I’ve been grappling for over 10 years. I first started MMA when I was 24, and I’m now almost 40.
I’ve never ranked in BJJ because, personally, I never felt it was necessary for what I wanted to achieve. I know people will have all sorts of opinions about that statement, and that’s fine.
My goal was never to become the best sport jiu-jitsu practitioner I could be. I wanted to become good at integrated fighting skills.
If I encountered a good grappler, I wanted to be able to use strikes on the ground. If I encountered a good wrestler and ended up underneath them, I wanted to be able to fight effectively off my back, minimise damage and find a way back to my feet.
That changes the way I look at grappling.
A huge amount of jiu-jitsu simply has very little application to MMA. Fightnomics started looking at this kind of thing years ago, using official UFC data to analyse what actually worked in fights and what didn’t. The book was originally developed from the perspective of understanding and betting on fights, but there was an important lesson in the data. Not everything we spend time learning has the same value when you actually put it into a fight.
Pair that with intelligent coaching and you come back to the philosophy Bruce Lee famously advocated: absorb what is useful and discard what is useless.
During my years learning BJJ, my coach was receiving private tuition from multiple-time world champion Braulio Estima. I was lucky enough to attend two seminars with Braulio myself, as well as learning directly from his student David Rogers of Rising Crane, and then taking that jiu-jitsu and applying it to MMA.
One of the biggest things I learned was that concepts, pressure and strategy are more important than collecting moves.
If you genuinely understand base, posture, pressure, positioning and weight distribution, you become much harder to sweep. If you understand how and why an escape works rather than simply remembering a sequence of movements, you have a much better chance of making that escape work when somebody is trying to punch you in the face.
That is why I believe the best way to grapple for MMA is simple:
Grapple for MMA.
Not endlessly trying to learn Berimbolos and increasingly complicated moves with ridiculous names that have little relevance to the environment you are actually preparing for.
Most of my students these days are normal people. I don’t need them memorising hundreds of techniques with names they can barely pronounce when many of those techniques have little relevance to MMA, let alone a real-world situation.
For that reason, I honestly haven’t spent the last few years trying to constantly add new moves to what I teach.
I’ve continued coaching what works.
Sometimes it’s boring.
But it works.
If you cannot escape mount when somebody is allowed to hit you, knowing another 20 submissions isn’t going to solve that problem. If you cannot protect yourself, create space, control posture and get yourself back into a position where you can fight effectively, then that is where your training needs to go.
I’m not making any outlandish claims about my own grappling. I’ve never ranked in BJJ and I don’t pretend otherwise.
What I have done is grapple with an incredible variety of people. Different belts, different levels, competitors and martial artists from around the world. I’ve grappled in Italy, Croatia, Barcelona, Canada and elsewhere, with plenty more places still to tick off the list.
So I think when people see that we are an MMA school and assume grappling isn’t at the forefront of what we do, they misunderstand how we train.
Grappling is absolutely fundamental to what we do.
We just prioritise grappling techniques that genuinely work, and then we train them in the environments where we actually need them to work, including some of the worst possible scenarios.
When one of my students took on a vicious striker in Birmingham, it was his MMA grappling that saved his arse.
When I took one of my Martial Method students to his first interclub, he ended up against a NAGA grappling champion. My student had less than six months of training and still managed to survive without being submitted.
That doesn’t mean six months of MMA training magically makes someone a better grappler than a grappling champion. Of course it doesn’t.
It demonstrates something different.
MMA is a very different sport from submission grappling.
And it is important to understand the difference.
When you are learning grappling for MMA, your priorities change. You have to think about strikes. You have to think about damage. You have to think about whether the position you are fighting for actually makes sense when punches and elbows are involved.
Sometimes the goal isn’t to submit somebody.
Sometimes the goal is simply to survive, reduce damage, reverse the position and get back to your feet.
I’ve been in enough situations in fights, training and sparring where I’ve had to rely on those skills. I’ve had to survive a bad position, get back to my feet or create an opportunity to cause damage.
So no, our grappling shouldn’t be overlooked because we don’t approach it like a traditional BJJ school.
We grapple a lot.
We just grapple for MMA.
And after more than a decade of doing it, coaching it and seeing it tested, I know that approach works.