The 3 Things John Danaher Wants to Change About Jiu-Jitsu

When you're training athletes for jujitsu, and one of the interesting things about the Gordon Ryan conversation that I had recently, I didn't know that you are Gary Tohnen's striking coach as well. Oh yeah. Yeah. Pretty amazing that you can do both, that you can train them in both jujitsu and also train them in striking. And I know you have a background in striking, but still, when you're training an athlete like Gary, if you're training someone like Gordon for jujitsu, I'm sure there's some emphasis on takedowns, but it's not a primary concern. The primary concern is submissions, right? Like oftentimes you'll see Gordon will sit, will pull guard, all these things that are not possible in MMA or in court. That's very rare. How much of a shift is it to train them for mixed martial arts? Because you're clearly training him to strike and training him to strike, but ultimately the skill set, the best part of their skill set involves in submission. That's correct. The big challenge for most jujitsu players when they try to apply their craft in mixed martial arts is, one, can they get it to the ground? That's a challenge in itself. And an even greater challenge is, can you keep it on the ground? It means nothing if you take someone down, if they just spring back up within three to five seconds, it's energy spent, it had no reward. A sad thing about jujitsu is that when it's practiced, there's almost always a kind of gentleman's agreement that there's going to be a top player and a bottom player. And if you start in the bottom, you stay in the bottom. The moment you get into a mixed martial arts context, that goes right out the window. And now you have two responsibilities. You don't just have to pass your opponent's guard from top position, you have to hold them down while you're doing it. And that's not easy. When you look at the notion of escape in jujitsu, the overwhelming majority of escapes in the sport of jujitsu are escapes to guard position. If you're mounted, you elbow escape, you put them back in guard. If the guy's got side pin on you, your elbow escape, put him back in guard. If the guy's behind you, you do a forward roll, spin back into him, put him back in guard. 90% of the escapes in jujitsu are escapes back to guard position. And so when you start in bottom position, you tend to stay in bottom position. Now contrast that with the sport of wrestling, where the overwhelming majority of escapes are escapes to standing back up to a neutral position on your feet. That means that when jujitsu players face other forms of grappling, they're not trying to put us back in guard, they're trying to stand up. And jujitsu players never practice against that when they're doing their daily training. And so suddenly you've got a guy who just assumes for his entire career that if he's on top, the other guy's going to play guard. And this guy's not playing guard at all, he's just pushing your head, standing up and hip icing up to his feet. The jujitsu guy's like, well, what's up? I had top position, why aren't you playing guard? And so they're now put into an area where nothing in their training has really prepared them for this. And jujitsu is going to have to mature. I've always said jujitsu is one of the greatest products I ever saw in my life. I wouldn't have invested 30 years of my life into jujitsu if I didn't believe that with all my heart and all my soul. But like any great product, it has its deficiencies. Jujitsu always had three major deficiencies, leg locks, takedowns, and thirdly, the one that no one talks about, the ability to impose top position once it's gained. A huge part of my career has been the recognition and the attempt to change these three great faults in jujitsu. As much as I loved jujitsu, we've got to take a step back and take an honest look at it. It's got these three deeply entwined faults within it. Leg locks was the most obvious one. In a game which was supposedly all about control leading to submission, there was an arbitrary rule that 50% of the body couldn't be attacked. It was lunacy. Over the last 10 years, I believe it's fair to say we've reached a point where that is no longer the case, that that is a great weakness within jujitsu. The younger generation of jujitsu, I would match them against any grappling art in the world on leg locks with no fear whatsoever. I couldn't have said that 15 years ago, but things have changed. Now we need to address the other two great weaknesses. Jujitsu has to do something about the crisis which is starting to emerge around takedowns and the ability to impose top position. What you're seeing among jujitsu athletes now who go into mixed martial arts is they just have to turn to other arts. They have to learn wrestling. They have to learn these. There's nothing wrong with that. The truth is that jujitsu has become a smaller and smaller component of mixed martial arts rather than what it was when it first started, which is a dominant force in mixed martial arts. For most of the athletes, jujitsu is something you learn to stay out of some pesky submission holds. It's not the be all and focus for most of the athletes in mixed martial arts. Most of them are centered around kickboxing skills and wrestling. I think that we have done a great job of overcoming one out of three great problems in jujitsu, but there's still two more to go. Catch new episodes of the Joe Rogan Experience for free only on Spotify. Watch back catalog JRE videos on Spotify, including clips. Easily, seamlessly switch between video and audio experience. On Spotify, you can listen to the JRE in the background while using other apps and can download episodes to save on data costs all for free. Spotify is absolutely free. You don't have to have a premium account to watch new JRE episodes. You just need to search for the JRE on your Spotify app. Go to Spotify now to get this full episode of the Joe Rogan Experience.