Addressing Eco Drama: Why Drilling Won't Make You A Better Fighter w/ Josh Peacock (SSOF Ep 136)

Josh Peacock2:47

They have discovered the ecological approach and immediately, before even really reading much... I mean, they claim they have read about it, but it's clear by their questions and what they say that they haven't. They've just decided that they're going to attack it. Greg Souders is the avatar of eco approach. In fact, there's a rumor that he created it. I don't know if you heard this or not, that Greg Souders is in fact the root and the font of ecological...

James de Lacey3:20

Well, he's definitely the face of it currently.

Josh Peacock3:48

Yeah, yeah, yep. And so he's the... Big Dan says in his challenge to Greg on Instagram, he says we're going to dispel this once and for all because it's a flawed concept of training, I guess, because of... who knows. Just pick at any given point in time, pick your reason of what it is.

He said that it's an insult to the legacy of all the gods of Jiu-Jitsu and their knowledge because you don't have to learn a technique, you don't have to learn one technique or something. And then it turned into the real reason. This is a little bit speculative on my part, but there is... I pulled out some evidence from the actual discussion. The real reason is that this damages the instructional complex, the instructional... I'm sorry, somewhat obnoxious guy... the instructional industrial complex.

So the Danaher disappointment squad, let's call them that now, carried entirely, I think, on Gordon's shoulders now... I'm just being mean. I'm nobody. They could kill me. They're rich because of instructionals, very. And Greg said something like, 'Hey, I'm going to save you $400 about how to train. You don't have to buy this instructional for all this money.'

And Tom DeBlass didn't like that. In fact, he said it word for word: 'You told everyone not to buy a $400 instructional because of this.' People don't volunteer that stuff idly on accident, right? That was top of mind for him. So follow the money, guys. Nothing changes. People think Jiu-Jitsu is special. Jiu-Jitsu is not special. Everybody wants money and influence. Okay, calm down. All right.

I think that's the real reason. It's a little bit speculative. Hopefully nobody thinks it's slander. I think I have good reasons to believe it. But the stated reasons is that all the elite guys do drilling, so therefore drilling is the best. So I think you should probably never spar and you should only drill infinitely. Okay, if it's that good, then why spar at all? Okay, if it's that freaking good, then you should drill it. If a little bit of drilling is that effective, then why not do a lot of drilling?

Of course, that raises some uncomfortable questions that are impossible for any of these people to answer because the exact reason why you need live sparring, there are no exact reasons people are aware of. They don't know why, really. They don't know why there should be a limitation on drilling. They believe there should be a limitation on drilling, but they don't know why.

So how do we come up with an optimized, an effective synthesis of how to do training if we cannot figure out the contribution of those methods to actual skill development or even just how it contributed to the best people that won ADCC and all this stuff? Apparently, what, four or five decades of Jiu-Jitsu in the U.S. and we still haven't become grown up enough to have an examination like that yet.

I am confident that no matter how much of a manchild you are, eventually you will grow up, however. So we're going to get there. We're a little bit special ed right now, but eventually... the brain damage horseshoe loop will eventually bring us out of low IQ questions to high IQ questions. I'm confident, I'm confident, guys. One day, one day we'll get that.

James de Lacey7:41

I want to unpack a lot of this approach. I've applied a constraints-led approach at a very surface level, mainly in rugby, so I have a little bit of knowledge understanding, but obviously it doesn't go deep deep.

I want to just dive into probably the common questions that a lot of people also have around this approach. I think just like politics, people get sucked into the extreme ends. It's either eco dynamics or nothing, it's drilling or nothing.

So it'll be interesting to kind of go into, okay, ecological approach for you, what does that mean when it comes to training for, let's just say Jiu-Jitsu, because we're talking that topic now? And is drilling something that should... or should, I don't know if should's the word... but is drilling something that should be part of training if trying to learn the sport is, say, your number one priority? Should drilling be part of your training if learning the sport is your number one priority?

Josh Peacock8:46

Is that... yep, I'm not missing...

James de Lacey8:46

No, you're not missing anything. I probably framed that very poorly, but hope...

Josh Peacock8:46

No, no, sorry, I was distracted because I'm by the road and I was trying to make sure the sound wasn't [unclear].

Yeah, from my perspective, no, you shouldn't. There's like four... there's like a bunch of reasons why drilling should not be a part of your training. The first and primary reason is that drilling is not an effective way to acquire the requisite skills to be good at the sport.

Greg, in the recent... it might still be going on, Lord help him... the recent debate, Greg was talking about the transfer problem. There have been direct studies on several sports that are more complicated than Jiu-Jitsu, guys. I'm sorry, Jiu-Jitsu is two bodies interacting. These other sports are many bodies, dozens of eyes trying to organize around one task, far more complex systems than the Jiu-Jitsu competition situation.

I know that that is not popular. It is objectively true. And if you... these people will never talk to me because I'm not a Jiu-Jitsu black belt, but if you will get on a recording with me, I'm happy to embarrass you.

These are way more... there's way more elements in these systems. These systems are, in like soccer, football, rugby, far more complex. There's studies in all of these sports, and they show that the transfer is not good from the rote stuff. And even there's one study that I reviewed on my website where instead of testing in a live performance environment, they actually made people do constraints-led approach and traditional approach...

And the test environment was drills. And what they found was that the constraints-led environment with zero cone drills, any of the fundamentals, any of that stuff, right, the analog to that in jiu-jitsu is the rote drilling and the technique repetitions and the flow drills, right? They did that stuff in soccer, they tested in exactly that environment, and the people that did constraints-led approach did exactly the same.

So the idea that you need that stuff for the fundamentals—which I would challenge the fundamentals anyways, but let's assume fundamentals, you have to have fundamentals—the constraints-led approach, or they call it nonlinear pedagogy, same thing, same results, but superior adaptability.

Why superior adaptability? Because the environment that they tested in was foreign to the environment that they practiced in. Now it doesn't work the opposite way around. The CLA approach, when measured on traditional metrics, does just as well as the traditional approach. So the approach that is directly teaching to the test, the cones and the drilling and the fundamental stuff, did not do better. Directly teaching for the test did not do better than CLA.

However, we know, everybody knows by experience—oh boy, here we go. Oh look at that, framed yourself on the camera too. Yeah, robots and jiu-jitsu people all dumb, I'm just kidding. But we also know, everybody knows from experience, but also the research bears this out too, that when you do the drilling and stuff it does not transfer directly to the performance environment. When it goes live, it breaks immediately. There's a different and new learning curve that happens when you hit live. So that's the main reason.

The other reason, it's just more fun. Why would you, if you only have two or three hours a week to train, why would you do stuff that's not fun? The drilling isn't fun. Nobody likes it that much. The more you go along in jiu-jitsu, the more you want to roll, right? And there's no problem with that. You don't need to demonize that just because your ego as an instructor is harmed that the purple belts are growing up and they want to find their own way.

Yeah, those are the two main reasons. The one is the transfer problem. The other is that it's more fun anyway. So why would you, with those two things in mind, why would you do drilling? That's my question.

James de Lacey13:10

So what then is defined as say a rote learning drill, and what will be defined as a constraints-led exercise that would teach you the same skills?

Josh Peacock13:10

Yeah, a rote drill or a static drill, there's a lot of ways that people talk about it, would be it's sequenced and it's cooperative. So there's a script, there's steps to go through. Some drills, you can do a choose-your-own-story type of thing where you can go and do a different part of the technique, but it's never entirely unscripted. The opponent doesn't give you any real energy, they don't make any intelligent tactical decisions to counter you, and the energy is just different. And that's the cooperative aspect of it.

It's the information you get there is different. What is regulating your behavior in those situations is the recollection of the technique that was taught and trying to hit the steps in the way they were shown to the satisfaction of the instructor. Now in an actual role, first of all, you can do it wrong and it'll still work.

Number two, you can do it a different way and it'll still work, and it might even work better for you. Number three, there's all kinds of things that you never do in the rote drill that are required to make it work that you don't learn and get good at until you do it live.

So if you want to zero in on a particular sort of tactic, first of all, I wouldn't try to force a single technique. That's not a good way to constraints-led approach. It collapses on the philosophy and it removes the difference between the constraints-led approach and the way everybody's done things. But there are ways to get closer to those things and zero in on submission mechanics in a way that helps people understand how to hit those mechanics in a number of different ways, from a number of different pathways and positions.

And one of the things that Greg does, and many other people, is to start people from one arbitrary control position and ask them to maintain that control position. Okay, that's an underrated skill. We're told, I was always told by all the best people, I went to a seminar by Fabio Gurgel, I learned under Lucas Lepri, he's here in the Charlotte area, I learned under him for a year. There's some other really fantastic area instructors in the area I learned under that had all the good information, they're all watching Dinher and everything, and many of them are elite competitors.

I was told how to do it, but until I got enough time trying to maintain a control position and necessarily moving between tactics and trying different things, only then was I able to become skilled at holding the control position. Now here's a pop quiz. Anyone that knows jiu-jitsu knows jiu-jitsu: position before submission. If position is important leading up to submission, wouldn't it be kind of important to get good at holding a control position that leads directly to a submission against a resisting, intelligent, resisting opponent? Wouldn't that be kind of...? The answer is of course yes.

But until recently, the only sort of non-free-sparring live training that anyone did was positional sparring. Positional sparring is a—but until recently there was a fairly limited set of games that's pretty wide and limits you to one slice of the game. And almost none of them have to do with maintaining control of a submission, of a breaking position that you would put yourself in, or a choking position. Okay?

So if you wanted to build that skill through a live interaction, you have to constrain the environment such that that opportunity is available to them every trial to the in the game, and then give them a focus to work towards where they can organize their actions towards a behavior that will get them what they want. So you can do one of two ways. You can just have them hold the control position, and you can have them hold the control position and seek a submission. You can do all of that in the same class. You don't have to master the one before you do the other.

Okay, these are all things that you need to know in order to be skilled at that the submission mega-skill. And you also have to be skilled at getting into those control positions. Okay, it's all important. None of it is more important than the other. And the way that you train in jiu-jitsu is just to find ways to facilitate all these different navigation skills in a live environment that are actually mal-, actually pro-adaptive to what it is you want to do.

It's impossible to teach all the techniques you need, because the way that jiu-jitsu taxonomizes techniques is every sequence of position, submission, all that stuff is a separate technique. Eli Knight's talked about this. Seth Sini, Seth did a good video talking about how many techniques are in jiu-jitsu. The way jiu-jitsu people think of techniques and reps is there's a whole sequence, and for every one breaking mechanic—and there's all kinds of different ways to do the same basic, you know, leg triangle, arm triangle, guillotine, all different kinds of ways just to do the mechanics—there's different entries and setups and all.

You combine all those together, and each one of them is a separate technique, or that, you know, in the way that most people think of it in jiu-jitsu. How in the world do you get enough repetitions, even on a traditional view of repetition, thousands of repetitious muscle memory, how in the world do you get sufficient repetition and muscle memory on that stuff, all of that stuff, through the traditional approach, assuming that that's actually how you develop skill?

James de Lacey19:48

No, perfect. I want to follow on with that as well. So you've obviously mentioned this positional sparring, which was that, I guess, the traditional approach—positional sparring was limited because you'd be like, okay, side control or mount or whatever it is, you're just going to go from there. You mentioned obviously you're trying to add constraints to elicit some behavior that you want out of the exercise that you're doing, so you're getting at least to do those movements.

You obviously mentioned something like, for example, if you're trying to, I know, choking mechanics or whatever it is, so if you're starting from say mount, how are you then designing the exercise where that would be the outcome most of the time, or the behavior most of the time? Because obviously if you say your goal is just to get, I don't know, get a guillotine or take the back for a rear-naked choke, the guy at the bottom's always going to defend that one movement. So is there a specific way that you're setting these up where it can be more free-flowing?

Josh Peacock21:15

Well, I don't think it can be more free-flowing if you want to make sure that they're able to finish the breaking or the choking mechanics. You have to move back and forth between the very low variability games and the higher variability games. And so just do a lot, just do a bunch, and do them in random order. Like you don't have to do anything in... just because it makes sense to you in your head doesn't mean it's actually enhancing your...

Your practice, you can do everything in random order and there's actually research around that. It's fantastic. The differential learning kind of bears this out in a parallel sense. So yeah, you do want people to get a chance to feel it.

I know that some people think, well, if I just show them the mechanics, like how to hold, because the rear naked choke is hard for people to understand. They're trying to pull the head back and they're trying to push the head into the crook of the elbow and all this stuff, and most people can't really finish it that way. So what you really want to do is you want to make this space really small and then you want to cross the elbows in and sink them in, right?

And it feels a certain way when you do it with cooperation, but when you do it live it feels entirely different. And reaching that is really, really hard, and some people actually don't even have the requisite conditioning in their arms and their shoulders to really do that reliably.

So you could say that they have to do it not live to really learn it. But if they can't do it in an environment that's actually live, then can you even call it learning? I would say no, because I have a technical definition of learning that is based in Psychology, in part in the APA. There's motor learning has its own kind of iteration on it that's in the same vein, and that is a change in behavior based in training and experience, right?

And the experience is important, by the way, because now we're hearing from jiu-jitsu people that experience cannot reliably lead you to innovation in jiu-jitsu and then in the elite level skill, even though elite people actually testify that they got their skills this way in many cases. Ethan Crelinsten recently said that he did not learn his passing game from anyone.

It was entirely trial and error because he has a weird body type. He was always the smallest guy in the gym and he did not have a ton of access to elite—he got into Faixa Hobis gym eventually, but he did not always have access to elite teachers, so he did trial and error. So that's just out of the question.

But yeah, go back and forth. Start somebody locked in if they really, really, really are struggling. Just give it to them locked in and they're probably going to finish it pretty quickly. Let the person underneath do whatever he wants from the locked-in position. If he's a roided-out muscle head, maybe he'll escape, but most people aren't that way, so you'll probably eventually get it.

If the person is kind of strong already—a lot of guys starting are strong, they come from manual labor, they have an athletic background, they just want to stay in shape—they're not going to have trouble finishing a locked-in RNC. So remove information from them in the game. Let them start here, but their other arm is free. Okay, give them a problem to solve. This sort of constraint to afford and repetition with repetition, these ideas are really important to building very strong skills that transfer.

I know from experience, not on my own mat, from the place I train at, that this works fantastically well. Greg knows it works well because he has hundreds of students that come through his school. He has purebreds now that are cleaning up in competition. Scott Sievewright has hundreds of people that have come through his program. It works, it works just fine.

And if anecdotal evidence is anything, then we have just as much as anybody else, right? We have just a sufficient amount of anecdotal data as anybody else does on this point. Maybe not in volume, but we have just a sufficient amount of anecdotal data as anybody else does on this point.

And the only reason you don't believe it is because you literally just haven't tried it. You believe something about it that I think is not true. I've definitely seen it with my own eyes in addition to the research, and you are not willing to challenge your own belief. That is the end of the conversation there.

James de Lacey26:03

I love that. But we've played some pretty awesome little games at Vale BJJ here in Austin as well. Like, for example, one of my favorite ones that helped me one of the most was, for example, just no-gi De La Riva. And the person starting De La, the person standing up is just trying to pass—or sorry, the person standing was just trying to not fall over. The person on the bottom was just trying to get them to fall over on their butt, or even starting a single leg X doing the same thing.

And it's just that ability to try random over and over and over and see what they do and fail. Okay, I can't go that way, I can't go that way. And just that is enough to kind of get you more comfortable in those positions because you're spending, say, five plus minutes in that position trying to do something and get an outcome. And it's productive.

Josh Peacock26:29

Yeah, for sure. We, an entire domain of discussion that we have literally not even touched on, and I think it's going to be necessary because the conversation today really bears out the necessity of understanding how to test, measure, and understand—there's something called the performance learning paradox is what Stew calls it. Schmidt calls it performance versus learning.

And the interesting thing about the performance versus learning effect is that it is a bipartisan, almost universally recognized phenomenon. It does not matter whether you're ecological or information processing or what have you. This is something that is recognized in the scientific literature by virtually everybody. And the fact that jiu-jitsu people aren't aware of it doesn't matter. Okay, it just means you're ignorant. It doesn't mean that—everyone thinks that because they're default IP that they're now part of some sort of scientific literature, like they're part of some valid method.

Bro, the best IP people don't do what you're doing. Okay, sorry, I'm not IP, but the best IP people are not doing the silly stuff you do. Okay, sorry, I don't want to be mean. Maybe I have to be mean. Okay.

Okay. Performance versus learning, what is that? It is the transience of improvement that you see on the mat usually as a result of direct instruction. It disappears by the next practice. Why does it disappear? Because learning has not taken place.

So we don't have direct access to learning when it's taken place inside of the body. It's a complex process involving many subsystems in the body and your growing relationship with the environment. Because we don't have access—this is just a basic principle of psychological inquiry—because we do not have access to the internals, we have to infer that learning has taken place by measuring performance.

The complication is that learning does not happen on an immediate time scale. That means the improvements you see in both under instruction and immediate improvements in a game—this is where Eco people that aren't sufficiently grounded in research are going to get tripped up—these are not evidence of learning.

In terms of direct instruction, you're trying to fit your body's movement into something that's been described or shown to you, and you're able to do that in a very limited capacity, and then it kind of goes away by the time you try it next. Okay, so the transfer there is low, and learning has not taken place yet.

When you do a game and you're trying to work from more of an ecological approach, immediate improvements are due to motor adaptations. Motor adaptations, again, is an IP—this is a Schmidt thing. Okay, we all agree on this from the literature, regardless of what the jiu-jitsu people say. Okay?

So the motor adaptation is actually an underrated ability of the human body to adapt to a novel environment without learning. So it's inbuilt, and some people have a better capacity than others. You already have an inbuilt capacity that you've been told since you were a child doesn't exist, because that's how most of traditional education works. You already have an ability to navigate certain complex environments, even in jiu-jitsu, that is better than what traditional approach produces from drilling after months and months.

And so people that actually tried the constraints-led approach, they're like, oh my gosh, people are doing one or two games and they're doing stuff I don't see for three, four, five, six months. And that's amazing. But for me, it's amazing for a different reason. It's amazing not because CLA is better for learning, which I believe it is, but it's too quick for learning to have happened yet.

It's amazing because your body already has an inherent and incredible ability to adapt to novel circumstances in a way that looks skillful to us, because we have an uncalibrated and false sense of what the human body can actually do in terms of perceptual motor control and perceptual performance.

So learning happens actually on longer time scales. And when something becomes consistent, when it persists, when an apparent performance gain continues from environment to environment over time—four, five, six weeks—in a stable way, now you can safely understand that learning has taken place.

So when you're trying to test, action research, whatever, if drilling is learning or drilling is working for performance, are you testing it based on immediate performance, or are you testing it based on actual learning? Something that shows up in the performance environment, in a live environment, not tested by other—

Drills tested in the actual thing you're trying to get good at. Is it showing up there consistently and in a stable way, or are you just looking at immediate performance indicators that disappear? And we all know they disappear. I was a coach, you're a coach, everybody's a coach. Stop lying. You know that this doesn't work this way. You wouldn't have to scream and repeat things if it worked that way. It doesn't.

So if you're measuring based on immediate improvement, you are measuring nothing. You're measuring a transient vapor. You're measuring a phantom. You're not measuring learning. So if you want to understand what works best, you have to measure first of all in a representative environment. Number two, you have to give a sufficient time scale to test if the learning took place, if it's an actual change in skilled behavior or habit, so to speak, in the martial arts paradigm.

James de Lacey33:04

Yeah, does that answer your question?

Josh Peacock33:04

Yeah, I think so. And I've got some more follow-ups to add on top of. I think it will help clarify a lot of things too.

James de Lacey33:04

Yeah. Around, say you're doing some of these, I guess, constraint-led—I don't want to call them drills, let's call them exercises. When, or do you give feedback? Because there are, at least from my experience, there's some people that kind of need to be kind of told what to do, or they kind of get lost in the exercise where they kind of don't know where they should, where they should explore almost with it.

Is there a time, a place where you kind of need to give some kind of instruction to get them going, or is it a matter of redesigning the exercise to try and facilitate what's happening?

Josh Peacock34:02

You don't have to redesign the exercise necessarily. In terms of feedback, external focus of attention is a very important aspect of what we do, by the way. External focus of attention is another thing that was discovered by an IP lady. Dr. Gabrielle Wulf—she turned me down for an interview, so I'm wounded, but I love her anyways. I'll always love her. So I'm on fire today, guys. I'm very spicy today.

So this is another instance where bipartisan research is just in total contradiction to the way the Jiu-Jitsu is taught and most sports. What we want to do is we want to direct their attention to where it needs to be. So what does that look like in a very tactical specific way?

I actually have experience not as a coach but as a partner to at least one kid that was really having trouble with the games. I'll get to that in a second. One thing that you can do is you can re-instruct them on the task focus. Often we forget what it is we were supposed to do, and when we're reminded what we were supposed to do, our intention is properly calibrated and our bodies are able to take care of the rest.

If that's not good enough, maybe the task is a little bit too ambiguous. You might want to redesign the game, or you might want to just give an additional task focus. This is what Greg does. He calls it scaling focuses. So he can take a game with a lot of variability to it that might be difficult for somebody who's pretty new to Jiu-Jitsu. And instead of making them try to manage all the different aspects of the main task, he will give them the option to focus on a lower level, like a subtask.

So for his leg locking games—and this is all in his YouTube channel, I encourage you to watch it and study it and take notes—there's a leg entanglement game where the purpose is to get heel exposure and slap on a heel hook. For somebody who has never had any exposure to controlling the legs and gaining some heel exposure position, there's all kinds of different ways to do it. It's going to be difficult to get to the place where you can actually control somebody's leg enough to facilitate a heel hook.

So what Greg says is, if you're in this class and you're struggling with one of these higher order tasks, just focus on this thing or this thing. So if you're brand new, focus on hanging on to the leg. Just attachment. Attachment is the precondition for most Jiu-Jitsu tactics, whether it's a takedown, a submission, pass—you've got to be connected. Sweeps, all of it. Maintain connection.

If you can maintain connection already but you're still struggling to get to heel exposure, just focus on getting heel exposure. So getting the heel hook, just focus on trying to expose the heel consistently. Don't be worried about finishing it. And if you have a basic functionality in those things, then work on finishing it. But work on getting into a leverage position where the person has to tap.

You can add those scaling focuses in to make a more complex game more appropriate to the learning level of somebody, or you can scale the game down a little bit. The danger with scaling the game down is I don't want you to spend a lot of time in those games because those games are missing information. And that information is useful to understand when you're in danger, when you can be attacked, when you can attack, when you shouldn't attack, all these little nuances we don't talk about a lot when we do rote drilling and things like that.

I want to make sure that when we practice, as much of that is available to us as possible. So it's okay to start with low variability games that are constrained down pretty tightly. But don't stay there. You don't even have to stay there for the duration of the class. Add more variability. Your students can handle it. It's a limiting belief.

James de Lacey38:45

I really like that. I really like that approach of having that larger game, but maybe someone who's less skilled has a tighter focus on what they're trying to do versus maybe the other person is trying to go for the heel. Actually makes a lot of sense. And it scales across a large class too. You're not having to do, these people have to do this and these people have to do this. This new person can't do that drill, so they have to do an easier drill, for example, and then it's kind of disjointed.

I really like that. Really like that approach. Obviously we talked a lot about Jiu-Jitsu, and I think Jiu-Jitsu is probably, I'm not going to say easier, but it's more innate in grappling because there was already a lot of positional sparring and things like that in there, so it kind of fits in well. But for striking arts, boxing is very heavy on pad work and bag work. Muay Thai, the same thing, very heavy on pad work as well. So how can this be implemented in sports like that?

Josh Peacock39:09

Oh, you're going to like this, because it should be used for strength and conditioning. So the heavy bag is good for raw conditioning. You should make it as variable as possible, but really, for learning, that's really just for priming your body to deliver force from different positions and under different conditions.

And I think that the pads really shine for that because the instructor, the coach, can create all kinds of variability around the way the person moves. He can move around the person and cause them to reorient themselves. And he can force them to engage in ways of delivering power from different angles.

However, for skill, for skill, perceptual motor skill, your ability to read attacks, create counters, and create opportunities for offenses, all of these things are sport skills. It's not good for that. And that's because the environment is impoverished. In order to understand how to create a combination, you have to read the way the body of a fighter is moving in the moment, moment to moment. You understand openings based on that, and that's how you construct combinations on the fly.

In ecological dynamics, we call this soft assembly. Soft assembly is the idea that you scale your actions according to your experience level to the information you perceive in the environment. If you're new to the environment, you are still scaling your action to the environment—the motor adaptations—but it's not as skillful because you're not attuned to the right information variables necessary. The more skillful you are, the more you're paying attention to the right variables.

In boxing, that would be maybe looking for openings in this area. What's going on with the loading of the shoulders? Is it possible for me to time a shot to get a shot in here? What do I need to do to bait? Higher order skills of like baiting and things like that. All of that's missing from the pads.

And not only is it missing from the pads, but in cases where you lead pads based on the gesture, the information is often mismatched to the environment, the performance environment. So let's say the function, one of the functions of a cross is to cross over a jab, which is where I think that that term came from. It's a way to score, or as almost like a counter to a jab.

And when you're trying to understand if a jab is coming, an online in-the-moment cue is the movement of the lead shoulder. There might be other cues. There might be other pieces of information, not cues, but pieces of information that are leading you in the direction that there's a jab coming. But the chief information—

Is the movement of the lead shoulder. But when you gesture for a jab on a good pad holder that knows what he's doing according to the conventional wisdom of boxing, which is kind of a closed body of knowledge, using the movement of the opposite shoulder, so you're getting the opposite information when you practice that.

Now if you truly—and I hear this a lot from folk pedagogy people that talk about how to train—they say you perform how you train. If in fact you perform how you train, why is it, how are you supposed to get, train the function of crossing over a lead when you're training the punch in response to a cross?

James de Lacey43:27

That's perfect. And for designing, I guess, games: so you obviously heads and bag good for strength conditioning. We definitely covered that before. And then the pads obviously different information because we're perceiving something different. But then obviously a lot of—there's different ways to spar—but I'd just love to take, hear your thoughts on this. If you're going to do games, it would almost be like you're sparring every day. So I'd love for you to go down that road of, okay, how would you design sessions then that would give you the not the correct information, but at least be able to perceive information that is relevant to competition?

Josh Peacock44:06

There's two things going. The first one has already been solved by people who aren't even Eco, and that is that there is a way to spar with greater control and technicality that's still fast, but that is not doing a ton of damage to your body. So people already know how to do that outside of Eco.

And if you start—Scott has proven this and so is Pedro Sierra and many others—if you start people with live environments immediately, they actually develop that control really fast along the line of motor adaptation. And that is a requisite in my mind to training. If you want to do productive training, you have to do that.

Now you actually can get worn down and broken from sparring if you're sparring too hard all the time. So you should save hard sparring for probably leading part of your camp, leading up to a fight, or if you don't really fight then once a quarter or something like that. You can build a pretty good game without doing a lot of hard sparring because the overlap and the transfer is far greater from the aliveness than it is from the clinical sterility of padwork and cooperative sort of scripted work.

The other thing that's going on that people actually don't know—and I don't fault them for not knowing this, I never knew this either—is that the inherent variability of the games-based training actually protects you from overuse injury and over time makes you more resistant to injury.

So when you force students to do the same thing over and over and over again to a sort of aesthetic standard, which is what most of drilling is, you actually lead them—this is why people tend to get tendonitis a lot. And people like Greg, Greg used to always get injured all the time. He did excessive drilling up until the mid-2010s.

One of the theories in injury is that excessive repetition, which is actually believed by IP people to be necessary for skill—to have a repeatable motion that you can reproduce—that's actually damaging to your joints and to your muscles. And it certainly doesn't protect you when you are forced into a situation where you have to move in a variety of places.

So when you train, when you're required to use a bunch of variable movements and deal with lots of novelty, you avoid the overuse and you become over time actually more resistant to it. And you can easily counteract this if, as a constraints-led approach coach, you make your students play the low-variability games a lot.

So if you make them play a game—this has happened to me quite a bit—where they're trying to hold on to the leg for a single leg, right, and a lot of people really love this game, and they don't want to open it up to let you do other things for takedowns and mediate your own entry and try different takedowns. They just want you to get a hold of that thing and hold it and then facilitate the takedown.

When you do that for a big portion of the class and then you do it throughout the week and then it comes up again two weeks later or the next week, or you do it the whole month, you get some pretty nasty elbow tendon. And so the wonderful injury-preventing effect of CLA has been disrupted because you're not programming in enough variability of the exercises into your practice.

So just because you're doing CLA doesn't mean you're doing CLA in a high-fidelity, principled sense that will actually get you these benefits that it could give you if you did it in the way that it is as outlined by the researchers.

James de Lacey48:15

What would be some examples of those, of low-variability games, as a boxer, MMA athlete, or whatever?

Josh Peacock48:55

As a boxer, one, a low-variability game where I think the skill transfer would probably not be very good, is just to do jab against jab and there's no other tactics at play. You can make it even worse by making them stationary. You can make it even worse by only allowing them to punch to the body or punch to the head. So you only have one region to target, and so you're removing all the decision-making from it.

And everywhere where you're removing decision-making possibilities, you're diminishing the overlap of the performance environment, you're diminishing the variability, and diminishing probably the transfer as well. Yes, diminishing transfer as a result.

So that would be one example. If you're a kickboxer and you think you're going to make really skilled punchers in a kickboxing context by just making them do boxing-type games, this is not a good way to go about it. When you take out the shots and stuff, it changes the stance. It removes an entire dangerous problem area that you need to be able to manage in order to effectively use your punches. It changes the nature of your defense.

And if you're really—everyone's always telling me they don't like bad habits, they're really afraid to do games for bad habits—well, if you could close your mouth and listen to somebody, you might realize that making people just box without the broader context of kicking, which significantly changed the game—we know this, okay, speaking of the body of knowledge all the shamans have figured out—we know that kicking changes the game.

We know that the Muay Thai people tear apart the sideways stance of boxers and taekwondo and karate people. And that's what you're going to do when you only do boxing is boxing, because naturally you're actually going to blade the target area away, because you already have a sense that it's in danger. You're going to make that adaptation immediately.

Oh my gosh, here we go again. Robots. Scott's proven this with his beginner strikers. He doesn't have to teach them stance at all, and they automatically start blading when the kicks come in. The blade starts to go away. Okay, so why? Because there's natural adaptations going on and you can feel the danger already. Nobody has to tell you you're in danger.

I don't know if Jiu-Jitsu people knew this or not: you usually know when you're in danger. Sometimes you're confused about what the danger precisely is. You know you're in danger. Okay? It might take you time to calibrate and adapt tactics. Some people are faster than others. It doesn't mean you're incapable of doing it.

Jiu-Jitsu instructors, martial arts instructors, taekwondo instructors: we're just very impatient. We're very egotistical. We think everyone needs our knowledge. They need to know, they need to know that you have to do your fist like this not to hurt yourself, they need to know it, right? All these ridiculous things. I don't know if that answers your question or—

James de Lacey52:09

That was good. I've got a final question for you to wrap this up. You kind of touched on it there where you talked about bad habits. And as you mentioned, people will avoid games like that because they haven't learned the perfect or the proper punching or kicking technique. And then they see them do these games and it's, well, what's happening here? Arm punches, random kicks, whatever.

So for someone starting out there, in these situations, this stuff: is there ever a time where punching mechanics or kicking mechanics even matters and should it be taught? And then is that something that is developed through these games in the long term?

Josh Peacock52:35

Your ability to scale is the way that you develop this better, because you can't—in taekwondo, in the formal understanding of a technique, there is a specific range that a kick is used from. This is of course backwards, because you can use a kick from almost any range. It just isn't going to look the same way.

And so you have to scale the technique, the tactic, to what you are perceiving in the moment. In the fact of the reality, whether it's competition or self-defense, is that you get your shots where you can get them. Okay? You're fighting somebody who's resisting you with everything they have, and some of them are skilled.

Get your shots where you can get them. You can't always choose the optimum range, and so you have to understand what part of your body are you going to hit with, and then you have to understand where you're going to hit them. And you're not always in control of what parts come open. If you're very skilled, maybe. But you have to create opportunities and you have to find opportunities, and range is going to be different based on the other person.

It's always scaled relative to the body, and what you need is relative to every passing moment, changing moment. This window of time that's always changing—what you need is slightly different one moment to the next. And fussing over optimal mechanics is a luxury, sort of egghead thing, because you can't create, even as the most elite fighter in the world, you cannot create the optimal conditions under which to safely perform the optimal round kick, the optimal side kick, the optimal whatever. It's not real life.

And so fussing over the optimal way to deliver force has almost no overlap, probably no overlap, with actually fighting. Because you have to deliver force as much as you can under the circumstances, from whatever angle, whatever range, whatever previous body position, under whatever tactics that the person is giving you. You've no control over most of those things. You can kind of move yourself around, but maybe if you're, skilled versus skilled, you take what you can get.

And it's really wild that this needs to be explained to people who've been coaching for 30 years, frankly. This is just wild to me.

James de Lacey55:34

Perfect. That's actually a perfect way to end this podcast, Josh. We hit that 60-minute mark and I actually thoroughly enjoyed going through a lot of that constraints approach. But where can people find, keep up, or find you and keep up with what's happening?

Josh Peacock55:34

Absolutely. I'm at combatlearning.com. I'm starting to release video analyses where I look at training videos. If you have one you want me to look at, maybe it's yours, maybe it's something you saw, I will review it. If it's somebody speaking about something, I will analyze it. And you can also find me on Instagram at Combat Learning.

James de Lacey56:01

Perfect. I'll link that up in the description as well for anyone who's interested. But I appreciate you coming on, Josh.

Josh Peacock56:01

Thanks so much, man. I've been a fan of your podcast for a long time, been following you for a couple years now.

James de Lacey56:28

Oh, I love it. I love it. I love it when podcast listeners come on the pod, too.

Josh Peacock56:28

Yeah, boy.