ANN ARBOR, MI — After two years and $6,412 spent on instructional content, local purple belt Blake Morrison told reporters Monday that he is ‘starting to feel pretty comfortable’ with the basic armbar from closed guard.
Morrison, 29, a data analyst at a mid-sized logistics firm who trains four evenings a week at Headwaters BJJ, confirmed that while he has not successfully finished an armbar in live rolling since late 2024, he has mapped every major conceptual pathway to the submission across 127 logged hours of instructional footage.
‘I’ve finally got all the framing sorted in my head,’ said Morrison, scrolling through a 47-tab browser window that included active subscriptions to SubmitLab, GrappleVault, Sovereign Grappling Systems, and a premium tier of a platform called the Ecological Jiu-Jitsu Laboratory. ‘I’m running a modular framework with hub-and-spoke transitions. It’s less about hitting the submission and more about understanding why the submission is there to begin with.’
Asked what the framework has submitted people with, Morrison said it was ‘more of a philosophy.’
Morrison’s personal Notion database, which he updates on his lunch break and occasionally during meetings, currently contains 6,200 tagged techniques across 14 color-coded collections. Each entry includes timestamps, instructor bio, source ranking, conceptual weight, and a personal comprehension rating on a 1-5 scale. A cross-referenced tag titled ‘Armbar (Closed Guard) — Core Mechanics’ contains 219 entries. He has rated his own comprehension of the position at 4.2.
His in-gym armbar count across four years at purple belt: zero.
His total submission count at purple belt: three. One was an Ezequiel on a first-time white belt who had already tapped himself by pulling his own arm across his throat. The other two were accidental.
Training partners at Headwaters describe Morrison as ‘incredibly knowledgeable and incredibly tappable.’
‘Blake can tell you the exact second the Vinson brothers pause in the Leg Entanglement Protocol seminar to explain why the inside heel position is structurally superior to the outside variant,’ said Corey Tiedemann, 25, a blue belt of two years who works in HVAC installation and owns two gis, both bought used. ‘I don’t know what half of those words mean. But I’ve armbarred him from closed guard seven Sundays in a row.’
Tiedemann, who has never watched an instructional video in his life and recently learned that you can pause Netflix by pressing the spacebar, confirmed that each of the seven armbars finished from the same closed guard entry within an average of 47 seconds.
‘I just grab the arm,’ Tiedemann said. ‘He’s always looking up at the ceiling like he’s trying to remember step four.’
Morrison, who rotates three identical vacuum-sealed gis on a weekly schedule tracked via a second Notion database, declined to comment on the losing streak when reached Sunday evening. He was in the middle of uploading his fourth full backup of his instructional library to a third separate cloud provider, at a combined annual cost of $480 — a figure that does not include his $6,412 in content purchases.
‘Redundancy is just responsible,’ Morrison said. ‘If one of these services goes down, I’d lose irreplaceable insight. Especially the three-minute segment in Hargrove’s half-guard footwork lecture where everything clicks.’
Morrison has never drilled the half-guard footwork he referenced.
He has, however, watched the three-minute segment 41 times.
Headwaters BJJ head instructor Ricky Delgado, a second-degree black belt who began training when Bill Clinton was still a second-term president, said he has tried for years to encourage Morrison to simplify his approach.
‘I asked Blake to demonstrate the armbar from guard at the Tuesday fundamentals class a few weeks back,’ Delgado said, rubbing his cauliflower ear with the resignation of a man who has rubbed it roughly 11,000 times. ‘He told me he was still, quote, tightening up the details. I said, Blake, I’ve seen you armbar in 2021. You did it fine. He said the field had evolved.’
Morrison arrived at the following open mat carrying a spiral notebook, which he placed on the edge of the mat and annotated between rounds using a system of red, blue, green, and black arrows that he has confirmed is legible only to him.
‘I asked him what the green arrow meant,’ said training partner Jenna Holcomb, a three-stripe white belt who works as a preschool teacher. ‘He said it was a reminder. I asked a reminder of what. He said he’d explain later. That was three weeks ago.’
Morrison’s girlfriend, Hannah Whitlock, 27, said she no longer asks how training went. She learned early in the relationship that the answer would include words like ‘frame,’ ‘connection,’ ‘ecological validity,’ and eventually a 14-minute unprompted summary of a podcast featuring a sports scientist she has never heard of.
‘He told me last week that his grappling has never been sharper,’ Whitlock said. ‘Then he came home with a black eye, a bruised rib, and Corey’s name written seven times on a notecard tucked inside his gi bag. I didn’t ask.’
At press time, Morrison was reviewing slow-motion footage of himself getting armbarred in last Sunday’s roll, scrubbing back and forth across a single four-second clip he had color-corrected, slowed to 40 percent, and uploaded to a private folder labeled ‘Research — Defensive Framing (Closed Guard) — Q2 Priority.’ He had annotated the clip with 19 voice memos, one of which, at the 2.3-second mark, is simply the word ‘hm.’
Reached Tuesday for a final comment, Morrison said he was considering a short break from buying new instructional content to ‘let the existing material really sink in.’ He said this while checking out of a $189 online workshop titled The Silent Mount: Passive Pressure Principles, which he had discovered twenty minutes earlier.
He told reporters he plans to watch it tonight.
Twice.