The Fallacy of “The Street”

A few days ago, an article I wrote back in February about butt scooting was reposted here at Jiu-Jitsu Times.

I saw several responses saying that butt scooting veers from the original “street fighting” origins of jiu-jitsu. I think this demonstrates a certain fallacy of thinking that exists among specific elements of the jiu-jitsu community.

Depending on the kind of “street fight,” jiu-jitsu may not prepare you.  If you think it prepares you for all physical confrontations, you are wrong.

That’s right; I said it.

However, jiu-jitsu DOES somewhat prepare you for self-defense situations.

To clarify, if you wind up in a situation in which you are dealing with a single, unarmed attacker in a relatively stable environment, jiu-jitsu will make you a superior combatant. More often than not, jiu-jitsu practitioners prevail in situations like these.

But many “street fights” today do not fit that description. Weapons are involved and people generally aren’t alone when they get into fights.

Lots of fights happen in bars, too, where the floor is sometimes covered in broken glass. Worse yet, bottles can be used as weapons.

The reality is that if you got into a street fight to begin with, you are likely woefully unprepared for adulthood. There are a lot of things you can do to avoid a street fight, like talking the situation down, calling the police, running, and avoiding places where people who may want to start street fights frequent.

If all else fails and you have to fight someone, you are unprepared. I promise.

The reason I say this is that most people do not have the stress inoculation needed to intelligently deal with these sorts of situations.

A big issue is the factor of the unknown. When Gracie Jiu-Jitsu was initially developed, it was developed in a society where most fights happened one-on-one and without weapons (like knives and guns). It was a different time.

I am NOT saying that you should refrain from training self-defense. The reality is that incidents can happen in which the self-defense we learn in jiu-jitsu comes in handy. I’ve read a few articles about women who were trained in jiu-jitsu and wound up using it for self-defense.

But here’s the thing: if a woman is using jiu-jitsu for self-defense, chances are the man attacking her is not taking her seriously, and that lack of respect actually becomes a weapon that a smaller, possibly weaker person can use against an aggressor.

Self-defense aspects are important, especially for people who may be put into self-defense situations throughout their lives. A staggering number of women are assaulted every year. If more of them knew jiu-jitsu, that number would go down substantially.

(Of course, if boys were taught to be gentlemen, that would also have a huge effect, but that’s a different conversation.)

Bearing all of this in mind, the best way to test the readiness of your technique is the one way that “purists” rail against the loudest: competition. The reality is that the only way outside of getting into street fights to truly test your technique against a fully resisting opponent who doesn’t care if they hurt you is on the mat at a competition. Your teammates aren’t going to pull out all the stops when they roll with you. So keep training how you train, and if you compete, chances are you are just as prepared (and unprepared) as someone who trains for “the street.”

The moral of the story is: avoid street fights. They’re unpredictable and unhealthy.

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