Ryan Hall is a bjj black belt under Felipe Costa and one of the best featherweights around. His competitive pedigree is matched only by his teaching credits – you will seldom meet anyone who hasn’t relied heavily on a Ryan Hall instructional at one time or another.

Additionally Hall was a part of Ultimate Fighter season 22 which he won. He last fought Conor McGregor sidekick Artem Lobov back in December of 2015 and won via decision.

Hall’s MMA record stands at 5-1 and he’s got a fight scheduled against Gray Maynard slated for the The Ultimate Fighter 24 finale (December 3rd 2016).

Hall recently talked the evolution of grappling with mmafighting’s Luke Thomas (podcast embedded below):

On Mount being a lost art: 

I think that mount has been a lost art for a long time. In competitive jiu-jitsu, it was something only a few people really had a handle on and it being a lost art was almost a common sentiment even 6-8, 10 years back.

As positions have evolved and rules have changed, behaviors change. Speaking personally, I have a great deal of interest in how rules structures and incentive structures affect behavior. When I see Roger Gracie – who is a master of the mounted position – when you look at Rickson Gracie, Demian Maia in mixed martial arts, and he’s obviously an incredibly strong positional grappler – there are guys who have these positions really dialed in. I think it’s been going away for some period of time and I don’t envision it making a comeback, honestly.

On the priorities changing in the Guard vs Pass duality given the new found popularity of sub only:

One of the things we have to note about the sub-only matches – not all the sub-only matches, of course, because you get some very high-level people – is it’s B-level grapplers competing against other B-level grapplers or B-level grapplers competing against an A-level grappler. You don’t see really, truly high-level positional dominance until you get to the A+ level of control. Mistakes are made – technical, strategic, tactical. Sub only has taught us some really valuable lessons in pointing out some holes that always existed, but we have to guard against the possibility of regressing and becoming as dogmatic in our new view that this is the thing as we were initially.

Look how long it took, frankly, most of the Gracie jiu-jitsu types to become traditional martial artists. They were the leading, cutting edge of, ‘Hey, this is the new stuff. You guys need to learn it.’ Now, they’re obsessed with what their path was and saying this and that’s not the real jiu-jitsu. It’s more of a mentality than anything else that’s either growth oriented or not.

On Demian Maia:

When Demian Maia mounts you for the first time, it’s not like being mounted by somebody else. He’s dealt with great, high levels of opposition and they haven’t.

People could go through the challenges of learning how to control from the mount, but the reality is they’d have to go through jiu-jitsu in order to learn that skill at a high level because classical jiu-jitsu is guard versus pass. Even now, that’s disappearing. When you go sub only, it’s no longer guard versus pass because the amount of investment, time and energy that is takes to, one, develop that skill and two, use it in a match, is disproportionate when you consider the return on investment you can get from doing something like a foot lock.

On Wrestling and How Jiu-Jitsu rules have neutered it:

Certain people’s wrestling is better than ever, but in a lot of cases it’s worse than ever. Again, as much as you can avoid wrestling under certain circumstances in almost everything other than ADCC, when you compete in jiu-jitsu now in sub only, wrestling has been effectively neutered.

It looks to me like I’d have been borderline impossible to beat in sub only. Not impossible, but just on this side of it. It changes the nature of everything. I’m really glad that I had the losses I did and the frustrations I did because it forced me to learn all sorts of things that I might not have otherwise had to learn if the opponents that I couldn’t make play my game at the time were forced to engage me on my terms.

To listen to the entire amazing conversation with hall press play below: