EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,290 words- 0:00 – 15:00
And we're live. John…
- JRJoe Rogan
And we're live. John Danaher, thank you very much, sir. Very nice to see you.
- JDJohn Danaher
It's my pleasure, Joe. Thank you for having me here.
- JRJoe Rogan
Uh, nice to be with a fellow fanny pack proponent as well. And, uh, now you, you have one of the, the beautiful Higher Primate leather bags. I like that, huh?
- JDJohn Danaher
Joe Rogan has just given me one of the most beautiful fanny packs that I've ever seen in my life. Um, I, I wear a very cheap fanny pack and this, this is a thing of beauty. I was just telling Joe about, uh, my student, Gordon Ryan, was recently given a Gucci fanny pack.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- JDJohn Danaher
It's literally the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life. When he wears it around me, I get insanely jealous. And-
- JRJoe Rogan
But would you buy one of those?
- JDJohn Danaher
No.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's like a $800 fanny pack.
- JDJohn Danaher
Just on, just on principle, just on principle, I can't buy an $800 fanny pack. But I could definitely stab Gordon Ryan in the back with a knife and steal it from him-
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- JDJohn Danaher
... and blame it on Nicky Ryan. I could do that easily.
- JRJoe Rogan
Blame it on his brother?
- JDJohn Danaher
Absolutely.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- JDJohn Danaher
Make a great TV series.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs) The fanny pack is making a comeback. It's a slow comeback that a lot of people are reluctant to join. They're, they're scared. They, they worry about their position in the sexual food chain.
- JDJohn Danaher
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
And-
- JDJohn Danaher
With, with good reason, by the way.
- JRJoe Rogan
I don't know why. I feel like anybody that won't fuck you 'cause you have a fanny pack, you don't wanna fuck them. They're too much work.
- JDJohn Danaher
Strong point. Strong point.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, it's just not worth it.
- JDJohn Danaher
Essentially it's always a battle of, uh, appearance versus function.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- JDJohn Danaher
Um, fanny packs score very, very low on appearance, but very high on function.
- JRJoe Rogan
I feel like that one bucks the trend.
- JDJohn Danaher
I think (laughs) you're right.
- JRJoe Rogan
Uh-
- JDJohn Danaher
Between this and the Gucci, we've got something going on here.
- 15:00 – 30:00
Mm-hmm. …
- JRJoe Rogan
pre-Jusmar Palhares. But you, all of the sudden, came along with this very effective system that... there was rumblings many years ago about this, where a lot of people were talking about it, and a lot of people were saying that, you know, "John Danaher has this insane leg lock system." And then you started developing all these chi-... for people who don't know, the top grapplers in the world... there's a, there's a lot of top grapplers in the world. Jiu-jitsu is incredibly competitive. But you're recognized as being one of the premier coaches of the most promising young people, like Gordon Ryan, who you were talking about before, who was an Abu Dhabi champion, Garry Tonon, Nicky Ryan, Eddie Cummings. You have an incredible crew of world-class strangle artists who are also known to be some of the very best leg lockers in the world. So what happened?
- JDJohn Danaher
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
How did that, how did that all take place?
- JDJohn Danaher
Um, let's go through, uh...
- JRJoe Rogan
We should talk about the history of...
- JDJohn Danaher
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... the, the taboo.
- JDJohn Danaher
L- l- let's... you, you've actually asked about six different questions.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. I'm sorry.
- JDJohn Danaher
No, no, no. It's, it's good, but we can answer them in turn.
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay.
- JDJohn Danaher
So let's go... let's... the first question, your first question was a historical question. How, how did it happen? Okay?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- JDJohn Danaher
Um, first off, um, there was nothing in my early, uh, uh, learnings, uh, o- of, of jiu-jitsu which suggested leg locks. Nothing. Okay? Um, Renzo would teach. Um, by the way, I should say my, my, my sensei throughout my entire career has been Renzo Gracie. Um, I never left Renzo. He taught me from white belt to black belt, and I never left his academy. I'm the only one of his students who stayed with him from white belt to black belt and never left. Um, uh, so Renzo would teach leg locks, but it was taught in always the same fashion that everyone else did. Here's a move, here's a, you know, a figure-four toe hold. Here's a heel hook. Here's an Achilles lock. Um, so the, the moves themselves were known. Okay? They, they were, they were in existence. It wasn't like I invented heel hooks or something like that. That's, that's not the idea. Um, but they weren't emphasized. Um, a very, very, uh, talented and, um, uh, uh, influential, uh, figure in my life was a guy that I only knew for three days. Now, that sounds, that sounds crazy, right? How can you learn something from someone in three days? Well, actually, the influence he had occurred in three minutes. I'm a big believer in the idea that someone can come into your life for a very short period of time and have a massive influence. I truly believe that. In my case, it was, uh, a great American grappler called Dean Lister. Dean Lister was invited by Matt Serra to come to the Renzo Gracie Academy. I believe, don't quote me on this, but I believe Dean was a brown belt at the time. I'm pretty sure Matt was a brown belt at the time too. And, um, uh, he brought him in for around three days, and he trained mostly with Matt Serra in preparation for a grappling tournament, if I, if I remember correctly. Now, Dean was known mostly in those days for his Achilles lock. Uh, later on, he would become a heel hook specialist, but in those days it was mostly an Achilles lock. And he came to the academy, he rolled with some people, and he did...... uh, he was doing Achilles locks and getting some success. Um, you know, it went both ways. I, I remember, um, uh, he, he couldn't really get his stuff to work on Matt Serra and Matt Serra could get his stuff to work on him. But, um, uh, he was doing something which was unusual. And so I talked with him just briefly after class one day and I said, "You know, it's interesting what you're doing with these Achilles locks because I don't really do that at all. It's not something I do." And he said one sentence which completely changed my outlook. He goes, "Why would you ignore 50% of the human body?" One sentence. "Why would you ignore 50% of the human body?" And I looked and I was like, "I don't know. Why, why would you? It makes no sense." And we never talked again. And then he went back to California. He went on to become two, two time ADCC champion, mostly with leg locks. Um, but what Dean gave me was not technique, didn't show me a single technique, but he gave me a point of view. If you give a man a point of view, you can change him. Okay? He can, he can work from there. That was the influence. And, um, my sensei, Renzo Gracie, was an extremely, uh, liberal minded professor of jiu-jitsu. He would let us do whatever we wanted. Okay? He wasn't one of those guys saying, "No, no one in my academy is studying leg locks." He was never like that. He was, he would allow his students to go in any direction they wanted provided they could prove it was effective. Um, so I started studying leg locks and that's where I'm gonna come to the second question which you asked, which is, why did leg locks have such a bad reputation in jiu-jitsu? It's curious, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- JDJohn Danaher
We don't talk about this way about arm locks. Um, I'm gonna run through the main criticisms and you'll, you'll be my witness on this, Joe. I'm sure you heard the same criticisms-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- JDJohn Danaher
... a thousand times. You would always hear people ref- uh, refer to leg locks in the following way. The first, the first criticism, they were too dangerous. Okay? If you, if you allowed people to do leg locks, everyone would be injured in a week and jiu-jitsu would be impossible. So that was the first criticism you would always hear. The second great criticism is they didn't work. Okay? Um, you might be able to tap out a white belt with a heel hook, but if you're world championship level, you're never gonna tap anybody. It didn't work at higher levels. That by itself, those two criticisms seem to go in opposite directions. If they, if they're really that dangerous, but they don't work, how, how does that, how do those two gel? They're either incredibly dangerous to the point where they can't be practiced or they don't work. They, they, the two arguments contradict each other. Then you hear other arguments that they were positionally unsound. That if you were in top position and you went for a leg lock, you would lose position and that was a disaster. Okay? That's a criticism with no merit because the, that cri- same criticism applies to guillotines, arm bars, etc. You can be mounted on someone, go for an arm lock and lose position, end up on bottom. But no one criticizes arm bars. Um, so as I went through the reasons why people criticized leg locking, none of them really made sense. So I started asking myself, well, often the reasons people give as opposed to what the real reasons are, are very different. And the more I thought about it, the more I thought the real reason people don't like leg locks runs much deeper than that. Let's understand jiu-jitsu for what it is. Jiu-jitsu is a systems based approach to fighting. Okay? What is the system of Brazilian jiu-jitsu? Well, it can be described in a few different ways. I'm gonna give you one rendition which is pretty simple and will resonate with most of your listeners. Jiu-jitsu is a system based around four distinct steps. You can add steps, you can subtract steps, but the, the rendition I'm gonna give you now is probably, probably the most widely known. Okay? Let's say a friend of yours asks for advice on fighting. He knows you're a Brazilian jiu-jitsu expert, you're a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu and he's saying to me, "Joe Rogan, tell me, I don't know anything. I, I wanna fight someone else using your Brazilian jiu-jitsu. What are the steps of Brazilian jiu-jitsu? What's the system that it, uh, what is the system that it espouses?" You're gonna see always that step number one is take your opponent to the ground. Okay? Why? Why do you, why do you think the ground is so special? Why did Brazilian jiu-jitsu choose the ground as step number one of its system? Why do you think?
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, it all came out of judo, right? So Brazilian jiu-jitsu took the effective submission techniques of judo and then just refined them.
- JDJohn Danaher
That's the historical reason.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- JDJohn Danaher
But what's the, what's the mechanical, physical reason?
- JRJoe Rogan
'Cause you can control someone on the ground far better, right?
- JDJohn Danaher
Yeah, you can control people. Lomachenko con- uh, controls people in a standing position with angle and distance. There's different ways to control people.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes in boxing if you only are boxing.
- JDJohn Danaher
But why the ground? Why did they choose the ground? What's the mechanical reason? What happens when you take a human being to the ground?
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, there's a whole barrier behind them that you can press them against.
- JDJohn Danaher
What about if you're in bottom position?
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, you could use that barrier as leverage.
- JDJohn Danaher
True. But there's something that occurs when someone goes down to the ground. There's something big that you're maybe missing here.
- 30:00 – 45:00
Yeah, that's what you…
- JDJohn Danaher
leg lock.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, that's what you used to have-
- JDJohn Danaher
Leg locks were seen-
- JRJoe Rogan
... yeah.
- JDJohn Danaher
... leg locks were seen for generations as a signal of failure. When you couldn't get the system to work, you had to resort to leg locks. It meant you were a bad jiu-jitsu player.... you couldn't impose the fundamental system of Jiu-Jitsu, and so you chickened out and you went to leg locks. That's why they were despised.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- JDJohn Danaher
That was the real reason why, for generations, leg locks were dismissed.
- JRJoe Rogan
You don't think it was because so many people were injured by them that they were-
- JDJohn Danaher
No, absolutely not. People get injured... The worst injuries in Jiu-Jitsu don't come from submission holds. The worst injuries in Jitsu, Jiu-Jitsu come from falling body weight when people jump guard, when people accidentally, um, poorly perform takedowns. That's where you see catastrophic injuries in Jiu-Jitsu. It's where you see career-ending injuries. The joint lock submissions, you're out for a week, two weeks, you know, catastrophic injuries. Um, as I said, the... Go on YouTube and put in "guard pull gone wrong." You'll see catastrophic injuries.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- JDJohn Danaher
You'll see career-ending injuries there. You're not gonna see it from arm bars, heel hooks, et cetera. You'll see people getting hurt, but it's a contact sport, you expect that, okay? Um, no. There's a, a very simple elegant system in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. We just saw one rendition of it, the four-step approach. And you clearly see leg locks don't fit comfortably into that system. What I did is I tried to find an avenue where they could come in, and the results were surprising. The first thing is, our four-step rendition of Jiu-Jitsu looked at Jiu-Jitsu from top position, where we took our opponent down to the ground and we were on top of them. But my study of Jiu-Jitsu didn't start from top position. It started from bottom position. If you look at my students in competition, you will notice that around 80% of their entries into leg locks come from bottom position or with their opponent behind them. In other words, from what are supposedly inferior positions. So for me, it was never a question of losing position when I went for leg locks because I was already underneath my opponent. I started underneath. How can I end up on bottom by going for a leg? I'm already on bottom. So most of my early work in leg locks was how to get into leg locks from disadvantageous positions, from underneath or when someone is behind me. So I never have, felt this problem of, okay, I'm, I'm, I'm gonna lose position if I go for leg locks. I could still play a, a conventional Jiu-Jitsu game and have a very, very strong leg lock entry. That was the first avenue of leg locking. But things became more interesting when I got further into the leg lock game and I started to realize that as you add leg locks into the game, you change the very nature of the sport. If you look at Jiu-Jitsu as it's ordinarily practiced, it's a single direction game. If someone is in front of me and I'm standing over them, Jiu-Jitsu is all about movement from the legs towards the head. I'm supposed to pass their guard, work my way up to chest-to-chest contact, and get my head next to their head, either in front of them or behind them, either mounted or rear-mounted. So Jiu-Jitsu always goes in one direction. If you ever get stopped or you lose position, you just start the process over again. It's a mono-directional sport. It always goes from the legs to the head. Once you start adding leg locks into the game, Jiu-Jitsu becomes a two directional sport where you can go from the head down to the legs. You can go in both directions. So if I'm passing someone's guard and I simply can't do it, I can fall back and go back into the legs. If I'm side control on someone and they start to recompose their guard, I can fall back into the legs. I'm going from their upper body down to their lower body. Traditional Jiu-Jitsu always goes from the lower body directionally up to the upper body, so that you end up head to head with your opponent. But once you start adding leg locks, Jiu-Jitsu for the first time becomes a two directional sport instead of a one directional sport. And you can play your opponent's reactions between the threat of lower body and upper body in ways that opens up submissions so much more easily than the traditional game.
- JRJoe Rogan
So if I take you back to the moment where Dean Lister says to you, "Why would you ignore 50% of the human body?" You go back and think about this, and what is your next step? Do you just start looking at students and looking at what you're teaching and analyzing positions? Uh, you, you were still rolling at the time.
- JDJohn Danaher
Yes. Correct. Um, the first thing that I started to look at is, okay, who out there is doing a good job of leg locking? And the honest answer was, there weren't a lot of people. What you would see is random success with leg locks. You'd see a guy wins a match here, a guy wins a match there. Um, uh, most of the eminent leg lockers of that generation were actually coming out of Japan. You'd have people like Rami Nasato, who had a decent heel hook for that time. Um-
- JRJoe Rogan
Imanari.
- JDJohn Danaher
Imanari. That was a little bit pre-Imanari. Imanari came slightly after Rami Nasato. They, they, they fought each other in grappling matches.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hm.
- JDJohn Danaher
C- One was younger than the other. Um, uh, but, uh, you know, they had some success. I believe even Sakuraba finished Newton with a knee bar. So, you know, the, the, the knowledge was there. Um, but there was nothing systematic about it. There wasn't... There wasn't, there weren't people who were coming out and just systematically finishing people with one move, okay? Um, uh, so there wasn't much in terms of people to study. So the first thing I started to asking is, well, what is the, what is the nature of leg locking? What... Um, if it's... Uh, it seems to have some problems associated with it. It, it's not as controlling as the traditional methods of Jiu-Jitsu, and that was really the key word there, control, okay? Why do people favor things like rear naked strangles so much? Because it's such a controlling position. Rear mount is an incredibly controlling position.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- JDJohn Danaher
Um-... why do people favor things like kata gatame, uh, the, the, um, triangle, because this too is a, a, a very inherently controlling position. All the most high percentage, uh, finishing holds in Jujitsu all have control as their dominant feature. Okay? It's hard for people who are ... And as a result, one person can continue to use the same move with a, a large degree of success, um, uh, over time against the wide array of opponents. So everything I ... Every question I asked ultimately always came back to control, and the one thing you would see with regards to use of leg locks in the late 1990s and early 2000s was a lack of control. So all of my studies immediately went to the notion of control. Now, there are many forms of leg lock, but the ones that interest me the most always come out of what the Japanese call ashi garami. Ashi garami is a generic term. It just means tangled legs. Okay? There are many different forms of ashi garami. Ashi garami is a mechanism by which I can use two of my legs to control my opponent's legs and hips. What I started to do was make a deep study of this notion of ashi garami. How am I gonna use my legs to control the real estate between my opponent's knee and his hips, preferably on both sides? Probably the single biggest cliché that you'll hear about Jujitsu is that it's position before submission. At the time, I was primarily interested in the idea of control before submission. Control is a much deeper and wider concept than the basic point-structure-based positional position before submission model o- of Jujitsu. There's many ways to control people that have very little to do with, with position. For example, ashi garami itself scores nothing in, in Jujitsu, but done well, it can control an opponent just as well as rear mount can. So I started to see that there were many forms of control that went outside of the traditional basic positional hierarchy of Brazilian Jujitsu. Ashi garami was one of them. Probably the single greatest key in the development of my leg lock system, again, came from a simple realization, that the greatest mistake that people had made in leg lock work prior to the arrival of the squad was that they made no distinction between the mechanism of breaking and the mechanism of control. Ashi garami was the mechanism of control. The lock itself, whether it be a heel hook, an Achilles lock, a figure four toe hold, that was the mechanism of breaking. If you watch 99% of the people out there who claim to be experts in leg locking, they don't distinguish between the two. They see, for example, heel hooking as a single skill. There's the lock on the legs, the ashi garami or whatever term they use for it, and the lock itself, they're not distinguished. They're taught as a single skill. You can't differentiate the ashi garami and the lock. And you'll see people teaching in this manner. What I did was to de- strongly distinguish between the two so that my students could all hold an ashi garami position and switch from one ashi garami to another and hold people for extended periods of time and inhibit movement. If I can inhibit movement for long periods of time, I can break you at will. I can take my time when I come to break you because the control is there. The control is prime, the break is second. For most people, it's just throw in the ashi garami and-
- JRJoe Rogan
(coughs)
- JDJohn Danaher
... immediately go for the lock. They don't even distin- The ashi garami is described as part of the heel hook. They don't distinguish between the two. Once I made that realization in the early 2000s, that's when the ball started rolling. That's when, um, uh, a significant amount of progress was made. Um, I would say that y- your question was an interesting one. Okay. You, you had the insight. Liston gave you the insight. What was the ... what started you going? It was this making first the critical distinction between control and submission, and in the case of leg locking, between the mechanism of control, ashi garami, and the mechanism of breaking, which is the lock itself. In my case, the, the heel hook.
- JRJoe Rogan
A really good example of this is how effective it's been implemented by your students against real world-class Brazilian Jujitsu competitors who don't use these methods.
- JDJohn Danaher
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
Like, a, a good one is Gordon Ryan versus Cyborg.
- JDJohn Danaher
Yes.
- JRJoe Rogan
Cyborg, who is a fucking beast of a man, and just a physical specimen, a, a real freak, and is known for his tornado guard, is, you know, is no stranger to leg locks, is no stranger to any of the positions of no-gi or gi Jujitsu. But when I watched Gordon wrap him up and control him, and before he got the submission, you could see Cyborg look completely befuddled.
- JDJohn Danaher
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
You know? He was-
- JDJohn Danaher
And the match was over roughly 30 seconds before the submission was applied. You could just see it- Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. He was just trying to figure out a way out of it and just was-
- 45:00 – 1:00:00
Uh, his- his right…
- JDJohn Danaher
he's gonna post his right hand on the floor and try and backstep out. Let's go just a little further forward into the video. Good. Freeze. Uh, go back just a fraction. Just a little more. Okay. What does Gordon's right- right foot have?
- JRJoe Rogan
Uh, his- his right foot, it looks like ... It's hard to see here, but it looks like he's got-
- JDJohn Danaher
He's got inside position with one foot.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- JDJohn Danaher
He's got inside position with one foot. The whole question is what's gonna happen with Cyborg's left leg. Now we've got a battle between Gordon Ryan's left leg and Cyborg's left leg. Okay? How the battle goes from here will come down to one thing: who wins that battle. Okay? Go forward just a little more. Hook. Stop.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh. Right away.
- JDJohn Danaher
Okay. Gordon Ryan just won the battle. Essentially, at this point, the fight is over.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- JDJohn Danaher
The only question is, how long is it gonna take? Why am I so confident? Am I- am I an asshole? Am I saying this because I'm an asshole? No, I'm- I'm saying this because I know what's happening. I gave you one of the key notes of the leg locking game already. I'll say it again because it's so important. The man whose feet dominate the inside position will always dominate the ashi garami game. Now, the second. Whenever you go to attack someone's leg, 90% of the resistance on the leg you're attacking comes from the other leg. That's so important, I'm gonna say it to you again. Whenever I go to attack my opponent's right leg, 90% of the resistance is gonna come from his left leg. We talked about control. The foundational principle of control in leg locking is a principle I refer to as double trouble. Double trouble is a simple idea that if I control both of my opponent's legs, he do- no longer has the opportunity to use his second leg to defend the first. So the amount of trouble that you've put him in is literally doubled in a matter of seconds. Gordon Ryan has a hold of Cyborg's right leg with his left arm, and he has a- a hold of Cyborg's left leg with his legs. Why was I so confident that the match is over at this point? Because both of Cyborg's legs are now controlled by Gordon Ryan. He has just attained double trouble.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- JDJohn Danaher
Now, let's slowly advance the video. Do you see how Cyborg's legs are in a straight line? He's having a very, very hard time holding his base. Here's the con- stop. Uh, can you go back just a fraction? Right about here. Freeze. Okay. Our whole approach to jujitsu is based around the idea of putting wedges around our opponent's body so that we can inhibit movement. A wedge functions just as, um, a door stopper stops a door from moving in a breeze. Okay? The only thing better than a wedge is a reinforced wedge. That's where the wedge is locked in place by another part of your body. Gordon Ryan currently has inside position with the right leg.He has control of Cyborg's other leg with his arm, so both legs have some degree of control. But he's about to massively reinforce that control by locking a triangle, or a senkaku, around his opponent's leg. In order for that to happen, he's gonna have to lift his hips slightly off the floor so they can elevate over Cyborg's left knee. Watch the video. There's the elevation, there's the lock. Freeze. Freeze. Now he's got Cyborg's two legs in a straight line. That means Cyborg's only mechanism of posting or saving his balance is his left arm. That's all that he's got left. At this point, the fight is done. Cyborg's right leg is controlled by Gordon Ryan's left arm. Cyborg's left leg is controlled by a reinforced wedge, the strength of both Gordon Ryan's, uh, legs locked up in a triangle. Cyborg's actually a weight division heavier, I believe, than Gordon, but it doesn't matter. At this point, both hips are controlled. This is a full st- st- state of double trouble. Both legs controlled and a breaking mechanism in place. There's an ashi garami on the leg. You can break someone from there. Cyborg knows his only method of not being finished is to keep his hips over Gordon Ryan's hips. So the next battle is, how is Gordon Ryan gonna put Cyborg's hips on the ground? What's saving Cyborg is his left hand. Let's see how the battle goes. The battle just got lost. The hips went down. Why was it so easy? Stop. Why was it so easy?
- JRJoe Rogan
I don't know. Tell me.
- JDJohn Danaher
Do you see that right knee?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- JDJohn Danaher
That's what pushed him over. The right knee went into the pocket of Cyborg's left hip.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- JDJohn Danaher
That meant the directionality of force was slightly away from the one base of support that Cyborg had left, which was his left hand.
- JRJoe Rogan
Left arm. Mm.
- JDJohn Danaher
So he got sat on his hips. Now go forward just a little. And freeze. What do you see, Joe?
- JRJoe Rogan
In what? What do you, what do you want me to look at?
- JDJohn Danaher
What do you see-
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, I see both legs are wrapped up.
- JDJohn Danaher
Good. Be more precise.
- JRJoe Rogan
Uh, well, he has incredible control with his right leg, um, the way he's got his right leg and his left leg triangled. He's got the, uh, Cyborg's right foot tucked deep under his arm, and he also has the left foot in there as well.
- JDJohn Danaher
Good.
- JRJoe Rogan
So he's completely wrapped up with his-
- JDJohn Danaher
Good.
- JRJoe Rogan
... legs and his arms.
- JDJohn Danaher
Very good. Okay, let's bring in a few points here. First, if you want to immobilize a human being and prevent them from moving, one of the best things you can ever do is lock their legs together. You get a dangerous prisoner, what's the first thing you do? Handcuff his feet together and handcuff his hands together. He's no longer dangerous. Okay? Here, Cyborg is one of the most dangerous jujitsu players in the world, but with two of his feet locked together, he's, he's effectively neutralized, okay? Perhaps most importantly, we've got a very interesting distinction here between what we call a primary and a secondary leg. Which leg is the ashi garami locked up on?
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, he's got the left leg is, was triangled.
- 1:00:00 – 1:15:00
I think this style…
- JDJohn Danaher
Eventually, people will figure things out. It's just the way hu- uh, progress works. But, um, uh, I think at this point, it's pretty clear that people have changed their minds about leg locks. People, I think, are recognizing that there's something different going on here, that this is a control-based approach to leg locks rather than, uh, you know, a speed and power-based, uh, approach to leg locks. And, um, uh, the evidence for its success really comes from the nature of the squad itself. If you look at the three founding members of the squad, Eddie Cummings, Gordon Ryan, and Garry Tonon, all three have very, very different body types. All three have very, very different personalities. And yet, all three use a very similar game. Um-... two of those three athletes came from nowhere. They had no competition record before they started training, uh, with me at the Renzo Gracie Academy. One of them had a competition record. He was a... I believe Garry Tonon was a brown belt, uh, competitor in the gi and, but he had no leg lock game. He was a guy who was essentially known for scrambling from bottom half guard and using rear naked strangles and, out of scrambles. Um, strangles out of scrambles, my God, that w- that was a tongue twister. (laughs) Um, uh, so, g- Garry Tonon was a particularly interesting case because he came to me as an already developed athlete. He's trained under a very good friend of mine, Tom DeBlass, um, and completely changed his game. So that showed something very interesting. That showed that someone could already have a developed game and then take on this and change their game. So that was a particularly interesting case. With the case of Eddie Cummings and Gordon Ryan, they came to me early in their development so they, they, um, they took it on wholesale as it were.
- JRJoe Rogan
I think this style and approach w- and one of the things that's so fascinating about it is it really requires someone like you to systematically break it down the way you have described it. Um, I've done jujitsu for 20 years, but I never stopped and thought of all the positions in the system, all the steps in the system, take the fight to the ground, get past the dangerous legs, you know, uh, achieve some sort of a dominant position, go for the submission.
- JDJohn Danaher
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
I, n- I didn't do that.
- JDJohn Danaher
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
I knew, I knew what I was doing.
- JDJohn Danaher
I s- what I find with most jujitsu players is that they know what they're doing on-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- JDJohn Danaher
... an unconscious level.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- JDJohn Danaher
My job as a coach is to make it conscious, okay? Um, now for me the most interesting thing when I, when I first started thinking about jujitsu as a system, okay, I did that when I wrote a book for my, for my sensei, Renzo Gracie. Um, he asked me to write a book and I started thinking deeply about, you know, what is this thing that I study? I, I spend all day on the mats, what am I doing exactly? And, um, when you start consciously thinking about, okay, breaking it down to steps, you see Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu as a step by step, uh, system. My question was can I go further than that? If jujitsu is a simple single system, what about if you divided jujitsu up into niche areas and instead of having one overall system, you had an overall system with many subsystems within it? So we had a leg system, a back system, a front headlock system, a kimura system. My approach to jujitsu is that I'd recognized that much of the success of early Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu came from its systematic nature, the fact that it was a systems-based approach to jujitsu and I took various niche areas and created systems within systems. Then things started getting interesting when I started integrating the system so if the one subsystem failed, you could transfer to another. That meant that my students could put opponents who had trained much, much longer than they had into a niche area which my students had so much knowledge of, so much training in that isolated niche domain, that they could take someone who had trained three, four times longer than themselves and have more knowledge in that one domain than their much more experienced opponent did.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- JDJohn Danaher
And so what you saw with the squad was incredibly speedy progress where they were getting wins against people who were trained two, three, tor- times longer than they had. And this idea of what I call integrated subsystems, instead of having jujitsu as just one simple single system, you keep the overall system of jujitsu but you have subsistence within it. Each one integrated with the other so that when one system fails, you can pass off to another and go back and forth until you get the win. That was my approach to jujitsu. That's what I want to do is in, if I can innovate jujitsu in any given direction, that's probably the one I would push the most.
- JRJoe Rogan
Now, throughout this time, you're dealing with some pretty significant injuries and physical limitations-
- JDJohn Danaher
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
... that yo- you've had. Um, tell me about those-
- JDJohn Danaher
Yeah. Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... what those were and what, h- and how those hindered you.
- JDJohn Danaher
Sure. Yeah. Um, uh, when I was in, in my early teens, I was involved in a, um, a rugby injury where my, my knee was, uh, massively injured. Um, over the next, uh, six years, uh, I would dislocate my knee, uh, the ligaments appeared to be, um, uh, severely compromised every six months or so. I'd, uh, get a, a fresh injury which would be severe and I'd be on crutches. I spent, um, a significant amount of my teenage years on crutches. Um, around the age of 19, I had one last injury and, uh, my knee just seemed to have no power in it. Things like, uh, I walked with a limp and, um, you must remember this is in the 1980s in New Zealand and this is pre-MRIs, um, pre-arthroscopic surgery. Uh, the doctors said, "Well, we can do an operation where we shorten the ligaments so that there's less looseness in there and, and hopefully your knee will be strong again." Um, an operation was performed and, uh, unfortunately the ligaments were cut too short and as a result my, my leg never straightened again. Um, I developed a, a severe case of arthrofibrosis where my knee actually became deformed and doesn't straighten. Um, simple actions like walking, kneeling are extremely painful for me and have been my whole life. Um...
- JRJoe Rogan
Just walking around is pain-
- JDJohn Danaher
Just walking is painful. Uh, kneeling is extremely painful and, um, you know, it's not easy to do jujitsu where there's a lot of kneeling and, uh-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- JDJohn Danaher
... uh, also there are other kind of structural problems as I got older b- because I walk with a limp and one leg significantly bent and one straight, uh, I, I tend to be completely out of balance, out of sync with my body. So I-... soon developed, uh, considerable hip and back pain. Um, so this was something I carried with me my whole life. And, um, uh, when I started jiu-jitsu at the age of 28, uh, there was a, there was a concern, you know, "Am I gonna be able to do this?" Well, fortunately, ground grappling, as a rule, is generally easier on your body than standing martial arts. There's, uh ... I, I don't think, for example, with my leg, I could even become moderately effective at Muay Thai or taekwondo where suddenly we have to jump and land.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- JDJohn Danaher
I just couldn't do it. Um, whereas jiu-jitsu, because it's on the ground, you can, you can become pretty good. Um, so I battled through that and, uh, I'm, I, I developed a, a satisfactory degree of competence and I, uh, I got a black belt from Renzo Gracie and I became one of his, uh, main teachers. So-
- JRJoe Rogan
How did you train with such a compromised knee?
- JDJohn Danaher
Uh, you just figure out a way around it. You just ... What are you gonna do? Sit down and die?
- JRJoe Rogan
And, but you, you never thought, "Well, boy, I fucked my knee up. I don't wanna fuck my other knee up too."
- JDJohn Danaher
You know, I, I, I think at that point, you, you just gotta go forward.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- 1:15:00 – 1:25:02
I never liked the…
- JRJoe Rogan
and, um, you, you're, uh, showing all the guys in the squad, the Danaher Death Squad, do you have, um, like... Do you have it worked out to the point where it's like you have a curriculum? Like, do you have like the-
- JDJohn Danaher
I never liked the word curriculum because that kind of implies that it's all worked out in advance and-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- JDJohn Danaher
... you know, it's done step by step. Um, I come in on any given day and I'm, I'm there seven days a week. I watch all of my athletes every single day. They don't do anything without me watching them do it. So I know at the end of every day what they need to work on tomorrow because I'm there.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- JDJohn Danaher
So it's not like a set curriculum where, you know, I know that on April 13th, I'm gonna do this. It's not like that.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- JDJohn Danaher
It's like, "I saw you train yesterday. I saw where you fucked up and I saw where you were good. So tomorrow, we're working this."
- JRJoe Rogan
What an amazing resource for those guys to have someone like you standing over them watching them and analyzing their positions and techniques and progress.
- JDJohn Danaher
That's, um, that's generous of you to say. Um, but I always feel that my students are more of a resource to me than I am to them. I've been blessed through my entire coaching career to have some truly remarkable students, some of whom are famous and known to you and many others who aren't. And, um, uh, whatever debt they owe to me, I feel I, I owe at least as much to them. Um, my students literally give me everything. I'm, I'm a notoriously difficult person to get along with. I'm demanding, I'm, I'm a perfectionist. Um, I can be downright unpleasant. When my body's in pain, I'm short-tempered. Um, and yet they're like angels. They, they stick in there and they tough it out and they give so much time, so much effort, so much thought. And as I said, whatever resource I am to them, they, they give it right back. They're a resource to me.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, that, that attitude is why you're such a fantastic coach in the first place. Um, I remember one of the first times I started talking to you is when you were working with George. Now, what's interesting is you had a, a very interesting approach and even the way you described things. You would talk about shoot boxing.
- JDJohn Danaher
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
Describe that because you, you didn't talk when... Like, I remember, uh, I think one of our first long conversations was at some weird Denny's or something somewhere. And one of those weird road shows like where we just sat down with-
- JDJohn Danaher
(laughs) You, you're absolutely right. That was the first time we met.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- JDJohn Danaher
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
W- We had a long conversation-
- JDJohn Danaher
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... and, um, you were talking about the principles of shoot boxing. Like, please explain.
- JDJohn Danaher
Um, one of the strange things about the sport of mixed martial arts, it's so young that it... there's still so much to be done.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- JDJohn Danaher
Okay? Even the way people understand mixed martial arts, to me, is interesting. 99% of people who look at mixed martial arts see mixed martial arts as an eclectic sport. In other words, it's a conglomeration of different martial arts kind of banded together and then you've got mixed martial arts. It's a mix of martial arts and there you have it. You get two guys in a cage and you've got mixed martial arts. I never saw mixed martial arts as an eclectic sport. I see it as a transcendent sport. What I mean by that is there are four distinct skill areas of mixed martial arts. Any one of those skill areas always goes beyond the component martial arts that make it up. In other words, the skill area transcends the various martial arts that make it up and creates something bigger and different from the core components that originally built it.When you look at the sport of mixed martial arts, you see there are four dominant skill areas. (inhales) The first occurs when they first come out and the two athletes have no connection with each other, and they're dancing around the cage. (inhales) This is the so-called shoot boxing phase, which involves skills drawn from Western boxing, Muay Thai, karate, uh, freestyle wrestling, and various other martial arts, where the two athletes are jockeying for position and typically, they're trying to determine the direction of the fight. Will it go down or will it stay up? (inhales) That's one skill area. The second skill area is the skill area of the clinch, where the two athletes are both still standing, but now they've got a hold on each other. They're no longer moving around at will. (inhales) This has its key components come... drawn from Muay Thai, Greco-Roman wrestling, freestyle wrestling, judo, et cetera, et cetera. Then there's a third key skill area, the area of fence fighting, fence boxing, where the two athletes are in a clinch, but they're locked on the fence, which dramatically changes the skills required for success than if you're in the open. And then you have a fourth skill area, which is the ground, and of course, that's divided into top and bottom position. So there are four skill areas of mixed martial arts. You could add more or less. You... uh, for example, you could add in the idea of the, the geography of the cage can add in new areas, but let's stick with that fundamental four for now. (inhales) If you show me any one of those skill areas, yes, you can derive skills from those component martial arts, from Muay Thai, from judo, w- whatever you choose, but that skill area is gonna have other elements that are not part of those original martial arts, that are something different, something unique, and something above the various component martial arts that made it up. (inhales) When you're fighting on the ground, a lot of what you do is derived from Brazilian jiu-jitsu and modern mixed martial arts. Most of the athletes come from a jiu-jitsu background, or, or... th- when they work ground skills, they, they work on... in a kind of a jiu-jitsu framework, but many of the things going on down there are a mix of things that are far outside of your daily training in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. You can bring in things from Muay Thai. You're throwing Muay Thai elbows on the ground, but on the ground, the elbows have a very different feel from the standing position. The, the mechanics behind them are significantly different. You're throwing hooks on the ground, but the mechanics of throwing hooks on the ground are very, very different from the mechanics of throwing hooks in the standing position. So yeah, you're, you're bringing skills in from boxing, but you're adapting them too, okay? So the way to look at the sport of mixed martial arts is not just like, "Okay, I'm gonna rope together some wrestling, some boxing, and see what happens." Rather, you're developing skills in four distinct areas, a minimum of four, and the skills you ultimately develop go beyond and are significantly different from the core components that you started with. And so ultimately, the skills of a mixed martial artist at the highest levels transcend the various core martial arts that made the sport up. You'll go into something... You're going further. When you fight in a mixed martial arts fight, you're a jiu-jitsu fighter using a lot more than just jiu-jitsu and the various other boxing styles, et cetera, et cetera that you use. (inhales) In the case of shoot boxing and Georges St-Pierre, everyone always talks about Georges' wrestling. Now, Georges is a very good wrestler. He's wrestled a long time with very good people. But 90% of the success of his ability to take people down goes far beyond wrestling and has to do with the precursors to the shot. What wrestling teaches you to do in mixed martial arts is how to finish a shot. It gives you the body mechanics to finish the shot, but the setups are completely different from wrestling. I can show you endless examples of good wrestlers who went into mixed martial arts competition with no background in mixed martial arts and couldn't take anybody down. The distance is different, the stance is different, the motion is different, the setups are completely different, the context is different. You're being punched instead of grappling. (inhales) Georges, in my opinion, throughout his career, had a level of skill and technical insight in the, the art of boxing, kickboxing, and do take-downs that no one else has even come close to. Much of what he did in that area came from himself. Did he have good wrestling coaches? Absolutely. Did he have good boxing coaches? Absolutely. Great Muay Thai coaches? 100%. But the skills he was exhibiting went beyond any one of those teachers or even them as a whole. The act of tying together all of those disparate skills came from him, the integration of skills, and so you have someone who had a wrestling background, had a boxing background, had a Muay Thai background, but ultimately what he was doing was something bigger than all of those put together. There's a synergistic effect here with the, the, uh, the sum was, was somehow greater than the components that, uh, uh, individually made it up. And that's what I mean when I talk about a transcendent sport. Um, Georges St-Pierre was largely responsible through individual experimentation starting in his late teens and going through his entire career in the development of shootbox.
Episode duration: 2:38:36
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