everyone agrees that the fundamentals of the heart and soul of jiu-jitsu but there is much less agreement about what actually constitutes the fundamentals of the sport traditionally most people have always associated a certain set of moves with the fundamentals of the sport I've always believed this is something of a mistake when you look at the idea of a fundamentals program we must go beyond the idea of fundamental moves and start looking at the two other elements which are equally if not more so fundamental to the sport of jiu-jitsu these are the various movements that underlie
the moves that we perform and the concepts that bring all the various moves together a true fundamentals program will work at the level of movement skills moves and concepts when I talk about the fundamentals of jiu-jitsu rather than look at a superficial element or a superficial manner at the various moves of the sport I rather prefer people to look at the fundamental skills of the sport my interpretation of the fundamentals of jiu-jitsu divides the skills of the sport into three separate areas standing position ground position bottom ground position top each of these three areas has
five central fundamental skills within it the standing position is composed of the five skills of stance motion grip Kazushi that is off balancing and transitioning to the ground which of course is usually done through takedowns or from various forms of guard pole on the ground in bottom position the five fundamental skills are pin escapes guard retention guard sweeps half guard sweeps and turtle escapes in ground position top the five fundamental skills are opening a closed guard passing an open guard passing half guard pin maintenance in transitions and turtle breakdowns so three areas of skills standing
ground bottom and ground taught each with five fundamental skills within it this creates a picture of jiu-jitsu as a sport with fifteen fundamental positional skills of course there are other skills outside of position but the heart and soul of jiu-jitsu it's real fundamental content is in his positional skills because everyone will tell you position becomes comes before everything else in the school okay guys are here today from the great John they're huge honor for me as always and guys we are super excited because we were just starting the new fundamental series so we had a
great success if you enter the Cystic series that was all about noogie and they with many subjects like lag locks back attacks camera armbar triangle front head locks then now we were just starting to fundamental series that's gonna be always key and they it will be all about the fundamentals of your so that's like the most important part of your as the part of the people struggle the most and many times when you see someone doing something wrong as your hits 99% of the times because they didn't have a great fundamentals so John can you
explain to us a little more and also tell us what's gonna be the first part of the series that everybody's writing like asking like when it's gonna launch what's the first one there's there's a sense in which this is we launched the videos in an order that didn't make a lot of sense and in some respects when you think about it the first video should have put out should have been fundamentals everything starts with the fundamentals what we didn't we put out the advance material subsystems first now the reason for that was largely due to
demand the squad for many years have been doing exceptionally well and international competition and there was a huge interest in ok what are you guys doing differently and there was a sense in which people saw the squad is using something new and exotic and different and to a large extent they were but people got distracted from the fact that none of that would have been possible if they didn't have secure foundations upon which the more exotic elements of our game could actually be built upon there's a sense in which we're covering up for lost ground
we started with the more exotic newer elements of our approach to jujitsu but we would be doing a huge disservice to the jiu-jitsu community if we didn't go back now to the fundamentals everyone agrees that the sport is built in a foundational fashion that there's a there's a kind of bedrock of tactics moves skills and concepts upon which everything else is built jiu-jitsu is rather like an inverted pyramid and that small foundation everything else rests upon that and if you attack the foundation everything else would crumble so often I'm sure you've had the same experience
Bernardo you'll see a talented young athlete who does some things extraordinarily well and you see tremendous potential but any weakness in the fundamentals will always be exposed in Clara Titian and it because it puts a ceiling on how good they can get and there's nothing sadder than watching someone hits three beautiful moves in a row and then get caught on something that was entirely avoidable so I'm fascinated by the project aesthetically it's a whole different look this is in a in a ghee so it has a very different look to it but the big message
that we we're trying to put out here is that into the system was essentially a very detailed look at my own approach to the sport of jiu-jitsu which is the idea of subsystems within an overarching system people know that one of my interpretations of Brazilian jiu-jitsu as as a sport as a as an industry's idea that it is itself a fairly simple systematic approach to combat the most well-known rendition of their system is the four-step system that I outlined underneath Joe Rogan podcast there are other ways you can interpret the system and depending upon how
the match starts or whether you end up on top of bottom but ultimately you're always going to end up with Brazilians having somewhere between two to six sticks which you are repeatable in the case of failure and so it's this ignore it's incredibly simple and yet devastatingly effective systematic approach to combat what I tried to do as a coach starting many years ago was when I first understood you get to as a system my question was well what if we created subsystems within an overarching system could we enhance the overall combat effectiveness and present units
and that's what the great experiment behind the squad was it was an attempt to show this and I think it's fair to say people now see that this was a successful approach not the only way of doing Duty super it's one very good way and what I want to do now with the go through the fastest series is to take a backwards step and say okay here's the subsystem approach which is unique to to the squadron now it's not unique now everyone can learn but initially at least it was unique to the squad let's take
a backwards step now and let's look at the overarching system of resiliency in which the subsystems are housed in which they grew and that's what I that I want to do with the gopher the fastest it's to look at was angels who as everyone does is this simple to the six step system which has been a so successful for the generations now and and has so many different applications so I can't wait through as much as we're engaged in this for a lifetime you want to get as good as you can as quickly as you
can and some of the great cliches of resilience was you know it takes ten years to be a black belt minimum and you know you can only make so much progress in so much time as a coach I often have to tell my students you know that they come to me depressed like you know I should be better at this point and and I had to give them sessions of counseling where you're like you know relax but it does take time now yes it does take time but I will say this it doesn't have to
take as much time as many people tell you I have a theory of development and Judith never she talked about this publicly because I think people would think I'd lost my mind if I if I said this I I believe that in any kind of major physical skill human beings can almost completely reinvent themselves within a five-year cycle it's my honest and cherished belief that you can do remarkable things within a five-year span in some kind of physical activity some kind of sport there's an old cliche often thrown around in the business world that people
have a natural tendency to massively overestimate what they can accomplish in six months and an equally strong tendency to massively underestimate what they can accomplish in five years I'm a huge believer in the truth of this [Music]
