What White Belts Actually Need to Learn in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu

Hello and welcome to Toby on Fitness Tech. I figured today I would do a little bit of a different video back to kind of jiu-jitsu content. And I wanted to specifically talk about each belt level and each rank and in particular give you actionable items for what I believe you should be working at at each rank. So, up above me, I have uh my belts, and I'll pull them all down for you, and I will describe what was done at each belt level, and what I believe you should be doing because I actually get questions about this at the gym or sometimes I'll give people unprompted advice at their belt level depending on where they were at. We have a lot of new white belts at the gym right now. So, we'll start at white belt and probably a lot of people out there are new white belts or thinking about getting into the sport and I'll describe what I believe you should be doing at that belt level. What are action steps to take to improve your performance at that level? Uh where I what I believe is the best path to success for making it to the next belt level. Um those specific action items. So, what you should be working on at the belt level in my opinion, right, this is just my opinion, the opinion of a brown belt at the very end of his brown belt. Now, I'll describe why I prefer to actually be uh a four stripe brown belt as opposed to a black belt and my fears around becoming a black belt. And uh and and so first we're going to start with, you know, what do I believe you should be working on at that belt level? Uh what what do I think uh is the most impactful thing in your training in terms of uh is it training intensity? Is it amount of times you make it there at the gym? Uh we had a white belt who's training six days a week uh at this point in time and where I believe he should go in terms of like what he should be working on right now. And by the way, spoiler alert, it wasn't jiu-jitsu related. Um so we have that, you know, what do I believe you should be working on? uh you know what's the best path to the the not only the next belt level but also to peace of mind at the belt level you're at right now because I think that's extremely important jiu-jitsu we talk about the blue belt blues all the time and I didn't get it and I'll explain why I didn't get it and what actually helped me to not get that and uh and then things to expect at the next belt level. So, with that in mind, I have both of these off. Let's pull down my white belt. So, my white belt, and by the way, you're wondering what's up with each of these belts, right? So, all of these belts are my actual training belts and in the garage except this brown belt. So, all of these are my actual training belts from the belt level. That's not my brown belt, and I'll explain it when I get there. My brown belt's in the bag that's right next here. And I'll pull that out, too. But and in my garage, I have an alternate version of each of these belts except purple belt. And I'll show you the purple belt when we get there. And um so the white belt in particular, I have two of them because I was always losing my belt. So at every belt level, I have two. Uh even at brown belt, I lost my belt for a period of time. Purple belt is the only one where I did not lose my belt. And so I had that belt for all the purple belt. The most time I went without my belt was one training session here or there where I didn't have it in my bag. But in general, every other time I've lost my belt either, you know, somewhere around my house whenever I was moving like and I end up finding them. So this is this is my white belt. This is obviously not the one I got at the gym, but this is the one that I wore most often. Um, you can see it's like whitish brown and whenever I was using it heavily, right, I washed it right before the seminar where I got my and I washed it thoroughly with bleach to get some of the brown out of it, but this thing was dang near brown. Um, so my white belt experience was long [laughter] to say to say the least. And so you'll see that there's five stripes on this white belt. And yes, I actually did get five stripes, but not in the mistaken way that some people get five stripes where uh where you know what I mean, the coaches didn't know. Uh my coaches intentionally gave me a fifth stripe because I actually spent three years. So from 2017 to 2019, I was at uh I was at White Belt, which is an incredible amount of time to spend there, training five to six days a week at the time. And I would say the advice I gave someone this morning, by the way, that I believe is advice I wish I had earlier on in my jiu-jitsu career, uh, not career, but journey, I would say. And it's try to establish a weight that you're comfortable at and uh try to maintain that weight or at least try to get to that weight for a period of time throughout the year. And this was uh specifically an individual who used to be 160 lbs, started doing jiu-jitsu 5, six days a week and is now 145 lbs. And in most of society, that's great. But in jiu-jitsu, that's not big enough. Uh especially not in a gym with a whole bunch of 200 pounders like me. Uh he's going to have to play a style that is very hard to do with that kind of rapid weight loss and he's having trouble actually eating enough to put on the like he's eating a lot but he's doing jiu-jitsu 5 six days a week. I was also 170 lbs for most of white bell. I started having tremendous success when I took the restrictor plates off because I used to be morbidly obese. I I lost the weight through running then started jiu-jitsu. And once I took the restrictor plates off, went up to 185 lbs, I started to have a lot more success in tournaments, even whenever it was fat. So when I first made my way to 185 lbs, I was definitely fat. Like I have pictures of me at 185 in my first 185 lb tournament versus me at 170 lbs. And I just added maybe a pound of muscle and and 10 lbs of fat, you know, which is suboptimal at best, but it allowed me to start strength training because I wasn't strength training at all. And in fact, this white belt was not doing any strength training. and you can't because it beats if you're doing six days a week, you will beat up your body to where you can't do jiu-jitsu. My advice to him was add one strength training session on Friday and if you beat yourself up too hard with that strength training session, good. Don't train on Saturday and take Saturday, Sunday off, depending on how you feel from that training on Friday and Monday. You're still going to be sore when you do jiu-jitsu, but he will be way better off to eat more calories, get his weight back up, do a heavy strength training session, and it just needs to be one at this point in time. I didn't want to overburn him, tell him he needs to train three times a week, give him some complicated routine while he's still learning jiu-jitsu. He has so much to learn on the mat that I was training five days a week and going to a personal trainer at one point in time uh to get ready for tournaments at the end of white belt and into blue belt that I truly and by the way most of my personal training sessions ended up being quasi like physical therapy sessions to fix up all the stuff from jiu-jitsu. So, even if he went to three days of strength training, two of those are going to be fluff sessions just to fix up any like shoulder injuries, impingements, anything like that that he gets from jiu-jitsu because it'll be a lot. Uh, but he needs to put that size back on because size matters in jiu-jitsu. But at White Belt, I ended up spending three years there and I'm so thankful. So most people uh whenever they do jiu-jitsu uh they end up spending a year or two and then they end up up at blue belt. But by the time I was at blue belt, I was competing with the purple belts at the gym that I was at. Hence the fifth stripe from my coaches. So what happened is my coaches were the morning coaches most of the time. Uh and I very rarely made it to classes outside of those morning classes. and and and I definitely didn't make it to the promotion seminars. So, it was a struggle with my running schedule. I was still doing a lot of running at the time. I just valued the running over paid seminars. You know, if I'm going to pay for something, I'll pay for one of these runs over paying for one of the paid jiu-jitsu seminars. And so, I didn't make it to them. And they only did promotions at seminars at the time. I don't know if they've relaxed that now, but they and and they usually had one free seminar a year in the first year. Um the first year they didn't do that seminar or no, they did do the seminar the first year, but I couldn't make it because I had a run over and the second year they didn't have they didn't have the seminar. Um for whatever reason, they didn't end up doing it that year. So, like, you know, you had to pay essentially to get a promotion uh at my original gym where they only did them at seminars and the seminars were paid seminars. Uh I don't think that's a big problem, right? As long as it's understood. Uh I've never had complaints around that, you know what I mean? But I just couldn't make it. And uh and it also set it up so that when I got the blue belt uh I entered in a tournament at the in-house gym. And I'll talk about that when I get there. But realized that at white belt I was competing with the bigger, heavier, stronger purple belts at the gym. And I wasn't winning a lot of those matches, but I had enough success in those matches. You know, it would be maybe 1 in 10 I would win, which at white belt, that's incredible to be able to win against a 230 lb 6'4 purple belt. Uh to be able to win 1 and 10 I thought was amazing, right? And I still think it's amazing, right? It typically doesn't happen. And I think that setup of spending so much time at white bel white belt meant that when I got to blue belt, I didn't get that blue belt blues because I was already The problem with blue belts typically is they're in a no man's land, right? They're good enough to beat these white belts pretty easily, but not good enough to compete with the purple, browns, and blacks at all. Right. Uh, and actually, believe it or not, I remember at white belt taking out one of their purple belts, right? Uh, easily and effortlessly. And it I it still bothers me to this day that I did it because that should never happen. And what happened is we had a purple belt. Remember, I'm 170 lbs at the time. So, right now, I'm pushing over 220 pounds, right? And and I'm way more muscular, right? And I've got probably 20, 30 lbs of muscle on that version of me. So realize this is a tiny lean version of me who doesn't look strong, but that version of me was incredibly strong running half marathons. Like it was not that I was weak, I just looked weak. By the way, you can see some of my other videos in the channel where I talk about testosterone deficiency. I was deficient in testosterone, so I wasn't going to look muscular no matter what I did. Um, and and now I'm on TRT and you can tell [laughter] you can tell that I'm taking androgens. Like there's no question there. Uh a and that's besides the point though in in other than the fact that this purple belt didn't respect the fact that I had gameending submission ability and all I did was this was like not one that I'd normally roll with not one of the bigger stronger one not one of the exciting ones that was you know a one in 10 chance of victory um this was just some random like he was not someone that I I' had ever seen in the gym. before. So, he may not have even been like he may have been an out oftowner. I'm not really sure, which happened a lot because we're in a central hub. It's not that surprising that we could have gotten that. But basically, all I did is I crawled up his he he went to posture out of my triangle as I was setting it up and he postured straight up, which is like the first basic defense that you learn, right? And against me, that has zero chance of working. So he's on his knees. He postures up straight. And I still remember to this day cuz it's so ridiculous. All I did is I and I had a collar grip, right? So he postures up, which you would expect would break your collar grip, but all it did and he was still inside my guard. My guard was kind of sitting on him. I just And this leg was over. I just walked the other leg up, snapped the triangle on, and dropped him back down and finished him. Like what did he think was gonna that you were just gonna posture up out of my triangle? You know, he he he took no effort with his hands to break my grip off of his collar, which should have been like step zero. Like you can't leave that collar grip and posture up. Only bad things are going to happen. So at purple belt, I felt like he should know that. You know what I mean? Like that's one where white belt Toby at at three stripes knew not to to posture up with someone's collar grip on them, right? Because you're just going to pull them onto you, right? And make whatever situation you're in, especially from your knees, worse, right? Same. By the way, if you're standing and the person has a collar grip on you, you don't want to leave that collar grip on you like at any cost because it's pulling your head down, right? and you're so susceptible to so many submissions. You want that grip off of your collar. Um, and it's just a basic thing that people should understand. And you should start this understanding at white belt. By the end of white belt, you should understand basic defense for essentially every submission. In my opinion, you should have a way to defend against anything that could be thrown at you up until, you know, certain leg locks at certain gyms don't teach. We teach we kind of teach them all at any we teach them in the ghee, which is totally illegal um in practice, but you know, the people who compete in our gym compete in no ghee. Um, so ghee and no ghee, but you know, like we we're always doing both, so there's no point in just teaching ghee submissions. And uh and it's beneficial to learn them. You know, you might as well learn them uh in both situations. Like I'm I'm, you know, I'm someone who uses uh illegal knee reaping a lot. Uh, and I've gotten more safe with it over the years to where I'm not injuring people, but I still do it in the ghee, you know, and it's it's legal in no ghee, but illegal in ghee, even at my belt level. Uh, but in general, by white belt, you want to know how to defend yourself, and you want to have yourself set up with a routine and a structure that you can handle. And yes, I was doing five days a week. Yes, it was too much for later in life. I mean, I had no kids. Realize also this white belt version of me, no kids, right? So, it's not a situation. So, I didn't have kids until up at purple belt. So, realize, you know, this version of me had no kids, was training five days a week, uh also went through a divorce at one point in time, but that was uh at the very end of white belt into blue belt. So, uh, it was definitely an interesting time period in my life and at times jiu-jitsu was used as a coping mechanism because everything else was falling apart to be honest with you. So, I wouldn't advise using jiu-jitsu in that manner, but it definitely helped. And it definitely helped because of the people that I had around me, right? When, you know, I moved back home temporarily. Uh, and I was really worried about coming back to the area uh here, but you know, I had all of those friends that I made at jiu-jitsu. Uh, plus I had friends who were willing to take me in so that I could stay with them while I was going through the divorce. And so I could just pour my time into training, you know, training and at the gym. And uh it made life a lot easier to have, you know, one to have that escape of thinking about everything that was going on with house sales and all of the craziness that goes on there. Uh but two, to have something to focus my energy on. So, and I and I could just spend a large amount of time between, you know, LA fitness, uh, working out, lifting, that kind of stuff, and jiu-jitsu. I really had, uh, I had a way of spending my time, you know. So, I I'm really appreciative uh, to what jiu-jitsu afforded me, a white belt. I'm thankful for my three years of white belt. I'm sure that's not normal. I mean, you realize uh there was a guy um Derek Moneyberg who went the whole way from white belt to black belt, right? And I've talked about him in the channel before. And the amount of time I spent at white belt and also white belt and I guarantee you I was training a lot more than him in a lot more modalities, strength training, running, everything. But I didn't run a sevenf figureure business at the time. I didn't have much going on in my personal life because I'm going through a divorce, you know, at at the end of it and at the beginning of it, it was chaos and it was like the marriage was already failing, you know, uh, in 2017 like it it like it was already not going well. Um, and and part of it, you know, we myself I will talk about it a little bit. I guess myself and my ex-wife both trained jiu-jitsu at one point in time and we were getting stripes accordingly together and they my old gym liked to make husbands and wives match up. But if you look at the amount of time on the mats, uh I was spending three times the amount of time on the mat that my ex-wife was. But she learned at a faster rate than I did. I mean, that's the truth. But what she wasn't learning is she was learning in a faster rate to to have offensive mechanics, but I was learning defenses to so many different submissions that would pay dividends against the upper belts. That's the truth of it. When you're here, uh, when you're a white belt, you want to learn defense. And the best way to learn it is to roll with these upper belts. And every time they kill you, ask questions. you know, I was not I I was a little scared to ask questions of the upper belts and that cost me big time because I had to spend hours, you know, I remember uh I had an upper belt who bow and arrow choked me every day for 6 months straight. And instead of asking this upper belt, "How did you do that?" and having him walk me through it. I decided I would get my ex-wife's brother to lock me in this submission for a night and go to an open mat and just work on it for an hour straight. And luckily, one of the black belts came over and walked me through all of the different ways to get out of this bow and arrow and all of the things to look for getting into the bow and arrow. Um, and I realized that the best solution to a bow and arrow is to not get in it. Once once the hand once the hand that's on your leg is is established, the the choke's done. So, you have to attack the arm that's locking the choke in and get those legs away from the human who's locking the bow and arrow in at at a particular time or else or else it's game over. And I don't get caught in very many bow and arrows now. I've gotten caught in a few over the years. Um, and usually they're like deficit. Like I got hit with a rolling one like a year ago, I remember. And I only remember it because dang near snapped me in half where the person launched themselves over top of me and rolled into it. Um, but you have to have a pretty innovative bow and arrow to hit me with it. And it's because of hours of being put in it and then hours of because after he showed me after the black belt showed me that plus I spent, you know, an hour, hour and a half drilling it, I still went in and was 50/50 for quite a while of getting out of this guy's bow and arrow, but slowly the percent rate of getting out was higher. And again, this is me at white belt against a he was blue belt whenever I first got there, but he's purple belt by the time he's hitting me with his bow and arrow. So, uh again, this is me competing up against a purple bow. Uh the other thing I will say at white belt is you need to challenge yourself. And what do I mean by that is I was already two stripes in and we had someone walk through the doors that again I don't learn very quickly. I'm not like this fast learner. That's why I'm okay with spending three years at at White Belt because I was not a quick learner. Um, if you'd given me a test, I might have scored pretty low on that test of of techniques, especially offensive techniques uh at White Bell. But we had someone come through the door when I was at Two Stripes. We had someone come through the door one stripe, too, that I train with now. He's a black belt at my current gym. And I'm able to win the matches against him. But I developed a whole style to face him, right? So realize that's the obsession of creating an entire style to face a singular opponent. So he had a new white belt. He was highly competitive coming in and then he ended up becoming obviously even more competitive and you kind of have a choice whenever that happens. So you know I'm at two stripe white belts. This is a brand new white belt and he's uh coming in and he's highly competitive. A lot of people will shy away from that type of opponent, but I decided I was going to face him every day after class. Basically, this guy came through the door, uh, was highly competitive for me from the first month of being there and was just progressing at at such an incredible rate, and I decided I'm going to face him every day at the end of class. So, our last rule at the end of class, and it was basically a no time limit match until one of us gave up, uh, was against each other for a long period of time. And I feel like that was the only way I was able to stay competitive with this guy. Otherwise, he would have just blown past me with his technique and his abilities. But it allowed me to kind of hone a style and and develop a lot a lot quicker. And thankfully, he offered me the opportunity to do that, right? Uh cuz it kind of takes both of you agreeing to it. And even cuz I still remember to this day because I only did it out of fear of not being as good as I could be at jiu-jitsu, right? I didn't want this guy to get to be better than me, who had all the same physical attributes as me. He's a little bit older than me, too. He's not even younger than me. Um, but just learns at an incredible rate. And and we also were were never partners while we're actually doing the class. And one day we were partners and it was an absolute disaster because we were so used to competing each at each other at the end of class they were doing this drill where it's like you're escalating you're kind of like learning things but you're you're doing them in live situations. Some gyms do them, some gyms don't do them. It was not very common here but of course this was a day where we were doing that was probably once once a month or so we would do that kind of a class. And he ended up we ended up in this situation where we were, you know, going live and they said, "Oh yeah, start at 10%." We go 100%. Start 20%. We go 100%. By the time it was like three or four live sessions in, we're both huffing and puffing as we're coming back to the and like everyone else is clearly going 10 or 20%. But it's because we weren't normally training partners. And my normal training partner that I would train with back then, we would definitely be going 10 20%. You know what I mean? In fact, we would roll with each other. My normal training partner, we'd roll with each other really, really light in the opening match and like lighter than everyone else because we knew both of us kind of had dangerous submissions at white belt and both of us, you know, there's a risk of of injuring the other person and so we're rolling really light. But what's funny is if we met each other for a second round afterwards, if something like it wouldn't happen very often, but every now and then it would, it'd be 100%. So, it wasn't like we weren't willing to go 100% on each other. We just knew that that opening match we could use as a warm-up and then go off and and face other people. and that but the reason why I tell that story of you know they were they or at least I called it the death match because it literally went till someone tapped out the timer didn't matter none of that mattered to us we were going until it was done and u and the reason why I tell that story is because at white belt you kind of have to decide are you going to be someone who shies away from uh someone who's competitive against you or are you going to be someone who leans into that and faces them constantly even if it's a losing battle, right? I got lucky in that situation and it wasn't a losing battle. But I can tell you now at my current situation, there is a match that I I consistently take on and I am losing a large percentage of them, if not all of them, but it's uh up at Brown, you know, it's me versus another brown belt. And uh but what I did at White Belt shaped that personality. And I think that that's an important personality trait for longevity in the sport. And I see a lot where people don't make it to upper belts um because they don't have that they they shy away from people in a way that you know eventually they pull themselves out of the sport because they don't feel that they're good enough at their belt because they shied away from those hard rules early. And I really think in the early days that's the time to set that precedent of I'm not going to um you know walk away from a role. I mean obviously if that person's going to hurt you, you know that's a whole different situation, but you know there was no way he was going to injure me. Well, I'm not going to say there's no way he was going to injure me because it could always happen. But it wasn't highly likely that he was going to injure me. He wasn't an unsafe training partner or anything like that. It was just a hard match, you know, a bad stylistic match for me, too. And I think that's really important to get that down at White Belt. So, in general, I would say work on your defense at White Belt. That's, you know, that's the biggest takeaway for me. I mean, I was working on uh choke defense, especially. I was notoriously hard to choke, even back at white belt. Um, but that's because I put myself in those situations a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, and uh and tried to work through them. Uh, you know, be prepared to tap. Be prepared to tap a lot if you're still a white belt. Um, you know, I was tapping every practice every day. Also, I feel strongly, and this is probably somewhat controversial because everyone has a different take on it, but if you're like me and you're watching because you do a lot of strength and conditioning work, uh my recommendation is to turn your power off in most of your matches or especially when you outweigh someone. When I was out weighing someone by 30, 40 pounds, most of the time my unless they were a an upper belt, even a white belt, I had my power turned off a lot of it. Uh I just feel like you'll learn so much more, especially if you're going up against a blue belt, you outweigh him by 40 lbs. You're going to learn a lot more by turning your power off and, you know, seeing what you can do. Now, I will say there's another story for me at white belt that's not so positive and uh definitely shows my arrogance and and ego, but uh you know, I would turn my power off anytime I was with pretty much any upper belt that I outweighed by over 30 lbs. And in this particular situation, I outweighed him by maybe 20 lb, not much more than that. So, it wasn't that egregious of a weight difference, but I'm 6' tall. I'm like way taller than this guy. And, you know, I had my own personal trainer at the time, so I was strength and conditioning all the time. And so, I turned my power off in a role with him. Uh, and he submitted me once or twice, you know what I mean? And, and I learned quite a bit from it. I use them as learning experiences to see where my flaws are in my game. And I still do it where I turn my power off to this day and roll with people with the power turned off or turned or dialed way down. And I use it and and now I can survive a lot better obviously than I could at White Belt. But I think that's beneficial. I think it's extremely beneficial to do. However, you know, you have to be in there with training partners that a know it's happening, [laughter] you know, or at least have some semblance of a clue that your power is turned off, right? At white belt, this guy didn't know my power was turned off. And he had heard stories of me being fairly good at white belt and was back in the locker room talking about how he submitted me twice and it wasn't even a competitive role. Uh, and that got back to me cuz my buddy was in the locker room. I never changed in the locker rooms. I always went out into my car and my apartment was right next door to the gym. So, it was well I was like 5 minutes from the gym. So, I would go home, shower in my apartment um at this point in time. So, at this point in time, I I uh would would go home and I think I I traditionally always went home. I didn't I didn't shower there even whenever I was living further away. Uh or I'd shower at work. Uh I can't remember. No, this would have been one where I went home afterwards just cuz it was a night class or weekend. Can't remember the exact timing of it cuz it was so many years ago. But I do remember I rolled with him after that with my power turned to 100%. And of course I went to submit him with a rear naked choke and he pushed my hand over his chin and I just neck cranked him. Like I don't even I don't have any patience for that. Like if you push my hand over your chin, I'm either going to break your nose or break your chin. You know, I'm like, if you push it and can't get it the whole way over your head, um, you should tap because I will finish that, right? Uh, and I'll finish it by digging it in. And if you push it any further, you'll just break your own nose. I won't ever break someone's nose, but if you do that, you know, you're risking your own nose because my my hands gonna be clamped down very, very hard, still on your chin. um I'm probably not gonna be able to slide it back down, but I can easily just turn it and neck crank you. Uh and so he was like, "Oh, that wasn't a submission. That was a neck crank." And he just went from offending me once to offending me further than anyone had ever offended me in a role. And so I I didn't just neck crank him two or three more times. I let go of arm bars to spin into them to neck crank them from a different position. like clearly I could submit you with whatever I want and I'm choosing to submit you with neck cranks now. You know, after the second one he realized, oh, he's doing this intentionally and in 5 minutes he can neck crank me four or five times. Uh just showing the difference in skill level with my strength turned to 100%. Right? It's it's a combination of skill and strength. And my skill was probably dialed a little bit back in that first role too, just cuz I was I was all beat up from from cuz I think I went to personal training and then came in. So I was really beat up whenever I came into jiu-jitsu, you know, and that that's that was a big factor for some of my performances, especially at white bell, you know, and and even later on, I had some performances where I was pretty beat up. But that's one of the situations where my ego got the best of me and I probably shouldn't have done that. It probably gave me a little bit of a negative reputation even there. Um, not that I don't still have that, right? I I I I'm, you know, I'm unapologetic about uh neck cranks and and illegal jiu-jitsu submissions because you have the opportunity to tap and I'll never crank the neck crank. I will give you the opportunity to tap, but I will let you know that I can do it, right? And and like and I had a I well, I'll tell this later, but let's just say it's not the last time my neck cranks came into into effect. And in in my own competitions at white belt or anything like that, I never had to neck crank someone. I uh you know and I didn't have a great set of performances at at white belt uh until till the very end of white belt but I did compete all throughout white belt and I think that was another big factor. I was thinking about this after I had recorded that uh you know video talking about the fact that it was 3 years and I thought about it more deeply and my original gym had a very interesting thing around competitors and that we would spend more time at the belt than others and I really think that was to give us a better opportunity to have better jiu-jitsu performances at tournaments. So, I think it was to our benefit doubly, right? Uh because my last uh tournament at White Belt, I got a gold and two bronze medals um at a Grappling Industries tournament. And I'm trying to remember back. It was gold and two bronze medals. Uh and you know, I'm glad that I had all that extra time to work on things at White Belt. I really think it was beneficial to me. But that's my that's my white belt journey. I would say in general. Work on your defenses. Work on figuring out who you are on the mats. Right. I learned pretty quickly that you know I'm not going to be the most technical. Uh you know I'm not going to uh you know I have I have a lot of techniques that I've honed over the years. But I also e even to this day for me to tell someone what they should do, I kind of have to put myself in the situation and then work through what I would do and how I would get out or how I would attack from there. And yeah, I I really put put yourself in difficult situations with difficult opponents at White Bell or else it's going to be a disaster later on because you don't have the skill set necessary to cope with that. So that's uh that's white belt.