Insight, BJ Penn and my back attack system: As many of you know, I am a huge believer in the idea that someone can have a massive influence upon you even when you met them very briefly, or even without ever meeting them. This is done through the power of INSIGHT. Someone can give you a critical insight, some idea that changes your point of view in some significant way that inspires you to change direction and change how you do things. For example, I met Dean Lister once and he gave me a new perspective with a single sentence that changed my jiu jitsu forever. Another huge influence on my jiu jitsu comes from the oddest source – BJ Penn. Mr Penn was in opinion, one of the absolute most skilled and talented MMA fighters of his generation. On two occasions he fought my student, Georges St-Pierre. both were epic matches in very different ways. In preparation for those matches I studied Mr Penn's game to help construct a plan of operations. I was extremely impressed by Mr Penn's use of his legs to trap the arms of his opponents to facilitate strangling them. Now Mr Penn was a man of extraordinary flexibility. Experimentation quickly showed that his arm trap position was very effective, but that few people had the necessary flexibility to employ it as he did. As it turned out, he was never able to get those positions when he fought Mr St-Pierre, but I did not forget how effective that technique was. I immediately began working on means of controlling and trapping arms from rear mount in ways that did not require flexibility. A sophisticated and intricate system of hand trapping patterns and grip nuances quickly got great results. In time I added four auxiliary back subsystems to the main hand fighting system so that the WHOLE body could be attacked, rather than just the neck. When the squad rose to prominence, they all proved highly adept at back attacks and the senior students, in particular Gordon Ryan, Garry Tonon and Eddie Cummings, all added key features and insights. The irony is that the entire project started from observing a rival to one of my students, a man I never actually met, but whose insight and example inspired greatly me.
