Joe Rogan has been the utmost authority for all things martial arts. He’s recently piped in about something that’s been grating him for quite some time – Jiu Jitsu matches are not fights (in spite of what AJ Agazarm would have you believe):

 “Jiu-jitsu is not fighting because you’re not hitting each other, So, you’ve got a jiu-jitsu match, for sure. Not really a fight because you can’t get leg kicked, you can’t get elbowed in the face, you’re not going to get kneed into a coma, it’s a totally different experience than a fight, and it’s almost disrespectful, in some ways, to call a jiu-jitsu match a fight. But other people like to refer to it as a fight. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

To listen to him explain it tune in to:

Rogan has been practicing jiu jitsu for a number of years and is a black belt under both Jean Jacques Machado and Eddie Bravo.

Rogan also has very specific ideas on how to get better at it:

One of the things about jiu-jitsu… This is very important lesson for anyone who knows jiu-jitsu because a lot of people don’t like this aspect of jiu-jitsu. Some people have this meathead idea that a way to get good at jiu-jitsu is to go against the hardest guys, get your ass kicked and that’s how you learn.

Actually that’s the wrong way to learn. The best way to get good at jiu-jitsu is to strangle blue belts. You go and you find people that are just learning but they’re not as good as you and you choke the f*ck out of them.

That’s how you get really good at your technique. And people say “Well that’s bullying.” – well it is important for the blue belt to at some point spar with black belts. It is important because you need to know that there’s a higher level of proficiency , there’s a higher level of skill and then there’s a shorter distance in between points that these guys are hitting. They’re cutting the chase, they’re getting – they’re capitalizing on very small openings and they clamp down and when they clamp down and when they capitalize on these openings they get submissions quicker. So you have to know that there are guys that are better. That’s important but to drill the most important thing is drilling and when you drill you drill with someone of like your level and you just practice on each other. “