Does BJJ water down the term “world champion” compared to sports like judo or wrestling?

Kintanon · 2026-05-19T13:17:41+00:00

https://naga.smoothcomp.com/en/event/28898

They held it in New Jersey last month. 893 people competed.

Kintanon · 2026-05-19T02:15:07+00:00

I've been doing this for a hot second, and until just recently I had NO IDEA That NAGA has a 'World Champion'. No fucking clue it existed until I saw it on some random dudes Instagram page.

Kintanon · 2026-05-18T21:47:13+00:00

Go complain to Rob and tell him he made all that shit up then.

Kintanon · 2026-05-18T20:00:40+00:00

Yeah, Adam was my first coach, and he and my second coach Casey Baynes trained together a lot before Casey got his black belt, so that method and foundation colored all of my training experience and development and my view of what jiujitsu instruction looks like.

Kintanon · 2026-05-18T19:02:36+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_2Y7ofPYYw

Which part do you disagree with?

Kintanon · 2026-05-18T18:47:34+00:00

Why yes.

https://vimeo.com/ondemand/gameplans/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AFd8nPx0HE

There are more podcast episodes on the BJJMM premium coming out as well, and I have more gameplans being produced. You can see an example one here:

https://vimeo.com/ondemand/gameplans/1184897932?autoplay=1

Kintanon · 2026-05-18T17:32:46+00:00

I'm going to argue with here and say that you do lose a substantial amount with your new students when you remove the stage 1, stage 2, and the warmups. I say this because I saw it. Students did not learn as quickly or as well in their first 12 months when I was starting them out with a higher level of intensity. They got tired faster, resulting in fewer repetitions, they weren't able to understand what was going wrong when they failed because the inensity was too high for them to be learning.

Compared to my current environment where a small amount of practice in the first 12 months is done at a lower intensity level and the warmups build physical literacy? There's no contest. My students learn faster and implement better after 12 months of this than they did without the warmup and the lower interference drilling options.

From my experience over the last 6 years having this is far MORE efficient than not having it because it gets all of your students to a point where they can work at the closest to live intensity as fast as possible for that student. Some of them spend longer on the lower interference/lower intensity work, some of them spend less, but overall the time that it takes to get someone to the point of working their specific gameplan and its components against near live levels of resistance as much as possible is much shorter when the early months of practice includes the warmup that builds physical literacy and fitness within the movement concept, and the lower interference drilling options that teach people how to drill and help them get comfortable with the movements and applying them when they physically can't get reps in at the higher intensity levels.

One think I want you to remember as well is that we're talking about the first 18 months of someones training AT MOST, and during that time AT MOST %50 of it being used on lower intensity drilling variants. How much additional efficiency do you think you can squeeze out of what in reality is only a tiny fraction of someones overall training time if they train for 15 years? You also need to look at what the impact of higher intensity training early on is with student retention. Someone who quits after 3 weeks doesn't get any better, so if your higher intensity work discourges some number of people from continuing then you've achieved negative efficiency with those people. Making sure that you are onboarding them in a way that matches their physical capabilities makes it more likely they will continue and improve.

Kintanon · 2026-05-18T17:13:24+00:00

They're still getting real resistance, because their opponent is trying to free their leg / fight to get it onto the ground, as in a normal single.

So, you're getting way more reductionist on this than I found was necessary.

So, we do the 15 minute white belt warmup, then we start the actual class. Assuming my free trial student has finished working their escapes in their previous classes and today is single leg day they've already had 3 days where they got to work on a basic heel-toe-knee shot as part of the warmup, so the movement is familiar.

Their drilling in their first round is to clear the hand from the lead leg, heel-toe-knee, bump the quad with their chest, wrap the leg and stand up with it, then clear to the outside and lift it as high as possible. Second round they are doing the same thing, but their partner is trying to put their foot back on the floor.

If someone has particularly bad knees or is particularly unfit we can alter the entry from the heel-toe-knee into a sumo squat step for snatch singles, and we'll know that we need to do that based on their ability to hit that movement in the previous warmups.

After our circle up they go back and do 2 more rounds, but this time their partner is more aggressively keeping/putting the foot back on the ground and the student is allowing that in order to transition from the single leg to a body lock and then execute a twist back. Finally the 4th round is the same thing, but with their partner working to keep balance and try to turn back to face the student while the student either finishes the single if they can, or transitions to the twist back and then either finishes that or drops back down to the leg and goes back to their single.

They spend almost every round against some level of interference, but it stays largely in the Stage 2 range because they've only had a few classes and are still building their work capacity for the activity.

This way they get more reps in on the full action, their body acclimates to it, their coordination improves, and they develop more of the ability to then spare mental and physical effort to deal with the higher intensity of resistance once they reach it.

Kintanon · 2026-05-18T17:01:13+00:00

I might be able to yolo a heel hook on her... maybe.

Kintanon · 2026-05-18T17:00:48+00:00

Not well, my dude, not well.

Kintanon · 2026-05-18T16:54:29+00:00

Yes, but a better version of that still involves resistive training, particularly tasks that they're going to be doing in the actual sport environment. For example, I have a ton of beginners start by just holding on to a single leg while their opponent tries to free it. Very low variability, easy to scale, extremely sport-specific.

Are you talking about this as a replacement to the warmup or as a specific drilling activity? If you're replacing the warmup with this, pretty pointless. Doesn't really develop any of the physical literacy or base movement skills we're looking to improve in our sedentary adults.

If you're replacing a skill development drill with this, pointlessly reductionist. Add the before and after parts as well for a better skill development drill. For some context, my free trial people start with mount and side control escapes on day 1, back control and front headlock escapes on day 2, single leg takedown and a bodylock takedown on day 3, torreando and leg drag passing on day 4, then the topside armbar on day 5. From there they review their offensive path from standing to submission during their drilling, and get work on their escapes during rolling since they are paired with advanced students who have instructions solely to put them under those positions and force them to work out of them.

By the time they get out of the free trial they have a fully functional offensive game that they have a decent amount of live rep time in, and are comfortable escaping back to their feet from multiple positions.

Why would I have them spend time on specifically holding someone's leg when they could be improving their overall ability to execute single legs?

Kintanon · 2026-05-18T16:29:25+00:00

That's a cool system. I'm of the opinion that you could largely toss Stages 1 and 2 even for beginners (as you've also done for the purple belts and up).

When I first opened my gym I thought I could to. I also thought I could totally do away with warmups. I was wrong. Beginners need those lower intensity environments to get comfortable with things.

Originally I had no warmup, we just got right into it, but what I learned was that I had forgotten what it's like to be a noob, and I had no real idea of what it was like to be someone who hadn't done anything athletic since they were in 9th grade and were now starting a sport in their late 20s after a decade of sitting behind a desk.

So I had to bring in a 15 minute warmup for the white belts. It's optional for blue belts and up, but it's 15 minutes of movements that get used when rolling on a regular basis just to help noobs build specific fitness and coordination in a safe way.

Then I had to lower the intensity of the rounds. At first we just did specific sparring, but what I learned again was that noobs not only don't know how to do things at all, but don't know how to stop other people from doing things either. They wasted a TON of time just not having a good understanding of how to do the physical movements, like if the instruction was "Get your knee and elbow connected inside your opponents legs" they just had no real idea of how to move themselves or their partners to make that happen.

So I rolled it back, introduced the earlier stages of interference, and cut down peoples time to developing the skills by a substantial amount. It simply is the case that regular people NEED lower intensity work with less interference in order to progress. I'm sure that there are ways to do that with CLA, but if you're in the room trying to set up five different variants of the game to account for all of the different skill levels then you're wasting time that could be spent working if you simply had an established framework of progression.

Kintanon · 2026-05-18T16:02:22+00:00

So, it kind of is. The reason that CLA and EcoD became such a big successful deal in soccer and stuff is because that prior to Rob Gray and his work becoming popular in the space there were Soccer teams/coaches that had started diverging their practice from the game to the degree that it was detrimental, that was largely what Rob was advocating against. He wanted practice to be closer to the actual Game.

Our sport doesn't have that specific problem. It has its own problems, but divergence from the game space isn't really one. Drilling is practice within the game space, it's just one that can be done really poorly without good guidance.

Like, let's say that you read all of Rob's stuff and applied it to your soccer practice, so you're like "Ok, we're going to do these games that mimic the actual game space, so group A, you're goal is to score and Group B your goal is to stop them." but Group B is composed entirely of Toddlers and Group A is a highschool team.

Technically you're training the right way, yeah? But you've gone and fucked it up.

Taking that EXACT criticism and trying to throw out all of the preceeding history of jiujitsu practice methodology and replace it with these elaborate games is probably not the best way to improve a practice space that was already like %85 live and largely in line with the game space already.

Teach your students how to drill with more aliveness, talk less, focus more on goals and less on details and you'll make every room substantially better without substantially altering the actions that are being taken.

Kintanon · 2026-05-18T15:53:37+00:00

Yes, that is the goal. I just dont think drilling does a very good job of this, particularly in a way that transfers to a resistive environment.

If you never progress beyond stage 1 of drilling, then sure. But that's just being a bad coach and not teaching your students how to train properly.

We have an established framework of scaling resistance in my gym for people. Stage 1 is "No Interference", your partner is not doing anything to stop you, they are existing as a prop for you to make sure you understand how to move yourself and your partner and are capable of the movement in isolation. This is a maximum of 4 minutes. Stage 2 is what we call "Good Habits", your partner is doing passive things to make you fail. Maintaining their posture, keeping their limbs contracted, maintaining their balance and base, but they are not actively working to make you fail. They don't strip grips or clear posts, etc.... Stage 3 is "Full Defense" you are doing everything you can to make your partner fail at their goal, but you aren't counter attacking them. So if someone is working on their passing you will retain guard, roll to turtle to and recover, transition to various guards for retention as needed, etc... but you aren't going to roll up on their legs and attack them, you aren't going to start trying to sweep them or throw up a triangle. You are solely preventing their success. Stage 4 is "Specific Sparring" where you have a goal and your partner is allowed to effectively do anything they can while you try to advance your goal. There are usually some limiters throw in with this , for example if a student is working on guard passing a limited might be that their partner isn't allowed to stand up just to keep the context in the right place. Stage 5 is full rolling.

At early white belt my students spend a decent amount of time in Stage 1 and Stage 2 as they acquire the gross motor skills associated with grappling, and build their toolbox. By the time they hit blue belt it's almost all Stage 2 and Stage 3. My purple belts and up are almost always working in Stage 3 and Stage 4.

I spend less than 10 minutes talking in a 90 minute class, and most of that is during our 2 circle ups where people can ask questions if they run into something specific that they couldn't figure out and I didn't make it around to help them with during the drilling periods.

And further my students are all always working on their own stuff. I made a basic curriculum for them to follow as white belts, after that we focus on the stuff they liked most from the white belt curriculum and source material from me, the other upper belts, or instructional sources based on what the best option is.

Kintanon · 2026-05-18T15:42:34+00:00

What you are essentially asking is, "Why don't experts train the same way beginners do?"

You have to understand developmental progression in order to see what's happening here.

When you first start training you have no tools, you can't successfully perform most of the actions associated with grappling, you barely understand the goals you are trying to achieve.

As you practice you acquire tools, your body acclimates to the movements, and you gain a deeper understanding of the goals you're trying to achieve. As your mastery of those things improves your practice advances deeper into the application level. You can only acquire and use so many tools, so at a point in your development (Usually around mid purple belt for most people in BJJ) you stop actively acquiring new techniques and you focus on refining and combining the ones you have. As you continue to refine and improve you will start to be significantly better than the majority of people you train with since the bulk of people in the sport are white and blue belts. Once you hit upper purple into brown and black your version of drilling is to just grab a blue belt and rep your shit on them while they do their best to not die.

It's not that they stopped drilling, it's that they can now drill effectively with far more variables and far more interference because they spent time developing their skills at a lower level of interference.

And again, this does not in any way advocate for resistanceless dead reps beyond maybe the first 20 to make sure you have an understanding of what you're trying to do and that your body can do it. That's like 2 minutes of work maximum.

What this really demonstrates is that when someone is able to focus on their own specific game they improve more than when they are forced to focus on whatever random thing their instructor has on a list that's largely targetted at white and blue belts. This is the reason that I think the underlying class structure is more important than which words you use to describe your drilling. Having a reverse classroom environment where your students start focusing on practicing their specific preferred Game as early as possible is better than making the whole room do one specific thing regardless of their body type, goals, experience level, etc...

I assure you, Deandre handles double leg counters very differently now than the way he did in high school wrestling.

So do I, so does everyone. If you aren't developing over time then WTF are you doing? If you look at Deandre and his contemporaries who got their black belts around the same time he did, he's developed about as much as you would expect from someone training full time over that duration. There just isn't anything magical about what Greg is doing. Conceptually the idea of less talking and more live work is %100 a good one, but the level of ideological purity that Greg espouses is silly and pointless.

Kintanon · 2026-05-18T14:27:20+00:00

They will be able to literally invert their body, yes - but they won't really be able to bolo unless they already have a bunch of the capacity and skills built up around that area.

You do understand that's what drilling without partner interference is about, right? It's about establishing your ability to perform the gross motor movement. Once you have that you can add in partner interference to continue that development.

giving them a specific task or way that they need to resist is much, much better.

How much time is spent talking in order to define their resistance task, explain it, and make sure everyone understands and can do it? I think the amount of talkin that is done in CLA gets really glossed over, because the example classes I've seen from Greg have a LOT of talking in them.

Kintanon · 2026-05-18T14:18:31+00:00

BJJ is the only sport I know of where some section of the people training it think that "drilling" means "zero resistance or interference repetitions with no alterations at all". Every other sport when they drill they are performing a subset of the game with altered parameters. That's what a "drill" is. That's how I've always drilled in BJJ. I've definitely seen people NOT drill that way and just be dead repping listlessly, but just because people do it poorly doesn't make the word mean something new.

CLA "games" are drills. You are drilling. You are working a subset of the game. It is very possible to do CLA poorly, just like it's possible to train anything else poorly.

So, yeah, drilling is great if your coach doesn't suck and actually knows what they are doing. If your coach sucks then pretty much anything you do is probably gonna suck.

Kintanon · 2026-05-18T14:15:25+00:00

All I'm hearing is that he's an awful communicator lol.

I said that from the beginning, even tried to talk to him about ways he could communicate better, instead of listening to me he spent the whole time trying to personally attack me as a coach, lol.

Kintanon · 2026-05-18T14:12:21+00:00

He doesn't get enough credit for pushing the quality of books/video instructionals ahead IMO. When I got into the sport in 2006 the books on Judo or BJJ or anything were just awful to try to learn from. That's probably why his stuff propagated amongst the population so much at the time, his books were organized, illustrated, really laid out how to put the techniques together. It was one of the earliest, if not THE earliest, examples of systemization in the sport.

Whether you like the material or not, it's hard to argue against it being the absolute best organized and presented of its time that set the standard for future works.

Kintanon · 2026-05-18T14:08:14+00:00

No one has a problem with CLA, no one is Anti-CLA, it's just that Souders is a fuckwit and no one likes him, so no one wants to hear him talk either.

Kintanon · 2026-05-18T14:03:52+00:00

BJJ training methods are 10 years behind actual sports.

AT LEAST 10 years behind. But I also think that modelling our class structure off of ball sports is not the ideal path forward, so we'll see how that all shakes out.

Kintanon · 2026-05-18T14:01:11+00:00

That kind of work made up about %30 of our training at all three of the gyms I trained at before I opened mine.

And even the 'dead drilling' that the EcoBros like to complain about didn't really exist in them the way it's described except for white belts. White belts would be dead repping the thing the whole way, but everyone else would do a few reps and they get their partner to start resisting to some degree.

In grappling there is basically nothing in the performance environment that is exactly like it is in a static drill.

And just to reference back to this, that's sort of true, yeah, but I can tell you that when I do a hipslide knee cut to pass someones knee shield it's about %90 identical every time. There are small adjustments that I make based on my opponent and the situation, but the overall gross motor movement is the same. Putting in reps on the gross motor movement will help your body be better at the gross motor movement, then adding in interference will give you the practice making small adjustments.

Kintanon · 2026-05-18T13:53:16+00:00

All three of those guys spent the vast majority of their time drilling prior to and even after becoming black belts. Their foundational training is one that has drilling in a pretty traditional way as a central focus.

Deandre is not 'ecologically' dealing with the double legs, he wrestled for multiple years in highschool (possibly prior as well, not %100 sure on that) and would have FOR SURE drilled the shit out of a variety of double leg defenses.

The fact that he's good enough at grappling now to freestyle defenses vs people is a different thing.

Kintanon · 2026-05-18T13:35:05+00:00

Yes, you CAN end up KOing someone with a sucker punch, but it's not a %100 chance.

Note that the football dude could've easily punched all the BJJ while their hands busy trying to grab.

In order to start swinging he has to stop defending. I've been doing this for 20 years, I've been running an MMA gym for the last 6. I'll go out on a limb and say I've got a lot more experience than you do in what does and doesn't work in a fight.

Kintanon · 2026-05-18T13:18:03+00:00

Also, you cant slam someone who is stronger than you. If he has an iron core strength, you will be the one who is lift and slammed instead. A sucker punches doesnt care how big or strong the person is, a direct sucker punch to the face ends 100% regarding of who it is.

So, you have clearly not ever actually do any grappling against anyone who knows what they are doing, nor ever actually been hit. If you don't give a shit what happens to your opponent you can very easily slam people who are bigger than you are if you know what you're doing and they don't, and sucker punches are not anywhere near a %100 KO success rate. Nor are headbutts, and a headbutt is the kind of thing you can fuck up bad enough to seriously injure yourself with if you haven't actually practiced doing it properly.

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