What do you think: how important is wrestling in Jiu-Jitsu? Particularly in no-gi?
Well, almost every professional and elite Jiu-Jitsu competitor will say that wrestling is vital to your success on the mats.

For example, Stuart Cooper interviewed a number of elite grapplers during a recent Grappling Industries event, and many of them said that wrestling is a must!

Dante Leon, a 2x IBJJF No-Gi world champion, is the first one to admit it:

It’s gotten past the point where it’s something that’s important. [Now] it’s imperative, it’s completely necessary, it’s something that has to be done.

And I think the next generation [of no-gi BJJ athletes] would be well-advised to start with that as soon as they can.

Leon emphasizes that, nowadays, a lot of BJJ athletes already had wrestling experience before they started with Jiu-Jitsu.
And that, simultaneously, wrestling is getting taken up much more frequently by the BJJ practitioners themselves:

You know, North Americans do have a strong wrestling base. So, we have a grappling base before we get into Jiu-Jitsu.

A lot of these people who are coming into Jiu-Jitsu now and coming up through the ranks have the experience in wrestling; whether or not it was in high school, in middle school wrestling, things like that.

And a lot of people who got into Jiu-Jitsu before wrestling are starting to do wrestling a lot sooner. So, I think that’s a really good thing.
And I think it’s something you need to have.

Because, with proper wrestling you can take the fight to the mat whenever you need to and whenever you want to.
And with proper wrestling defense, you can stop someone from taking you down.

Robert Degle points out that it won’t be a matter of “just wrestling” though, but of mixing it with Jiu-Jitsu:

If Jiu-Jitsu remains honest, we’ll see better techniques rise to the surface.
So, you’ll just see a refinement of “what works” over time…

And, I think that, you’re going to see more and more wrestling in the future. And not just blast Double Legs, Jordan Burroughs style, it’s not gonna be just that.
It’s gonna be wrestling, synchronized with Jiu-Jitsu.

Watch the entire video with some super interesting takes:

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