Full Ryan Hall Interview

[Zenphobia]

After technical difficulties, the transcript is back up. Thank you to Ryan Hall for letting us post this.

M: Let’s start from the beginning. How did you get involved in Jiu-Jitsu?

R: When I first began Jiu-Jitsu, I was up in New York City going to school for electrical engineering at Manhattan College. I started at a small gym called Ronin Athletics. It’s a Straight Blast Gym affiliate. I was up there my freshman year in school and started training single day, took a train an hour each direction to go train four or five days a week, and then slowly but surely my GPA tanked. I did more Jiu-Jitsu than school and ended up coming back to Arlington, VA and met one of Lloyd Irvin’s best students at the time, a guy named Jeff Ruth. He beat me up. I thought it was cool. I decided I’d stick around and train as much as possible. Later on, I met Lloyd, and he eventually offered to start sending me around the world to compete for him. I guess I showed a little bit of promise.

M: What belt level were you when you started training with Lloyd?

R: I moved back home as a white belt. I had been training with Lloyd for about 3 months when I got promoted to blue belt, but I had about 6 months of experience before that.

M: One of the things that really sticks out about your career is how quickly you’ve progress to the top of the sport. Is there something that you do differently training-wise that has let you advance that quickly?

R: I feel like I’ve been fortunate to have the opportunity to train with a lot of different people and to compete a lot, but honestly what I try to do and What I really believe helps me the most is that I try to break Jiu-Jitsu down to a fundamental level and really work to understand what determines success and failure, kind of on a body mechanics level, to really understand that there are correct and incorrect ways to do things.

There are plenty of reasons that people have success with a given technique or a given strategy, yet often times they are succeeding in spite of doing things improperly. I know I was. You can win a match and still have done 10 things wrong. Maybe you’re the vastly superior athlete or maybe the other guy was hung over…or you could do almost everything right and still lose. In any event, the idea is that if you can get down to a fundamental level of body mechanics and understanding, you can kind of distill your Jiu-Jitsu down to something that’s very direct, very simple, allowing you to be able to operate on a higher level of efficiency in many, many positions, all positions really, instead of just drilling just one series or just a couple series of moves and becoming very strong [in that particular area] while neglecting other areas.

Many guys I know, they’re very tough at their specific areas. Like so-and-so has a great De La Riva guard; they can use this sweep to this sweep to this sweep, and they know that series in and out, but if you can drag them out of that series, they’re far less dangerous because their Jiu-Jitsu knowledge is more superficial. On a more fundamental level their movement as a whole might not be great. Rather than focusing on specific techniques, I feel what’s been able to help me and my students succeed pretty rapidly has really been trying to focus on how to move rather than a series of techniques…I’ve noticed a massive change for the positive.

M: What kind of movements do you mean? Obviously people work on things like shrimping and sit-outs-

R: At this point…I don’t think that the shrimp is a real move.

M: <i>I start to smile and laugh at this point, thinking that he’s joking.<i>

R: I’m dead serious. I can explain it to you for sure. The shrimp is not a legitimate move. The way that people first… I’ll use this as one example, and hopefully you’ll have an idea of where I’m coming from. And to be honest, there’s a certain level of trade-secrets kind of thing. The reason I don’t shrimp is not that it’s garbage or that it doesn’t ever work, but there are problems with the way it’s taught. Say for instance you have side control, and I manage to get an underhook, and I start shrimping away from you. When I’m initially in side control, I’m kind of glued to you and as a result, I’m relatively stable. My feet are wide. My hips are back. When I shrimp, I put my feet together and I scoot and my profile goes from this to this, for a moment, and then I reset.

<i>Hall holds his hand out with his fingers spread into a square and brings them together into a single cluster to demonstrate what happens when you shrimp.</i>

“And then I go again. I’m pushing you away. Reset. Pushing away, scooting away, reset. The serious problem with the bottom is that you’re not only pinned in place by the person’s weight, but you’re also controlled because the person on top has the ability to move very quickly. You should probably act accordingly. I don’t think that any strategy off the bottom should be based on the idea of out moving the person on top. It may work at white, blue, purple, brown, but once you get to the elite level…all of those guys are very, very on point, regardless of whether or not they understand something on a truly fundamental level or they’ve just been the beneficiary of elite training partners and all [their] bad habits just got Darwin-natural-selected-killed off.

Say for instance I go play basketball with the Wizards—and they’re not even that good of a professional team. They don’t need to teach me how to play. If I just get to play with them, eventually I’m going to get very, very good, and if we played one-on-one I’d kill you. Now, say we played one-on-one right now, you’d probably beat me, I have no idea. The idea is just by competing at the high level, the only things that will work are the proper movements, the proper strategies, whereas if I competed at a low level, that’s when you’ll see people taking shots they shouldn’t take, driving the lane when they shouldn’t, making all sorts of strategic and technical mistakes that only work against lesser opposition. I feel that the shrimp is like that. Just because you can make it work on me doesn’t necessarily vindicate the movement or mean that it’s technically correct because I’m only but so good, and there are people like [Rubens “Cobrinha” Charles] out there that are far better.

What is the right move, then? It’s when everyone knows it’s coming, and it’s not a trick, and there’s not even any sort of flash to it. It’s funny: the best way that you know that Roger may not be being entirely honest when he’s asked what makes him so successful is that he’ll tell you, ‘I’m just doing the same thing as everyone else.’ ‘Roger, why won’t you put out an instructional DVD?’ ‘I just use basics.’ ‘I see…so that’s why everyone mounts and x-chokes their opponents into oblivion every time?’ I would argue that there are things that aren’t visually apparent that are very, very different between what he does and what the rest of us do… In my mind it’s not even a questions at this point. There is a small, small handful of people doing this, and it’s not some sort magic. I truly believe that they know something that other people don’t that they’re not particularly willing to share. I’ve been trying to figure it out for the last couple years, and I feel like I’m starting to make progress little by little. I’ve gone from not being able to pass the guard to that being the absolute strongest part of my game and the cross choke from mount being my number one finish.
_________________
-Marshal

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[Zenphobia]

M: You kind of made your reputation with the triangle stuff, and that was pretty fancy, and you worked a lot with the inverted guard-

R: I don’t believe in it anymore. I’m not doing it anymore. I don’t really believe much at all in the guard, actually. If someone would bet with me, I’d put down money that the strategy of the guard will completely disappear from Jiu-Jitsu, maybe 30 years from now. It’s certainly not going to happen over night, but think about how much better Marcelo Garcia is than the guy that was the middleweight champion 10 years ago. It’s a huge difference. Now imagine how much better the Marcelo Garcia of 30 years from now would be than the current Marcelo Garcia. It’s such a massive difference it’s almost scary.

Since Jiu-Jitsu is such a young sport, there’s so much potential for growth. I think that things like the strategy of aggressively pulling guard, in which I go and sit down to a mechanically inferior position (the guard) that works if I know something that you don’t, can’t possibly last. Once everybody’s knowledge is more on an even keel, I think that the guard as an offensive strategy will disappear, at least at the elite level. I don’t think the guard entirely will completely cease to be used…If you take me down, I have no choice but to go to my back or turtle, maybe sometimes people will elect to use the guard, but the idea that I’m just going to run out and pull half or spider guard on you will be done. It would be pretty hard to convince me otherwise.

M: What will take the guard’s place?

R: Takedowns, and top positioning. I feel very fortunate to have trained with and have competed against some of the best guys in the world, and I can say one thing with a n absolute certainty—I will never make the mistake of pulling guard on Cobrinha again. [laughs]. Again, I don’t mean to put my shortcomings on someone else and suggest that just because I can’t do it [that] something doesn’t work...but with the guard there is no room for error. None. Cobrinha, even though he’s known for his guard, is, in my opinion, far better on top; he’s far more dangerous. I’d much rather be in someone’s guard than have them in mine because you are the master of your own destiny for the most part when you’re on top. You’re in control of the situation. You are generally the initiator of any sort of action, whereas on the bottom I have to wait for you to do something dumb. Assuming that we’re both in proper position, I have to sit there and hope that you do something egregiously stupid enough for me to win, and I think that’s a poor strategy.

Even though it works right now, it’s probably going to peter out in the long run. I’ve given it a lot of thought and I think that the reason a lot of people think the guard is such a great position is that, if I come in day one, and I’m a white belt, and you’re a black belt, you’ll demolish me. It’ll be like magic. I won’t have any idea what’s going on. I won’t have anything for you, and you’ll be able to beat me up like a little kid. And I’ll say, “Wow, what Marshal is doing, it works,” and that will be true, but in reality, imagine playing one-on-one with LeBron James. He could beat either one of us, probably, with no hands because not only is he physically better suited for that game but he’s technically so much better and so much more skilled than us that he can do whatever he wants.

Oscar De La Hoya, you couldn’t hit him in the face, I swear to you, if he put both hands behind his back. It’d be ridiculous. He enjoys a similar skill advantage that allows for this not-so-bright strategy to be successful in spite of itself. Just because you can stand on your head and triangle me when you’re really good and I’m not doesn’t make it a good idea when both of us are at a high level.

M: So skill level gives the guard a sort of mystique almost and makes it seem stronger than it really is?

R: Exactly. It’s really more a function of you could do whatever the hell you wanted. You could take a shot from 10 feet away and take me down if you’re really good and I’m not. As everything kind of closes up, that kind of JV thing kind of goes away.
[…]

R: What makes a position work is the fundamental understanding. If you have a killer guard and you have great pressure on top and you have excellent fundamentals and you have superior positioning, you will always do well. You can make almost anything work if you are the vastly superior fighter, but against someone else who is really, really on your level (assuming that level is high)… I’ll tell you what it generally comes down: it comes down to simple passing. Heavy pressure. Half guard sweeps. Not spinning upside down or things like that.

The things that win championships are the single leg, the double leg, the standard choke from the back…not some fancy, rolling sweep. Even at the purple and brown belt level that stuff doesn’t typically work—at least not against the guys getting on the podium at the CBJJ tournaments. That’s my whole issue with the rubber guard and things like that. It doesn’t really do much to someone who is on a professional skill level other than hold them in place. Obviously, that can be extremely useful at the right moment, but as an offensive strategy, it’s not particularly viable. If I know that, and I’ve been doing this for 5, 6 years, how is it ever going to work on someone who is way better than me? One of the things that my coaches have always impressed upon me is that if something doesn’t work reliably at the elite level, it’s not worth your time. I couldn’t agree more.

M: What you’ve been telling me kind of runs counter to what a lot of people in the sport believe right now. When did you start developing, realizing this kind of revelation?

R: After training with Bruno Frazatto for the first time in 2007 for a couple months. Then really in 2008 it started making the biggest difference, and I spent a ton of time thinking about this—I was out for 8 months last year. I had 3 surgeries on my arm, so I had a long time to think about it in between watching re-runs of Heroes. As a result of all this evaluation, I came back a lot better and a lot more skilled after 8 months off than I was before I left, even though I had been training all the time before I got hurt. Not just better, but different. In the past, I used to roll around and try to triangle people a whole bunch of times with a decent amount of success. But, if the other guy was really good…not so much. But now, it’s get on top, pass, mount, choke. Get on top, pass, mount, choke.

I don’t compete quite as often as I’d like to because, honestly, it’s a lot harder to find worthwhile matches at brown belt than it was at blue and purple. Still, I feel like I have a lot more success with this method [against high level guys]. I there’s much more control, and it’s made a big difference for [my] students, as well. It’s scary how good people get in a small amount of time. Blue belts at my school can pass my guard. I’ve trained for a couple years without being passed more than a handful of times. It’s really the simple differences that are the key, and they aren’t really taught at most places.

You teach me something, and you’re good, so I do what you do. In reality, I ought to sit down and see if that’s really the best way to do it. Why is Marshal showing it me this way? Is it the best way? Could it be improved upon? Maybe yes, maybe no. If you and I were to sit down and break down the arm lock from mount or break down the strategy for mount, at least we’ve sat down, done the due-diligence, and decided that a certain strategy is ideal. But if we decide that it’s not perfect, not the best, I don’t care if
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-Marshal

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[Zenphobia]

it’s Cobrinha that shows you—he’s not perfect, he’s phenomenally good, but just like everyone else, there’s aspects of his game that could be improved upon. He would obviously be very likely to give you some of the best advice you could hope to find, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily unimpeachable.

Let me take a strategy: the arm lock from mount, I do not believe in anymore. For the most part, I think it’s a poor strategic choice. Here would be why: this is bad enough in grappling, but in MMA fighting, which is really the goal of grappling… say for instance you mount me. I start sticking my arms out like Anderson Silva vs. Travis Lutter. You say, “Uh oh, Ryan’s a pretty good grappler. I’m going to snag this arm and put this match away. The problem is that it’s probably the worst thing that you can do. You just did something that will either succeed or fail. If you succeed, what happens? You win. What happens if you fail? You end up on bottom. That’s bad enough in grappling if someone really knows how to pass—the thing is that most Jiu-Jitsu guys don’t know how to pass particularly well until the black belt level. When you get someone like Lucas Lepri or Cobrinha on top of you, it’s horrible. Train or compete with Roger Gracie and I bet you decide you don’t want to end up on bottom ever again.
[…]

M: When you say that a position or technique is fundamentally good, and I want to make sure I’m understanding you correctly, a move that is fundamentally correct won’t put you out of position-

R: You are never, ever allowed to sacrifice position. Ever. Period. I don’t care how good you are. I used to have a really good triangle, and I still have a pretty good triangle, but I won’t ever go for it anymore from the top, almost ever. The idea is that if I get it, I’ll probably finish, but in practice it’s fundamentally wrong. It’s teaching me a bad habit. I’m relying on a crutch, hoping that someone else’s being a little less experienced than I am will allow me to pull something off even though it’s not the right move. The right move is the cross choke from the mount, or you spin them over and you rear naked choke. What happens if you go for the rear naked choke and I defend?

M: I still have position.

R: You still have the position, and you try again. And you try again, and again, until you succeed. You will chip away at me until I quit, until I am either dead or tired or I give up, and you will eventually win. You don’t put all your eggs in one basket, even if it’s a great freaking basket. If you go after it once…the spinning chokes, the jumping chokes that screw you if you miss…I hate all that stuff. People come to me all the time and say, ‘Teach me the inverted guard.” I’ll show them if they really want to know, but I generally prefer not to. Instead, I’ll try to sell them on this: learn how to wrestle a little bit, and I’ll show you how to pass. The guard is an important position, but the purpose of the guard is not so that I can triangle you; the purpose of the guard is so that I can get on top. It’s the proper strategic choice, seeking the mechanical advantage.

People are always coming up with these crazy whacky schemes or 10 step moves that nobody has ever seen before to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. Just get so good that you can tell me what you’re going to do and I can’t stop you. That’s when you have something.
[…]

The whole key is saying, ‘Look. I don’t want to beat regular people. I don’t want to beat guys that are kind of good. I don’t want to beat hobbyists. I don’t want to pull out a sweet highlight reel full of backflips and wacky nonsense.’ You know who has a sweet highlight reel? Roger Gracie. If something doesn’t work against the top 1% of competitors, I don’t want to do it. If you fight for a living and you have a lower standard than that, you have to be out of your mind […]

Recently I’ve coming to this conclusion, like, within the past year… imagine you directed your training like Roger Gracie since you were 10 years old. You directed your training only to the mount, only to the back. You may end up on bottom, and you may not sweep me right away, but I will never finish you. Eventually, you’ll get on top… Pressure, pressure, pressure, make people quit, and that’s really what he does. And that’s the difference, honestly. I think that’s where everyone will be. If everyone grappled like Roger Gracie, nobody would pull guard.

M: Your training has completely changed, what we used to see, your whole philosophy.

R: Completely different. Here’s the thing: I may pull guard in a tournament, but it’s only because I am far from perfect, you know? I want to win, so I go to the Worlds at brown belt, and I only got train about 2 months for that. I have a ton of competition experience from the guard, so I feel comfortable there in spite of the disadvantage. So I pull guard because my takedowns good enough at that point that I wanted to stake my entire Mundial on them. Instead of the triangle, though I looked to sweep, pass, mount, back, choke. It was completely different than what I would have ever done in the past.
[…]

Basically, I’ll pull guard because I want to win. I’m not good enough to do the ideal thing in every single situation, and if I match up against someone else’s weaknesses, someone who is not particularly sharp from on top, I’ll be like, yeah, I’ll pull guard so I can get the advantage at this time. I know it is not the proper strategy, but life isn’t a physics problem, so I’m forced to reap what I’ve sown in terms of having spent years doing things that were not what I now feel I should have been doing… hopefully one day I’ll be good enough at wrestling [that I can do the ideal thing every single time], kind of like what Roger does. I hope to one day be like that.
[…]

What makes someone very, very good is their decision making. Let’s say I do the right thing maybe 8 out of 10 times. Let’s say you do the right thing 8.5 out of 10 times. Marcelo Garcia does the right thing 9.7 out of 10 times. That’s the difference in safety, in skill. So the idea is, I need to take from you your decision making process because if you’re making the right decision and you’re in a better position than me, you will always beat me.
[…]

Not that he needs my validation whatsoever, but the way Marcelo Garcia plays guard, is, in my opinion, how it should be done. Your whole job is to pull them off of you and stand up into a single leg. I’m finding more and more that the traditional sweeps don’t really work at the high level, at least not in the way that you normally think of them: you cut me over, and I fall like kaboom right on my back. That doesn’t really happen. It’s like a 20 point touchdown. It just doesn’t usually work like that when both guys are at a truly elite level. …I guess I’d say my approach to the guard has changed drastically. It isn’t to pull some whacky sweep or triangle out of my ass anymore. My whole goal is to just make you off balance to the point that you can’t, for a moment, stop me from standing up—and now I finish from a positional advantage. I feel that’s the truly reliable way to do it. You can replicate it against a high-level opponent who knows what you’re doing. That’s when you know you’ve got something. […]

The whole idea is I try to never have a strategy any more, and I don’t really teach “moves” per se at Fifty/50. I teach people how to off balance guys, how to stand up properly, how to wrestle. I feel that it is just so much more effective.

M: I’m pretty much out of questions at this point, but I know one thing that people reading this will want to know is about the shrimp, what you’ve replaced that with.

R: I can show you, but I can’t tell you. It would take like a page to explain it, and it probably wouldn’t translate into text very well.

M: Would you mind if we taped it?

R: I’d prefer not to do that. [But I’ll show you].

M: Any other comments?

R: Anyone interested in coming to my school in Arlington, VA, anyone, anywhere is welcome to come down and train. We really try to learn from everyone and I feel that the open door policy at Fifty/50 is easily one of our strongest assets. I hope to train with some of you guys soon. www.5050bjj.com.
_________________
-Marshal

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[CombatChaz]

Thanks Marshal.
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[Lion]

wow. i relay liked this because it summed up my experince. Well mine wasn't that clever, and thinked trough, but when i stoped to pull guard and always went for the top position i knowed that I have two possibility.
One is to get the top pass and start to work even if I get sweeped and end up at the bottom. Or start in the bottom and try to hunt for subs or get sweeps wich are way harder, than to get the top at the beggining.
That was my limited experienc in the very begginer level. (plus on that every one was heavyier than me)
And always looked weird that I could control guys more from the top. I mean with way less energy.
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The god of war hates those who hesitates

[ransom]

hmm...what happened to the other posts on this thread?
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--nick

[JMall]

I think Rickson would disagree with him about the guard.

Some of the ideas are true though. Grappling and Gracie Jiu Jitsu are not synonymous according to Rickson.

What Rickson did is develop and perfect a very specific set of tekks that will work on any opponent in spite of their size. If he couldn't do something on a larger opponent then it wasn't part of his Jiu Jitsu.

And it is true that high level guys know and perform slight variations of tekks that make them more effective. They look like they are doing the same thing as other people that have not learned the fine details but in reality the weight, pressure, leverage etc... is different and you won't necesarily see the difference.

Some of Ryan's ideas are off the wall though like what he was saying about shrimping. Unless I missed something and there was a point that didn't transfer well in the article.
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[JudoJoe]

I want to see the new shrimp, or not the new shrimp whatever it is.

Show us the knowledge!

Awesome interview btw Marshal.

[LSBJJ]

Ryan Hall makes some interesting points. But to say the guard is obsolete is stupid. Ryan’s problem in high level grappling matches isn’t the effectiveness of his guard/triangle game it’s that he was a one trick pony. Once his opponents neutralized his guard he was stuck. Elite-level grapplers do that.


To use a baseball analogy (who doesn’t like baseball analogies) it would be like a major league pitcher only throwing 98mph fastballs. That would be a guaranteed strike out in High School and in most minor league games. Once you get to the majors they are going to tee off on you. But, DON’T throw away your fastball because it no longer works. Instead ADD some new pitches so you’re no longer predictable. The best pitchers only use two or three pitches (with various speeds). They are so effective because the hitter has no idea which pitch will be thrown.

Grappling as I see it is the same way. I use my triangle to set up my armbars, which I use to set up my omoplata, which I use to set up my triangles, while always leaving in the threat of a sweep, etc. Leaving my opponent always guessing what I am trying to do.

One last thought; the guard/triangle that Ryan uses works on 99.999999% of the world’s population but not on a handful of elite grapplers. Is that really a reason to call it obsolete?
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[myke7777]

[LSBJJ]

[myke7777]

[Ladogaboy]

[Zenphobia]

[JMall]