Category: Reviews

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10 Second Review:
Submit Everyone is a comprehensive guide to building a submission-driven game that showcases Camarillo’s talents as a grappler and a teacher. The quirky “military report” writing style may put you off (or you may not care), but the content and techniques are stellar. Camarillo’s material on the “kimura control” is worth the price alone. You can pick up a copy for around $20.

Full Review:
A month ago, Kevin Howell sent me a digital prerelease of Submit Everyone, his latest work with Dave Camarillo. Since then, I have been reading through it and trying out the material daily. Here’s my review.

The book, with its full title “Submit Everyone: The Guerrilla Jiu-Jitsu Files: Top Secret Tactics to Become a Submission-Focused Fighter,” takes the “guerrilla” theme to the extreme. It’s laid out like a typewritten military dossier full of polaroid photos. Howell employs a military vocabulary, with jargon like SNAFU and AFTER-ACTION REPORT and labeling techniques SITREP 4.16. Here are sample sentences:

SUBJECT CAMARILLO is operating in the spider guard with his foot on the right biceps of CONTACT DARCY, MATTHEW.

…

All the guerrilla has to do is simply follow the POE and he automatically arrives in an easily attackable position for his preferred fire team.

The writing can be a little confusing and contrived, though sometimes the pseudo-military terms do work, like calling a “go to” position for offense and defense a “fire base or HUB.” Once you get used to it (or if it never bothers you), the lessons underneath are valuable.

Whatever complaints I have about the writing style, they’re easily overlooked in favor of the excellent techniques and high quality photography. Camarillo and Howell put a lot of thought and care into the creation of his book. (As I said, I read a PDF copy, but I’m sure the real book is well made—big pages, glossy paper, crisp photos—like all Victory Belt publications.)

To start the book, Camarillo does a good job showing what he sees as the difference between a “submission focused” grappler and one that worries about points.

First, he shows a traditional way of maintaining position as someone escapes side control by turning to their knees, where he circles around and keeps them trapped under turtle. (It’s actually a pretty good technique, but not the lesson he wants to teach.)

Next, he shows his “guerrilla” approach, where rather than worrying about just staying in the standard safe positions, he’s quickly gripping to attack with chokes and armbars as he circles to the back.

That is a simple example, but it does show Camarillo’s style of jiu-jitsu well. He’s always looking to finish the fight from every position. That’s not to say he throws good positional control out the window. He does show when you’re better off securing a position on a defensive opponent. But on the whole, he wants to end the fight now instead of playing it too safe or waiting to see what happens.

Camarillo goes out of his way to show the influences judo, sambo and wrestling have on his jiu-jitsu. He demonstrates moves that blend each art to demonstrate how the mix can surprise someone who is only familiar with one art. Camarillo’s dynamic style shows even through the slideshow nature of step-by-step photos. This book would have made a great video.

He also addresses the endless “gi vs no-gi” debate with my favorite answer: “Shut up and do both.” His full reasoning is a bit better than that, but you get the idea.

A book like this is in danger of becoming just another “mixed bag of submissions”, but Camarillo does a good job of avoiding this by using his techniques to illustrate underlying concepts, putting them into combinations, or grouping them by shared positions.

The first part of the book shows a wide variety of basic submissions: chokes, armbars, triangles, omoplatas, kimuras and more. (No leglocks are shown.) He offers these as the core submission that you’ll likely build your personal game around.

He moves on to showing simple submission combos and chains, like how armbars and triangles go together, how collar chokes can give you armbars, or how a kimura can always lead to an armbar. These combinations get progressively deeper as the book continues. He shows attacks from many positions, like closed and open guards, including his “octopus guard” (different than Eduardo Telles’), side control, knee-on-belly mount and rear mount, and more.

By the end of the book, Camarillo dedicates himself to showing the depth of his armbar game. He does this to illustrate how he wants you to pick a single submission and make it your best attack by learning every entry and solutions to any roadblocks. This includes a bunch of good armbar defense breaks, similar to what Eddie Bravo shows from his “spider web” position (though I prefer Camarillo’s.)

Throughout the book, Camarillo stresses the importance of continuously attacking and never giving up ground or trading “one for one.” This involves using sweeps to off-balance for easier submissions, jumping into submissions while passing guard, turning your escapes into attacks, defending takedowns with submissions, keeping on submissions even during scrambles, attacking through submission defenses, and more.

My personal favorite moves are the ones that highlight Camarillo’s use of the kimura grip in combination with armbars, chokes and taking the back. In his Back Attacks DVD, Ryan Hall credits Camarillo with teaching him this approach, and anyone who tries it will see why it deserves the praise. I’d pick the book up just for this alone.

So who should get this book? Is it too advanced for a white belt? By its nature, any instructional about submissions is geared toward higher belts. Many of Camarillo’s moves are combinations that take a good sense of timing and full commitment (not the hallmarks of beginners). This isn’t a surprise coming from a guy who’s famous for his flying submissions. I wouldn’t recommend this book to white or blue belts who aren’t confident in their basics, but a competitive blue belt or any higher belts will find a lot of valuable material.

If you already own a copy, please leave a comment below to let me know how you liked it. Happy new year!

The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle is a book that examines “hotbeds” of talent around the world to figure out how they create so many skilled people. The author investigates highly successful places like a Russian tennis camp, Brazilian soccer clubs, outperforming academic programs, the Z-Boys skateboarders, and a prestigious music school, among others.

To get a taste, read Coyle’s New York Times article “How to Grow a Super-Athlete,” which inspired the book.

Given the diversity of fields he studied around the globe (sports, music, academics, etc.), Coyle tries to find common threads that tie them together. How do unrelated places with no knowledge of each other come up with similar training methods? Why do good teachers and coaches share common traits? Coyle finds his answer in neuroscience and its new discoveries about myelin.

Here’s Coyle’s basic premise:

• Performing a skill uses circuits of neurons in your brain.
• A fatty coating of myelin builds up around our nerves’ axons, the long “wire” that connects them to other neurons.
• Researchers ignored myelin for a long time as “just an insulator,” but now they understand that it strengthens and speeds up nerve signals. Today, it’s viewed as the neurological basis of acquired skills.
• When a neuron fires, it attracts cells called a oligodendrocytes that add new layers of myelin. Repeated firings—like in practice—cause more myelin growth. More myelin means more skill.
• If we know what causes myelin growth, we can focus on practices and teaching methods that promote its fastest growth.

In the Scientific American article “White Matter Matters,” myelin is explained like this:

• White matter, long thought to be passive tissue, actively affects how the brain learns and dysfunctions.
• Although gray matter (composed of neurons) does the brain’s thinking and calculating, white matter (composed of myelin-coated axons) controls the signals that neurons share, coordinating how well brain regions work together.

To get a visual of myelin’s role, check out this interactive graphic from Coyle’s website.

Coyle breaks the “talent code” into three key factors that he believes encourage myelin development:

1. Deep practice — how to acquire skill by building the most myelin
2. Ignition — what motivates deep practice and what he calls “primal cues”
3. Master coaching — how teachers encourage deep practice and ignition

The myelin theory is appealing, because rather than chalking talent up to genetics, nationality, luck, fate, or magic, it lets you point at something that everyone has in their heads and say “That’s what does it.” Coyle doesn’t discount those other factors, but he is enamored with the theory that myelin underlies all of it. Throughout the book, he explains everything through a lens of myelin growth.

The trouble is that myelin research is relatively new (which Coyle admits), and myelin’s role in learning is not yet fully understood. Myelin is likely a large component to the neurological basis of learning and improving skills, but to state that “myelin equals skill” is an oversimplification that ignores other complex processes in the brain.

In trying to make talent and greatness attainable to anyone, Coyle leaves some holes in his theories unexplained. The most obvious is why two kids with the same passion could receive the same instruction but only one really achieves greatness. Coaches and teachers do value hard work over natural genius (a point Coyle makes), but they also know that each student has different aptitudes, and not everyone is destined to be great.

Coyle’s theories don’t make clear distinctions between acquiring a talent, popularity and commercially successful, or achieving true greatness. He points to the pop singing coach that produced Jessica Simpson as an example of a “master coach,” but her process is to copy other successful pop singers. This also ignores the business side of engineering a pop sensation through marketing and publicity.

In a later chapter about master coaches, Coyle tells the story of how the Oakland Raiders turned to retired college football coach Tom Martinez to help them decide between drafting JaMarcus Russell or Calvin Johnson. Martinez is portrayed as a sagely coach with a special knack for spotting talent (which he may be), but unfortunately he recommended Russell, who is now considered one of the biggest draft busts ever. The Raiders fought to get his $9.55 million salary back after dropping him, and Russell was arrested for drug possession. To be fair, Coyle couldn’t have known this would happen when he was writing the book.

Coyle tries to downplay the role of genetics in determining natural talent, but by basing skill development on a physiological process (myelin growth), he opens the door to genes influencing it. This is never addressed.

While The Talent Code isn’t overtly a self help book or a “get good quick” scheme, its marketing promises self-improvement with slogans like “Greatness isn’t born. It’s grown. Here’s how.” If you go into the book expecting step-by-step plans and detailed programs for how to learn, you’ll be disappointed.

To his credit, Coyle does stress that talent is a results of many hours of hard practice.  Using myelin development as his underlying reason, Coyle points to frustrating training as the most valuable kind because it triggers repeated and urgent neuron firings. He also cites the popular idea that it takes 10,000 hours of practice (or about a decade) to achieve mastery. (This number is debatable too.)

Overall, The Talent Code is a pleasant work of pop psychology that highlights many interesting people and places, attempting to make sense of a complex topic in the same style as a Malcolm Gladwell book. It avoids becoming just another syrupy self-help book by stressing the importance of hard work and dedication, but it doesn’t bring too many new insights to the table. Its message can be summarized like this: “Get someone passionate about something and make them practice for years under an experienced coach and they’ll get good (unless they don’t.)”

Here’s a quick list of “take away lessons” you could get from it:

• The elite got that way through many thousands of hours of diligent practice.
• High repetition is necessary to gain competency in a skill.
• You learn the most by pushing yourself to the edge of your ability and paying attention to your mistakes so you can fix them.
• The learning process is often frustrating and you can’t always tell when you’re improving until you’re put to the test later.
• A good curriculum “chunks” skills together so they are easier to learn, and the chunks get bigger as the student becomes able to handle the earlier ones.
• Students should spend a lot of time watching masters practice and perform.
• Coaches and teachers value hard work and persistence over “natural genius.”
• A good coach establishes an emotional connection with his students so he know when to be nice and when to push hard.
• You can focus on specific skills by doing drills that isolate it for repeated trial-and-error.
• Those who achieve greatness often started with a humble instructor who fostered a love for the subject.
• Those who see themselves doing an activity for a long time find more time to practice (and therefore get better) than those who only set short term goals.
• Kids who feel talent can be gained through hard work have better problem-solving skills and more determination than kids who believe their intelligence or skill is inherited and unchangeable.
• “Having fun” isn’t the primary goal of people who want to get good, though they find what they do pleasurable on some level (or at least necessary) and push through all the difficulties and challenges.