Strongman tries BJJ! Hey guys part 2 of my collab with my Brazilian jiu-jitsu and Muay Thai coach Tim Carpenter. We go all the BJJ basics for beginners. This was perfect because I had my first competition coming up and needed to learn how all the points work, and basic take downs, submissions, and come up with a game plan for the day. I’m absolutely loving this martial arts and cant wait to see what the future holds!
In my experience, cops make the same excuses regularly for why they won’t start or they quit Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I brought in one of my professors, Angelo Popofski, to discuss responses to the top three I’ve heard over the years.
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There’s a ton of anecdotal stories already suggesting that ground fighting is an essential component of self defense, but there are still a number of holdouts. People that either insist grappling is either unlikely to happen or unwise to specialize in. On a Saturday afternoon, I posed this question to The Martial Arts Community of Facebook.
Nearly 21% saying “no” is a pretty large percentage. And while this poll is far from scientific, I have a feeling that if we scaled the sample size up the percentages would hold. It’s an age old argument, how important ground fighting is in self defense training. These days, the question of whether or not it occurs in “the street” is more or less settled. The argument is shifting now to just how important studying grappling is.
At High Percentage, we don’t trust people. We trust data. So for the past few weeks, we watched 200 street fights and recorded several data points about ground fighting. Here’s the main questions we asked:
Did one or both participants engage in fighting on the ground?
Did the fight intentionally or unintentionally go to the ground? (ie, was it the result of a clear takedown attempt, and not a knockdown or stumble)
If the fight was intentionally grounded, what was the outcome for the participant who took it to the ground?
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Were there strikes landed on the ground?
Were the grounded fighters able to return to a standing position?
LIMITATIONS
As usual, street fights can get crazy, particularly when they escalate into melees with multiple small fights happening to several participants attacking one. Our biggest limitation was parsing these out in to separate fights when possible. Sometimes it wasn’t.
A smaller limitation was that it was sometimes hard to tell when takedowns were intentional or not. But for the most part, we were able to come to consensus each time.
In the end, some of the questions we asked we’re simply indeterminable. In these cases, we marked them as such.
With all that out of the way, here were our major takeaways from the data.
SEVEN OUT OF TEN FIGHTS WHEN TO THE GROUND, NINE OUT OF TEN FOR WOMEN.
73% of fights went to the ground, a clear majority. Fights involving two females were even higher, many because of women’s propensity to clinch. Too many factors favored the ground. Frantic movements off balanced people. Changes in terrain as simple as stepping off a curb prompted falls. And of course, taking shots to the head would often drop participants. But those weren’t even the leading reason for why fights went down.
OVER HALF OF THE FIGHTS WENT TO THE GROUND PURPOSELY.
Either way, it’s clear that more and more people are intentionally taking fights to the ground, not accidentally finding themselves there.
People who took the fight to the ground on purpose tended to win, or at least not lose.
Less than 2% of participants who took the fight to the ground went on to get knocked out or incapacitated, which says a lot. By and large, fighters who “scored” takedowns went on to defeat their opponents 39% of the time.
About half the time (46%), the fight had no clear outcome. This isn’t to say no one got hurt, but no one was so hurt they were incapacitated, which is good.
When fights go to the ground, they tend to stay there.
58% of the fights that went to the ground, stayed there for the duration. Typically, the top fighter would immediately throw strikes (79% of fights involved strikes on the ground.) and the bottom fighter would be overwhelmed. In the cases where participants were able to stand back up, 57% returned to the ground within seconds. Bottom line: if you go down, you’re staying down.
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Fights that go to the ground have less violent outcomes for both participants.
45% of fights that remained on the feet resulted in a knockout. That number dropped to 12% if the fight went to the ground. In fact, 58% of all ground fights ended with no clear resolution, aka no serious injuries. Fights that stayed standing ended indecisively only 43% of the time.
It’s important to note that these numbers go both ways. Even participants who “lost” fights on the ground were less likely to lose via knockout.
Bottom Line
It’s no secret that we are a jiu-jitsu website. At the same time, we’re not searching for conclusions that always validate our beliefs. We go where the data goes. Right now, it’s very clearly telling us a story. Ground fighting is a reality, and people that employ grappling skills tend to perform better and walk away in better shape.
That being said, we recorded many fights where grounded participants were brutally attacked by third parties. Other fights involved dangerous weapons. These are the harsh realities of self defense that should give everyone pause in a real fight. In the split seconds we have before we must make decisions. Go for a takedown or stay standing. There’s no right answer, we just have to play the odds.
Louis Joseph Martin III
content writer, www.sanabulsports.com
contributor, www.jiujitsutimes.com
contributor, www.wbbjj.com
owner, www.highpercentagemartialarts.com
source, https://www.highpercentagemartialarts.com/blog/2019/3/23/almost-all-fights-go-to-the-ground-and-we-can-prove-it
In this Jiu Jitsu Instructional video, Black Belt World Champion Bernardo Faria teaches Creating Pressure in Side Control.
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We constantly get questions in the White Belt BJJ Group asking what types of exercises are best for supplementing your BJJ. Here is a short video series that answers that question.
“Turf Toe” or an injury to the big toe can be a significant hindrance in BJJ. An injury like this will effect explosiveness, push-off, directional changes, takedowns, and your overall mobility.
In this video I share 5 tips and modifications that you can make to your BJJ game that you can implement today to help keep you on the mats, limit re-injury, and actually improve your overall jiu-jitsu game.
Hip switched top half guard can be an excruciating position for the person on bottom if the guy on top is good with pressure. This is certainly never a position you want to be in and is not an offensive bottom half guard position at all (outside of a “hail mary” club the head sweep).
In this video Lachlan Giles teaches how to prevent getting caught in this situation, and how to get out of it if you do get caught there.
Getting Squished in your own Closed Guard sucks. It can prevent a lot of Sweeps and Submissions you’re used to using from there.
BJJ Black Belt – Drew Weatherhead – shows not only how to Escape the entire position, but also how to get back to Sweeping and Submitting your Opponent!
