Get Up Grappling

 The "Grappling Gap" is what I call a problem that martial arts consumers have been facing for as long as martial arts training has been available to consumers in the USA. Where can a martial arts consumer go to learn the ground grappling that they REALLY need? Let's look first at what they do NOT need:

1. Most martial arts consumers don't need choke holds. In a real life emergency situation they are just about as likely to kill someone on accident by applying one of these as they are to successfully resolve a violent confrontation with one. Chokes are more curse than blessing.
2. Most martial arts consumers don't need submission holds. The average attacker on the street isn't going to know that they should tap once  you have them in a submission. The submission may or may not do enough damage to stop them, and most submission holds leave you on the ground in a compromised position.

What ground grappling every martial artist needs to understand is how to get off the ground when someone is trying to hold them down on the ground. 

This obviously means that they then need to learn to hold others down on the ground, which can be handy in some self defense situations when police are expected and the person you are holding on the ground is someone the police are looking for. This then means American Folkstyle wrestling right? NO. American Folkstyle covers much more than this, much of which is highly injurious to the martial arts consumer. If it's too injurious practice it is of no value at all. Picking someone up off the ground and throwing them back down while falling on top of them as hard as you can with all of your body weight is an extremely dangerous thing to do. 

Though Judo is more common for Adults, it's NOT recommended for casual self defense training for the same reason as American Folkstyle wrestling. Also Judo does NOT have the same focus on escaping to their feet that American Folkstyle has. So then we must want a more traditional grappling art like Glima, Bokh, Sumo or Tai Chi, where the focus is getting the opponent on the ground while remaining on your feet, right?

That's what I call the Internal Skill, and it's much more useful for self defense than going to the ground with your opponent.  But the Internal Skill does not fill the Grappling Gap! The Grappling Gap is: what do you need to get back on  your feet when you are on the ground? Even though this is practiced in Combat Glima, still most of the focus of that training isn't getting up from the ground as much as it is on the Internal Skill.

The most popular grappling alternative to Judo or Wrestling is Brazillian Jujitsu (BJJ.)  BJJ doesn't want to get up to their feet, and BJJ is completely focused on 1 and 2 above which can do more harm than good for self defense. Also for long term lower back health and speed of learning, it's best to avoid BJJ's main strategy for being on the bottom, which is to pull the attacker into your "guard" (between your legs.)

So far the only way I have personally addressed the grappling gap is through one-on-one instruction from MMA fighters. Though I love MMA and Muay Thai, finding coaches that will take you seriously as a student when you yourself specifically intend to never compete (as getting into a public fight intentionally is the opposite of self defense,) is easier said than done. However, it is interesting to me that when the Karate Nerd resorted to the same remedy that I did (seeking one-on-one instruction from an MMA fighter,) the Karate Nerd ended up learning exactly the same techniques I did:

Hypothetically what then we need now is a new type of focused sparring to learn this kind of grappling, which I have been calling "Get Up Grappling." It should NOT start on your feet, because we all have answers for what to be doing when you are on your feet. Get Up Grappling should start on the ground: 

1. They should start in side control with the "attacker" on top and the "defender" on the bottom. 
2. The attacker should then try to get in full mount and slap the defender in the face a few times to simulate striking vulnerability. 
3. The defender should try to get to their feet. 
4. Once the attacker gets in full mount and lands a slap or two, or once the defender gets to their feet, they switch roles with the attacker now the defender and the defender now the attacker.

Here's an example of the kind of technique this type of practice may result in:

Risk of Injury

 In 2010 Penn & Teller claimed the entire martial arts industry was a sham. They offered many arguments that were convincing, but the most convincing one was essentially "you are far more likely to get seriously injured practicing martial arts than you are to be seriously injured by an attacker that you could protect yourself from using martial arts." As a martial arts consumer advocate, risk of injury is one of my primary concerns.

This is personal for me. Since 2019 I have had to recover from two shoulder impingements, one on each side of my body. One was from a car accident, the other was a martial arts injury. Beyond this I learned talking to my various physical therapists that it is common for weight lifters and martial artists in the USA to develop shoulder impingements from over training muscles on their front like chest and abs, while under training muscles between their shoulder blades. This combined with the fact most martial artists make their living by sitting in chairs in front of computers, is bad news for their posture in general.

Some of the Katas I look down on from some styles of Southern Kung Fu and Karate have a strong emphasis on holding tension on those very muscles between their shoulder blades. Thinking back on my own traditional training in Tai Chi and Choy Li Fut if I had listened to my instructors better I would have put more focus on maintaining good posture and spent less time doing high reps of push ups. Standing Meditation (Zhuan Zhuang) and Tai Chi forms have helped me greatly in rehabilitating my shoulders and correcting my posture. However there is one exercise I would like to point out that all chair dwelling martial artists should consider, and that is the straight arm push up:

But I got one shoulder impingement from doing a grappling drill. Specifically we were practicing double leg take downs on a mat, and I got turned sideways with one of my arms isolated, slamming my shoulder and face into the mat, compressing my shoulder and collarbone. And this a drill wasn't even necessary as it wasn't free sparring.

But when it comes to free sparring injuries, the worst martial art I have studied is BJJ. In one year I had 3 injuries that prevented me from free sparring for more than one week (about a month in two cases.) I have done full contact 1990's (today would be called Dutch-style) kickboxing, full contact stick fighting, full contact karate, a lot of dangerous stuff, and BJJ on paper shouldn't have been the worst, but it was. Icy Mike reports more serious long term problems here at 4:40 :

Joe of Fight Bible (the not-pro-fighter on the channel) reports numerous injuries, including even a broken neck, from doing BJJ. Now let me ask you a question: are you better off doing martial arts that give you a broken neck, or doing no martial arts at all?

Many people love to dismiss some forms of Tai Chi sparring as useless, because they don't include strikes and try to remain standing on their feet instead of going to the ground when they execute take downs:

But not only does this help people develop some stand up grappling skill without getting a shoulder impingement or more serious injury (it helps that they aren't landing on top of each other when executing a throw,) it helps to build balance to prevent injuries outside of fighting. But we need to know how to fight on the ground or we have a big missing piece from our self defense training, right?

Well what exactly do we need to know about ground fighting? We need to know how to get up to our feet. It then follows we need to know how to hold someone down on the ground. That's it, that's all most martial artists need out of ground grappling, is one person holding on the ground and the other getting back up. Which grappling arts commonly available to martial arts consumers commonly teach this? Not BJJ or any other Judo lineage martial arts, because they are obsessed with smashing the other guy on the ground and getting a submission, and dedicate less than 1% of their training getting back to their feet.

Fight camps for striking sports such as MMA, Boxing and various forms of kick boxing are notoriously injury prone. The biggest problem with Muay Thai from a consumer perspective is the culture of having matches: you don't have to be good at Muay Thai for very long before you will feel pressure to take a public fight. The punishment you will take in that fight, and the punishment you will take prepping for that fight that you wouldn't get in regular training, will likely be far more dangerous to you than any injury you would have avoided by beating up an attacker on the street with your Muay Thai. Consider the injuries from fight camps endured by both fighters from one of the most important boxing matches of all time:

Traditional martial arts seem to have a clear advantage over combat sports when it comes to risk of serous injury. However these arts are also not without their safety challenges, and almost useless if they do not include free sparring (free sparring is often done safely in both combat sports and traditional martial arts.) Risk of injury should be a top priority for anyone to consider when evaluating a martial arts school, trainer, or technique.