Mine tooOriginally Posted by GJM
Mine too
I am preparing the questions for the podcast when we interview Gabe to learn more about his plans and platform.
Likes pretty much everything in every caliber.
I was hoping that there would be some response besides telling of a single story to answer a specific statement. Since that is not forthcoming, I will just have this to add since there are a lot of people on this board who do not do BJJ and might think what was said is actually a legitimate indictment of the art. Voodoo Man's whole narrative that competition was somehow responsible for his friend’s action is demonstrably wrong and based on a completely false premise. I can go on and on with reasons, but for brevity’s sake, I will just give two for now. But these are two that are the easiest to understand, even for someone who does not train BJJ.
1) Competition focus could not have caused the friend’s action for the simple reason that you do not release the hold to a tap in competition. The match is only stopped when the referee signals and commands you to stop. It is possible for the guy in the hold to tap, the other guy releases, and if the ref did not see it, the match can continue! So you are specifically told NOT to release on the tap. As a matter of fact, most IBJJF referees will tell new white belts in their first competition exactly that before the match starts. I did it all the time as a ref, including when I officiated at the European Championships with the language barrier (there were a lot of eastern Euros competing), and most of the refs that I know will do so as well. And even if the ref does not mention it, it is in the rulebook, in black and white, for everyone to see, and has been pretty much since the formation of the federation almost 30 years ago. So there is absolutely no way that competition ingrained such a response, because it goes exactly against the rules to act in that manner.
2) Even if a person had a subconscious reaction to tapping and released the hold, it would not have led to the situation you described, simply because if you performed BJJ properly, it could not happen. A good BJJ player does not flail around in a desperate drag race to slap on a choke or limb break, hanging on for dear life while doing so. That is contrary to the heart of BJJ. There is a fundamental, underlying principle that the entire body of BJJ is built on, and that is referred to as “position before submission”. In other words, one needs to have positional based dominant control before and during the execution of a submission. For example, I need to not just be on top of someone, I need to have such control that they cannot escape, or prevent me from applying the attack, or defend and stop it in the middle. Only then is the submission applied. So, even if said person had made the mistake of releasing the submission in a weird and unprecedented autonomic tap response, the other person still could not have reversed the situation and went back to being an active threat, because in addition to releasing the hold itself, the person would also have had to continue the further action of moving off the position into a neutral or inferior position afterwards. An extended action that all would have had to have been without conscious thought. That is the equivalent of touching a hot stove, and not only pulling your hand back, but then running away to the far end of the room and squatting down, all in one continuous automatic reaction. That would defy all logic in believing that would happen more than as a great anomaly, and in no way would provide reasonable evidence that this kind of failure could possibly occur much, if at all.
Thanks for adding your thoughts, Cecil.
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See, this is why we need a like button. I heart this thread.
Interesting thread.
I went back and tracked down Ron's instagram post here
and the last comment nails it for me;
grandmasterwicked
"There are always exceptions, never underestimate your enemy or overestimate yourself."
And in case someone thinks I am doubting the veracity of his story, nothing could be further from the truth. All I am doubting is the underlying cause of the failure in the story to be related to competition or competition focused training, in and of itself.
Could an individual have a failure of that kind? Maybe, but it is an individual failure, and not an indictment on the training. I am reminded of how often we see someone letting their muzzle of a loaded gun cover someone on the range or in the real world. We don't then hear cries that the entire rules of safety need to be scrapped. Rather it is chalked up to an individual mistake, that cannot, and should not be applied to the macro.
Cecil, that was just an absolutely outstanding post.
Seriously. Well said.
Excellent posts Cecil and you are 100% accurate in your assessment. Prior to competing in MMA, I competed in various BJJ competitions. A tap is not an "I give" motion to you, it's an "I give" motion to the ref.
The strength in BJJ is in positional dominance and understanding where you can and can't be damaged. You can ride out a very large person as long as no weapons are involved and dominate them without applying a single submission.
Getting off track from the original topic, but I'd say competitions are a solid way of learning how to rapidly apply accurate shots under pressure. It's the same reason my camp didn't prepare for a MMA fight by just throwing on gloves and slapping the hell out each other every night. You need to drill the fundamentals over and over and over again in the safest manner possible.
What I do agree with is that you won't know how you will react until the bullets go flying, but at least you will have the fundamentals to give you the greatest chance possible to survive. We had plenty of studs in the gym who sucked when they competed in front of a crowd. Even with that said I guarantee they would still dominate any normal fan in the crowd.
In the duh! category, any kind of BJJ/MMA/TMA competition will provide way more stress and pressure testing than any shooting competition. I would guess that it's orders of magnitude more. The difference is, you can be an out of shape slug, or injured, and still go shoot competition. You can even do well. And, since it's the most stress most people can avail themselves of on a regular basis with a gun, it is still worth something. Much harder to attend high level force on force on a monthly basis. Finally, for anyone who hasn't yet competed, and wants to benefit from the stress of it, I personally never found USPSA or IDPA to be stressful. Steel challenge, otoh, gives most people the shakes at one point or another. I hear Bianchi Cup does as well, but I have yet to try it myself.
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