Darren Branch sent this this video to Rickson Gracie Black Belt Henry Akins. Henry is known as a BJJ Street Defense expert and wanted his take on the video.
Henry Says… “Apparently the guy in this video is a purple belt in Jiu-Jitsu, which means he’s been training anywhere from 3-6 years. Its a demonstration of the sad state BJJ has regressed to. Apparently people are using this video to justify that sport BJJ is effective for self defense, which what I see is the exact opposite.
Here we go… There is a point where threats start being exchanged “ill whoop your ass” and you can see the situation is escalating and there is a very high possibility that the situation is going to get physical and the BJJ practitioner is standing within striking distance WITH HIS HANDS DOWN… instead of hands up in case a punch is thrown. He’s very lucky that punch didn’t connect or else that would have been the end of the video.
THEN he clinches and has absolutely no idea of BASE… he falls backwards against a completely untrained opponent who’s not even trying to take him down into a non-dominate position…half guard!??? So he either pulled half guard or fell into half guard instead of initiating a take down himself or at least pulling guard. Now he does manage to take the back and escape a headlock on the way to taking the back!!! But then has absolutely no idea how to maintain that position and loses it into an open guard…
when he had both hooks in and an arm around the neck… how on earth as a purple belt or even a blue belt does he not know how to maintain and finish against a completely untrained opponent pretty much equal size. He goes for the arm with absolutely no control and loses it, I realize guys were stepping in at this point to try to break it up but he didn’t even have the leg over the head when he started to try to apply the armlock. He almost gets pile-drived into the ground when the guy pulls up out of the armlock!
Then transitions to 50/50 guard which again is NOT a dominate position (how many times have you seen people getting punched in the face from this position) and goes for the heal hook. So basically for the duration of the fight there was only about 4 or 5 seconds where he actually had a dominate position. He was in a significant amount of danger for most of the fight.
He never had control of the fight, this is a guy who has been training for 3-6 years against an equal sized opponent with zero training. It pretty much was a giant scramble with a couple submission attepts thrown in. I know it’s easy to criticize from the sidelines but that’s not my intention.
As an Instructor that believes in BJJ being the most effective form of self defense my intention here is to help people see the mistakes that were made and hopefully have people learn from this situation that this is what YOU DO NOT WANT TO DO, instead of praising his performance and giving students the completely wrong idea.
Another point i’d like to make is his actions and effort did not keep him safe at all.
Even though he did not get beat up he was not “SAFE” Example, imagine you are in a war zone and people with machine guns are shooting at you and you run out into the open. Even if you do not get shot are you SAFE?
Now imagine you are in a tank out in the open and people are shooting at you with machine guns. Do you feel safe? BJJ can be a TANK for you if used properly
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