00:00:00.25 Rick whatever you want this to be is fine with me. 00:00:04.31 nextlevelguypodcast Well, it is an absolute honor to have you back on. You are still one of my favorite guests, and i still follow everything you're doing. 00:00:09.27 Rick Thank you. 00:00:11.48 nextlevelguypodcast and Like we talked about just now, when I looked at your black belt video, it's just tiring to watch. But to imagine that competition, the the level of heart, soul, and dedication you put into training for that, it's amazing. 00:00:25.72 nextlevelguypodcast But for people who maybe don't recognize the great that's sitting beside me, how would you describe who you are? 00:00:34.61 Rick I am just a guy that loves jujitsu and has never quit. I don't think of myself as anything exceptional. 00:00:46.83 Rick I think of myself as someone who has a bit of OCD. i tend to get into things pretty deeply. Whenever I discover something I'm interested in, I get into it very deeply. tend to get bored easily with things once I've achieved a little bit of mastery, because most things in life, honestly, aren't that hard to master. 00:01:07.67 Rick But jujitsu is very different. Jujitsu, the deeper you get into it, the the more you realize the layers and the layers. It's like an onion. You're just peeling away at the onion. And when you're a Blue Belt, you think you've gotten to the core. But no no, no, there's levels to that. So I'm just someone that didn't quit. 00:01:26.78 Rick And I'm someone that you know i think I'm relatable to athletes that are getting a little bit older. That's become my specialty is helping older athletes navigate jujitsu because it does change. You know you have to evolve with the physical reality that you're experiencing in your body. And I got injured a lot when I was younger training and you know really pushing the pace very, very hard. And I had to learn all those lessons myself. 00:01:55.32 Rick And so these days I try to maybe infuse those it pieces of wisdom so that people can avoid some of the pitfalls that I have not avoided myself. 00:02:09.14 nextlevelguypodcast Because that's what i liked about it, because you've written a book for the older grappler. And as I was going through it, i was like, OK, I wish I'd known that before. I need to focus on that. And you break it down into the physical, the mental competition, just dealing with the aches, pains, strains, life. 00:02:26.71 nextlevelguypodcast And I think that's been sorely missing. 00:02:28.09 Rick Thank you. 00:02:29.63 nextlevelguypodcast But what was the sort of the need for a book at this point? Because you've got the artist skill, you know, you're a black belt, you coach, you teach, you compete. why did we Why did you see the need for a book just now? Were you seeing similarities in people as they got older who were struggling and maybe had to leave the sport because of it? 00:02:50.20 Rick You know, I've had an idea for this book for many years now, which was initially just I thought it would be a short PDF that would just be some things that I think are important. 00:03:04.22 Rick But when I started down this path of actually writing it as a book, I realized, man, I've got 00:03:09.81 nextlevelguypodcast Mm-hmm. 00:03:11.55 Rick 22 chapters worth of things I want to talk about. This is more than a PDF. And so I really just dug in and um obsessed. I did nothing but write for about two and a half months straight. I mean, literally from the moment I got up in the morning from the time I went to bed at night, I had ah a hole in my calendar finally after a long time. i hadn't had much time in my calendar. And I'm not somebody that believes in picking away at something over a long period of time. I'd rather set a goal and get it done quickly. i think it ultimately ends up better when you can obsess a little bit. 00:03:50.46 Rick So I did and I got it done. I was a little surprised that I was able to get it done. But, you know, I forget the name of that principle. It's that whatever task you have in front of you will always occupy however much time you've given yourself for that task. 00:04:02.02 nextlevelguypodcast uh is that preto 00:04:05.74 Rick So I gave myself a hard deadline. Yes, I don't think it's Plato, but it's a not Pareto principle. It's one of those principles that your your task will always expand to fill what available time. And if you give yourself a year to complete something, well, that's too far. You're, you know, there are too many opportunities to get derailed on the journey of that. 00:04:28.22 Rick And so to me, it's better to just obsess and and get it done. And that's what I did. 00:04:33.37 nextlevelguypodcast And how did you find that transition? Because, you know, like when you've done a lot of videos, you've got the great like art skill, you know, you're kind of focusing on this beautiful kind of compositions because, you're you know, you were a video engineer when you were younger. And it's not just you don't just create videos, you create art. You know, you really showcase and put a lot of love and passion into what you make. And some of your videos are breathtaking. 00:04:57.63 nextlevelguypodcast But why did you choose writing? What was the... Did you just have so much... you Because you go into great detail. But what was... Why did you pick writing as a medium for this kind of delivery? 00:05:09.91 Rick Well, I used to write a lot, and we've all lost our attention span in this day and age of doing this all day long. we you know I find that it's difficult for me to read long books anymore. 00:05:22.95 Rick And I used to be a voracious reader. 00:05:25.11 nextlevelguypodcast But... 00:05:26.26 Rick And and these days it's harder. and so And I used to write a lot. I used to take pride in my ability to write. It's a skill that's perishable if you don't practice it. And so there was just you know that old love of mine to rekindle that a little bit. 00:05:41.94 Rick and jump back in and see if i could I could do something decent was the motivation. And there's something cool about a book. It's sort of permanent. it's you know I can call myself a published author now. i can i can i can call myself a bestselling author. What's funny is it immediately jumped to the top of the the number one new release in sports psychology. It was the number one new release in martial arts for a little while. And in some other category, it was the number one seller. 00:06:13.21 Rick And so that's kind of cool. I think it's you know sort of I don't know, sort of completes my journey in a way to say that I've been able to write a book. And now I'm itching to write that next one. and I've got some other ideas. And maybe I'll take a couple of months at the end of each year going forward and try to write something. 00:06:31.46 nextlevelguypodcast It's dangerous, isn't it? The second you get into one, it's like a new hobby. Suddenly you're like, oh, I could do that. I could do that. I could do that. And I think it's very well deserved because it's not just a book. It's a companion piece for somebody going into jujitsu, especially somebody older. Because you focus a lot on like the core message on about identity, letting go, about aging, you know letting go of who we think we should be or competing or comparing ourselves to the younger pups instead of being that old wolf that just... 00:07:02.22 nextlevelguypodcast finds themselves through jiu-jitsu because you said it's where I had to write a heap of quotes out if I wanted to master jiu-jitsu something had to change my body couldn't stay the same and I think that hits home for so many older grapplers but what version of yourself did you have to personally let go I mean you talk a lot in the book about your own story which really hits home the message but what what changed in you between the younger version and the older version Or the better version, shall we say. 00:07:32.86 Rick Well, you know, what I thought initially after that first day of training jujitsu, I realized that I needed to i needed to change. i had to improve my fitness. I had to learn jujitsu. i had to learn the techniques and mechanics. I had to learn to move my body in ways that are efficient for jujitsu. 00:07:53.75 Rick And so initially, I thought that that was the work. But what you come to realize is that jujitsu is it's just a vehicle for self-mastery. 00:08:06.85 Rick It's just the husk around self-mastery. And so the techniques we train, the things we learn in Jiu-Jitsu, the struggles we face, there are so many deeper lessons in there that will weave themselves into your life on a very, very profound basis. 00:08:25.08 Rick And that was the surprising thing to me was that there were these deeper principles that the struggles on the mat touched upon. And eventually, with training, the self-defense aspects of jujitsu become far secondary. you know Initially, everybody starts training jujitsu because they want to get fit and they want to learn some some self-defense. 00:08:48.79 Rick But after a couple years of training, You've got skills. You could probably handle yourself in just about any situation you'll find yourself in. But yet, people continue training for years, sometimes decades. 00:09:01.85 Rick Why? Why do they keep training? Well, it's because of the deeper realizations you make. you know There's 10 or 12 things that I point out in the book that you gain. You gain functional strength. You gain better ability to move, you know movement potential. You become comfortable with discomfort. You ego management, which is massive. You become comfortable with discomfort. you stress inoculation, right you're able to think and solve problems under pressure, and a whole bunch of other things that I think emerge naturally through training. 00:09:39.90 Rick and And so that was what I think in the last chapter of the book, I talk about that, that initially I thought the journey would be one thing, but ultimately it's just a vehicle for self-mastery and self-improvement. 00:09:53.43 nextlevelguypodcast Yeah, mean, that was one of my favorite things about it was was how jujitsu isn't just a martial art. it's ah It's a discipline that shapes our life. It makes us who we are or it helps you find yourself. 00:10:06.14 nextlevelguypodcast mean, how how should people start seeing jujitsu in that sense rather than just as a hobby? It's something cool. You know, my favorite celebrity does it. how How should we see it as a mechanism for finding ourselves? 00:10:21.72 Rick Well, the struggles that you face on the mat will force you to confront things about yourself. And how you train in response to those things will teach you powerful lessons as well. And for those of us over the age of 40 training jujitsu, 00:10:38.71 Rick you no longer have that body you had when you were young. In my 40s, I was still pretty athletic. 00:10:42.33 nextlevelguypodcast This guy. 00:10:44.39 Rick Yeah, of course, all of us. And I was still pretty athletic. I think at 40, you're not so far off of that. You can still kind of remember what it was like to be in your prime. 00:10:55.29 Rick But the years are ruthless. And every year you become a little less capable, a little less capable. And if you don't, modify how you train for longevity and for, and you know, if you don't realize that ultimately you're on your own personal journey, this isn't about you collecting more taps than anybody. It's not about you dominating the room. It's not about all these superficial things that maybe you could think about doing if you're 25. 00:11:25.21 Rick By the time you're in your forties, you have to recalibrate what jujitsu is. And it's a lifelong pursuit that will make you better in a multitude of ways, but you have to stick around without breaking yourself to be able to absorb those lessons. And and so, yeah, that's probably how I would answer that. 00:11:47.35 nextlevelguypodcast Because it's quite realisation when you first start it because everybody says it's the gentle art, and you get your arse kicked for... I can remember being covered in bruises for weeks, and you always find them in the most bizarre and inappropriate places. 00:11:54.22 Rick Hmm. 00:12:01.30 nextlevelguypodcast And then eventually, all of a sudden, your body just switches on, it clicks into place, and it kind of gets used to it. But where do you think... 00:12:09.69 Rick Thank you. 00:12:10.30 nextlevelguypodcast do you see... a difference or a similarity and where people struggle is it physical is it the mental aspect is it that ego is it there they're they're physically can't do it where do you see people disappearing along this journey like because you've coached a lot of people do they come to you discuss the issues they're facing is it family is it health just wait and tear 00:12:37.49 Rick Well, yeah, there are many things that you're going to have to confront. And it's not one thing. You mentioned ego. Ego suppression is something that you will have to do throughout your entire journey. 00:12:51.16 Rick As a black belt, I still have to keep my ego in check because the ego is protective. It's protective of your sense of self. it it hates to tap your ego hates to lose it makes excuses for failure your ego can bring a lot of negative things if you don't learn how to accept it and be okay with it because the mats don't lie and unlike in the real world where we can pretend to be something we're not and people create oftentimes ah a bit of a delusion bubble that they live in because we're not tested in these other realms. 00:13:05.14 nextlevelguypodcast Mm-hmm. 00:13:28.66 Rick And jujitsu, you're only as good as you are. And that's it. You're only as good as you are. You're no worse than you are. 00:13:36.37 nextlevelguypodcast Yeah. 00:13:36.86 Rick The ego will tell it try to tell you you're much worse than you are when you don't do well. But if you can't accept that, you're simply not going to last in jujitsu because it's it's going to be too emotionally debilitating every time you train to think that you didn't achieve this level that you you think you should have. 00:13:58.36 Rick And so that's one of the things you'll have to confront. And you'll have to confront the fact that you have an older body that just isn't as capable. You need more recovery. You have to find the technical path, not the path through more physical attributes. 00:14:12.18 Rick And then you know you mentioned some some things like family and relationships and those things. Well, the other aspect of training Jiu Jitsu is the community bonds that you make. There's something incredibly powerful about wrestling with somebody and and sharing this powerful moment with them, this shared struggle with them, that allows people to bond very, very deeply in ways that you know we don't approximate through normal relationship building mechanisms. 00:14:43.58 Rick and And so that's where I think some of those people start opening up about things in their life, their family, their, you know, their they they they feel safe with their community in jujitsu because you're all in the same boat. You all have the same struggles and you're all trying to improve. 00:15:02.23 Rick So it's incredibly powerful, I think. 00:15:05.43 nextlevelguypodcast Because it really really impacted me when I was reading it because I saw a lot myself between white to blue belt, you know, that comparison. Every role was a fight. Every every tap was ah an insult to my masculinity. 00:15:16.75 Rick Right. Right. 00:15:19.66 nextlevelguypodcast And it kind of i was reading it and I felt almost felt a wee bit ashamed because I saw how I had fallen into the trap of I was doing jujitsu to try to be this version of myself I thought I was rather than just enjoying this thing and learning it and embracing this great body of people. And I ended up walking away from it after an injury. 00:15:40.41 nextlevelguypodcast And it's one of my biggest regrets because I'd started to find my pressure passing style. I'd found a way of expressing myself through my own game. And i think that really hits home in the book is how you really do... 00:15:55.50 nextlevelguypodcast it's not just a technique book it's like the therapist coach that we need as we're doing it and how we don't fall back on the excuses of you know oh i've got family oh i can't go i've got my kids party i've got this i've got that have you had that kind of feedback from other people that kind of you're actually let let me speak the truth rather than hide behind my fallacies 00:16:21.98 Rick Yeah. Yeah, very much so. And what you described as a white belt, blue belt is what we all have to go through. You know, that was me as well. 00:16:32.63 Rick I had a lot of ego wrapped up in who I was on the mat. And as a result, I didn't allow myself to be very vulnerable on the mat because I had something to prove. And ultimately, that's going to slow you down. 00:16:47.54 Rick Even if you're young doing jujitsu, your if you maintain a high level of intensity every time you train, it's very difficult to add new components to your game. You're just reinforcing the old patterns. And and so your ego has to allow you to let go some of that. 00:17:05.66 Rick But yeah, those lessons. we We all have to go through them. And I went through every single one of them. And I still go through some of those things even now. it's just a never ending, you know, confrontation of who you are, you know, the gap between who you are and who you think you are. 00:17:23.70 Rick And so you have to just make peace with that. 00:17:27.29 nextlevelguypodcast that was the great thing about it was in chapter after chapter where you were saying, you know, basically you think black belts have it all. And you were saying, well, you struggle at this age. 00:17:37.69 nextlevelguypodcast Roles are like this. You have to warm up in a certain way because your body won't negotiate with you. You know, it's it's great to see an insight into just because you go up a belt doesn't mean you're any better or any worse or you don't deserve it or whatever. 00:17:51.26 nextlevelguypodcast But there's just a whole new range of problems that you become aware of. And I can remember going in and thinking, oh, m I have no rite of passage, so I don't know how to do this. 00:17:56.40 Rick Yeah. 00:18:03.12 nextlevelguypodcast And I'm going to drop out here because I don't know how to to do this challenge. And, oh, I'm going to go and become a podcaster. I'm going to go away and do a sport where i can hide in the shadows. You know, it's... 00:18:13.46 nextlevelguypodcast I could feel myself, i could feel this kind of stress and strain rather than just going, a great bunch of people, it's a fun activity, um enjoy it and go home. I was seeing this as a kind of, oh shit, like this is, people are judging me, but it's not that at all. 00:18:28.54 Rick Yeah. 00:18:28.68 nextlevelguypodcast People are glad to see new training partners and things like that. It's a big thing we don't have the modern rite of passage, that we can use social media to hide who we truly are. 00:18:41.21 Rick Well, some of that is reinforced by the fact that jujitsu is a meritocracy. and we wear colored fabric around our waist that signifies rank. 00:18:52.25 Rick And the on the positive side, that belt that you wear is accountability. right it it It forces accountability because You might not feel worthy of that blue belt the day it's tied around your waist. And so you're confronted by by this gap between who you think you are and who you need to become. And so it's always going to motivate you to get to that next level. 00:19:17.88 Rick And to me, that's probably the greatest strength of the belt system is that it forces accountability. But there's a dark negative side that comes with that. And that is the idea that if you're a blue belt, you have to tap all the white belts. 00:19:31.58 Rick If you're a purple belt, you better tap everybody below. 00:19:32.07 nextlevelguypodcast Mm-hmm. 00:19:35.29 Rick And you start developing this false... metric because it's unrealistic to think that you're going to be able to defeat everybody at a belt below you. For one thing, humans come in all different sizes and shapes and have different athletic profiles and different ages. And, you know, if you're a 48-year-old purple belt training a couple times a week, it's unrealistic to think that you're not going to struggle against a good blue belt who's 30 and who trains five days a week. 00:20:10.23 Rick You know, and so sometimes um and that, you know, everything circles back to the ego. And and so we tend to magnify this thing of jujitsu, whereas it's better to just think about it as just you versus the old you. 00:20:26.33 Rick The only reason you're training is because you're on your own unique path. You're trying to get better. You're not in competition with anybody. You're making small improvements, small epiphanies every time you train. And those things compound over many years. 00:20:41.72 Rick And so it's better to not think about the other training partners that you might be struggling with because they're on their own journey as well. But that's hard. That's hard to do. 00:20:52.25 nextlevelguypodcast Yeah, i mean, because there's a bit when you talk about an equation of like how if you come across like a brown belt might think, oh, people go, oh, high level of skill. But when you actually compare a brown belt against a very younger, more physically dominant Purple belt. 00:21:09.37 nextlevelguypodcast It's not an actual brown versus purple skill development. You have to you have to associate the the skill level, the athleticism, the strength, the size, the weight difference. 00:21:20.65 Rick Yeah. 00:21:21.77 nextlevelguypodcast And it really kind of hits home like how we compare ourselves. It is our own individual path, but it's really hard to do that when your ego's going, well, you tap to him. That means he's better. Or you suck because you didn't beat so-and-so. 00:21:36.34 nextlevelguypodcast How much ego disguised as discipline as keeping us safe in jujitsu rather than holds back? 00:21:52.60 Rick You know, what 00:21:58.49 Rick was the first thing you said? You said something I wanted to respond to and I i just spaced out. So, oh, there was a good point. i wanted make I hope you can cut this out because I just, I totally lost my train of thought. 00:22:12.31 nextlevelguypodcast I have this i have this so but amazing way of waffling and people kind of go, what the fuck it is he going to get that point? and i think it was more about like how the comparison, the ego, the, you know, you look at, we hold ourselves against by judging. 00:22:18.92 Rick No, no, no, no, no. 00:22:23.56 Rick Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay, got it. 00:22:27.13 nextlevelguypodcast Well, you know, we didn't tap, we didn't win. 00:22:27.64 Rick Yeah. Yeah. 00:22:33.02 Rick People, as I said, come in all different shapes and sizes. And in combat sports, there are weight classes for a reason, because weight and size and strength, those things matter hugely. 00:22:47.22 Rick i make the point in the book that In the UFC, there's a 15-pound difference between middleweight and welterweight. 15 pounds. That is a rounding error in jujitsu because we all roll with everybody. 00:23:01.50 Rick And so the Gracies came up with a great formula, and I think it it really works. And that's called the Boyd belts. And the Boyd belts is the idea it's it was named after an over 60 black belt who wanted to turn in his black belt. He wanted to get demoted. because he was increasingly struggling against younger athletes. 00:23:21.24 Rick And so the Boyd Belt principle holds that every 10 years or every 20 pounds equals a belt in terms of difficulty, not technical difficulty in terms of physical difficulty. 00:23:36.02 Rick So if you're a blue belt who's 40, and you're going against a blue belt who is 30, that 10 year gap makes it feel like rolling with a purple belt your age. And again, not technically, they didn't magically get better, but in terms of The fact that their body can simply do more. You're having to diffuse their athleticism with your own body that's giving you less. And so your perception of the challenge is going to be similar to that of you going with a purple belt your age. And so when you do that math with the people you train with, maybe you're going against the guy who's 10 years younger and he's 20 pounds heavier. 00:24:16.44 Rick Well, 20 pounds is one belt. 10 years is another belt. There's two belts right there. So that 00:24:22.70 nextlevelguypodcast Yeah. 00:24:24.28 Rick blue belt you're rolling with is really a brown belt in terms of the overall physical challenge you you face with that. And it's really important to keep that in mind because, again, you know we we have this idea of representing our belts perfectly. If you blue blue belt, you want to tap all the white belts, but you have to keep all that In mind and understand that ultimately you are just on your own journey This is not has nothing to do with anybody else. It's a comparison between you and the person that walked in to the Academy on day and 00:25:01.75 nextlevelguypodcast Because one of the big eye-openers I found especially in it was how you talked, know, was about how not to run... but with comparing ourselves to others, not trying to win every round, but to actually find ourselves through the sport and go on our own paths. 00:25:20.98 nextlevelguypodcast But what point does competitiveness comparison, when does it become not healthy, but actually goes into the realm of self-harm, like it is actually holding us back? 00:25:31.29 nextlevelguypodcast Because I still really struggle with that. like I still feel that people are judging me, people are comparing me. 00:25:35.15 Rick Yeah. Hmm. 00:25:38.55 nextlevelguypodcast and i probably nobody's even batting an island, but I was taking a win as a great role and a tap as that was a crap weekend and I would yeah i would think about it and compare myself and beat myself up about it for days after. 00:25:55.80 nextlevelguypodcast When does it become self-harm compared to actually a healthy version of that? 00:26:03.25 Rick Well, we all are competitive. If you train Jiu Jitsu, you're competitive. I'm still competitive and I don't always roll as mellow as I should because you're facing this opponent and the ego and all those things. So that's something that will follow you throughout your entire journey. You will never perfectly master that. 00:26:24.38 Rick But, um you know, again, we're each one of us is on our own pathway and If you train at maximum intensity all the time, not only are you going to be more injury prone because it's when we're pushing beyond, you know, sometimes we you know we've pushed ourselves at a high volume of jujitsu in a training session. You're in your eighth round, ninth round, 10th round, and you're still pushing. Well, that's when the injuries can happen for sure when your form degrades. 00:26:59.16 Rick But also, what happens when you're pushing really hard is the only thing you're going to be able to play is your a game. And your A game is a very small subset of your overall game. 00:27:11.86 Rick We have an A game, a B game, and a C game, which is ah like a pyramid. And the C game are all the new things that you're learning that haven't bubbled up yet that you're not all that great with yet. The B techniques are the ones that are you know pretty well, but they're not the ones you necessarily look to in crunch time when you have to get something done. 00:27:32.22 Rick Well, if you train with only that small subset of your A techniques, you're never going to be able to expand and grow and add new techniques. you know Pianist doesn't learn a piece at concert tempo. You always have to slow things down. And in jiu-jitsu, it means dialing the intensity down so that you can, and it takes two to tango. 00:27:57.53 Rick But if both parties can reduce the intensity, then what happens is you hold the windows of opportunity open a little longer so that you can think and problem solve and make those adjustments that let you keep practicing the new things you're working on so that they bubble up and become something you're very, very good at. So ultimately, if you train hard all the time, you are slowing down your own progress and you're a little bit more injury prone for sure. 00:28:25.42 nextlevelguypodcast Because there's that great part where you said in the book, I had to write it down, if I ask myself whether I should do one more role, it probably means I shouldn't. And that hit home so many times of, you know, that one last one for the road is always the one that you tweak him at a muscle or you get hurt or you that you do something stupid. 00:28:37.00 Rick Yeah. 00:28:45.98 nextlevelguypodcast And it's it's a great sign of we need to be smarter as we age. But when does, you know, how... 00:28:54.20 Rick Well, or it, oh, sorry, I was going to say, or that extra roll or two, it prolongs your recovery, which means you might not be able to train as often. 00:28:57.24 nextlevelguypodcast ah so 00:29:06.97 Rick And to me, the best um the best value is to train with as much frequency as possible, because ultimately that's going to let you develop the fastest. 00:29:19.03 Rick But if you're so beat up from training that you can't train again for four days, then you're ultimately really slowing down your development. And so by keeping yourself a little bit more mellow and not rolling that extra round or two. And listen, I used to be the guy that never took a round off, even until somewhat recently. you know Just in the last few years, I finally got to a point where I was like, man, I can't can't do every roll. I can't do every round. 00:29:48.44 Rick and And then you start recalibrating with that reality and realize, no, I'm going to keep myself within. I can do six rolls, seven rolls if I'm feeling good, maybe five one night. I'm not feeling so great. 00:29:59.13 Rick and but And if I stay within that, it means I can come back and train it in two days versus four days. So ah ultimately, it's going to make you a better martial artist. That constant exposure to the art is going to let you progress much, much faster, even if you're keeping the intensity low. 00:30:16.95 nextlevelguypodcast It makes a lot of sense because until you're doing it, you know yeah you enjoy it so much and wakes this sort of like primal version of you, especially if you're winning. You think, oh, just one more, one more, and then something just tweaks. 00:30:28.99 Rick Yeah. 00:30:29.77 nextlevelguypodcast You fall back. They land on you. You're heavy, a and suddenly you're out for a few days or you can barely walk upstairs to your work or whatever it is. and Do you think that that's a thing is as we get older, restraint becomes harder than effort? 00:30:44.57 nextlevelguypodcast That moment of, i know I would like to, but I shouldn't. We actually need to be smarter as we age. 00:30:53.05 Rick Yeah, i'll I'll quote my professor, Roy Dean. He says that sometimes the discipline is the discipline to know when to not train, not just the discipline to keep yourself training. 00:31:05.59 Rick And so, yeah, and, you know, listen, it's fun. Rolling is the most fun thing in the world for me. Man, to say no to a roll is very, very difficult. But you have to understand that we we simply get more fragile. 00:31:20.82 Rick Every year, i feel a little bit more fragile than I did the year before and in a noticeable way. you know The joints become less elastic. The max heart rate declines. the you know The spinal column is you've got bulging discs from bad posture for so many years, and your hips don't open up And you know were we're all on this slow decline. 00:31:45.34 Rick And so accepting that reality and finding a way to keep training so that you can continue to make consistent progress, because the only pathway to success in jujitsu for the older athlete is through better technique. 00:32:01.83 Rick That's the only pathway. When you're young, you can go do all the strength and conditioning. And we see that in competition. Guys that are, they are a perfect combination of highly technical and highly physical. 00:32:14.20 Rick And that's awesome to behold. But once you're over 40, over 50, over 60 for sure, the the physical path, sure, keep yourself in shape, lift weights, stay strong, right? We need to maximize our physical attributes, but you're never gonna overcome that 20-year age gap. 00:32:34.49 Rick And so how do you defeat someone who's bigger, faster, stronger? Well, you have to be more technical, better timing, better feel, better sensitivity, better understanding, better knowledge. 00:32:43.87 nextlevelguypodcast Mm-hmm. 00:32:45.78 Rick All of these things that can continue to improve year after year after year after even though your physical attributes are declining every year. And the the game becomes, can I keep moving the the technical line? 00:32:59.45 Rick Can I keep moving this up year after year as my physical attributes do this? Because we don't want them both to decline, or then you're not going to be effective at all. 00:33:09.53 Rick You need at least the technique to keep keep improving. And so, yeah, it's it's strategic and it's frustrating because you can't train as much as you'd like and you can't push as hard as you'd like. But like but ultimately, that's the path that's going to make you able to deal with size, strength and skill without having to match that. 00:33:29.85 nextlevelguypodcast Because there's a really core message in the book about the the need for sustainable training, you know, to how we have to actually focus on longevity and staying. 00:33:43.19 nextlevelguypodcast And you said and old guy jujitsu isn't a consolidation prize. It's what efficient jujitsu looks like when the goal shifts from winning exchanges to winning years. 00:33:53.95 nextlevelguypodcast And that really hit home to me. I was like, I would go in and think I only do well by winning every round. 00:33:57.03 Rick Mm-hmm. 00:34:01.21 nextlevelguypodcast Whereas is actually just getting in the door, meeting some mates, having a laugh, learning a skill, developing my own self-defense and just ability to master my own body and control myself, et cetera. 00:34:15.00 nextlevelguypodcast and you know and grow emotionally as much as physically is actually a real thing i should be focusing on and what does staying mean to you now you know compare it to it's not just winning but is it improving is it just getting more years on the mat is that how we should approach our jiu-jitsu training 00:34:38.84 Rick Well, if your goal is to make jujitsu a lifelong pursuit, then you have to train at an intensity level that allows you to do that without breaking your body. You know, jujitsu is hard on your body no matter what. 00:34:52.34 Rick And, you know, i'm I've got some neck issues now, some back issues. I've got things that I've done to myself just by virtue of the fact that I've trained a lot of jujitsu. 00:35:02.90 Rick And so you you have to ask yourself, what is the end goal? 00:35:02.93 nextlevelguypodcast All right. 00:35:06.98 Rick Well, if the end goal is to continue to get the benefits of jujitsu and minimize the negatives, which is a broken body, well, it requires training with intention. 00:35:18.97 Rick And you know any one role means nothing, if you think about it. I mean, how many roles have you had in your journey? Thousands. I've had tens of thousands. 00:35:28.83 nextlevelguypodcast aye 00:35:31.03 Rick You know, can you remember every one of those roles? Of course not. it You know, any one role is just a moment in time. 00:35:36.25 nextlevelguypodcast Mm-hmm. 00:35:39.67 Rick Whatever that result, it doesn't mean anything. It just means that in that moment, you won, you lost, whatever. it's Maybe you retired, maybe, you whatever. It means nothing. 00:35:50.58 Rick So we have to zoom out a little bit and ask ourselves, why are we training if we're training for longevity? and to get the deeper benefits of jujitsu, then, you know, we have to just let go of that momentary competitiveness. And look, I'm not saying that you shouldn't be competitive and you shouldn't crank up your jujitsu now and again. 00:36:11.26 Rick you know, sometimes I'd be writing these chapters in the book and I thought, man, I sound like a wimp, like I'm just preaching energy conservation and And longevity, well, no. i mean, during my own journey, I've had to sharpen the knife. And I've had to get myself to peak physical condition. And I've had to do hard things. And I think that that's important to do because there are lessons in that, in the preparation of that, that you will gain that you can't get any other way. 00:36:37.94 Rick But that can't be the default setting. You can't make competitiveness your default setting when you're over 40. Or you're just going to start wearing your body out. You're you're going to start getting those lingering aches and pains, those repetitive use injuries. You're not going to grow as much for the reasons that i mentioned a minute ago that you're just playing your a game. 00:36:57.85 Rick and And, you know, everything seems to always circle back to the ego. you know It's just managing the ego and telling yourself that any one role It doesn't matter. No one's judging you. no one's Nobody cares, honestly. If you get tapped three times in a row, nobody in the room cares. you we We tend to magnify that. 00:37:20.98 nextlevelguypodcast that's the thing, isn't it? It's like, if you ask somebody... away from the mats, you know, and they would say logically that they are looking to train for as long as they can. 00:37:31.73 nextlevelguypodcast But if you then watch them in our in a match or if you watch them in a training session, they emotionally chase the intensity. And the book's littered with prime examples of how we screw ourselves up by our but our approach, by chasing the young people, by and by fighting every role rather than tapping early and beginning again. you know, like thinking about ourselves, our longevity, our recovery as much as what happens on the mats. 00:38:02.39 nextlevelguypodcast what habits do you see with older grapplers especially that is screwing them up that is damaging their longevity 00:38:12.02 Rick Well, it's just what you said. It's that competitiveness. by virtue of the fact that we wear these belts that signify rank and we tend to be competitive. And honestly, it feels good. You know, once you're in shape, it feels good to push hard. 00:38:27.35 Rick aye I mean, i love intense training. you know There's something about it that feels more honest. It feels more real. It feels more like it's you're tapping in more into the essence of a combat martial art when you're really being pressured and you're having to solve hard problems very dynamically. 00:38:49.08 Rick And in some ways, it feels more productive, like we are training more productively. And when you walk out of the dojo feeling absolutely depleted and you can barely get to your car and you open the car door and you're just eating yourself down into this. 00:39:05.00 Rick There's something about that that feels good. It feels like you improved. feels like you're okay. You're you're showing discipline and dedication by pushing hard. And there's a place for that for sure in jujitsu. Sometimes you need to do that. 00:39:21.50 Rick But again, you can't make that the default setting. So that's probably the biggest pitfall that older grapplers have is that If they train that way all the time, it's a slower journey and they're going to get injured. That was me. That whole decade in my 40s, I've got that famous chart of all my injuries that I put on my videos a few times where I show 20 different things, so you know, pointing at my elbow, my knee, my this that. And most of those things happened during that decade where I was refusing to accept that 00:39:56.38 Rick that I was older and I was just going to be the best jujitsu guy i could be. and And, you know, you realize that that that's just not the way. It's it's not the a sustainable path. And everyone will eventually have to learn those lessons. Otherwise, you're simply not going to you're not going to make it. You're going to have one too many injuries and then you won't see a reason to come back. 00:40:21.85 nextlevelguypodcast we wear them with like a badge honour, don't we? We kind of look and go, oh, used to do this, or I hurt my knee while I was doing this. 00:40:26.94 Rick Yeah. Right. Right. 00:40:30.17 nextlevelguypodcast or you know It's like the Al Bundy, I scored four touchdowns in a single game kind of approach and married the children. you know It's like we look at these things as... 00:40:37.40 Rick right right 00:40:39.64 nextlevelguypodcast ah I used to be able to do that or we hold on to these little moments rather than thinking I could still be doing it if I had just been a bit more sensible and there's a really vivid moment in the book is your first role where you're talking about your limbs are filled with sand your heart's pouncing and bounding against your ribcage you can barely get oxygen in and this guy's just throwing you around and you know you're just getting beaten up But you know you're sitting there just completely destroyed, but you're fit, but you're not jujitsu fit. 00:41:13.05 nextlevelguypodcast And it's such a different level of challenges and extreme kind of goals and things that we have to endure. 00:41:13.96 Rick Yeah. Yeah. 00:41:22.78 nextlevelguypodcast But as we age and recovery slows, how should we start looking at recovery and the true cost of a session so we can actually do this long term and not just have a great role and then never come back? 00:41:39.64 Rick Well, we tend to think that recovery is just something we do after training. There's the training and then there's the recovery. But recovery is training. You have to recalibrate how you think about recovery because recovery is just as important a part of training as the training itself. 00:42:00.63 Rick And I've come to believe that you have to engage in active recovery, just doing nothing for a couple days after training before your next session. That's just a way to make sure that those lingering aches and pains never really go away because what you need is blood flow. 00:42:19.35 Rick Right. Recovery requires you to get your heart rate up a little bit, get your joints mobilized, get your joints moving. You know, we lay in bed for eight hours a night and your joints will stiffen up. Sometimes you get out of bed and you're stiff in the mornings. Well, you need to move. 00:42:35.67 Rick And so I've really come to realize, especially every year as I get older, that Recovery means a little yoga in the mornings. Recovery means doing a little bit of mobility work to get those joints going, get those hips moving. Recovery work means going on walks and getting that blood flow. Recovery means sunlight, means eating well, means electrolytes and hydration. It means you know all those things, which as you get older, all those little details are much more important than they were when you're young. 00:43:09.50 Rick When you're 20, you can eat pizza every day and go train every day and party all night with no cost. 00:43:14.10 nextlevelguypodcast How I miss those days. 00:43:16.38 Rick Oh my gosh. Yeah. But, you know, we we can't do that. So, so yeah, I think the biggest shift for me is this understanding that recovery is just as important as the training itself. 00:43:30.97 Rick And you're robbing yourself of quality training if you don't recover with intention. 00:43:38.68 nextlevelguypodcast because another R word that came up pro out from like your recovery session, because you go into great detail about hydration, sleep, you know, like dynamic warmups, all this, like you have this great stuff that so many people would benefit from just by reading as they started to train. 00:43:55.70 nextlevelguypodcast But, One thing that really helped him was how we don't base our recovery on reality. We base it on our ego. And I think a great thing I took from the book was the art of sustainable training. 00:44:03.68 Rick Mm-hmm. Yeah. 00:44:07.20 nextlevelguypodcast and Because where you said it was hundreds of small adjustments and you focus on things like movement, recovery, ego, preparation, If somebody wanted to you know train for decades, what does sustainable training actually look like for an an older grappler? 00:44:23.31 nextlevelguypodcast For say a fat guy sitting on the side of the microphone who's asking, how do I go back and train sustainably and survive against these morons with the six packs and endless gas tanks? 00:44:38.01 Rick Yeah. 00:44:40.86 Rick Yeah. Well, ah I mean, you you said the adjective you used was this this fat guy. And so I think that one of the things, especially for us older athletes, that you can do to help your jujitsu is simply shed all those useless pounds that you're having to carry around every time you train. 00:45:00.63 Rick Because fundamentally, jujitsu is a movement art. it's It's an art in which we are moving ourself in and out of position. You're moving yourself into positions where you have some offensive opportunities or out of positions of danger. 00:45:16.28 Rick And, you know, we're not really moving our opponents. Yeah, we are, but it's based on leverage and our positioning more than anything. And so the question is, what ah what can you do to allow yourself to move better? 00:45:30.90 Rick Well, one of the simplest ways is simply shed those pounds that are useless. And so I'm definitely an advocate of staying lean, Your pressure game won't be quite as good, admittedly, but everything else about your game will improve your mobility. 00:45:46.18 Rick your you know It's less wear and tear on your joints, carrying less weight. 00:45:49.93 nextlevelguypodcast Yeah. 00:45:51.55 Rick so So that's part of it is looking at the machine that you have realistically and saying, OK, what can I do? to build a machine that can handle the demands of jujitsu because they're pretty, pretty intense. It's basically wrestling is what we're doing and it's pretty intense physiologically. So what things can you do as an older athlete? Well, work on your mobility. 00:46:16.50 Rick people people focus way too much on strength and they don't focus enough on mobility, I think, right? Because strength gains can happen really quickly. You go to the gym for six weeks and now you're 30% stronger than you were six weeks ago. So it feels real productive to do that. 00:46:32.82 Rick But if you're loading... weight onto a body that has structural deficiencies and isn't mechanically optimized to being able to do this stuff, you're just going to get hurt. So I always recommend to older athletes, assess your body first. 00:46:49.40 Rick You know, maybe enlist the help of a good physical therapist, a good exercise physiologist, a good strength and conditioning coach who really understands biomechanics and assess your body and figure out where are you weak? 00:47:03.86 Rick Where are you strong? Where are you rigid? Where are you flexible? Get an accurate picture so you can start attacking the things that are deficiencies so that you can give yourself a body that's constituted in a way that can handle jiu-jitsu without breaking down. 00:47:20.82 Rick And that's fundamental. So before adding another strength and conditioning session before you know doing all this other stuff, just ask yourself something more fundamental. Is your body constituted for jujitsu? And then start there. 00:47:35.00 Rick And so, yeah, it's I think a lot of those things matter more. the yoga, you know all those things matter more as an older athlete because you're asking your body to do you know a lot in jujitsu. 00:47:48.66 nextlevelguypodcast Because a big thing that came across when I first started was I thought pressure passing was just putting your weight on a person. But when you actually see how to actually control and dominate and transition, and just you know like there is so much more into pressure passing than simply just being heavy and laying basically on top of somebody. 00:48:05.98 Rick Hmm. 00:48:07.42 nextlevelguypodcast And it suddenly comes across as... It's all about more technique, more effort. It's more actually understanding of true control and not just white knackling and trying to throw somebody before they get you kind of thing. 00:48:23.19 nextlevelguypodcast But I love this emphasis you have about movement over strength. Is that what we forget? We build, we try to be stronger to compete with people rather than having a body that can actually cope with the demands and meet the conditions we need to be good at jiu-jitsu. 00:48:41.94 Rick Yeah, well, you you mentioned something very important, which is that you initially are trying to use strength to make your pressure passing game work. But really, when you go against somebody who is very, very skilled, but they're very, very light, and yet they can apply immense amounts of pressure, they feel impossibly heavy. 00:49:03.58 Rick the question is, what is that? What are we feeling that because that's not body weight. And it's sort of like when you see a circus performer lay on a bed of nails. Well, they can do that because they're distributing their weight across 200 nails versus ah putting one nail in the board. And now, you know, you're not going to be able to do that because you're concentrating all your weight on that one point. Well, that's pressure. 00:49:27.42 Rick It's aligning your skeleton, aligning your your body in relation to your opponent's body to pin understanding where to create wedges understanding where to how to position yourself to maximize the effect. 00:49:42.65 Rick And that becomes you know the true expression of pressure, whether it's passing, whether it's you know pressure whether it's pressure from the bottom. We can apply apply pressure from anywhere. 00:49:55.03 Rick And the principles are all the same. It's aligning your skeleton, using frames, using bone structures. body you know bone structures more than anything else. 00:50:06.49 Rick and and And those are techniques, right? that takes That's a much more sophisticated understanding than just throwing your weight on someone and trying to squash them that way. 00:50:19.77 nextlevelguypodcast because it kind of really hit home and when i was reading the book, it's like I felt vindicated because I had started getting really good at really pressure passing people, really controlling them, you know, going into headquarters and... 00:50:32.72 nextlevelguypodcast going into kneecap passes and things and like swinging legs into places so it basically made me i couldn't go anywhere else but into mount or there was all these kind of little tricks i was developing and when i read how you were in the book you were saying about how ah a good older athlete shouldn't try to compete explosively we should look to control the person transition 00:50:56.74 Rick Yeah. Yeah. 00:50:56.92 nextlevelguypodcast you know inch by inch move slowly through it is that the beauty of like flow passing figuring out how to be heavy rather than strength we actually figure out how to use our body and control other people's by learning that phenomenon 00:51:14.87 Rick you know there are fundamentally two ways to play jiu-jitsu there's the um faster more dynamic athletic style and there's the slower more methodical control-based style and these aren't two separate ways they're just two ends of a continuum and older athletes or more advanced athletes will naturally be drawn to the more control-based style of jiu-jitsu because it lets you um be effective without doing as much with your body, right? The athletic style requires you to redline yourself all the time, whereas the controlled style, you can be relaxed and you can be effective without doing a whole lot. 00:51:57.37 Rick In fact, when you watch high-level practitioners, sometimes it doesn't really look like much is going on. And then one one of the two people will advance their position slightly, six inches. They're six inches from where they were, and yet now they're able to lock down and control that new position. And oh, now they're six inches farther. And so it becomes much more incremental. And that's something I think people will naturally be drawn to as they get older. And as their physical attributes decline, you realize that you have to play this more incremental style. And it sounds like you're already on that journey. 00:52:31.93 nextlevelguypodcast Yeah, I loved it. I can remember that moment of kind of like, is this cheating? Because it felt like i was actually controlling people who used to kick my arse. And I'd be kind of like, oh, if I get them here, can you know pass into them and then get hold of like body locks or and stack passes. 00:52:42.15 Rick Um, 00:52:51.22 nextlevelguypodcast And suddenly i was like... oh I mean this is something I can do and and I actually felt like I was almost cheating in a way and I actually asked the professor at the time should I stick to pressure passing should I learn the other styles and he told me to stick at it because that's what older grapplers should be doing and you know he was saying try about this try about that but it wasn't like try to match them doing the handstand cartwheel passes all this kind of stuff he was like just you be you Is that what a lot of about older grapplers forget is jujitsu is a personal expression of who we are, our history, our injuries, our what what we've happened in our lives before. And we're expressing ourselves through how we perform jujitsu. There's not one size fits all. 00:53:40.41 Rick Yeah, ultimately, you're going to have to find your expression that works for you, for your body type, for your your mental attributes, how you think about the game of jiu-jitsu. 00:53:51.51 Rick you know It's a deep art. It's a broad art. There are hundreds of techniques in jiu-jitsu. And you know I've used this analogy before. i'm a i'm a i call myself a recovering musician these days because I don't play a lot anymore. But back in my 20s and my teens, I was obsessed with music. So in music, there are only 12 notes, at least in music of the West, right? Classical, jazz, funk, pop, rock, blues, all those styles, there's only 12 notes. A piano only has 12 notes. They get repeated at octaves, but there's only 12 notes, which means that all of those musical styles, and they are very, very different, they all use the same ingredients. 00:54:33.30 Rick Well, in jujitsu, we have only 13 things that we can attack. Shoulders, elbows, wrists, hips, knees, ankles, and a neck. That's 13 things. 00:54:45.85 Rick Which means, similar to music, You play jazz, I play rock, right? In Jiu Jitsu, your game can be vastly different than mine, even though all we're doing is manipulating these same 13 spots. That never changes. Sort of the meta principle never changes. But your expression is yours. My expression is unique to to me. And the things that I can do, the things that I make work in my game, they may not be right for you. 00:55:16.25 Rick you know be counterproductive to you so yeah ultimately each person is going to develop their own game and i think that's really the blue to purple journey more than anywhere else is because from white into blue belt you're just having to learn everything but then as you get into purple you're throwing away the things that don't really work and you're arriving at your game And then the whole rest of the journey from purple to, you know, coral belt is just refinement, mostly of the things that you like to do. 00:55:50.49 Rick Not that you shouldn't work on everything, but your focus will be primarily on the things that are unique to you. 00:55:57.91 nextlevelguypodcast you said in the book about how we we knew in our bones if we deserved the belt and how ah a problem a lot of people have is they try to honour the belt. They try to defend the the justification that we owe that you know that we just we are justified to have that level belt. So we need to act like it. And if we lose or get tapped... 00:56:20.47 nextlevelguypodcast we see it as a slight against their skill. And, you know, you talk about Boyd who was going to go down and demote himself because he didn't feel like he could keep up with the young people. 00:56:25.05 Rick Yeah. 00:56:30.94 nextlevelguypodcast Is that something that we forget? we we look We don't base it on our skill, our journey, our self-expression. We look you know we we don't look at have we look grown under pressure because everything in Jiu-Jitsu happens under pressure. 00:56:50.39 nextlevelguypodcast But do we look at it as, a again, the ego rather than the evolution of who we are? 00:56:58.84 Rick Yeah, well, that ego, you have to manage always. Every day you train, you have to manage your ego and keep sight of the fact that you're only ultimately in competition with your old self. 00:57:11.80 Rick And that's the only metric that matters is how would you do against that person? And by that measurement, each one of us would do great. Even with two weeks of training, you're you're going to beat your old you. 00:57:25.37 Rick And so so we forget that, you know, we get caught up in the, you know, get caught up in the the idea that you have to represent your belt perfectly and all all those things. and And yeah, everything always seems to come back to the ego in some way. 00:57:41.94 Rick And that's very, very powerful. Really, it's that developing humility. You know, some of the most humble people I know are some of the most deadly killers in the world. 00:57:55.70 Rick And yet you're like, man, line up 99.9% of the world population and you would be able to defeat them. But yet these people are insanely humbled. humble Why are they so humble? 00:58:07.74 Rick Because that humility has been forged through failure. 00:58:11.50 nextlevelguypodcast Yeah. 00:58:12.15 Rick year after year after year of having to tap and realizing that there's always someone better than you. and And you can't always tell. You look at this person you bump fists with, and you're younger, you're bigger, you're stronger, but yet they make you feel like an idiot. 00:58:26.52 Rick you know So you develop a humility because you can't tell by looking at someone whether they're good at jiu-jitsu or whether they're a skilled martial artist. you know So yeah, those things are all very, very important ultimately to to you know to keep the journey about you versus your old you. 00:58:44.53 nextlevelguypodcast I can still remember that first time I went into a competition class. Like it was Gracie Baha and it was like the you went in and actually rolled with blue belt and above whereas we had kind of stuck it. 00:58:58.52 nextlevelguypodcast you know they They had basically taken it easy on us, let's put that way. And when we went into this advanced class, I remember shot for a double leg and I was thinking, I was the bee's knees, you know I was doing really well. 00:59:10.72 nextlevelguypodcast I'd just got promoted and ah to my third or fourth tab by and i remember this guy just straight into um a guillotine like it was nothing and then he just beat me up for about five minutes and then showed me some stuff after, humble as you like but it was so much like ah oh suddenly it woke me and then I remember the first time i ever rolled my black belt ah suddenly having this guy just dominate you and it wasn't he didn't need to even move very much 00:59:22.04 Rick Mm-hmm. 00:59:40.57 nextlevelguypodcast But his grips felt like vices. you know He felt like he was just he could do whatever he wanted. And i he was just toying with me. And it suddenly dawned on me when you actually understand and the the art of the skill versus just trying to wing it, trying to win. But when you actually embrace it and become it, 01:00:03.19 nextlevelguypodcast It is phenomenal. It was terrifying. i mean, I watched some of your roles and I think it looks like you are nowhere near 60. It looks like you're about 20. 01:00:13.75 nextlevelguypodcast You seem to just dominate and just express it and you've just got this way of doing it. And I think that was something I really struggled with was, again, this ego thing. 01:00:26.74 nextlevelguypodcast But for people who are coming back to it, you know, maybe they had the injuries, maybe they stepped out, maybe they're eating like they were still training and weren't and become like the Michelin man, m you know, like a chubby guy sitting speaking to you just now. 01:00:43.16 nextlevelguypodcast If people are going back to it, what should our... 01:00:43.65 Rick Mm-hmm. 01:00:48.21 nextlevelguypodcast versions of this be? How should we look at our goals for the going forward so we don't go in and just think I tapped again and again and again. What should your goals, your metrics be that we're focusing on so we we make a success of it this time? 01:01:06.10 Rick ah Yeah, well, it depends on your level at white belt when you're first starting it's nothing but failure. And you have to be okay with that. You have to be okay. 01:01:17.78 Rick Knowing that you don't get to be the hammer for a long time, you have to be the nail. 01:01:21.77 nextlevelguypodcast Mm-hmm. 01:01:22.84 Rick But that's a critically important part of the journey because you're learning i mean, how do you learn to defend against someone more skilled than you if you're not in those positions over and over and over to where you begin developing the timing and the sensitivity and the understanding of the ways in which they can dominate you so that you can begin taking action to prevent those things? So even though you're losing, you're gaining really, really valuable skills. 01:01:55.83 Rick you know If you approach each role just as, look, I'm going to prolong the inevitable. They used to be able to tap me five times in a role. Now he can only catch me twice. That's massive improvement. And it's it's about recalibrating what success is when you get older. 01:02:06.18 nextlevelguypodcast Mm-hmm. 01:02:11.48 Rick Success isn't did I dominate the room. Success is you know did I do a little better than I did last time? Did I stay calmer than I did last time? Did I make less you know ego-driven decisions? did i Was I more methodical? was i you know There's a ton of things that you can look at as positives coming coming back to Jiu Jitsu. But ultimately, it's just you versus the old you. It's the ultimate metric that that matters. right 01:02:40.37 nextlevelguypodcast Because you said in the book about, is it is it the quality of our movement that defines us? It's not we don't fall back to this perceived level of our abilities. We fall to the level of our training, our preparation. And does it stem from, you know, like as we go back or as we start, we should be focusing on our timing, those little nuances, understanding where we struggle, understanding the the bits that we get caught in and using that as homework and figuring out why we're doing that, not looking at it as a heart, looking at it as a ah learning experience and kind of go and th thanking the person for showing us that. 01:03:11.98 Rick Yeah. Yeah. 01:03:21.56 nextlevelguypodcast yeah for me You know, how how do we understand that concept of um using the quality of our movement as a focus rather than the win-loss ratio? 01:03:36.92 Rick Yeah, well, you're touching on a couple of things. you know Quality of movement is something that you know we should all strive to improve their movement. And you mentioned that um you you like the way I roll. Well, you know that's just years of focusing on developing good movement capability and being able to you know move well within my own limitations. And then you add the element of timing because you know You can be quick despite the fact that you are slow in an absolute sense. 01:04:10.62 Rick Being fast and being quick are two different things. Being quick just means that you have recognized that there's an opportunity here to move and do something productively in jiu-jitsu and your ability to then execute that thing within the window where it makes sense. 01:04:25.90 Rick And so that's how you feel quick. against somebody who's faster than you is by developing those skills. 01:04:32.13 nextlevelguypodcast Mm-hmm. 01:04:34.36 Rick you know so So yeah, i but you know that's a long journey. you know We have to be okay with the fact that Ultimately, the struggles you faced on the mat today are going to inform what you need to work on because jiu-jitsu is fairly self-directed, even though we've got a coach who's teaching us, but they're not watching you every moment. They can't advise you every day. 01:04:59.54 Rick Ultimately, you have to take some control of your of your journey. And the best way to do that is simply to look at the problems you're having as opportunities to grow. you know not as reasons to beat yourself up because you keep getting caught in this choke repeatedly no that's jujitsu graciously giving you an opportunity to learn how to not get choked as much and so then you go do your homework and and and come back and experiment and you you know you behave like a scientist where okay well i thought that was going to solve the problem it didn't quite solve it let me go back to the drawing board and and over time you'll solve all those things you know the problems 01:05:37.75 Rick As your belt darkens, the problems get smaller and smaller and smaller. you know As a black belt, I'm not looking to solve the big problems anymore. I'm just looking for little things, little ways to be a little bit more efficient, a little bit more um you know defensively competent, you know just making those small things. And that becomes a very fun part of the journey as well, just looking for those little gems, those little things that can make a big difference, even though to someone looking at my game, they might think that what I'm you know what i'm excited about is imperceptible. They may not even see what I'm seeing there, but there's this little gap. in my knowledge, this little gap in my in my game that I can then find something to fill that gap. 01:06:22.68 Rick and And so that's that's the journey ultimately is at first you need to solve all the big things. Why someone passing my guard? right Why am I getting stuck in inside control? Eventually those won't be nearly as big problems or you'll be able to turn those into little failures within bigger sequences. So you just have to solve the little stuff and know over time. 01:06:45.74 nextlevelguypodcast No, it makes a lot of sense because in the in the book you have chapters on like hydration, sleep, you know the big parts of when we first start or when we come back to where we really struggle. 01:06:57.48 Rick Yeah. 01:06:57.91 nextlevelguypodcast And then I'm sure that everybody who's been on the mats has had this moment where you kind of go... oh, and and it's like a video game where the map goes from grey to, it opens up and suddenly you can see a wee bit more of the the map or the the city that you're working in and you go, ah, and it links in and you kind of understand it and then it's the next depth or next layer of the problem and it really kind of It opens up that thing of, right, so I understand that now. 01:07:26.94 nextlevelguypodcast Oh, but now that causes me to get stuck in this problem or against this kind of grappler. 01:07:30.54 Rick Right? 01:07:31.18 nextlevelguypodcast And it's kind of like, oh, right. And I think that's the part I enjoyed. um But then when I let that ego part take over, i was kind of like... oh fuck like ah but if i focus solely on learning what was i getting stuck in going and watching videos and you have this great series of guides of how to learn away from the coach away from the mats you know using instructionals youtube videos how to build a body that that copes for the demands of jiu-jitsu 01:08:02.42 nextlevelguypodcast Is that what we should be doing is working on our timing, seeing what we're getting stuck in, doing our homework away from the mats, figuring out how to control a person, how to express and and control our own bodies? 01:08:16.89 nextlevelguypodcast Is that the kind of thing you should be doing, like were saying about this journey that we take control of? 01:08:23.26 Rick Yeah, that's the real work. That's the deeper work is because ultimately, 01:08:30.39 Rick you know Every belt has a character to it. The white belt and blue belt is the belt of technique accumulation because you you don't know anything, so you're having to learn everything. 01:08:42.90 Rick But then eventually, you develop your own game. But by the time you get the black belt, your impulse is extreme simplification. 01:08:53.97 Rick You want to be maximally effective by doing nothing. right That's the the the ultimate goal, to be able to dominate people that are bigger, stronger, faster by you doing almost nothing. right You're so precise. You can shut people down just by your posting there, your wedging there, posting there, blocking there, putting your body here. And you can do these things that they don't look like you're doing much. 01:09:18.90 Rick you know And that's what, to me, keeps it fascinating year after year after year. Again, I'm someone that gets bored easily, but yet it's those kinds of improvements that you can make to where every year you're just a little more efficient, a little more efficient, you're able to have just a little more success. 01:09:38.04 Rick Not that you don't still have problems. I still have guys I struggle against. I still have you know problems in my game. But um you know that focus is really just on you know, those little those little things that make a big difference. 01:09:55.32 Rick and And that's something that can continue to improve year after year after year. That becomes the whole game, really. It's just you know chipping away. It's sort of like when you if you look at a sculptor, right he's going to sculpt something, a human face, let's say, out of bronze or out of stone. Well, the first thing they do is chip off the big blocks, all the big stuff that isn't that thing. 01:10:22.07 Rick But then eventually, it's just sandpaper. Eventually, it's just very fine tooling. It's just you know you're you're making 01:10:32.38 Rick tiny, tiny improvements in this thing. And someone watching you do that may not even notice, what did he just sand off? There was nothing there. But to your educated eye you're like, nope, there was a little imperfection there, but I managed to get it. And that's jujitsu. You're just, what you're attempting to do is perfect yourself. 01:10:51.19 Rick you know You're trying to achieve this perfect version of yourself, a person that's perfectly calm all the time, a person that ah is capable, a person that can problem solve effectively, you know all the things that carry over into your life. 01:11:05.72 Rick And you you just want perfection in those things. And that's not something you'll never achieve. But every year, you get just a little closer to that. And to me, that's the real value of pursuing this art as a lifestyle. 01:11:20.60 nextlevelguypodcast And is do you think that's a big problem is that people don't even focus on the big things, you know, like hydration, sleep, um ego management, movement. 01:11:31.67 nextlevelguypodcast So we get to be like Michelangelo the turtle rather than Michelangelo the painter. You know, we kind of, we we screw ourselves up by not even dealing with the big stuff so that we can understand go on that journey that we you know we stay stuck in the minds trying to compete with the young paps rather than just find ourselves 01:11:54.78 Rick Well, all of the big stuff is the little stuff as well, because the big stuff with enough work, it's no longer a big thing anymore, but it's never nothing. You know, in other words, if you realize that you've got some mobility deficits and you spend the next couple of years doing primal movements and animal movements and, you know, all that stuff, and you develop the ability to move well now, well, great, you've solved that. You're no longer that stiff, rigid person you were a couple years ago. You can move really well, but there's always more work to do, right? 01:12:27.66 Rick There's always a little bit more refinement, a little more refinement, a little more refinement. 01:12:28.06 nextlevelguypodcast Yeah. 01:12:32.26 Rick And so in every area, it becomes more fine grain over time. But those things never really go away. 01:12:42.20 nextlevelguypodcast And is there sort of three areas that you think that if like if you took every single person listening and said, if these people listen to these three areas, 01:12:53.75 nextlevelguypodcast you know um set them as your goal like better sleep better hydration um doing some shadow work to figure out why you know to lose a bit the ego whatever it is is there things that you jump out at you that would help everybody listening or is it such a personal journey it's hard to break it down 01:13:14.93 Rick Well, you can certainly separate into categories. There's the physical side, of course, and all the things that affect the physical. And then there's the mental and there's the emotional. And all those things are in play. 01:13:27.26 Rick If we're talking about the ego, that's an emotional thing, right? It's it's trying to, you know, doesn't allow us to tap in time or it's you know it can be destructive. 01:13:31.81 nextlevelguypodcast Mm-hmm. 01:13:39.19 Rick and So I think you have to work on all those areas, right? really. and physically, it just starts with an assessment of where you're at. How do you move? How strong are you relative to yourself? 01:13:53.30 Rick You know, and you answer those questions and then you embark on a journey to solve those things. And and listen, we can all do better. I'm not as disciplined as I could be. I don't always do the work. It's not like, you know, I write a book. It doesn't mean I'm the perfect example of all of these things. 01:14:09.27 Rick But we are all a work in progress. And hopefully every year you train jiu-jitsu, you have made progress in all of these areas. You're emotionally a little more stable. You're intellectually more knowledgeable, more understanding. You're physically, you know, we're declining every year. So it's not that e you can solve that, but are you maximizing what you have? 01:14:37.97 Rick Because that's all we can do is you know do the best within whatever physical attributes we have available to us. And so it's a multidimensional thing, and and it's just something that you just have to keep chipping away at. 01:14:52.06 nextlevelguypodcast Because a big part of like jujitsu, you know, you hear people talking about like the brotherhood, the bond of the guys on the mat or the girls on the mat. What is it about the brotherhood? It becomes something that we didn't know we needed to find this kind of group of people who will choke the hell out of and then will hug you after. 01:15:15.89 nextlevelguypodcast you know It's such a weird thing of trying to batter each other and then you love the person for it. How do we move past, when we first start, move past the, okay, i need to fight this person, I need to win, I need to do this, I need to do that, to actually go past the superficial and actually build true bonds with these people and actually find our tribe of people? 01:15:42.39 Rick Well, I think some of that happens organically. You know, i make the case in the book, it's an entire chapter, that modern life doesn't really demand all that much from us. 01:15:54.04 Rick You know, we we live in pretty, you know, we we live under systems, whether it's political systems or or just the way that our societies are structured. 01:16:08.06 Rick that they tend to funnel people from the time you're a kid. Okay, you have to go to school. Great. Now you can go get a job. Great. Now you've got a career promotion. Now, you know, these are very sort of controlled things in our life. 01:16:21.85 Rick And that's very different than when you step on the mat and you bump fists and now you're fighting for your life because someone's trying to strangle you. And I think that there's something lost in the modern world in that we don't have rites of passage There's, you know, um i I mentioned in the book, a young man is not expected to wander off into the desert on a vision quest to discover their name, or they're not expected to go hunt a lion alone in the savannah, which is something that people in the savannah do, or they're not expected to, you know, kill their Spartan foe, right, in Spartan warriors, when you got to a certain level, the next step was you had to go find someone and kill them. 01:17:01.32 nextlevelguypodcast Yeah. 01:17:08.38 Rick you know and So there's these rites of passage that are very, very powerful, and they sort of mark a moment in time where you've crossed this threshold from being a young man to being an adult. But in the modern world, we don't really have those types of things, those types of initiations. 01:17:25.97 Rick But jujitsu is, to the white belt, jujitsu is an initiation, right? It's got all those same attributes that rites of passage have, which is voluntary suffering, which is skill acquisition under duress, which is, you know, all of the things that we experience sometimes for the very first time. 01:17:48.92 Rick And in in some ways, jujitsu is the first real rite of passage that we've ever voluntarily put ourselves into where we, you know, this thing is not going to be handed to us. We're not goingnna be able to fake our way. We're not going to get the promotion because we knew the right people or because we kissed up to the boss or because, you know, all the ways in the real world in which we can either advance our position or, you know, have success. 01:18:17.30 Rick in ways that we didn't really earn in Jiu Jitsu. None of that is possible. you you Your skill is all that matters. um i mean how How you express jujitsu ultimately is the only thing that matters. And you're only as good as you are, right? So it's all those lessons that you get from being in that sort of tribal system where, 01:18:44.66 Rick um you know, everything is enforced through reality, really. You're you know I mentioned the book, you know who to listen to because they can do the things that you can't do. You know who you're becoming because the mats tell you that unambiguously. And so it's very, very powerful. I think you know jujitsu is not the only thing that you can achieve these sorts of things in, but it really checks all the boxes and in a way that few other things in modern life do. 01:19:17.30 nextlevelguypodcast Yeah, because I remember reading and I was getting the sense of like that you start making new friends, you find yourself, that you actually feel confidence that you deserve the belt level you're at, that you actually move from the ego into developing yourself through jiu-jitsu and treating it as an art. And there was all this thing. And then it came to the that question that I always hear, 01:19:44.12 nextlevelguypodcast Does an athlete, a competitor, a hobbyist, whoever whatever level you are at, do you need to compete? Because everybody always says, you never know who you are until you've competed. 01:19:55.06 nextlevelguypodcast But some of the best people I've rolled with have never competed. 01:19:56.70 Rick Yeah. 01:19:58.94 nextlevelguypodcast They just go in and train and enjoy it. And they are on another level compared to everybody else. What is that focus? Do we have to sharpen the knife by competing? 01:20:10.20 nextlevelguypodcast Or if not, what do older grapplers have as their goals if they're not focusing to win competitions or just give it a shot or whatever it is? 01:20:24.41 Rick You know, competition is generally not required to advance through the ranks. Most people never compete in jujitsu. Probably 90% of all jujitsu athletes never compete even once. Now, it's my personal conviction that Whether you want to compete regularly as a lifestyle or not, that's a different question. But I think that as a jujitsu athlete, you should at least step onto a competition mat a few times throughout your journey just to feel what that higher level of intensity feels like. 01:20:58.20 Rick Because even though you train hard in the gym, even though you're pushing yourself, there's still something a little different about stepping onto some unfamiliar mats, 01:21:10.74 Rick Everybody's watching, everything feels different. You're in in an unfamiliar environment going up against an opponent who doesn't know you, doesn't care about you, doesn't care if you have to walk with a limp tomorrow, they're gonna come at you with an intensity that you're rarely gonna feel in the home academy. And then there's the pressure, the moment, the adrenaline, you know all those things. I think that those things are immensely valuable to experience at least a few times on your journey. 01:21:40.02 Rick But for the over 40 athlete, the calculus has to include the risk factor, the safety factor, because it's not like you can just Well, I suppose you can. You can sign up for a competition and just go do it without training for it, but you're not going to have any success if you do that. Competition requires you to prepare, which means scaling up your training, rolling with more intensity, doing the strength and conditioning. you know all that stuff. And a lot of times it's the increased risk that you put yourself under during the training for the competition. Not always the risk on competition day, although there is increased risk. It's the volume of training leading up to it. And so this becomes a very personal decision for everybody. 01:22:29.66 Rick i don't compete anymore. you know um My body's starting to suffer a little and you know I've got some some issues that I'm having to manage. and pushing myself to that higher level of ah fitness and competitive intensity. it's It's just a little counterproductive for me at this stage. But that's a question that each person is going to need to answer for themselves. What I do believe is that you shouldn't feel less than. 01:22:57.82 Rick if you decide to not compete, it's not a reflection on you. Now, you have to ask yourself if the only reason why you're not competing is is because you're scared or you're scared to lose, well, that's not a good reason. 01:23:11.04 Rick In fact, that's a reason why you should. You should have to confront those things about yourself. But if that's not it, if it's just a calculus based on the fact that you know you work 60 hours a week, you have a family life, you don't train that much, you're training for the fun of it, you're training because it makes you better, stress relief, all all those things, well, that's enough. 01:23:15.82 nextlevelguypodcast Yeah. 01:23:31.64 Rick I mean, for that person, that's probably enough. They don't need to feel pressure to take their training to some higher level so they can go have competitive success. you know And then there's other people that love to compete regularly. It's just part of their identity. They love the challenge. They love that feeling that they get. And I know plenty of those guys too. So very, very individualized. 01:23:54.71 Rick No judgment either way, as far as I'm concerned. Maybe maybe you know there are coaches that are highly competitive that encourage all their students to compete all the time. But you know I was never one of those. 01:24:06.52 nextlevelguypodcast Yeah, because I see it all the time. There's that debate of like, are you a martial artist if you don't compete? And you think like you're a martial artist if you step on the mats. It's just an extra sense of that level of, you know, you can find out more about yourself by competing. And I remember when I was training, 01:24:25.59 nextlevelguypodcast I was shaking myself thinking about competing. And then I thought that's a sign I should be doing it because that's just another part of myself to develop, to learn about myself or to over overcome that fear by doing it. 01:24:32.23 Rick Yeah. 01:24:38.11 nextlevelguypodcast And it's I think we all go through that journey and it's really hard to kind of compare ourselves again, that ego thing. And I get asked to cover a lot of books in the show. 01:24:52.06 nextlevelguypodcast And when I saw you were bringing a book, I thought, have to get you on because I know the level of quality that you'll put into this. And I really do mean this, but this is a book that every grappler should read, especially for people who are going into jujitsu, especially if they're older, because... 01:25:07.83 nextlevelguypodcast it didn't it you know You don't just cover the basics of here's a technique, here's that. You actually explain how to make it an enjoyable part of your life, how to get the most from it, how to find yourself through it, how to to actually be a martial artist, not just a guy doing jiu-jitsu. 01:25:26.31 Rick Thank you. 01:25:27.38 nextlevelguypodcast And it it is a phenomenal book, and it it should be a must-read for everybody. But for people who are get the book... 01:25:35.22 Rick you 01:25:36.34 nextlevelguypodcast How would you want them to use it as a tool for going forward to, if it um if ah the book did its job perfectly and it did exactly as you wanted for each person reading it, what would a jiu-jitsu practitioner do differently in their training, in their life after reading your book? 01:26:01.78 Rick Well, to me, it was the book that I wish someone had handed me on that first day of training 20 years ago, because I had to learn. 01:26:07.48 nextlevelguypodcast 100% agree 01:26:09.34 Rick i i had to learn all those lessons myself. I had to learn about ego management. I had to learn about intensity. i had to learn, you know, the frequency of training is better than high volume and high intensity. 01:26:24.03 Rick you know, I had to learn. I I've tried different ways of eating, paleo and keto and carnivore. like you know Jiu-jitsu has forced me really to look into my life more holistically and examine because everything impacts performance on the mat. 01:26:44.63 Rick And so to me, this is a book that I wish someone had handed me. It's just It's guide. you know it's ah it's a guide on the journey it's a handbook it's not intended to be some deep you know deep book that gives you every answer to every problem you have it's more like me just pointing at the things that i think are important that will help you train with longevity and help you improve year after year and how to calibrate 01:27:19.19 Rick you know, what success means, redefining what success means when you're older. a lot of the book really doesn't, it's not necessarily intended for older athletes. 01:27:31.20 Rick I think a lot of it is just good, you know, basic values that you should bring to jujitsu, even when you're younger. 01:27:35.01 nextlevelguypodcast Yeah. 01:27:39.64 Rick But because i'm I'm known more as the old guy that does jujitsu, I thought I would orient it toward that because that's really my market. 01:27:49.98 nextlevelguypodcast So for those who are listening who think, I really want to try this, or I really want to go back to it, or, but at this stage in my life, I've got kids, I've got responsibilities, I've got a dicky knee, or I'm carrying a few extra pounds, or whatever it is, how do we... 01:28:09.43 nextlevelguypodcast What do you want them to hear when they say at this stage in my life, I don't think I can do this anymore. I don't think I'm good enough. I don't think I'm fit enough. I don't think I'm young enough to go and learn this sport to start on this journey. 01:28:25.91 Rick Yeah, the hardest part of the jujitsu journey is getting yourself onto the mat that first day. And for a lot of people, it can be very, very difficult because it's scary. you're Maybe you've been sedentary for 20 years. You're carrying around extra weight. You don't move that well anymore. You're 47 years old. You're past your prime and you're thinking, and what am I doing? Really? 01:28:48.06 Rick you know Maybe I should just go take a CrossFit or yoga or something else. I don't know about this jujitsu thing. But it's my conviction that it's possible to train safely at any age. You have to, number one, select a good training environment where your training partners aren't trying to kill you. 01:29:07.51 Rick And so what I always tell people is look at the schools that are closest to where you live. Start with the very closest one. go watch class, go see what they teach, go watch how they spar, go talk to the instructor. 01:29:23.61 Rick If you've got particular issues with your body, say, listen, I've got a hip that doesn't work so good, whatever, and get their opinion on that. And if you feel a good vibe, 01:29:34.39 Rick and it feels right, then jump into a class. If they offer a beginner class, jump into the fundamentals class. That's a great place to start. But understand this, that, you know, jujitsu will improve your fitness a lot. Jujitsu will improve your mobility. Jujitsu will give you a lot of things that will improve you. 01:29:55.16 Rick But if you're starting older, I still think that you are better served by assessing what your body can do and correcting those areas that are problems. Maybe your shoulders are very inflexible. Maybe you've got a low back that just doesn't function very well, right? Go work on those things. 01:30:17.42 Rick I'm not saying necessarily before jujitsu, or you can certainly do both simultaneously, but jump into jujitsu. take a look at your body, begin assessing what kinds of things are limitations and what kinds of things are potentially going to make training a little more risky if you don't if you don't take care of. you Use it as a vehicle to discover more about your body and improve those aspects. And then when you go in to train Jiu-Jitsu, 01:30:45.37 Rick Again, you're on your own personal journey. You don't need to conquer the world in a day. You don't need to you know all of a sudden go from no training to you're training five days a week. You're going to end up hurting yourself. Just ease into it. 01:30:57.87 Rick Begin getting your body functioning. Get your weight under control. Get your nutrition on point. Use it as a way to stimulate positive changes throughout your life. You don't have to change everything at once. Just start chipping away at it. 01:31:10.65 Rick And if you do those things, jujitsu is, you know, actually very safe. you know It's not risk-free, but all sports have some degree of risk, and and jujitsu, I think, all things considered, as is relatively safe. 01:31:25.78 nextlevelguypodcast And would you think that's the the better you mean in the book about redefining success? It's no longer about taps or wins. It's about, are you on the mat day in day out? 01:31:36.19 nextlevelguypodcast Are you training for longevity rather than wins? Are you actually finding about yourself, fixing the things, going on this journey, overcoming the fears? 01:31:40.67 Rick Yeah. 01:31:45.84 Rick Yeah. 01:31:48.15 nextlevelguypodcast Is that the true meaning of success in jujitsu? 01:31:53.85 Rick yeah we get too hung up on the the taps or getting tapped if you tap someone that's a success if you didn't get tapped or if you got tapped it's a failure if you got the tap it's a success and there's no other successes or failures in anything you do in the academy it's either i got tapped or i didn't or i tapped but those are 01:32:18.65 Rick just one metric out of many, many, many things. And they're not even the most important metrics. The real metric is, are you training consistently? Are you improving your fitness consistently? 01:32:31.08 Rick Are you getting more mobile? Are you developing greater knowledge, greater understanding? do you understand the positions better than you did yesterday? and And what all of those questions have in common is you versus the old you. 01:32:46.10 Rick Ultimately, if there was one meta message in my book, it would be that just compare yourself to you. you This is about you and you becoming the best person you can become, you you becoming the best version of yourself. And that's possible to do that at any age. 01:33:07.51 Rick But it requires you to compare yourself to you and not get so hung up on the dojo drama of who's tapping who and who caught me. And, you know, those things are irrelevant, really. 01:33:21.69 Rick I mean, sure, we want to be effective in jujitsu. And with training and skill, your ratio of taps versus getting tapped is going to naturally improve and it's going to keep improving. 01:33:32.18 Rick But those things are just outcomes. the The real benefit was all the work that training jujitsu forced you to do. 01:33:43.51 nextlevelguypodcast I mean, I 100% agree. And I just wish I had had this book before I started training because there were so many things I looked at and I thought, i wish I'd known that before. I wish I'd focused on that before. 01:33:56.25 nextlevelguypodcast And it's definitely a ah must read for any grappler of any age, of any stage of jujitsu. But why should we buy it? that you know It's a perfect time for a sales pitch. 01:34:08.12 nextlevelguypodcast For somebody who's thinking, this sounds a great book, what would be the... what How would you tell them? what What would they need to know about the book if they're sitting on the fence, perhaps? 01:34:21.91 Rick Well, it's a short book. It's not a lengthy, lengthy read. You can actually sit down in probably two or three evenings and read the book. It's 22 chapters, but the chapters are short. So I tried to not, you know, 01:34:37.59 Rick get too lost in the weeds and keep keep it. So it's one of those books that you can get a lot out of, i think, in a compressed period of time. And it's more of a handbook. It's not necessary to read the book sequentially. I've organized it in a sequence that I think makes sense for the book, but you can bounce around and read whatever chapters you feel like or keep coming back to certain chapters. So I think it's just... 01:35:02.65 Rick You know, if you're a jujitsu nerd and you're into training and you're into jujitsu, the book is just another perspective to add to your arsenal. And that's probably the best reason to buy it is it's just going to probably help you in a few different areas. Some of that you might not have even considered before, especially if you're a little bit older trying to train. 01:35:25.37 nextlevelguypodcast And I'll definitely help them level up their jujitsu. And i yes, I do hate myself for getting the plug in there at the And what do you want people to remember about this? you know what What would you like them to take from this interview going forward, apart from buying the book? 01:35:45.27 Rick Well, I started jujitsu very late in life. I was 41 years old. That was 20 years ago. And, you know, I'm not a world champion. i'm not a... 01:35:58.94 Rick you know someone that has made the competition arena, how I've made myself famous or anything like that. I think that I'm just somebody that cracked the code on how to train sustainably with longevity in Jiu Jitsu, how to keep it being fun year after year, how to keep you know those lessons, those important lessons that Jiu Jitsu teaches, how to keep those coming in. 01:36:23.64 Rick you know And ultimately, I'm just someone that didn't quit and I was able to to crack that code. And so I hope my legacy is that I've been able to help people along the journey. And I think that's probably why people are drawn to my content is I'm relatable. 01:36:40.54 Rick in a way that maybe the you know the world champion who was a freak athlete when they were young, well, they're not relatable to the average guy who's 39 years old starting jiu-jitsu. They look at that guy as, no, that guy had all the physical gifts that I don't have. 01:36:54.65 Rick But that Rick guy, okay, I can relate to him. I can relate to the struggles that he has because he's had those same struggles that I'm having. So I think that's probably the biggest benefit is that um'm I can relate because I've been through all that. 01:37:09.11 nextlevelguypodcast And I think you undersell yourself because you ah you teach it in a way that we can actually understand Jiu Jitsu and how we can apply it to life. you know It's not just turn up five days a week and do that. You actually teach us the art of the skill. 01:37:21.18 nextlevelguypodcast You actually teach us how to learn Jiu Jitsu, how to make it part of our life. 01:37:22.49 Rick Yeah. Thank 01:37:25.06 nextlevelguypodcast And you do it in such a fun, inviting way. But every one of your videos, you learn so much from it. yeah And that's why i think you're and you're such a good coach about it. 01:37:34.20 Rick thank mother 01:37:36.67 nextlevelguypodcast And you're so down to earth and humble and giving. yeah you know is there How do you think this has changed you looking back now, look after writing the book? 01:37:47.48 nextlevelguypodcast ah Does it surprise you when you actually try to put all your knowledge, your history, experience and love into the book? 01:37:58.42 Rick Yeah, well, there was more there than I thought there would be. As I mentioned, initially, I thought it would be a much shorter book, even though it's not all that long. ah and and there's And there's actually more that I could have said. I had a bunch of chapter ideas that I ended up not developing just because I didn't fit with the time constraint I had. So yeah, there's there's a lot there. 01:38:18.58 Rick And yeah, I'm just happy to to have You know, each one of us gives back to jujitsu in our own way, ultimately. And we do it either by being a good training partner with the people we train with or by being a better husband, a better employee because we're more calm under pressure and and those things. And so I think that ultimately it's important for each one of us to give back a little bit. And to me, you know writing a book and contributing with my videos and the events that I do, you know we run Old Grappler Summit, which is an over 40 retreat down here in San Diego. We do a couple of events every year. 01:39:01.57 Rick And those are amazing. We get people from all over the world that show up. And so it's just my way of giving back to the art of jujitsu and and trying to stay in it because it's such a beautiful, transformative art that I love it and I love being part of it. 01:39:15.93 nextlevelguypodcast Love it. And, you know, before you bring out more books and more, you do TED Talks and more instructionals and, you know, you continue to change the way Jiu Jitsu is learned and understood, how can we follow on your journey? 01:39:29.39 nextlevelguypodcast You know, how can we sign up for the seminars, the for, you know, for the workshops, for finding social media? 01:39:37.60 Rick Mm-hmm. 01:39:37.73 nextlevelguypodcast How can, before you become the superstar author like J.K. Rowling, how can we follow your journey? 01:39:46.81 Rick Well, I have two primary websites. One is rickellis.com. It's just my name. And anything that's personal related to me is over there. 01:39:57.85 Rick The events that I do that are not old Grappler Summit, I always announce and publicize those through rickellis.com. We've got a Costa Rica trip later ah toward the end of the year. I don't have that on the website yet. I'm building that out. So rickellis.com is a good place to find me. 01:40:16.18 Rick OldGrapplerSummit.com is where we publicize our over 40 camps that we run. And then on social, YouTube, I'm the Art of Skill on YouTube, Art of Skill channel. That's probably my number one social network. That's the most popular one for me. 01:40:35.49 Rick I'm on Instagram at RickEllisHQ and TikTok, RickEllisHQ. And Facebook, I think it's Rick Ellis HQ as well. So I'm on all the platforms. you know I'm happy when people friend me on Facebook or follow me on Instagram and all that. But YouTube is probably my big social media channel. 01:40:59.75 nextlevelguypodcast I'll hit stop just now because