Rob Biernacki is a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu practitioner who was born in Europe and lived across the continent as well as Africa and North America whilst growing up. According to Biernacki, “the closest thing I have to a home town would be Vancouver, where I went to elementary and high school.” Starting BJJ at the age of 26, he got into grappling after watching the UFC and seeing the proof of its effectiveness. These days, he trains out of his own gym, Island Top Team but also trains mostly under the Caio Terra Association whilst travelling as well as other high level gyms.
We asked Biernacki about his favorite BJJ positions, starting with guard – to which he answered “I don’t have a favorite guard. I like the idea of having the right guard for the right situation a lot though, so I play a variety of guards and my favorite thing is catching someone who favors a particular type of passing with something when I find an appropriate guard to match them. Again, I don’t favor a certain sweep technique, but the feeling of catching someone with a perfectly timed, effortless sweep is one of my favorite things in BJJ. Probably the 2 that most often represent that are the basic hook sweep from butterfly guard and the twist sweep from half guard.
As far as passing, there are moments where you create the appropriate opportunity and can slip through your opponent’s defenses in one clean movement, those are my favorite, so any floating or deflection-based passing would qualify. I quite like a good, slow pressure pass, but grinding through a guard just doesn’t feel the same.” Elsewhere, his main submission is the Caio Terra ankle lock. This is somewhat unsurprising due to Caio Terra being the coach of Biernacki.
Rob usually competes at Middleweight, and usually walks around just under 180lbs, saying “A few weeks of clean eating and hard training puts me under 175 pretty easily.” Like many consistent trainers with several years under their belt, he’s also had his fair share of injuries and adds ” My worst injury was a torn groin, adductor and abdominal muscle, all at the same time. Put me off the mats for 9 months.”
He also had an interesting story about competing against Todd Margolis of which he says “My toughest opponent was Todd Margolis. I saw him in my bracket at NoGi Worlds and thought there was no way I could beat that guy. He was in the first competition footage I ever watched when I began training, beating guys I would see winning ADCC a few years later, and he’d just won NoGi Pans. I was totally psyched out by him, and getting past him by the skin of my teeth is definitely my biggest competitive achievement. It took everything I had to get through that match.”
Next, we asked him about the grappler who influenced him the most. Biernacki claims this was Ryan Hall, who is often a popular answer. He stated “The single most influential grappler on my style is probably Ryan Hall. Maybe not in terms of technique anymore, but he was the first high level grappler I was exposed to that really showed how successful thinking conceptually and scientifically about BJJ could be, both in terms of instruction and competition. On top of that, being a huge nerd and seeing Star Wars references or things of that nature in his instructionals helped pave the way for anyone who is disinclined to hide more oddball or cerebral aspects of their personality in what can still be very much a meathead sport.”
Moving on, Rob also answered what his biggest achievement was from BJJ, mentioning “As weird as I know this is going to sound, was being able to buy a Porsche with extra money made from teaching BJJ. Knowing that it’s possible to achieve that level of success without having to compromise and become a McDojo operator, force mandatory gis on people, or any of that sort of nonsense, was huge. That sort of thing seems so distant now, with Covid and not having our school be able to generate any significant revenue for the time being, so looking back and seeing it now really allows me to reflect on the magnitude of what it meant.”
Q&A
You seem to be big on a scientific approach to BJJ, do you think BJJ was a bit primitive in this aspect up until recently and if so why?
“I think it still is largely primitive, and more than a bit, very few coaches or practitioners are actually employing scientific approaches. Why is down to a few reasons, and I apologize in advance if this gets into the weeds a bit. The first reason is money, or lack thereof. BJJ is such a niche sport, as much as it has grown in the eyes of those of us that have been around it for a while, it is still not very popular on a global scale. It’s probably where something like skateboarding was in the 70s or maybe early 80s, let alone something like baseball, or boxing, in terms of having 100 years of professional sports development behind it. I’ll use football as an example, how many coaches are there on a pro team? A dozen, fifteen maybe. What about medical staff, athletic trainers, etc? A BJJ athlete might have a wrestling coach in addition to their BJJ coach, and might go to a crossfit gym or get sponsored by a chiropractor or a physiotherapist or something.
The money just isn’t there to support proper training approaches, because the athletes don’t make enough to have dedicated full time coaching staff. The vast majority of coaches have to spend at least some, if not most, of their time running classes for people who show up a few times a week and don’t compete. You can’t optimize a program like that for performance, and worse yet, you aren’t incentivized to try. The average club owner is usually better off learning about hacky marketing tactics to grow their business than they are staying up to date on sports science and cognitive learning strategies.
The second reason is that a lot of BJJ practitioners are, frankly, dumb. To achieve a high level in wrestling, you have to go to school. To achieve a high level in BJJ you don’t, and you certainly will see young people dedicated to BJJ not pursuing post secondary education. As a result you don’t have the same exposure to scientific methodology and critical thinking skills, so the overall approach you see embraced isn’t often driven by intelligent analysis, to be charitable. Hell, even among people with smart coaches who use some scientific approaches, you have athletes with poor thinking skills who will not be able to build a culture of scientific advancement because there is such a cult of personality ethos in BJJ.
This brings me to the third reason, which is the level of inertia created by the culty practices so common in BJJ clubs. Black belts are afforded way too much deference in too many matters, students are entirely too tribal about their affiliations, and business owners encourage it. I’d like to think it’s getting better, but people speaking out about how archaic some of these practices are is still largely performative in my opinion. Some of the more egregious notions, like the ‘no creonte’ mentality are fading, but others persist. For a sport that’s supposedly about “proving it”, people still embrace a lot of magical thinking and the uncritical fashion in which training is approached is the opposite of the robust debate necessary for true science to be done. People are far too emotionally attached about their training methods, techniques, and associations, and that stifles correct analysis.”
What is your biggest joy – competing and winning medals or teaching and coaching?
“Teaching and coaching. It’s not even close. The elation I feel when I see a student have a breakthrough in class or in a match is leagues beyond what I feel when I have personal success competing.”
Could you say more about the BJJ/grappling scene in Canada? It seems to have a few known guys and quite a big scene up there
“Canada is a big place, so I can only comment on the scene in our province British Columbia, which is on the west coast. We have a mostly awesome scene here. Earlier on when I moved back to BC and opened a club on Vancouver Island (which is a bit geographically isolated from the rest of mainland BC), there actually was a severe lack of high level training available outside of the greater Vancouver area even on the mainland, but that has slowly changed. And there used to be a paucity of good NoGi training, as the BC BJJ scene was very Gi oriented, but in the last few years that too has changed, particularly with the arrival of Ben Dyson and Stu Cooper. I hope I also had a role in helping popularize NoGi around here as well, particularly through my work with Matt Kwan, him having such a great competitive resume and his school on the outskirts of Vancouver, On Guard BJJ, cranking out high quality NoGi practitioners. The scene has long had great Gi competitors through Alliance Vancouver and Roll Academy, so it’s cool to see things get more balanced out recently.”
You got onto the leg lock meta a while back, what do you think the next big trend will be in the future?
I think that the addition of heel hooks to IBJJF will create an interesting selection pressure on the development of strategies to deal with techniques that a lot of competitors are way behind on in terms of offensive development. I reckon you will see a lot of berimbolo/crab ride stuff specifically adapted to deal with leg entanglements much like you saw with Felipe Pena against Gordon Ryan, only with that experiment being run over and over in multiple iterations, which will provide a far more robust data set.
Your gym is under the Caio Terra Association and you like his ankle lock. Is it fair to say he influenced your style a lot?
Caio is probably the biggest technical influence on me at this point, he’s the guy I go to for solutions to the most intractable problems. His technical precision is otherworldly, and something I will continue to aspire to, though I will obviously never achieve it.
Your gym also teaches yoga and strength and conditioning. Some places don’t offer this, would you say it’s pretty important for the long-term?
We actually have expanded our yoga program through a partnership with a local yoga studio, so our students now have access to a full schedule of yoga classes rather than just a couple a week at our club like we used to have. BJJ is great, but any sport will have physical imbalances in the body that are developed by overspecializing in certain movements, so it’s important to balance those out, whether it be yoga or strength training, for any sort of longevity.
Lastly, do you have any future plans or goals to mention?
My plans for the future are first to rebuild my business after Covid fades, it’s going to be a different world for BJJ entrepreneurs. How the economy and demand recovers will be interesting, and unfortunately the BJJ community has a lot of idiotic conspiracy theorists and unscientific thinking it seems to be embracing so we may end up shooting ourselves in the foot on that front by being part of the problem when it comes to vaccine hesitancy. Other than that I’d love to do NoGi worlds again, and I have a new instructional series coming out in the spring with Stephan Kesting at grapplearts.com that I’m pretty stoked to get feedback on, and a new section to my Online Academy bjjconcepts.net that we are working on adding in the next month or so.
