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.

I didn’t want to go to Jiu-jitsu last night.

I was on little sleep, was in the middle of an important project for a client, and with some personal and medical stuff going on, the stress made me feel like a cord with the most of it frayed and coming apart. The last thing I wanted was to put myself in a position where I had to perform on demand in front of people who would see me fail and perform poorly. Most of all, I did not dig the thought of not living up to my own expectations. The easiest thing would have been to get my Professor to run the fundamentals class, and go home, go to bed, and pull the covers over my head while waiting for a new day.

But I went. And guess what? Teaching-wise I was solid, because somehow I can always pull up the needed drive to do that, but when it comes to my personal training, that is not the case. My performance rolling was not awesome. I did not do as poorly as I feared (that is actually almost impossible to do since I always fear the worst), but I still was not particularly good. And so what? Do I do this to make everyone think I am awesome? Do I do this so I get rich and famous? Nope. I do it for myself, and for what it does for me.

And that benefit – what I get out of it – is as much in the doing, and the choice and effort of doing, as it is any particular level of performance. Sure, I want to get better, and I am hoping to see improvement at least in some incremental way, but the real advancement is in the discipline to just do it when you don’t have to. The easy thing is to not do it, so when we make the choice to take a step forward; it is truly and in every way a step forward.

Character has been defined (quite rightly in my opinion) as what you do when no one is looking. Well, discipline can be defined as doing what you know you should when there is no immediate consequence to not doing it. If I am fasting, could I go ahead and have a donut? Sure, who would know, and one donut is not going to destroy the diet, but it is in those little choices to not do so that we grow.  My buddy Larry Lindenman did the carnivore diet for a month not that long ago. When he explained it to me, I asked him if it would have been a big deal if he had eaten a salad. His answer summed it up – “no, but that was not the diet”. He made a choice to follow a program for a month, and cheating even once was a violation, so he did not do it. It is that simple.

Now, just because it is simple in no way means it is easy. In fact, it is probably one of the hardest things to do as a human being. But here is the secret. YOU CAN DO IT. I know this because I am nothing special, and I can do it, so you can too. Give it a shot and keep fighting that good fight with the inner voice that tells you to stop. It is worth it. Win baby, win.

So a top grappler (Ben Askren) got knocked out in the most recent UFC by a flying knee from a striking centric opponent (Jorge Masvidel) and then, inevitably, the people who have zero to do with it try to jump on and attempt to validate themselves by somehow aligning themselves with the situation.

It only took minutes for a number of non-grappling martial artists and combative self-defense “experts” to make claims that they too are equal to this KO. Probably the most laughable was a knife focused group posting all over social media that they have been teaching this same move for years. As if that meant one damn thing. It is sad commentary that so many martial artists, who have so little ammunition to argue against the efficacy of grappling, will make such huge leaps in order to try to bolster their weak side of the debate.

Here are a few points these folks should keep in mind.

1. It is irrelevant if they have taught a similar move. Is there any evidence at all that they themselves have been able to pull it off against a fully resisting and uncooperative opponent? How about just one of their students? Of course no such evidence exists because if it did, they would have already bragged about it. It is really unseemly to try to equate yourself to someone who does a fighting methodology completely different from you, who you have never trained with, and who has a bio of accomplishments that have nothing to do with you in any way.
2. Just because you “know” a move, or have even taught a move is meaningless. If you have not been able to practice it under high pressure sparring against another person who is doing their best to make you fail, then you have about a zero chance of suddenly pulling the move off for real. So someone can pick up a guitar and play a couple of chords. They are not going to suddenly become the next Jimi Hendrix until they practice. A lot. For real. Anything less is mental masturbation fantasy. A good number of traditional martial artists love to try to convince others that there are hidden grappling moves in old kata, and ergo, they are knowledgeable grapplers. Except that not one of them can actually pull off any moves against even a BJJ white belt with less than a year of training. Because sheer knowledge does not equate to being able to perform. I “know” how the top Formula 1 drivers drive. That does not mean I can drive the same way.
3. Cherry picking your examples of success is intellectually vapid. So the flying knee knocked a high level grappler out in the most recent UFC. Awesome. Now, let’s add up all the times in the past 50 UFCs where not only did it NOT KO the other guy, but actually failed miserably and it failed to do any damage, and put the knee thrower in a worse position than prior to the knee. What you will find if you do the numbers is that the success to fail rate is along the lines of 1:50. Does anyone really think those are good odds and that with the low level of success that anyone should be putting much of their limited training time into doing it? If so, I have some ocean front property in Arizona I can sell you.
4. The biggest issue with people trying to somehow share the spotlight in these situations is that they are by default telling you that they are as physically capable as a professional athlete in the prime of their career who does nothing but train multiple hours every day. We know that is not the case, and they are not on that plane of performance so their chance of pulling the move off is not even the same. Which makes their attempt to equate themselves all the more laughable. If a pro athlete can only pull off such a move once in a great while, the non-athlete chances are exponentially more remote, so stop pretending. It is just gross.

It can be very useful to see what is working in MMA fights. However, we need to see what is working CONSISTENTLY, not the rare move. Just because some technique is spectacular does not equate to useful.

There are many positive things about training in BJJ. Perhaps the single best one is that the mat does not lie.

Far too often, and historically speaking, self-defense training was based largely on faith. We had to trust that what we were learning would work, because we could not test them particularly well. They were “too deadly to spar”, or in the case of firearms, no one wants to get shot in practice. We did not have the gear or even a good framework to attempt to apply them.

As students, we had to accept the stories told by our teachers. That this particular technique worked 300 years ago in SE Asia to fight off pirates or marauding invading samurai, or that this other technique was really successful in killing Nazi sentries in WW2. Any martial art geek (this writer right there among that crowd) can talk about legends of people who came before, especially if said person was in the same lineage. I remember reading a ton of stories about legendary rooftop fights that happened all the time in Hong Kong in the 50’s and 60’s. A number of Chinese martial artists, including Bruce Lee, had some their laurels stemming from these encounters. Then, thanks to the wonders of the internet age, someone found actual film of some of these fights and put it online for the world to see. I cannot begin to tell you of my disappointment at seeing them. A bunch of 12 year olds fighting in the school yard had better skills and technique than these “masters” exhibited. But prior to that, we had to accept the myth that these were amazing fights and only gods among men could emerge triumphant from them.

Thankfully, there were three concurrent events happening. One, the rise of the information age made it easier to trade facts and truth rather than legends. Two, the advent of better training gear, ranging from headgear and gloves all the way to firearm marking cartridges (simunitions and UTM) allowing us to be more safe in applying real force and pressure on training partners and coming as close as possible to experiencing what a fight for your life may feel like, and three, the arrival of Brazilian Jiu-jitsu into the US and then the rest of the world.

What BJJ did, outside of giving us a functional and safe grappling methodology accessible to anyone, was to give up a template and framework in which we could truly test things. Every single time you step on the BJJ mat to train, the truth will be revealed. No longer can a “master” who is too fat to even climb a flight of stairs without stroking out can pretend to be a fighting god. No longer can someone say that all it takes to win a fight is to eye gouge or groin grab someone. It is no longer possible to pretend to know something about the mysteries of fighting without being able to demo the ability to apply that mystery.

That extends to the world inside BJJ as well. Anyone can go on Amazon and buy a black belt, put it on and walk into a BJJ academy. But they will be kindly asked to show what they can do. And it will be evident quickly if they are a phony or not. Royce Gracie once said “A belt covers two inches of your ass. You have to cover the rest.” And truer words were never said. There have been some cases of a phony belt getting caught publicly and sometimes the video even goes viral. More often, it is a quieter and more private affair where someone comes to an academy and says they are a purple belt (or any belt lower than black). But it only takes a couple of rolls to find out if that is fact or fiction. Sometimes the person does not know he is not at that rank. He was given it for some other reason by a higher belt (probably for financial or student retention reasons by the instructor – and shame on him for doing so), and moves to another school and after a bit of training realizes he is out of his depth. At a good school, they will help him to grow into that belt rather than punish him for someone else’s mistake and make him take it off. That has happened multiple times at my Professor’s academy. We know it is not his fault, and can help him, but we don’t have to tell him what is up. The mat does not lie and shows him the truth.

Sadly, there are still people out there who try to fool the world, but if they have not been caught, they will be. My favorite is the guy who never really out and out says he is a black belt in BJJ, but wears a black belt because he is a black belt in some other art like Tae Kwon Do. He knowingly knows he is being deceitful, but is desperate to get away with it. Nothing ever good comes from that, because eventually, the truth will tell, because the mat does not lie. It is fine to tell the world you are awesome, but the mat says prove it. And you either can, or cannot.