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.

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?

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.

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.

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.