After nearly a century of testing in a wide variety of settings, Grand Master Helio Gracie’s system of self-defense remains fundamentally sound and intact. To be sure, three generations of Gracie family members, and other equally committed practitioners of the art, have evolved the original techniques and added to the Gracie Jiu-Jitsu arsenal. All of these changes, however, strictly adhere to the Grand Master’s requirements for street applicability, energy efficiency, and natural body movement. Today, we call these requirements the “Helio Gracie Guidelines.”
On your path towards Gracie Jiu-Jitsu mastery, your knowledge of the Helio Gracie Guidelines will serve you in two important ways. First, it will enable you to solve problems on your own by modifying techniques in accordance with the guidelines; second, it will enable you to recognize the multitude of impure techniques that are being developed by instructors who do not know, or choose not to adhere to, the founding principles of the art.
Focus on practicing techniques that are fully street applicable. Focusing exclusively on techniques that are not “punch proof” will cause you to develop a false sense of security. If you modify a technique, you must verify that the new variation keeps you safe from all potentially dangerous strikes.
Any technique that relies on speed and power rather than leverage and timing is not energy efficient. In a real fight there is no time limit, so you must learn to save your energy. The only reliable way for you to defeat a larger, more athletic opponent is to utilize techniques that cause your opponent to exhaust energy, while simultaneously preserving your own. Before adding any technique to your arsenal, you must verify that it is more reliant on leverage and proper timing than on your athletic capabilities. Do not trust techniques based on strength or speed as they are unlikely to work against a larger, stronger attacker.
Any technique that requires you to move your body unnaturally is likely to fail in the heat of battle. Natural body movement is the best foundation on which to build the instinctive reflexes needed in a real fight.
With the demand for Jiu-Jitsu instruction at an all-time high, thousands of self-proclaimed instructors have opened schools around the world and are creating or modifying techniques at an unprecedented rate. The problem is that most of these techniques violate the first guideline of Gracie Jiu-Jitsu – they are not street applicable. The main reason for the divergence from this foundational principle is that these instructors are creating techniques for sport competition rather than real street fights. Any technique that is designed to work in any kind of controlled competition with all of their associated rules, weight classes, time limits, safety considerations, and point systems, will give the practitioner a false sense of security since these circumstances are totally non-existent on the streets.
occur when fast, strong, and/or flexible instructors modify the techniques. In contrast, it was Grand Master Helio’s lack of athleticism that forced him to develop techniques that relied almost exclusively on leverage, making them reliable for any student, regardless of their size and athletic ability. Today, nearly all of the individuals who are making the adaptations are impressive, competitive athletes and many of their “solutions” to sport situations rely on their superior physical attributes. When a student, who is smaller, weaker, slower, or less flexible than the instructor tries to learn these techniques, they invariably face difficulty due to their lack of equivalent athleticism. Even if a student masters one of these techniques, they will find it difficult to use it in a real fight against a more athletic opponent. Their reliance on excessive energy or an unnatural body movement will lead to exhaustion, at which point they will realize the fundamental flaws in the modified technique.
At Gracie Jiu Jitsu Athens, our primary concern is to preserve the techniques as they were developed and practiced by the Grand Master so that we can effectively teach them to the greatest number of people. Few schools, if any, share this concern for the preservation of the pure techniques, so you must be very discerning when adding techniques and strategies to your arsenal. To test the reliability of a new technique, ask the following three questions:
1) Can I apply this technique in a real fight against a striking opponent?
2) Is this technique energy efficient enough to be applied against a larger opponent?
3) Is this technique based on movements that are natural for my body?
