Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Anthem

05/05/2026

A Critical Self-Preservation Skill

For quite literally years and years I have been telling people that one of the single best skills we can have if we are truly interested in real world self-preservation is the ability to breakfall. It is not sexy or tacti-cool, but it is far more likely to be used and more likely to save you from harm than a firearm or H2H fighting skills.
The simple fact is that everyone falls – whether that is because of slipping/tripping over something on the ground, or getting our feet tied up through bad, hasty, unthinking movement. We all have done this at some time, and some of us have done it a lot. Hopefully, the most negative thing we get afterwards is embarrassment or some broken skin, but all too often the consequences are much worse. For anyone who is unsure about that, look up how many times a senior citizen who falls and breaks their hip then passes away as a result.

At the beginning of my Immediate Action Combatives coursework, I tell people the seminar is NOT about teaching you to voluntarily go to the ground to fight. Instead, it is about "when you do not intend to go to the ground but find yourself there regardless". When I ask students if that is possible and how it would be, they universally answer "after falling", because anyone who is honest will admit that they have fallen at some point in their life. I point out that even if you do not want to, if you have not trained specifically to stay on your feet, finding yourself under sudden surprising violent assault is not the time when your brain is going to be able to do so easily.
Take this video as a case in point, as it is a perfect illustration of what I try to get across.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZ2PGmUIAYo&feature=emb_logo

Does anyone think that the LEO wanted to go to the ground? Of course not. It is obvious that was unintended and totally accidental. And because it was accidental, and he was not prepared or trained for it, the single reason he did not suffer worse consequences was that the bad guy had the same reaction. If the bad guy had not fallen over the officer and had a bit more presence of mind, there is a pretty good chance the officer would have suffered major injuries from the bad guy’s knife, and perhaps even have died. The good guy was also extremely lucky that he did not suffer injuries from the fall itself such as hitting his head. Again, nothing good would have followed that.

The good guy in the above video was lucky, but I don’t really think counting on luck to save your life is the best plan. That is no different than making poor financial decisions over and over again in the hope that you will hit the lottery at some point. You need to prepare and practice for it the same exact way you practice drawing from concealment with your carry pistol.
If you are honestly interested in self-preservation, than you need to spend a solid amount of time on the things that are most likely to kill you. Having decent health (regular physical checkups, including dental since there is a direct link between poor dental hygiene and heart attacks), not being excessively fat, eating like an adult, being a good driver, knowing CPR and how to work an AED machine and recognize the signs of a stroke, and knowing how to survive a sudden fall. None of these are sexy or can be easily accomplished by buying gear, but they mean far more to your actual well-being.

In the next article, I will talk about how we go about learning and developing the ability to breakfall.

הסרטון מכיל תיעוד של אלימות וכן של יריThe clip contains shooting and gun violence.The following video is a part of Haaretz news coverage. For the newspaper w...

04/30/2026

If you are interested in truly cutting edge instruction in fi****ms training, check out this upcoming collaboration between Simon Golob and Jeff Gonzales on 8/29-30/2026 in Casa Grande, AZ.

The course is not "tactical" vs "gamer", but instead looking at how the two sides can work together and produce a superior student performance.

I will be there at the class, so come and watch me be the worst performer and join in on the mirth!

Near and Far: The Complete Handgun Fight is a 2-day course blending close-quarters gunfighting w/long-range handgun skills, from arm’s length to 50+ yards.

04/29/2026

Striking vs Grappling in the Real World

This is an interesting video. I'm not gonna comment on the law-enforcement Context, I'm not gonna comment on how they arrived in the situation that they're in, and I am not actually going to make any points about what I think as an inexperienced non-law-enforcement professional what these officers should've done. But I am going to point out an issue that often gets overlooked in the self preservation training community.

Watch the video and notice what the female officer does while her partner is wrestling with the suspect over the gun. She is frantically hitting the bad guy as hard as she possibly can. And we clearly see the results. And said results add up to Zero. .

Further, that Female officer looked to be pretty good shape. She looks to be fit and looks to be the kind of officer that you would hope would show up to deal with stuff. Certainly you could make comments about how her striking could be better directed and the mechanics might be improved, but what she was doing was not really wrong.

What was wrong was that it was completely useless. And here is why. The female officer is not that big. Hard to tell from the video but she looks fairly average size for a female of her age. Again, obviously seems to be in pretty decent shape, but not super muscular nor super large. And that is the major issue with striking that far too many subject matter experts overlook when they bleat endlessly about how grappling will get you killed and what you have to do instead is hit the other person.

That sounds really great if you are a 200 pound person hitting somebody your size or smaller. Probably a decent and effective strategy. .However what is overlooked - whether through willful ignorance or flat out stupidity - Is that physics matters.There is a reason that every striking combat sport has weight classes.You can be the best 135 pound Striker on the planet, but if you go to punch somebody who outweighs you by 100 pounds, it's not going to do a whole lot. Roberto Duran was one of the greatest boxers of all time and his nickname was Hands of Stone, so that lets us know that he could hit really hard. He was lightweight through middleweight champion in the 70s and early 80s. But you know what title he never won, what title he never fought for? Heavyweight. Why is that? Because the worst top 20 heavyweight boxer on the planet would have destroyed him and maybe even killed him. There's almost no boxing commission in the world that would've sanctioned a fight between Roberto Duran and some heavyweight. Because physics matters. So if someone like a Duran would have a hard time hurting someone 80 pounds heavier, what chance does that middle age guy, who has never fought or trained H2H before, and has a short weekend course on it going to be able to accomplish?

You can have all the technical skill on your side. You can be an abnormally proficient striker. But hitting somebody 50, 80 or 100 pounds heavier than you negates most of that and anybody who tries to argue that is lying or they're an idiot. And anyone who tries to say “well, that's why you strike to specific points” has never fought anybody for real. The best we can do is hit general targets as often and as fast and as hard as we possibly can. And if you are substantially smaller than somebody else, that is not going to be super effective as the video here so ably illustrates.

What we know does work from decades and decades of jujutsu and MMA is that you can be a smaller person and win at grappling against a bigger person. That is not a debatable point. I can point out an incredibly dense amount of empirical data to prove that. It's easier for a smaller person to win through grappling than it is through striking.

Am I saying that striking sucks? Obviously not. I have spent an inordinate amount of my own personal training time working striking. But we have to be conscious of the limitations of striking. It absolutely has its place, but it is almost never a more superior tactic than grappling in the real world.

18K likes, 8.9K comments. "Suspect Tries to Take Officer’s Gun During Struggle in Portland"

04/06/2026

The past is another country

We can read about it, study it, learn from it, but we can't live there. Or, at least, we shouldn’t.

It is important to learn from the past. Whether we have made mistakes or we have made good choices and done good things, It's always good and useful to touch base with those things to help us ensure that our future path is as good as we can possibly make it.

But we can't wallow in it. Whether it's a great decision or a poor decision. Whether we had a fantastic experience at some point in our past or we had a horrific one. Dwelling on any of it does no good. You cannot move forward while dwelling.To move forward we must live in the present and plan for the future.

For example: I had an opportunity in high school to follow quite literally the best strength and conditioning plan a person could follow. I had the book and the template. If I had followed that template I would have been in much better condition, far less injured, and had a base of health and vitality that would've followed me to this day at 61. Instead I followed trends and what was popular and what I thought was the cool thing. I wasted a good 15+ years. That mistake is certainly embarrassing to me and disappointing in what I missed out on. However, letting it guide me going forward is literally a waste. It would do me no good to beat myself up over and over and over again and cry about what if. Instead, I put my focus on building Health and Vitality the correct way and using that book and that old template to move forward. I'm not gonna waste any more time whining about the past because the future is too exciting.

Focus on where you're going and ensure that your path is as smooth and productive as possible. Learn from your past mistakes but leave them there in the past. They can be monuments, but they should not be an albatross around our necks.

03/11/2026

This is something I posted before, but it needs repeating because too many good people are beating themselves up about their own training. It keeps coming up in the self-preservation training community when someone feels they are failing in their own journey.

Within the last few days, I have been reading a number of online posts as well as having some private discussions through email, text, and PMs with people all roughly about the same thing. There are a good amount of people out there putting in effort to be better, safer and more dangerous but stumble along the way.
Whether someone feels like they are not training as much as someone else they read or hear about online, or if they did a competition of some kind and don’t do as well as they hoped, or they took a tough training course and got wrecked, or shot some hard drill and put the result up publicly, they use a lot of negative talk. “I really got my butt handed to me in that class”, or “I let my team down by my performance in that tournament”, or “I will never be as good as –fill in the blank- because I just am not as dedicated in my training as he is” are typical statements.

Here is my statement to all of you talking like this – STOP IT. NOW.

Stop wasting thoughts on “if only”s , or that you are not good enough, or that you do enough. If you are authentically doing the work and putting honest effort in, regardless of how much time you are spending doing it, you are winning! Being honest to the problem and trying to do something about it is the win.

Everything else is just the process result. The journey is the win, not what comes at the end, because in our quest to become more capable/safer/dangerous, there is no end state. We keep on keeping on, and take pride in the blood, sweat, tears, money, and time we put in. Nothing else is worth worrying about.

And STOP COMPARING yourself to others. Your journey is yours and yours alone. So what if I put in more mat time than you? Or that Scott Jedlinski shoots more than you? Or that Larry Lindenman or Chris Fry or Craig Douglas has been working real world fighting material longer than most of you have been adults? Or that Rayno Nel spends more time lifting weights than you do? Or so-and-so has better genetics/more time/more money/easier access to training?

None of that matters. You are not in competition with any of them, nor do you need to measure yourself against any of them. Hell, you are not even in competition with that violent criminal actor out there waiting to do harm to you.

You have no control over that. The only thing you can control, which means it is the only thing you need to compare yourself to, is the you of yesterday. The only question to ask is “am I better than I was yesterday?” If the answer is yes, even if you are only 1/100th of one percent better, than you are wining. Period.

To sum up, please listen to this. If you are actively, honestly working to be better than you were yesterday, you are doing great. Pat yourself on the back for a second, and then put your nose back to the grindstone. And stop belittling what you are doing.

02/27/2026

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu for Self Defense

“Never go to the ground!” ….. hmmmmmmm…. “never”

I have a friend in law enforcement who has an excellent story of using bottom half guard to keep a guy between him and a group of dudes trying to kick his skull in with his back to the tires of a car while he waits for backup to arrive.

Or let’s say you’re at a holiday party, there’s family and friends all stuffed into a little kitchen while the food is coming out. Children are running around at ankle height. Just then the door comes in, and here comes your one friend’s baby daddy fresh from jail.
He’s screaming he wants his kid; he grabs a knife off the butcher block. Now I’ve seen plenty of systems where you NEVER get entangled with a guy, you NEVER go to the ground willingly, and I’m sure there are some “I’ll just shoot him” types… in a room full of people… in front of his child… that’s your choice to make.
Personally I think having a skill set that allows you to effectively control someone while your buddy calls the cops and lends a hand is probably a good choice given the totality of the circumstances.

On the one hand, yes, staying upright, mobile, and conscious are priorities. On the other hand is the “all fights go to the ground” mantra. Well, here we are as a student stuck with catch phrases and empty slogans in a rich, chaotic, messy tangle of limbs and uncertainty. What’s the answer? What if I told you, it depends? What if the capability to stay upright and keep someone off you is not independent of the ability to take someone down at will and control them? Or that those same take down skills translate directly into one’s ability to stay upright? And there’s the rub. The guy training BJJ isn’t just learning cool submission moves from bottom, he’s also defending them, and trying to stay on his feet while another grown man tries to throw him around and pull him down.

Here’s a performance driver: if I’m going to the ground I want it to be on my terms, because I’ve made a choice to do so based upon the circumstances. The one dimensional fighter doesn’t get to take the fight where he wants; he tries desperately to keep it wherever he is comfortable.

"A boxer is like a lion, the greatest predator on land. But you throw him in the shark tank and he's just another meal." - Renzo Gracie.

In Renzo Gracie’s book, Master Jiu Jitsu, he speaks at length about the early days of MMA and about all the ranges of the fight and why the BJJ fighter had such a dominant advantage in those days. The part that translates best for our discussion is simply that it is easier to take the fight to the ground than it is to keep it standing once the players have become entangled. Simple as that. You need to not just be better than your opponent, you need to be MUCH, MUCH better if you want to stay upright and he does not. Further, the number of fights we see where guys simply fall over one another, or a curb, slip on gravel or ice, ect. and wind up going down with no intention to do so is too large to ignore. Gravity is out to get you, it takes effort to stand even when you’re not being punched in the face.

Once we hit the ground, without some basic horizontal grappling skills we are in for trouble.

And then we could go down the rabbit hole of this discussion. What techniques or styles translate best to the Weapons Based Environment (WBE, as per Craig Douglas)? What about Gi vs no-gi ? What BJJ do we see in modern MMA where everyone has some sort of grappling? I'd like to talk about some of those points later, but for now I want to talk about why I believe in BJJ as a core foundational element for self-defense.

Pressure.

From day one the BJJ student will face a live adversary. There will be technique, and there will be drilling, there will be learning a new skill, and there will be some guy that’s bigger, stronger, younger, and more experienced than you attempting to force his will on you while you try to execute it. From the very first you’ll need to deal with suffocation, panic, making observations and decisions when you're gassed out tired and hit with adrenaline.
Over time, it will take more and more pressure to overwhelm the practitioner. We learn piece by piece to deal with stress and to become functional in the jumbled mess of limbs and be able to execute complex techniques based on intuition and feel.
This is where BJJ shines. Constant, relentless pressure.
It's not about under what circumstances the triangle choke is appropriate for self-defense, or whether breaking an arm will stop an attacker. It's about what you do when you're overwhelmed, when you can’t breathe, when your muscles give out and dizzy from exertion.

The BJJ practitioner knows this place. He goes there every day.

02/10/2026

The chaos of a life or death struggle, especially at hand-to-hand combat range, can be mentally overwhelming. In a grappling encounter , this chaos level goes up exponentially. The better the skill set, the less this occurs, but what about for that person who is still learning to fight under in-extremis duress?

Keep this checklist in mind, and follow it when you don’t know what the next step is.

1) Breathe - this sounds like a “duh”, but under stress , most especially in grappling, this is about the first thing that falls apart. Either we stop breathing entirely, or we hyperventilate. Both ways mean we can get the right amount of oxygen into our body the needed way. Focus on forced exhalation. The following inhale tends to follow correctly after a good and powerful exhale.

2) Move Your Hips - You May rightly ask “how”, and the answer is that it does not matter. Moving the core and the main driver of leverage (which are what the hips are) leads to some movement which makes correct movement easier are more likely.

3) Underhook, underhook, underhook - The underhook is everything in grappling, whether standing, on the ground underneath an attacker, or on the ground on top of an attacker, the underhook takes care of so much. Get the underhook and keep the underhook, and a path to winning becomes visible regardless of position.

02/06/2026

Sure, BJJ is a fantastic method of self-preservation. It is not a debatable point (unless you belong to the fighting equivalent of the Flat Earth Society), but that is only a small aspect of why it’s a good idea to train in it.

It is the most accessible and repeatable method to learn how to function under massive stress and resistance, to be able to process information in adverse conditions, and to do so without experiencing too much physical trauma. Taking a course like ECQC is the best way to experience that, but there is no way you can do ECQC on a weekly basis, so regular training in a good and legit BJJ Academy is the most useful alternative.

But even more that that, there are the things illustrated in this graphic. People who won’t do the training will never see this, but that’s on them.

02/04/2026

For those of us who are all about being a multi-disciplinary thinking tactician and one who is truly prepared for whatever life throws at us, we need to deal with a great deal of information and material. One of the things I talk about a lot, both in writing, teaching, and being interviewed on podcasts is something that keeps coming up by people emailing or messaging me. It is one of the most important lessons I try to emphasize, but one that gets lost in the avalanche of things we concern ourselves with in this lifestyle. What I try to preach, again and again and again, is to JUST START.

Start what? Start training! Just start something. I don’t care what it is. I get a lot of questions about the best way to start, what area should be the focus, and how to find the right training. Here’s the thing. I T DOES NOT MATTER. What matters is that you are working on something.

Should you find a BJJ academy first? Should you take a defensive shooting class? What about medical? And then we worry about health and fitness. Wait, what about the pre-fight threat containment? And on and on ad infinitum. I have even contributed to it by writing different articles on my blog about specific pathways you can take when studying unarmed fighting methods.

It is easy to develop paralysis by analysis. We get so stressed about finding the perfect path. We hem and haw and waste time.
Stop the wasted time. Pick something you can do right now, and begin walking the path. It may be joining a jiu-jitsu school, or buying a kettlebell. It may be signing up for coursework with Craig Douglas or William April or an OC class with Chuck Haggard. Perhaps Tom Givens is doing one of his Intensive Pistol Skills courses (probably my single favorite class Tom teaches and the one I think is truly indispensible for the private citizen) within reasonable distance. Or you saw the Red Cross has their one day first aid/CPR/AED class coming up close to your house. I don’t care. And I don’t care which one you do first. Just do something.

The path only truly begins when you take the initial step. JUST START. NOW.

01/22/2026

Training in BJJ can be tough. It is a long slog to get to where you can functionalize your actions against a truly resisting training partner or opponent. It is not really about individual technique at all. Rather, it is about mechanics, leverage, positional control, posture, base, pressure, grips, angles, and how to adjust all that on the fly. And the problem with all that is the difference between success and failure may be very close together. When the margin is so close, it can lead to a lot of frustration. That frustration can then start a downward cycle that gets you thinking you flat out suck at jiu-jitsu and that you should just give up.

Here is the antidote to that. Everyone who does jiu-jitsu feels that way at any given time! There has not been a practitioner yet that succeeds on a constant basis and never doubts themselves. That is impossible. We all feel it. All jiu-jitsu training is made up of peaks, valleys, and plateaus.

The peaks are great of course. We pull off that new pass or sweep against a tough partner and everything clicks when we roll.

The valleys suck so hard. Feeling like nothing is working, maybe to the point even that the stuff that used to work is no longer a sure thing.

I hate the plateaus the most. You don’t have the feeling of getting worse, you just feel like you are not getting better. You can do all the things you have been doing, but you can’t make that next step to actual progress. To me, this is the most frustrating place. It makes training true drudgery at times.

Every one of us will go through all of these at different times. Sometimes they will be short periods, but often they last for weeks or even months. I remember one plateau in particular after I had been a black belt for a few years. I think that particular plateau lasted almost a year. Truly awful.

How do we break this cycle and make sure we stay in the peaks? As soon as someone discovers one, we can all try it. The simple fact is, we can’t stop this. We will be in one of these areas regardless. There is no escape.

I can hear the audience moaning that I am making them depressed. So I will make it better. There is a good way to deal with the issue. What is it? Keep training! Just show up. Some days are good, some days are not, and some days are so-so. Just enjoy the time put in and the experience of being on the mat pursuing something you love with other likeminded folks, and don’t stop. The only thing to stop is expecting a particular outcome each session. Just train, don’t quit, and move forward and you will get better. Maybe not at your preferred speed, but it will happen. Just keep on keeping on.

01/21/2026

Here is a quick video on fine tuning your hip escape (or "sh*****ng").

Cecil Burch demonstrates the Hip Escape. Proper form allows wide use case.