This is backdated.
Cal Jones shoehorned freestyle wrestling into Judo.
Something lots of American coaches mix!
But Cal started with Games, and he’s since embraced an ecological approach.
This post is part 3 of 4.
We go over:
PART 1
Cultural Difficulties in Introducing the Ecological Approach
Why bother trying to spread the Ecological Approach?
Tensegrity & Unity of Action
PART 2
How did people find Cal Jones?
Lesson Learned in Applying the Constraints-Led Approach
The Mysticism of Names
PART 3
Regulatory Difficulties for Rogue Gyms
Improving the Belt System
Where do Katas come from?
PART 4
Emergent Skills
Games for Turn Throws
The Role of Memory
Regulatory Difficulties for Rogue Gyms
Are there special licensing requirements? I know that in the UK, there’s lots of special licensing requirements for boxing and I was wondering if Judo was that way.
We’ve got the British Judo Association, which the Welsh Judo Association is a subsidiary of. They’re part of the same organization. We have the British Judo Council. That’s another one.
They’re all backed by insurance companies.
You have to have insurance to be able to train. So there is licensing stuff there. But I’m on the cusp of throwing my toys out of the pram and leaving Welsh Judo.
Because they’ve been so useless.
I appreciate when you say any kind of journey time to an American, they think it’s so short, because the country’s so big. But for Wales, where I live, we have a five-and-a-half hour journey to get to South Wales. Where the capital is.
All of the funding is down there.
Everything is South Wales focused. There’s a big mountain range in the middle of the country. So to get to Cardiff, we have to go out down into England and back across to get to Cardiff.
When you’re selected for the Welsh squad or going to any tournaments, you’re expected to do this five-and-a-half hour journey there.
Pay for accommodation. So I was selected for Welsh squad as a child. They wanted me to train twice a week in Cardiff. Well, I’m not moving. If I became a professional Judo player and fought in the Olympic games, I’d be getting like seventeen grand a year.
Why the fuck would I do that? No.
So it was utterly unfeasible. And I’ve petitioned them. I’ve written e-mails. I’ve offered to go on the board of directors as an unpaid person. I point out that when I was a kid, there were like thirty clubs.
Now we’re down to like, four.
And there’s absolutely nothing coming back from them. So I have been Umm-ing and Ahh-ing about whether to just tell them. Well, I’ll see if we can go another route.
We’ll see if we can get another governing body to underpin us.
But I’m not the most organized human being. I think that would be difficult for me.
There’s an underlying fear here in the US that some sort of regulation will come from Gracie Jiu-Jitsu. Capturing part of the government bodies. But a lot of states, like the state I live in, are practically still the Wild West. There’s antelope running down the street. I can just go down the street and say I’m teaching Submission Grappling. And if there was a controlling BJJ body, they can’t control that. Is that a possibility over there?
Yeah, I probably could. The qualifications I have mean I could get a sort of cowboy insurance. There’s WUMA, that would insure a three-legged dog with one eye, you know.
You just have to produce however much they want a year.
Show credentials. They just need you as like a blue belt, in whatever sport or martial art you want to do. They will insure you for that. So I could do that.
The only difficulty, then, is when you go to competitions.
If I wanted my guys to go and compete, they’d have to be insured by those [Judo] governing bodies. Which might be difficult. And their grades wouldn’t count.
If they’re not ratified by an IJF affiliated governing body.
So if I said my guys are black belts, and they went to competition, they’re just the white belts. They wouldn’t have any affinity. No standing.
Which would be frustrating.
Improving the Belt System
I guess I’m always thinking about re-inventing the wheel. I had a hard time learning music. I had a lot of tutors as a kid. But I absolutely hated it. Same went for anything that was taught formally. And then I was twenty-six, going back and looking at mathematical logic and I realized oh, I had my own internal language to do this stuff. To solve the problem. But my teachers disliked that. And that’s why I disliked “learning”. So I went back to start learning music again. But I did it in the way that people were playing music five thousand years ago. Doing it that way helped.
Do you do that for Judo? If you were to do that for Judo, do you know what direction you would take?
I’d pretty much be doing what I’m doing now. I pay very little attention to what anyone else is doing. I’m fortunate that my club is small enough. I’m the least important person imaginable.
If I was a flagship club, I might have people showing up and telling me that I can’t be doing stuff.
So our grading system. I’m supposed to have a syllabus. It’s supposed to show me a list of techniques that are coinciding with the grade that they are. If they want a blue belt, they have to show me Tai Otoshi, Tomoe Nage, and Sumi Gaeshi. They have to show me a Juji Gatame. Juji Jime.
A list of moves.
They demonstrate them to me.
And I say, “Yes, you are that grade now.”
I’m sure you can see why that doesn’t quite chime with me. So I’ve not done that at all. It’s whenever I decide it’s probably time to give these little sods a new belt. I’ll do a grading.
We turn up and I say, “Okay, we’ve graded.”
I’ve made it explicitly clear to every single member of my club that our grading system is atrocious. And I just use the grading as a demarcation of time, rather than ability.
In Karate, they have eight-year-old black belts.
The grading system is this thing that is cashed-in on. You have to pay like fifty pounds a grade. The parents come. You do this little dance routine. You get given a certificate.
It’s just set for attention and to try and extract as much value as possible out of your customers. It’s not for me. So I’ve really, really explicitly explained to all of the parents and all the adults. When it comes to grading time. This is kind of farcical.
The way they want me to grade you is ineffective.
So not wasting time doing it that way.
So how do the explanations with the parents go, then?
I’ve had a couple [parents] who have brought kids, and it’s vicarious living.
They want little Johnny to be well-hard. Proper good. They say, “I don’t want him to have a grade if he doesn’t deserve it.”
And you say, “Well, we don’t really have grades like that.”
The system used to be competitive.
The way I got my grades was, you’d turn up to a grading. You’d fight two or three people that were your grade. If you beat them, you’d go up a belt. If you didn’t, and you’re a kid, you’d get stripes.
If you’re an adult, just hard cheese. You’d have to beat those people to go up a belt.
So you knew that a green belt was at least better than three orange belts that they fought on that day. There’s an actual pecking order. If you turned up in a green belt, you should be able to beat an orange belt.
Now it’s just knowing moves.
An orange belt can beat the hell out of a brown belt. At that point you think, it’s just literally something to keep your gi closed. It has no more value than that. Even the Dan grades have been quite watered down. Because the standard for brown belts is so low. You just have to beat brown belts for your black belt.
I sound so old. The old man whinging about how it was better in my day.
It is true that the brown belts now are like the old green or blue belt level. They’re not hardened. They’ve not done loads of competitions. So their capacities are reduced.
Which is a shame.
I think BJJ is going the same way. There’s a lot of watering down of the grades. I remember fighting a BJJ brown belt a decade ago. He was just on another planet. He was so good.
I felt like a child in his hands.
I fight brown belts now- and I haven’t trained in ten years. I’m just a fat old man. And I can pretzel them. A lot of the time.
I guess it’s a saturated market.
You end up with like, if I’m getting a belt at Royce Gracie’s gym, I might go to Roger Gracie’s gym. Or I might just go online and do the Gracie Combatives. It’s been a little watered down like that. Which is a shame.
The grades used to be badass, in BJJ.
What I think of as more traditional BJJ gyms definitely have the belt tests. The funny thing is, the closer the gym is tied to MMA as a focus, the more likely you are to walk into a blue belt who can wipe the floor with most black belts. It’s pretty common. I went to Brazil to train and it was a frequent occurrence. They wouldn’t give the MMA fighters the belts because they had very little gi-time. But they were well beyond.
Imagine not giving Gordon Ryan his black belt.
One of the guys in B-team does not have a black belt? But he places in ADCC.
At that point, we think that belts are pretty meaningless, right?
It’s not that valuable anymore. It is stuck. The fact that you used to have the gym’s reputation on the line used to mean a lot. But now they have so many affiliates.
You’ve got the school where Carlson Gracie is or whatever, but then you’ve got the affiliate. It’s just watered them down.
Whereas if you’re, you know, ‘Punisher BJJ’, where you’re just trying to build a club that has a fearsome reputation? You know the guys from there are killers. At that point, you just sandbag.
You end up undergrading your guys. So they turn up and Pulverize people at competitions, right? Which isn’t healthy either.
Both of those are an unhealthy position to be in.
You don’t want to be sandbagging.
Because you’re not testing your athletes. You’re just trying to build a mythos of credibility for your club. As a marketing strategy, I understand it.
For the development of athletes that are in your charge, it’s not great.
You kind of want grades out the window.
Go compete. If you win those competitions, you qualify for these competitions. If you’re winning in these competitions, you qualify for those competitions.
It’s just the level you fight at that matters, not the belt you wear.
If you want to give people in those competitions belts to wear, I think that would be a better way of doing it.
Kind of like the Association Football division system, where there’s a going up and down?
That’d probably do it.
So you’d end up with, if you’re at ADCC or an IBJJF world event, then you can be a black belt. If you’re in national level stuff, you can have a brown. If you fight regionally, you can have a purple. If you fight locally, you can have a blue. If you don’t fight, you can wear a white.
There you go.
All I needed was ten minutes or so for a whole grading system.
Why don’t I run the world?
I have been fantasizing about a system like that. I don’t know if y’all use Smoothcomp?
The BJJ guys do, yeah.
Something like that, with this rating system built in. Here at least, gyms used to challenge each other. They don’t do that anymore. It’s become passe. Somehow low-status to challenge someone from another gym. But I feel like that ecosystem used to keep things a little honest.
100%, yeah. You’d end up having people that you pin your reputation on. If somebody turns up, I give them my purple belt, and they get the shit kicked out of them.
It has become very gauche.
‘This person tried to gym-storm and got their head kicked in.’ That kind of thing is seen a lot now, and they are quite funny.
What state are you in, by the way?
Wyoming. There aren’t very many people here. A lot of them are wrestlers. Or boxers. MMA hasn’t fully hit the state yet. It’s ten years behind, in many ways.
Do you have the boats coming? Is it time to spring for MMA?
All the pieces are there. All the parts are here. Great wrestling, good boxing. But no one’s really setting things up yet, gymwise. Native Wyoming fighters seem to leave Wyoming as soon as they get professional fights.
It becomes a thing then, doesn’t it? All the people that are successful enough to carry the state? The state can’t carry them, I guess.
So no one’s coming back to form a gym. To get that kind of training here, you have to somehow afford three or four different specializations. It’s one of the homes of Bareknuckle boxing, I guess.
I suspect bare-knuckle boxing has been going on a little longer than that little federation, there. It’s interesting that bare-knuckle boxing is so much safer than regular boxing.
Yes, quite a counter-intuitive thing, in that.
I’d much rather bare-knuckle box than box with gloves, for a career.
Where do Katas Come From?
There is another weird thing about injuries. Hearing about the ecological approach. I realized that I had this assumption in the back of my head. Probably ingrained from all that training. The assumption that the reason we do katas or repetitive movements is to avoid injury.
It’s wild, isn’t it? Do you know where Kata came from, in Judo?
It’s quite an interesting passage in a book I used to send to people, on Judo. They were telling me how important Kata is.
When Kano had his first dojo going. It was called jiu-jitsu, at the time. Ended up being so successful. There were too many people on the mat to do randori at one time.
So they had one group doing randori. The other people were just stood bored.
He had them going through some forms.
It was their ‘waiting to do Judo’ task. It wasn’t something he thought was really important for developing technique. It was, ‘those guys are training, just go do this’.
Go fiddle.
That totally makes sense. There’s something about it that does seem like a waiting-in-line sort of thing. Frustrations in the military were things like that on a larger scale. It makes sense that, in the past, if you took a thousand peasants, and you wanted them to be able to do something, anything, a week from now, you would have to go through repetitive motions.
But today, with a professional force and force-on-force exercises- which is the military version of sparring. I didn’t understand why we weren’t doing that everyday. The only explanation I could come up with is scale. Scale, and people whose job isn’t doing that. You want to get them to do something in a short amount of time. Lots of lines. Queuing.
It’s a weird one with the military.
So much of what happens in the military isn’t becoming more combat effective. A lot of it is trying to generate people that can follow orders. Conform. A lot of the stuff you want from soldiers.
The hurry up and wait stuff, right?
Has a lot of that, I’m told. That is just there as a ‘we’re going to break you so we can rebuild you’. Form you into the type of person that will take commands.
That’s where repetitive tedium has its power.
In terms of combat effectiveness, you’re just not going to get great soldiers if you have them fannying around doing line drills.
It’s not going to be very effective.
There’s this ‘break glass in case of war’ thing. Where some people who were really effective in combat zones are not the people who do great in garrison, and vice versa. It was very weird to see the combat veterans come back with all this knowledge and experience, and have most of what they’re doing be squashed. I saw people being thrown under the bus as soon as the fighting stopped.
I’ve got quite a few friends who’ve come back from Iraq and Afghanistan. I’ve got one that’s still in the Army.
He’s said very much the same thing.
Now he’s in the Guards. The Guards have a rotation where they guard the palace.
He’s like, “I’ve gone from having my friends blown up in a military convoy where I was under RPG fire. Where all the stuff I was doing was from hands-on experience as a combat specialist. And now I’m back, I’m written up because my shoes aren’t quite shiny enough.”
I can see how that would be really, really, frustrating.
I feel like part of the purpose of the military is to take all the parts of the population that are likely to cause problems for a society in the long-term and make them obedient.
It was with him.
Gouse is very much that. He himself would be the first to admit that were it not the Army, he’d be in prison. It does attract a very specific type of person. Not that all the people are a specific type of person. But a lot of the people that are that specific type of person are attracted to the Army.
High-risk takers. Massive adrenaline junkies. ‘I live at this level’.
Another friend, Pat, was an engineer in Iraq and Afghanistan. As an eight-year-old he used to hang off balconies by his feet on the seventh storey.
And you kind of think, yeah. It’s not overly surprising that you’re in a fucking warzone.
Absolutely no concept of mortality or fear of these situations.
I wonder if martial arts gyms are doing the same kind of thing at a smaller scale. Something I would notice is, for some instructors, they would teach you these moves. If you did something that wasn’t one of those moves, they would get extremely angry. Especially if you beat them in a sparring session. It’s almost like people are installing a chain of techniques.
And then the game turns into chess, as everyone likes to say.
You forget that you can just flip the board.
It’s a real problem for coaches that coach in that linear way. You end up with new students. They play your game.
They do your moves the way you do them.
I’m 6’1”. 18 stones. The best guy at my gym is like 5’6”. 65 kg. He’s like a little bear. Deadlifts 200 kg, he’s three-times his bodyweight strong.
The stuff I do is nothing akin to the stuff he does.
It’s just totally different.
If I’m ever showing a kinematics or somebody’s finishing mechanics off for a move, I’ll show them some solutions that might help them. Discuss some principles as to what they’re trying to achieve. Make the strangulation work, or whatever.
Loads of the time, I’ll show, let’s say an arm triangle, and I’ll say, “This isn’t the only way. This is how I do it.”
And Adam, my little freak, would say, “Yeah, but if you do that, I’ll just do this.”
And you go, “Oh, yeah, I suppose you could.”
He says, “I do it like this!” And he does this thing where it’s way better than what I’d have done.
I’m comfortably in a position that my ego can take the fact that there are people that do something way better than me. But if I was the, “Ah, that’s not the way I do it!”
It would be an impact. That they’re not playing chess with the same moves I have.