#50 What’s Better, Pulling Guard or Passing Guard? How you play your game can make or break your body

Do you pull guard? Do you go for the take down? The question is not which is better strategically to get the win but which is better for your body when it comes to minimising injuries? JT & Joey delve into exactly how certain positions put you at greater risk.

Guard retention is all Flexion
How to bulge a disc
Closed Chain vs Open Chain Movements
Bad Knees? Pass guard.
Neck Issues- why guard isn’t safe.

Regardless of your preference the positions you choose to play can have seriously negative effects on the body and if you already have injuries the boys have the answers on a better way for you to play.

Speaker 1: 0:04

Better listen. Very careful.

Speaker 2: 0:08

A good martial artist does not become tense, but ready,

Speaker 3: 0:13

Essentially at this point, the fight is over.

Speaker 1: 0:17

So you pretty much flow with the goal

Speaker 4: 0:22

Who is worthy to be trusted with the secret to limit this power.

Speaker 5: 0:28

I’m ready,

Speaker 6: 0:29

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another Bulletproof for BJJ podcast. I am JT. I’m Joey. What’s up guys. Welcome today. We will be speaking about what is better for your playing guard or passing guard . Contentious issue, right? There’s a lot of people out there saying, oh , God’s submissive. Guard’s weak people saying , oh , top game’s tough top game smash. A lot of people out there going be bowls , a king people playing guard . They’re winning lots. They’re doing all this, the race to pull guard . Yeah. That we see in the lighter of divisions, the double , the double guard pull you don’t see it as much at heavyweight. And people are very emotionally attached their identity to, oh , I’m a , I’m a Guera . I’m a guard player. And then so many memes about guard pullers , man guard is very central . Like, I mean, the guard is jujitsu is so it’s like the purest kind of the , the art, the heart of fighting off the ground. But we’re talking about it in the context of what is better for your body, cuz there’s a lot of people out there with injuries or they’re railroading themselves towards injury. And we are gonna talk about what we feel is better for your body. Not what is better for competition success, not what is better as better to jujitsu is an opinion more just like, what are you doing to your body when you play guard ? What you up less? Yeah, basically. That’s what it comes down to. And so if you are coming off the back of an injury or you’ve got a or even say you’re fit and healthy, but you can’t afford to get injured, what is gonna be the safer way for you to do jujitsu? And I’m gonna say it right now, guys, passing guard is easier and better on your body than playing guard . Yep . Yeah. So we’re saying top game, right? Top game. And why do I say this? Not because I’m a top game smash kind of guy. I actually spent the majority of my jujitsu career waits for me to pull guard time. I’ll play in top game now son. I mean, this guy’s gotta , he needs well , I’ve had to up my ju I throne mate. He needs to work on his guard . So that’s why I put him there. But no in truth I’ve been, I’ve been doing some Judah. I wanna work . It’s part of my game that I feel is lacking. That’s why I work on it. But in truth, I did more injuries in the first two of my jujitsu because I was playing bottom. Not because of the way I played bottom. My guard changed over time, went from a closed guard , half guard , very static to inversions and turning upside down and open guard and all kinds of stuff. But the truth is it is more taxing and we are gonna break it down for you. Don’t just take our opinion on it. Let’s analyze what that does to your body. So we see a lot of different injuries. Don’t we, Joe , we see a lot through jujitsu , a lot of problems. Yeah. Heaps of injuries. And we’ve dealt with heaps ourselves. Of course. And what I’m gonna say here is a lot, lot of the injuries, not all, but a majority come from too much flexion flexion in the shoulders like internally rotated hip flex is overemphasized. So we’re , we’re talking rounding of your body. So if you are hunched over back is rounded head forward. This is flexion. And then extension being arching the , the other way. Yeah , yeah . Bridging out. Yeah. We, in our day to day lives spend a lot of time inflection here. We are sitting in chairs, sitting in cars, you know, sitting on the couch, on the phone. So much of what we do is anteriorly focused where generally you’ve got a kid, you’ve gotta create all your kid. You’ve got a kid on your hip or you , whatever you’re doing so much. What we do is in of us and jujitsu just emphasizes that in particular playing guard . Yeah, absolutely. And it places more load into that position. Doesn’t it. If we look at some of the, the basic principles of good guard , retention, knee , chest, keep your knees pinned to your chest. Yeah . Right. Keep like, keep your arms in, stay up, like keep the smaller surface areas you can on the ground. So you can so that you can move. Yep . Good guard. Retention is staying as flexed as possible. Yeah. That’s right. Right. We , what we’ve gotta separate for people is one is a technical approach to what are the most efficient mechanics in order to succeed under this rule set of a game called jujitsu . And the other side of the discussion is what cost does your body pay in order to hit these technical markers? And that’s what we’re saying is like, you get up by spending this time on the bottom. Yeah. Agreed with this flexion piece, say someone then driving into you to try and pass your guard and whether they’re applying pressure or they’re then adding their body weight into your position. Yeah . And you’re kind of getting rewarded by staying in that position. Yeah. Right. Like if I’m not gonna let, ’em get past my leaves cuz I’m gonna keep my knees pinned to my armpits or to my chest. Yeah . Holy. You’re spending minutes and minutes and minutes here. Like that was the whole fight. The whole round you just did was seven minutes of them trying to, of pass and you stay , you guard retention and yeah. Trying to Inver. Yeah. That’s a hell of a strength session of you just working flex flex . Yeah. Yeah. And then maybe for whatever reason, you don’t spend any time counterbalancing that. So you might get away with that for a while . That’s okay. But then you get an injury, maybe bulge disc , maybe, you know, your , your back hurts all the time. Why is my back sore all the time? Because when you’re not doing jujitsu, you put all your time in engine jujitsu, you are not doing any extension work. You’re not balancing it out. And really this is one of the biggest problems you get an injury, say you hurt your knee before we go there. Yeah. Can you just talk on , uh , you’re talking about bulge disc , what is the relationship between being in a flex position in the spine and, and bulging a disc ? So if you look at the anatomy of the, of the spine without getting too scientific, if you are a listening and you never see this video, that’s fine. But understand that most, not, not all there is some exceptions to this, but most disc bulges occur under flex . So your spine is rounding forward. And the , the disc is what sits in between the vertebra, right ? Yeah. If we think of it almost like a little gel sack, like a , a bra , a pad , and that if you take a certain amount of load through your spine and your vertebrae move in a certain way and you take more load than your ligaments and muscles can like , so your connective tissues and muscles can support that load will go directly into the spine. And if there’s too much pressure, you can get like a, like a pop . Yeah . And basically the , the structure integrity of the gel sack pops. I dunno if you’ve ever seen like a basketball that gets an egg. Yeah. Right. It’s almost like that. And then the inside lining pushes out. Yeah . It’s very similar, but that can then push on nerves. Like JJI track when she fought one jelly off her head. Yeah . I look at that kind of bulge. It’s confusing metaphor. Similar. Just so massive egg. No, it’s actually a much more smaller nuance, but sure. You can imagine that if you like the problem with it is because you have so many nerves innovating from your spine. It puts pressure on them. And this can result in massive amounts of shooting pain down your leg. It can result in not paralysis, but like muscle seizing , not relaxing. And these take a long time to heal. Here’s the thing habitually in your life, your inflection. A lot of the time when people are rehabilitating disc bulges , they have to do extension work in a very slow, easy, controlled way. And then they have to strengthen that. And it’s all this time that you lose from having an extreme case of flexion under load . Now we’re not saying if you play guard , you’re gonna herniate your discs. That’s not what we’re saying, but if you are out there and you’re playing guard and you’re starting to get pain in your lower back and you feel like you can’t stretch your hips and risk , it’s , it’s a risk factor. It is absolutely. But don’t get me wrong as much as there is some reflection in passing guard. If you look at the modern, you know, guard passing, you’re not down on your knees, just rucking in like a rugby player , you’re standing up, you’re moving around. It’s a much more mobile on the feet game. So there’s a lot more agility involved and you have to be able to keep good posture. I mean, there’s times when might pressure in, but for you to successfully really put pressure into another person, you have to keep your back kind of straight ish. Yeah. I mean you . Yeah. Yeah. You might, there might be a degree of flexion , but it’s nowhere near under the load that it’s in. Say when someone’s trying to stack past you definitely like if I’m putting your knees over your head, oh , and I’m chins getting crushed to your chest , you got that upper back flexion fully rounded. But then we’re also like, because the knees are shoved into the mats and the hips are up. It’s putting all this pressure on your lower back. It’s an extremely unique and great amount, like enormous amount of load through the lower back in that position. That’s almost like you you’d be hard pressed to replicate that anywhere else. Yeah. And, and that’s the thing your feet are in the air. They’re dangling, you can’t form tension through your legs. You can’t form tension through, through your Glu hip , like , which is the major stabilizers for your pelvis. And, and then also how that sets up your kinetic, your posture chain for those muscles to be able to contract. So yeah, we can see clips of really flexible bendy people doing these things and it looks cool. We want to do it, but understand this, your risk of injury, there is so much higher and once you are injured and if any of you out there hearing this, if you’ve bulged a disc and you’ve had that pain, you know what that is? You don’t wanna go back there. That’s the last place you want to be. So the next step on this, we’ll step away from the spine vinyl . We’re gonna go to knees. I’m gonna actually say knees is a big issue. When it comes to guard playing as opposed to passing, this is why we’re gonna talk about in the context of like , um , an open chain or a close chain movement. So when we refer to this in the gym, you can look at a squat barbell on your back, barbell , squat , or any kind of a squat. Your feet are based . This is a closed chain movement. Two , two feet on the ground closed chain. But I’m saying, if we look , look at a movement, like a leg extension machine where somebody’s sitting and they’re extending their leg, their foot is not based . This is an open chain movement. Yeah . So let’s relate this back to a guard scenario. If you are playing open guard , you know, someone I’m , I’m not sure if you could really turn because no one really talks about out jujitsu this way. I’m not sure if you could say a spider guard is close chain. I’m not sure if you could say that because there’s moments where you lose tension, right? Jujitsu is very asymmetrical. It’s very rare that you have your feet. Very evenly placed tension, both legs, cetera , but look at lasso, right? You are like taking your leg around your foot is hanging out in the air. You’ve got a whole lot of tension through your lower limb, your quadricep, your hip, but your foot is not based in any way. So as much as you are forming tension through a bit in your quad, a bit in your hamstring, your leg is just dangling in the air. And this is actually much more precarious is then if you had your foot based on the ground, say you were trying to pass the guard. You’ve got a low base, you’ve got your combat base, whatever it might be. And you are , you are trying to negotiate the guard. Your foot is planted on the ground, even though your stance may be asymmetrical. It is far easier for you to form tension through your quads, your calves, your hamstrings, when your foot is based on the ground. Yeah. So in terms of your knees, whether you have an injury or you don’t have an injury, don’t get me wrong. If you’ve got a really wild guard playing partner, like we had this guy at , uh , absolute called crazy legs. He’s very flexible, but he is also a big strong guy and he would just flail. So you were probably gonna get a black eye. So, you know, if you got a real wild guard player, you might still get injured by getting kicked in the face. But if we’re talking about potential knee injuries, you having your feet in the air and trying to leg pumble and do a variety of things, your knees less stable than if your foot was based on the ground. Yeah . That’s the context in which I’m kind of talking about it here. Yeah. I think like you can even like try this, like you’re standing in your combat base or, you know , in your fight stance and you’re standing on the ground, you can reach down and like, feel the tension through your legs, through your hips. Your Glu are working quads on a little bit hams on calfs . Like all the muscles of the leg and hip are like on right now, versus you’re on your back. I’m trying to like stack past you and you are like egg bettering , like puling your legs back in those muscles are not all on, in the same way. No. And they , and it’s, and yes, when you establish your guard, you can then create tension and create this connection. And that can activate things. But when it’s this scrambly kind of Flay part where you’re pumping and , and , and it’s this more haphazard piece, there’s a , there’s a real lack of tension going on there. Isn’t there. And that’s when, particularly the knees, the ankles, the hips are under threat. Definitely. And if we think about how the knee stabilizes quads are super important, quads are super important. But when we’re playing guard and we’re pulling our knees into our chest, we’re talking about flexion versus extension, right? Your quads are extensives . They straighten the leg. Now, obviously in jujitsu , we never wanna have our leg fully extended or have our arm fully extended. We’re always trying to juggle it. But if you think about guard , you’re pulling your knees to your chest and you’re to your butt. This is hip flexes on hamstrings, on quads. Aren’t doing a lot. And I don’t know if you guys have ever had this, where you’ve had somebody jam your heel into your butt really suddenly. And your knee suddenly goes into flexion . You’re like, ah , oh , that wasn’t comfortable because there was no tension around the joint supporting it. You’ve just have your leg jammed into a weird spot under like their load without your muscles supporting the joint. And this can create pinching, you know, like tears in the meniscus, all kinds of things. Well , yeah, that, I mean, that is, that is when you at the greatest risk of tearing something, right? Yeah. Your joint gets pushed into a position, no tension through those tissues. That’s that’s right. Yeah , absolutely. That’s where you can up. Yeah. And so let’s now take it to a dealing with injury perspective, regardless of whether it’s an upper body , lower body back neck. If you are lying on your back, you will be using your neck. If you are lying on your back, like trying to sit up, you are going to be using a lot of your core musculature, right? If you are lying on your back, even though if you have a knee injury, you’ve got your leg in the air, you’re thinking, oh , there’s not much load in my leg. As soon as someone grabs your foot or grabs your, your, your gave hands and leg drags, you, you are no longer under control of that leg. Like it’s, it’s no longer a choice for you now. Whereas if you are standing up and you have an knee injury or an ankle injury or anything, you get a certain level of feedback from how much weight you put on your leg. If you can’t put all of your weight in your leg, you probably shouldn’t be rolling. Let’s be honest because someone might shove you to that leg trying to sweep you. And then it’s your weight, their weight multiplied. And then you’re falling over and you might rein injure yourself. But as a feedback mechanism, if you are coming back from injury, doing some drilling from the top position, it’s much more under your control. So you’re like, Hey, I can’t knee here. Can we do the other side? Or, Hey, I , I can’t put all my weight in that leg. Can you not sweep me that way? You know, like you are getting that sensory feedback when you are lying in your back in your guard and your legs in the air. You’re like, ah , it feels fine. Yeah. I can work from here. And then you’re fine until you’re not. Yeah. So when, when you’re dealing with injury and you’re coming back, if you are of work out , man, how do I get back on the mats? I , I’m not sure what I should be doing. My recommendation as somebody who’s hurt every single major joint in their body, the , the kind of slow integration or the slow coming back without doing yourself, any mischief would actually be to start by doing some kind of guard, passing drills and some stuff where you , you very much have your own body under your control. Yep . And that’s gonna require an understanding training partner as well, to let you do that. Absolutely. Maybe one condition to the, you know, talking about the perils of playing the bottom position is if you go to something like a close guard , yeah. A close guard can be more safe for an individual because you’re kind of locking the position up. You’re closing the legs you’re wrapped around there . You’re taking away a lot of the , um, the chaotic nature of these transitions in open guards. But it’s very like keeping your guard closed is very demanding. Absolutely. If you’ve got some joint integrity issues. Yeah. I mean, I didn’t with it when I was coming back from the knee. Right, right. Right. So, I mean like, I mean, keeping your guard closed against any like hard opponent, you know, whether your joints are a hundred percent or not is hard. Yeah. So that’s, I , yeah. I agree with you. Like yeah. Closed guard is, is more controlled, but it just demands of you to be able to stay there and work from there. And invariably, at a certain point you will open your guard . Yeah. It’s true. You know, it does happen whether it’s forced open or you choose to part of the reason why I have shifted my attention away from not, not that I don’t play guard . I play play guard as much as I play , uh , on top. What I do find is that I eat a lot more. Like I cop a lot more from the bottom, you know, I’m more than nail than the hammer. Right . Like, you know, even though it’s not problem, it’s like part of the game in terms of getting need in the head or cross faced or like twisted or right. Get more beaten up. Yeah. I find that I come out of sessions feeling much more. I mean, don’t get me wrong when I do judo and I get thrown on the ground a hundred times, man. I’m feeling sore from that. But I’m not talking specifically about takedowns I’m talking when I say no, Joe , I am not gonna pull guard against you. We’re either having a standup war or you are pulling guard. I find I come out of those sessions. The only thing that I really feel the most is probably my fingers. Yeah. Cause I’m grouping a lot. Whether, you know, GE or Nogi, I’m , I’m always trying to grip and control, but my back feels fine. Neck feels fine. It’s true. Your hips are less tight. I mean, how about yourself, Joe ? You’ve done the knee surgery thing. You’ve come back. You’ve done extensive rehab. You do ongoing work. Where did you feel most vulnerable when you were , uh , undoubtedly on the bottom. Yeah. Yeah. I like to play ex guard and I suppose my leg was just not working, you know, wasn’t working particularly well for a long time. So it was what I found was my guard was getting past easier. Right . Which then meant I had to work twice as hard to recover back to a guard. Right. And it just meant that yeah. I was copying heaps of damage because the , the thing is like, say, we all look at , um , for people listening, you look at rubber guard , you look at these assassins, you know? And you’re like, wow, look at the way. They just grab their leg and reef it over in front of someone’s face. Yeah . And you’re like, that’s for your knee. Your knee is absolutely getting right now, but you can do it right. Same way when someone passes my guard and I’m like, holy, my guard’s about to get passed by this B Lu belt . Sure. Right. I’m like scrambled . I’m getting my leg in front of their face. I don’t care how it happens. Find a way there’s a price that is paid for fighting to this degree where it’s like, I’m just getting my leg back in . So I’m gonna , I’m gonna invert. I’m gonna turn, I’m gonna bring the leg in lower . Back’s getting up. He flexes are getting super jacked. You know, my knees getting all this weird pressure put through it. But in the moment when you’re warm dude , and it’s the game. Yeah. You can get away with it. Right. You just gotta make it happen. Exactly. Right. So that whole, like that scenario of like, I gotta get my guard back or I gotta not let them pass. There’s a , there’s a , like, I’m paying a price every time I go to that realm. Whereas when I’m on top and this is assuming I’m not getting swept and then just having to play from the bottom, of course, which does happen . Yeah . Assuming you’re like, all right , you can maintain a top position. Yeah. You’ve got other issues to play with. Yes. There are other risk factors, but you’re not dealing with any of that. Yeah . No one is compressing my lower back when I’m on top. Yeah. No one is like grabbing my, my , my chin and like pumping it into my chest and compressing my, my , uh , cervical spine. Yeah . So it’s like, yeah. Other risk factors, but definitely not those ones. And so for someone, yes . Having, coming back from the knee surgery, I found that top position was just way safe before me. Yeah . I was in way more control. I could deal with , you know , I had new problems, but I wasn’t, I didn’t feel as physically threatened. Yeah . And certainly my knee didn’t cuz my knees outta the equation. Yeah. Right. Unless I’m stepping in and then, well then yeah. Getting leg entangled another story . Well , but that’s right. Because then some people are gonna be like, well how about leg locks? Yeah. They don’t work. Well, look, if you’ve, if you think you’re a candidate for knee surgery, you’ve had knee surgery. It might be as a result of a leg lock . Maybe you need to leave them alone for a little while. We’re talking about coming back from injury here, people. So let’s just like on that though from a , from a Ji technique perspective, I found that , um, there was a point with, at a line where I train where , uh , I, I used to just play shin to shin and pull everyone into my ex guard . Yeah . And it worked really well. Sure . And then at some point someone asked the coach, Hey, Joe keeps getting nailing this and coach like, Hey guys, today we’re workshopping hound . Not to let Joe get his guard playing . And , and I came in and all of a sudden people are beat it. No one will let me get my shin close to the , their shin. Yeah. Right. Everyone’s legs are back. Yeah . And they’re driving into the guard with the upper body, more of a pressure pass. Right. And that’s been me up for like 12 months now. But my point is, what was beautiful about that is their legs are outta the equation. Yes. And so, you know, whatever you play, however you wanna play. But if you were someone who’s like, I don’t really trust my knee or I got a little injury there just want to play like that, play this more of this upper body pressure passing style. Your legs are under way less threat. That’s true. And I , I , I wanna move this kind of chat to more like a longevity piece, cuz this is something that no one talks about in jujitsu . Right. We look at somebody like , uh , Mikey Mui who is incredibly flexible. He’s also incredibly strong and is just , uh , an exceptional physical and also jujitsu mind. Right? Absolute exception. I have heaps of people saying, oh man, I wanna have that. Mikey Machi squad . It’s never gonna happen. You are not gonna have that range. It’s super deep squat . It’s not just deep. He can sit into the squat and then touch both his knees down to the ground and come back up. Oh , right. Like , like , but to the floor kind of vibe, well he goes but to the floor and then touches his knees. Yeah . Internally rotates. So like he’s an exception. Mm . You can’t think that you are going to touch that degree of range. And don’t don’t imagine that that is a good thing for your body. Like yeah . Yeah. There , there are exceptions and people can do lots of really crazy things. You’re like, oh , look at Paula Meel , not tapping this knee by his knees, bending inside out. Like , that’s what I want. Well , I want the knee that bends the wrong way, but , and I can still walk on it, but it’s not gonna happen. Cuz he had surgery and he had to have 12 months off competition. That’s right. And he it’s gonna be a long, like from probably 40 to whatever. Oh , he’s gonna be some tough years. It’s a lot of pain and you’ve put your body under that kind of pressure and load and damage. And yeah, we look at glory, but we it’s the same thing with MMA fighters. Yeah. God look at max Holloway. He’s talking so much here. He’s getting hit. He’s dodging. He’s hitting back. Try and get max to put a couple words ago . He’s like the dumber BJ Penn . It’s a frustrating thing because he’s a , seems like a lovely guy was a great champion. He’s taken a lot of damage. The thing that we don’t talk about in J Jitsu is how do we stay in the game longer? Cuz we only care about that sexy part where someone’s young and they’re hot and they’re killing it and then, oh they fell off. Oh , why haven’t I heard about that person for a couple years? Cause they completely themselves. Yeah . That should not be you. You shouldn’t be approaching your jujitsu with this real samurai do or die mindset. Don’t TA let it snap kind of attitude. It’s like, it makes no sense because when we look at the reality of the surgeries, the money, the painkillers, they’re just reduced quality of life, reduced quality of life . But that was a , we actually had this discussion and I , you know, don’t let me misspeak on this one, Joe . But I remember when we chatted about it that before surgery , you’re like you’d said to me, we’d kind of gone back and forth. You said, oh no, it’ll be good in the sense I , I can have my leg up. I can just get down to some of this administrative stuff I’ve been meaning to work on. And it’ll give me a chance to work on this stuff that was before. And then the reality was what though? Oh yeah. Yeah. So I , I , I was thinking I’m gonna have this knee surgery, but I’m gonna be late. I got two weeks where I’m basing on the couch and in bed and then it’s gonna be, you know, a pretty inactive couple of months, but yeah, great. I can catch up on all this Bulletproof stuff and things that we’ve wanted to build and blah, blah, blah. And then I was just in a drug induced painkiller haze and you know, and also under quite a bit of pain in and couldn’t focus for, you know, two months and I didn’t get done. Yeah, man , I watched a little bit of Netflix, but, but you , you are like, oh this is, this is not what I thought it was gonna be at. Oh this is a horrible ex not a horrible experience, but this yes it is . But it’s not like I can just , um , go do something else and be productive. I like , no, no, no, your , your body’s all up and you’re on your and yeah. Like you’re pressing pause on a lot of things in life. Yeah . For a long period of time. It’s not just like, oh I can’t walk. I’ll just do other stuff. No, you gotta deal with train up a body. Yeah. Problem . Just doing pullups in my wheelchair. No, you’re not. I mean that don’t get a strong if you’ve got a smaller injury. Yes, it’s right . But we’re talking when you got a catastrophic one surgery. Yeah. The rehab. And so it’s very disruptive to your life. So relating this back to you doing Jui and you going, oh, what do I work on? I’m not sure. So Simon , uh , one of our new guys, he’s, he’s an old gentleman. He’s in his fifties, he’s a Savage, he’s a builder. He’s got iron grips. So strong . He does strong . He’s such strong grips. And he’s an intense guy, lovely guy. But he’s like , I can’t afford to get injured, but he rolls really hard. Yeah. And I was like, man, you gotta , you just gotta die down a little bit. And he’s like, nah , but I need my body for my job. Like I wanna do jujitsu and I wanna do it as much as I can cuz I love it. But you know, I’m a , I’m a tradesman I need to , I need to build stuff. It’s like, that’s how I make my money. So I can’t afford to get injured here. It’s like, okay, well let’s consider this . Have you considered tennis? Maybe some golf, slow it down a little. No, never do that. I , I just said to him, look, you’re gonna have to do a little bit more body maintenance. But the other thing is too. We can teach you anything and everything in jujitsu, we can teach you to invert. We can teach you do this, do that. But if we’re looking at what takes a lower toll on your body and you want to get the most out of your three days a week at jujitsu, this isn’t to say, you don’t learn Garda . You don’t do it. If you think about, Hey, I’m gonna be rolling. And where do I want to be? To be less risky. Try to play to the top. Try to do that. It doesn’t mean you can’t get injured from on top. Someone could just jump a guillotine on you and then break your neck, Joe Worthington. You said that when I , I that guys ever up , what you mean? Am I talking ? Of course I’m talking about that, but yeah. Yeah. That’s right. I mean, we’re not saying like never play guard again, but we’re just trying to point out, Hey there’s there are risks and there are different risks associated with playing on the bottom versus playing on the top. You know, something that I can speak to for me for a long time was there’s a personally and this is not a slight on guard pullers , but for me I pulled guard for a long time. Cause I was just being lazy. Sure . I was just being super lazy. I , I just, yeah , it’s easier. Go in , save hands and then just like go in and like, and pull guard. And usually like people would just pass it. And then I was like, again, fighting super hard to try and get to an okay position to then get back on top. And it was like, I think it was until I trained with Adam, he was like, stop doing that. Yeah . And then I was like, okay, like, but my point was was that like I was doing it unnecessarily and I was doing it unintentionally. Right. And if we’re thinking about longevity, there’s obviously like you’re trying to build a game. You’re trying to build a style of jujitsu, but you also want to build a style of jujitsu that you can ideally maintain for a long period of time, like for forever. Sure. So yeah. You’re gonna get damaged. That’s that’s inherent in the game, but if we can reduce the damage that you’re getting, you know, by 2% on a daily basis, when you train, that’s actually quite significant when you extrapolated out to 12 months. 24 . Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, this, I actually got this from , uh , Robert Drysdale . It was kind of interesting doing his seminar. He was talking about the efficiency. So even though getting to guard is efficient, you don’t have to fight hard like wrestling. So labor intensive judo is so labor intensive, the gripping, the fighting. But the payoff is if you end up being the person who’s doing the take down , as opposed to the take down E you, you are less likely to get injured. Like the majority of injuries that occur from standup fighting is the person who gets taken down. Right? So the barrier to there is if you suck it, stand up grappling, you are more likely to get injured in the process of getting good at it. But once you’re good at it, you’re pretty safe. You know like you you’re doing well because you control where it goes next. If you know your take down , well, you know where it’s gonna end up, but this is the thing I wanna say. Sure. Pulling guard is less labor intensive. Like you’re saying you were kind of being lazy with it. But if we’re just talking efficiency, if you’ve gotta do multiple multiple rounds, you’re like it’s way easier for me to just pull guard as opposed to trying to have this stand up war , cuz you dunno what’s gonna happen. Right? But this is what I would say. What Drysdale had said to me is let’s think about this. When you are passing Gravitys on your side, gravity is pulling you into the person. Gravity is supporting you when you are playing guard . Not only you fighting your opponent, you are also fighting gravity. It’s a good point . This is hard work. So yes, if you have strong, tight hip flexes and a really strong core and flexible hips, is it easy for you and efficient for you? Yes, that is true. But if you have stiff knees, stiff hips, a tight, low back, you are gonna have to do so much work to just put yourself in a fight, ready position to do that. Yeah. Whereas it is absolutely less labor intensive for you to improve your hip early , a bit ankle mobility, bit knee mobility, a bit to be able to play from the top. If that makes sense. Yeah, it does. And so I always think this as much as I love God and I actually think, you know, there’s so many good back takes from different guard positions. It’s like, it is magical to watch. And when you pull it off it , yeah . Nailed it. Worst thing. And I was saying this about deep half guard to Jeremy. One of my students, you’re gonna cop a lot of pressure. You’re gonna be eating a lot of groin in the face. You’re getting a lot of wear and tear on your ribs. So even though it is a very effective, sweeping position, you need to know you’re gonna cop it from there. Yeah. And so overall I think OIE from , uh , from Alliance who’s who plays a lot of deep half , he loves deep half and you know, half the time he pulls, he is really good at pulling it half the time he’ll it goes up and down. But half the time he’ll be successful in sweeping me with it half the time I will just cross face the outta my head until he lets me pass. Yeah. And it’s like, yeah, it’s 50% effective. Wow . But there’s a big, yeah , there’s a, there’s a lot of cross face , but I mean that’s OIE , but I mean even like go to Bernardo , right. His deep half game , so effective, but he always had facial Gras. He always had deep gouges in, around his eyebrows and cheeks. And like, but he’s a tough guy. He just ate that and was like, I’m prepared to cop it, but also had a lot of injuries too. Yeah . So if we circle back around to what is better for your body and we’re talking about longevity, we’re talking about you being a human sitting in chair, driving cars, doing your job. Flexion is the root cause of so like loaded flexion in particular is the root cause of so many injuries. When we look at people playing on top, there is more extension involved, standing up out of guard, extending your hip. Like there’s so much more of that. And the supporting musculature of your calves, hamstrings, quads, glutes, low back, they function better together with your feet based on the ground. So can you use your legs from guard and use your hammies and your quads? Yeah, of course you totally can. And it , you know, like if you are really good at guard playing, not saying, oh you’ve suddenly gotta change your game. But if you bulge your disc because old mate 120 kilos sprawls on you in a stack, are you gonna be doing beer and BOS? No. Like you you’re gonna have to give that away for a little while. It’s not say you couldn’t come back to it. You are gonna have to spend some time working on your extension. You’re gonna have to spend some time stabilizing your spine. And those opportunities are available to you playing from the top. Even if that hurts your Meow brother, God pulling heart. Your thank us in 10 years. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, that’s the thing guys . So the reason why I wanna bring this up was I, I having a , a pretty in depth conversation with a friend of mine who doesn’t believe in top game, but has some really bad ankle and some really bad knees. And it’s like, I’m struggling. What do I do? Doesn’t believe in top game? No, just thinks it’s like inefficient and it’s old school. And like, why would you bother when you can just take the back like this and da , da , da . But that , that he’s younger than me. He’s 12 years old . He’s 20, he’s 26 years old. And he’s already feeling aged through the ankles and the knees. And he’s like, man, lassos killing my knees man. Every time I do this, someone tries to grab my Fort and I turn and I’m , but he’s like, I’m in pain when I’m not doing jujitsu. He’s 26 years old. Mm . So whether you’ve got injuries or you don’t, I am gonna put it to you. My friends that for longevity passing the guard is better for your body than playing the guard . There it is. Folks take it or leave it. I put it out there anyway. So for you guys out there, we have just real leads to our new program standards program. And we’d love to get you feedback. Uh, we want you to give it a crack. Now there’s some people out there that we have always promoted , um , training , uh , two days a week , uh , with, you know, other bits and pieces. But we want you to elevate your standard. That’s what it comes down to. We want people to be stronger. We want people to do a bit more. Now, originally when we set it out, we set it out to two workouts. Didn’t win Joe . Yeah. We wanted to try to keep the two workout thing. But because standards integrates mobility and strength, we just came to, it was either gonna be two really long work accounts or three smaller ones. And we’re like, let’s go three smaller ones. Yeah. The beauty is, and we’ve said this on the , on the program is that you can do it in a week or you can do it in 10 days. True . So if you’re the kind of person that’s like, no, look, I can only go to the gym twice a week. Then you just do two workouts per week and you’ll do the third one the next week. And the , you know, like it cycles on . Yeah , yeah. So seven or 10 days, whatever. I mean, some people are like doing it six days a week. That’s right. They’re doing it twice. You go or whatever pace you want. But the beauty is, is that the, the 12 key standards that JT and I believe are the keys to strength and mobility in a way that is most specific for jujitsu are all developed within this one program. And so that’s, that’s a beauty of, it’s like a really tidy package. It’s all there. I was training it yesterday. Yep . Workout took me like 48 minutes. Nice. You know, and obviously I’m a bit more comfortable with the movements and stuff. Once you’re in it, it moves pretty quick. And that was with a 10 minute warmup. For the most part, there are progressions with , if you log into the program, well , proof of bjj.com and then you click on the standards for the most part, the, a series and the be serious there’s progressions. But then we have some accessory work, which is there designed to help you get stronger and get better at those different movements, but they don’t have the same progressions in terms of new moves for you to do the way that you progress them is by gradually getting stronger and putting a bit more load and gradually building it up in that way. And it will change range over time guys. And that’s the great thing about the program. We are still in the process of absolutely perfecting it. So you giving us feedback, enables us to make it better for you. So what we’d love is for you to email us, hit us up, let us know what you think of it once you’ve tried it. And also just recently, we had a really good example of someone testing their standards and sending us a video. So ultimately what we’d love to do with you guys is have you video you doing the movements when you feel you are ready, like not just yet, obviously play with it, but when you are ready and you’re like, yeah, I want to get my blue belt across all standards. And this is the key. If you are like a black belt at pullups, but you can’t touch your toes and it forward fold like in , you’re a white belt, then you need to put time and energy on that. But once you feel ready and you feel like, yeah, I reckon I can competently do all 12 standards to the blue belt level, record it, send it to us, let us know where you’re at and we can sign off on it and say, yeah, you are to the blue standard for Bulletproof of BJJ. Absolutely. Show us your standard. That’s it. All right , my friend. Thank you, Joey. Thank you my bro . Cheer guys . Thanks guys .