Mastering Jujitsu - MMA Training in Naperville, Chicago, Aurora, Schaumburg, Merriville - Hobart, IN

Most people think of a marital art as a collection of techniques, and they tend to associate a given fighting style with its most distinctive technique. This response is a natural enough consequence, seeing that most styles put an emphasis on technique as the basis of their art. But it is a rather unfortunate state of affairs. The truth is that technique by itself is on little value. Technique is only as useful as the degree to which it can be used by a practitioner under combat conditions. All the technique in the world is useless if it cannot be applied well. The missing link in most fighting styles is an adequate training method that allows a student to successfully master a technique under combat conditions.

We saw earlier that Jigoro Kano, the founder of judo, was the man most responsible for the adoption of a superior training method as the basis of his style. What was fascinating about Kano was the fact that he taught a relatively low number of techniques, few of which were original. Despite this fact, his students were able to totally dominate their competition in the grappling matches of the 1880s that quickly took judo to absolute prominence in Japan by the end of the 19th century. The underpinning of his success was the adoption of live training as the basis of judo training. By engaging in live training, the kodokan team was able to utilize their techniques far more efficiently than their competitors could.

Kano realized that there was a tremendous gap between theoretical knowledge of a technique and practical knowledge of a technique. In other words, the knowledge of how to do the technique ans apply it on an unresisting training partner is radically different from the ability to apply it under combat conditions on a fully resisting opponent. Repetitive drilling and kata can build great expertise in the former but does not guarantee expertise in the latter. It was this gap between theoretical and practical knowledge that Kano was able to exploit and thus destroy his competition.

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