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This blog is written by Connection Rio team member Torryn Heffelfinger. He’ll be blogging weekly on life and training BJJ in Rio de Janeiro. Source: trainingthedream.blogspot.com.br
This week I am going to talk a bit about how my wrestling has helped and molded my BJJ game. Having wrestled for 13+ years, it would be impossible to say that my wrestling has not helped or shaped my style of jiu-jitsu. I started BJJ two days after my last collegiate wrestling match and as time has progressed I have tried to build my game in a way that will use my wrestling strengths to aid me.
Having wrestled for the past 13 years or so, one of the biggest questions I get from guys in the BJJ world is, ‘How do you feel your wrestling has carried over to your jiu-jitsu?’ It’s a pretty broad question which, at the time, is hard to fully go into. Here I am going to try to go more in-depth at answering it.
I feel that wrestling is a great accompaniment with jiu-jitsu. One of the biggest positives is that coming into the sport of BJJ from my wrestling background I already had a knowledge of body pressure, leverage, and distribution of weigh. The intense push-pull of wrestling, along with the need to either keep an opponent on the mat or pin him gives a wrestler a leg up on those just starting BJJ from no other grappling background. This is because while a BJJ newbie may spend weeks or months learning how to distribute getting a feel for pressures, the wrestler already has that down and can focus on other aspects of the game. To illustrate my point one of the biggest comments I hear is people saying, “man wrestlers have the best base, and they are hard to knock of their base”. Wrestling also gives a new BJJ practitioner a leg up by allowing them to already be familiar with one aspect of BJJ, top control. In wrestling the overall goal is to pin your opponents shoulders to the mat and keep them there in a variety of positions and moves. So while the wrestler may not yet now any submissions, controlling from side control, half guard, the back, and the mount positions are all familiar to the wrestler…
