John Danaher recently explained why BJJ’s stand-up game continues to lag behind everything else.
His diagnosis starts with how standing position is treated in most schools…
As a formality rather than a real focus:
Most coaches tend to treat the standing position as a warm-up.
Class begins, you practice a couple of takedowns, and then you get into the serious part of class, which is the ground.
The second is the coaching problem, which breaks into two specific traps.
The first is what he calls the fragment fallacy – teaching takedowns as standalone techniques rather than as part of a connected system:
You can’t learn Jiu-Jitsu in fragments. You have to learn the whole thing.
The second coaching trap is the add-on fallacy, where instructors import techniques from wrestling or judo without adjusting for BJJ’s different rules.
Wrestling setups built for no-gi often break down once a gi is involved, and high-amplitude judo throws, which are normally protected by referee stoppages in judo, and that can turn disastrous in BJJ, where a failed attempt can leave a competitor stuck on the bottom for the rest of the match.
The third and arguably most persistent issue is motivational, since the incentive to prioritize takedowns simply isn’t built into the sport’s structure:
You can be a world champion in Jiu-Jitsu without knowing a single takedown.
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