Wrestling Concepts For BJJ w/ Former Top 3 Ranked D1 Wrestler Joe Spisak (SSOF Ep. 41) - Stop Getting Choked When Shooting Doubles

Joe Spisak2:58

Yeah, yeah, that's a really good question. So one of the things that I've noticed whenever you're wrestling at a really high level, and you kind of take that jump from high school wrestling where you are a big fish in a small pond to coming into college wrestling where it feels like you're learning all over again... I didn't get my first takedown in a college room for a couple months, and it was just super demoralizing.

But a big skill gap difference is in the hand fighting. And that's one of the things I noticed coming into jiu-jitsu and starting to train jiu-jitsu much harder. There's just less of a focus on hand fighting. I noticed some of the jiu-jitsu people, even seasoned black belts and stuff like that, they'll get kind of lock-and-go on their shot setups and kind of fall into legs.

Which, with guys who are good at hand fighting and can control the ties on their feet, that's smelling blood in the water for us. If we have someone taking a sloppy shot, I love getting people into that front headlock position and then bullying the [expletive] out of them and looking to score some points from there. So I think that's one of the big things with standup.

And then another thing... So Brandon Gucci, a guy who's big in the Austin jiu-jitsu scene down here, and he was a Division One wrestler at Duke. He's super dangerous on his feet from an upper body perspective—throws like lat drops, headlocks, things of that nature. Maybe it's just the people that I've been training with in jiu-jitsu, but it seems like there's some upper body stuff there that still needs to get worked on, because I'm watching Brandon launch dudes across the room.

James de Lacey4:25

Oh yeah, for sure. Do... maybe dive into a little bit about hand fighting. What hand fighting actually is and I guess what you're trying to achieve doing it. Because I think when people... maybe people, jiu-jitsu players, that hear hand fighting might not understand what's really happening there and what you're trying to achieve doing it. Because it's definitely a skill that takes time.

Joe Spisak4:55

Yeah, great, great question. So hand fighting... I guess general principle is you're looking to better your position on your feet and open up angles to score points, right? So whenever you're on your feet, you're in your stance. General rule of thumb is you don't want to have outside tie, right? So if someone has inside tie on you, you're starting to pummel in so you can get inside tie.

And what my dad would always say is you're looking to create angles, you're looking to open up windows, right? So while we're hand fighting, you may be doing wrist rolls, you may be faking shots, you may be head beating. You're looking to ultimately get that person in bad position so you can get in on legs and get a really easy shot.

Whatever I was alluding to earlier was sometimes I see jiu-jitsu guys just kind of shoot in and get in on a leg, and then they really have to go Hulk smash to get the... to score points and get a finish, right? But you don't want to have to go Hulk smash and exert all that energy if you can hand fight super hard, hit a nice fake, hit a snap elbow pass, and get them to the point where their body's facing the other direction and you can blast double them to the ground and exert that energy up front.

That's what you're trying to do with hand fighting. You're trying to put your opponent into bad position so you can score points on them much easier. And generally, also, I guess to add to that... you hear coaches say exert your will, kind of force your position, force your positioning on them, right? If I'm really good at a wrist roll, fake snap shot, whatever, I'm trying to force those positions on my opponent, right? That's what you're trying to do. You're trying to bully them into your positions while you're hand fighting.

James de Lacey7:10

Yeah. Is there... I guess are there... or are there things that someone who is trying to up their wrestling game... I guess techniques or things they can focus on that are high percentage to really drill? Obviously there's so many different things you can do. There's so many different setups. Everything almost needs a setup, I think.

That's one of the other things I know that's something I did and a lot of people, other people, do is just try to come in and just take a shot. Because that's kind of all that we know, all that we learned through jiu-jitsu was here's how to do a single leg, here's how to do a double leg, okay, and then try and do it when you're at your training. But are there... are there things that someone can drill to start practicing these setups and different things?

Joe Spisak7:37

Yeah, great, great question as well. So I guess my first point to that would be always try and train with the best possible people you can. Again, another Steve Spisak, my dad-ism, is you never want to be the guy in the room who's beating up on everybody for a prolonged period of time. You want to be going in and getting your ass kicked. That's how you ultimately get better. It's the iron sharpens iron adage.

So any opportunity you have to train with someone more knowledgeable than you in wrestling, do it, because it will be a lot less hard to create bad habits.

Secondly, I'll say don't try and overcomplicate things. We all sit down and watch Instagram reels and TikTok and watch all this super high-level wrestling and jiu-jitsu technique, when in reality what has won matches the past decades, in wrestling at least, hasn't evolved that much. It's been a lot of the same stuff, right?

So find some really good core setups and find one, two, three, and drill those over and over and over. And then once you feel really comfortable with them, then start to expand your arsenal a little bit. But I mean, just off the top of my head, some very simple setups that you can do...

So that comes back to that main principle. You always want to try and fight into that inside tie. You don't want to get ear to ear because it's basically just... it's a position where it's stalemate, basically. You're not going to be able to generate much offense.

And then, you know, level changes, pop up on both arms, you can chop, you can hard head beat, you can fake and snap, just basic things like that to get your opponent moving, open up that window, and get angles on them. But a pop, a chop, a snap, a fake shot, that's all stuff that should be, you know, just be into you. You should get 10,000 reps of that as soon as possible, and it will make you a much better hand fighter.

James de Lacey9:56

How much of that have you drove just shadow wrestling as well? Is that something that you have found valuable with that?

Joe Spisak9:56

Yeah, so shadow wrestling in terms of just on your own? Yeah. So that's good. We would do a lot of visualization stuff and shadow wrestling, and it's always a good post-practice cool down to keep the sweat going too.

And a lot of my shadow wrestling is just good level change, just setting up shots. I like to get fancy sometimes and hit a little duck under, look fresh. I'll hit some low-level stuff and drop to that. And then a lot of my shadow wrestling too will just be a sprawl and practicing my sprawl and spinning out, and then also just adding in fake stuff there as well.

So it's tougher to do some of the more advanced setups in there, but it's definitely something you can start working into your arsenal. And honestly, the just the more you can get used to being in your stance here, the longer you can stay there, the more you can level change, it will just make your hand fighting better overall because you don't get as tired and you won't succumb to putting yourself in bad position.

James de Lacey10:50

Yeah, that's one thing I've noticed when I was doing a lot of shadow wrestling in preparation for some comps a while ago. Man, your lower back and stuff, if you're not conditioned, your lower back and your legs take a beating just doing say five minutes of it compared to if you're doing five minutes of something else. It's another level.

Joe Spisak11:13

Yes, 100%. You'll see dudes start fading in the third period and then they start standing up and just leaving themselves wide open to get picked apart. So that's why it's so good to shadow wrestle and train stance motion, because it's such an important part of wrestling is good position. Good position will always win in wrestling.

James de Lacey11:13

Yeah, that's something that I know you've taught and I know Andrew teaches as well with the wrestling side. I guess it's one of those wrestling concepts too around positioning that I'm trying to bring into my game because, as I mentioned before, just shooting from no setups and stuff like that, it doesn't ever end well.

So maybe a little more on the positioning side with this. Obviously you mentioned the hand fighting, but is there anything else outside of the hand fighting that you're trying to do to set yourself up with successful takedowns, successful shots, or anything like that?

Joe Spisak12:06

Yeah, so I noticed very quickly that some of my best shots in wrestling did not translate that well over to jiu-jitsu. And I'm sure other people have had success with some of these shots and I just haven't quite cracked the code yet, but I've found a couple positions that I'm able to bully people into that I feel much more comfortable and have a higher percentage to be able to find a submission.

So obviously, let's start with some of the good shots that have worked well for me in the past. So just a nice blast double where you can blast them and throw their hips to the side and go right to side control. That's a classic. We've had a lot of success with doing Russians as a tie-up, working our way up, and then either snapping them down or just going straight to try and get the back and then mat return them from your feet.

Some of the stuff that I haven't had as much success with would be my low leg shots. And one, I think it's because in jiu-jitsu you are barefoot, so I start to sweat a lot and it's kind of this step in the bucket situation, right? Wrestling gripped up, and you can lower your level and you can hit nice low legs like that.

Once you really start sweating and you're trying to plant and low leg, you end up slipping sometimes and then getting stuck under that person. And whenever I'm getting stuck under people, I feel like I'm just getting opened up to guillotines and darce chokes and things of that nature.

So I've tried to almost completely cut out scrambling and or getting under people and getting stuck in this position down here where they have a front headlock or they're on top of me, because I don't feel great in that position. But doubles have been working great, upper body throws, headlocks where you can go straight to side control. And then knee pulls and outside leg sweeps have been working really well too. You're on the corner and then you can sit them down and go side control from there.

James de Lacey14:23

Got it. That's funny you mentioned about the sweating because that's something that becomes, I guess, a pain in the ass when you start to set things up and you can't even keep your footing. Do you have any other strategy things when the sweat starts rolling for setting a lot of things up?

Obviously gripping and hand fighting also becomes more difficult because things like arm drags and stuff become pretty much impossible in that situation too. So is there anything else that you'd like to do?

Joe Spisak14:23

Yeah, so I think that is when your upper body, your hand fighting, your Russians, your really close combat stuff is when that becomes really important. Because whenever I'm sweating, I'm not taking outside shots and really trying to pop off on people and use my speed and agility. I'm trying to systematically work myself inside and get to stuff that I know I'm not going to have to worry about slipping off.

James de Lacey14:47

Yeah, but that's always a tough one. In freestyle wrestling, which is one of the two types of Olympic wrestling, so there's freestyle and there's Greco, Greco's upper body, so they wipe you off in between periods. So in between periods you come off, they towel you off, and then before you're allowed back on the mat, the ref basically feels you and makes sure you're dry because they don't want slippage.

Joe Spisak15:19

So yeah, oh, well, not going away.

James de Lacey15:19

Yeah, for sure. I don't know if you've had much experience with MMA, because are there, if you have, are there any other concepts that apply over to MMA well or that are similar to Brazilian context for jiu-jitsu? Because I'm assuming if you're not really hand fighting MMA, you're obviously setting up with different strikes and things like that. So is there any concepts that you have found that may transfer over well there?

Joe Spisak15:44

Yeah, so I am by no means the MMA expert. Love to watch it. Did do a fight whenever I lived in Chicago. It was an amateur fight, like bar fight, got a couple G's to do it. But it was kind of exploring if that could be a career choice for me at the time, and realized that that just wasn't really me.

I really enjoyed it, but if you want to be a top tier fighter, it's a full-time job. And I was having success in other areas of my career, and I decided that that's why I'm really happy I found jiu-jitsu, because I feel like it's a lot lower chance that you're going to really mess yourself up and hurt yourself as opposed to striking in MMA.

But I do have a fight on YouTube, and I think that I pretty much went in there and did classic wrestling stuff, right? Threw a couple punches and looked for the first opportunity I could drop down, hit a double, throw the legs to a side, get side mount, and then ultimately try and go full mount and just start teeing off.

That's what I see a lot of wrestlers do that they transition in, because that's what we know how to do really well. So you think about wrestling, you've got neutral position, you've got bottom position where you're trying to escape to score points, and then you've got top position where you can turn people over to pin them or ride them and get riding points in college.

And a lot of stuff from your feet will translate over to jiu-jitsu. A lot of stuff on top, that's been awesome. I rode a ton of legs in college. That was definitely my best position. So riding legs and looking for rear naked choke has translated over super well for me.

But then bottom doesn't really translate over at all. And in fact, it's probably a lot of unlearning stuff from wrestling, because you do want to be on your back in jiu-jitsu and it's a power position, as opposed to trying to fight off there. In wrestling, it's funny you mentioned about the top position in the pinning.

James de Lacey17:59

I think it's Khabib's camp, and where they talk about pinning a must be, where they talk about pinning the opponent on the ground as well. But the idea of being able to pin an opponent down to they essentially cannot escape, for example side control, a lot of guys in jiu-jitsu are really good at escaping side control and things like that. So what is it from wrestling?

Joe Spisak18:23

That you've been able to play over that can allow you to basically pin someone down and keep them there. So wrestling is, it's a lot of things, but body control is definitely top there, right? And so just all the years of wrestling and learning not to get in bad position and not to have someone flip you over or escape or whatever, translates over really well to Jiu-Jitsu.

So once we can get on top and we can slow things down and think a little bit more about kind of the chess match behind Jiu-Jitsu, I mean I feel pretty damn confident whenever I'm on top of someone just like years of riding legs. It translates over really well to Jiu-Jitsu.

James de Lacey18:52

Is there, are there any, I guess it's a difficult one to kind of explain because it's more of a technical thing that you'd have to, there'd probably be more to be shown, but obviously being in side control, are there things that you do as a wrestler that is different than a Jiu-Jitsu player might do to keep someone there?

Joe Spisak19:22

Well it's just different because whenever you're in quote unquote side control in wrestling you're literally on top of them trying to pin them, right? They're literally fighting for their life trying to get off their back. You're scoring points on them actively. In Jiu-Jitsu it's not like that.

That's a, that can be, it's not a prime position for the person on bottom, but it's a position that people can systematically work through. It's like they still got a lot of match left in them. So it's two different things really.

James de Lacey19:48

Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. No that makes sense. And I want to come back to the standups. I want to try to get this as practical as possible for anyone listening. And maybe just cover, I know you mentioned you talked about the hand fighting, the setups, blast doubles are kind of like your thing there as well. Is there, are there, if you had to pick maybe a handful of takedowns for someone to drill and get good at, do you have a few that you see as the best or high percentage in that regard?

Joe Spisak20:11

Yeah, we're talking from a Jiu-Jitsu perspective, wrestling translating to Jiu-Jitsu? Yeah. So let me get my pen out here and kind of think.

So I think there is stuff that, there's takedowns that you want to learn early on in your career just because they'll be easier to learn and get good habits set up and they can be your bread and butter that will also be high percentage takedowns. But then there's also kind of some new age stuff that people can hit too that not a lot of people are doing that can work really well in Jiu-Jitsu as well.

So I think my number one would definitely be some type of double leg is what we could put in there. And then maybe you could tie it in for double leg, but some type of duck under series. I think that can work really effectively as well.

Duck under being, you can get fancy with it and you can kind of fake to this side and then throw your arm up and come around the other side and you end up in that claw position behind someone where it's just an easy mat return right to side control. Or you can claw and come over top and throw a choke in as well.

But it's a really low-risk move in terms of if you don't hit it you're just right back into your stance and you're not really missing anything. So sometimes I'll go inside tie as well and I'll feint to the right or feint to the left and then I'll come backside and duck straight to that double leg position. So you can catch people sleeping with that a lot when they're in bad position too.

And again, it's not super high risk if you end up missing it. Where you do get at risk is if you try and hit that and you get a little sloppy and you're coming back up. What did you just do? You just open yourself up to put yourself in blast double position. So stuff to watch out for.

I think after that, I'm pretty comfortable upper body, so I think upper body takedowns like a headlock. I mean, I'm such a sucker for a headlock. I love it, it looks sweet. And a nice little fancy variation of that that I've had a lot of success with in college: so whenever people come and lock up a headlock they come this way and throw their hip into it.

Well you can do something called a crunch headlock where you still have that headlock locked up here and you basically reverse your hips, crunch your elbows, and then pop your hip like this and you come backside and it's really effective as well and not too many people hit it. So I think upper body stuff would probably be my number three takedown.

I guess just to kind of close out some other upper body things that work. So my dad called this a Polish hop. So you basically have an over under position, that's where you see a lot of upper body happening, you see people pummeling back and forth. It's how you hand fight in upper body position.

And what you can do is the side you have the overhook on, you can get an angle, come around and trap their leg and squeeze it right here, body lock, and then launch over top. And same thing, you can end up right in side control. It's a really good way to, while you're hand fighting, get position and launch. And then I think that's kind of the top ones that I've had success with with upper body.

And then I guess lastly, to kind of just close it out, I told you not the biggest fan of low legs because I don't like to get underneath people and put into that front headlock position. Good outside leg singles I think can work pretty well, although you have to watch out for a guillotine. If you're doing an outside leg sweep and you're under people right here, I've seen people just sneak in guillotines all the time, which I don't love getting in that position either.

And the last one that I really love that I hesitated bringing up first is a knee pull. It's basically like a lefty high crotch and I lead with my left leg and bait the person into posting. You basically put your hand like this and treat it just like you're throwing a shot put. Throw that shot put, shoot in lefty, and then come backside like this.

So you get that angle and you're on the outside corner. And then you can use that and basically come right up, take the back, or just run through them. But yeah, that's kind of my list.

James de Lacey24:35

That Polish one is actually one we learned on Saturday from Andrew, where you replace the leg with your leg and basically kick your, basically replacing their leg and they're unbalanced and you're just essentially falling back like that. It's actually quite handy with that over under position because obviously no one's going to give you double unders when you're directly in front. So it's another option there for you.

Joe Spisak24:59

Yeah, no, exactly. That's awesome. And kudos to the Tackett brothers, man. All of them are beasts. They're great guys, they're great ambassadors of the sport and they certainly know their stuff. So I'm really happy to hear that he was coaching that as well.

James de Lacey24:59

And then just on the 50/50 positions, so you obviously talk about the ear to ear position when you're kind of both tied up together, something kind of avoid. Is there anything else that you see as a 50/50 position that if you're in that, just kind of get out of it and reset?

Joe Spisak25:31

Yeah, I think a lot of that is going to be dealer's choice because some people are more comfortable in certain positions than others. I've seen some people that I thought were in 50/50 positions and people are just baiting into that because they can start a go-to series or system from there.

But let's see, some of the 50/50 positions that I get in that I absolutely hate. And I think a big learning curve for me has been the heel hook stuff with Jiu-Jitsu. I was a phenomenal scrambler in college, diving on legs, rolling through, scrambling, just kind of that in-between made-up wrestling which I really enjoy.

But once we get into a ground position where someone has a heel hook on you and you have a heel hook on someone else, I haven't quite cracked the code on that positioning yet. And I'm still kind of working through the chess match of heel hooks and all that down there.

So looking to link up with the Tackett and get some crash courses on that, but I absolutely steer away from that all the time. And I think that's where a lot of wrestlers struggle coming into Jiu-Jitsu, and same with MMA people as well, because if someone tries to hold on to your leg like that in an MMA fight, you're just going to punch them in the face, right?

So it seems like a technique series that is native to Jiu-Jitsu and where some people that have trained exclusively Jiu-Jitsu definitely have a leg up, pun intended.

James de Lacey26:52

Yeah, definitely. You have to come to Val's leg lock class on Tuesdays as well. That's where it's at too. Ryan Valo, he does a lot of...

Joe Spisak27:19

Stuff. I mean, he explained the leg game in jiu-jitsu. There's jiu-jitsu and there's leg locks, and leg locks is a different sport. Definitely, I would love to come to a practice there with you sometime and we could switch roles and you could coach me up on some of you guys' leg lock stuff because I definitely need some work there. I'm all yours.

James de Lacey27:19

It's great stuff. Now, this has been an awesome Joe. We covered a lot of wrestling stuff here, but if anyone wants to find you and follow you and see what you're up to, where can they do that?

Joe Spisak27:43

Yeah, so I'm pretty active on Twitter, so joespeezy, J-O-E-S-P-E-E-Z-Y. That's my Instagram handle as well. And then LinkedIn, Joe Spisak, feel free to add me.

I own a company called Fulfill.com. I have a couple e-commerce brands, always looking to network with great people in our sports genre as well as people looking to better themselves from a career perspective too.

James de Lacey28:02

Awesome, perfect. Now thanks for coming on and sharing all that wrestling knowledge, Joe. I appreciate it.

Joe Spisak28:02

Thanks for having me, James. Talk soon, brother.