The Ecological Method: Martial Arts Skills, Not Drills

If there's one skill I prioritize, it's recognizing connections. This video breaks down how to identify, break, and establish connections from top and bottom positions to control the fight and progress your game.

This is my Guard Passing 101. I break down the process into four key steps, focusing on principles like passing the foot line, controlling the knee line, and pinning the hips, all of which are trained in live scenarios.

Are you a smaller person getting smashed by bigger opponents? Here are two key principles to focus on: using your knees and feet to manage distance and using frames to disrupt your opponent's connections.

Here's a real-time problem-solving session for one of my students struggling with mount maintenance. We use constrained games to help her develop the skill to counter bridges and break connections, rather than just drilling a technique.

Here are three wrestling games we use to develop takedown skills. We focus on destabilizing the opponent from an over-under position and using foot sweeps to break their base, all with live resistance.

This week we are working on hand-fighting and wrestle-up games from a seated guard. The goal is to create openings, enter a guard like De La Riva or shin-on-shin, and then work to a dominant position.

Here are three games for developing destabilization and reversals. We use constraints to focus on specific skills like hand fighting, achieving chest-to-chest connection, and escaping pins to reverse the position.

A glimpse into our training rounds using the ecological approach. We focus on repetition without repetition, allowing fighters to find realistic outcomes by breaking connections, controlling pins, and hunting for submissions in a live environment.

How do you learn submission escapes? We focus on reverse engineering the submission. By understanding the core concepts that make a submission work, you can learn to dismantle it in a live roll.