Wrestling / BJJ At Casa De Luta Fightklub Saarbrücken

 

Wrestling is an awesome sport which will help your BJJ, MMA and build character, toughness and discipline that will help you in all aspects of life, forever.

BJJ is a profoundly, intricate and elegant sport that you will be able to practice for the rest of your life and will make you lethally dangerous.

Studying together will make you a well rounded grappler and if you get the chance to train Judo or Sambo then do those too.

Wrestling and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu are two forms of grappling that can benefit from one another, yet there is still a debate on which form of fighting is superior. Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu purists swear that you don’t need takedowns and that the guard is king, while wrestlers claim you don’t need Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu to win a fight on the ground. 

Though they share many similarities, a key difference between BJJ and wrestling is intensity. Wrestling, generally speaking, is a more explosive, demanding and aggressive sport. This comes with positives and negatives.

The positive is that wrestlers almost always have excellent conditioning. Wrestling clubs focus extensively on cardio, strength and explosiveness. Make no mistake, doing Jiu-Jitsu will also improve your fitness. But not quite to the same degree as wrestling.

This permeates much of the martial art itself. The goal in wrestling is to take your opponent down and pin them to the ground. The goal in Jiu-Jitsu is to submit your opponent, which you can do from both top and bottom position. This is a crucial difference.

Bottom position in Jiu-Jitsu slows the game down. Watch two athletes playing a guard game. Then compare that to two wrestlers trying to take each other down and scramble for top position. You’ll see that the latter is much more dynamic.

The tradeoff here is that athleticism matters more in wrestling. The fundamental principle of BJJ is that it works for people of all shapes and sizes. So goes a famous quote from BJJ co-founder Helio Gracie: “Always assume that your opponent is going to be bigger, stronger and faster than you; so that you learn to rely on technique, timing and leverage rather than brute strength.”

The technical aspect of BJJ, and its use of the guard, allows practitioners to neutralize large differences in size and strength. Which is not to say that wrestling is not technical – it is. It’s that its focus on takedowns and pins favor strength, conditioning and explosiveness more so than BJJ.

If you’re more interested in pushing your body to its physical limit, you may prefer wrestling. If you’re more interested in the technical side of martial arts, and of real-world self-defence, it’s our opinion that Jiu-Jitsu is a stronger option.

What BJJ can learn from wrestling

Though Jiu-Jitsu is perhaps a more comprehensive martial art, there’s still much Jiu-Jitsu practitioners can learn from wrestlers.

Practice takedowns. Wrestlers drill takedowns extensively. Takedowns are often excluded from many BJJ curriculums due to their being more vital to sports BJJ than to self-defence. But drilling takedowns gives your grappling game a huge boost.

Conditioning helps. It’s true that technique is more important than athletics in BJJ. But that doesn’t mean that becoming a better athlete can’t improve your Jiu-Jitsu. Better cardio and explosive power are hallmarks of wrestling, and can be of great benefit in BJJ too.

Don’t get too comfortable on your back. There’s nothing wrong with playing guard in Jiu-Jitsu. Grapplers have won world championships from having a strong bottom game. But remember that in a real-world situation, you don’t want to be playing guard. Make sure you learn how to get top position, even if you don’t like playing Jiu-Jitsu from there.

Casa De Luta FightKlub Saarbrücken (Eingang im Hinterhof) Mainzer Str. 30 66111 Saarbrücken Email: acasadeluta@gmail.com