That may or may not be why the assorted bros like it. You’ll probably only come to mischief through your own idiocy, by not conceding fast enough. Pedro Garcia has never had an injury, in 16 years. Soon you realise that you don’t need to hit people, you can restrain, you can hold people and you still get the same buzz out of it.” It’s quite hard to get injured in jiu-jitsu: it’s unlikely to happen by accident. “We don’t hit,” Garcia says, “it’s only grabbing, grappling. There are other martial arts that will exhaust you faster – Thai kick-boxing is notorious – but if you want to get ripped without knowing quite how, do jiu-jitsu. Some combination of your bodyweight, your opponent’s, the mental agility you’re ideally deploying, the scrambly, anything-it-takes spirit, requires extreme physical exertion. But once you try it, well, you still won’t understand it, but you’ll believe it. The bit I’m really sceptical about, until I try it, is the workout potential: people always say it’s a 1,000-calorie-an-hour burner, and those stats are pretty unusual (for comparison, running would burn 700, strenuous cycling 600). If you’re arrogant, it will be good for you to have to surrender to someone much smaller or 20 years older. It’s very character-building, Garcia says. Even if you did go into it because you had delusions of greatness, the sport would soon shake you out of that. I have a nurse in her 50s, very light, seems really sweet and friendly, but once she got the hang of it …” He shakes his head, awestruck. But I have students that are maybe 60 kilos. It’s a misconception that you have to be big and strong.” He pauses to adjust that, slightly: “Obviously, it does help. “It is a misconception,” Garcia says, “that this is a sport for supermen. The majority of jiu-jitsu happens on the mats. The advantage can flip in an instant, and there’s a mind-game element to it – sometimes it will suit you to make your opponent think they’re winning. You’re always trying manoeuvre yourself into a position where your strongest part is up against your opponent’s weakest, whether that’s a quicksilver wrist slipping away from their thumb or your hamstrings against their biceps. Core strength probably comes into it I wouldn’t know. It’s like physics, made of arms and legs. The overall principle is that you take your opponent’s strength and use it against them, to make them fall over, then carry on using their strength against them until they concede. I could tell you the rules, but this is not, by any means, a sport you could learn from a book. He’s one of the best students I’ve ever had.” This annoys me, inexplicably: what’s it to me if Mark Zuckerberg is good at fighting? Zuckerberg won his title in Silicon Valley. There is, and it reads like the grand tour of the international playboy: Miami, Rio de Janeiro, Paris. That doesn’t mean there’s not a competition circuit for jiu-jitsu. The majority of jiu-jitsu happens on the mats, and this isn’t considered very elegant or spectator-worthy by the martial arts purists who inhabit, for instance, Olympic committees. But when you do jiu-jitsu, once you get to the ground, that’s when it continues.” Judo and jiu-jitsu, despite having a lot of similarities, have a critical fissure: “In judo, if you take someone down and you hold them for a few seconds, then you win that’s the rule. One family in particular, the Gracies, founded an academy to teach a version of Kosen judo, which is predominantly ground work. The sport came out of the Japanese diaspora in Brazil. “People do yoga, right? We call this involuntary yoga.” Wait, what? “Because I can make you bend.” Pedro Garcia, the 44-year-old founder of PG Academy (“I’m so lucky I’m called Garcia,” he said, “because I just used my initials, but now I can pretend it stands for Pure Grappling”), explains its popularity.
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