Millions of regular people worldwide have discovered Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu's power to build confidence, get fitter, learn self-defense, and make new friends. Let's talk about why BJJ is so great for this, and how we make this happen at Golden Jiu Jitsu
Brazilian jiu jitsu, or just ‘jiu jitsu’ is a type of submission grappling arts. While there are countless types of combat sports & martial arts, bjj is notable for four main reasons:
1: It actually works. There are a lot of martial arts that legitimately don’t work - primarily because they don’t do any live sparring. Without live sparring, there’s no way to evaluate whether or not a technique or idea works or if it’s bullshido.
2: It’s relatively safe to train. Out of all the combat sports that actually work it’s the most ‘lifetime sport’ - meaning that people still play the game til late in life. I know a lot of people in their 60’s that are still on the mats.
3: Technical skill correlates more to success compared to other martial arts. While being skilled helps in all martial arts, I’d say that you see the biggest gap in results in ground grappling.
4: Its an incredibly complex and rich game with a seemingly infinite number of rabbit holes that you can go down. This complexity and depth make the game a lot of fun, and it’s the reason many people like myself are so drawn to it.
All in all, it’s essentially the best compromise for training something that works while decreasing risk of injury. Most importantly, it’s the most fun combat sport you can play.
In order to talk about what makes jiu jitsu unique, it’s helpful to understand a bit of the ecosystem that our sport is part of.
All grappling disciplines are non striking martial arts (so no punching or kicking is allowed) where the goal is to control your opponent.
Grappling is as old as humans are - we’ve been fighting and grappling for our entire existence. From pottery and sculpture, we can date grappling back to at least 2000 bc, so about 4000 years ago.
The first Olympics included submission grappling called pale and it was the most popular organized sport in Greece at the time.
We can split grappling sports in half between those that include submissions and those that don’t. Most ‘wrestling’ arts are grappling without submissions.
Wrestling sports are focused on getting a standing opponent down to the ground. There’s a huge array of styles with different rulesets and different attire including greco roman, American folkstyle, freestyle, sumo, Irish glima, and turkish oil wrestling.
On the other side of the coin, we have grappling styles that do include submissions like catch as catch can, sambo, judo, and jiu jitsu.
There’s a huge overlap between all of these grappling disciplines between shared techniques, naming conventions, submission holds, and more. Brazilian jiu jitsu, for instance, is really a hybrid of catch wrestling, japanese jiu jitsu, judo, and more. Each of those arts are hybrids of other disciplines in turn.
Since the advent of the internet, this hybridization and cross pollination between different styles has become even more prevalent. Nowadays, the distinctions between techniques and positions are more blurred, and it’s hard to attribute the lineage of ideas and moves.