Throw Choke Lock Pin Punch Kick Tap

This video is part of a series, the rest of which consist almost entirely of blatant disregard for rules and safety in BJJ. The first two installments are pretty good.

But this one had a substantial number of instances where the DQ was debatable or downright patronizing. I understand that slams from the guard (or an armbar or triangle) and heel hooks are illegal; fine.

But shaking someone off should be legal. A straight ankle lock that turns into a heel hook *because of how the person being attacked moves their foot* should be legal (perhaps with a penalty instead of a DQ—I’m not even sure for which grappler!). Letting someone fall from shoulder height because their triangle grip is weak should be legal (3:00). Pushing someone as they sit up in guard should be legal (6:34).

(Source: youtube.com)

Rickson became Rickson by getting beaten up by Rolls. And now, we can see this process on tape. The results are more tachiwaza than I expected.

Rolls opens with a simply brilliant sticky-footed deashiharai, but he can’t keep the pin.

Once they’re back on their feet, Rickson fires back with yoko otoshi, but has to bail to guard when Rolls nullifies it. Rolls passes to half-guard and looks for the back while Rickson attempts a belt-grip sumi-gaeshi sweep. Rolls ends up in knee mount and tries a paper cutter choke, but Rickson bellies out and stands up. The two set a quick pace, and Rickson seems quite intent on playing a wrestler’s game against Rolls: a bent stance, taking shots, standing up when in danger.

Rickson tries a single leg but Rolls has none of it. Rolls threatens that desashibarai again but ends up succeeding momentarily with a morote seoinage instead. He tries to off-balance Rickson with sasaetsurikomiashi right as he stands up, but Rickson keeps his base.

The match ends with another sublime throw from Rolls, a left-side double-sleeve osoto-otoshi—similar to my own tokuiwaza. Incredibly, this kicks off a scramble that Rickson comes out on top of by way of a single leg. 

Really impressive seeing how much like judo their training was back then.

(Source: youtube.com)

I debated over whether to dignify this steaming pile of self-serving quarter-truths with a response. Unfortunately I’ve taken the bait. Penn & Teller used an episode of their supposedly myth-busting show, Bullshit!, to tell you that your body type—how muscular or fat you are—is entirely up to your genetics.

Please, take your time cleaning up any vomit on your keyboard.

Their thesis is this: those fitness trainers with gym bodies? Their genes made them that way. You can’t look like that. Are you fat? You’re going to be fat no matter what you do. Those skinny kids? It’s impossible for them to put on muscle no matter how many weights they lift. It’s science! 

Well, no, actually it’s “science” trying to be edgy. It’s sciencey. It sounds like science. Really, Penn and Teller are shoveling bullshit rather than dispelling it.

“It’s a cold fact of genetics that there are three basic body types,” they say, before describing with haughty certitude the immutable Ectomorph, Endormorph, and Mesomorph. I do not have the scientific standing to take a position on that theory, though I have my suspicions. But Penn and Teller go further. These body types, you see, are not just genetic tendencies. They are genetic destiny. The deoxyribonucleic stars have foretold your body.

Am I overstating their case, perhaps? No one could refute reality this bluntly. I mean, you know someone who went from skinny-fat to muscular, right? Or someone who used to be fat who is now trim? Or someone who used to be muscular in their youth who has let themselves go? 

No, they go whole hog:

Exercise will help you maintain better health. We’re not arguing that. But even Jack [LaLanne] can’t change this fact: your body shape is all mapped out the day from you were born. In other words, all this [clips of Jack LaLanne leading workouts] will never turn you into this [picture of a young Jack LaLanne striking a bodybuilding pose]. Make no mistake, Jack LaLanne hit the genetic jackpot.

(Circa 3:15 to 3:40) 

Maybe Jack LaLanne did hit the genetic jackpot. Maybe he didn’t. If his parents and siblings and cousins were a gang of chiseled Adonises and marathon winners, we could make that case. Otherwise we have to plead ignorance.

But the point is that it’s almost immaterial. The vast majority of fit people just did the most with what they were genetically given. They worked hard and ate with discipline for years to get muscular or skinny. Jack LaLanne would not have looked like Jack LaLanne—or been as capable into old age as Jack LaLanne—had he sad on his ass and ate Doritos for forty years.

Of course genetics determine upper limits on our abilities to change our bodies. That is not in dispute. The claim is that genetics is the entire enchilada. To wit:

I’m Penn and this is my partner Teller. Like most Americans, we have more money than self-discipline. We watch what we eat…a little. We work out a few times a week, and we feel pretty good. But we still look like fucking Penn & Teller. Hell, we could work out fifty hours a week and that wouldn’t change. Even if we busted our asses and lived like monks, we still would only be slightly more toned, ‘cause like it or not, these are the bodies our genes fucking give us. This is what we are. That’s the power of genetics. Anyone who tells you different is selling a load of bullshit.”

(first minute)

To be clear, that’s not accurate. Again, genetics influence how your body responds, and your genes will indeed set a maximum on how athletic you can be or the minimum body fat you can maintain while not feeling like shit. But they overstate the case by an order of magnitude. 

For instance, it’s well known in sports science that there are sensitive ages for particular physical attributes. Someone who lifted weights regularly during their teen years will always find it easier to be strong than someone who didn’t, regardless of the DNA they were born with. Someone who played serious soccer or basketball for a decade will be better able to return to that level of fitness than someone who has never played sports in their life. So right there—genetics are not the end-all and be-all of your body’s potential.

I’ll be generous: Penn and Teller hit the mark when they indict multi-year gym contracts and the marketing-fueled supplement craze. I agree, those are bullshit of the steamiest order. They are the result of consumer capitalism and an advertising-saturated, results-with-no-effort culture.

But Penn & Teller conflate Buns of Steel ad copy with squatting and running and fucking pull-ups. These free-market libertarians seem incapable of debunking overpriced pseudofitness equipment without reassuring every skinny-fat karate nerd that he’ll never be able to deadlift twice his body weight.

What Penn and Teller are saying—what they are explicitly stating as scientific fact—is that none of us can change how our body looks. We are all stuck with our bodies just as they are. It’s a strangely twee thing to say for such supposedly scientific types. But when Thoreau wrote these words—

Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can?

—he did not mean to be content with what we were born with. He did not mean, nor does science tell us, that our cells predetermine our fate. No, “it is the work of our own hands, matched to reason and principle, that will determine our destiny.” Bobby Kennedy was right, there is pride in that, but also experience and (scientific) truth. Penn and Teller show that this is not the only way we can live. But it is how I’d like to live.

(Source: youtube.com)

Ido Portal manages to crack one of my most fundamental understandings of physical culture: the centrality of training.

Back when I first started supplementing my martial arts with strength and conditioning, Rippetoe and Kilgore sold me on the perspective that “exercise” is for the masses. These people are merely running on hamster wheels. “Training” is for those of us concerned with bettering ourselves. Training is a plan for the workout. Training gives the workout meaning. Training is why we do what we do: to get better.

But now Ido is saying no, we don’t need to train, that’s not really what we were ever doing:

People want to move! They want to flow on the ground, they want to do handstands, and they want to be mobile, they want to be flexible. They don’t want to bench press so much.

It’s a moment of realization in the market: what are we training for? It never arrives! We are always preparing and training. We want to do it! We want to move! We are training…for what?

What we do is very immediate. It is the moment. You are not training. You are moving.

…

Move. Move, because you can.

This is an earthquake in my philosophy. He is certainly right, I feel it in my sternum. I want to do it, to do it all—to lift and yoga, to judo and box, to handbalance and run. Yes, I do these things to better myself, but whenever I stop training combat sports I realize that I spend my life doing these things because I love doing them and doing them well, not because I really care about training for better judo. Sure, when I’m serious about judo or boxing I tailor the rest of my physical culture to be judo training, but in the broader scheme I’m with Ido. I’m moving, not training, and I love it.

So from now on, it’s not training. It’s movement. Wow. I am sure this will have repercussions.

(However, I refuse to follow Ido when he extrapolates this line of thinking into rejecting barbell training until after bodyweight mastery. Unless that mastery—in his words, “self dominance” and being able to “control your own body”—means merely a bare minimum of a bodyweight squat or a push-up or two, I simply don’t see why his approach is superior. A barbell deadlift makes sense even for people who can’t do handstands.)

(Source: youtube.com)

In a talk about computer-assisted art that makes itself worth of the medium, Bret Victor talks about feeling an art in your body:

There’s another fundamental rule of animation called [blah blah blah]… these are very basic, very fundamental rules of animation, every animator knows them. But every animator knows them in their heads.

So, I make this distinction between knowledge in the head versus knowledge in the hands. And I’m going to make an analogy here, because I don’t actually do that much animation myself, but I do play music. I improvise on the piano. Like the rules of animation, there are rules to music; there’s music theory. I think it’s very important to understand the theory. But when I’m playing, I’m not consciously referencing the theory, right?

So, I might go up to a dominant seventh and then resolve it down to fifth. And I know what I’m doing, but it’s not something I’m thinking about, it’s something that comes out of my body, something that lives in my hands.

The funny thing is, I can’t even say that—up to the seventh and down to the fifth—without doing it with my hands. That’s how deeply rooted that knowledge is in my body.

So that’s where that knowlege in the hands where you’re performing according to instincts out of your body and your emotions is something you can have when you have a performance medium.

…

I can [do this animation technique] until my body tells me that it’s the right time to release it. I think this is totally different than being back at your drafting table or back at your computer, like, calculating “we’re going to spend six frames doing this and three frames doing that”. It’s something that comes out of listening to the emotions in your body. And I think that this leads to more emotional expressiveness in the art itself.

An artless art, growing out of the unconscious. 

I dropped by the jiujitsu club this week, to see how my hip and shoulder would handle it. (Answer: mostly fine, but not fine enough to train hard, so I continue yoga and careful lifting.) And I felt this emotional power to feeling the art arise naturally from my unconscious. It felt like riding a bike, or like running into an ex-lover. The body responds in all the old ways, even when the mind is unsure. It was as exhilarating as ever. The feeling of naturally expressing movement—and even a degree, no matter how slight, of movement mastery—I found to be an inherently emotional experience. In team sports this often manifests as camaraderie. In yoga they call it spirituality or a chakra and slap some half-assed cosmology on it. 

Without diminishing this wondrous sensation, I’d like to briefly note a drawback. I think this bodily passion for movement, particularly grappling, may get in the way of rational training. When playing judo, for example, I have to force myself away from the old patterns, into new territory that might not have the fluidity that easily produces emotional expressiveness or flow. I have to fight this succubus of expressing knowledge-in-the-body and do yoga for a year to be healthy enough to play judo vigorously again. Body knowledge is embedded with emotional hyperpalatability.