The text of the September 2009 post
BJJ is the latest craze MA to get involved with and people have been rushing to take classes and seminars.
I myself first got involved about 1997 when carlos Gracie first came to the UK for his seminars. At the time some of the old Judo Sensei were telling us we didn't need BJJ as everything they were teaching, which seemed "new" was already in Judo.
Not only did this turn out to be true, but Judo is actually a far more effective combat system.
Judo is distilled from Jujutsu, so the hrows can be practiced safely and in real time. Gene LeBell, famously named "The Toughest Man Alive", and one of the few people ever to defeat Bruce Lee in a match fight was Judoka and a wrestler. He came up with the iconic maxim "A man can take a kick or a punch. But can he take being dumped on his head?"
So it is with contact grappling. We know from boxing, KB and Thai that fights often end up in a clinch. Thai is the only striking art to properly address this with it's use of the knee.
Judo starts with vertical grappling and is all about throwing the opponent.
In karate a point is scored if the technique would have been enough to finish the opponent had the fight been real and the strike landed with real force.
In Judo the point is scored when the opponent's shoulders hit the mat. In practice the uke breakfalls safely. In combat the throw would have been enough to finish the fight.
Randori is Judo's "throw sparring". Shiai is competition. In a Judo grading, a student has to fight at each belt level to pass to the higher grade. When you meet a Judo Black Belt, you know he's really earnt it!
This is something that has been sadly missing from karate, with the exception of kyukushinkai, and something we have re-introduced at Shiro Tora. Here, technical knowledge is not enough, you have to be able to apply it in real time under pressure. "If you see it taught, you see it fought"!
Newaza, Judo's ground grappling method is very much a secondary element. It is for IF the fight goes to the floor with no point being scored with the throw. It doesn't assume that it naturally will.
You can win if you pin your opponent to the mat for a count, as you can in wrestling.
In submission grappling, both in Judo, wrestling, and BJJ, the opponent must tap out when you apply a choke or lock. In combat there would be no tap out, you would choke the opponent unconscious or break the arm.
The theory that "95% of all fights go to the ground" has been proven satistically to be a falesy. It is true that a mismanaged fight will go to vertical grappling RANGE, but the proper use of HKE and throws will end the fight there. The opponent may go to the ground, but you don't have to go down with him and roll around the floor looking for a submission.
Judo newaza is basic and effective, and it's quite sparse in the kyu grades.
So those who don't stick with Judo once they have their Black Belt, much like those who never take an advanced driving lesson after they've learnt to drive, don't ever do the dan grade newaza and never learn what the Judo Sensei have been telling us about how much more there is in Judo newaza
BJJ starts with groundgrappling, it's where you start your training. You don't learn to throw til much later. It's really not much different from Judo, as we've been told, it just has a different starting point.
BJJ is incredibly detailed from day one in it's examination of newaza, much the same way as boxing is with punching.
BJJ get good at "rolling" very quickly, the same way as Judoka do at randori and boxers do at, well, boxing.
Of course, looking at street combat, BJJ would stand you in good stead should the fight end up there.
However the fight won't start there. You have to go through kick and punch and vertical grappling phase to get there.
It's also the last place you actually want to end up in a street fight, rolling around on concrete while his mate kicks you in the head.
So for real combat, Judo would be a far more comprehensive system to learn than BJJ.
If a student asked me where to go for supplemental grappling I'd always say go for Judo. I wouldn't say avoid BJJ, just don't choose it over Judo. If you can do both, great, but if you can only choose one, choose Judo.
In the early UFCs Royce Gracie showed us the remarkable effectiveness of BJJ, taking his opponents to the floor and finishing them all there, winning the first two events outright.
However, when concerned with street self defence, when fights don't start from the floor, and you really don't want to go there if possible, a lot of people are looking once again to Judo to deal with things if the striking ranges collapse and you end up in vertical grappling.
Judo is a far more effective self defence system than most people realise. (But then so is rugby, in fact it was invented by the army to teach soldiers unarmed combat.) Gene LeBell, once named "The Toughest Man Alive" and one of the few people ever to defeat Bruce Lee in a match fight, was a Judoka as well as a wrestler. He came up with an iconic maxim that defines grappling for combat:
"A man can take a kick or a punch. But can he take being dumped on his head?"
The effectiveness of Judo lies in this statement. Perform a Judo throw, one that would have resulted in an ippon had it been on the mat, to a street attacker on concrete, and the fight will be over.
When the UFC started it was style vs style. As the grapplers dominated the early events, strikers realised they had to learn to grapple. However, doing a few months or even a few years of grappling did not make one able to beat somebody who had done it all their life. What was needed was to find ways to not be taken down by the grappler and for the fight to finish standing with a KO. This is what we started to see happen. Wrestlers, Judoka and JuJutsu men started getting knocked out by strikers, especially Thai boxers who weren't afraid to get in a clinch and use the knee. Then there was TaeKwonDo expert Mark Weir who could manage the long range and knock grapplers out with a head kick.
LeBell's famous argument now had a conjecture.
"A good grappler can take being dumped on the mat. But can he take a full on leg kick from a Thai boxer? Can he take being punched full in he face by a boxer?"
It was like when kickboxing first started. Originally we had karateka who learnt to box and boxers who had learnt to kick. As KB evolved, we had new styles developed for this kind of event. So it was for MMA, and now we have MMA training studios and people who have only ever trained this way and for this kind of event.
The 2012 addition comment:
3 years after I first wrote this there has been a lot of development but the underlying message is still the same.
We do mat days and it is fun to "roll", just as it is good to put on the gloves and box
But anyone can learn to fight on mats - if you can't do it on the wood you can't do it on the streets
So most of our newaza, our ground training, is done deliberately on the wood so you learn it on hard surface
Also the first thing you learn in the Guard series is punch defence - and you learn it on the hard floor with an opponent wearing boxing gloves really trying to hit you
only THEN do you worry about the guard submission series
and half the Guard series is the sweeps - how to sweep to the Mount from stage 1, or get a stage 4 standing opponent to the floor so you can stand up
All the standing dumog applies on the ground as do the kempo strike options - we never "change gears" and just grapple against another grappler, unless we're doing rolling on mat day for specific isolation
