Steve and Corey talk to legendary NCAA and Olympic wrestler and coach Dan Gable. Gable describes the final match of his collegiate career, an NCAA championship upset which spoiled his undefeated high school and college record. The Coach explains how the loss led him to take a more scientific approach to training and was critical for his later success. They discuss the tragic murder of Gable's sister, and the steps 15-year old Gable took try to save his parents’ marriage. Gable describes his eye for talent and philosophy of developing athletes. Steve gets Gable's reaction to ultimate fighting and jiujitsu.
The Champion (1970 documentary on Gable's senior NCAA season)
man·i·fold /ˈmanəˌfōld/ many and various.
In mathematics, a manifold is a topological space that locally resembles Euclidean space near each point.
Steve Hsu and Corey Washington have been friends for almost 30 years, and between them hold PhDs in Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Theoretical Physics. Join them for wide ranging and unfiltered conversations with leading writers, scientists, technologists, academics, entrepreneurs, investors, and more.
Steve Hsu is VP for Research and Professor of Theoretical Physics at Michigan State University. He is also a researcher in computational genomics and founder of several Silicon Valley startups, ranging from information security to biotech. Educated at Caltech and Berkeley, he was a Harvard Junior Fellow and held faculty positions at Yale and the University of Oregon before joining MSU.
Corey Washington is Director of Analytics in the Office of Research and Innovation at Michigan State University. He was educated at Amherst College and MIT before receiving a PhD in Philosophy from Stanford and a PhD in a Neuroscience from Columbia. He held faculty positions at the University Washington and the University of Maryland. Prior to MSU, Corey worked as a biotech consultant and is founder of a medical diagnostics startup.
Added: The wonders of YouTube! A great interview with Chris Campbell -- perhaps Gable's best wrestler!
Keenan Cornelius is a world class blackbelt in jiujitsu. His skill level is sufficiently high that he can verbalize his tactics in real time as he rolls with lower belts.
"He's trying to bump me off mount, so I'm shifting my weight to my left knee to keep my weight off of his hips. But once he gives me an opening I'm going to slide under his lapel to finalize the choke..." Sometimes he is several moves ahead of his opponent!
Roy Dean does something similar, but with narration added in post-production, here. Roy's video is more precise (for one thing, he's not out of breath) but what Keenan is doing is super impressive :-)
If you do Judo, MMA, or BJJ you've probably seen someone choked all the way out. In this video CrossFit athlete Brooke Ence learns how to do hadaka jime (naked choke) and goes out herself. Very interesting if you've never seen it before :-)
Judo/BJJ chokes block blood flow to the brain, not air flow to the lungs. Deprived of blood (hence, oxygen), the brain transitions to unconsciousness quickly and rather abruptly, with interesting effects on memory and awareness.
I trained for years with a former Navy SEAL who would fight a submission to the end, so I choked him out on a number of occasions. Sometimes he would wake up afterward and ask me what happened. He also made the same little gurgling noise that Ence makes in the video.
Apologies for the lack of posts. I've been enjoying some time with the family in CA :-) Kids have the MI middle school state swimming championships coming up and we got some good training done in a beautiful outdoor pool. I'm using USRPT methods, which seem to work well for my kids. I wish we had it when I was competing.
We had really good luck with the weather, sunny and 60s every day on the central coast.
I don't know whether Arnold ever read Nietzsche, but he certainly developed the Will to Power early in life. I quite like the video above -- I even made my kids watch it :-)
When I was in high school I came across his book Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder, a combination autobiography and training manual published in 1977. I found a copy in the remainder section of the book store and bought it for a few dollars. The most interesting part of the book is the description of his early life in Austria and his introduction to weightlifting and bodybuilding. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in golden age bodybuilding, the early development of physical training, or the psychology of human drive and high achievement. Young Arnold displays a kind of unbridled and unironic egoism that can no longer be expressed without shame in today's feminized society.
Chapter 2: Before long, people began looking at me as a special person. Partly this was the result of my own changing attitude about myself. I was growing, getting bigger, gaining confidence. I was given consideration I had never received before; it was as though I were the son of a millionaire. I'd walk into a room at school and my classmates would offer me food or ask if they could help me with my homework. Even my teachers treated me differently. Especially after I started winning trophies in the weight-lifting contests I entered.
This strange new attitude toward me had an incredible effect on my ego. It supplied me with something I had been craving. I'm not sure why I had this need for special attention. Perhaps it was because I had an older brother who'd received more than his share of attention from our father. Whatever the reason, I had a strong desire to be noticed, to be praised. I basked in this new flood of attention. I turned even negative responses to my own satisfaction.
I'm convinced most of the people I knew didn't really understand what I was doing at all. They looked at me as a novelty, a freak. ...
"Why did you have to pick the least-favorite sport in Austria?" they always asked. It was true. We had only twenty or thirty bodybuilders in the entire country. I couldn't come up with an answer. I didn't know. It had been instinctive. I had just fallen in love with it. I loved the feeling of the gym, of working out, of having muscles all over.
Now, looking back, I can analyze it more clearly. My total involvement had a lot to do with the discipline, the individualism, and the utter integrity of bodybuilding. But at the time it was a mystery even to me. Bodybuilding did have its rewards, but they were relatively small. I wasn't competing yet, so my gratification had to come from other areas. In the summer at the lake I could surprise everyone by showing up with a different body. They'd say, "Jesus, Arnold, you grew again. When are you going to stop?"
"Never," I'd tell them. We'd all laugh. They thought it amusing. But I meant it.
...
The strangest thing was how my new body struck girls. There were a certain number of girls who were knocked out by it and a certain number who found it repulsive. There was absolutely no in-between. It seemed cut and dried. I'd hear their comments in the hallway at lunchtime, on the street, or at the lake. "I don't like it. He's weird—all those muscles give me the creeps." Or, "I love the way Arnold looks—so big and powerful. It's like sculpture. That's how a man should look."
These reactions gave me added motivation to continue building my body. I wanted to get bigger so I could really impress the girls who liked it and upset the others even more. Not that girls were my main reason for training. Far from it. But they added incentive and I figured as long as I was getting this attention from them I might as well use it. I had fun. I could tell if a girl was repelled by my size. And when I'd catch her looking at me in disbelief, I would casually raise my arm, flex my bicep, and watch her cringe. It was always good for a laugh. ...
When I was in Japan in the mid-1990s almost no one outside of a small group of MMA fans had ever heard of BJJ or Gracie Jiujitsu. Sometimes when I went to a judo club to practice I would just explain that I was a "newaza specialist" (ground technique specialist) or even that I wanted to do Kosen-style judo.
The Imperial Universities that specialized in Kosen judo did so partially because they were nerds! One could become adept at newaza with less natural athleticism and less practice than was required to become a true tachiwaza (standing technique = dynamic throws) specialist. A relatively small amount of training in ground technique allows a fighter to completely dominate an untrained opponent. The Kosen competitors would simply drag their opponent to the mat without using any flashy throws or takedowns, and then submit or pin them. More video.
I cannot really tell from the video whether these Kosen practitioners have also adopted techniques from modern BJJ. I see some spider guard, but apparently that is an old Kosen style! Don't let the black belts fool you. In Japan you go from white to black belt directly, and 1st dan black belt just means you know the basic moves and are still very much a student. These guys in the video don't look all that advanced to me for the most part. (It's not easy to be admitted to Kyoto University, by the way.)
Here's a top-level Kosen guy. He's destroying those scrubs in Canada ;-)
Wikipedia: Kosen judo(高專柔道Kōsen jūdō)is a variation of theKodokanjudocompetitive ruleset that was developed and flourished at thekōtō senmon gakkō(高等専門学校)(kōsen(高專)) technical colleges inJapanin the first half of the twentieth century. Kosen judo's rules allow for greater emphasis ofne-waza(寝技, ground techniques)than typically takes place in competitive judo and it is sometimes regarded as a distinct style of judo.
Today, the term "kosen judo" is frequently used to refer to the competition ruleset associated with it that allows for extended ne-waza. Such competition rules are still used in the Nanatei Jūdō / Shichitei Jūdō (七帝柔道Seven Imperials Judo) competitions held annually between the seven former Imperial universities. Similarly, there has been a resurgence in interest in Kosen judo in recent years due to its similarities with Brazilian jiu jitsu.
Brazilian Jiujitsu (BJJ) was introduced to Brazil through the Gracie family by judoka Mitsuyo Maeda. Maeda had significant experience fighting wrestlers and boxers; from this experience he developed a theory of combat that has evolved into modern MMA.
According to Renzo Gracie's book Mastering Jujitsu, Maeda not only taught the art of judo to Carlos Gracie, but also taught a particular philosophy about the nature of combat based on his travels competing and training alongside catch-wrestlers, boxers, savate fighters, and various other martial artists. The book details Maeda's theory that physical combat could be broken down into distinct phases, such as the striking phase, the grappling phase, the ground phase, and so on. Thus, it was a smart fighter's task to keep the fight located in the phase of combat that best suited his own strengths. The book further states that this theory was a fundamental influence on the Gracie approach to combat.
John Danaher is one of the deepest thinkers in combat sports, MMA, and jiujitsu. He has coached a number of world champions in MMA and jiujitsu/submission grappling (Georges St. Pierre, Garry Tonon, etc.). The recent leg lock technique renaissance is largely due to Danaher and his school.
Danaher was a philosophy PhD student at Columbia before discovering BJJ through Renzo Gracie's academy in NYC. When I was a Yale professor (in the 90s) I made trips to Renzo's for training. I don't recall Danaher (who would have been a student/instructor there at the time), but I do recall Craig Kukuk, Renzo's partner in the school and the first US blackbelt instructor.
Kukuk had played linebacker at Iowa State University (where I grew up), and we spent time talking about Iowa (a big wrestling hotbed) and the origins of jiujitsu and ultimate fighting in the US. I had trained in Japan and so knew quite a bit about the relationship between traditional Judo and BJJ. At one time I probably knew as much as anyone about the relationship between Judo, BJJ, MMA, and US folk style wrestling.
Greetings from the Central Coast of California! I've been spending part of the holiday working with the kids on their swimming. Hope to get both of them qualified for the Michigan middle school state championship meet :-)
It's hard to beat sunshine, palm trees, and an outdoor pool in December!
Frozen Spinach (see picture)
Handful of frozen blueberries
Small handful of nuts (pecans, almonds, etc.)
1/2 scoop protein powder
1-2 cups milk (or 1+1 milk and water)
Makes 2 large glasses of nutritious green super smoothie. Give the other one to your spouse or kid or roommate, or just use half the recipe :-)
Rinse out the blender container immediately with warm water for easy clean up.
Most of the volume is spinach, so calorie density is low, while antioxidant and nutritional content is high.
Smoothie diet: drink one glass (~250 calories, 20g protein), wait 15 minutes, all hunger will vanish for 90+ minutes.
(Photo quality meh because I took them using a $40 Moto E (Android) I have been experimenting with. Over Xmas last year I researched cheap Android phones for my kids. Lots of very good devices for ~$100 or less. The carrier / data costs dwarf the cost of the handset.)
This video might help you with your New Year's resolution!
The claim that one has a fixed budget of will power or self-discipline ("ego depletion") may be yet another non-replicating "result" of shoddy social science. Note that the ego depletion claim refers to something like a daily budget of will power that can be used up, whereas Jocko is also referring to the development of this budget over time: building it up through use.
Over the holiday I started digging through my mom's old albums and boxes of photos. I found some pictures I didn't know existed!
Richard Feynman and the 19 year old me at my Caltech graduation:
With my mom that morning -- hung-over, but very happy! I think those are some crazy old school Ray Bans :-)
Memories of Feynman: "Hey SHOE!", "Gee, you're a BIG GUY. Do you ever go to those HEALTH clubs?"
This is me at ~200 pounds, playing LB and RB back when Caltech still had a football team. Plenty of baby fat! I ran sprints for football but never longer distances. I dropped 10 or 15 pounds just by jogging a few times per week between senior year and grad school.
Here I am in graduate school. Note the Miami Vice look -- no socks!
Ten years after college graduation, as a Yale professor, competing in Judo and BJJ in the 80 kg (176 lbs) weight category. The jiujitsu guys thought it was pretty funny to have a professor on the mat! This photo was taken on the Kona coast of the big island in Hawaii. I had been training with Egan Inoue at Grappling Unlimited in Honolulu.
These videos are from Roy Dean's BJJ academy in Bend, Oregon. In the first video Dean narrates each 5 minute match (shown first in slow motion, then at full speed), explaining the techniques, strategy, and mechanics of high level grappling. The competitors vary in style, skill level, and size (from ~160 to 220 lbs). The matches are what I would characterize as old-school (position --> submission) BJJ, not the boring win-on-advantage style that has become common in tournaments.
In the second video Dean pushes the action more aggressively, giving up a bit of the sparring "flow" found in the first.
John Danaher discusses his coaching philosophy. Danaher trained UFC champions Georges St. Pierre and Chris Weidman, among others.
Danaher student Garry Tonon on wrestling and jiujitsu. He's shown rolling with AJ Agazarm, a former All-Big10 wrestler and no-gi BJJ world champ.
These fights are from a no-time-limit submission tournament a few years ago, featuring the top brown belts in the world. Some of the matches lasted over an hour, others ended after only 5 or 10 minutes. I like this style of competition much more than fighting for points.
This will be one for the ages. I think Cormier can get inside on the taller Jones. We'll see Jones fighting off his back for the first time. I wonder what his guard is like.
In the last video Cormier is shown wrestling with Russian Olympic gold medalist Khajumurad Gatsalov.
Great documentary of Overeem fighting in Boston and training in Ko Samui. The locations look very familiar to me even though I was last in Thailand almost 20 years ago. At the time I think I was the only guy on the island who knew any BJJ. I'm glad I didn't mix it up with any Muay Thai fighters, although I was tempted :-)
@26 min: great discussion by one of the trainers about the fast evolution of MMA techniques and tactics. @32 min, the attraction of the fight game.
