A long journey with jiu-jitsu

Over the past couple of weeks, I had to do some moving things around and had to go through some storage boxes to see what could be tossed out and I came across a few of my training journals from years ago.

For the hell of it, I thumbed through a couple just to see how much I have changed (a lot, needless to say) but what was really interesting and fun to me was finding the entry for my first formal Brazilian Jiu-jitsu lesson from someone who actually knew jiu-jitsu. It was April of 1989. I had heard and seen a bit of BJJ in the martial art magazines prior to that, and I had just started to hear these vague rumors of the “Gracie Challenge” and a video that supposedly showed some of said challenges, but April ’89 was the first true hands on, legit training in it. Since that time I have continually trained to some degree in jiu-jitsu without a break. So officially over the thirty year mark!

I can hear my Professor now as he reads this – “maybe someday you will actually get good at it” LOL

It kind of boggles my mind that it has been that long, but what boggles my mind truly is that I am still learning things almost every time I step on the mat. There is always a new technique, a new way of doing something old, a new training drill, or just a detail that I had overlooked in a simple move in the thirty years prior. Just last week I was in Chicago and was exchanging ideas with Larry Lindenman, and we each had a money guard pass that started off exactly the same, but the actual pass was different. I had never seen his, and he had never seen mine. We both over the next week started doing the other guy’s move and so even as black belts, I am still learning. Outside of marriage, I don’t know of another activity that I can say that about after four decades of constant working.

Another example of how people can miss little details is last night in the Fundamentals class, I taught the kimura armlock. One of the most essential and foundational – and arguably, one of the most quintessential – attacks in jiu-jitsu. I quite literally taught every important detail about the move, and I showed everyone exactly how I set it up, how I controlled it, and how I finished it. I let them work it for about 20 minutes. And then later in Advanced class, I tapped multiple people out with the kimura, doing everything exactly like I showed, and it still worked. Because I understood the little things like timing, pressure, leverage, mechanics, positional control, and they did not to my extent, so I could use the exact move to still do precisely what I showed them I would do. I love that! I was the oldest on the mat by at least 10+ years, and most of the students were closer to 20+ years younger than I am, but I could still do what I needed to do, all because of the little things, and the depth and breadth of experience. I certainly could not do that playing basketball, or lifting weights, or most any other physical act.

Besides the day I got married and the days my kids were born, finding jiu-jitsu was probably the best day of my life.

Gun Grapple :real world example

This is a tough video to watch, not so much for the actual outcome since the deputy came out alright, but for what could have been a far worse and more violent ending. However, it is an incredibly important video to view, because it so succinctly illustrates a point I have been screeching about for over fifteen years.

It does not matter who brings the gun to the fight. The person who controls the entanglement owns the gun. Period. It does not matter how fast or accurate you are, what kind of holster you run, or how awesome the gunsmithing that has been done to the pistol. None of that matters if you cannot win an entangled fight.

Watch how the deputy has zero control over what is going on. The criminal dictates every single thing that happens, including where it moves to, and when or if it goes to the ground. Then take careful note of when the deputy brings the pistol into the altercation, and how immediately the attacker snatches it away. The attacker had complete control and it was literally like taking candy from a baby. The deputy was utterly helpless. The only thing that saved her life was either luck that the gun malfunctioned , and that the attacker after he got the gun turned down his intensity and drive and seemed to slow down his movements and did not aggressively pursue her. The deputy had nothing else on her side because all she could do at that moment was run.

Think about this video the next time you hear someone say something along the lines of “if you try to wrestle me, I will just shoot you” or that the way to beat the jiu-jitsu practitioner or other grappler is to just get a weapon out. Would it have mattered what weapon was introduced there? Would a knife, a sap, or OC spray matter at all in that moment? The answer is simple. No, the outcome would have been the same. What gun-centric people fail to realize is that getting a weapon out is a fairly obvious thing in general, and if the other person is so dominating the fight that your only solution is to go to the tool, then they will see it with plenty of time to take advantage and assume the control of it. You may get it out and be able to use it. After all, the Hail Mary pass in football does work. Well, at least once in blue moon. Not exactly the kind of odds I prefer to stake my life on.

Self-defense tweak #7 – Pre-Fight

And now we come to the final installment of this series on tweaking your jiu-jitsu for functional self-defense and address the great weakness and missing element from the art. And that is the true lack of dealing with what I refer to as the pre-fight threat containment.

Before we get too much further, I want to pause a second and point out that this is not a jiu-jitsu problem. This is a problem that BJJ has in common with every other martial art, defensive shooting methodology, and even combatives/streetfighting systems. Too often, by too many instructors and experts, this topic is only covered in the most superficial way possible. It almost always starts and ends with a general admonition about “keeping your head on a swivel” and being situationally aware. And that is if it is even brought up at all! But that is completely facile advice if you do not teach how to implement that, and not show how to train it to make it an actionable skill set.

Even the combative or street focused arts rarely teach it. You see this constantly in the arts that love to focus on dubiously legal concepts like pre-emptive striking. How can you truly know if you are legally justified and tactically able to do something like that if you cannot articulate the signals that indicate it is appropriate? If you don’t know when it is time to launch that pre-emptive cycling hammerfist attack, then it is irrelevant how good you are at it. Being good at fighting does not equal in any way understanding when to fight.

What do we need to know here? We need to understand how criminals act, think, and operate. We need to know the best ways to get ourselves deselected as victims. We need the ability to recognize pre-assault indicators, as well as the most likely and most vulnerable locations where we can be attacked. We need the verbal agility to engage with the attacker and not fall prey to his well practiced lines that allow him to close with us. We need to be able to integrate that skill with proper movement because it does not matter if you have the verbal agility of a standup comedian if you stop moving when you talk. We should be able to de-escalate a potential violent situation and resolve it without having to fight. And there are a few other related skills along these lines, but suffice it to say that there are a number of important things that we should be good at so we never need to resort to any defensive ability.

Now, having gone over that, think for a moment on the last time you worked any of those skills in the last shooting course you took. Or the last time you were on the mats at your dojo. When was the last time you got together with some friends in a training group and worked on even one aspect of this? We all know the answer. Unless you have trained with a tiny handful of specific people, that answer is never.

So regardless of what discipline you come from, find the coursework and instructors who can rectify this, and make sure you have plugged it into whatever fighting methodology you count on to defend yourself, whether it is jiu-jitsu, or something else.

self-DEFENSE TWEAK #6 – “Submissions”

One of the final mental tweaks we have to make to ensure our jiu-jitsu is completely prepared for realistic self-defense is to understand what we mean when we talk about “submissions”.

Quite simply, there is no such thing as a submission. Every single finishing move we do is exactly that – a FINISHING move. It may be a choke that renders the other person unconscious within 2-5 seconds, or it may be an arm attack that snaps the elbow or dislocates the shoulder, or a leg attack that destroys the knee and leaves the opponent writhing in immense agony. It may very well be a slam to the earth that acts as the strongest strike possible, or a throw that does as much damage as a joint attack. The underlying principle is that we are able to do so much injury to the opponent that he will end his violent actions against us.

So what then are we doing in training? Obviously, we cannot do these things to our training partners, or we will be out of partners within the first session. What we do, in order to practice finishing techniques over and over so that we instill the automaticity we need to pull them off when we are in the middle of a chaotic criminal assault, is to do the move right up to the point of no return and no further. That point is signaled to us by our partner by “tapping out” – i.e. he taps our body or the mat at least three times quickly and loudly. At that moment, we can release the hold and discontinue our further forward movement. And then, both of you can go right back to it and try again.

The tap is nothing more than an admission by our partner that he can do nothing else, and if the training continues, he will be severely injured or go unconscious. We are not doing a move to get a tap! We are trying to do something overwhelming to the other guy and he lets us know that he concedes he is helpless and we CHOOSE to stop. This is a simple concept that anyone who has done jiu-jitsu for even a short period in a legitimate academy knows. It is instilled in you quickly since you are responsible for both the safety of your partner as well as yourself.

So why do I write this and take extra note of it? This is not for the BJJ practitioner, but rather for the guy who is about to start. And truthfully, it is a gentle way to let the interwebz combat and self-defense experts know that they are being as ignorant as children when they try to push the pathetic trope that somehow, if you do “sport” jiu-jitsu, that when you do it for real, the bad guy will tap and you will unconsciously release your hold only to find yourself at the criminal’s continued attack because he fooled you. There has never been one documented instance of that every happening anywhere. The self-defense gurus love to talk about such-and-such situation where someone did it, but they never seem to be able to produce video, police documentation, or even names. There is also the Krav Mage types who love the fake video of the guy doing an armbar in a parking garage and while he is holding the arm, the other guy pulls a knife and starts stabbing. Their “proof” it happens is a fake video! The actual version is this video will be the screaming of the bottom guy as his elbow is destroyed a soon as the top guy’s back hits the floor – about 1 second. Not only will he not have time to get a knife out and start stabbing, he won’t have time to make a move towards it, and even if he had started to draw before the break, he will do nothing but thrash around in abject pain as his whole world now revolves around the shattered bone and tendons.

Quite simply, it won’t happen with someone authentically training under the eye of a knowledgeable BJJ instructor. Every single attack in jiu-jitsu is taught from the beginning as a finish, and not a “hold”. Even in competition, both participants before a match are reminded that they should not release a lock until the referee tells them to, regardless of the other person tapping. It is in the IBJJF (International Brazilian Jiu-jitsu Federation) rulebook that you specifically DO NOT release just because you feel a tap. It is for the referee to decide.

So for the person contemplating a step in to the wonderful world of Brazilian Jiu-jitsu – Just keep in mind that we don’t look for submissions; we look for finishes.

Self-defense tweak #5 – SPECIFICITY of training

A lot of people in the jiu-jitsu community that want to push the self-defense aspect of our art like to quote the legendary Grandmaster, Carlson Gracie who once famously said “if you take a black belt, and punch him, he becomes a brown belt”. It is a good pithy phrase to get someone to consider that just because you can roll and spar does not automatically translate completely over to self-defense.

And it is true on a very, very superficial level. The problem is that people who like to quote this phrase forget to add the rest of what Carlson Gracie said. What he then said was that if had that same black belt spend a little time dealing with strikes, he stayed at a black belt level when he encountered them for real. That is a far, far cry from some damning admonition to not do competition jiu-jitsu. Carlson was a huge proponent of “sport” jiu-jitsu, and his team was considered the top one in the late 80’s and into the late 90’s. He loved it, and thought it was a vital component to being truly good at jiu-jitsu.

What he was trying to remind people was that you needed to have some specificity of training that you went through to make sure you could handle anything that came your way. If you never ever worked against the authentic energy of someone punching you, the sheer shock of it happening could derail your response. The first time you get a sense of what it feels like to get hit should not be when your life in on the line. The same goes for weapons. It is not a hard skill to build in the ability to actively monitor for someone trying to deploy a handgun or knife, unless the very concept has never crossed your consciousness until the moment when you are looking down the barrel of a pistol.

At some point, you need to work the concept in a physical manner until you build some familiarity with it. That does not mean you have to spend years only working grappling against weapons or strikes. The vast majority of our time can actually be spent in a healthy, fun, safe, and productive way by just doing our normal training that we generally do in the academy. Once you have got a real grasp on it (perhaps by doing a training course like Craig Douglas’ ECQC) just carve out a small percentage – say one hour for every 20-30 hours of “normal” training. This is enough to maintain proficiency and to keep the groove greased. This is especially true if you take into consideration all the little things I have already written about in this series. Maybe once a month, get together with a handful of training partners on a Sunday and do two or three hours of full on training with weapons, strikes, and even multiple opponents involved. The other two to three times a week can be left to your regular BJJ schedule.

Here is an example of working weapons concepts directly into a standard BJJ paradigm:

And just as I brought up in the article on the dangers of hyperfocusing, jiu-jitsu is not the only art that is guilty of not doing enough specific training. In actuality, the gun community is far worse because there is rarely any oppositional resistance of any kind. If we need to make sure our grappling has some direct experiential connection with weapons and strikes, shouldn’t our weapons work have some of the same with regards to the oppositional part?

self-defense tweak #4 – Stand up

As we discussed prior in this series, we need to have options for self-defense. We need to be able to select the right answer in the correct moment and not just stumble headfirst without thinking. Today I am going to talk about one specific option that is a classic part of fundamental jiu-jitsu, but one that sadly gets overlooked all too often. This option is to stand up and get to your feet.

There will be moments when staying engaged on the ground is not a good choice. It may be that we are suddenly about to face multiple actors who will jump in. It may be that the opponent starts striking and is able to hit us hard and continuously and we are unable to handle it in the entanglement. Perhaps the opponent produces a contact weapon such as a knife, and we can’t stop it and getting away and making big space becomes a really, really smart idea. However, it may be a situation where we have reached a stalemate with the ground fight, such as the possibility that the other guy has enough grappling skill (or enough disparity of physicality) that he negates what you are doing.

This last scenario is something that can occur in a typical sparring session at any jiu-jitsu academy in the world. I see it happen pretty much every single class. At least once, I will either see, or actually be involved in, this exact thing every day I train. I have heard my Professor yell “get up!” so many times over the past 25 years while watching students rolling and not being able to progress forward. Usually, the stalemate arises because the two people in it are peers and are evenly matched, or one person just happens to have a game that works against the other guy. I think it is a very human tendency to keep bulling ahead, regardless of the lack of success. It’s almost as if we are locked into the operating program loop.

The answer is to remove ourselves from the stalemate. Not as in running away, but in taking a step back and looking at other options, with getting back to our feet a very useful one. Once there, we may have more freedom or speed of movement, or we now have more space in which to move. If I am trying to pass his guard from the knees and I cannot, then standing may give me the ability to go in a direction that from the knees was not possible. Or if I am in side control and he is able to block my submission attacks, then standing may allow me to see another pathway to get the tap.

Here is one way to do so:

The mantra should be that we are ALWAYS looking to either:  a) sweep, b) submit, or c) stand up against any opponent at any time. Whichever of those three options gives us the best chance of success, we will take that. It is the height of foolishness to ignore one of those things. The more options we have to throw at an opponent and the more he has to worry about defending against, the more we have the chance for on e of those attacks to work. For self-defense, all we do is add d) strike, e) shoot/stab/smash or f) run like hell.

Here is a drill that is easily implemented that can help ingrain this response:

The tremendous advantage to practicing this is that it can be done in the jiu-jitsu context with no one being the wiser and I am also practicing my ability to stand up and disengage from the fight and getting away. It is a win-win ; I improve my capability of self-preservation in the street and I get to have a damn fine option on the mat.

Self-defense tweak #3 – Options

In the previous article, I wrote about the absolute need to not hyper focus only on the single attacker that is in front of you and that you know about. As I said, that is to ensure that you can see other things going on around you and allows your brain to make other cognitive actions. Today we will go into more depth about why we need that ability, because that allows us to exercise the best option to survive and win against the violent criminal offender.

As I mentioned before, one of the dangers or hyperfocusing is that we get mentally locked into a single answer to the problem. In the specific case of using Jiu-jitsu for self-defense, we need to keep in mind that yes, in some contexts, entangling with an attacker and even taking them to the ground may be the single best answer. It may also be the single worst answer. It all depends on context. If we turn all of our attention to the single opponent in front of us, we may miss the second attacker coming up from behind who hits us when we are not prepared. Or we may miss the signal that our opponent is going for a weapon that he is carrying and he starts shooting or stabbing. Or we may miss that the police have pulled up and all they see is us on top of another person and they interpret things to mean that we are the aggressor and we end up getting arrested.

If we miss these signals, and keep trying to choke him out or break a limb, we may miss the moment when we should have done something else. That something else may be just pinning the other guy so he cannot move or continue the attack. Or it may be that we need to get up and run away from the situation. Or that we should not go to the ground at all. We need to have multiple options to maximize our chance to preserve our lives and well being.

Arguably, we need more options than just pure Jiu-jitsu, such as possibly using tools ourselves. The tool may begin and end at pepper spray, or it may include knives, small impact weapons such as saps, and might very well include firearms. However, these extra options are a bit outside the specific scope of this series, so suffice it to say that the more options we have, the better the chance we select the right one.

Self-defense Tweak #2 – The danger of hyperfocusing

The next thing we need to address with our Jiu-jitsu when we are discussing self-defense is the danger of hyper focusing.

What do I mean by this? To put it simply, this is the very understandable concentration of the threat in front of you to the exclusion of all else. This is not odd; it is simply the general way our minds work even when things are normal. Our brains function best as uni-taskers, where we can focus our thoughts and actions on a specific and directed task. Under life and death pressure, especially when it comes on suddenly, is it any wonder that this will happen even more forcefully?

Many people who have studied how to survive violence have found this over and over again. It goes by different names – Massad Ayoob has written for decades about this as part of the “body alarm reaction”, but regardless of how we refer to it, it is the same concept – you are only thinking of the interactive actions between you and the immediate aggressor.

In our framework of jiu-jitsu, this will genially involve the defender dealing solely with what is happening right in front of him, and probably cause us to treat it the same as if we were on the mats in the academy, when the only other thing that can affect us if other students rolling nearby collide with us. This is incredibly dangerous! Not only do we have to make sure that we are not attacked by other parties while engaged, we also need to make sure we do not ignore things like the police arriving and giving us commands that we do not hear. Needless to say, they don’t react well when that happens and they don’t automatically know who the good guy is.

We also have to keep in mind that just staying entangled with someone (even if we are “winning”) may not be the best idea in a given context. This principle will be addressed in another part of this series but suffice it to say that our brains cannot be mentally locked into just the grappling situation we find our self in to be able to look for different options. Like a computer program stuck in a continuous cycle of operation, it may need a system reboot to find a better path.

And just as with the concept of arm control, we already have a decent way to instill the idea of not letting ourselves get hyper focused by what we are already doing in the academy on a daily basis. One of the things I make sure of every class I am in, I always know what is happening off the mats. It is a simple matter of knowing when someone comes in the front door, or walks to the back and into the locker room or bathroom. Or when one of the students steps off the mat and sits down on the side. Very basic things like that. I don’t ah veto do anything about any of them, and it does not change what I am doing while rolling with my partner, it is just a simple and easy way to build a general rather than a hyper focus. If someone comes out of the locker room and I did not realize that person was in there, I mentally put a negative check mark on my ledger. The goal is to rarely have to make that mark. It is not hard, nor does it have to be obvious to anyone else.

One of the things to keep in mind however, is that this is not a jiu-jitsu centric problem. Not at all. It is a problem across the board with all “specialties” whether that specialty is grappling, striking, knife, or gun. And the self-defense people reading this better not be getting smug In truth, we are more likely to see it come up with people who come from the gun world. In that world, authentic oppositional training is rare, and in addition, there is already an overwhelming tendency to see the firearm as a magic talisman/luck rabbit’s foot/Harry Potter wand, and just having or producing the gun will lead to a positive outcome, and so this leads to truly massive failures in force-on-force training time after time. At this point, I have seen tens of thousands of these drill evolutions and I cannot begin to count the gun person desperately trying to introduce a weapon when the good answer was to do anything but that. Hyperfocusing only on the immediate and automatic can get you killed.

You may come up with other “games” to accomplish the same goal, but however you do it, don’t ever let yourself get lazy and only see the person on the mat entangled with you.

Tweaking jiu-jitsu for self-defense pt.1

I am continually amused by people who don’t know anything about Brazilian Jiu-jitsu attempt to try to talk about why it is a bad choice for self-defense. Even with the easily discovered legion of actual video and even more legion of documented non-video reports of real world success, these critics tend to have substantial cognitive dissonance. Unfortunately, they are so vocal that they have even convinced some jiu-jitsu people of their arguments. This is sad, and misguided. With one single exception (and one in which I will write about in the final part in this series), what we need to do to successfully use jiu-jitsu to defend ourselves is already internally physically contained within the art. All that we really need are a few mental tweaks to make sure we are doing what we need to be doing. Rather than hoard that information I want to get it out as widely and as public as I can, in order for as many good guys have access to these concepts and can utilize them to keep themselves and their loved ones safe.   I am going to write a multi-part series of posts showing all jiu-jitsu practitioners the handful of minor mental adjustments they need to make to be able to rely on their own methods to protect themselves and their loved ones.

I kick off the series today with the single most important physical action we need to take, and our first line of defense. And that is active control, or at the very least active monitoring, of the opponent’s arms.

In a self-preservation situation, where striking and/or weapons may be involved, I cannot let my opponent have freedom to use his arms. Period and end of story. Any damaging thing he can do to me has to emanate from his arms.  Even if I am on the bottom of side control or the mount, I still need to be active in monitoring it as best as I am able. I need to have the shot at preventing him from deploying a weapon, or setting an opportunity up to start throwing bombs; or if the weapon comes out, to be able to keep him from using it in the manner he wants to.

This element has to be ingrained in us from day one, and it must be constantly reinforced so it becomes as subconscious and as automatic as possible. If we ignore it, or dismiss it as “just something else to worry about” , then we underplay how crucial arm control is to our very survival. If you takeaway nothing else from this series of articles, please absorb that one.

Here is what is so funny about this principle – we already need to do this all the time in our normal jiu-jitsu practice! This is not wishful thinking in any way. It is simple fact.

Think about it. If he is trying to pass my guard, what is the main weapon he is using? What if he is trying to sweep me? Or if he is trying to escape from a bottom position? What about when he has superior position and he is working for a submission? What if I am on top and working for my submission? Don’t I need to have some control over his hands? If not, he can block that submission all day long, or work an escape/reversal while I am focused on the attack. His hands/arms are going to be the main driver in anything he can do in opposition to me. No matter what is happening, he needs his hands to do the majority of it, which means I have to obtain some control over them. Don’t take my word for it. Go watch high level grapplers who are successful over and over again. Watch something such as the 2015 match between Roger Gracie and Comprido. Note how Roger controls Comprido’s limbs as soon as possible, and how it leads to the eventual win by choke. You will be able to see this in your own academy any night of the week. The dominant wins will happen when one person controls the hands of the other person. Every single time.  

So if that is the case, why do we so often slip up, to include great champions? Because in anything we normally do – regular training, heavy duty sparring, competition, and even MMA – the penalty for failure is not that bad. If we tap in a roll in class, then we restart, slap hands and go again. In a tournament, we lose and the tournament is over for us, but there will be another one soon where we can try again. Even in MMA, the worst that happens is a knockout, but even that is not so bad. We still have a career in fighting again (usually) and we still essentially have our health – even if we have some trauma after for a few days. With such a fairly low penalty for screwing up, it is treated as not so bad and we can easily develop a bad mental scar of shrugging off the mistake of letting the other guy have freedom with his arms. The problem arises in that the consequence of that same exact failure in a self-preservation scenario quite literally is death or massive and/or permanent bodily injury. That is not something we can shrug off, and therefore it has to permeate our fundamental mental approach at all times in training.

Does this mean every moment we train we must do it like it is life or death? Of course not, life does not work that way, and training in just such a manner will lead to injury and mental or emotional burnout.  After a long tough day at work, maybe when we get to the BJJ academy we will need to be more relaxed and less intense on occasion. That is no problem at all as long as we keep it in mind what we are doing and why – FOR THAT MOMENT ONLY – it is okay to slide. We cannot let it become an every time approach. Keep those stakes in mind, and let that be ever present.

This is an incredibly simple concept, but it is monumentally crucial, and we need to treat it accordingly. We don’t need to add or change any of our physical actions on the mat, but keep the principle in mind always.

Jiu Jitsu | pugilism | edged weapons | contact pistol