I too can debate this till my fingers go numb and I agree that in aikido and mma fighting the techniques and counters are insane and almost never ending. I've practiced aikido where my partner and I have gone for what seemed like an hour (ok probably less) just countering one technique into another. Kote gaeshi (or mawashi) is one example of this never ending countering technique. If someone really wanted to spar I would advise cross training with jiu-jitsu, judo or some other art if you really wanted to fight people. That really isn't what true aikido is about. Since we are basically on the same page about this I'll skip to my main point.

I believe that aikido is all about the style and way in which it is taught. It all boils down to philosophy. I personally think there is no point in sparring with aikido, especially this kind of "hard" aikido. It goes against the main philosophy of aikido, "the way of peace and harmony." It teaches focus, centering, physical awareness and the use of minimal resistance to let yourself escape from an attack and stay calm. I always liked the teaching that the true aikidoka will never let himself get into a corner in which he would have to defend himself. Another states "If you have to resort to aikido you've already lost the battle."

While this isn't always practical it is a code to live up to and hopefully live by. I believe that yes, if you're going to battle someone picking a fight and beat him up, aikido is not the right sport for you. However for most people that I have seen in my aikido class they are not the ones wanting to try to fight at all. In fact in my dojo if you come in with the attitude of "I'll use this as soon as I leave these doors" you won't be staying very long. This traditional aikido training teaches one to be able to break away from an attacker (maybe immobilize him for awhile), not stay in a prolonged fight or spar, and run to get help. Of course some people argue (and this isn't towards rembar) "well that's a sissy way to fight" and you can think that, I feel it's taking a high road.

Again I just want to emphasize I think that if one was to take this style as a way of life it may impact on the effectiveness of the art in a physical fight, but that is not what this art was meant for. There is the bridge between aikido and jiujitsu which takes jiujitsu aspects into a form to not hurt the attacker. Some sections encourage the more violent follow through, but I don't think it is the majority. I still do think however that in a street confrontation (not two martial arts specialists sparring) against someone like a common drunk at a bar, traditional aikido could be very effective to get away from an initial attack.

"Street fighter with no credentials"???? *cough, cough, cough*. Think again, my friend.

This is a fight between BJJ black belt, MMA fighter, and UFC former champion Royce Gracie and Five Animal kung fu teacher and now 34-21-1 MMA fighter and BJJ practitioner Jason Delucia, taken from one of the Gracie Jiu-Jitsu in Action videotapes.

As a BJJer myself, I intentionally didn't sift any of these challenge matches, and I'm not sure how I'm going to vote yet. I believe that BJJ fighters standing out in high-level MMA competitions through their superior groundwork skills is far more convincing of BJJ's effectiveness than these clips from the BJJ in Action tapes, which amount to little more than propaganda films.

Not to mention, nowadays, these kind of things tend to give BJJ a bad rep, not a good one.

Yikes.

*sigh*.

While it is true that the Gracie family made submission attacks famous by representing Brazilian jiu-jitsu (BJJ) in mixed martial arts (MMA), everything you just posted is - and I almost never say this - completely ignorant of the sport and martial arts as a whole.

Submissions were not brought into "the sport" - and by this, I assume you mean MMA - by the Gracies. The Gracies, as I wrote in my BJJ sift, took the judo/jujitsu taught to them by Mitsuyo Maeda and developed the newaza groundwork into a new system, focused on establishing positional improvement and dominance before the application of submissions. It was this conceptual change from the general judo mindset of throw-and-fall-or-scramble-to-position, rather than the submissions themselves. Judo, for the most part, has all the submission BJJ does, it just generally doesn't train them as much or as well. So really, the submissions were brought into the sport by judo, which was brought into creation by Kano through adaptation of the teachings of jiu-jitsu. If you want to argue about fighters using the submissions, sure Royce Gracie made use of them famously in UFC 1, but the first UFC tournament was set up to ensure no other submission grappling styles, including judo, was entered to make a clearer differentiation of style versus style, among other reasons. When such fighter picking was stopped, submission fighters from many styles sprung up in MMA competition.

If you're not talking about modern MMA, then consider the fact that pankration from Greece in 648 BC was the first Western MMA competition, and chokeholds and joint locks were widely displayed and documented.

Consider that catch wrestling can be traced in nearly every culture, from Lancashire catch-as-catch-can wrestling to the US hook wrestling to the Indian pehlwani.

Or you might even be referencing the infamous gong sau of China, where kung fu masters would challenge each other for the rights to open schools in villages or cities, matching style versus style, starting from millenia ago and continuing to the present day. Of course, dubious as the documentation surrounding those matches were, and as stupid as kwoon-storming is, there have been accounts of Chin na masters defeating other strikers through armbars and rear naked chokes.

As for "ruining the sport", I can only assume you're talking about the present version of MMA, as represented largely by the UFC and Pride FC (which have recently been merged as one organization. The UFC and Pride, as you may know, evolved out of the Vale tudo competitions in Brazil and Japan, which when brought to the US were imitated and televised. Of course, you should also be aware of the fact that vale tudo tournaments were largely organized by Helio Gracie, the original creator of Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and his descendants. The UFC was created largely as the brainchild of Rorion Gracie, Helio's eldest son and BJJ black belt, as well as Art Davies, one of Rorion's student. In fact, according to many inside sources who were present for the UFC's founding, it was created in a large part to showcase BJJ for the US, just as Pride FC was created in a a large part to showcase Rickson Gracie, another one of Helio's sons, versus Nobuhiko Takada, a famous Japanese shoot-wrestler and mixed martial artist who also trained in a form of submission wrestling. So how exactly do you figure that modern MMA, which exists largely because the Gracies wanted to showcase the effectiveness of submission fighting versus pure striking styles, is somehow ruined because it did exactly that?

And finally, you have absolutely no idea about submission grappling. If you think getting a submission hold is a "basic skill" that can beat anybody, and the sport now revolves around using and avoiding those holds, then how do you figure that only one of the five current UFC title holders is a well-known submission specialist, and even HE won his title fight two days ago by knockout? If it's such a get-out-of-jail-free card, why doesn't everybody just use those magical subs? How come sprawl-and-brawl and ground-and-pound are becoming such dominant strategies of fighting in MMA fights? Oh, and what did you mean by "strength, skill, stamina or fighting spirit" having no effect on submission grappling? Superior skill, strength, stamina, and fighting spirit is what submission grappling is all about. The fighter with the greatest combination of all four will win, just as with any other art in MMA. Look at Yuki Nakai, the grappler who continued a fight despite being eye-gouged illegally to the point of complete blindness and yet continued on not only win his fight by submission but also fight AGAIN the SAME night against the most feared grappler in the world at the time, Rickson Gracie. Look at Ronaldo de Souza, aka Jacare, who had his arm broken in a fight but continued to fight and win. Heck, look at Rickson Gracie, who is well-known for having an insane cardio routines involving sandy beaches and mountain running. Or any of the MMA athletes at the top of the sport, who train and spar and weight lift and run and work out for hours on end each day and every day so they can become strong and build up endurance and improve their skills, all thanks to their fighting spirit and determination to be the best.

If you doubt me on any of those facts, just get yourself to a real, honest-to-goodness MMA gym, and tell the first MMA fighter you see that submission holds are ruining the sport. Seriously. I'd like to know what happens.

Do you know why I'm annoyed by your comment, Enzoblue? I'm annoyed because training submission grappling is not fucking easy. It is hard, painful work to train. It is expensive as hell, in terms of money as well as time and effort. I am shit-awful at it, and my only goal each day I step on the mat, which is every damn day, is to suck a little less than the day before, and sometimes, like today, I don't feel like that's happened, and I haven't been able to move my neck in certain directions for days because of a neck crank that got cranked on too hard. And yet tomorrow, I'm going to put on my smelly, sweaty gi, get in my friend's carpool, and go roll around on a mat with large, sweaty men who outweigh me by over 50 pounds on average for several hours, and come back tired and sore and cranky. (Hah, pun, get it? It's a joke because my spinal column isn't functioning properly.) And I'm happy with all of that, from the musty gym smell to the same old jokes my friends make about me being gay that they've made for years, because through my training I know I am acquiring a skillset that is not available or acquired in the general public, and yes, I do take pride in what I do because it is a part of my life and part of who I am, and also there's the fact that my training and dedication can and have helped me to choke fools out who are deserving of it, just as those things have saved the lives of friends and acquaintances who were attacked in ghettos and Iraqi villages. And yet here you come to say that I, along with every other MMA competitor who has devoted far larger amounts of their life to perfecting the art of submission grappling, am ruining the beautiful sport of mixed martial arts, a sport that I am, as well as those competitors far above me, dedicated to as well and one that I do my best to represent well in the public eye. No. I'm sorry, but I'm not going to let you say that, because you're wrong.

Consider this: the UFC and modern MMA changed what "one would actually consider fighting". People used to think those flicky, chambered TKD kicks would hurt, or that they could just avoid a takedown attempt with elbows to the spine, or even in later years, they could just fight out of guard. The sport has evolved, and anybody who has a half a brain can see that a good MMA fighter needs to train to fight out of the three ranges that have been established through the test of the fight, standup, clinch, and ground, as well as be able to strike, grapple, and submit from all three ranges if necessary, as well as defend against an opponent's attempts to do so to oneself. Submission grappling is part of the sport out of necessity, not because it's what people (and by that I mean Westerners) think of when they think about fighting, or because it looks pretty - it's in the sport because it works. The skills and abilities trained in sub grappling allow a more skilled fighter to beat a less skilled opponent, given reasonable size comparisons, just as with every other martial art that has been used with success in MMA. The concept of MMA is the extension of Bruce Lee's philosophy of Jeet Kune Do - take what works, and lose what doesn't. So in reality, sub grappling being used to win fights in MMA is really part of the evolution and development of martial arts, in fact it embodies what MMA and the development of effective martial arts is all about. And if that simple fact offends, then perhaps you don't understand quite as much about MMA as you might like to think you do.

Sorry I didn't see your comment 'til later, I was away for a while - I just made a reply now though.

In reply to your comment:
“I still wonder what are the fundamental differences between BJJ and Jiu Jitsu. Is not the reason BJJ is more often referred to when discussing the sport because the fighters and schools from Brazil have been so successful?

I am in no way denigrating what we know as BJJ, but is it not just Jiu Jitsu practiced and taught by brazilians? I say this because I think the Japanese fighters in the clip would be more likely to call what they are doing Jiu Jitsu.

This of course leaves out what the brazilian schools may have added to the judo and jiu jitsu taught to brazilians by Esai Maeda, as there has been a long interval of development in Brazil..

”

I've heard that Carlos Gracie once said something along the lines of, "Judo and BJJ should in theory be the same, but the Japanese forgot how to do submissions and the Brazilians are too lazy to practice their throws."

In terms of BJJ vs. JJ/judo, I believe BJJ is referred to because the ruleset, terminology, goals, and overall culture changed after the Gracies took what Maeda taught them and changed it.

Generally people call what they're doing BJJ because JJ could mean a huge number of ryus for Japanese JJ or even something broader like American JJ, all of which have different sets of techniques and methods of training, so the distinction of particular styles of JJ is important when describing what one trains. In a large part, there's a huge respect if one were to have a black belt in BJJ because that is a known constant in terms of dedication, knowledge, and ability to tap fools out. But if one were to say they train just JJ, nobody would know exactly what that means and what their actual fighting ability is. So I believe many Japanese fighters would say what they're doing when they're fighting is jiu-jitsu, but the martial art/style they train is BJJ. Make sense?

I still wonder what are the fundamental differences between BJJ and Jiu Jitsu. Is not the reason BJJ is more often referred to when discussing the sport because the fighters and schools from Brazil have been so successful?

I am in no way denigrating what we know as BJJ, but is it not just Jiu Jitsu practiced and taught by brazilians? I say this because I think the Japanese fighters in the clip would be more likely to call what they are doing Jiu Jitsu.

This of course leaves out what the brazilian schools may have added to the judo and jiu jitsu taught to brazilians by Esai Maeda, as there has been a long interval of development in Brazil..

DigitalDragon, you misunderstood Empire's argument about contact. Boxers, Muay Thai fighters, kickboxers, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, judo all have their students start whacking, throwing, or submitting each other from Day 1. They continue to train this way at all times. So who do you think's going to be a better fighter, somebody who gets punched and punches people all the time and learns to put power in it, or somebody who whirls their feet and hands around and maybe touches their "opponents" when dancing? Practice makes perfect, right? How come capoeira players don't practice hitting each other, then? You said you've seen masters fight each other in person. Any of them ever get KO'ed, or even get knocked silly? I doubt it, and if it was, it was probably an accident.

*sigh* This is why arguing on teh internets is dumb. It's so much easier when the people I'm arguing with can put on some 4 oz. gloves with me to put their claims to the test and then get themselves punched silly. So much easier that way.

Actually Capoeira is not effective at all, and here's why:
-Unlike most martial arts, in capoeira the "fighter" is constantly off balance, either by doing some ludicrous moves or by rotating insanely. It's not efficient at all, and it's a waste of energy (which basically contradicts every actual martial art). Even the stance constantly rocking sideways is a waste of energy.
-Unlike martial arts, Capoeira was never actually put to the test. How many revolutions or wars have you heard about that happened in Brazil during the slave trade era? And if they used it against their "masters" they would certainly be done for. Martial Arts like Kung Fu, Karate, etc, have ALL been put to the test of actually engaging in real combat, not just sparring.
-Also in Capoeira they never really fight, actually they're not even supposed to touch each other. So, not only was it never used in actual combat, it's not even trained as such.
So... Capoeira is cool looking, and I'm sure it's a very complete body workout, but as a fighting style, it's completely pathetic.
Now, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu... that's efficient and effective.