My seventh ‘People Who Read People’ podcast episode is an interview with Robert Drysdale. Drysdale is a well-known Brazilian jiu-jitsu and mixed martial arts expert, champion, and trainer. If you’d like to know more about him, you can read his Wikipedia. He currently operates a training gym in Las Vegas: Drysdale Jiu-Jitsu.
Links to the episode:
In this episode, we talk about:
- Some basics about MMA and jiu-jitsu for people not familiar with those sports
- The importance of predicting opponent behavior in competitive fighting
- How mental visualization has always been something Drysdale has used to prepare for fights
- The importance of staying stoic before and during a fight
- How pre-fight behavior and facial expressions can give insight into fighters’ mental states, and maybe even predict a fight’s outcome
In this episode we talk about a few studies. Here those are:
- 2018 paper Karate: Emotions and Action Anticipation
- 2015 study: Human perception of fighting ability: facial cues predict winners and losers in mixed martial arts fights
- 2013 Scientific American write-up about predicting winners based on pre-fight pictures of smiles
- 2014 study about visualization helping improvement in sports (includes reference to Alan Richardson’s 1960s basketball study)
Here’s the YouTube video: