According to Greg Souders, who recently appeared on The Charles Eoghan Experience podcast, the BJJ community is facing a significant challenge: homogenization of teaching methodologies and technical approaches.
“The big issue in the jiu-jitsu community right now is literally everyone’s a copy of John Danaher and Gordon Ryan,” Souders stated during the interview. “If you go on YouTube or Instagram and look at all the way techniques are being described, it’s pure John Danaher’s language and his ideas, and people are just regurgitating the step-by-step stuff they’re being taught by somebody else.”
This observation highlights a concerning trend in jiu-jitsu instruction where creativity and individual expression are being replaced by carbon copies of popular methodologies. Souders, who advocates for an ecological approach to teaching jiu-jitsu, believes this copycat phenomenon limits growth and understanding of the art.
The ecological approach that Souders champions focuses on creating appropriate learning environments rather than dictating specific movement patterns. It emphasizes learning through live interactions where students can discover solutions organically rather than memorizing predetermined sequences.
Souders explained that when instructors simply copy Danaher‘s language and teaching style, they miss the opportunity to develop their own understanding and teaching methodology that might better serve their specific student population. While acknowledging the brilliance of Danaher’s system, Souders suggests that blindly following it without adaptation or personal innovation stifles the evolution of jiu-jitsu.
The conversation touched on how practitioners who train with resistance, test techniques in competition, and adapt movements to their own bodies naturally transform what they’ve learned.
“You guys are actually out there doing the live work. You’re actually out there sparring, testing it, putting it into the competition stress. And so of course you’re changing it because ideas are context dependent,” Souders noted.
Souders previously butted heads with Dan Manisoiu and Gordon Ryan who called his methodology ‘r*tarded’.
While learning from masters like Danaher and Ryan is valuable, the future of the art depends on practitioners finding their own voice rather than becoming mere echoes of others.
But Souders is perhaps intentionally failing to see that more than Danaher‘s terminology it is his methodology that’s leaving a lasting impression. Danaher led multiple athletic men to becoming ADCC medalists in just a couple years of training.
