Anytime I hear or read about someone talking about the supposed difference between self-defense oriented BJJ and competition oriented BJJ, I throw up a little in my mouth. Rather than write a lot to explain why, I will show you why I have that perspective. Watch this:
What kind of jiu-jitsu was that? Self-defense? Or sport?
Here is the answer – yes, to both. It is just jiu-jitsu, the way it has been
trained for 90+ years.
This was how I practiced for years with Professor Megaton
Dias. This video was filmed around 1994 and most of it was shot in the old Boys
and Girls club backroom south of Bethany Home Road. No windows, no A/C, and not
much mercy from the instructor! Please tell me what parts of that were sport
only, or were self-defense only. You won’t be able to, because Jiu-Jitsu encompasses
all of it.
BJJ is like guitar playing. If you can truly play the
guitar, then you can play different things without a problem. It does not take
much to play a hard rock riff or solo like Eddie Van Halen, or a jazz line like
Pat Metheny, or a classical part like Andres Segovia if you are already good at
guitar playing and understand the underlying principles. It is all guitar. The
techniques to play one of those are fundamentally the same as one of the
others. You may certainly concentrate on one, and not pay much attention to the
others, but that is solely on the individual, not the methodology or system.
Further, look at the video again. Note how part of it was
filmed at a local karate school that Mega gave a workshop at. Look at the
flooring. Carpet, not mats, and thin carpet at that, laid directly on concrete.
But wait! That must mean the jiu-jitsu cannot work, because there are no mats.
And yet, there they are, doing the techniques with no issue. We also sparred with
all the lights off, and sparred in the parking lot. We even had Vale Tudo
Friday nights, where we put on gloves and trained.
Note also that how we generally ended up on the ground – by
being taken there. No guard pulls, no starting on the knees. We fought for the
takedown and continued the fight. And you see the results – that often the
fight is ended right away within seconds. THAT is Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
So please forgive me when people who have quite literally never ever spent one minute on BJJ mats try to tell me how my art is not about true “fighting”. And all that is why I just laugh when people who have never trained tell me that “fighting on the ground will get you killed in the street”.
I posted this a couple of years ago, but I want to revisit
it because it is a topic that unfortunately keeps coming up.
There is current mantra being circulated in BJJ circles that
essentially tries to demonize someone for pulling guard. The thought goes that
if you are just pulling guard, you are missing a substantial part of Jiu-Jitsu
and are taking the lazy path. Don’t misunderstand me, I am all for working the
takedown and being on top and I absolutely despise the current trend
(especially in the lighter weight divisions) of someone just dropping their
butt to the ground to start the match. I think being on top is an optimal place
to be, whether in competition or for self-defense. However, optimal does not
mean “100% of the time”. There are extremely good reasons to at times pull
guard, and I go over them in the following re-posted article. Please try to
keep in mind that context is king (as I regularly try to get across).
Here is the original article:
Recently, on the Strenuous Life Podcast by Stephen Kesting,
he talked about a question that often is argued in BJJ circles – should you pull guard in competition? He and his guest spent a bit of time on it and covered a few things pretty well (though the guest really needs to get some depth of experience with realistic self-defense because he missed the mark completely there), but I think they completely skipped over the single most pertinent answer to that question. And that leaves me to give it a shot.
Should you pull guard in competition? Of course you should, IF THE CONTEXT SAYS IT IS THE BEST RESPONSE. That goes for street oriented self-preservation tactics as well. So what is the context?
If pulling guard gives you a more optimal way to win, then that is the correct context. It is a simple mantra, yet one that seems to be overlooked most of the time the idea is brought up, but it is the only real reason to have any particular move in your arsenal. No move of any kind, standing or ground, works every time, so we need to make sure that the move we choose has the best chance to lead us to victory.
What are examples of the context? The most obvious is when you are sure your opponent is substantially better at takedowns that you are. If you are facing someone who is superior there, why would you try to match his strength? Just because some fighting expert said we should always look to execute the takedown and end up in control? Great idea, but against someone better than that, what is the chance it will work for us?
Check out this video compilation of a person going up against superior Judo players and using a guard pull strategy to negate their advantages:
Case in point. A couple of years ago at the IBJJF Pan-Ams, in my first round match, I was going up against a guy who I found out was once a member of an Eastern European Olympic Judo Team. Now, I think I have some decent takedown skills that have worked for me, and I certainly train them on a constant basis in order to get even better at them, but come on! What were my chances of ending up in a good position if I fought an Olympic level judoka for a throw? The answer is slim to none, and slim already left town. Most likely I would have ended up at least two points down and in an inferior bottom position. Instead of wasting time, and/or getting thrown by fighting him on his strengths, I took another path. I got both good grips, and pulled him hard into my closed guard where I was immediately was able to get an overhook on one arm and grab part of his far collar with the overhooking hand. I went straight into an excellent position and ended up winning the match (I lost later in the finals, but that is a story for another day). I am still waiting for someone to say that was a poor strategy.
Think about it with a good critical eye. Jiu-jitsu is about using your opponent’s strengths and attacks against him. Going head to head in opposition to his strengths are the exact opposite of that mindset. It makes zero sense.
What about in a self-defense context? Exactly the same focus! If pulling guard can lead to a faster and surer way to win (i.e. survive and prevail against a violent attacker). Then that is what we should do. For example, if you are being attacked by a bigger, stronger criminal, and you are on ground that is unstable or slippery, are you really going to be able to turn into your pet koshi-guruma without ending up falling over with your feet coming up from under you? What of you knew with almost absolute certainty that your attacker knew almost nothing about the ground? How well is he going to be able to defend when you pull him into your guard and then immediately transition into an armbar? In actual fact, my own coach did that when he was assaulted once on the street about 1997. He did essentially a version of a guard pull that resembled a failed yoko-tomoe-nage and as soon as they hit the ground he shifted to a straight armbar and broke the attacker’s arm. Guess who stopped fighting at that moment? I will give you three guesses, and all three should be gimmes.
Why not exactly “street”, here is a guard pull in an MMA context where the grappler negated the striker’s superiority by taking him a different part of the pool:
(skip to the :50 second mark to see the guard pull, and note how after that the grappler had the edge in controlling what was going on. Something that probably could not have been said if the grappler had stayed standing against the striker)
Make no mistake about what I am saying and please don’t put words in my mouth. I am not advocating guard pulls 100% of the time. I am advocating to have the skill set and experience to be able to choose in the moment what is the path that gives you the best chance of success.
Within the last few days, I have been reading a number of
online posts as well as having some private discussions through email, text,
and PMs with people all roughly about the same thing. There are a good amount
of people out there putting in effort to be better, safer and more dangerous
but stumble along the way.
Whether someone feels like they are not training as much as
someone else they read or hear about online, or if they did a competition of
some kind and don’t do as well as they hoped, or they took a tough training
course and got wrecked, or shot some hard drill and put the result up publicly,
they use a lot of negative talk. “I really got my butt handed to me in that
class”, or “I let my team down by my performance in that tournament”, or “I
will never be as good as –fill in the blank- because I just am not as dedicated
in my training as he is” are typical statements.
Here is my statement to all of you talking like this – STOP IT.
NOW.
Stop wasting thoughts on “if only”s , or that you are not
good enough, or that you do enough. If you are authentically doing the work and
putting honest effort in, regardless of how much time you are spending doing
it, you are winning! Being honest to the problem and trying to do something about
it is the win. Everything else is just the process result. The journey is the
win, not what comes at the end, because in our quest to become more
capable/safer/dangerous, there is no end state. We keep on keeping on, and take
pride in the blood, sweat, tears, money, and time we put in. Nothing else is worth
worrying about.
And STOP COMPARING yourself to others. Your journey is yours
and yours alone. So what if I put in more mat time than you? Or that Paul Sharp
shoots more than you? O that Larry Lindenman or Chris Fry or Craig Douglas has
been working real world fighting material longer than most of you have been
adults? Or that Jouko Ahola spends more time lifting weights than you do? Or
so-and-so has better genetics/more time/more money/easier access to training?
None of that matters. You are not in competition with any of
them, nor do you need to measure yourself against any of them. Hell, you are
not even in competition with that violent criminal actor out there waiting to
do harm to you. You have no control over that. The only thing you can control,
which means it is the only thing you need to compare yourself to, is the you of
yesterday. The only question to ask is “am I better than I was yesterday?” If
the answer is yes, even if you are only 1/100th of one percent
better, than you are wining. Period.
To sum up, please listen to this. If you are actively,
honestly working to be better than you were yesterday, you are doing great. Pat
yourself on the back for a second, and then put your nose back to the
grindstone. And stop belittling what you are doing.
This video provides some interesting insight into an aspect of criminal assaults that often gets overlooked.
I am not going to cover the situational awareness aspect of this. My dear friend William April of April Risk Consulting does a terrific job of that for this incident on his Instagram page. Read his wise words here:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BuPmlGqHD_1/
What I want to talk about here is the lack of efficacy of
the attack. This is a perfect storm for the bad guy. He has all the time he
wants to set up his attack, he is able to initiate completely from behind, and
the victim is totally clueless to what is going on even after the first stab.
And the result? Not that much! Multiple stabs in the back, and the victim
appears to have been almost unaffected.
This is an excellent view into the reality of a knife attack, and it gives us great observation into using a knife for self-defense. Too many pro-knife instructors blithely advocate techniques that are not that far off from how this bad guy is using his blade. The typical knife that can be carried for most people in the modern world is going to have a blade length of 4 inches and less, which if you look at the knife used in this attack and compare, the knife we will have is essentially smaller. Using something like that is categorically light years away from using a giant Bowie knife or Japanese wazi-kashi. Assuming that the effects from a big blade translate to a much, much smaller blade is foolish in the extreme. As well, thinking that with a small knife you are going to penetrate deeply enough with a slash to reach tendons and ligaments is just as wrong-headed. With the stabs done in this video, there was not much damage done, so what will be actually accomplished with a slash that by definition cannot go as deep?
This is not a putdown of using a knife in the
self-protection mode. Not at all. In fact, I am a strong advocate for just
that. But we have to be realistic in our approach, and we cannot arbitrarily
think we can just swing or stab away to get the job done. We have to have a specific
tactical plan of action that is supported by concurrent techniques, along with
some dedicated pressure testing and drilling to make sure we can pull it off on
demand. And always have the idea that it could fail and that we need back up plans.
Anything less is going through life with big blinders on.
This viral vid has attracted a lot of commentary, and most
of it centers around either the fact that it shows how poor situational
awareness leads to bad outcomes, or if she had only been armed to fight back.
I don’t disagree with either of those, but that is not what
I want to focus on. Rather, let’s look at a well worn trope that is often
thrown out there. There are a number of pithy phrases that get trotted out in
the tactical self-defense world and one of them is that if you cannot use your
firearm, than just “run away”. Like most of these tropes, it sounds good in
shorthand, and it appeals to our sense of simplicity. But how does it work in
real life? Well, when people talk like that, it is usually from the safety of
their keyboard when they are nice and comfortable, and also when there are no
issues in the way, such as injury or illness, or particular circumstance. The reality
is shown by this video. She tries to run away. She abandons her purse and tries
to flee. How well does that work? Not at all. One of the attackers is more
physically capable and easily runs her down. Note that she is on a flat surface
with no obstructions and does not hesitate to start to run, and yet it is all
for naught. She is caught and thrown violently around. She is lucky that these
criminals were only interested in her property, and not her, because she was
helpless.
My point is not that running away is bad or useless. My point is that we as a community must step away from the simplistic and deal with real answers to keep people safe. Don’t settle for glib advice. Look at the real world, and how things can actually happen, and start to plan for those worst case scenarios.
Every time someone promotes any grappling in a
self-defense context, the same insipid, moronic comment is trotted out “you will
get your head kicked in by his buddy”. This is on the same level as “ma booger
hook” for intelligence quotient. This video amply demonstrates why context
matters and there is no hard and fast, black/white rule. It was the grappler
who had someone essentially helping and the non-grappler who was outnumbered.
This is life. You may be flying solo, but you may also often have people by
your side. Well, you do if you are not a keyboard warrior who spends more time
on the ‘net in his mother’s basement that is. In that case, you probably won’t
be going out on the town with a friend.
Note the complete and utter domination of the
grappler. The other guy literally cannot do anything. He is as helpless as a
baby. Note also that he is not particularly smaller than the grappler, nor is
he physically frail or weak, but it is irrelevant. The grappler has zero problems
doing whatever he decides to do. THIS is the reality that non-grapplers fail to
grasp. They will pontificate about how they can eye gouge, or hit the balls, or
access a weapon while the “sport grappler” is doing his thing when the truth is
they will be controlled and their actions will be completely dictated by the
experienced grappler. Find a moment in that video when the non-grappler had any
realistic chance to do any of the typical counter moves advocated by some
people. Hint: you won’t find it.
For all that he did right, the grappler had an
ENORMOUS mindset failure. William April continually harps on the fallacy of
projecting your world view on others. Here is a perfect example of why that is
dangerous. The grappler obviously felt the fight was over. The other guy
however, thought otherwise. This is not a mistake that is limited to grapplers.
Most people fall into this. That is why we need to study and understand how
criminals think as well as act. Do not fall into the trap of thinking that the
fight is over until you have made sure it is over
I don’t give a flying bag of monkey crap how good you are
when you have had a couple of hours to warm up, are doing it by yourself, have
no impartial judge to watch, and pick and choose your performance examples. If
you think that showing the results of a drill that you shot 23 times before recording
is equivalent to a guy performing cold and on demand in public to someone else’s
standard and judgment, then you are an idiot. Shot a sub 5 second FAST but
never seem to show up to a class where you can actually try for a coin? Cool
story dude.
If you are the guy who
loudly proclaims that some NFL QB sucks, and you go on to say that he should have
checked off the first receiver and thrown to the third guy, but have not yourself
touched a football since you were a scrub water bearer in high school, you are
an idiot.
If you tell everyone at Buffalo Wild Wings that some UFC
fighter sucks and that he should have had a smarter game plan for the match, but
always seem to have some excuse about why you don’t train, you are an idiot.
If you tell a black belt that has been actively teaching BJJ
since 2004 that the t-shirt choke he shows will never work, but then fail to
show up to a seminar (at no charge done in your area) to show in person why
that is true, you are an idiot.
If you tell everyone that you have an unstoppable guard
pass, but somehow never seem able to go to a competition in which you would
obviously take the gold, then you are an idiot.
If you tell the world that BJJ guys are vulnerable to “dirty tactics” and don’t know how to deal with them, but when you are invited publicly to multiple BJJ schools to demonstrate that in person and you strangely go silent? Here is your idiot ribbon.
If you cannot perform cold, on demand, on someone else’s timeframe
and for public consumption, then your critique is as valid as your performance.
Zero.
If we are concerned with true real world self-defense, then
our standard of performance, and the final arbiter of that, has to be what we
can do when we are not prepared. As world renown firearms trainer Tom givens
has noted, self-defense is a come as you are affair. Is it important to train hard
and track our progress? Of course, because doing so pushes the envelope of what
we can do, and therefore gives us a better upper end of our individual spectrum,
but at the end of the day, it is what we can do when the balloon goes up that
matter. Don’t tell me what you can do on your best day. Show me what you can do
when you are sick, tired, injured, etc. And don’t insult those who do focus on
that and show their performances that reflect that.
This is an interesting video to me for a lot of reasons,
because it so simply illustrates how so many simple self-defense community
tropes are incredibly foolish.
Now, before I take a look at this, understand something. I am not going to comment at all on what the police officers should be doing prior to the start of this video. LE tactics and procedures as it relates strictly to LE work is beyond me and whatever lane I have some knowledge of. I refuse to go into those areas that I am not familiar with just because I am considered a subject matter expert is some other vaguely related area. Too many people make that mistake, and I will not be one of them.
So, with that proviso, let’s look at what stands out to me about
this video.
The first bullet point is the sucker punch. There is a continuing bleating in the tactical/self-defense community about not going to the ground in a street fight, mostly because you will get stomped and KOed by other attackers. While I agree that is a definite danger, the issue I have with that statement is the implied part that being on your feet makes it easy to deal with multiple attackers. The simple fact is that the position is not the problem, but being hyperfocused in the position is. Note that the officer was standing, and had plenty of room on level ground to move. And it did not matter one single bit. He got hyperfocused on the person he was helping to arrest and got hit. Also note that it actually was not multiple attackers against a single defender. It essentially is two attackers versus two defenders! Even numbers and it still went bad, even on their feet and upright. Also note that the cops were well aware that there were a lot of people standing around, and they still failed the awareness test. Take a look at slow the second bad guy comes into the fight before he throws a punch. He was taking a lot of time and there were ample chances for just one of the LEOs to see him, and it did not happen. Just being on your feet does not mean you are going to be situationally aware and prepared for multiple attackers anymore than being on the ground automatically means you are extra vulnerable to multiples and will be taken by surprise. We need to move away from simplistic and mindless sound byte phrases.
The second big takeaway is what happens when the bad guy takes the cop down. First watch the cop on the bottom try the eye gouge The bad guy obviously has no ground game and does not even try to control the cop’s hands or block them, and the vaunted eye gouge has literally ZERO effect. Then watch the third cop come in and kick the bad guy in the head (just like all the combative gurus warn grapplers about) and then punch him, and again exactly zero effect. I am not saying that getting booted in the dome or getting eye gouged can be laughed off, but I will categorically state that those things are not sure things. Not even close. There is a good chance (as demonstrated here in this video in great depth and detail) that they will be useless and if you don’t have the skill set to deal with the entangled fight, and are relying on those kind of tactics, you may very well be setting yourself up for failure.
In short, don’t rely on phrases that sound good but fail in
the real world as often as not. Base your self preservation on high percentage
and intelligently thought out material.
One of the biggest epiphanies I had in my martial arts life was watching Gracie Jiu-jitsu in Action in 1988.
It is probably too hard to fathom what this did for me.
Seeing grappling work so well against different arts was like a gut shot. It
woke me up to what was possible, as well as the probability that I was had not
seen the total package of fighting. What the UFC did for a lot of people in
1993, and then later in 2005 when it hit the mainstream, was what I felt in
’88.
This video is actually one of my favorite parts of the first volume. Here is the quick back story. There was a karate instructor in Rio who was looking to prove the superiority of his art and decided that challenging the Gracies was a good idea. He most likely thought that they would want so many rules and be on soft mats that he would not have to actually face them. To his shock, the Gracies agreed to all his conditions and even suggested using the location (which I will get to in a moment). There are a number of important takeaways from this short video, and they are easily understood lessons if people would look at it with a critical eye.
First of all, this video took place in the late 70’s and was
made widely available on the original mass marketed video tape in 1988, and yet
there are some who keep spouting ideas that this video trashes.
Note the surface. It is the kind of hard and
unyielding surface you might find on a public racquetball court. It is most
certainly NOT a nice padded mat. And the ones who wanted this surface? That’s
right, the grapplers. Of course, that should be impossible because all the
combative experts say grapplers won’t be able to fight when they are not on
mats, that somehow they will freeze when they are on a solid surface and they
will be at the mercy of the non-grappler. Utter crap. It isn’t that big a deal
to fight on a hard surface. No grappler wants to continually train on it,
because it will eventually cause accumulated trauma and damage. But that is
over YEARS of training, and has nothing to do with a single particular instance.
As this video aptly demonstrates over multiple fights. Find any single moment
where the BJJ practitioner is having trouble with moving on essentially
concrete. You won’t find it, just as you won’t find it happening in any of the countless
hundreds or even thousands of real world videos showing people using grappling
to defend themselves. It is a moot point and another illustration of why those
combative “experts” who have no grappling experience have no idea of what they
are talking about.
Note the absence of gloves. Bare knuckle
striking, done by stand up fighters who spend all their time using bare knuckle
strikes. There is no chance of hiding behind the old trope of “well, the gloves
softened the blows and made the strikers less effective”. The grapplers let the
strikers have yet another advantage and it made no difference.
Note that even with the bare knuckles, the
strikes had no effect. Most of the time, the karate men got off only one or at
most two strikes before they were tied up and taken down. Striking is a great
and useful tool, but thinking that you will be able to end a fight against an
adrenalized opponent with one or two strikes generally falls in the fantasy
camp.
Note that even though most of the jiu-jitsu
fighters did not have a particularly great method of closing the gap, it still
worked 100% of the time. Most of them were turtle your head and dive forward
type close, and it did not matter. Imagine if instead it had been a good collegiate
wrestler or trained MMA fighter. How much better that close would have been. If you do not train and have practiced to deal
with a true grappling close, you will fall victim to it far more often than
not. You are fooling yourself if you think you can handle it otherwise.
Note that unlike the striker that the jiu-jitsu
man could strike at will once he had established positional dominance and the
other man was completely at his mercy. That is a much more sure way of being
effective with your strikes.
Note in the last fight the attempt to smash the
grappler backwards to the ground. Again, according to combative “experts”, this
should be sufficient to stop the grappler and let the other man escape, and yet
once again that kind of wisdom fails in reality. Even slammed to the hard
surface by someone 40 pounds heavier on top did not shake the positional dominance
of the grappler and the choke still happened right after.
As I said, I love this video for all the short and immensely
powerful lessons it provides. Learn from it.
