How to teach BJJ without drilling (ecological game design with Greg Souders) 

Thanks a lot! I agree, it's super important to understand that there's a lot more nuance to training this way than people might think at first glance. Appreciate you watching and for the feedback!

Game design really is difficult. I find myself referring back to Greg’s games as a template for how to structure games and how to break up (or introduce) certain concepts. It’s been helpful so far but it definitely takes a lot of time and effort. But the great thing about it is that once you build out a few staple games you can always refer back to it to revisit those concepts and change things around to learn new ones. I’m not an expert but have been building these games and training with them and seeing impressive results. Hope it helps!

If you study Motor development and motor control (mostly sports science field) you can understand this very easy.. It’s a way to learn through exploring “affordance” (what he calls constrain to us is affordance). The problem is that in sports when in competition you need to have your skills more and more specialised. And ecological approach does not provide skills specialisation as other methods. That’s the reason most school / clubs/ academies… doesn’t teach it. it’s not like no one thought about it before, it’s just not the methodology for specialisation. We use Ecological approach with kids so understand and develop skills but then you need a more methodical approach for specialisation of that same skill. You can also teach any newbe with ecological approach so they can get the general ideia of the sport. But once they understood it…

That's great to hear! Really great feedback, thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed it.

Hahaha, thanks for watching!

That's awesome to hear, thanks for watching! Greg's the man.

Awesome, glad you enjoyed it! Thanks for watching.

exactly!

Thanks for watching, glad you liked the format of the video!

Thanks bro, had a great time making this, glad you got something from it! Greg's the man! Hopefully you and I can do some more of this together.

Yeah, Greg is awesome. Definitely one of the best coaches I've been around!

Glad it was helpful! Thanks for watching!

Glad you enjoyed it!

Appreciate you for watching! Glad it’s helpful

Thank you! And thanks for watching

Thank you! Yeah that's definitely one of the criticisms I've seen a lot lately, that people think coaches just hang back and let students try to magically figure stuff out, lol. The key is the game design, which takes a lot of work.

Glad it was helpful!

Thanks for watching!

Haha I love it! Thanks for watching!

Thank you!

thanks brother! glad you liked it

That's great to hear, I'm glad you enjoyed. Thanks for the feedback, and for watching!

I teach historical fencing,not grappling so take what I say with a pinch of salt. However, what I do in my private lessons is largely very similar to my general classes, just focused on the specific issues my student has asked me to help them with. You still design a game but you play one of the roles and your student another. It also allows you to be more specific with game design to really focus on a particular issue they;re dealing with. And you can tweak it as you go. Sometimes what the student needs however isnt necessarily skill development but rather confidence building or emotional endurance practice or expanding stress capacity or increasing intensity. For such things you may want an asymetric game of a particular sort. A student recently wanted to focus on using thrusts as opening actions and landing them as often as possible. Once we felt that was good we added certain opening conditions to make the game more representative to the end game(a particular tournament he was to attend). Then we also added particular follow up responses on my end and misdirections I could throw his way. If you had a student that needed to work on for example blast doubles as opening actions you'd first focus on a game that rewards blast doubles(having the opponents back touch the mat being a win condition for example,and having a cue to tap the backs of the opponents knees as you run your shoulder through them, giving them some cues on timing and potentially arm clearance tips) then you might want to add a goal of attaining side control from top position, for which you might give cues and tips similar to what was going on in the first half of the video etc. etc. You'd just be playing the other side, while they're working on those objectives,and you'd have your own win conditions too If you wanted to focus on building confidence you might make a game asymetric in their favor, if you wanted to make it a pressure test you could make it asymetric in your favor, etc. Asymetric as in,one side has easier win conditions to achieve, in fencing that could be something like one side having only shallow targets count(arms,legs when closer than the torso), and the other side having only deep targets count(head,torso,legs when at the same distance as the torso), cause you can hit the shallow targets from further away and tend to have at least a small advantage In grappling that could be like one person having to achieve a closed guard or side control, while the other might have to achieve a submission of some sort Within a private lesson you can also more easily more often change the game than in a big class with lots of folks. You can always constrain the game to something more specific if that's what your student requires. You just dont want to lose too much representativeness of the general game (bjj/judo/greco-roman/freestyle/whatever grappling style) they're interested in learning Or even if you go super-specific with one game,to have other specific games for other aspects of the general combat sport/martial art.

thanks man!

Awesome, glad it was helpful! Thanks for watching!

Thanks for watching! I have a few more in the pipeline to edit, stay tuned!

Thanks for watching, glad you got something from it! I'm not in Rockville anymore but if I get back up there I'll ask Greg if he's down to do that.

Thank you for watching! I'm glad it's helpful. Greg's the man!

I don't think there's anything out there like that right now, but I'd love to see it too! I know Kit Dale has a course on task-based games, but I'm not sure the degree with which it aligns to CLA.

Thanks Josh! Keep up the great work.

www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?mid=1e5MPTbxnzyb4OO_haZ6y52IsQJADT6w&ll=41.164983660081425%2C-77.84399984036094&z=5

Thanks for watching! More to come soon from my trip to Standard

Thank you! I'll be posting more soon from my trip there!

oh no! sorry to hear! what happened?

I’ll let Greg add his additional reading list, but some good ones so far that I’ve read: - How We Learn to Move by Rob Gray - Learning to Optimize Movement by Rob Gray - Constraints Led Approach by Ian Renshaw et al

@@joshbeambjj appreciate it Josh!

I think one of the primary ways is by scaling the variability of the games

Yeah you’re right, I noticed this afterwards 🥲 good feedback, thanks.

Finally, someone addresses the most important aspect of the video 🤌😂

@@joshbeambjj 😂😂😂 keep it up josh this was a great video!

I think you're definitely right about needing a highly skilled coach (in both BJJ and who has a deep understanding of CLA) so that the practice can be designed in a way that teaches the correct skills (and also, no offense taken at all on my end, I'm still just a blue belt and have a long way to go to understanding deeply the skills to build in these positions). Luckily for his students, Greg is highly skilled in both areas. Thanks for watching and for your comment!

Deandre isn’t even in this video 🤣

what are you referring to?

@joshbeambjj i am referring to how you put entire paragraphs and long sentences in each bullet point. a bullet point need to be concise and to the point- or else the person looking at it is just annoyed by too much useless info hence will ignore it rather than sit there deciphering the novel you wrote

@joshbeambjj an example of this: -The top player goal is to push arm in and setup the one arm in and out configuration. vs -top uke goal: setup the one arm in & out position

Congratulations bro! You’ve done it! You’ve solved the problem of cognition in motor control, the problem of transfer, and helped us understand the true nature of specificity all in one run-on-sentence. It’s nice to know that we can all now halt our efforts. Thank you sir.

Why do you say that?

Most likely cause they didn't actually watch the video

It gives the vibe that it produces weak Bjj practitioners. “Coach, why didn’t you just tell me NOT to leave my foot in his armpit? I’ve been doing that in your class for years!”