This has been a hot topic in jiujitsu for some time, I’m not attempting to jump in the fray on this just cause its popular to do so but more so to write out my thoughts after having some relevant experience with it and forming the start of an opinion. Let me be clear up front, my opinion based on my experiences and I’m willing to be wrong and willing to change. I’m all about whatever works, if there’s a better way I want it, full stop.
I moved a little over a year ago and so for only the second time (the first after only a year and mostly “BJJ for MMA”) I have changed gyms. I’ve gone to a lot of camps, trained with a lot of different people, and had I believe a wide range of influences. But for the first time when I joined Inverted Gear Academy I am at a gym that does fully CLA style training. I decided the people I met there were great, the leadership was amazing, and the culture was exactly what I wanted so I would remain open minded even if skeptical of the training methodology. I’m not going to claim to be a convert, but I think one of the things I have learned is just how non controversial this style of learning really is.
Before we dig in a bit I’d like to mention a point of of my mentors and coaches Shawn Williams wrote about recently. To paraphrase he said when someone says they either do or do not believe in drilling, stop first and ask them to define the term. This is important. A lot of our issues here is not sharing a common language in jiujitsu. I’m going to say Inside Sankaku, your going to say Saddle, that guy will say 411 and well spend more time debating who calls this position what than it merits. Without shared language we will be unable to converse. That’s fundamental to communication skills. I will attempt to be descriptive without being overly wordy, but its important for clarity.
I was recently at a BJJ Globetrotters Camp (Maine 2026) and Robe Cole gave a great lecture on what training informed by Ecological Dynamics is. Many of the things we’ve done for as long as I’ve been training fit this approach, we just didn’t have the language and the framework to define it that way.
What I learned was that CLA has 4 pillars.
1. Session Intention – What is the goal
2. Constrain to Afford – nerdy way of saying we are setting up rules so that you are encouraged to do the thing we want in part 1
3. Representative Learning Design – more nerdspeak that means training should reflect real conditions
4. Repetition without repetition – you get to do the thing again and again but real movement and energy means its not cookie cutter. No rote repetition of 100 arm bars on a training dummy.
Deeper example
1. Session Intention – We want you to be able to stand up and open closed guard in order to start passing
2. Constrain to Afford – Guard player wins if they get top players hands to touch the mat or get to their feet. Top player wins if they get to vertical posture (standing upright) and opens the legs
3. Representative Learning Design – Starting in closed guard on the knees neither player with grips. Does this look like the way we normally find ourselves in a match? yes.
4. Repetition without repetition – Every time you stand and open the guard you reset and start over. Top player will have the opportunity to stand and open the guard over and over no two reps will be identical.
Ta-Da! that’s it. Now where you get a full send on this approach is you don’t do the common practice of first practicing how to stand up with a nonresistant opponent. That practice of movement without resistance is normally what people will call “dead drilling” as opposed to “live training”.
Now lets step in the time capsule and BAM its 2012 and I have joined Stout PGH / Team Renzo Gracie and begun training with my good friend, and primary coach Warren Stout. It’s a fundamentals class in the first gym location in Pittsburgh’s Lawrenceville area. Its a small room, the “shower” is a pipe that comes out the brick wall in the back, the rounds are hard and the windows are steamed up. I am learning about closed guard. We do a short warmup of some common grappling movements, we have practiced how to stand without resistance, have explained what the closed guard is and how it is used. We then do what we call “a drill”, you start in closed guard, bottom player is not permitted to use their hands, top player wins if they stand up and open the guard. So… if you told me back then you “don’t believe in drilling” and we don’t share a language I’d think you meant you do do this type of training. Not so. This clearly fits within the CLA framework, and the only place a full CLA style practice would differ would be deleting the time spent practicing the movement without resistance, and the warm up. We stopping doing warm ups years ago in favor of getting the body moving with drilling. At IGA there’s no warm up nor drilling. Every class is 100% games.
So, is it “just positional sparring” ? No. Does positional sparring fit in the CLA framework? It can. But just like every square is a rectangle not every rectangle is a square. Failures of not sharing a language pops its head up again. Lets take the commonly used Sweep/Pass/Submit (SPS) type exercise. We start in say half guard, any submission is a win for either player, top player can also pass to win, bottom player can also sweep. From my current understanding this hits pillars 1&3&4, but certainly not 2. How would we address 2? Well, if we define our intention (1) as top player is learning to pressure pass half guard we can say top player is not permitted (he’s constrained to afford!) to stand and must keep chest to chest connection through the pass. I might further give bottom player rather than just sweep or submit the option to win by standing, thus encouraging top player to learn how to hold someone down. Does that mean SPS isn’t useful training? Not in my opinion it isn’t, but I’m thinking of it more now as scenario based practice and less about learning a new skill.
Back to the mid 2010’s, the school is bigger and Warren travels regularly to New York to train with Danaher and what will soon be called the Danaher Death Squad (DDS) as they terrorize the burgeoning submission only scene with well thought out, designed, and executed leg locks. Danaher has not yet released the multiple DVD set Leg locks: Enter The System that will soon unleash every autistic kid with a unicorn rash guard against the ACL’s of the population, and a deep drive in the BJj community to systematically systematize all your systems. When Warren would come back he would show us what the guys were working on each week and advanced class for ages was leg attacks well past everyone getting sick of them. What were some of the exercises we would do? Starts in “true 50/50” which is basically scissoring, with the goal of getting to whatever ashi garami we worked on while your opponent did the same, no passing, standing, or submitting allowed. Does this, from what I’ve said fit a CLA framework? Id say yes. 1. Our intention is learn leg pummeling to gain positional dominance, 2. No standing or passing – forcing us to stay in the seated leg pummel to achieve the intention, 3 Does it represent what real exchanges look like, sure does, 4 are these choreographed reps? Absolutely not.
Now, my initial skepticism had several facets. As we can see above we did plenty of things that fit within a CLA framework, but we also did drills in which an opponent was no more than a body, and other drills where our opponent was to give us pre determined responses we would practice the reactions to, so I wasn’t against this sort of training I just had reservations about ONLY doing CLA. Lets look at some, and my current thinking.
How the fuck are you going to organically mumbo jumbo yourself into learning a triangle? Why not just show the person a triangle? – Current thought: Ive watched it happen, games set up in closed guard and person in guard wins by standing and opening guard, bottom player wins by getting top player into one arm in one arm out. That’s a Trap Triangle. Coaching queues like get your thigh over their shoulder and into a diamond shape with your legs. Then next exercise starting in trap Triangle bottom players goal to close figure 4 and make an angle, top player get either both arms in or both out. That’s it, brand new people learning triangles without drilling it, all live with resistance.
But what about the common answers to common reactions? Why not just show them the high percentage step by steps? Current thought: They get there after they have experienced the problem. Basically what I’m seeing is not giving people answers to things they haven’t experienced, and instead once they experience them give them pointers and coaching tips to lead them there. Retention is high.
Its a good practice for me, I mean I know how to do jiujitsu but new people will be lost. Current thought: Not only do I see our small sampling of white/blue who never trained another way get technical and experienced FAST but I’d say the unexpected thing I didn’t even think about is that the timing, balance, and proprioception skills build up incredibly fast and that THOSE SKILLS are the underlying foundation you need to build technique onto. We have all seen how well anyone who has done any physical sport, even gymnastics, catch on because they do not struggle through simply falling over or knowing how to move their body in space. I’ll remain both skeptical and open minded here, and sample size is small but from what I’ve seen people go from clumsy to stable very quickly when 100% of their training is live.
An added benefit is the complete eradication of the “what if” guy. You know him, we all hate him. I show how to escape mount and his hand shoots up. “But what if…..” and you can either go down the rabbit hole of endless if they do this you do that or you can have them mount you and try it. Yeah that person is absent entirely, there’s no theory, no white-boarding it out. If you have a what-iffer in there they can just try whatever nonsense they saw on an Instagram reel and get smashed.
I will also say a lot of my reservations are solved by continuous Q&A through the learning process. “They keep standing” gets met by “Try to think about breaking their posture more, keep them looking down.” and the like. I’m not sure how other CLA gyms run but Hillary and Nelson have built a very healthy learning environment where everyone can ask anyone, and all experience levels want to learn through doing.
Now, is this the perfect bestest way to train our art? I don’t know, but I don’t have unlimited time. I’m pushing 50, I have a demanding job, a busy life, and I love to train. For me this has been a great way to spend my most limited of resources – time. If your a full time pro athlete maybe we could design a more robust training schedule that includes light drilling days, lifting days, games, live sparring all in the right proportions to peak for an event. That’s a different discussion. For right now this has been a good use of my time. Its been efficient, just like good jiujitsu should be.
Shawn
Antifragile Training 