5 Lessons Learned from Training with John Danaher

In this video, Roy Dean discusses his experience training with John Danaher and shares five takeaways from the training. He mentions that the technical palette was diverse, with classes on various techniques such as omoplata, guillotine, leg locks, and inversions. He also praises Danaher's succinct in-person instruction style and emphasizes the importance of stand-up grappling in training. Dean compares his own teacher, Roy Harris, to Danaher, highlighting their similarities in being great minds in the art of jiu-jitsu. He also talks about the class structure at Danaher's academy, which includes no warm-up, long series of technical threads, and emphasis on positional escapes and stand-up grappling. The speaker concludes by discussing the fun and invigorating experience of training intensively and encourages others to have similar training adventures.

What's up? Everyone wanted to give you guys something a little bit more meaty, something a little bit more than my last video, which was an inspirational look at my training with Danaher and everything that I talked about in that video, I'm going to just blow up and go into a deep technical dive, so hope you pack a lunch because I'm going to talk for a little bit.

Five takeaways from training with John Danaher. So I’ve got my laptop here and I have a couple of points that I wrote down. Number one, the technical palette was diverse, so when I was there I expected that my leg lock game was going to improve greatly and when I came back everyone was like, “Oh man, how are your leg locks? Your leg lock game must be sick!” But yeah, my leg locks were improved for a variety of reasons. He did two classes on leg locks, but he's got a very diverse game and the technical palette was really quite diverse.

Just a couple of notes that I wrote down; he did two classes on the omoplata and there were some details there that I had never seen anyone else go over with omoplata. In particular, putting your calf over their elbow and having that pinned on the ground. That was a really cool, nice detail. It was a beautiful sequence, of course, pretty extensive, but he did two classes on omoplata, two classes on guillotine, arm in guillotine, and the regular guillotine.

He went over the traditional guillotine and the modifications he had made over the years, and I think it's so much tighter, so much more effective doing the modern standard, the modern way of doing the guillotine. It's almost like it's so tight that it's almost like you're doing a gi choke with just the bones in your hands and arms.

It's really, I would say their front headlock game with the guillotine from the Danaher Crew is the tightest I have ever felt. I haven't been caught in a guillotine for a long time. Years. And I got caught in several with different ways that they tighten it up. There's ways that they grab their elbow, they grab their wrist, they grab their hand in various configurations, so we did a couple of classes on the guillotine, guard passing, guard retention, stepping over their leg, going north south. That was good. They did them on the same day.

We did a class on leg locks, actually two, I actually didn't participate in those. Those were times where I was just watching the class, but I still was able to get quite a bit out of it. And then there was a class on inversions that I brought a buddy to. So my buddy and I are both black belts, pretty experienced. He's done MMA, and coached professional fighters, I mean the whole thing. And we felt like white belts and we laughed and laughed. We went to lunch afterwards and laughed about it over and over because man, I haven't felt like that in a while. The inversions and getting into inverting into ashi garami, I had just never done that. I had never really experimented with doing the horizontal kuzushi that they used to get into the leg lock position and then inverting underneath.

It was pretty humbling and watching John do it, and he was so calm and patient when he was inverting, he was actually inverting in slow motion and explaining at the same time, telling us all the relevant details and I mean we could catch some of it, but the whole thing was a little, it was beyond me, it was beyond me, and that's a cool feeling to have. I don't get it that often, but it actually sparked some level of joy.

We also did a John Wayne sweep into the arm drag into katagatame, or kind of like a seated head and arm choke from the guard and also into a triangle. We did a full class on escaping the body triangle. I have never been to a class where they addressed the body triangle. Maybe one answer, I've certainly been asked that question at seminars, but I've never actually attended a class where someone went over escaping the body triangle.

He did an entire class on it: If they get you and you roll out, hand fighting, breaking their choking posture, hand fighting, elbow cuts, so you can start to rotate into them, rotating while they follow you. The worst case scenario if they follow you and then you go back underneath them. It was incredible. It was incredible. So technical. Then we did EBI rounds at the end of that class, so it was a really cool and very technically diverse palette that he showed.

And then from kind of like a meta view, just having seen a lot of people teach classes, it's interesting to see what they reinforce, what they, I wouldn't say recycle, but what they go back to reinforce while introducing new material. So I could see the major emphasis that John was giving with front headlocks and leg locks, but it was also some other really juicy segments of the game that he was introducing his people into.

Now also want to mention this is not the pro class. I didn't go to the pro class. The regular room was tough enough, so I fielded a lot of questions. Did you roll with Gordon Ryan? What was that like? I wasn't even there. I'm just in the regular class, the equivalent of the blue basement back in New York City, the regular class that he was teaching that he teaches twice a day and then he does a pro class.

So this man is definitely on a schedule of teaching and having his mind so involved in the art. I mean really it shows with the sharpness of his explanation and the diversity of what he showed because it was good. It was good. He's really creating well-rounded players.

So number two, his in-person instruction is very succinct. My second takeaway is John teaches the way I like to teach, which is essentially no warmup.

You just start out with a simple technique or positional escape or something like that and then you add to it going through the class eventually doing a series of motion so that you are actually warmed up without doing any calisthenics and you're able to deliver the most amount of information in the shortest period of time, which is very jiu jitsu. I mean the efficiency of information exchange is very high.

When I had my own physical academy and I encourage my own affiliates, you can do a warmup that is pretty brief and that's good sometimes it often depends on how old your school is.

If you are brand new, you better be showing 'em how to do fundamental movements and ukemi. You need to show them the basics like that. But if you have an established school of with experts and intermediate players and a few beginners, then you can go right into it because the beginners are going to pick up on the fundamental movements that everyone else is doing. So when you have your own academy, it depends on how long the academy has been open and the maturity of your student level.

So his actual in-person instruction is very succinct and I think this is a contrast to the material he puts on BJJ Fanatics, in his instructionals, he talks at length, he talks at length, and I think he wants to kind of preserve his legacy and really go do a deep dive into the why he's doing stuff. A lot of people don't do why they do “like this or like that, not like that. Smash the guy!”

But there's no time to waste. He gets right to it. He shows really great stuff and a lot of it I was familiar with, but he was able to sew together some techniques and some variations that I had seen over many years from disparate areas. For example, he did a class on the arm lock. He did it from the guard and then maybe we swept the guy over. We ended up with various leg positions where you can have them cross body, you could have it foot on one side of the body, leg across the head, both ankles across the head, both ankles, one ankle in front of the head, near the head, just all the different leg variations and then all the variations on how you can hold that leg for stability.

So you have the juji gatame, and then you have the leg, which is common, but then you could also grab that far leg too. There's different ways you can grab that far leg. I've seen this from various players in Brazil where they're actually grabbing the far leg on the inside. I've also seen it where they grab the far leg on the outside in wrap. I've also seen judo variations where you grab both legs and pull them into you so you can come back up and if you need to repeat the process of getting into that arm lock again.

So I had seen these from various Brazilian variations, to little judo influences, to various leg configurations I had seen and used over the years and he sewed it into one complete comprehensive lesson and to me as an instructor, I was like, oh, that was so good. It was so good. And the students that were fresh to it or relatively fresh to it, they just take it in as, “Oh, this is how it is.” But they don't realize how lucky they were to get a concentrated dose of technique like that, which illustrates all the variations. It was pretty sublime.

Number three, let's talk about the class structure, which I kind of did in the last thing.There's no warmup. You go straight to technique and then he emphasizes standup grappling. This is huge actually, the next generation of grapplers, you can't just do the bolt-on approach of, “Okay, I'm going to do three months of wrestling and then I'm going to enter this tournament and I just do regular jujitsu before.”

You have to do it every day. You're just not going to get the feel. You're not going to get the feel for, I mean it's like if you're a standup player and you do three months of groundwork before entering a tournament, I mean you'll do better, but you're still not going to be great at it. It has to be intuitive. It has to be a set of physical skills that you approach with confidence and can't think about too much when you're tired. So one thing I really like about his class structure is that he does the takedowns at the end.

A lot of people, I advocate this for my own affiliates… I just did a seminar where I went over the basic class structure of how RDA classes should run and I feel like doing takedowns when you're already warm, your body is up for it and then you can go, right? It's a very natural transition to go into standing rounds when you're doing your sparring. He does no warmup, long series of technical threads. Standup is usually two techniques at the end then, and I love this, not enough people do it, I feel… he has people start first round bottom mount and then you go into do your sparring from there.

And a lot of people, there are some very tough people that when you pass their guard, they melt mentally, they just fold because they're not used to escaping from side control or from the mount. But if you have a really good positional escapes, it's playtime because you know what to do from there. So when I went and trained, we did positional escapes from the mount for the first round. There's no timer on these rounds by the way. It's just whatever John was feeling.

Second round is turtle position.I'm really good at escaping the mount. Escaping turtle? So-so. Okay, good against people that are just okay, but against really tight players? My turtle escapes are lacking… but this is why you go and train. This is why you go and train.

I learned I'm susceptible to a guillotine coming out of the turtle. If I turn back into 'em, that's one thing I definitely got alerted to. And third round is standing vs sitting. One person is standing, passing the guard and the other person is sitting and they can wrestle up or they can defend or they can enter into leg locks, they can do whatever. Then the last round is hands, feet, and back. So it's a standup round. You need to either hoist their leg to a high single position, give a single leg, bring the foot all the way up, okay, once you've wrapped it, that is considered a win.

If you snap them down, get both hands on the mat, then that is considered a win. So you don't need to complete the takedown. You can do the full takedown but you don't have to. Or if you get to their back and are able to lock your hands, then that is also considered a win. So that's a great round. I went with various people in that, some big guys, some smaller players, sometimes I sat it out, I was just too tired.

There were a couple times in that last round, there's only a minute or two left. But I just felt I was at that exhaustion point where I said, “It's not smart for me to continue. I might get injured.” That is extremely rare. I really have to be pushed to that. But they were long rounds, it was a tough room and I had to train every day that I was there. I couldn't get injured. So you just play it smart and your partners typically understand.

Number four, people have asked me to draw some comparisons between my teacher Roy Harris and John Danaher, and I'm happy to do so. They've been training for… Mr. Harris has been training for longer and he is more highly ranked. He's the second non Brazilian to get his coral belt or seventh degree black belt. But from any modern player's perspective, they've been trained about the same amount of time and they are both great minds. Both great minds in the art. I have a couple of notes here. Mr. Harris was the first to offer a structured approach. He comes from a JKD background and they're really good at categorizing things in JKD. So he offered a structured approach with positional escapes, with categorizing submissions, just giving actual criteria for belt levels so that people could focus and I mean it's made all the difference in my training and in the technical legacy that I'm leaving.

So he was really an innovator in that area and he was also probably the innovator when it came to leg locks. He was introduced to heel hooks and knee bars and straight foot locks by ensemble master named Nikolai Rin who when Mr. Harris was a teaching class, he was doing the self-defense class over at University of California, San Diego. And Nick came in and is like, Hey, can I roll with you guys too? And he said, absolutely. And he tapped everybody, including Mr. Harris and Mr. Harris being a very curious mind wanted to know what is this guy doing? So he learned it was Sambo and Nicholas had been selected. He went to a Sambo school and so he was raised in the art and sport of Sambo and he passed on his love for leg locks to Mr. Harris. So he was teaching us heel hooks and straight foot locks and all kinds of variations that I still catch people with today early on.

And Mr. Harris had one of the first no gi academies in the country, which he felt was more adapted to the Southern California lifestyle. And I can't help but agree and he's come up, he's continued to evolve and innovate for his own needs and the needs of his student. When I took a private lesson with him about a month ago, he was introducing me to his innovations, which were, I mean, I feel no one is doing a stack path like maybe Joe Morera, but no one does a stack pass like Roy Harrison. It's actually like a stack pin and there's all kinds of subtleties and the power of it. He stops you before you can even get anything going. He's immobilizing you before you can get into your movement or long technical sequences, which is brilliant in a way. And it's a way that he can continue to dominate younger, faster, stronger players by freezing 'em immediately.

Those strategies he's developed to lead people down a path of his choosing are it's deep. And I need to go deeper into that insight he's been working on with John Danaher. He was in one of the best rooms for so many years over at zos and he had so many different wrestlers come in, all the wrestlers, all the BGJ players from essentially all over the world, including many people from Brazil. He had the incredible instructor guino there. I mean just he had a cornucopia of talent and technique that he was exposed to early on for Danaher at his level. And I consider mean, obviously these people are, they've been training longer than I have. They're sensei and s sensei. One who has gone before. Sai, a more advanced student, senior student Danaher, had incredible sequences and they were so tight. This is what I love.

Mr. Harris is trying to go beyond technique. Danaher is deeply, deeply into the tightest possible transitions between systems of techniques and really optimized mechanics. Everything was optimized every, I'll just share one thing, the handholds, the hand fighting, all of that was optimized. I sat with him on the day I was recording. We had a couple of great conversations on the mat and he talked to me about how grips are essentially a trade-off between optimum leverage and the robustness of the grip. So the fingers, for example, great leverage, but the robustness of the grip is not very good. The wrist is pretty good leverage. But again, because you can open out toward the thumb, the robustness of the grip is not that great. He does a half and half approach so that his hand comes over, wraps the best of the meaty part of the palm and is also connecting to, so this kind of half and half grip, you're getting the best of both worlds and optimized grip.

He told me that and I just kind of absorbed it. And there are many things that I've been thinking about. There are some things I've been thinking about for weeks since that training experience and that was one of 'em. He is constantly, when you see John do a technique, he goes all the way. When he does his guillotine, he's not shy. He stuffs the head and goes all the way through and then he'll go into some kind of modified hand position reinforcing the elbow, whatever. But he's not easy on Zuke, but they're getting a special gift that's for sure.

Building up to a guillotine, stuffing the head, getting into a good position right away. An optimized position right away is one thing I noticed also. He's always putting his weight on. If he goes to the back, he's bringing the guy forward. He's making the guy put his hands on the mat and carry his weight. So watching him demo, he doesn't spar, but watching him demo these vectors of movement and weight distribution and optimized mechanics was really interesting to me. I knew, obviously I know a lot of the technical sequences he was doing, but seeing the way that he did it made a big impression on me and it's something that I needed to remember. Don't just take the back, take the back and make them carry your weight. Number five. Fifth takeaway. Fifth takeaway. It's fun to just train and I realize that I have a pretty luxurious training schedule. Yes, I train, I still keep in shape. I have an association and I train with my friends over at C-V-B-J-J. I teach when I'm in town and it's great. I do maybe two to four classes a week. I feel good. I hit the gym, I go to yoga, I do my thing. I have plenty of recovery time. But it was great to go back to basics.

Basics where it reminded me of when I was 21 and I moved into a dojo, I moved into a Japanese Jiujitsu Dojo in Monterey, California. I cover that in my first book, the Marshall Apprentice. And life is simple. You get up in the morning, you train, you go home, disinfect, shower, scrub down, have a great lunch, enjoy the afternoon, maybe catch class in the evening, take some notes, go home, repeat. Maybe I catch class and have dinner with a friend in the evening, but you're training every day. And I really didn't do very much except train, train, recover. When I got back from that trip, I had lost five pounds. I'm like 1 95, 1 98. I came back, I was 1 92. I walked in, I walked back in C-V-B-J-J and they're like, whoa, you look skinny, man. I was like, yep, yep. Because I was burning more than I was taking in.

And the second week I was there, I did not have, so it was like two and a half weeks of training. I didn't have the pep. I did not have the pep that I did the first week. And it's okay because you're there to learn. And John recognized that I was not there to win a gold medal. I was there to enhance my knowledge and it was good. I had such a warm welcome from Jason, the owner of Henzel, Gracie Austin, to John being very cool and accommodating to all the training partners I had. No one was trying to kill me guys. Didn't take it easy on me, that's for sure. And I did okay. I did great in some rounds and not great on other days. And that's how it is. Every day is different. The question is, are you going to be a man and take your beating with a little bit of grace, a little bit of humility. You don't gloat when you win. Just take it, take it. Life is about can you take your beating with a little bit of dignity.

So people have also asked me about doing this themselves. I actually have some of my black belts that want to go down and train with me next time I'm down there and I absolutely encourage it. I am going to put the invitation out there to my guys next time I head down and it's great. It's a way to stay invigorated about the art. I was really inspired by John's dedication. I'm not there. There was a time, there was a time where I was running an academy and teaching multiple times a day and in it a hundred percent I do consider myself to be a serious student of the art. But seeing his level of dedication, seeing how much he puts into being there, I mean he was there morning and night and then he goes and teaches the pros and no wonder he's so sharp.

It's on his mind all the time. I'm personally not there, but I was able to pick up on it and I feel like I'm a better juujitsu practitioner from having been there and having done that intense training. It's good for you. And if you want to have an adventure like that, you should absolutely go and do it. The people at Henzel Gracie Austin are very nice. You'll pay either a monthly map fee or if you just drop in for a class, it's kind of expensive, but you can work something out with them where you do a pass and just go show up, pay attention, drill spar, take your beating profit. That's all there is to it. You just do the work and you're going to end up a better person and make some friends along the way. So I really appreciate that I had the opportunity to go and do that.

I feel fortunate that I can go and train with masters, whether that's my own teacher, Roy Harris or another Master John Danaher. And I also open that gate for my students. They don't need to feel like they're cheating on me. If they go and train with John, I encourage it. Go. I have an open relationship with my students. They can go and train with John and I want want my students to exceed my own capacity. I want the lineage to have very, very high standards. And it's difficult for one teacher.

The truth is it is very difficult for one teacher to pass on the entirety of their knowledge. I feel like I've done a good job with the media I've been able to produce over the last 15 years, but it's still not a hundred percent. You need to show people how to train and give them permission to be the best they can be. So hopefully with this trip I've been able to inspire my own students and hopefully inspire you to go out there, keep that journey going. It's not you get fourth degree black belt. You think the journey's over. Give me a break.

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