John Danaher reveals how Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu saved his life four times, despite its initial reputation for leg locks as a last-resort tool. His "double trouble" system—controlling both legs to neutralize resistance—reshaped modern BJJ, while injuries (bone-on-bone hip, knee collapse) forced him to adapt training without surgeries. Danaher’s coaching philosophy, exemplified by George St-Pierre’s skill integration and Khabib Nurmagomedov’s dominance, hinges on transcending individual martial arts through setup mechanics, pace control, and direction. Yet even champions like Chris Weidman—who lost three UFC title defenses to Rockhold (one-arm guillotine), Romero (flying knee), and Mousasi—struggle when wrestling speed disrupts their game, proving adaptability is the ultimate weapon in MMA’s ever-evolving landscape. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, what the internet is, is it shows what people are like when there's no social cues, when they're not in front of you, they don't have to deal with, like, looking you in the eye, and what weird little hidden demons of jealousy and anger and resentment.
It wasn't really a question of wanting to figure out.
It was a pretty simple desire that I had.
When I grew up in New Zealand, martial arts was almost entirely based around striking prowess.
You'll back me up on this, Joe.
We're similar age.
When we grew up, the...
It's no exaggeration to say that the study of martial arts in English-speaking countries, North America, Western Europe, etc., was absolutely dominated by the striking arts.
And if you ask the average person who was the best fighter in the world, they would typically say whoever was the best boxer in the world.
So in the 1980s, Mike Tyson wasn't just the best boxer in the world, he was the best fighter in the world.
People...
Always equated prowess in fighting with the ability to strike.
I grew up in that time period and so I grew up studying kickboxing as a teenager in New Zealand.
I came to the United States And for the first time, there's no wrestling culture in my country.
New Zealand has no wrestling culture.
It's one of the few countries where there's no indigenous wrestling culture.
There were, but it was kind of lost in the sands of time.
When I grew up, wrestling was something I saw once every four years at the Olympics on TV. And I didn't even associate it with fighting, to be honest with you.
I just saw it as this strange sport where two guys tackled each other.
And so I came to the United States and I was working as a bouncer.
America has much, much more of a wrestling culture in it.
In New Zealand, when I grew up, when you fought, you were expected to fight with fists and if it went to the ground, the two guys stood up and they resumed fighting.
You stood up and you fought like a man.
That was the idea.
And in the United States, when I was bouncing, I was Absolutely shocked and impressed by the prowess of judo players and wrestlers in street fighting, working as a bouncer.
I worked alongside them and I was massively impressed.
To give you an example, I used to live on West End Avenue on the Upper West Side.
When I would come home from working in nightclubs at 5.30 in the morning to go to sleep, there would be large numbers of street-walking prostitutes on my block, my avenue.
If you saw even a single street-walking prostitute in that area today, it would be front-page news of the New York Times.
It would be so shocking, so completely out of people's minds.
1991, I believe, was the year with the highest murder rate in recorded history for New York City.
So it was a very, very different New York City.
It's not what you see today.
So I came into this environment and I saw these people were incredibly adept in fighting.
They were using grappling technique to do so.
This impressed me a lot.
Shortly after that time, as I was working, I started to hear talk about this show, this ultimate fighting show.
And there was this Brazilian guy who had beaten everyone.
He was wrestling people and strangling them and locking their arms, things like this.
Things that I'd never heard of.
So I'd heard this and...
One day I was teaching at Columbia University, and a close friend of mine, who was also on the PhD program, came into my office.
It was office hours.
And he said, John, you know, I know you work as a bouncer.
And I know you work at night.
And I started doing this martial art.
It's called Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
And it's mostly fought on the ground.
And I remember you said most of the fights you get into, people get put down on the ground and they wrestle.
And I was wondering if you would be interested in doing it.
And I was like, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu?
I never associated martial arts with Brazil.
For me, martial arts, Japan, Korea, Brazil.
What do they got?
Capoeira?
Who's this guy?
So I'm like, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu?
Isn't Jiu Jitsu like Japanese?
Isn't it like a contradiction of terms like Brazil Jiu Jitsu?
So at the time I was around 230 pounds and this guy couldn't have been more than 140 and he'd only been training two weeks.
So he goes to me, we go on the ground and we wrestle on the ground.
And I was like, okay, let me put you in a headlock and let's see what you can do.
So I shut the door of the office.
I cleared out the furniture.
This poor kid on the ground.
Now, the only thing I knew how to do on the ground in those days was headlock people.
I was a strong guy.
I had a pretty nasty headlock.
So I grabbed my poor little friend and throttled him with basically a Kezika Tamay type headlock.
And to my shock and horror, he started slipping around behind me.
And I started holding harder and harder.
And about two minutes went going, and I really had no real control over him.
And he was starting to get around behind me.
Now, I didn't know back attacks were.
I had complete naivety on the ground, but I could feel something bad was happening.
Someone getting behind you is never a good thing in a fight.
And I was getting tired.
My arms were getting tired.
I had no control over the guy.
And finally, he slipped out, and I had to stand up and run away.
Are you kidding me?
I'm twice your size.
You've been training two goddamn weeks.
And if this was a real fight, he would have got away from it.
I'm tired.
That's not good.
And I was going to say, if he did this in two weeks, What could you do with some training?
So I was fascinated.
I went down, got completely destroyed on my first day.
It was hilarious.
Who was there on his first day?
Matt Serra.
He was a blue guard at the time.
So even on that first day, you met people that would become very important in your life later on.
And I vowed to the moon and the stars that I would at least become competent.
I couldn't live with the idea that I was incompetent at an important element of fighting.
I didn't want to be a world champ.
I just wanted to be competent.
And I believed it would make my bouncing work significantly easier.
That was absolutely true.
Within a very, very short period of time, bouncing got massively easier for me.
You always hear this cliché, jiu-jitsu saved my life.
How many people say that all the time?
Well, I can think of, without any question, there are four times in my life that jiu-jitsu actually did save my life.
I can say that with complete honesty.
It's a cliché for most people.
For me, it did happen.
So it made a massive difference, but I still saw it as something that was interesting and something I just wanted to gain competence in.
That fundamentally changed because really at that point I wanted to finish my PhD and become a professor.
That was my original goal when I came to the United States.
But things started to change when the three senior students at the Henzo Gracie Academy, Hikato Almeida, Matt Serra, and Rodrigo Gracie all went their separate ways.
They had to go out and start their own schools.
And Henzo was busy fighting professionally in Japan, so he couldn't be at the academy all the time.
And he came to me and he said, John, you're going to have to be a teacher.
So this is in the 90s and you are a purple belt at the time.
When did you develop this leg lock system that has become so legendary?
So for people, for the uninitiated that have never heard of you or understand what we're talking about here, For the longest time, jujitsu was primarily attacks on the arms and the neck.
That was pretty much it.
And there were known attacks on the legs, but they were frowned upon.
Yes.
Something happened.
You got to see some of those techniques in MMA. You got to see some heel hooks, occasionally foot locks.
There's a few guys.
Orlovsky pulled off a foot lock in the UFC against Tim Sylvia.
There's a few guys that were pulling these off.
This is pre-Husamar Palhares.
But you all of a sudden came along with this very effective system that there was rumblings many years ago about this where a lot of people were talking about it.
And a lot of people were saying that, you know, John Donaher has this insane leg lock system, and then you started developing all these...
For people who don't know, the top grapplers in the world...
There's a lot of top grapplers in the world.
Jiu-Jitsu is incredibly competitive, but...
You're recognized as being one of the premier coaches of the most promising young people, like Gordon Ryan, who you're talking about before, who's an Abu Dhabi champion, Gary Tonin, Nicky Ryan, Eddie Cummings.
You have an incredible crew of world-class strangle artists who are also known to be some of the very best leg lockers in the world.
The first question, your first question was a historical question.
How did it happen?
Yeah.
First off...
There was nothing in my early learnings of jiu-jitsu which suggested leg locks, nothing.
Henzo would teach.
By the way, I should say my sensei throughout my entire career has been Henzo Gracie.
I never left Henzo.
He taught me from white belt to black belt and I never left his academy.
I'm the only one of his students who stayed with him from white belt to black belt and never left.
So Henze would teach leg locks, but it was taught in always the same fashion that everyone else did.
Here's a move, here's a figure four toe hole, here's a heel hook, here's an Achilles lock.
So the moves themselves were known.
They were in existence.
It wasn't like I invented heel hooks or something like that.
That's not the idea.
But they weren't emphasized.
A very, very talented and influential figure in my life was a guy that I only knew for three days.
Now that sounds crazy, right?
How can you learn something from someone in three days?
Well, actually, the influence he had occurred in three minutes.
I'm a big believer in the idea that someone can come into your life for a very short period of time and have a massive influence.
I truly believe that.
In my case, it was a great American grappler called Dean Lister.
Dean Lister was invited by Matt Serra to come to the Henzo Gracie Academy.
I believe, don't quote me on this, but I believe Dean was a brown butt at the time.
I'm pretty sure Matt was a brown butt at the time, too.
And he brought him in for around three days and he trained mostly with Matt Serra in preparation for a grappling tournament, if I remember correctly.
Now Dean was known mostly in those days for his Achilles lock.
Later on he would become a heel hook specialist, but in those days it was mostly an Achilles lock.
And he came to the academy, he rolled with some people, and he was doing Achilles locks and getting some success.
You know, it went both ways.
I remember he couldn't really get his stuff to work on Matt Serra, and Matt Serra could get his stuff to work on him.
But he was doing something which was unusual.
And so I talked with him just briefly after class, and I said, you know, it's interesting what you're doing with these Achilles locks, because I don't really do that at all.
He went on to become two-time ADCC champion, mostly with leg longs.
But what Dean gave me was not technique, didn't show me a single technique.
But he gave me a point of view.
If you give a man a point of view, you can change him.
He can work from there.
That was the influence.
And my sensei, Henso Gracie, was an extremely liberal-minded professor of jiu-jitsu.
He would let us do whatever we wanted.
He wasn't one of those guys who said, no, no one in my academy is studying leg longs.
He was never like that.
He would allow his students to go in any direction they wanted, provided they could prove it was effective.
So I started studying leg locks, and that's where I'm going to come to the second question, which you asked, which is why did leg locks have such a bad reputation in jiu-jitsu?
It's curious, right?
We don't talk about this way about arm locks.
I'm going to run through the main criticisms, and you'll be my witness on this, Joe.
I'm sure you heard the same criticisms a thousand times.
You would always hear people refer to leg locks in the following way.
The first criticism, they were too dangerous.
If you allowed people to do leg locks, everyone would be injured in a week and jiu-jitsu would be impossible.
So that was the first criticism you would always hear.
The second great criticism is they didn't work.
You might be able to tap out a white belt with a heel hook, but if you have a world championship level, you're never going to tap anybody.
They didn't work at high levels.
By itself, those two criticisms seem to go in opposite directions.
If they're really that dangerous, But they don't work.
How do those two gel?
They're either incredibly dangerous to the point where they can't be practiced or they don't work.
The two arguments contradict each other.
Then you hear other arguments that they were positionally unsound.
That if you were in top position and you went for a leg lock, you would lose position and that was a disaster.
That's a criticism with no merit because that same criticism applies to guillotines, arm bars, etc.
You can be mounted on someone.
Go for an arm lock and lose position and end up on bottom.
But no one criticizes armbars.
So as I went through the reasons why people criticized leg logging, none of them really made sense.
So I started asking myself, well, often the reasons people give, as opposed to what the real reasons are, are very different.
And the more I thought about it, the more I thought the real reason people don't like leg logs runs much deeper than that.
Let's understand Jiu Jitsu for what it is.
Jiu Jitsu is a systems-based approach to fighting.
What is the system of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu?
Well, it can be described in a few different ways.
I'm going to give you one rendition, which is pretty simple and will resonate with most of your listeners.
Jiu-Jitsu is a system based around four distinct steps.
You can add steps, you can subtract steps, but the rendition I'm going to give you now is probably the most widely known.
Okay, let's say a friend of yours asks for advice on fighting.
He knows you're a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu expert.
You're a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
And he's saying to me, Joe Rogan, tell me, I don't know anything.
I want to fight someone else using your Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
What are the steps of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu?
What is the system that it espouses?
You're going to see always that step number one is take your opponent to the ground.
Okay.
Why?
Why do you think the ground is so special?
Why did Brazilian Jiu Jitsu choose the ground as step number one of its system?
What's the most explosive event in the Olympic Games?
The event that probably requires more Transfer of energy and development of kinetic energy than any other.
There's a bunch you could name, but one of them for me is always going to be the javelin throw.
The javelin throw involves a full powered sprint, a jump, a massive explosive turning of both hips and shoulders, and a throw.
All the quintessential explosive elements of the human body are involved in the javelin throw, probably to a greater degree than any other Olympic event.
And as a result, people can throw a javelin 80, 90 meters.
What would happen if you took those same javelin throwers and made them perform the same event on their knees?
Every one of the pins of Jiu-Jitsu, the value of it is measured by your potential to strike your opponent on the ground.
That's why they score more.
Neon Valley scores more than side control, because from distance of Neon Valley you can strike with more power.
It's inherently unstable, however, so it scores less than mount, which is inherently more stable, and offers the same punching platform.
Step number three of Jiu Jitsu is to work your way through a hierarchy of pins where the pins are graded in value according to your ability to strike with effect on the ground.
So far we've got three elements in this system of Jiu Jitsu.
Step number one, get the fight down to the ground where explosive kinetic energy is less likely to be developed by a dangerous opponent.
Step number two, get past his dangerous legs.
Step number three, work your way through this hierarchy of pins where the pins are understood in terms of the potential to harm your opponent with strikes on the floor.
When the system's not working and you can't take your opponent down, you can't pass as guard, you can't maintain a dominant position, and you can't get the regular submissions to work, fuck it.
The worst injuries in Jiu-Jitsu don't come from submission holds.
The worst injuries in Jiu-Jitsu come from falling body weight.
When people jump guard, when people accidentally, when poorly performed takedowns, that's where you see catastrophic injuries in Jiu-Jitsu.
That's where you see career injuries.
The joint lock submissions, you're out for a week, two weeks, you know, catastrophic injuries.
As I said, go on YouTube and put in, God, Paul, gone wrong.
You'll see catastrophic injuries.
You'll see career-ending injuries there.
You're not going to see it from arm bars, heel hogs, etc.
You'll see people getting hurt, but it's a contact sport.
You expect that, okay?
No.
There's a very simple, elegant system, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.
We just saw one rendition of it, the four-step approach.
And you clearly see leg locks don't fit comfortably into that system.
What I did is I tried to find an avenue where they could come in.
And the results were surprising.
The first thing is our four-step rendition of Jiu Jitsu I looked at Jiu Jitsu from top position, where we took our opponent down to the ground and we were on top of them.
But my study of Jiu Jitsu didn't start from top position.
It started from bottom position.
If you look at my students in competition, you will notice that around 80% of their entries into leg locks come from bottom position or with their opponent behind them.
In other words, from what are supposedly inferior positions.
So for me, it was never a question of losing position when I went for leg locks because I was already underneath my opponent.
I started underneath.
How can I end up on bottom by going for a leg?
I'm already on bottom.
So most of my early work in leg locks was how to get into leg locks from disadvantageous positions, from underneath or when someone is behind me.
So I never felt this problem of, okay, I'm going to lose position if I go for leg locks.
I could still play a conventional jiu-jitsu game and have a very, very strong leg lock injury.
That was the first avenue of leg locking.
But things became more interesting when I got further into the leg lock game and I started to realize that as you add leg locks into the game, you change the very nature of the sport.
If you look at Jiu Jitsu as it's ordinarily practiced, it's a single direction game.
If someone is in front of me and I'm standing over them, Jiu Jitsu is all about movement from the legs towards the head.
I'm supposed to pass their guard, work my way up to chest-to-chest contact, and get my head next to their head, either in front of them or behind them, either mounted or rear-mounted.
So Jiu-Jitsu always goes in one direction.
If you ever get stopped or you lose position, you just start the process over again.
It's a mono-directional sport.
It always goes from the legs to the head.
Once you start adding leg locks into the game, jiu-jitsu becomes a two-directional sport where you can go from the head down to the legs.
You can go in both directions.
So if I'm passing someone's guard and I simply can't do it, I can fall back and go back into the legs.
If I'm side control on someone and they start to recompose their guard, I can fall back into the legs.
I'm going from their upper body down to their lower body.
Traditional Jiu-Jitsu always goes from the lower body, directionally, up to the upper body.
So you end up head-to-head with your opponent.
But once you start adding leg locks, Jiu-Jitsu for the first time becomes a two-directional sport instead of a one-directional sport.
And you can play your opponent's reactions between the threat of lower body and upper body in ways that opens up submissions so much more easily than the traditional game.
The first thing that I started to look at is, okay, who out there is doing a good job of leg locking?
And the honest answer was there weren't a lot of people.
What you would see is random success with leg locks.
You'd see a guy wins a match here, a guy wins a match there.
Most of the eminent leg lockers of that generation were actually coming out of Japan.
You'd have people like Romina Sato who had a decent heel hook for that time.
Iminari.
That was a little bit pre-Iminari.
Iminari came slightly after Romina Sato.
They fought each other in grappling matches.
One was younger than the other.
But, you know, they had some success.
I believe even Sakuraba finished Newton with a knee bar.
So, you know, the knowledge was there.
But there was nothing systematic about it.
There weren't people who were coming out and just systematically finishing people with one move.
So there wasn't much in terms of people to study.
So the first thing I started to ask is what is the nature of leg-locking?
It seems to have some problems associated with it.
It's not as controlling as the traditional methods.
That was really the key word there, control.
Why do people favor things like rear naked strangles so much?
Because it's such a controlling position.
Rear mount is an incredibly controlling position.
Why do people favor things like karagatame, the arm triangle?
Because this too is a very inherently controlling position.
All the most high percentage Finishing holds in jiu-jitsu all have control as their dominant feature.
It's hard for people to work.
And as a result, one person can continue to use the same move with a large degree of success over time against a wide array of opponents.
So every question I asked ultimately always came back to control.
And the one thing you would see with regards to the use of leg locks in the late 1990s and early 2000s was a lack of control.
So all of my studies immediately went to the notion of control.
Now, there are many forms of leg lock, but the ones that interest me the most always come out of what the Japanese call ashigurami.
Ashigurami is a generic term.
It just means tangled legs.
There are many different forms of ashigurami.
Ashigurami is a mechanism by which I can use two of my legs to control my opponent's legs and hips.
What I started to do was make a deep study of this notion of Ashigurami.
How am I going to use my legs to control the real estate between my opponent's knee and his hips, preferably on both sides?
Probably the single biggest cliché that you'll hear about Jiu Jitsu is that it's position before submission.
At the time, I was primarily interested in the idea of control before submission.
Control is a much deeper and wider concept than the basic point structure-based position before submission model of Jiu Jitsu.
There's many ways to control people.
They have very little to do with position.
For example, Ashigurami itself scores nothing in Jiu-Jitsu, but done well, it can control an opponent just as well as rare mount can.
So I started to see that there are many forms of control that went outside of the traditional, basic, positional hierarchy of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
Ashigurami was one of them.
Probably the single greatest key in the development of my leg lock system again came from a simple realization that the greatest mistake that people had made in leg lock work prior to the arrival of the squad was that they made no distinction between the mechanism of braking and the mechanism of control.
Ashigurami was the mechanism of control.
The lock itself, whether it be a heel hook, an Achilles lock, a figure four toe hold, that was the mechanism of breaking.
If you watch 99% of the people out there who claim to be experts in leg locking, they don't distinguish between the two.
They see, for example, heel hooking as a single skill.
There's the lock on the legs, the ashigurami or whatever term they use for it, and the lock itself.
They're not distinguished.
They're taught as a single skill.
You can't differentiate the ashigurami and the lock.
And you'll see people teaching in this manner.
What I did was to strongly distinguish between the two so that my students could all hold an ashigurami position and switch from one ashigurami to another and hold people for extended periods of time and inhibit movement.
If I can inhibit movement for long periods of time, I can break you at will.
I can take my time when I come to break you.
Because the control is there, the control is prime, the break is second.
For most people it's just throw on the ashigurami and immediately go for the lock.
The ashigurami is described as part of the heel hook.
They don't distinguish between the two.
Once I made that realization in the early 2000s, that's when the ball started rolling.
That's when a significant amount of progress was made.
I would say that your question was an interesting one.
Okay, you had the insight.
Lister gave you the insight.
What started you going?
It was making first a critical distinction between control and submission, and in the case of leg logging, between the mechanism of control, ashigurami, and the mechanism of braking, which is the lock itself.
A really good example of this is how effective it's been implemented by your students against real world class Brazilian Jiu Jitsu competitors who don't use these methods.
Like a good one is Gordon Ryan versus Cyborg.
Cyborg who is a fucking beast of a man and just a physical specimen, a real freak.
And is known for his tornado guard, is no stranger to leg locks.
He's no stranger to any of the positions of no gi or gi jujitsu.
But when I watched Gordon wrap him up and control him, and before he got the submission, you could see Cyborg look completely befuddled.
A real world-class brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt like cyborg when you watch that that match I was like this is stunning because gordon is what 21 years Which is amazing and cyborgs in his 30s, right?
Yeah, he's one of the best guys in the world And when you look at how well Gordon dismantled him on the ground using the strategy that you just described, it just...
See if we can find that, actually.
See if you can find Gordon Ryan versus...
His actual name is, I believe you pronounce it, Abru.
That's fucking crazy and immediately he dives under Gets low Using butterfly guard And so what he's trying to do, Gordon is trying to do what with Cyborg's legs?
Initially, there's a battle going on here for inside foot position.
Cyborg is an extremely well-trained and knowledgeable opponent, and he's doing a good job of trying to backstep with his left leg.
He knows that if he keeps both of his feet on the left-hand side of Gordon Ryan's body, he will be able to prevent his opponent getting inside position.
So he's doing the right thing.
He's doing a good job here.
Cyborg's not naive.
As you said before, he's a multi-time world champion.
He's very, very good.
He's not leg-locking someone who doesn't understand what's going on.
He knows what Gordon Ryan wants.
There's a battle here for inside foot position.
Cyborg is doing the right thing.
He's going into a back step.
He's going to post his right hand on the floor and try and back step out.
Let's go just a little further forward into the video.
The only question is, how long is it going to take?
Why am I so confident?
Am I an asshole?
Am I saying this because I'm an asshole?
No, I'm saying this because I know what's happening.
I gave you one of the keynotes of the leg locking game already.
I'll say it again because it's so important.
The man whose feet dominate the inside position will always dominate the Ashigarami game.
Now, the second.
Whenever you go to attack someone's leg, 90% of the resistance on the leg you're attacking comes from the other leg.
That's so important I'm going to say it to you again.
Whenever I go to attack my opponent's right leg, 90% of the resistance is going to come from his left leg.
We talked about control.
The foundational principle of control in leg locking is a principle I refer to as double trouble.
Double trouble is a simple idea that if I control both of my opponent's legs, he no longer has the opportunity to use his second leg to defend the first.
So the amount of trouble that you've put him in is literally doubled in a matter of seconds.
Gordon Ryan has a hold of Cyborg's right leg with his left arm.
And he has a hold of Cyborg's left leg with his legs.
Why was I so confident that the match is over at this point?
Because both of Cyborg's legs are now controlled by Gordon Ryan.
He has just attained double trouble.
Now, let's slowly advance the video.
Do you see how cyborg's legs are in a straight line?
He's having a very, very hard time holding his base.
Stop.
Can you go back just a fraction?
Right about here.
Freeze.
Okay.
Our whole approach to Jiu-Jitsu is based around the idea of putting wedges around our opponent's body so that we can inhibit movement.
A wedge functions just as a door stopper stops a door from moving in a breeze.
The only thing better than a wedge is a reinforced wedge.
That's where the wedge is locked in place by another part of your body.
Gordon Ryan currently has inside position with the right leg.
He has control of Cyborg's other leg with his arm, so both legs have some degree of control.
But he's about to massively reinforce that control by locking a triangle or a senkaku around his opponent's leg.
In order for that to happen, he's going to have to lift his hips slightly off the floor so that he can elevate over Cyborg's left knee.
Watch the video.
There's the elevation.
There's the lock.
Freeze.
Freeze.
Now he's got Cyborg's two legs in a straight line.
That means Cyborg's only mechanism of posting or saving his balance is his left arm.
That's all he's got left.
At this point, the fight is done.
Cyborg's right leg is controlled by Gordon Ryan's left arm.
Cyborg's left leg is controlled by a reinforced wedge, the strength of both Gordon Ryan's legs locked up in a triangle.
Cyborg's actually a weight division heavier, I believe, than Gordon, but it doesn't matter.
At this point, both hips are controlled.
This is a full state of double trouble.
Both legs are controlled and a braking mechanism in place.
There's an ashigurami on the leg.
You can brake someone from there.
Cyborg knows his only method of not being finished is to keep his hips over Gordon Ryan's hips.
So the next battle is, how is Gordon Ryan going to put Cyborg's hips on the ground?
It's immobilizing the leg he really wants to attack.
He's switched his arm position from controlling the secondary leg, which he hasn't yet fully released, but he's put his elbow in front of the toes of the primary leg.
I'm told there's actually kind of like an industry of people who try to break what we do down and mimic it.
I know there's people putting out numerous instructionals.
They watch what the squad does and tries to break it down.
That's good and it's natural.
I'd be doing the same thing.
If someone else was coming out and wrecking people with a given rule, I'd be studying what they're doing too.
So yeah, there does seem to be an industry of that.
The question is how successful are they?
Do you see any other groups of people coming out and just exclusively finishing people with the same moves time and time again for years at a time at all levels of competition?
Tenth Planet guys have given you all the credit in the world, by the way, that they've started transitioning to a lot more leg lock attacks, leg lock defense.
What we find is that most people definitely struggle with defending it.
And, you know, this has been around for quite a while now.
It's been five years since the squad really started pushing this publicly.
And it seems like there's still going to be some...
Eventually people will figure things out.
It's just the way progress works.
But I think at this point it's pretty clear that people have changed their minds about leg locks.
People, I think, are recognizing that there's something different going on here, that this is a control-based approach to leg locks rather than, you know, a speed and power-based approach to leg locks.
And the evidence for its success really comes from the nature of the squad itself.
If you look at the three founding members of the squad, Eddie Cummings, Gordon Ryan and Gary Tonin, All three have very, very different body types.
All three have very, very different personalities.
And yet all three use a very similar game.
Two of those three athletes came from nowhere.
They had no competition record before they started training with me at the Henzo Gracie Academy.
One of them had a competition record.
I believe Gary Tottenham was a brown belt competitor in the Gi, but he had no leg lock game.
He was a guy who was essentially known for scrambling from bottom half guard and using rear naked strangles out of scrambles.
Strangles out of scrambles, my God, that was a tongue twister.
So Gary Tom was a particularly interesting case because he came to me as an already developed athlete.
He's trained under a very good friend of mine, Tom DeBless, and completely changed his game.
So that showed something very interesting.
That showed that someone could already have a developed game and then take on this and change their game.
So that was a particularly interesting case.
With the case of Eddie Cummings and Gordon Ryan, they came to me early in their development, so they took it on wholesale, as it were.
I think this style and approach and one of the things that's so fascinating about it is it really requires someone like you to systematically break it down the way you have described it.
I've done jujitsu for 20 years.
But I never stopped and thought of all the positions in the system, all the steps in the system, take the fight to the ground, get past the dangerous legs, achieve some sort of a dominant position, go for the submission.
What I find with most Jiu-Jitsu players is that they know what they're doing on an unconscious level.
My job as a coach is to make it conscious.
Now, for me, the most interesting thing, when I first started thinking about jiu-jitsu as a system, I did that when I wrote a book for my sensei, Henzo Gracie.
He asked me to write a book, and I started thinking deeply about, you know, what is this thing that I study?
I spend all day on the mantle.
What am I doing exactly?
And when you start consciously thinking about, okay, breaking it down into steps, you see Brazilian jiu-jitsu as a step-by-step system.
My question was, can I go further than that?
If jiu-jitsu was a simple single system, what about if you divided jiu-jitsu up into niche areas and instead of having one overall system you had an overall system with many subsystems within it.
So you had a leg system, a back system, a front headlock system, a kimura system.
My approach to jiu-jitsu is that I had recognized that much of the success of early Brazilian Jiu Jitsu came from its systematic nature.
The fact that it was a systems-based approach to Jiu Jitsu and I took various niche areas and created systems within systems.
Then things started getting interesting when I started integrating the system so that one subsystem failed you could transfer to another.
That meant that my students could put Opponents who had trained much, much longer than they had into a niche area which my students had so much knowledge of, so much training in that isolated niche domain that they could take someone who had trained three, four times longer than themselves and have more knowledge in that one domain than their much more experienced opponent did.
And so what you saw with the squad was incredibly speedy progress where they were getting wins against people who trained two, three times longer than they had.
And this idea of what I call integrated subsystems, instead of having Jiu Jitsu as just one simple single system, you keep the overall system of Jiu Jitsu, but you have subsystems within it, each one integrated with the other, so that when one system fails, you can pass off to another and go back and forth until you get the win.
That was my approach to Jiu Jitsu.
That's what I want to do.
If I can innovate Jiu Jitsu in any given direction, that's probably the one I would push the most.
When I was in my early teens, I was involved in a rugby injury where my knee was massively injured.
Over the next six years I would dislocate my knee.
The ligaments appeared to be severely compromised.
Every six months or so I'd get a fresh injury which would be severe and I'd be on crutches.
I spent a significant amount of my teenage years on crutches.
Around the age of 19 I had one last injury and my knee just seemed to have no power in it.
Things like I walked with a limp and you must remember this is in the 1980s in New Zealand and this is pre-MRIs, pre-arthroscopic surgery.
The doctors said well we can do an operation where we shorten the ligaments so there's less looseness in there and hopefully your knee will be strong again.
An operation was performed and unfortunately the ligaments were cut too short and as a result my leg never straightened again.
I developed a severe case of atherofibrosis where my knee actually became deformed and doesn't straighten.
Simple actions like walking, kneeling are extremely painful for me and have been my whole life.
Also, there were other kind of structural problems as I got older.
Because I walk with a limp and one leg significantly bent and one straight, I tend to be completely out of balance, out of sync with my body.
So I soon developed considerable hip and back pain.
So this is something I carried with me my whole life.
And when I started jiu-jitsu at the age of 28, there was a concern, you know, am I going to be able to do this?
Well, fortunately, ground grappling as a rule is generally easier on your body than standing martial arts.
I don't think, for example, with my leg I could even become moderately effective at Muay Thai or Taekwondo or something where you have to be able to jump and land.
I just couldn't do it.
Whereas jiu-jitsu, because it's on the ground, you can become pretty good.
So I battled through that and I developed a satisfactory degree of competence.
I got a black belt from Henzo Gracie and I became one of his main teachers.
So yeah, I had this problem and things didn't really become critical until my mid to early 40s when as a result of walking my whole life with a limp, my left hip started to become completely bone on bone.
So then the problems doubled because now I had a Completely screwed up knee and a hip, but I couldn't get any kind of operations because George St-Pierre was fighting, Chris Weidman was fighting.
They both had great goals and so I delayed the hip operation as long as I could until George had his first retirement and Chris Weidman became a world champion and then moved further away to Long Island.
He wasn't training with me so much.
At that time I started training the squad and my first active competitive grappling student was Eddie Cummings and I was able to work effectively with him as best I could with my hip problems and of course the original leg problem and then at some point I got to a point where I literally If I walked down a New York City block,
I would have to stop several times and just stand on the side of the road and wait for my hip to stop hurting so I could walk and it just became impossible to work with and I ended up getting a full hip replacement.
Knee replacement's a little bit more tricky because you don't have as much bone mass to work with.
And generally the longevity of knee replacements is not as...
Because there's much more movement in the knee than there is in the hip.
There's much greater range of motion.
There's less bone to affects too.
They generally don't have the longevity of a hip replacement.
I'm 50 years old, so ideally you would want a replacement that outlived you, but I would probably have to get a second knee replacement when I get older to replace the first, which is not ideal, but I'm probably going to have to do it.
So, to answer your question, in the early days it was an impediment that I worked around.
But as I got older, I had to do a first operation and now a second.
Believe it or not, Joe, I was actually scheduled to get my knee replacement tomorrow.
But I didn't do it because Gary Tonin is going to be fighting his first MMA fight in March 26. Now, is he fighting for 1FC? 1FC. Ah, interesting.
So if I got the knee replacement now, I would not be able to help him get ready for his first MMA fight, which I thought would be – that's not fair on my part.
But I think one of his main fears was that if he went through the amateur route and then worked his way towards the UFC, there would be problems because he's already an established name in grappling.
And I think he was concerned that it would be difficult for him to get people to fight amateur.
And then eventually make his way to the UFC. Whereas 1FC is a fairly well-known organization and they were pretty open.
He did a grappling match for them and they loved it.
They were like, you know, are you interested in MMA? So he could, as it were, go into a fairly high level of MMA right from the start as opposed to do a long, circuitous amateur route and then battle his way into the UFC. I believe, don't quote me on this, but I believe that was the logic behind it.
After the hip replacement, I could only do it verbally and I had to trust in my students, Eddie Cummings, Gary Tonn, Gordon Ryan and others, Brian Glick, no one knows him, but he's one of my great students.
I would point with a stick and they would do the moves for me.
Since then I've gotten a little better and I like to demonstrate as best I can.
There's days when I can barely walk and on those days I'll have the students go through.
Sometimes there's certain standing techniques that are a little risky for me to do and I'll have students demonstrate those.
Now, when you're teaching this system and you're showing all the guys in the squad, the Donaher death squad, do you have it worked out to the point where it's like you have a curriculum?
What an amazing resource for those guys to have someone like you standing over them, watching them and analyzing their positions and techniques and progress.
Describe that because you you didn't talk when like I remember I think one of our first long conversations with that some weird Denny's or something somewhere and one of those weird road shows Like we're just sat down.
One of the strange things about the sport of mixed martial arts is so young that there's still so much to be done.
Even the way people understand mixed martial arts to me is interesting.
99% of people who look at mixed martial arts see mixed martial arts as an eclectic sport.
In other words, it's a conglomeration of different martial arts kind of banded together and then you've got mixed martial arts.
It's a mix of martial arts and there you have it.
You get two guys in a cage and you've got mixed martial arts.
I never saw mixed martial arts as an eclectic sport.
I see it as a transcendent sport.
What I mean by that is there are four distinct skill areas of mixed martial arts.
Any one of those skill areas always goes beyond the component martial arts that make it up.
In other words, the skill area transcends the various martial arts that make it up and create something bigger and different from the core components that originally built it.
When you look at the sport of mixed martial arts, you see there are four dominant skill areas.
The first occurs when they first come out and the two athletes have no connection with each other and they're dancing around the cage.
This is the so-called shoot boxing phase which involves skills drawn from Western boxing, Muay Thai, Karate, freestyle wrestling and various other martial arts.
Where the two athletes are jockeying for position and typically they're trying to determine the direction of the fight.
Will it go down or will it stay up?
That's one skill area.
The second skill area is the skill area of the clinch, where the two athletes are both still standing, but now they've got a hold on each other.
They're no longer moving around at will.
This has its key components drawn from Muay Thai, Greco-Roman wrestling, freestyle wrestling, judo, etc., etc.
Then there's a third key skill area.
The area of fence fighting, fence boxing, where the two athletes are in a clinch, but they're locked on the fence, which dramatically changes the skills required for success than if you're in the open.
And then you have a fourth skill area, which is the ground.
And of course, that's divided into top and bottom position.
So there are four skill areas of mixed martial arts.
You could add more or less.
For example, you could add in the idea of the geography of the cage, you can add in new areas.
But let's stick with that fundamental four for now.
If you show me any one of those skill areas, yes, you can derive skills from those component martial arts, from Muay Thai, from Judo, whatever you choose.
But that skill area is going to have other elements that are not part of those original martial arts, that is something different, something unique, and something above the various component martial arts that made it up.
When you're fighting on the ground, a lot of what you do is derive from Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and modern mixed martial arts.
Most of the athletes come from a Jiu-Jitsu background.
When they work ground skills, they work in a kind of a Jiu-Jitsu framework.
But many of the things going on down there are a mix of things that are far outside of your daily training in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.
You can bring in things from Muay Thai.
You're throwing Muay Thai elbows on the ground, but on the ground the elbows have a very different feel from the standing position.
The mechanics behind them are significantly different.
You're throwing hooks on the ground, but the mechanics of throwing hooks on the ground are very, very different from the mechanics of throwing hooks in the standing position.
So yeah, you're bringing skills in from boxing, but you're adapting them too.
So the way to look at the sport of mixed martial arts is not just like, okay, I'm going to rope together some wrestling, some boxing, and see what happens.
Rather, you're developing skills in four distinct areas, a minimum of four, And the skills you ultimately develop go beyond and are significantly different from the core components that you started with.
And so ultimately the skills of a mixed martial artist at the highest levels transcend the various core martial arts that made the sport up.
You're going further.
When you fight in a mixed martial arts fight, you're a jiu-jitsu fighter, you use it a lot more than just jiu-jitsu and the various other boxing styles, etc., etc., that you use.
In the case of shoot boxing in George St. Pierre, everyone always talks about George's wrestling.
Now, George is a very good wrestler.
He's wrestled a long time with very good people.
But 90% of the success of his ability to take people down It goes far beyond wrestling.
It has to do with the precursors to the shot.
What wrestling teaches you to do in mixed martial arts is how to finish a shot.
It gives you the body mechanics to finish the shot.
But the setups are Completely different from wrestling.
I can show you endless examples of good wrestlers who went into mixed martial arts competition with no background in mixed martial arts and couldn't take anybody down.
The distance is different.
The stance is different.
The motion is different.
The setups are completely different.
The context is different.
You're being punched instead of grappling.
George In my opinion, throughout his career, had a level of skill and technical insight in the art of boxing, kickboxing into takedowns that no one else has even come close to.
Much of what he did in that area came from himself.
Did he have good wrestling coaches?
Absolutely.
Did he have good boxing coaches?
Absolutely.
Great Muay Thai coaches?
100%.
But the skills he was exhibiting went beyond any one of those teachers or even them as a whole.
The act of tying together all of those disparate skills came from him.
The integration of skills And so you have someone who had a wrestling background, had a boxing background, had a Muay Thai background, but ultimately what he was doing was something bigger than all of those put together.
There's a synergistic effect here where the sum was somehow greater than the components that individually made it up.
And that's what I mean when I talk about a transcendent sport.
George St. Pierre was largely responsible through individual experimentation, starting in his late teens and going through his entire career in the development of Shootbox.
Now, when you work as a coach for George, you weren't just working as a jiu-jitsu coach.
You were working in almost like a mastermind sort of a position.
I mean, I saw some conversations that you had with him where you discussed various things.
In fact, one of the things you came to me about was you asked me if I knew anyone who was proficient at the spinning back kick.
And that's how I got to working with George.
Your coaching with him was not just simply like, these are the principles of jiu-jitsu, this is what I want you to work on, when the fight goes to the ground.
You were working on a lot of different aspects.
You were a guy that sort of put it together.
Now, when you don't have a background in striking and you're looking at all of these various disciplines and trying to formulate a strategy for a guy who's such a supreme athlete like George, how did you formulate that?
Did you do it based on the individual, based on their physical strengths and limitations and sort of formulate what you think would be the best approach?
The squat's there like seven days a week, three times a day.
George was never like that.
So in the time available, we'll work on what we can.
So everything's always done with George.
How much time is available?
And what is the scenario that's coming up?
For George, almost always, it was an upcoming mixed martial arts fight.
So a lot of people often ask me, say, you know, how come he didn't teach George St. Peter leg locks?
Why wasn't he leg locking everyone in MMA? Well, that's a good question.
First off, leg locking, as you saw from the Gordon Ryan clip, requires...
If it's not done well, leg locking is one of those things where if it's done well, it's amazing.
But if it's done badly, it's the worst looking thing in the world.
It's a disaster.
Secondly, George's game, because his takedowns are so strong, is almost always done from top position on the ground.
It's rare for George to be in bottom position on the ground.
And in a fight situation, if you're already on top of someone and you've got the striking prowess of George St-Pierre, I was happy to coach him more in what we call grapple boxing, the skill of grappling to punching on the ground.
It just made more sense for him.
He's competent in leg-locking, but he's not like Gary Tonner, Eddie Cummings, or Gordon Ryan.
Could he finish most black belts?
Yeah, absolutely.
But why would you stake a fight where literally millions of dollars are being fought?
There's a legacy on the line.
Why would you take that risk when you could just stay on time and punch him out like he did with, say, John Fitch, for example?
So it didn't really make sense to push that hard on George.
Your question, though, was, okay, what about these other skills?
What about standing position?
Well, I'm fascinated not just by Jiu-Jitsu, but by martial arts in general.
And I've always believed all the various sport martial arts in the world have areas where they are particularly strong.
For example, people make fun of Taekwondo.
No one does Taekwondo or MMA. You'll back me up on this joke.
There are some Taekwondo players out there at Olympic level who can kick with a skill level that most people can't even imagine.
I've seen people like Herb Perez do kicking demonstrations where You're looking at it.
This is one of the most impressive things I've ever seen in my life.
And this is a guy who, if he hits you, he's going to take your head off.
But if you can integrate that into a well-developed Complete skill set, they could be incredibly effective and I always saw tremendous potential for Taekwondo's jump spinning back kick.
No one does spinning back kicks better than Taekwondo.
That's one of their main things and they do it incredibly well.
The setups are fantastic, the application, the mechanics, everything's super impressive.
So I always thought that would be a, you know, George had a good spinning back kick, but I thought that would be a nice addition.
You always want to be Building new skills into a pun.
You don't want to be that predictable guy where everyone knows what you're doing.
And I know you came from Taekwondo backgrounds, and so I thought that would be an interesting thing for you to work on with him.
When you see that, it's like those things by themselves, you're just gonna get taken to the ground and smashed and most people, unless you land one of those catastrophic spinning back kicks right away, the odds are you need all those other things as well in order to be particularly effective, which is why George was such a unique case.
Going back to your original question, the idea of George in Shootbox, you'll see that George's entire methodology in The Standing Musician is built around the concept of a dilemma.
The dilemma is always between his jab and his takedown.
People always talk about proactive and reactive takedowns.
Okay, this guy's a reactive, this guy's a proactive takedown guy.
The thing about George is he would use his jab proactively, but he would use his takedowns reactively.
Now that's interesting because George would literally provoke people into the takedown.
I'm not going to claim to be a medical expert, but it's one of the most frustrating things that George has had to deal with, where there are certain parts of the human body that are just out of your control, and the stomach is one of them.
Just things happening in your stomach, you can't control it.
Things like stress seem to make it worse.
And the truth is that no one really knows at this point.
So wherever there's doubt, my Instinct is to think well, do you really want to come back George?
And I gotta tell you when he came back This is what was really interesting about that fight George had said I'm better.
I'm a better martial artist than I was before and he looked better I mean, he definitely looked like he was a little out of competition Like there was a moment.
And I think you could see it in Bisping's face, like, pretty early on.
Like, this guy is...
This is not a rusty George St. Pierre.
He's not a small welterweight who's making his way in the middleweight.
He looked huge.
He looked phenomenal.
His technique, the way he was landing leg kicks and his sharp jab, and then ultimately that left hand that he used to stun Bisping and get him on the ground.
You were there the night George went into his first retirement, and you'll recall the whole retirement thing was kind of, the speech was vague, it wasn't clear, it was confusing, because in truth he didn't know if he wanted to retire.
The whole thing was actually contrived in the octagon, right there in front of you.
It would have been a hard fight.
The training camp hadn't been the best camp.
The fight for Hendrix was...
George was unclear if he wanted to fight at all.
There were all kinds of controversies involved in the fight.
And then when the fight was over, it was a very close fight.
And he wasn't sure what he wanted to do.
There was some language miscommunication.
And ultimately, essentially he walked away from the game.
And he walked away for four years.
That's a long time to be out of a sport that's as young as MMA, which is evolving all the time.
Every year the sport changes and the belts tend to change hands very, very quickly.
So when George started talking to me about the idea of, okay, I want to come back.
I think I've still got to come back.
I want to come back.
There's a desire, a passion.
And My point to him was, first off, you sure you really want to do this?
Like, you know, the last two fight camps was tough.
He didn't seem to have the same kind of drive as he used to have.
You sure you want to do this?
Is this like a middle-aged fantasy going through here?
And he said, no, no, I feel this.
I want to come back.
So my question to him was, If you're going to come back, are you just going to do the same thing?
Are you just going to come back to welterweight and do what you always did, which is come out and beat the best welterweights and just hold the title?
Are you just going to be doing the same thing?
I thought, if you're going to come back, let's do something significant, something you haven't done before.
And so the way I put it to him was, what are the three most persistent criticisms you always hear about George St. Pierre?
You never fought up a weight class.
You never went up.
Number two, you fought so tactically sound, with such an emphasis on strategy and techniques or what have you, that matches could become dull.
The average fan was like, well, yeah, he's winning easily and it's dominant, but doesn't do it for him.
It's not exciting.
There's no drama in the fights.
Okay?
So we had this idea that on the one hand he was very technically sound, strategically deep but the fights weren't as exciting as they ought to be.
The idea that he'd never gone up a weight category and the third most persistent charisma he didn't finish fights.
He was a very skilled fighter but he wasn't finishing fights.
So my point is, okay, if you're going to come back, let's do it in a way where you address those three things.
Okay?
George is always concerned about his legacy as a fighter.
And if there were three persistent criticisms of George NPS legacy, it was those three things.
You're not finishing fights, you never went up a weight class, and you're too tactical.
Okay?
You're not providing the drama that a fight should.
So I said, let's change things.
In that four years, previous to that, whenever I was training George, I was training him for a fight.
He was fighting Nick Diaz, he was fighting Carlos Condor, he was fighting whoever.
And it was always getting him ready for a fight.
You're fighting Matt Hughes in two months, let's get ready.
Now you're retired, I'm not going to train you to fight some dude.
I'm going to train you in jiu-jitsu.
Freddie Roach is going to train you in boxing.
In this sense, we had the time now to start working on finishing skills.
A significant change occurred where my primary emphasis in training George in that four-year layoff was in submissions.
Now, happily, that happened at what time?
The time the squad was coming out.
So I had a group of some of the best submission peoples in the world for George to work with.
So his submissions started getting better.
Suddenly George said, Pierre, if he got on your back, it was a problem.
He's submitting people in the gym.
I could run off some names.
I won't do it because it's not the thing to do, but I could run off some names of people he submitted in the gym that would shock you, like well-known jiu-jitsu people.
And for the first time, our primary emphasis wasn't on grapple boxing, it was submission.
Freddie Roach was working on the mechanics of punching.
George always had good in-out movement.
He always had that karate movement, the ability.
He always had a strong jab.
But now he's teaching him how to sit on a punch.
Suddenly George had a left hook.
A guy who can integrate left hand between jab and left hook, that's a dangerous man.
Everyone was worried.
There's so much overreaction to George's jab that suddenly left hook opportunities were opening up.
And now he was sitting on that left hook and people were getting hurt.
So now for the first time you've got a guy who's got submissions and he's hitting with genuine power.
As he came back, there was a question of who's going to be the opponent.
And the next thing I said is, well, you never went up a weight division.
Then he trained with a lot of guys who came out of Thailand itself, from Tiger Muay Thai.
Yod, that's a shortening of his actual name.
They all have very long names, but Yod was one of his trainers.
They trained him prior to Condit and Diaz.
Did a fine job.
So there's never been a shortage of coaches in his life, but there are certain things that seem to gel with him more than others.
Interestingly, during that four-year period, George had a strong rebirth into karate and worked with a lot of specialized karate people, including Raymond Daniels and others.
They came mostly from the European point-fighting karate circuit, and he was working with them a lot.
And so they crossed a certain period of time where you're dealing with a different athlete now.
This is a guy who's had four years off and the training had gone in different directions.
His finishing skills in both fisticuffs and grappling had gotten considerably better.
He was toying with the idea of going up to 85 and experimenting with diet, etc.
to get his body weight up.
That's never an easy thing to do.
And tactically, he was working more on the idea of being an exciting fighter through movement and pushing harder for the finish.
And I thought those were three very, very healthy directions to go in.
And this would, as it were, if he did come back, this would offer a genuine opportunity to address the three most persistent criticisms of his career.
Initially, there was a lot of persistence from the UFC. I don't think they were fond of the idea at all.
They wanted him to go to 170 and do what he had done.
But George pushed hard for the fight at 85, and ultimately it happened in a rather strange way.
Tyrone Woodley had a fight at 170, which wasn't the most crowd-pleasing fight, and George St-Pierre was supposed to fight Tyrone Woodley, and then the U.S. said, you know what?
Fight Brisbane, it's on.
So we chose the Madison Square Garden.
That's one of the great fight capitals of the world and that's how it happened.
There was a critical moment on a Friday evening where I said to Farah Sahabi, this is the second time I've had to say this to Farah Sahabi, the other was the Carlos Condit camp.
I said, if George isn't training by Monday, we're going to pull the plug.
Just light drilling, some movement, and it occurred at the worst possible time.
It wasn't at the start of the camp, it was in the middle of the camp.
So the first two weeks were lost because...
Then we had two weeks of inactivity.
Then there's two weeks left.
And I remember the first time I went up, I brought Jake Shields, Gary Toner, and Gordon Ryan with me.
We came up and we went through some drills on the ground.
And I was happy.
You know, George looked okay on the ground.
He did fine against the squad guys.
And we worked on some specialized grappling stuff.
And then the next day he went to do a shoot box workout.
Now, I could sit here all day and tell you adventures of George St. Pierre doing shoebox training with people.
I've seen him spar everybody.
I'm not going to mention names, but I've seen George St. Pierre take down effortlessly some of the biggest names in mixed martial arts, in weight divisions far above his own, So many times per round, you just lose count.
I'm afraid to even tell you the stories because people wouldn't believe me.
I'm used to seeing George St. Pierre shoot boxing, bang, bang, down.
I've seen that since the start of his career.
I watched George St. Pierre do a shoot box workout where he couldn't score a takedown.
This is a fight two weeks away.
I'm just looking and going like, holy heck, what is this?
He's getting hit.
He's getting frustrated.
He's getting tired.
And I said to Faraz, you know, this is a crisis.
This is one of the biggest UFCs of the year.
It's Madison Square Garden.
He's the headline.
The UFC had to pull some big things to get this fight to happen.
They originally didn't want it.
If we pull out now, it's going to look like a disaster.
It's going to let George let the UFC down.
And to his everlasting credit, George said, I'll be back on Monday and I'll be better.
We went up and he dug in deep.
What can I tell you?
He's a trooper.
He trained every day those last two weeks.
As each day went by there was significant improvement and I remember there was a distinct moment about five days before the end of the camp I saw him do a shoot box workout and he looked like the old George I was okay.
I believe you should google ulcerative colitis Yeah, I don't know it's so it's something to do with stomach ulcers I'm not going to claim to be an expert, but yeah.
But it appeared to back off a little bit in the last two weeks.
He came back.
This is the kind of person George St. Pierre is.
The morning of the fight, Saturday morning, we're in New York City in the hotel room.
Farah Sahabi, Freddie Roach, and myself are at the breakfast table.
George comes down for breakfast.
He's weighed in.
He looks at his breakfast.
Originally the plan, because it was a fight at 185, was to have George come in at a higher body weight.
But he ended up weighing 191 pounds, which is exactly the same as he used to fight at welterweight, the same body weight.
So that was kind of a disappointment, you know.
And he quietly excused himself and went to the bathroom.
Everyone else went away to do their things and I sat there and I realized he's in the bathroom for an hour.
He came out and I was like, George, you okay?
And he looked at me and he said, I'm fine.
But I knew he wasn't.
And then he went out and fought.
And then afterwards he told me, dude, I was in so much pain.
And he was afraid to tell me because he would worry that if I cornered him and I thought he was compromised, I wouldn't corner him the way I normally would.
That I would doubt him.
So he kept it all inside, didn't say a word.
And he's a good kid.
You know, you can't help but admire a kid like that.
One, I cannot discuss because it involves a personal life of George St. Pierre.
There were some things going on in his personal life.
That deeply affected him, and he was deeply unhappy with some circumstances in his personal life, and it's not appropriate for me to talk about those.
And the second was the whole idea that it had become an obsession with George at that time, which was the use of anabolic steroids in mixed martial arts.
And he was deeply unhappy with what he perceived as the prevalence of the use of anabolic steroids in mixed martial arts as a whole and among his opponents in particular.
And he wanted a testing program to be brought in for that fight.
There was talk about it but nothing came of it and it became like this psychological obsession during the camp.
Between those two issues, there was a lot of unhappiness.
He came in, he did his training.
He's a professional athlete.
It's not like he missed workouts or anything crazy.
There wasn't going out at night or anything foolish.
But there was a degree of unhappiness where I'm looking and thinking, how much longer can this go on?
Now There was some talk about the Tyron Woodley fight and then Tyron had this bad performance, but if George did get healthy and was confident enough in his health that he could get through an actual training camp, would he be interested in considering a fight with Tyron Woodley?
This is a very complex thing and you talked about it with George addressing that or attempting to address that in his comeback and trying to finish and be more energetic and aggressive.
The reality is, that's not always the best way to engage.
There's a right way to fight a person with a particular skill set.
Especially in the Woodley vs.
Stephen Wonderboy Thompson fights.
I was like, this is the only way to fight that guy.
Unless you are what he is, which is a very skillful, traditional martial artist.
That has this very unique ability to bend at the waist like a snake and slide in with techniques and does a lot off the front leg, dangerous stuff off the front leg.
Unless you can do that too, you really shouldn't be on the outside striking with him.
It's just too weird.
That style's too weird.
So he kind of had to lay back.
Again, if you look at the results of the fight, the times in the fight where someone was hurt, it was Tyron Woodley putting the hurt on Wonderboy Thompson.
Those were the only times in the fight where it was really exciting.
Other than that, it was Wonderboy trying to pick at him from the outside.
Yeah, but that's a hallmark if you're going to call someone the greatest of all time is they have to be able to take on a wide array of opponents and still be successful.
I just feel like when you look at Benavidez, when you look at just many different people that he fought showed him a bunch of different looks, a bunch of different styles.
I think that's the big fight because TJ's willing to go down to 125. So instead of fighting Dominic at 135, TJ's like, I can make 125. And TJ feels like he'll be the guy to break the legacy.
He'll be far bigger, stronger.
He feels like he can match him speed for speed.
And he thinks he can make the weight comfortably.
I'm really fascinated by that fight.
Because also I think...
TJ is one of the few guys that's trained by, I think Matt Hume is one of the great unsung heroes of MMA. I agree with that, yeah.
He's one of the few guys you can genuinely say has expertise across all areas of mixed martial arts and played a pivotal role in taking someone from being an unknown to a legitimate great world champion.
All the time I see people who...
People often don't make a distinction between recruiters and coaches.
There's many fight camps out there that are very good at recruiting people that were already good and helping them to manage them, etc., and make them slightly better.
The world's full of recruiters.
But there's not many coaches out there.
Matt Hume took a kid who no one had heard of and took him from obscurity to arguably one of the best of all time.
And he did it in a way where that kid went from being essentially a wrestler to a genuinely well-rounded mixed martial artist with a complete set of skills.
He's come into the academy a couple of times before fights.
I've never actually seen him train.
After his fight in Madison Square Garden, he fought himself and a group of his friends, his training partners, came into the academy and trained in my Monday afternoon class.
Khabib didn't train, he just sat on the bench because he just fought on Saturday night, so of course he's not going to train.
But his My training partners came in and trained with the squad.
That was a fun afternoon.
They rolled with, I think, mostly Nicky Ryan.
It's hard for them, of course, because it's submission grappling.
That's not really what they do.
They do more the interface of grappling combined with striking.
So they had a hard time with it.
But he struck me as a very, very nice person.
He's shockingly big for his weight division.
Shockingly.
Like all the people coming out of the Caucasus regions of Russia, his wrestling is extremely good.
They have probably the best wrestling program in the world.
That whole area stretching from Ossetia through Dagestan, through Chechnya, all the way down to Iran, that that area is just the hotbed of wrestling in the world.
And it shows with all their fighters, they're all strong in wrestling.
And then they just add to that the various skills and you've got a tough, tough group of people.
What's interesting about those two fights is you have basically polar opposites.
Khabib Nurmagomedov is a control-based fighter, whereas Tony Ferguson is a scramble-based fighter.
And just that clash in styles is going to be fascinating.
With regards to Conor McGregor and Khabib Nurmagomedov, the feeling one gets is that if they did fight, it would be a complete shutout in one of two directions.
It's either like a man beating up a child on the ground, or it's just a flush knockout.
A guy unable to cover distance properly and walking into a left hand and just being catastrophically KO'd.
You feel like there's potential for it to go in both directions.
I just think that you're dealing with a totally different kind of human being.
Those people from Dagestan are just so hard.
It's just a hard part of the world.
They're made of hardier stuff.
You know what I mean?
It's just like they have to deal with way more.
Not that people in Ireland are soft.
They're fucking hard people, too.
I just think that with, I've always said the most important, if you have a pyramid of technique when it comes to mixed martial arts, the base of the pyramid, the most important thing is the ability to control the grappling, the ability to take a guy down.
If you can take a guy down and control him, you have a significant advantage.
You can choose where the fight takes place.
And if you're competent in the stand-up, which Khabib is definitely competent in the stand-up, so you are adequate in the stand-up but overwhelming when it gets to the ground, you can present problems with a guy standing up, in which case problems the guy has to deal with the striking aspects which open up the takedowns.
I wholeheartedly agree with you, but I'll go a little further.
Whenever someone asks me, what are the programs, what do you look for when you see a guy dominating fights?
What makes someone go in the right directions with their training and their fighting itself?
I always say there's three things.
If you show me a fighter who can, one, dominate the setups, two, dominate the pace of the fight, and three, How can I phrase this?
Dominate the simple direction of the fight.
Three things.
Dominate the setups.
Dominate the pace.
Dominate the direction.
You show me a fighter who can do those three things and I'll show you a fighter who can win 95% of the fights he gets into.
Dominate the setups, dominate the pace, dominate the direction.
Think about someone like Khabib or anyone who comes from a strong wrestling or judo jiu-jitsu with takedowns based fighters.
They're always going to be able to dominate the direction.
They determine whether it goes down to the ground or whether it stays standing.
Khabib always dominates the pace of the fight.
Once you're on the ground, you're on top.
The other guy's just reacting to what you're doing, trying to get back up to his feet, etc., etc.
You're dominating pace.
If there's one weakness that Khabib has, it is he's not as strong at dominating the setups to get to those areas where he can dominate pace, etc., etc.
If he's going to lose a fight, it's going to be in that area.
And Connor, more than anything else, is a guy who dominates the setups.
So Connor's skill He's a master of dominating setups, especially in the standing position.
But Khabib's mastery, out of those three critical areas for domination in all forms of fighting, is he's incredibly dominant in determining the direction of the fight and the pace of the fight.
That's why he never gets tired in his fights.
He's got a very high work rate, but he never gets tired.
You never see him just completely shattered, despite the fact he's working hard the whole time.
But yeah, with regards to your point before, this core combat skill, the most important one that you as a commentator look for when you look at fighters, can you determine, you put grappling skill as the number one thing, whether it be wrestling, whether it be sambo, whether it be jiu-jitsu, or whatever.
I would go further and say, yeah, there's three things that I look for.
Like, there's several schools of thought, and one of them would be, one of the more interesting ones is Nick Kurson and Marvin Marinovich, that camp, they believe that you already know how to fight.
And that what the camp really should be about is just radical strength and conditioning to the point where...
I'm not a big believer in the idea that you're going to create big, significant, fight-changing physiological changes in six to eight weeks.
It's not really my experience.
But I can show someone a single technique which can have a direct impact on a fight.
I can show them that in five minutes.
I'm not going to claim to be a medical expert who has a deep understanding of these things, but my experience in coaching is that physiological changes take time, and you're not going to get it done in a fight camp.
Yes, you can make physiological changes over a year, two years, absolutely.
George went up a weight division, but it took quite a bit of preparation to do so.
So there was this incredible meteoric rise, and then there was a short period after that where he appeared to be crushing great former champions like Liotta Mishida, Vita Belfort.
He wasn't just beating them, he was just incredibly impressive.
And then I think people were shocked by what appeared to be an unbeaten record, and then suddenly three losses in a row.
Getting smashed by Luke Rockhold, getting KO'd by a flying knee from Yoel Romero, and getting dominated by Gegard Mousasi, and then all the controversy that led to that stoppage.
He was a student of Matt Serra, who's one of my great friends and training partners from the Henzo Gracie Academy.
And Matt was having some medical issues.
And he said, John, you know, can you take over this student of mine, Chris Whiteman?
This guy's incredibly talented.
And I'd heard of Chris because, you know, we're linked schools, fairly close by, and people were telling me about this amazing wrestler who's, you know, incredibly talented, picks techniques up.
And, you know, I always take these things with a grain of salt because people exaggerate and stuff.
So Chris started coming in.
And it was all true.
This kid, you can show him a technique on Monday and by Tuesday he's doing it better than you are.
And he has a gift for physical movement that you don't see very often in guys that big.
He's big, agile, highly intelligent, and had at that time A level of self-confidence that was deeply impressive.
I would show Chris a guillotine variation and then five minutes later he would be using it in the gym and then a month later be using it in an MMA fight.
He literally would see opportunities and immediately act upon them.
What I worry about with Chris is that in those three losses I'm not saying this has happened, but what I worry will happen is that fighters who are typically very dominant and were confidence fighters when they experienced defeat lose confidence.
And a big part of Chris's success was that ability to see opportunity and have the confidence to immediately act upon it.
So my concern, if I look at Chris, is will that still be there?
Will he still have the same confidence, which was such a big part of his rise to the top?
Will it be drastically altered by three losses?
And I'm very pleased to say that it didn't appear to be so in the fight with Gastelum.
He actually took a heavy hit at the end of the first round in that fight and came back.
It looked like he'd gone through those three losses and come back strong and everything was fine.
So I'm pretty confident Chris will go on to great success again at 185. Knowing how good Chris is on the ground, how shocked were you about the Luke Rockhold fight?
Chris stopped working with me after the second Anderson Silva fight.
We did most of that camp together and then he stopped working with me, moved further out into Long Island.
He opened up a gym with Ray Longo.
I went back to training with Matt Serra.
Those guys were incredible training camp.
They did a fine job getting them through the machida fights, etc.
I was at that UFC. It was in Las Vegas.
Conor McGregor was the main event and Chris was the co-main event.
The fight had an interesting beginning.
Chris was doing well with the takedowns, but Luke Rockhold was doing a great job of controlling Chris's head with fake guillotines to prevent any kind of damage on the ground.
They're doing a good job of standing back up to the feet, so there was no really significant damage.
Then they got into an interesting kickboxing battle, where it seemed to go in one direction, then switch directions, and then Chris seemed to be getting the better of it, and things looked good.
And then there was just one episode where everything just came unstuck in a second.
And I remember watching, and it was like watching a bad dream, you know?
Yeah, Chris threw an ill-advised wheel kick, which is slow and telegraphed, and Rockhold took him to the ground.
And what I was most shocked with was, and I've seen it time and time again, I saw it in the David Branch fight, and saw it in the Leo Machida fight, is Rockhold's top game is fucking terrifying.
I attribute that not just to his skill, which I think is considerable, but also to training on a regular basis with Daniel Carmiere and Cain Velasquez.
His wrestling, his grappling, is severely underrated.
Maybe not so now, but his ability to control guys on the ground is just terrifying.
Yeah, because he comes so hard with the upper body, he leaves the lower body open.
And you're right, there's no consequence to it.
He can just get up whenever he feels like it.
He has a greater propensity to change direction at speed than anyone else I've ever seen in my life.
People always talk about speed.
They're always, you know, this guy's fast or that guy's fast.
To me, there's two kinds of speed that impress me in fighting.
One is the speed of decision-making.
If you can make decisions, good decisions, faster than your opponent, you're going to win a lot of fights.
And the other is your ability not to go in straight lines at speed, but to change direction.
Speed of directional change is the most important kind of physical speed in fighting.
There's plenty of people that weren't really that fast, but they can change direction quickly.
And that's the kind of speed that counts in fighting.
So the two kinds of speed that you needed to be a fighter is speed of decision-making and speed of directional change.
And you see lots of fast people.
Usain Bolt is fast, but he's not fast in directional change.
That's not his thing.
But the thing about Joel Romero is there's a certain twitchiness to his movement where it's so hard to read where he's going, where he's going to be in the next half second.
It was it was it was terrible It's just the the amount of force that he can generate is just stunning But he's also a guy that's carrying around a tremendous amount of muscle.
And I wonder what kind of pace he can keep up.
You know, and we saw that in the Whitaker fight.
He faded a bit in that fight, wound up losing that fight.
We've seen it in several of his fights.
The Tim Kennedy fight, he faded in that fight and eventually came back to win.
But your breakdowns of technique and strategy and what is actually happening, I think they're critical.
Your voice and what you're doing with the squad and what you're doing for jiu-jitsu as a whole and the way you're able to articulate that and break these things down.