What Can You Learn Online or in a Remote Session? A Lot, Actually
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As many of you already know, Sponsors of LMA who live near Los Angeles have been coming in once a month to train with me at the LMA Learning Lab (what I'm calling it for now). Since organizing martial arts training and "teaching" the LMA approach is how I make my living, some have decided to pay out of pocket for more lessons.
Some practitioners have no idea about my politics or the online program and just come to me hearing that I'm a private "martial arts coach" with a radically different approach to teaching. Several drive over an hour to train once a week. It's been overwhelming to see how much value people get out of our sessions.
A handful of people from out of state or hundreds of miles away have already come to LA for a private session with me. Several more have contacted me to let me know they're already planning an LA visit to train with me. One is coming to LA instead of going to Thailand again. LMA practitioners come from various styles to learn our approach. That says a lot about the significance and versatility of the program within the greater martial arts and learning landscape. Some come to me to improve their rock climbing, acting, pro wrestling, parenting, or even how they interact with their world.
Recently, for our nonlocal Sponsors, I have been experimenting with remote sessions through video conference and text chats. So far, it's been for practitioners who are already training at a gym, and we're having pointed conversations applying LMA theory to obstacles they're facing during sparring or competition.
However, I see remote sessions as an opportunity for developing practitioners to be guided directly in our theory and curriculum. For potential training organizers, how to best organize and design their training. Since it's remote, it can also be done during off days from training or while recovering from injury. Practitioners can send me relevant information beforehand, like videos, or describe to me what problems they are facing. Then, I can spend some time thinking about it before we meet, and then we can spend thirty minutes discussing it.
Z, a wrestler and wrestling coach with decades of experience, has been competing in submission grappling but has found difficulty with opponents who spam leg locks. He's a white belt, but when considering this challenge, does that matter?—especially in the context of his years of wrestling.
This is his first remote session, and he's still very new to our theory and has, in fact, even respectfully pushed back against the LMA approach with the traditional approach. With his permission, I am sharing an excerpt of our remote session so people can see the value not only in a remote session but also for those not yet in the online program, how much you can get from just reading LMA theory (like this transcript). I would argue it's more useful and valuable than the instruction most folks get in person.
Remote session
[Note: This conversation with Z has been edited for clarity. Some of the specifics might confuse nongrapplers but the universal principles will make sense to those even with zero martial arts knowledge.]
Me: One of the foundational concepts of Liberation Martial Arts is how you do one thing is how you do all things, right?
Z: Yes!
Me: So you already know how to grapple. The problem is that you see Brazilian jiu-jitsu and submission grappling as a different art or system—or so you've been told. So you're reinventing the wheel. You're a white belt again, but in thinking about context, should someone with decades of grappling experience ever be a white belt again in another grappling art? If so, there's a severe disconnect in their previous training and a problem in transfer. Transfer is an important concept in LMA.
Going back to "how you do one thing is how you do all things," practitioners who come to the LMA Learning Lab have zero martial arts or often even exercise or sports experience and start with motor learning, which is essentially physical therapy and somatic healing where they learn to better move their bodies without pain or restriction. They're also developing their embodied cognition, which just means learning to better connect with their bodies because that same body is the one they will use throughout various LMA gameplay.
From the LMA lens, there aren't different combat sports, and for the most part, there aren't even different martial arts. However, I should mention that the domain of martial arts is very broad, and some arts can be so esoteric that they can be islands onto themselves. We won't worry about them and just focus on the ones with meaningful universal overlaps. Universality is another essential concept.
So you have one body. All the various combat sports or arts are different games. What is a game? A set of rules. So it's about navigating different rulesets with the one body you already know. In the Learning Lab, practitioners connect with their bodies and then familiarize themselves with striking games first to universally learn how to explore the infinite possibilities within very specific conditions and how to maximize their opportunities within them. Through various games or rulesets, they learn to quickly adapt. By the time they get to grappling, it's no longer a new rodeo or art—it's just a new ruleset to familiarize themselves with. It's not even wholly new rules; it's either taking some conditions away or adding more conditions. The cake is the same, but the icing has changed. It's different but familiar games rather than new physical movement systems or arts.
You have an advantage. You already come to this with grappling. It's not a new rodeo. It's just another rodeo with fewer conditions.
Every house has its own rules, some more than others. We already know this. It's not a big deal, and we already adapt to these sorts of situations all the time in our daily lives. Otherwise, we would never be able to leave our homes. We understand that walking at home comes with different conditions than walking on the street, walking on a trail, or walking on the beach. But we don't need to relearn how to walk each time.
So that's the relevant theory and context you should know so we can now talk about leg locks. I'm not going to go over any technique or give you instructions. This isn't me doing a magic trick or showing off or being like, look what I can do—I can teach without teaching. It's so you understand that thinking about technique or constant instruction can make your progress worse than it should be. I'm imploring you to think about that.
Context is what matters, not the solutions. Rather than asking for and memorizing a bunch of techniques, just think about the rules and conditions first.
You can't leg lock in wrestling. It's not allowed in that game. In submission grappling, it's allowed and is a part of that game. Submission grappling is wrestling with fewer conditions.
Leg locks work best against people who think of them as a whole new movement system that changes the universal principles of the body rather than seeing them as a new set of conditions through which to navigate your movement system. They essentially want you to be lost, mesmerized, overwhelmed, scared, and panicked.
An opponent or training partner can only leg lock you if they have access to your legs. I'm not using "access" arbitrarily; accessibility is important in LMA and martial arts. The more you understand these concepts, the fewer obstacles you'll have because you'll know how to wayfind using these concepts as your navigation system. Wayfinding is a foundational LMA concept and underlying principle for LMA self-determination and autonomy.
Once you have a navigation system, you seldom need to stop to ask for directions. Instead, you might need to improve your navigation system rather than look for a one-time-use answer to get somewhere.
Whenever you end up in a leg lock situation, even if you escape, you gave them access to your legs. Remember you're always telling me about the lines of defense for preventing takedowns? What are those lines meant to do? Prevent access to your legs. You already have the wheel. Don't invent it again.
Since wrestling was never taught to you through a universal learning approach, and neither is BJJ, they force you to keep reinventing the wheel. So that's the context of how you ended up with this problem that should have never been a problem.
It doesn't matter whether it's a leg lock or a single leg—they want access to your legs to isolate one of them. Isolation is another key LMA concept.
Another critical concept is degrees of freedom, another linchpin to self-determination and autonomy in LMA. So long as you don't break any rules or, from the perspective of LMA, don't injure yourself or your training partner, you're free to move in all sorts of ways. That's your autonomy and self-determination.
As an aside, consider how little self-determination and autonomy there is, even in lefty training spaces? The instructor determines everything, including how you move your body. Then, if you think about the mat revealing who you really are, well... Let's not open that can of worms right now.
You call it "lines of defense," but in LMA, we've developed the concept further to obstruction, another key concept. Lines mean something else in LMA. Knowing things universally is why there is little difference for us whether we strike under Thai-boxing rules, boxing rules, sanda rules, kickboxing rules, wrestle, or submission grapple.
Since you recently competed, rather than saying training partner or opponent, let's just stick with opponent. One of the things that obstruct your opponent's access to your legs is the ground. If half my body was behind a wall, the wall obstructs your access to that part of my body. The ground does the same. If you pass while standing, you give them access to your legs. Who told you you weren't free to pass on your knees or drop to your knees when appropriate or mix and match based on context? That's your freedom. No one told you you couldn't, but since everything you do is via explicit instruction, since no one said you could, you don't. Under the traditional learning model for everything, explicitly or tacitly, you've come to believe you don't have autonomy or degrees of freedom.
When you're on your knees, you remove access to your legs. When your hips and knees are on the mat during a sprawl, your opponent can't access your legs. How shitty is a learning system if it isn't apparent that a leg lock, a single leg, or a half guard are all the same things? They all isolate the leg, and you want to prevent access to it through obstructions, which include hands, arms, legs, head, body, and the mat. You told me that's what you say to your wrestlers, yet since no one explicitly said this to you in BJJ, you didn't connect the dots.
Think back to your previous argument to me about the value of direct instruction in speeding up learning. It doesn't seem to speed things up but instead mortgages the future for one-time-use directions. The explicit and direct instruction process actually makes you a worse learner.
Now, if they begin grabbing your leg in a takedown or a leg lock, you can pull your leg back or go backward. You already do this when it's standing, and they go for takedowns. You already know you don't only have to charge forward in wrestling, but you haven't applied that same degree of freedom to submission grappling. Most only go forward, a few go laterally, and very seldom do people go backward in submission grappling when those are all your degrees of freedom.
But if you learned wrestling universally, a white belt wrestler would do everything I mentioned walking in the door, wouldn't they? It's not that relevant that you're new to Brazilian jiu-jitsu. It's normal to do high-level stuff on your first day if you know how to grapple universally.
For example, whether a leg lock or a single, you can underhook their arms and walk on your knees backward. You already do it in one context. You just haven't developed the wayfinding to recognize the context hasn't changed much. It's mostly the same map. It's really still the same context. Wayfinding is about developing a better read of the terrain or context.
Just because you're looking doesn't really mean you're seeing. Whether a leg or a body is right-side up or upside down, it's still the same leg or body. If you give a little kid two pictures of the same house, they might not realize it's the same house if one of the pictures is upside down. Eventually, they'll figure out it's the same house because they'll develop some wayfinding. But people don't develop their wayfinding much further than that because they don't know wayfinding is a thing, and they are taught to value answers more than context. Techniques are about memorization, and memorization has really low retention. Skill is about context and retention. If it's not retained, it's not a skill. Wayfinding is a skill that must be fostered. Fostering is another key concept and is the opposite of direct top-down instruction. Western capitalist society does not foster wayfinding, so it's not developed.
Most of the relevant things you need to know for leg locks you learned from wrestling. Instruction and the want for top-down instruction prevented you from connecting those dots because you're looking for new patterns from the new instructions when you already have most of the universal patterns. It's like getting a different car and thinking you must learn a new way to drive. Imagine having to relearn how to walk or drive for every new situation. It's really inefficient and ineffective.
You don't need to drill any of this because there's nothing to drill. Just roll again and keep rolling. Maximize your movement freedom and develop your wayfinding—which should be way easier for you than other white belts with no wrestling because you already did it for wrestling. Now, you just need to connect the dots.
It's really a matter of recognizing that these attacks aren't allowed in wrestling, but if they were allowed, how would you, as a wrestler, nullify them? If pinning doesn't end the match, what new possibilities does this afford? Affordance is another key concept.
Submission grappling is just submission wrestling, the same rodeo with more freedom.
[At this point, I thought our session was over because I didn't hear back from Z. Then he replied.]
Z: I know it's been around 20 minutes, and I haven't replied. Just need to read, re-read, and digest this for a bit. Thank you.
[After our session, he sent this message.]
Z: Now, thinking more about how I escaped leg locks last weekend, I realize that the footwork and mechanics were almost identical to how I defend single legs when they already have my leg but haven't elevated it to make it a high single. I tried to do pretty much this in my match, but my reaction was too slow because I didn't recognize it was just a single leg entry.
Prepping for the tournament, I was starting in leg entanglements with leg lockers, and that definitely helped give me a feel for the position, but like you said, it's easier to stay out of there in the first place. It's like teaching scrambling before teaching sprawling when I've always been adamant about sprawling coming first!
As for why this stuff didn't occur to me weeks ago, I think I got too caught up in trying to "learn BJJ" instead of thinking of it as just another wrestling ruleset to adapt my already-existing skills to.
Thinking as I'm typing again, and the latter is pretty much the only way that folkstyle wrestlers become successful Greco guys after college, and it's how the best US wrestlers do well in college folkstyle and senior-level freestyle at the same time. I already treat guard as wrestling from my back and my butt, and I've escaped from brown belts playing guard that way.
My brother played college baseball, and now he plays in adult softball leagues. He says that once he got used to how differently the ball moves, it became basically the same game to him. He didn't pay for softball lessons, and he doesn't have a softball coach. He just played softball games until he got used to softball-style pitching.
Shit, I've been wrestling since I was 10, and now I'm 30. Most black belts don't have 20 years of training, and there are ADCC world qualifiers who don't either! It is literally just a matter of familiarizing myself with and developing tactics for the positions and situations that are unique to BJJ on account of the rules.
[We got a lifetime of learning done in less than an hour or a single BJJ class.]
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