Keystone Jiujitsu

I got my bluebelt sometime in the 90’s. Rorion was giving a seminar in AC and there was about 70 people on the mat. He knew everyone’s first name about half way through. So he’s watching me train and goes hey Mike I think you should put on a blue belt. I’m freaking out and run over to Steve and I’m like Steve Steve! Rorion just told me to put on a bluebelt! Coach gives me the look and goes yeah awesome Mikey! He knew before I did lol. Over the years between promotion and self demotion I prob went through a few rolls of tape. Jiujitsu was hard but I was always harder on myself. I don’t think black will ever fit but I love training and teaching. At this point I will never stop. @stevemaxwellsc @roriongracie @keystonejiujitsu #graciejiujitsu #phillybjj #gratitude

Learn from everyone ranked or not

April 2019 two days of training with Coach @stevemaxwellsc and the Ohio crew @enclavejiujitsu @chagrinfallsjiujitsu #jiujitsulifestyle #phillybjj

Gracie Jiujitsu with The @ironkimono tonight and wed. Get in and train with him. #phillybjj #jiujitsulifestyle #keystonedojo

Jiujitsu is NOT spastic jacket wrestling. Jiujitsu is a principal that is used in striking, wrestling, ground fighting, weapons engagement AND your relationship with people and the environment (if you learned the whole art) BE GENTLE #jiujitsulifestyle #nihonjujutsu #graciejiujitsu #jiujitsu #jujitsu #budo #philosophy #japanesemartialarts #bjj #aikido #judo #zen

#backyardjiujitsu #onthemat #homedojo #phillybjj #graciejiujitsu #familybusiness #tatami

Good stuff from Inverted Gear

We can explain technique all day but jiujitsu and similar arts are learned by feel. Repetition of the basic movements with progressive resistance added. Someone with experience on the mat might look at this picture and wonder why my right arm is out of posture. Part of effective coaching is leaving openings for your students. They have to learn to recognize opportunities and then act. I never treat my students like sparring partners I always make mistakes that can be seized on if they are paying attention. #jiujitsu #jiujitsulifestyle #graciejiujitsu #oldschool #koryujujitsu #traditional #budo #teachbyexample

Not weeping... wiping away sweat after getting rolled up. Congrats to Laura and Christian on the stripes. #jiujitsu #phillybjj #graciejiujitsu #stevemaxwellsc #keystonedojo #morningjiujitsu

Coach showing how it’s done

Drilling self defense at Keystone Dojo. #jiujitsu #graciejiujitsu #selfdefense @keystonejiujitsu @stevemaxwellsc

STAY ON THE PATH #jiujitsu #chrishaueter #jiujitsulifestyle #phillybjj

Martial arts respond to evolutionary pressures. I just wrote this for a discussion group on Jiu-Jitsu but considering, I thought some of you might be intereste...d. ALL martial arts start because someone sees the need to not only learn how to fight better but to pass on that knowledge. As long as the students are engaged in real fights on the regular, they stay focused on that. However, in mostly peaceful societies that seldom holds for long. Then they start to change. Just as in biological evolution, martial arts teachers either produce offspring or they do not. Their offspring differ from them because their experiences and training will not be the same, even if they are trying to replicate what the teacher taught. The things that make them changed can be said to be causing evolutionary pressure. The things that exert this evolutionary pressure can be classified and the results can be understood. As a case study we can consider Judo, SOMBO and BJJ. All three share the same root, Jigoro Kano. So why are they different? To start, Kano learned Jiu-Jitsu starting just a couple of years after the Satsuma Rebellion. You may remember the movie the last samurai. That was based upon true historical events that took place in 1877. Kano opened the Kodokan in 1882, when he was 22 years old. He later became the dean of the University of Tokyo and eventually the minister of education. Because he understood the value that western educations systems placed on sports as an educational tool, and lacking the concept of sport in Japanese culture, he reformed the Jiu-Jitsu he learned into Judo to make it a better educational tool for teaching good character. In other words, the purpose of the martial art changed and along with that change, the focus of training and eventually the art itself changed away from a focus on winning real fights. It is worth mentioning that the oldest Kata in Judo, Koshiki-no-kata, about throws with armor. Two of Kano’s students were Mitsuyo Maeda, the Gracie family’s teacher, and Vasiliy Oshchepkov, the Judo second dan who was one of the founders of Russian SOMBO. Judo was still known as Kano Jiu-Jitsu until after both of them had left Japan and started teaching in Brazil and Russia respectively. The art evolved differently in both places because of the different evolutionary pressures in the two different environments. Oshchepkov, and his contemporaries, primarily taught the Russian military and had to please the communist party. After he was executed for supposedly being a Japanese spy, his contemporaries took steps to disassociate their art from Judo. One of these was that chokes were still taught, but not allowed during competitions. It is important to remember that this was before any of the three styles of competition had decided on the rule sets or scoring mechanisms that we know today. If you cannot choke, what is the purpose of taking the back? So SOMBO competitors did not bother to take the back. If no one takes the back, why would you learn how to defend it? So SOMBO evolved without the back mount as a thing, offensively or defensively. The other major differences are also because of the evolutionary pressure of the competition rules. With very little pressure to follow tradition, wrestling style posture became the norm and different throws became more developed. Also, Kano’s Judo had leg attacks, so SOMBO allowed them in competition and they remained as well developed as the rule set made practicable for achieving victory. Meada left Japan for the specific purpose of spreading Judo. In doing so he fought challenge matches, just like the ones Teddy Roosevelt sponsored at the White House when he was president. Meada brought that method of marketing to his students, the Gracie family, who continued to use it. Their version of the art began to focus more and more on the techniques that were useful in these matches. Over time, BJJ became almost exclusively focused on ground grappling, to the extent that many practitioners avoid training takedowns at all, and BJJ tournaments, which are not put on by an institution like the Army that can impose rules but were completely voluntary for all participants, decided on rules that allow people to do what they like and avoid what they don’t like. US forces outlawed martial arts training in Japan in the wake of WWII. Judo people convinced them to allow it by selling it as a sport. It became focused on being in the Olympics and the rules were focused on making it exciting for the crowd. The ground grappling became increasingly limited for that reason and soon most of what was known about ground grappling fell by the wayside. Interestingly there is a parallel in freestyle wrestling where victory could be attained by submission until the 1936 Olympics. The next Olympics were in 1948 and submissions were eliminated. The entire wrestling world stopped training on what had become superfluous techniques. An interesting corollary to all of this was when Rorion Gracie brought challenge matches back in the form of the UFC. The first few events had the rules that had been used by the Gracie family. The pressure of pay per view changed everything. After the match between Royce Gracie and Dan Severn went over the pay-per-view time slot, forcing them to repay the money subscribers had paid, they initiated time limits. Time limits, however, had the effect of making it possible to stall your way to a tie. Witch necessitated judges. With judges you no longer had to win. You simply had to be better in the opinion of the judges when time ran out. This further encourages stalling to a tie and the fights became very boring, so referees were allowed to stand the fighters up. There were a few fights where this was clearly the factor that decided victory, for example Conan Silveira’s defeat by Maurice Smith in Extreme Fighting 3. Rounds were the answer to make the standups appear natural. In UFC 1, of the four semifinalists, three had broken hands. Four-ounce gloves became the norm because they allowed for more safe striking and became required because striking makes for a more exciting fight for the fans. There are several more examples, like not being able to kick a downed opponent because American fighters didn’t know how to stand in base and the new martial art of MMA, completely focused on victory within the cage, and the unified rules evolved. Evolution is descent with change. Each generation of martial artists either produce another generation or they do not. If they don’t their art dies. If they do, the students will reflect their own experience which will be changed from their teacher because of the pressures on them both. In a system like wrestling where coaches work for the school system and the demand is to produce a limited number of champions who can perform within a proscribed rule set, the pressures are quite different from a commercial school where a teacher’s income is dictated by keeping the most students. The products will be different because of the difference in pressures and over time they will change the art. Hopefully, these examples have made my point clear. Martial arts evolve over time according to the pressures placed upon them by their environment. Most martial artists, even the top-level teachers and practitioners, have very little understanding of even their own martial art, much less others. I was actually working on a book on this topic before I switched jobs. Matt