Just Enough Jitsu

Brazilian Jiu-jitsu For Everybody

I get it. We martial arts people went too far. Without meaning to, and with only the best of intentions, we tried to turn you into little jiu-jitsu clones but we know now you are not going to do that. You have busy lives, you have families, you have life going on, and you aren’t going to buy a uniform, sign up to join a gym, and you are not going to train five days a week for hours at a time. But that does not mean you should not get the benefit of what we have learned and you should not have to suffer for our selfishness. At Immediate Action Combatives, we have removed all the barriers leaving you just enough to help you be safer without committing ten years of your life to that pursuit. This short course specifically welcomes every single person who thought Brazilian Jiu-jitsu could never be for them, but who also know that need some of it to be safer and to be more capable of defending themselves and their loved ones.

Who is this course designed for? Quite literally, EVERYONE.  It does not matter age, sex, physical condition, experience level – everyone can benefit from this material. Guaranteed. Or you will be refunded your tuition. That is a promise.

What is covered in this two to three hour module:

Break falls – easy to learn and easy to apply simple methods to not get hurt if you get knocked down, pushed down, or just fall

Technical stand up – simple to learn methods and all variations to do so for everyone regardless of physical issues or environmental situations

Standing up against pressure – How to get back to your feet when the attacker does not want you to and actively tries to keep you down

Protecting yourself on the ground when you can’t get up – Staying conscious and mobile when you are stuck on the ground in a horizontal position

Fighting back when you can’t get up – fundamental ways to take the fight to the bad guy when you are on the ground

Once again I stumbled across a firearms instructor online who is talking about integrating grappling into a firearms context.  While I am all for others recognizing and publicly talking about the absolute need to have some functional  ability in this area, unfortunately it all too often gives me a bad case of heartburn when I see it.

To be clear, the more dialogue and discussion about this the better because I don’t know that we have all the answers yet, and I always hold out the expectation that the stuff I do can be improved upon. But to engage in that kind of discussion, both parties need some depth and breadth of experience to truly understand it and to attempt to figure out best practices.

What tends to happen though is that weapon integrated grappling is so relatively new, and such a complex skill set, that few people have the ability to truly comprehend the variables and fine points, and even fewer have taken time to actually work it under authentic conditions (rolling around a few times with friends who know as little as you about this DOES NOT COUNT towards understanding – period ) and so a good number of those who discuss it have no clue what they are saying.

For example, those who don’t know much  will almost always trot out the “sport grappling” label pretty quickly. Why is that wrong? Because they can’t tell you what it means! First of all, they have never done any “sport grappling” so how can they possibly know what it entails? The answer is that they don’t. You know how to prove that? The next time you see that mentioned online somewhere, ask them what is the difference between “combative” grappling and “sport” grappling outside of specific context. Be prepared for a bunch of nonsense and straw man crap, because they have no clue at all. They cannot answer the question factually, and they certainly cannot answer it succinctly. You can’t talk clearly about what you do not know.

Entangled fighting, especially on the ground is the single most complex aspect of combat, and this complexity is exacerbated by virtue of the fact that it is also has the most variables, and those variables can be measured sometimes in tiny increments, and can change completely in the blink of an eye. Here is the quickest illustration I know of – if two people are engaged in a gunfight at 10 yards, having one of the parties move their elbow two inches will most likely will not have the slightest impact of the results of the shootout. On the ground and entangled, moving your elbow two inches is quite literally and with zero hyperbole the difference between life and death.  If someone is trying to teach grappling and they cannot understand that, then they have no business even throwing in an opinion in any way.

Why does it bug me so much? Mostly because of the implied narcissism inherent in someone who knows little pretending to know much, and who puts out false information that may very well get a good person injured or killed. It is also a screaming insult to those who have put in the time to study it, and having someone whose resume consists of getting certified after taking a five day grappling course, playing around with a few others on occasion who know just as little, and teaching a couple of moves  to people who have never done any grappling try to pontificate about things like best practices or training methods is nauseating.

If I turned it around, and had the same exact resume, but instead of grappling, made it shooting, how many of these top instructors would take me seriously? How many would graciously engage in a sociable discussion?  We all know the answer – ZERO. Not only would they not take me seriously, they would rage publicly and privately to all who would listen about these “new tactical gun instructors who know nothing but want to be on the same level as us! How dare they?” All I ask is that they look in the mirror first before speaking on things they really should remain quiet about.

There is a trick some instructors do in the self-defense/tactical community to make their training bio seem more impressive or give them more gravitas in an argument. For want of a better descriptor, that trick can be referred to as “padding the resume”.

The typical way it is applied is this: the instructor, to boost their standing in getting across their point in a debate will say something along the lines of “I have been training / practicing xyz for 20 years”. The other person in the debate, without that level of training, often will then acquiesce to the point. The problem is the instructor has NOT been training in the subject matter in the way he implies.

It comes up quite a bit when firearms trainers discuss unarmed aspects of fighting. Talking about entangled fighting for instance, this kind of trainer will let everyone know he has been doing Brazilian Jiu-jitsu for 20 years so when he says something, it seems proper. However, the truth is not quite as he portrays. What actually has occurred is that the instructor took a weekend BJJ seminar 20 years ago, has watched MMA since then, maybe actually joined a BJJ academy for 3 or 4 months 8 years ago, and just watched a video clip of Craig Douglas showing an aspect of entangled fighting in a weapons based environment.

I submit to you that while the time of 20 years when all that occurred did pass, that is not “training for 20 years” as any reasonable person will view it. What that is, instead, is about half a year of actual training spaced out over 20 years.  When the person on the other side of the debate actually has been consistently and regularly doing BJJ (or MMA, or Sambo, of Muay Thai, or whatever H2H methodology), the argument level is not equal in any way shape or form.

Just as someone who “started hunting when he was 5, did some skeet shooting as a teenager, and then took a CCW class when he was 40” has not been actively training shooting for 35 years the way someone who is on the range and pulling the trigger almost daily is doing it.

Caveat Emptor. Make sure the instructor gives his full bio with details, not just what he wants you to know.

A truly good and in-depth interview talking about using a knife to defend yourself in the real world, and all the issues surrounding it. One of my favorite podcast appearances yet.

Any time we are training in a physical activity where there is oppositional force such as in any of the combat sports, we run into the problem of measurement, specifically in a regular measuring of our performance and whether we are getting better or not.

If we are lifting weights, doing cardio or yoga, or shooting on a range, performance tracking is easy. With strength training, all we have to determine is are we lifting more weight, or more often? With cardio, are we going longer and/or faster? With yoga, are we stretching more, or hitting poses more solidly for longer periods of time. Shooting may be the easiest to track. Are we more accurate/faster than we were the last time we shot? All easily measured and even more easily understood.

But when working against the variable and almost endless possibilities that occur going against someone else, all that measurement becomes more like guesswork and a lot of “well, maybe”. Nothing is more frustrating that working really hard at getting better at a particular move, being able to do it perfectly well in isolation, but never pulling it off when there is resistance. We wonder if it is the move, or us. Actually, there is something more frustrating – when sometimes a move works, but other times, against the same opponent, it does not, and we can’t figure out why! That can border on heartbreaking.

The solution? I don’t know that there is one! Comforting, right? What we can do though is re-orient how we view progress, especially in the macro sense.

One of the things that it is easy to forget is that the person we are training against is working too, and may very well be working as hard and as much as you. We have to remember that while we are getting better, so are they and that can skew our relative view of our performance. Take my personal case as an example. I have 4 regular black belt training partners that are truly my peers. We are all within 10 years of each other in age, close in weight, and have been doing BJJ for close to the same amount of time, and we all train around the same number of hours in a week. When any of us roll against each other, the chance that one of us is going to dominate the other is remote. Occasionally, one of us might pull off someone cool, and be able to fully control the round, or even get the other person to tap. More often, like 98% of the time, the rolls are pretty even. If we were scoring them like a tournament, the typically result is either a close victory 3-2, 5-3, or pretty much a tie 0-0 where one or the other may have gotten an advantage (i.e. “almost a point”). If I focus on how I do with them, I could easily get discouraged. No matter how much I train, unless they stop training totally, I am not going to leap past them.

Instead, the person to focus our measurement against is the newer person, the less experienced guy. Can we get a move on him that we have not gotten before at all? If the answer is yes, more often than not, it means you are getting better. Especially if we are focused on self-defense, then the more accurate gauge anyway is against a person how knows little if any about BJJ, so the newer trainee is more precise in letting us know whether we are better or not.

Another way to look is against someone much superior to us. If that guy for example typically taps us five times in a six minute round, but then we consistently only get tapped two times, then we are better. Is that as much of an ego boost as being able to do something offensive back to them? Well, no, but it is realistic.

To sum up, don’t view your performance on a day to day measure, but rather over a longer period of time, say a month, and focus on what you did against people who you can do stuff against.

“Fine tuning the discus will take several years. You have to really develop a base for it, and then, after about 10 YEARS OF THROWING, you get to the point where you’re REALLY SOLID IN THE TECHNIQUE that you have and you just need to have your little tweaking here and there. ” Stephanie Brown Trafton 2008 Olympic Gold Medalist in the discus

So much deep truth here. This is how you get good. Work the fundamentals over and over for years and years, and then you start to understand them. And ONLY THEN can you change them for you, and only then do you begin to understand it well enough to coach. Contemplate what she says – she undoubtedly as an Olympic athlete trained everyday on her chosen specialty and she still said it took her 10 years to just get technically solid. Not even great. Just the tip of the iceberg. Compare to those who take a weekend certification class in something that they have never done and think they can teach, or that they can comment on social media and even argue with a true subject matter expert.

And I know a ton of people will not get this even after I added the emphasis in the quote.

As someone who strongly advocates BJJ as a backbone art for a good base in self-defense, I am often asked what the benefits are. The obvious one is being able to fight well on the ground. However, BJJ goes far beyond that. One thing is does better than almost any other single activity is getting you mentally and emotionally prepared for the fight.

One of the biggest issues that can occur when you find yourself assaulted is that by definition, things are not going your way. Perhaps we let our situational awareness lapse, perhaps we did not realize that the person we were in range of was a violent criminal actor (VCA) because he was using a ruse, perhaps we happened to be injured or ill at the time of attack, or a myriad of reasons put us in a bad place. Regardless of how we got to that place, said place is going to be uncomfortable – physically, mentally, and emotionally. And, unfortunately, the typical gun-centric range training most of us engage in doesn’t do anything at all to prepare us for that level of pressure. It is just not possible to do so when there is not a living, breathing, resisting opponent who is determined to win and that we must lose.

One solution to this is what is called Force-on-Force training. Typically it uses marking cartridges such as Simunitions or UTM to have a pain penalty that is still safe. The gold standard for this type of training is Craig Douglas’ ECQC course (www.shivworks.com). This is terrifically useful and much needed, but there is a large drawback – it is hard to conduct such training more than once in awhile. Not only is it expensive to have guns that can use these cartridge’s, but the ammo is as well, and you also have to have good protective equipment like good helmets. It also can’t be conducted in too many places outside of a shooting range (while these rounds are not lethal, they do pack a punch and can damage surrounding structures and bystanders quite easily). And on top of all of that, it is incredibly demanding physically. A couple of hours of this kind of training will leave most people exhausted.  Even for top athletes it would be tough to do more than on occasion.

However, the parts that are so valuable – the dealing with a resisting opponent and the physical, mental, and emotional pressures that are needed – can be more easily done in a BJJ academy. In every single moment you are on the mats there, you are going to be dealing with this type of situation. In a very short period of time, getting squashed underneath someone who outweighs you by 80 pounds becomes just another day.  It does not exactly become ho hum, nor does it become comfortable. But it does help you lose the sense of dread and helplessness, and that feeling is something that stays with you no matter what, and that you will be able to draw on when you are being attacked for real. And the best part is that because the pressure can be adjusted in training,  you can work like this hours at a time, day after day and be no worse for the wear.

I have said multiple times that BJJ gives the multi-disciplinary thinking tactician more bang for the buck than any other modality out there. Period. And getting comfortable with being uncomfortable is one of the, if not the single most useful.