hey guys Elon here from inside fighting and in this video we're going to Deep dive into whether Brazilian jiu-jitsu especially in its modern form dare I say sucks for self-defense and what do I know uh why would I be someone you would listen to I've been doing Brazilian jiu-jitsu since the late 90s I'm a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu am I the best in the world not even close but I know what I'm talking about and I I uh I love the sport but it's just that a sport so stay tuned I'm going to jump
into why pow pow inside inside fighting yeah dangerous dangerous maral all right before I get started please like And subscribe and also check out insid fighting store.com I just released raid volume 3 it's badass and I have a money back guarantee if you watch an instructional you buy it you watch it because if you just pirated it I can't refund anything that wouldn't make sense so if you buy you watch it you don't like it within 30 days I'll give you your money back all right that's my pitch enjoy it let's just jump right in
so jiujitsu for self-defense Brazilian jiu-jitsu let me uh talk about when I first started Jiu-Jitsu why I got into it real fast I've been doing Filipino martial arts uh I remember watching the early UFC's and thinking they were so badass a guy came to our school where I trained Filipino Mars and I thought he was an ninjitsu competitor that's when he said he's a j Jitsu competitor I didn't know what Jiu-Jitsu was and then he just took me down T me out took me down tap me out and I'm like I gotta learn this bro
this feels like a superpower and in many ways that's what Jiu-Jitsu was especially back then early two early 2000s it was like a superpower because Jiu-Jitsu in its very nature is Brazilian jiujitsu specifically is arguably the best style for taking out other martial artists in a controlled environment with soft ground if that makes sense like if you're on the beach if you're on grass any environment where you can hit the ground if you're in a ring that has like a Matt at surface and you're fighting one guy even if they're incredible at their martial art
you will probably beat them you could train Jiu-Jitsu for two years Brazilian jiu-jitsu and go compete against like a karate champion back in the day and you would be able to hopefully get them down and then for sure tap them out it gave you a shot against almost anyone and that was kind of the appeal for me back then now is that self-defense no does that have practicality for a certain amount of self-defense yes right we can't deny that that is a certain aspect of fighting it's a very different aspect than uh you know being
attacked with a knife or being attacked by a mob of people but there are conditions specific conditions and that what that's what street fighting is there or self-defense is there is no overall system for self-defense even combatives so what you get in Brazilian jiu-jitsu especially old school Brazilian jiu-jitsu I'm going to talk why new school Brazilian jiu-jitsu does not offer the same benefit in fact it's counterintuitive the old school Brazilian jiujitsu focused its energy on beating other martial artists and in the nature of doing that when the UFC was brutal like this let me just
add this to the uh to the screen right here but we're going to see right away look how brutal old school UFC is Parental Advisory suggested um this is when things were absolutely brutal this is what fights would look like oh man okay it's a lot different nowadays these guys are bare knuckle there's no uh there's no pretty much uh rounds they're grabbing hair they're hitting each other in the groin and here's the the most important difference that you have to train against in Brazilian J just to back in the day if you're were going
to be in this kind of fight explosive aggression I talk about this a lot um modern day fights are more technical you're learning how to fight a guy over a long period of time that has a high skill set back in the day in these fights were shorter a lot of the time because people would just explode at you or they would just gas out within the first like minute of the fight so was a shorter burst of Highly highly highly aggressive energy so Jiu-Jitsu was shining at fighting explosive bursts of Highly aggressive energy for
a couple of reasons number one I'll jump into it people were not trained on the ground they had no understanding of the ground it was a whole new world so it allowed you to come in and put people in an area where they had not fought before which is always a massive Advantage but look at the aggression here this is like simulates what a fight on the street actually looks like a lot more if you watch street fights than what modernday MMA is people are Reckless people are wild people put all their energy into each
strike and they want to end it fast there's a lot more adrenaline here whereas fights today are far more technical so the nature of the sport has changed and therefore it doesn't represent a street fight as much as it used to Old School MMA represented street fighting much more than modern day MMA that was sick okay just important notes and Jiu-Jitsu was was able to slow this down and allow the smaller guy to take the bigger guy into a place where they had not trained before which was almost like a superpower okay important to note
now if we look at what Jiu-Jitsu has become so the sport of Jiu-Jitsu itself back in the day was not as popular it was more Jiu-Jitsu guys would go into MMA but then Jiu-Jitsu became a much more popularized sport in and of itself and what we've created now and I said this earlier so back in the day old school Jiu-Jitsu was a system designed to beat other martial artists new school Jiu-Jitsu and this is the biggest distinction that no one talks about is a martial art designed to beat itself it's a very important distinction and
I'm going to explain why when a martial art becomes self-obsessed within its own Circle to beat other people within that Circle which is what happens in certain Sports it can create rule sets tactics techniques and principes principles that are counterintuitive to its original goal which may have been self-defense and this type of fighting specifically which has a certain value like I said and we we'll jump into that more later old school but new school specifically isn't even good for this we saw that recently with Kon Gracie getting his head smashed against the ground this is
like the most perfect demonstration of Jiu-Jitsu in modern day MMA by Bryce Mitchell and being koed Jiu-Jitsu just doesn't work in that environment anymore there's a couple reasons uh but one of the main reasons is that the focus on takedowns the focus on on fighting people who are hitting you and then again the focus on Jiu-Jitsu beating jiujitsu specifically has allowed things like this to take place and this is exactly what we saw in the Kon Gracie fight he just kept pulling guard until he got slammed on his head and then elbowed in his head
by the way this first person you see here this guy's just walking away from him is Mikey musi who's one of the best Grapplers in the world right now and this is what he's doing does this seem conducive to a street fight this is Gordon Ryan the best Grappler in history pulling guard does this seem conducive to a street fight now look could Gordon Ryan pull this off it's over could Gordon Ryan pull this off in a street fight absolutely he's Gordon Ryan he's the best in the world but what he's training for specifically Gordon
Ryan is to beat other Jiu-Jitsu guys I'm going to explain this now by showing you like an example of worm guard this entire series of uh tactics right setting up the worm guard sweeps from the worm guard submissions from the worm guard just one type of guard the sole purpose and I mean this the only place this is applicable is in G jiujitsu against other Jiu-Jitsu players there is no other environment where this is a functional technique meaning if you are training this there is only one reason to train it it is to beat other
people in the gym in the sport of Jiu-Jitsu okay so that's why you would be training this not for self-defense there is zero applicable value here for self-defense I would argue it is developing bad habits for self-defense reaching for the ghee you're G to get punched in the head being too comfortable on your back inverting to roll to take the back here is insane on concrete right your goal should be get to get back to your feet to sweep and get to Mount position you definitely don't want to be on your back inverting while holding
someone's collar and him punching you in the face with 42 steps before you get to any viable location and this is Jiu-Jitsu has become so convoluted with this it's become you know chess it's human chess that's what we all say again I've been doing Jiu-Jitsu 26 years I love Jiu-Jitsu but I acknowledge what it is a sport within itself this is why it's no longer as applicable to MMA because you just can't do that in MMA you can't do that many steps the complexity is too much and so if you look at like how you
should be training Jiu-Jitsu if you want to train for self-defense have someone put on gloves don't wear a ghee have them punch you in the head repeatedly take them down and control them on top that's it that's with basic techniques neon belly pinning the arms maybe like you could do some kind of whatever you want if you want to do like a you know a Dar choke but again you're hyper committing when you do a Dar or rear naked unless you can keep your your posture and not be on your back with the person on
top of you um so there's very very you need very limited positions you need very limited techniques it's why I say people ask me a lot is Judo better for self-defense than Jiu-Jitsu 1 million percent and Brazilian jiu-jitsu specifically 1 million percent I'll explain why if you are going to be a Grappler train grappling for street fighting specifically for self-defense specifically 80% of your energy should be takedowns the takedown is not only the fight Ender in most cases it's also the first step need in order to apply anything you're going to do in Jiu-Jitsu it
also teaches you when you train takedowns to stay on your feet better which is a life-saving skill set when fighting multiple people so if you're not training that 80% of the time and then 20% of the time on the ground with basic techniques you're not training functionally for the street for self-defense and Jiu-Jitsu does the complete opposite it's roughly 90% 95% on the ground it goes 95% complex series of techniques so it's the complete counter and when people say Jiu-Jitsu is the only sport in the entire world combat sport the only martial art let me
correct where people say it doesn't matter how you train in the gym when I'm in the street I'm going to do XYZ in other words the rule set for every other martial arts system is how you train is how you fight that's like rule number one for self-defense for Combat Sports for fighting in general people say this over and over and over and it's accurate the way you train in gym under high stress is going to be how you perform at the lowest quality by the way like your worst day in the gym is how
you're going to perform in the street so you're telling me you're spending your whole time in the gym inverting going for worm guard grabbing the ghee pulling it under the leg spinning around going for the back but when it comes to a high stress situation where a 220 pound meth head is coming at you like a wild aggressive Maniac that's trying to literally kill you you're suddenly going to be like you know what forget all my training I'm going to go back to my white to blue belt training and focus on fundamentals no you're going
to focus on your competition stuff because jiujitsu has become a sport that specializes in beating itself not beating aggressive Maniacs like it used to when you look at these you know early UFC's that's what people were fighting back in the day the second the sport became obsessed with pulling guard it lost a lot of its value and I mean look if you're training things like this that guy's neck broke flying armar that's something you might do in the gym that you could pull off on the mat this guy still broke his neck on a mat
can lead to paralysis but that on concrete but you're going to tell me hey I'm training flying arm barss I'm amazing at flying armbars all day that's what I'm doing in the gym catching everyone with flying arm bars you get into a street fight not going to do a flying arm bar okay congratulations to you you proved you could beat people in the sport of Jiu-Jitsu specifically in your gym on a soft ground you know with a with a rule set so it just doesn't translate anym the way it used to so jiujitsu if again
you need the fundamentals even those fundamentals nowadays are not taught the way they used to be like I meet people who don't understand basic closed guard because they're starting off with crazy guards like every guard now is so complex they're starting off with crazy techniques that their fundamentals are never even taught they don't even know basic passing in the right way they don't know how to choke in the most the most fundamental basic jokes but they could do the most crazy jiujitsu spinning inverted I'm going to flip upside down be on your back Baron bolo
into this and I'm like the hell are you doing here you know like it's fine again it's beautiful if you want to excel at the sport but it is not functional for self-defense um okay I got a little bit heated there so I what do I recommend people do again if they train jiujitsu like I said if your go goal is self-defense you are going to lose in the gym because you're going to come into the gym you're going to fight Jiu-Jitsu rules and people are going to specialize at beating Jiu-Jitsu because that's what they're
doing and they're gonna use techniques that they can't use in the street but they can use in the gym that would function very badly in the street so you're GNA have to sit there and be like you know what I'm only going to focus on my over hooks really tight underhooks I'm going to focus on always being on top I'm going to focus when I can get away and create some space to get up you have to change the way you train fundamentally and find people who are willing to train with you that way and
then ideally you add strikes into it because Jiu-Jitsu without and you start focusing and when people pull guard just step back be like no I got to work my takedowns and I know takedowns have the highest risk of injury I've again I've torn both my ACLS uh interestingly enough both of them have to do more with [ __ ] which points to the issue right it points to [ __ ] was one was on a takedown the other one was on a heel hook and uh yeah both torn my ACLS and then I have a
tor sing my right knee sadly now from kyoku Shin odly from a bad kick but that's besides the point uh the other thing Jiu-Jitsu nowadays has become obsessed with is leglocks like old school [ __ ] was obsessed with leglocks and it still is um Jiu-Jitsu kind of adopted that catch [ __ ] approach and focuses so heavily I always I think what's funny is a lot of modern day Jiu-Jitsu stuff that we were doing back in catch wrestling and [ __ ] in the early 2000s the irony is astonishing like wrist locks all of
a sudden those are becoming popular I'm like man we were doing this 25 years ago and it was a huge part of our training in sparring and nowadays it's like people like oh man you can pull off wrist locks yes you can pull off wrist lucks regardless and those are actually self-defense applicable very good um regardless you have to take into account if your goal is self-defense specifically how injured are you getting for the sake of your sport majority of people who are competitive injur jits who have serious serious injuries to their spines to their
knees to their shoulders to everything and so you compromise your your Effectiveness on the street like I just said my acl's my shoulders messed up my fingers my spine is messed up this is just me personally and I like I said I'm not the best in the world by any means I'm not competitive by any means I'm just a black belt who's been doing it a long time and had gym Wars and those gym Wars destroyed my body so if your goal is self-defense how far do you go with that before it's counterintuitive again before
the payoff is much lower than the risk because if if you have two busted ACLS you have spinal injuries you're waking up every day and pain are you as effective out there on the street than the guy who just did control who took you down went for moves that he knows he could pull off against a psychotic aggressive you know uh resisting opponent and trains for that specifically I don't think so oh yeah so where does Jiu-Jitsu shine Jiu-Jitsu in many ways shines in the mental health aspect getting you to face yourself every day going
into the gym in a very specific R set where you're not getting punched in the head uh which can be very healthy for a lot of people I I think Jiu-Jitsu in that end of things is brilliant I think it helps people with mental health issues helps people with aggression helps people with having an outlet a community uh and I think that is a major contributor to the popularization of Jiu-Jitsu and I think that's actually a great thing it's why I love Jiu-Jitsu I like going in there I like you know I like wrestling I
like fighting against someone but I don't delude myself into believing that what I'm doing in the gym is what I'm going to do in the street and that's the one major point I want to make if you want Jiu-Jitsu because you love it because it helps you mentally and because it helps you physically excellent fully supported if you go around then believing you're a tough guy like you know uh Joe Rogan and Joo promote saying it's like the one martial art that you need it's the best martial art this that I highly disagree for self-defense
highly disagree argue Judo way better [ __ ] way better and even in just in the grappling Circle wrestling catch wrestling virtually almost any other grappling style within the grappling world is better for self-defense literally I know that sounds crazy anyway I hope you like this video uh like And subscribe and uh buy my [ __ ]
