BJJ - why no evolution? It's payback time.

[Aloha From Hell]

My take on the BJJ verses the rest of the world is BJJ has failed to evolve, while the rest have been drinking from the BJJ firehose. When I started BJJ it was invincible because we spent 99% of the time practicing ground fighting, the philosophy being that the fight will always go there. With so much time devoted to ground fighting we became excellent ground fighters, we just never assumed there was a much of a chance of getting hit hard on the way down. We also assumed our apponents would be naive and not know how to anti-grapple. Well, the chickens have come home to roost. While BJJ'ers clung to their groundfighting roots, sometimes punching the odd heavy bag for 5 mins, the rest of the world learned enough BJJ to neutralize it. And guess what? A lot of those guys already had excellent standup skills, as well as amateur wrestling experience. Add a few years BJJ to the mix and you have a better rounded fighter.

The bottom line is this- many BJJ practioners have been smug and lazy. The instructors preferred to gouge students rather than keep BJJ one step ahead of the rest. Now it's payback time.

[Qkfx]

Good post Aloha. I was so glad to hear my instructor say that he was instituting classes practicing just take downs. He actually admitted this was a big shortcoming in BJJ. This was a miracle considering he had always seemed resistant to admit there were holes in the art.