is it still possible for a person who's a black ball to to then just go back to that beginning journey i guess of course let me tell you something i'm probably going to catch a lot of flak for saying this i have a belief i won't say something i won't call it knowledge because it's not known but i have a fervent belief the human beings in most skill activities not all skill activities but i will say combat sports for sure can reinvent themselves in five year periods now you might be saying five years what's magical
about five years mike tyson was 13 years old when he was taken in by customarto by the age of 18 he was beating world-class boxers in the gym and had already made a a strong name for himself in international boxing he's already a known figure it was five years yasiro yamashita the judo player began judo at 13. he placed silver in the old japans at 17. i could go on all day with examples of athletes who within a five-year time frame of starting a sport were competing at world championship level i'm going to give you
a rough and ready definition of sport mastery okay i believe that if you can play a competitive match against someone ranked in the top 25 in your sport and it's a serious international sport i would call you someone who's mastered that sport okay you you're damn good um if you can go with the number 25 wrestler in the world and give them a hard competitive match in the gym you may not win it but you know they had a good workout you have shown mastery of wrestling or indeed any other combat sport you care to
name there are numerous examples of people doing far better than that in five years winning medals at world championships and even olympic games in that five-year period this is not an unrealistic goal there is a lot of empirical evidence to show that people have done this in the past a lot of it so if you fully immerse yourself in a sport with a well worked out well-planned training program there is a mountain of evidence to show that in a five-year period you can go from a complete beginner to a very very impressive skill level to
the point where you're competitive with some of the best people on the planet you can reinvent yourself in these five-year periods what happens with most people is they get to a certain level and they get complacent they get lazy and they just keep doing the same old thing they've been doing but if you're diligent and you're purposeful five years you can accomplish an awful lot and as i said there's a mountain of evidence to show it by the way as a small aside somebody who's mentioned taversky and yamashita in the same conversation you're one of
the most impressive people i've ever spoken to but it's that's a small side uh so if if there's this complete beginner this is really interesting there is empirical evidence that you can achieve incredible things in a short amount of time there's a complete beginner standing before you and that beginner has fire in their eyes and they want to achieve mastery where do you place most of the credit for it for a journey that does achieve mastery is it the set of ideas they have in their mind is it the the set of drills or the
way they practice is it genetics and luck those are all good insights all of those factors you've mentioned play a definite role let's start with luck okay we are all subject to fortune and fortune can be good and fortune can be bad life is in many ways beautiful but life is also tragic and i've had students who showed enormous promise and just tragic events occurred in their lives the vicitudes of fortune can be a wonderful thing in your life and they can be a a terrible tragedy um i've had students who who died uh for
various reasons who could have gone on to become world champions i've had students who uh on a much lighter note just fell in love and just wanted to have kids and move away and that's that's a that's a wonderful thing but different direction um you just never know so luck does play some role um even things like where you're born uh the location of your physical location in the world or even the socio-economic location can can play a role which could be detrimental or favorable so yet luck does play some role thankfully it's one of
the smaller elements and i do believe that a truly resourceful mind can overcome the majority of what fortune throws at us and and get two goals provided you're sufficiently mentally robust other things you mentioned genetics [Music] i do believe in certain sports genetics really do play a powerful powerful role for example in any sport where power output and reaction speed ability to take physical damage then there are genetic elements which will help okay for example i couldn't imagine a world in which even if i i have a crippled leg so even if i uh grew
up in a world where my leg was was normal and i had normal legs and everything was fine with my body i don't believe that i could win the olympic gold medal in 100 meter sprinting for example okay i just don't have enough fast twitch muscle fibers but the more a sport involves skill and tactics the less you will see genetics playing a role if you look at the middle podiums in jiu jitsu for example you will see that no one body type is definitively superior to another you will see every variation of body type
and the metal platforms and jujitsu as skill and tactics become more and more important and things like just power output over time become less and less important then you will see that genetics play less and less of a role i'm i'm happy to say that the sport of jitter2 the evidence seems pretty clear that there's no one dominant body type in a sport of judas so rather there's just advantages for one type and there's advantages for another you just have to learn to tailor your game to your body with regards to training program yes i
believe with all my heart and all my soul that your training program does make a difference i've dedicated my life to that obviously i'm biased in this regard i do believe that all of the students that i taught who became world champions would have been great athletes whether or not they had met me or not i believe that but i do also believe it would have taken them a lot longer and they may not have gotten to the level that they did they i'm sure they would have been impressive but i do believe that the
nature of a training program plays an enormous difference i don't mean to say this in an arrogant way i believe that there's again a mountain of evidence to suggests this is true because you see it in many different sports let's talk for example about your country russia and its wrestling program russia is an enormous country but the location where russia's wrestling program comes from is actually very small and the population is actually very small i can't verify this but i was told once i can't verify this but the number of people who wrestle in russia
is actually significantly smaller than the number of people who wrestle in the united states it's also not part of the school uh uh athletics and it is in the united states yes that's a different point we'll come back to right to that because that's also an important point but if you look at the actual numbers of people there they're actually pretty small so ostensibly if it comes down to a numbers game america should dominate at the olympics if we have more wrestlers now this the story gets more complicated because america has a different style of
wrestling the collegiate style than the international freestyle that is a complicating factor um but nonetheless uh what you see there is that numbers on everything rather the manner in which people are trained clearly has an impact and we know very little about the this very little reliable information about the training program for wrestling in uh in the russian states but one thing is incontestable is the amount of success that they've had in international world championship and olympic competition they are disproportionately successful despite their relatively small numbers there's nothing genetically special about them um you can
talk about performance enhancing drugs but those are a worldwide phenomenon they don't have any access to technology that the rest of the world doesn't have at some point you've got to start asking what are they doing differently in the training room and there are many other examples of similar situations my country new zealand has an insanely successful rugby program the sport of rugby which they have dominated for literally generations despite the fact that our population is very very small compared with the rest of the country and we don't excel in many other sports it's new
zealand does fairly well and sports overall but nothing like they do in rugby um and you've got to ask yourself is there a culture there which built this up and the world is full of examples of seemingly small and unpromising areas or locations putting out disproportionately high numbers of successful athletes and that points to the idea that different training programs have different success rates and so i truly believe with all my heart and all my soul that how you train does make a significant difference i would even go further and say it makes the most
difference is it the only thing absolutely not we've already talked about fortune we've talked about genetics uh if you want to get nasty you can even talk about things like performance enhancing drugs that obviously plays a role in modern sports um uh but i do believe that the majority of uh of what creates success is the interaction between the athlete and the training program now the training program is one thing i i do believe that's the single most important but right behind it is the athlete themselves okay um in my own experience uh people talk
about athletes that i've trained successfully but they never talk about athletes that i've trained unsuccessfully um always remember that for every champion a coach producers there's a hundred people that they coach that no one ever heard of and this is completely normal a coach can never take the lion's share of the credit the coach creates possibilities but it's the athlete who actualizes the possibilities and so building that rapport and finding the right people to excel in your training program is also a big part of it you
