective okay so there's a sense here in which we're playing with the fundamental concepts of jiu-jitsu when loading all of our poets weight like breaking his balance developing what we call Kazushi or off balancing bringing his weight forward out of balance with a strong grip then we load a hundred percent of his weight onto one limb and then we just cut that little way I didn't

care who your opponent is well I think in what they see live learn again how I slid into it if you put a hundred percent of the body weight on one leg and you cut that leg away they're gonna fall down this is the way the world works okay so there's a sense in which we're learning a lot about the general nature of sweeping from one fundamental sweep we're learning that everything starts with grip we're learning that everything needs to be our opponent he's be taken out of balance and his stance broken and his weight

put onto one leg and then if we actually employ the move in this case as soon as we only a hundred say effective so let's quickly run through all that again okay we go up and out over here he's in our closed guard we go through we're gonna work with across the Pell group these other groups will investigate and they go for in the faster series a good initial grip we get hand control just like so we shift our hips out to the side and we reinforce our knee position just like so I used my

foot here listen let muscle to bring his body weight forward and now watch bananas kid my whole thing is to bring them out of belt by bringing the head forward now I use the mild scissor reaction from my top blade but all of us wait until one knee once the all his body waves compromise on that one knee it's so easy now my weight and end up on top so this is a good example of taking movies showing how it demonstrates principles concepts and body movements which we've proven it throughout your entire game in this

sense one move can teach you many moves and that's what makes a fundamental even though the scissor sweep is not really a move that we see much emotion beauty competition I literally can't remember the last time I saw at the World Championships I still think it's an important part of a beginner's program precisely because it teaches us so much about other aspects of the sport now let's contrast there with the idea of high percentage moves there are other moves that I like to teach in a fundamentals program that a lot of people would say that's

not fundamental that's advanced I disagree what I like to see is the fundamentals have applicability all the way through to Black Butler and Beyond it's my belief and I believes with belief of many people in jiu-jitsu if there are many famous athletes one of my good friends were to Gracie was one of them who took pretty much a game that was entirely fundamentals and just I refined them throughout his entire life and employed them with devastating effect at the highest levels my contention is one of the best ways to make a distinction between moves that

are fundamental and moves on and Lord is to ask yourself a simple question how broad is the application of these moves among jujitsu ethnics is this a move that you see a white belt Blue Bell purple ball brown belt black belt do you see it in both male and female categories do you see it in all weight categories do you see it being used for a long period of time by a large number of athletes with good success rates if the answer is yes I'm prepared to say it's fundamental the only way you could explain

how it's used by so many different people with so many different body types for so long is it adheres to scroll fundamental principles that make a high percentage so for example one of my favorite moves suma Gatien the hog sweet we've hung them down on two legs sorry two knees and from here we're able to use any given method to expose our training pilots belt and from here we get a good grip on a chain Piper's sleeves and again it's all about the braking of balance okay so we use this belt grip to break up

opponent's balance and bring its head forward when monado's head comes forward in front of his knees it's so struck hard from now to vent the off balance in this position even if banana takes us to knees off the mat and try polities body up high even from here it's going to be pretty easy once the roller fitting partner through and put it down to the back so this is a fine example of a move which you see all the time and I've coached many many wipeouts to use that within a very short time frame and

it just emits much successes there's many more experience black belts so there's two ways you can look at fundamentals you can say okay how much is this educate us about moves and general in jiu-jitsu may not be used that much in competition but it might still have educational value but at the end of the day you could have practical value to do to counter your theory you better like kick some ass so that's when I bring in the idea of high percentage so I'd like to see a mix of the fundamentals program between theoretical importance

say for example a scissor sweep and practical importance which is many of the moves which we teach them to go further I was the series yeah John one question here like every every video that I post you know that we do together I always see someone asking like what's John methodology for his competition training so how do you apply the fundamentals techniques with the competition to you because as you can see like I think Gary is probably one of the hardest guys to get a solution and the Guarani we almost never see he tapping as

well so what's the matter of methodology that you use for the competition training is there anything specific that you do those four Danyluk yes my whole thing is is is precision okay so often you see people teaching the generalities and there's okay defend say for example the rear mount in this fashion and they showed the generalities of the move that's fine you have some success escaping using generalities but my whole thing is to show particulars and details down to a level which a lot of people would find almost difficult to deal with like people say

oh I I teach too long or I show too many details I don't believe you didn't even show enough details but I made damn sure of one thing i prioritize details remember your students have to be able to remember everything under stress you can't give them ten thousand pages of notes and say remember that when you're getting strangled so last week we brought seven of the best customers from New Jersey fanatics here to to the trip here to Blas and then we I turned in a like a mini say Marissa that and they were talking

about that they were talking how when they watch your video sometimes they watch one technique and avala me one and then in Duvall I'm sure they watch something similar that it's a little bit different and then focus on the concept again very good so it's exactly what you are or you're saying there yeah but if you give the information and prioritize it so this is the most important thing this is the second most important thing this is a third most important thing and students will remember the most important things never get them out of bad

situations okay so I teach a mountain of details to when it comes to fundamentals I tend to be very straight dog fundamentals okay I don't get me wrong I love exotic moves I love innovation I'd love to see people's coming up with new stuff I do believe there's a tremendous amount of value in and being the first on the block with new technology you saw that was my leg locking my students came in using a general methodology of leg locking which hadn't really been seen before and again my huge competitive advantage when they first emerged

on the scene but you can't use innovation forever as a means of holding on to victory at some point people gonna figure out what you're doing here they can encounter the way life is the foundation perseverance of that foundation will always carry through so interestingly people tend to associate my coaching with rather exotic elements idiots who like system ventilated things like this but in fact the majority of my training time with my students its fundamentals but fundamentals aren't sexy to most people yeah but that's the question like so how do you implement that is more

like in the warm-up or it's doing the techniques you Troy why 50 details what words is that right great great question if another just see so many people dismiss the fundamentals into the warm-up okay on tripping just do it before class I've gone down the met five times okay that's a disaster because now you've taken one of the most important skills in the entire sport you've relegated to a warm-up so what are the students think it's just something to do before I get into the real technique no the real technique is the shrimping okay that's

the stuff is gonna make the difference when they're when someone's on top you better get out your thirty Seconds do it that's what's gonna get you out I teach body movements as a skill often a deed completion of class I will have observed the class not pull athletes in I'll say I saw you struggle in this position and we'll go through details bang bang bang bang bang and it's very very precise it might be the difference between gripping a hand here versus here and there might be the different screen hold it off a strangle or

getting strangled out and so I never relegate body movement and fundamentals to my warmup it's always taught as a very precise very clinical detail-oriented saying often after clocks so for example we'll work in class okay here's the theme of the class we go through a set of skills or themes for that given class name after class I it's power and I say I saw failure here here and here it's a graceless now anybody has any questions like ready yeah Maddy Mahoney had a question that I can't say anymore so if you're still there Maddy ask

you a question again after we answer this next question from Christopher Christopher wants to know what the number one fundamental drill would be in your opinion okay is there any way Chris could be a little more specific ways in a defensive drill or okay I always believe it fundamentals level defense is more important than offense okay the reason is simple when you first enter the school units and you come up with no skills you mentioned to a roomful of people who have been there before you so they have some skills and you have zero skills

and so inevitably well just most of the time you end up on the short end of the stick you're getting attacked so defense is the first gear we got to learn I would say the first thing I would start students with is solo shrimping and bridging skills okay you've got to start somewhere so start by yourself shrimping and bridging solo then experiment with body weight on top of you had people start in the mounted position and side positions and practice your bridging and shrimping underneath some body weight and then from there working in various positions

side to side with side side escapes escaping from mount left and right side so you feel comfortable both sides heavy Nepal is behind you from sliding your back to the floor in turn into a no escape and we look like so so everything will start with body movement bridging and shrimping there are other body boots or a report of bridge leadership Romania but two most important for your foundational escapes focus more and more and more upon the idea of an elbow escape there are many forms of escape and you do too but the elbow escape

statistically is the king by a landslide no other escape is statistically so important is the elbow escape in this time minute start with your own body and then work Oh terrific yeah Maddie wants to know have a little more details on kipping in the struggle to break bread Korea absolutely tipping is a more advanced form of body movement you probably are familiar with the word kipping from forms of exercise in particular chin up okay I'm doing a pull-up on a bar and I feel I've completely run out of energy and I cannot pull my body

up with my arms and back alone what do you see everyone do it's not kicking with your legs okay they cheat they get up well tipping is a way of moving my body weight through momentum built up by my legs so for example I want to move my hips to the left hand side I would take my leg I generate motion and then a Kip losing my hips to the left so I can if you just excuse me if another I can move in a circle just by kicking okay so if I want to create

space between myself and opponent I could do it was like planting a foot or I could do it I'm tipping and as a result we can get up to our base okay so tipping is a way of moving my body weight by generating momentum in my legs and you're ready that's it so guys you reasonably decides to do these lives because every time John comes here we always spend time like talking about this exactly today all right guys let's bring the life let's see how it's so so guys I hope you guys enjoyed and the

if you guys want to seem worried about phenomena toes we're gonna leave the link for their fundamental structures at Vichy fedex.com and this is something that I'm gonna try to do more if John's so he comes here like I was also month we take one entire week and we just shoot a ton of videos so I think the IV is gonna be very fun to remember guys the most important thing about discussion today don't see the fundamentals as a phase you come to pass word see the fundamentals for what it is the bedrock of your

entire game in the score Skog you are in the fundamentals the harder you gotta be to beat for your opponent and the easier it's gonna be for you to learn additional skills as you get more advanced in the sport it's not a Phase II possible it's an active refinement over time it's no exaggeration to say and there's a mountain of proof to prove this is true that you could have a game which was entirely fundamentals ahead love advanced elements to it and still be a great great world champion put the vast majority of your training

focus upon the fundamentals I promise you that all it will bring dividends that no amount of so-called advanced moves could ever hope to bring you all those guys ok I hope you guys enjoy it and make sure to check all the videos on PC phonetics comm us