Journal
Researched writing on jiu-jitsu. Every factual claim traces to a listed source, and where the historical record is contested the piece says so rather than picking the tidier version.
All articles
- Influential Practitioners
De la Riva, and the guard that took his name
A hook behind one leg solved a specific problem in a specific room in Rio in the early 1980s, and the widely repeated account of when it happened does not agree with itself.
Rick R · 8 min · 5 sources - Training Culture
Drilling, rehearsing, and what positional sparring changes
Three different activities share one word in most gyms, and the confusion is not linguistic: it shows up in how the hour is spent and in what the room believes it is buying.
Rick R · 9 min · 7 sources - Technique notes
Grip decay, and the half-life of a no-gi grip
A sleeve grip is a latch you can leave holding while you think. A wrist is a loan against your forearm, and almost everything published about grip in grappling measured the latch.
Steven P · 7 min · 6 sources - Guard Systems
Guard retention as a system
Retention is usually taught as a list of recoveries, which describes what a held guard looks like from outside without saying what is being held.
Steven P · 9 min · 5 sources - Equipment and Apparel
How a BJJ rash guard should fit
What the garment has to do while you are being gripped, dragged and sat on, the one fit rule anybody actually wrote down, and five checks you can run in a changing room.
Steven P · 10 min · 6 sources - Competition Analysis
How no-gi rulesets reshaped technique selection
Read the IBJJF and ADCC rule books side by side and they stop looking like safety regulations and start looking like two different price lists for the same actions.
Steven P · 10 min · 6 sources - Equipment and Apparel
How to wash a rash guard
Most laundry advice for stretch knitwear is confident, unsourced and about a different fabric. Here is what has actually been measured, what the care label is really telling you, and what we could not find evidence for.
Steven P · 8 min · 7 sources - BJJ History
Maeda, and the arrival of judo in Brazil
Almost every confident sentence written about Mitsuyo Maeda is contradicted by another confident sentence, and the disagreements are more instructive than any tidy version of the story.
Rick R · 10 min · 7 sources - Guard Systems
Seated guard and supine guard are two different jobs
Sitting up and lying back are usually taught as preferences. Treat them as two different control problems with different failure modes and the choice between them stops being a matter of taste.
Steven P · 8 min · 4 sources - Guard Systems
Taking the back from turtle
Three scoring tables define back control in three different ways, and what they disagree about tells you more than what they share.
Steven P · 9 min · 5 sources - Technique notes
The armbar from closed guard
The leg swinging over the head is the part everybody watches and the part that decides least; by then the arm has either been taken or it has not.
Steven P · 8 min · 5 sources - Training Culture
The dropout number nobody can source
Ninety per cent of white belts quit, or seventy, or seventy-five, or ninety-five, depending on which page you landed on, and following each version back to its origin is more instructive than any of them.
Rick R · 7 min · 8 sources - Technique notes
The guillotine from the front headlock
Arm in or arm out changes what the technique is, and the finish comes from the hips in both cases, which is why pulling harder with the arms is the standard way to lose it.
Steven P · 7 min · 5 sources - Technique notes
The kimura as a control before it is a finish
The figure-four grip on a wrist is worth more for the arm it removes from the exchange than for the submissions it occasionally produces.
Steven P · 8 min · 6 sources - Technique notes
The rear naked strangle from back control
A strangle and a neck crank are separated by a small change in what the second hand is doing, which is why four rule books bothered to write the difference down.
Steven P · 8 min · 5 sources - Technique notes
The triangle, and why the angle matters more than the squeeze
A triangle that will not finish is almost never a triangle that needs more effort; it is a triangle applied along the wrong line.
Steven P · 7 min · 6 sources - MMA and Jiu-Jitsu
What the early UFC tournaments actually demonstrated
The events are cited as proof that grappling beats striking. Read the format the way you would read any other experiment and the claim they support is much narrower, and more durable, than the one they are used for.
Rick R · 7 min · 4 sources - MMA and Jiu-Jitsu
Why sport jiu-jitsu does not transfer directly to MMA
Not a question about who would beat whom. A question about which constraints changed between the two activities, and what each change does to the value of a position.
Rick R · 9 min · 8 sources
Categories
BJJ History
How the art arrived where it is, and who moved it.
1 articleInfluential Practitioners
People whose work changed what the rest of us do on the mat.
1 articleMMA and Jiu-Jitsu
What happens to grappling when strikes, gloves and a cage are added.
2 articlesGuard Systems
The structures underneath the positions.
3 articlesTechnique notes
Shorter pieces on single mechanics. The Technique Library is the reference; these are the arguments.
6 articlesTraining Culture
How rooms work, and what that does to the people in them.
2 articlesEquipment and Apparel
What the gear does, what it does not do, and how to choose.
2 articlesCompetition Analysis
What rulesets reward, and how that shapes technique selection.
1 article