BJJ and Objectives

Background

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ) was developed around 1925 by Carlos and Helio Gracie after learning Judo and Japanese Jiu Jitsu from Mitsuyo Maeda. The Gracie brothers were not large or strong in stature and realized that Judo and Japanese Jiu Jitsu relied a lot on physical attributes like speed and strength. Because the Gracie brothers lacked these attributes (they weighed around 130-140lbs), they modified what they learned from Maeda to allow them, to defend, survive and win against stronger and bigger attackers. They did this by focusing on angles, leverage, techniques and superior position to negate strength and size.

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu was proven and further refined over the years on the streets, beaches, and no hold bars fights in Brazil. It proved its effectiveness against any other fighting style. To provide their system’s superiority, Helo Gracie and several of his sons, brought BJJ to the US and helped create the first Ultimate Fighter Championship (UFC). The first UFC was a no holds bar tournament style promotion. There were no weight classes, and the only thing that was not permitted was biting, eye gouging and oil checking. There were no gloves, and it was pitted as fighting style against fighting style. Since it was a tournament style event, if you one your first fight, you would go on to fight the winner in a next bracket the same evening. The winner had to win at least three fights in a row. The Gracie’s developed the UFC to prove to the world that their system of fighting was better than any other fighter. To provide this point, they selected one of their weaker fighters, Royce Gracie, to represent their family and BJJ in the UFC. Rickson Gracie was the family champion, he was strong, athletic, and unbeaten. But the Gracie’s wanted to prove that someone smaller and not strong would beat bigger and more athletic fighters, hence Royce Gracie was selected. Royce Gracie shocked the world and went to beat every fighter that evening and became the first UFC champion and went about this without much of a scratch. To prove this was not a fluke, he went on and won 2 other UFC tournaments. This ended up becoming the birth of what we know as Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) today.

Since the first UFC, BJJ has continued to prove its effectiveness. It is the foundation of what the US military teaches in its hand-to-hand combat system and is the foundation of what is taught to many police officers. Today, BJJ is often divided into two major categories:

• Traditional BJJ
• Sport BJJ

Traditional BJJ

Traditional BJJ is the name given to Jiu Jitsu taught as close to its original roots as possible. By this I mean, the focus is on teaching and learning Jiu Jitsu for self-defense and fighting. As Chris Haueter says, “for the street.”

In traditional BJJ self-defense techniques are taught, such as, punch blocking defenses and common attacks and grab defenses. Positions are taught to prevent someone from hitting you and causing damage and learning how to control your opponent is very important.  The the concept of position before position is king. This means you first want to establish control, get a dominate position, maintain this position, and then attack. Dominate positions are what we call top positions. This is when you are on top of your opponent and include side-mount, mount, and the back. These positions are such that you can control your opponent, unless untold amount of damage on them, without you getting damaged yourself. One of my professors, Chris Haueter outlines this best with his golden rules of BJJ:

                  Rule 1: Be the guy on top

                  Rule 2: When on top, stay on top.

                  Rule 3: When on the bottom, have a guard you shall not pass

                  Rule 4: Never forget Rule 1

At the end of the day, the main goal of traditional BJJ is to allow a smaller person to defend, survive, and win an attack or fight from a stronger bigger opponent. This is done through technique, leverage and position.

Sport BJJ

While traditional BJJ was developed to allow one to defend, survive and beat any fighter or person, sport BJJ took traditional BJJ and is designed for BJJ to beat BJJ. It first was developed with traditional BJJ in mind with the focus on awarding points in competitions for dominate (top) positions, and to allow one to refine their technique. For example, 4 points awarded in a competition for getting mount, or the back. 3 points for passing the guard. 2 points for a takedown, sweep, or side mount.

However, as time passed, partitioners of sport BJJ learned how to leverage the competition rule base and time limits to help them win by points only. As such, further rules were developed to make sport BJJ more interesting to watch (e.g. time limits, advantages for almost getting a submission, points reduced for stalling)

Due to this, new techniques and positions were invented that would give someone the greatest advantaged under sport BJJ rules and concepts such as getting on top and staying on top, or position before submission became less important. Examples of this include pulling guard, butt scooting, inversion, etc…

The ultimate goal of sport jiu jitsu is to win the match by submission or points. So all techniques focus on this. While there is some overlap between traditional and sport BJJ, their goals are very different. In reality, most schools today teach a combination of both Traditional BJJ and Sport BJJ, they just will focus on one more than the other. Also, sport BJJ helps refine someones technique to make it more effective in a self-defense situation. One just has to be mindful, if they want to be good at protecting themselves in self-defense, how they train and what techniques they focus because we don’t rise to an occasion, we fall to our level of training. The best advice out there on how to do this is again from Chris Haueter: “Think street, practice the sport, learn the art.”