Why did it take until the late 20th century for Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu to develop and the Gracie family crush almost all other unarmed martial arts at the start of MMA, when humans have engaged in unarmed combat for millions of years and every major country has long lineages of specialized competitive martial arts and tremendous incentive to find martial arts which worked and quick feedback loops?
I have a few gut-level suggestions for this, of varying strength:
1. In actual combat the circumstances heavily outweigh variations in style, so in historic clashes there was no clear superiority.
2. I think the incentive to find unarmed combat methods that work is fairly low. It only requires a little training with a weapon to be able to reliably defeat unarmed combatants of whatever skill. In example, the U.S. Army does little unarmed combat training, even though it is tremendously popular. As it was put to me, “The winner is whoever’s buddies show up first to shoot the other guy.” Also, it has a high injury rate.
3. Following on 2, almost all martial arts training broke towards art and away from combat; they severed their feedback loops. We can see this criteria at work in modern MMA, where boxing and wrestling are popular components of training despite the fact that they are sports rather than martial arts—but they kept the feedback loop, and specialize in important skills for MMA fighters (punching and grappling).
4. Until at least the invention of radio, I am skeptical there was enough demand for such a thing to motivate experts to travel and test their skills in this way. Most martial arts viewed fighting with other disciplines as unnecessary and arguably dishonorable. There needed to be a strong incentive to overcome these objections.
5. Until modern air travel, traveling internationally was difficult and time consuming.
For the interested, here is Joe Rogan interviewing John Danaher, a first-generation blackbelt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu from Henzo Gracie’s school. They talk about the development of the leg-lock, and there’s some interesting commentary in there about the relationship between the format of MMA and different physical skills emphasized by different fighting styles.
It’s also worth pointing out that MMA has adapted to jiu-jitsu. Grappling arts are integrated into the MMA curriculum and no longer strictly dominate. Fighters with striking-heavy styles can win by learning how to defend against takedowns and then just playing to their own advantage. At the present moment, it seems that Western wrestling techniques are possibly more valuable in the “metagame” than mastery of jiu-jitsu, because a very talented wrestler can put almost any opponent on the ground from a standing position.
For some more conversation on a similar subject, here is Joe Rogan again, this time with Ben Askren who is a former Olympic wrestler talking about sports psychology and a feedback loop wrestling teams have that MMA does not. The relevant section picks up about 22:95.
I have a few gut-level suggestions for this, of varying strength:
1. In actual combat the circumstances heavily outweigh variations in style, so in historic clashes there was no clear superiority.
2. I think the incentive to find unarmed combat methods that work is fairly low. It only requires a little training with a weapon to be able to reliably defeat unarmed combatants of whatever skill. In example, the U.S. Army does little unarmed combat training, even though it is tremendously popular. As it was put to me, “The winner is whoever’s buddies show up first to shoot the other guy.” Also, it has a high injury rate.
3. Following on 2, almost all martial arts training broke towards art and away from combat; they severed their feedback loops. We can see this criteria at work in modern MMA, where boxing and wrestling are popular components of training despite the fact that they are sports rather than martial arts—but they kept the feedback loop, and specialize in important skills for MMA fighters (punching and grappling).
4. Until at least the invention of radio, I am skeptical there was enough demand for such a thing to motivate experts to travel and test their skills in this way. Most martial arts viewed fighting with other disciplines as unnecessary and arguably dishonorable. There needed to be a strong incentive to overcome these objections.
5. Until modern air travel, traveling internationally was difficult and time consuming.
For the interested, here is Joe Rogan interviewing John Danaher, a first-generation blackbelt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu from Henzo Gracie’s school. They talk about the development of the leg-lock, and there’s some interesting commentary in there about the relationship between the format of MMA and different physical skills emphasized by different fighting styles.
It’s also worth pointing out that MMA has adapted to jiu-jitsu. Grappling arts are integrated into the MMA curriculum and no longer strictly dominate. Fighters with striking-heavy styles can win by learning how to defend against takedowns and then just playing to their own advantage. At the present moment, it seems that Western wrestling techniques are possibly more valuable in the “metagame” than mastery of jiu-jitsu, because a very talented wrestler can put almost any opponent on the ground from a standing position.
For some more conversation on a similar subject, here is Joe Rogan again, this time with Ben Askren who is a former Olympic wrestler talking about sports psychology and a feedback loop wrestling teams have that MMA does not. The relevant section picks up about 22:95.