Thanks SLG. Very reasonable response. After what appears to be a life long injury years ago, I am no longer eager to stand and punch it out myself.Originally Posted by SLG
Thanks SLG. Very reasonable response. After what appears to be a life long injury years ago, I am no longer eager to stand and punch it out myself.
SLG - as usual, a great analysis. But this one, being of yourself, speaks volumes of your maturity. Speaking as one into his retirement, I much appreciate your words.
MVS, I didn't take your comment as an argument at all. It represents a very commonly held belief system and I should be able to articulate a reasonable answer, or I am everything I rail against in the training community - someone who says do as I say because I am the authority.
The only issue I have with your comment is the idea that I am emphasizing one aspect of the fight. Hopefully, I can explain and point out that it is actually many, many aspects that BJJ can give you. I will try to answer this on a few different tangents, because it is not a simple reason.
Firstly, the major problem with a ranged striking game as a primary response is that it is so unpredictable, and as such, can only be described as wildly unreliable. Sometimes you punch a guy perfectly in the mouth and he is KOed. Sometimes you punch the same guy in the same place with the same punch, and he grins and says “is that all you got?” And you never know which card comes up. What a lot of people don’t realize about me is that I spent the first 25 years of my 37 year martial art career as a striker. That was what I loved, and what I trained the most. So believe me, I have hit a metric ton of people really hard, and I have been hit, really, really hard, more times than is probably good for the health of my brain. I know what happens, and how often, or how rare it is, for said strikes to work. I only did BJJ reluctantly, in order just to check off the box. I had no intent of doing much beyond a basic functional understanding of it. However, what happened was that I found it to work when striking failed me, and I had a better chance of pulling it off under true pressure. The same thing happened with a number of people studying the issue of modern SD in a weapon based environment, like Craig. Paul, Larry Lindenman, Chris Fry, etc. When Craig did the first open enrollment ECQC classes in the very early 2000s, there was a huge reliance on striking, and almost no grappling. As different folks attended with different skill sets, it quickly became apparent that those with good grappling always did far better than those with little of that. All of us teaching this stuff found that out through long trial and error, and thousands of students going through tens of thousands of training evolutions. Over the past few years, we have put more emphasis on grappling, because that is helping people get through these things easier and with less failure/trauma. Unlike striking, controlling the opponents limbs and denying his ability to strike/use a weapon/use foul tactics/escape and maintaining a dominant position means you as the controller gets to decide what is the best way to end the fight, and gives you the most optimum way of performing it. Quite simply, grappling, whether standing or on the ground, is a much more reliable and CONSISTENT method of fighting. It is also the easiest way of protecting yourself from loosing and taking damage. I am sure everyone has seen a boxing or MMA match where one person was dominating the fight with his striking and gets clipped and KOed by a desperation punch by the other guy. That kind of thing almost never happens in an entangled fight.
Second, the single surest way to find yourself on the ground is to train in a fighting method that spends no time on the ground. I think it is easy to understand the concept that where you spend most of your time training is where you are going to be comfortable, and can understand the nuances. If you are never there, you won’t be able to say the same thing. A guy may be an awesome carbine guy and can run that thing like he was born with it. Hand that same guy a TDA pistol, and if he has never shot one, will probably do pretty poorly on a FAST drill. In my BJJ gym for example, all our sparring begins on our feet. So just in one single hour long Intermediate class, where we will do 5 six minute rounds, means I am going to spend significant time trying to figure out how to get the other guy to the ground in a way that I can immediately dominate, AND AT THE SAME TIME, work on keeping him from doing the same thing to me. That is true functional training. Doing 5 rounds in a boxing gym where no one ever goes to the ground or at a Krav Maga gym where they may do some of it, but against partners who most likely have never had any grappling training outside of the minimal stuff they get in the KM class., is most certainly not equal.
Thirdly, as SLG pointed out, BJJ is the only fighting method (outside of Gun Fu) where a smaller, weaker person can consistently beat a bigger, stronger, faster opponent. That is not hyperbole in any way. Go to any legitimate BJJ gym in the world, any day of the week, and you will see that played out time and time again. The first bit of success I ever had was as a blue belt and 250 pounds; I rolled against two 300 pound twin brothers visiting our gym from Chicago. To spar them, both bigger, stronger, younger, and more aggressive than I was, and made both of them tap to chokes multiple times was a good and satisfying feeling. Is it possible for a striker? Sure, but not so consistently. The most popular division in any BJJ competition is the Open weight class where anyone of any size will compete, and you often see 145 pound dudes rolling against 250 pound +. Just Google any match between Mackenzie Dern and Gabi Garcia, or Caio Terra vs Bruno Bastos. It is a regular occurrence where the little guy wins. There is a reason that no boxing or Muay Thai tournament will ever have an Open Weight category. There is also a reason that old boxers don’t spar with younger fighters, while you see older BJJ players on the mat against young bucks as a daily thing. You can actually perform in that context. Not so easy to do when the younger guy has the power to knock over a brick wall, and you weigh 140, are 55 years old, and stand 5’7”. But it is eminently doable as a BJJ player.
Fourthly, as I pointed out in the article, it is well and good to tell someone to find X or Y to train in, but if actually being able to do that is close to impossible, then it is dumb to argue for it. Again, as I said in the article, I would LOVELOVELOVELOVE if it were feasible to send someone to a local Greco-Roman wrestling gym to get them dialed in on handling a standing entanglement. The fact is that your odds of winning the Powerball is better than you finding such a place, so rather than pontificate about it, it is better to just train something that is functional.
Fifth, I have written a number of articles on my blog and on TPI about how much the skill sets of the standing vertical clinch and many aspects of the grounded grappling of BJJ are identical. Half guard or butterfly guard for two examples, use so many similar techniques and concepts from the standing clinch, that you can have almost a complete butterfly guard game just using clinch moves. So, yes, you are horizontal, but you are improving a skill set that you might not get realistically anywhere else because you might not find a stand up wrestling gym that will teach you.
My sixth point is pretty simple – we screw up. In four decades of doing this, I can’t even begin to count how many times I have seen the guy winning the match/spar/roll slip, trip, or fall and the tide turns on a dime. And that is in the gym, where the pressure is lessened. How much more likely is that to occur when the stress is now life or death? So not getting some good work in on the ground is not smart.
And the last reason I advocate BJJ as heavy and as a primary is one I think gets short shrift. I completely reject the knee jerk, unthinking idea that going to the ground is automatically a bad idea. I literally have hours of videos where going to the ground was a damn great idea. In fact, there is a member of this forum who will tell anyone who asks that the only reason he is alive is because he took an encounter to the ground, and he will state in no uncertain terms that if he had tried to remain upright, the other guy would have beat him to death, or even been able to get the good guy’s gun and use it. And then someone of course always brings up multiple opponents as the trump card for anti-ground work. Except that being on your feet against multiples suck just as bad. People who talk like it is so much better and easier to accomplish. It isn’t, and anyone who has done good FoF with multiples will tell you it is still almost a Kobayashi Maru. At least on the ground, you can actually protect your back from someone coming up completely behind you. Even more to the point is how often do multiple opponent encounters happen? No one knows for sure. It is full of unsubstantiated anecdotal evidence. I am in the middle of a research project (about two years in now) using two massive data bases started at the instigation of Claude Werner where I am trying to come up with hard numbers on how often fights go to the ground, and how often multiple opponents happen. Right now, with about 600+ police documented cases down, the percentage of incidents involving more than 1 attacker is just about 40%. So we are going to throw the baby out with the bathwater by ignoring a skill set that may work awesomely in 60% of cases, and try to only focus on a skill that may only work marginally better in 40%. It just makes no logical sense to me all.
To be clear, I am not advocating taking a fight to the ground every single time. I hate that sort of dogma. What we need to be able to do, to steal some verbiage from Craig Douglas, is to become a multi-disciplinary thinking tactician that can make the correct choice in any given context. That means we have to have a functional capability in many skill sets – striking, standing clinch, grappling, as well as weapons and pre-fight threat containment strategies – to be successful. Just dismissing or minimizing one of some of those without a good reason is poor critical thinking. We need to do some work. Period.
Hopefully, all that rambling makes sense, and does not come across as attacking you MVS, because I certainly don't intend for that to be the case. I just wanted to really try to at least touch on all the reasons that I am doing what I am doing.
Last edited by Cecil Burch; 11-23-2016 at 02:27 PM.
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Thanks Cecil for that explanation!
Thanks for the lengthy response Cecil, I really appreciate it. I look forward to training with you again, maybe for more than a couple of hours.
Cecil's post should be a sticky. Lots of good stuff there.
I will offer a slightly different angle on the multiple opponent/going to the ground thing. I think aside from multiple opponents, the other main reason cited for why going to the ground should be avoided (and I agree, in general) is that unlike on the mat, we have cars, glass, curbs, etc to deal with on the street. I'd rather be on my feet when any of those things get in my way.
Also, as a small guy, I think, based on lots of sparring and a tiny amount of real world experience, that dealing with multiple opponents is easier when you can move. If it comes to getting swarmed, then maybe you can better protect your back on the ground, but almost all of the fights I've seen or responded to that ended that way, ended REALLY REALLY badly for the guy on the ground. Getting stomped to death is a real issue.
Cecil is a fair bit bigger than me, and when we were both in our striking prime, he was likely better than me, so that may color our views on this. Not to mention, he's orders of magnitude (to use a TLG phrase) better on the ground.
So it seems my communication skills are less than optimal or this would not have come up, so let me try to clarify a couple of things. This is not to argue with SLG, or to say that he is wrong. Instead, it is an attempt to get away form the black/white thinking about this subject, and to try to be a bit more nuanced instead.
I never have said it is a good idea to go to the ground against multiple opponents. Nor did I ever say it was better than staying upright against multiples. If someone can find a quote of mine where I did say either, I will publicly apologize.
What did say, I think quite clearly, is that going to the ground in that situation is not, to borrow a phrase previously used, orders of magnitude worse than standing. And I pointed out a couple of specifics why. My point is simply that this dogmatic, automatic knee jerk response of ground always = bad and that upright always = success against multiples is patently and provably wrong. In fact, over the holiday, someone sent me a video on Facebook that illustrated my point exactly. It shows a big parking lot brawl and it has one guy on his feet and moving around and he is striking one opponent. While he is doing so, another opponent comes up BEHIND him (right where I said was the major vulnerable spot while standing) and cracks him in the skull and he goes down and out. I could not have asked for a better and timelier video proof of my point. And if I can figure out how to download a FB vid and then embed it here, I will so all can see it for themselves.
I also (again, I think clearly) tried to point out how freakishly hard it is to actually put the theories of staying mobile and on your feet into effect. We can talk about them all day long, and can agree, that THEORETICALLY, they are better tactics. But theory does not equal ease of use.
One of the reasons I am making this point is that if we blindly and uncritically accept the dogma that ground fighting against multiples is always a bad idea, is that we put mental inhibitors on that will prevent us from using the tactic, even when it is the best choice. We have to be able to make the correct contextual application of the best tactic/technique to survive, and we cannot assume we will know what is always the single and only answer. Case in point, a member here can confirm this story because it involves a fellow member of his department. The LEO is question was responding solo to a noise complaint at a house party. The party goers took exception to his orders and attacked him. The only way he survived long enough for his back up to arrive was that he grabbed one attacker, dropped to the ground, and pulled half guard with his back to a car wheel well. The attackers could not get to his back, and could not attack him to the front because one of their own was being held as a shield. If he had stayed upright, he would have been badly beaten, and even killed. So if he had had the mental block in place of “ground is bad”, he may very well have died. Because he did not have that limitation, he was able to make the best tactical choice and survive. There are plenty of similar cases like that. Is going to the ground against multiple attackers a great idea? No, but there is no good, high percentage choice against multiples. They all suck a poop sandwich. But if we arbitrarily eliminate a skill set, we may just screw ourselves. Also, another reason I am hitting this hard is because up until fairly recently (say the last 5 or 6 years) the conventional wisdom of gong to the ground at all, even against a single attacker was pretty much along the same lines as the advice against multiples – i.e. you will die no matter what and never do it. And now we know that to be foolish and wrong, and have been proven as such time and again. I prefer that we don’t make the same mistake here, and throw the baby out with the bathwater.
As for the point about the ground is hard and has obstacles, I strongly believe this is way overblown. Before I moved my teaching to my BJJ instructor’s gym, I was teaching a closed door, invite only group out of my garage. It was not particularly stocked well and I had no mats. Being younger and dumber, I didn’t let that stop me and we spent a great deal of our time rolling around on my concrete driveway, in the asphalt of the street in front (on Sunday mornings when we trained, my neighbors would pull up chairs in their driveway and watch us), and in the parking lot of the park in our sub-division. It certainly was not fun at times, but it was not some major impendent to training, even on the ground. Really, all the mats do in a gym is to minimize the wear and tear on our bodies. No small concern, especially if we are training as I do on a normal week of 10 -11 hours rolling around. But it does not mean training on hard surfaces suddenly turn us into frozen automatons, incapable if functioning. Take a look as wrestlers and judoka using crash mats for example. They will use the big, soft, cushiony crash pads to work tons of reps on high amplitude throws and takedowns to save their bodies and minimize injury. But there are no soft crash mats in competition. Does that mean they can’t function? Of course not. It simply means they take a bit more pounding in a short period of time. It’s no big deal. I wrote an article on my website a while ago pointing this out and I used some classic BJJ footage to illustrate. In the 70’s, there was a big challenge Vale Tudo series of matches between a karate school in Rio and the Gracies. When they were deciding on where it was to be held, the Gracies insisted in be held on concrete floors. The karate people thought that was stupid on their part and it would help them so they agreed. They video shows they were wrong. All the fights went to the ground and the ridiculously hard flooring made no negative impact on the grapplers. And again, we have tons of video also showing that. A few years ago, on an episode of the Ultimate Fighter, two of the contestants got into a brawl at their house. One guy slapped on a triangle choke. Te other guy picked him up and slammed his back on the edge of a brick fire pit. The result? Nothing. The first fighter held onto the triangle, and the second fighter kept trying to get out. Eventually it was broken up. And the guy who was slammed full force on the brick edges did not even miss the training session the next day.
My point, AGAIN, is not that there is nothing to worry about ground fighting in “the street”, but simply to point out that more times than not, in the real world it is not as big a deal as some would make it.
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I wasn't sure if I should put this here as I don't want to derail the thread but this discussion has touched on enough things relevant to my question that I though it would add to the discussion.
Cecil or anybody, have you ever had yourself, or with students, had to reprogram default grappling responses? I remember reading in the thread about the automatic "take them down" response is eventually worked through but what about the next level...when you are on the ground? The question is what makes the decision to get up and disengage more of a priority than continuing the ground fight, under what circumstances would you, etc., etc....
My experience in a recent ECQC lead to me getting stabbed umpteen times and Craig asking me why didn't I just get up? I was totally focused on achieving and keeping a dominant position, which I had and kept, on the ground that I totally looked past the one on my feet. It almost feels as if I would have been losing the ground fight I would have wanted to get to my feet more than if I was winning. I was focused on accessing my tool on the ground and therefore fighting the guy over limb control that it took me getting nailed by the second actor and the ensuing grounded FUT to knock me out of my tunnel and get to my feet.
I've done BJJ on and off for the last 12 years so I am not unfamiliar with the ground. Alot of my journey has been the translation and modification of what I know to fit into the MD paradigm. But this aspect has always been something I have struggled with and continues to get exposed to one degree or another in FoF's that I have trained, especially ECQC.
It's like I go into competition mode when I get on the ground.....how could I address this?
Thanks for any input...
This is a really difficult issue, and one in which a numbe rof us spend a lot of time talking about and researching in an attempt to fully crack the code.
I would not use the term "reprogram".
What I would say is that when someone gets really dedicated to training something, it can be become very easy to hyper focus and unthinkingly default to that response regardless of the contextual application. The most blatant and most overwhelmingly demonstrated example is the gun-centric guy who tries to insert the gun in no matter what and then has it taken away and used against him. I have also seen it happen with knife people, guys with a heavy striking background, and of course with grapplers. All of them, when the pressure is on, have a tendency to go to whatever they train the most or the most recent.
After 10+ years of dealing with this, I am coming down on the side that it is almost entirely an issue where we never think about the proper place of whatever we are training when we are training it. For example, in my coursework, I have a simple exercise where we start to introduce the problem of multiple opponents in a grounded situation. It is really simple, and easy to grasp, and does not require any change to the physical skill set, and yet, even when I have experienced BJJ players, they can struggle with the concept and fail at executing it.
I think we have to not let ourselves have the idea that there is any one perfect overriding solution to the entangled fight. Not a gun, not a knife, not BJJ, not Greco-Roman wrestling, not good power striking, not disengagement. They are ALL good answers and can all work at the right time. We have to not be "attached" to the idea of any one answer. I really think that if we program ourselves as true multi-disciplinary thinking tacticians (to once again steal Craig's phrase), then we will be much less likely to hyper focus and get tunnel thought vision.
I know this is not an easy or simple answer, but it is not really and easy or simple problem.
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As a deeper illustration of my previous post, let's examine just what you said.
You said you were focused on keeping a dominant position. Great! But what is implicit is that you are looking at dominant position as a way to fight on the ground. Instead, look at it solely as a place in which you are optimizing your options while minimizing your opponent's. Then, you can be more free to choose the proper option, rather being being exclusivity tied to the ground. Because you also need to remember than in another scenario, being engaged and fighting on the ground may be the best choice. It is not one = bad, and the other = good. It is the right context.
Also, where you said this:
It's like I go into competition mode when I get on the ground.....how could I address this?
The best way is to not see the ground fight as just a ground fight. See it and understand it as one part of the macro whole, and you need to keep your eyes on the whole. One good training drill to address this is to be rolling with a partner and have someone from the outside call out a finish and you need to work towards that. For example, one iteration the finish could be a choke, the next one could be get a gun into play, and the next one could be stand up and create distance. This way, you are forced to look at different solutions rather than the first one that is in your head. Put in enough rounds of this and you will build a pretty good automatic open ended thought process. Again, this stuff is not easy and requires us to work. But it can be done with some sweat equity.
Last edited by Cecil Burch; 12-05-2016 at 04:35 PM.
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