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War of styles: BJJ vs Wrestling

After I finished putting my affection for BJJ into a love letter, my mind was still occupied with the topic for a couple of days. I realized that I had touched on a couple of things without fully exploring them, and they merit a short sequel or two.  About how grapplers fare against stand-up fighters and vice-versa has been said enough in the previous post. Now I want to focus on the question: what is the best form of grappling? 

There are several contenders here, among which I only pick BJJ and the western (freestyle or Greco-Roman) style of wrestling, these being the two most prominent forms of grappling in the world of mixed-martial-arts, and probably the most extreme examples of their own wider groups (let's call those groups submission-focused group and take-down-focused group).

A good approach for answering complex questions is to start with an extreme example and draw general conclusions from it. What happens if a "pure" wrestler" (who knows no submission technique at all) faces with a pure BJJ practitioner (who only knows ground-fighting), all other things equal? The answer from the statistics (thanks to UFC and the like) is that the BJJ guy wins almost all the time. The reason is very simple. Wrestlers don't have the expertise in finishing moves. No chokes, no locks. A wrestling match ends when an average BJJ one starts - one fighter on his back on the floor. Additionally, wrestlers have to work against their natural instincts to turn their back on their opponent. In wrestling, it's a way to make it harder for your opponent to throw you. In BJJ, it's the best way to get yourself finished with a rear-naked choke.

However, when good wrestlers start learning submission techniques, they can catch up with BJJ'ers rather quickly. The reason for this is also the reason why moving from BJJ to wrestling is not that typical, and it's not easy, either. There is an asymmetry here. Wrestling filters for athleticism. Wrestlers are quick, agile, and have probably the best strength and body weight ratio among combat sports practitioners. They are unsurpassable in the foundations of grappling: the sense of balance, explosiveness, dominating the opponent, the use of body weight, ... From this base, learning BJJ requires learning how to move on the ground - which is truly a new skill -, and learning the techniques, which is simply a matter of practice. BJJers, on the other hand, can be experts - even if not world-class - of submission without being particularly athletic - it is actually one of the huge sources of BJJ's popularity. Improving your strength and agility is much, much harder, than improving on your technique. Someone can be a world champion in BJJ if he starts training at 18. No one will be a world champion wrestler starting at 18. Some very heavy work in your teenage years just can't be made up for once you passed the age. 

There is also the cost/benefit ratio. BJJers don't put much emphasis on what is at the center of wrestling: take-downs. The reason is that in a competition, a take-down is not particularly valuable. It scores 2 points, less than getting in a dominant position on the ground. If a wrestler tries to perform a take-down on a BJJer, the latter usually doesn't put much effort in fending it off. The attitude is: "You want to get me to the ground? I'm ok with that. Let's see what you do once I dragged you down with myself". On the other hand, learning to be very good at take-downs requires a lot of effort, and most BJJers think it's just not worth it.

To reiterate, in a match between pure wrestling, and pure BJJ - where the point is to incapacitate your opponent - BJJ wins, almost all the time. But take a seasoned wrestler and train him in BJJ, and he'll be a very, very hard opponent.

However, most of this above are true for wrestling as it is practiced today. In older times, before it has become a sport known today, catch-wrestling, or submission wrestling was very popular and it contained many submission techniques. One of its most famous practitioners, Ad Santel, has beaten the best students of the Kodokan school, the home of modern Judo. Which, by the way, spurred an immense interest in catch-wrestling among Judokas in Japan, many of whom traveled to Europe and America to learn wrestling.

But for now, I deliberately concentrated on the extremes. The wider world of grappling can be explored some other time.


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