Gordon Ryan recently spoke about Greg Souders, the coach behind the ecological approach (the constraints-led approach) that’s generated significant discussion in BJJ circles over the past year.
Asked directly whether he’d incorporated any of Souders’ ideas into his own coaching, or whether the positional rounds tied to the ecological movement were something he’d already been doing for years, Ryan said:
No, I mean, Greg got that stuff from us. Greg came to Renzo’s and trained with us back in 2016, 17, somewhere around there.
And we were doing positional rounds back then.
I mean, he came and he calls them games, and he does different positions.
But all it is just there’s positional rounds, which we do, and then there’s just specific sparring, which we’ve been doing the whole time.
Pressed further on whether this was simply a continuation of what he’d always practiced, Ryan doubled down:
Yeah, I mean, it’s just, you know… It’s the same thing everyone else does.
They just take a thing and they try to rebrand it.
But at the end of the day, like, we have the luxury of being in the most objective domain pretty much in history.
Like, actual combat is a pretty objective thing. Combat with live sparring or live reps.
If I say something works, and you say it doesn’t, there’s a really easy way to prove that. You just get on the mat.
It’s not like politics where you have to wait 10 years to see how the policies work and things like this.
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