 Jiu-Jitsu, the most important martial art. Now, I can already feel a lot of you reaching for your pitchforks, so let's just get started with this one. Okay, so I just want to clarify for the context of today's episode. When I'm referring to Jiu-Jitsu, I am not specifying any particular discipline of an art. So I'm not pointing out specifically to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu or Judo or any variety of Japanese Jiu-Jitsu. I'm referring to the art of grappling in general and where it fits in and how it's important in today's training. And it might seem silly to explain the importance of grappling, especially to any serious martial artists, but I want to kind of change perspective today. I kind of want to challenge the viewpoint. And today I don't want to look at grappling as an art. I want to look at more of a foundation and connective tissue that exists between multiple arts. And I want to keep it civil. And I want to, you know, we're always on this mission to blur the lines, the political lines, you know, side A versus side B, you know, mixed martial arts versus traditional martial arts. You know, we want to look at things in a different perspective and kind of unify different ideas. And there's a lot of people out there who will scoff at grappling thinking, oh, well, I don't need to grapple because I know how to do my stand-up fighting and whatever. There's a lot of politics. So today I want to erase those politics and just kind of take this nugget of what grappling is and just kind of look at it from a different angle and see how it relates and fits in and what's really important about it and why I think everyone should have some form of grappling one way or another. And one of my primary reasons I think grappling is so important is because that close range, to me, defines most martial arts. When you look at punches and kicks and you look at medium to long range, honestly, that distance can be an equalizer because one person might study Taekwondo and the other person might have karate or kempo. When it comes to punches and kicks and sparring or fighting with that kind of a gap, there's a lot of strategy at play. There's a lot of adjusting and timing and, you know, logistical planning and looking for openings, reading your opponents. And when you're changing punches and kicks, that distance is an equalizer. You know, it's still kind of a bit of a chess game. When you get close range, when you get to the point where your hands are on each other's bodies, that is where I feel the real flavor of each martial art comes out because that is the moment where you went from strategy and trying to read your opponent to it's on, you're making direct contact, the response has to be immediate because if you don't respond right away, then that person will. So if you're fighting someone who's a judoka and you hesitate, well, you're going over their shoulder. If they're a BJJ practitioner and you hesitate, you're on the ground. You know, if they're a kempo practitioner and you hesitate, well, you've taken a couple of elbows and maybe blown out your knee. So that close range, I think, is absolutely crucial to the flavors and definitions and the actual heart of each martial arts because at that point in time there's nothing more intimate and more raw to have your hands physically on another person and theirs on yours in an aggressive manner. So that is the perspective I want to take and that's where I think jujitsu and grappling as a whole plays a vital role in self-defense. So what does the word jujitsu itself mean? Well, breaking it down to ju and jitsu, ju usually means flexible, gentle, soft, where jitsu translates to more of technique, method. So loosely speaking, loose translation is jujitsu means gentle technique. But honestly speaking, jujitsu is anything but gentle. But it doesn't really refer to gentle as being gentle. Gentle means more long lines of in contrast to a heart striking system. It flows and it rides with energy. So basically, you are using their force and body mechanics against themselves versus using your own force. So you're not initiating the energy involved. You're using their energy instead of opposing it. Now, you're likely to come across different spellings of the word and with the popularity of Brazilian jujitsu, J-I-U is the most common version you see today. And they're all really correct. You know, it's going to vary from school to school to slightly different translations from the same idea. But when it comes to Brazilian jujitsu, that's pretty much an exclusive spell and you'll see associated with that. So just to reiterate, when we're talking about jujitsu in this episode, we're not referring to one specific style, but we're talking to hands on that person's body, controlling their joints, controlling their energy and various versions of stand-up and ground grappling. So what exactly do I mean when I say that jujitsu is more of a connective tissue? The art of grappling is more of a connective tissue than the standard discipline? Mainly because it covers a lot of ground, literally. So if you're adept at arts like Brazilian jujitsu or wrestling, you've probably got a pretty good ground game, so you've got that part covered. But then you have arts like judo and samba and other jujitsu, stand-up arts, which has more throws and takedowns. So stand-up grappling is a bit of a different discipline than ground grappling. If you have both, that covers a lot of fighting ability. And when it comes to your striking martial arts, I personally feel that grappling greatly complements most martial arts that are out there. And many martial arts systems already have jujitsu embedded into the curriculum, embedded into the base material. Now some arts are more obvious than others, and some have more focus on grappling. But if you look at some of the older arts, like original Okinawan karate, it had a lot of grappling implemented. They had joint locks, they had throws, they had takedowns. It was there, and it was present before we saw a lot of streamlining and watering down that we see today. And that goes for a lot of martial arts. And if you look closely enough, most systems have some form of close combat or some form of grappling already established and built into the system, at least at a fundamental level. Now, I first noticed this constant when I ventured out into Japanese jujitsu and judo. My background is American Kempo, and it already had some jujitsu elements built into it. They just weren't as obvious at first. Now, the reason I ventured out was, you know, our school a few years back, you know, we did a couple of years of Brazilian jujitsu. It was kind of meshed into our system, so I had a little bit of a taste of that. And I also wanted to explore and expand my abilities and do more grappling like stand-up throws and locks and takedowns. So I thought that would be a great thing to complement and add together to my training. But what I found very interesting was, though, is I went into this school expecting just new techniques so that I could just add to my Kempo regimen. What I found instead was a completely different paradigm of thinking and a completely different way of training. The art had totally different concepts, and it made me realize, wow, this isn't just adding a few things to what I already know. It's a whole new discipline in itself. But on the flip side of that, though, as I train with it and as I continue to go forward with it, I'm starting to see a lot of similarities that point back to Kempo and realize, oh, wow, those concepts were already there, but here I'm seeing them isolated, here I'm seeing them in their true form, and now I can go back and see how they relate to my previous curriculum. So it was a really big eye-opening experience to venture out of my home art and try to add grappling to my regimen and realize how much grappling I was already embedded that I didn't realize was there and to how now I can understand it and utilize it better and in three, learn more concepts, more fleshed out and more complete ideas to now complement what I learned. So all together, it becomes more of a robust system, especially when you add the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu in there and that's what I mean by connective tissue. These concepts are now present throughout all the different layers of my training and it was a really exciting thing to discover. So this topic and concept has been my own personal exploration and I even taught a seminar back in February of this year that incorporated a lot of this thinking in that, you know, in Kempo, we've got lots of arm bars, we have joint locks, we have takedowns that I really like. So what I did was I took those concepts and I put the ideas of grappling into it and I used the grappling to flow from one Kempo technique to another. You know, the whole idea of recognizing your position, seeing your openings, what your possibilities were, and manipulate the other person to put them in a favorable position so you could do your submissions or do your techniques or whatever openings you could find. And that was a really fun experience and we had a great time exploring that and for anyone interested in watching it, it is available to our Black Belt members on both Patreon and YouTube memberships so if you're interested in seeing the seminar, it's up there. But the whole concept as a whole was a really fun thing to explore and it's really surprising sometimes to see how well different arts can cross-train together and compliment each other. When your hands are on another person, you can read their movements, feel their tension, and anticipate a potential reaction. Now this is not news to all of you out there who practice Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. You guys know this already and this is also why, very specifically why resistance training is important when you practice because if you want to learn how to read these movements, if you want to anticipate, if you want to feel the reactions, you need someone who's resisting, you need someone who's actually trying to do the same thing to yourself and that way that back and forth is what gives you the actual hands-on feel. That's where the real learning is. It's easy to memorize a sequence but it's a lot harder to apply it to somebody who's not letting you apply it. So those little subtle nuances of reading motion and actually trying to anticipate a reaction, you can only get by hands-on resistance training with a live opponent. Grappling is also incredibly flexible and forgiving. First, look at destruction versus submission. You have options. If you're grappling, you can choose to end the fight peacefully or you can go super aggressive. It really depends on the context and situation. For example, I recently saw a clip. It was a cell phone recording in a restaurant in which a drunk patron was causing trouble and actually began to assault staff. And another patron who appeared to have some sort of military background came up behind him, put him into a choke hold submission, took him right to the ground and he held him there. He wasn't hurting him. He easily could have gone for the choke out. He easily could have hurt this person but he chose to restrain them and he had really good control. He had the guys, he totally had, you know, control on the guy's joints and his locks. Every time the guy tried to struggle and get up, he just applied a little pressure, kept him in place but I was very impressed that this guy chose to go extremely peaceful. He controlled the situation immediately but he didn't hurt the person. Conversely, I've also seen video clips of people using judo to defend themselves but ending the fight much more decisively and quickly by knocking that person out. And don't let the words, gentle technique, really represent what it's about. You know, we learn grappling first with a compliant partner and I know a lot of Jiu-Jitsu arts and a lot of stand-up grappling artists get flack for being compliant and going with it. Well, here's the thing, when you learn an art in which you manipulate a person's joints and you're throwing them, you want to learn to do it properly but you don't want to hurt your partner. So a big part of training is one, break falling and learning how to take the fall, learning how to be thrown. That's one of the first things you should learn is how to be the uke, how to be thrown safely. Especially like wrist turns and throws. You know, when you do a wrist turn on somebody, they're not really going to just jump up in the air and flip over and land on their backs but you do that to go along with the energy because if you try to fight against, you know, someone applies a wrist lock and a wrist turn on you appropriately and you resist it, you're going to get hurt. You know, they're designed to actually spring your wrist and maybe even break the bones in your arm. So, you know, in the compliant setting, you go with it because that gives you the benefit of the person who's actually doing the technique. They get the feel of doing the control but the partner's not getting hurt but they're also getting the experience of break falling and going with the energy too so they don't hurt themselves. So it's kind of a give-take. It's kind of a damage if you choose to apply it that way. And that's one thing I really like about the school I train at is that we learn different versions of techniques. So if we learn to throw, our she-hand will first show us the jujitsu way to do it, the traditional way to do it. Then he'll show us how it might be done in a judo competition, you know, slight alterations that might be geared for points versus self-defense and then there's the street version, okay? So, okay, in the classroom, we put our partner down on the back but in the street, we're going to pile drive the guy's head to the ground. So there's different ways to look at it and that's what I mean by jujitsu and grappling is so flexible and it's so forgiving because there's so many different ways you can apply it. And one of my favorite things about jujitsu is the flow. You know, there's such a flow to it. If you try to throw a person or you try to take down or a joint lock and it doesn't work, chances are it didn't work because they oppose you but the beautiful thing is you can usually take the energy of that opposition and redirect it and find a different opening. So if plan A doesn't work, oh, okay, go to plan B. Oh, shoot, that didn't work. Go to plan C. But the thing though is, if plan C doesn't work, sometimes you can go back to plan A and back to plan C, back to plan B. You can ping pong back and forth until you find something that works. And again, take preceding jujitsu is a great example of this. How many times do you see both opponents, you know, resting in control from one to each other? It's a lot of give and take. It's almost a chess game and you keep trying moves. You keep trying combinations and you look for that opening until something works. And going back to what I said about jujitsu is very forgiving. A technique does not have to be 100% beautiful in order to work properly. Even if a technique is performed a little sloppy in a real-life application, if you have the right alignment and momentum, it can often still work. In a real situation, you're not looking for points. You're controlling that person's body. So clean technique or not, if they go where you put them, then the technique worked just fine. So why do I feel that jujitsu is the most important art? Why is grappling so fundamental? Because basically most fights, if it becomes an actual fight, at some point they're going to grab each other. Then whether it was just a shove fest or they're grabbing you to really hurt you or they have a weapon, if you can grab and control and manipulate their body, your chances of surviving this fight and defending yourself goes up exponentially. I believe that every martial art can benefit from grappling. And I mean stand-up grappling and ground fighting. They're kind of two different classifications of grappling. And if you can learn them both, that's all the better. And a lot of arts do have grappling built into it, but I do think it's worth learning and spending some time in a dedicated grappling art so that you can go back and you can cultivate those concepts and really make some effective blends of your own system and some new concepts and get that flow, get that whole system working together. So what I'm asking all of you today is to take a step back momentarily and look at jujitsu through different lens. So today's purpose, Brazilian jujitsu is not an art. Judo is not an art. These are concepts. It is a foundation of a framework and connected tissue that exists among arts. You know, it's the glue that connects techniques together or even binds arts together. It's understanding flow and control and inherently a greater understanding of how skeletal anatomy works. So in short, we all have the same general anatomy. And the more skills you can learn that help you to read and control a resistant opponent, the much greater likelihood you're going to walk away safely. And that's why I feel that jujitsu is one of the most powerful skill sets you can learn. So jujitsu is a connective tissue as opposed to an individual art mindset. Let me know your comments down below. Take down any misconceptions, throw out all observations, and let's roll with it.