Why Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is the Best Martial Art for Women

There are many martial arts in the world and many of them preach that they are the best.  The reality of the matter is that some martial arts are the best for certain types of people.  For example, a flexible guy who played soccer their whole life may be better off learning kick boxing or some martial art where he can utilize the strength of his kicks.

There are other martial arts that may be more technical and better for people who are different, and their minds function a certain way.  Today we are going to go over why we believe that Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (bjj) is the best martial art for women to learn how to defend themselves.  There are several reasons why we truly believe this.

Bjj is a martial art that does not use striking, it is a grappling art where you learn sweeps, submissions, takedowns, and other ground movements.  You learn how to fight off your back and have “guards.”  Guards are positions where you fight off your back and learn to generate leverage to increase and utilize every ounce of body strength you have.

Jiu Jitsu will teach women how to fight off their back which is very important for them, it will teach them how to use their body strength for submissions and locks, and it will show them how to use their hips.  These are just some of the reasons that bjj is the best martial art for women.

Fighting off your Back

Bjj is infamous for developing the guard and teaching people how to fight off their back.  In bjj you learn how to apply joint locks, chokes, and sweeps off your back.  You also learn how to be defensive and apply strikes off your back. So what does this have to do with women?  Well, one of the most dangerous places to be with a bjj fighter is in-between their legs.  There is a position called the closed guard that you learn how utilize your body to the best of its ability.  The closed guard is when you are on your back and someone is in between your legs. 

You learn how to use your legs, hips, core, back, and every other muscle to be defensive, apply joint locks, and chokes.  This is particularly good for women because they tend to have a lot of isometric strength and this is very important in bjj.  Men tend to out power women and for that reason women are constantly living in fear.  Wherever they are whether it is the class room, the bar, their workplace, everywhere men tend to instill fear in women just because the thought that a man could over power them and take advantage of them.

If women learn bjj they will have the confidence to fend off any attacker.  This is because they will learn ho to fight off their back.   It is not practical to assume that a woman could easily take a man down, even if she is well trained.  It is practical though to assume in some type of self-defense altercation between a man and a woman that the man would take the women down.  When this occurs if the woman is trained in bjj then this would be an ideal scenario.

Women who train bjj will learn how to apply submissions on people that are twice their size and twice as strong.  They will become extremely dangerous.  Let’s take a look at a young girl who was able to submit all the boys on here high school wrestling team by training bjj.

Using your Body for Submissions

One of the biggest benefits of learning bjj is learning how to maximize your strength and to be able to apply submissions.  What is a submission?  Well if you have watched the UFC you have probably seen people tap out, this is because they are in a submission.  A submission can be a joint lock, a choke hold, a leg lock, or anything that applies pressure to a joint, ligament, bone, or choke that makes your opponent tap out.  Some popular submissions include the arm lock, the leg lock, and the choke hold. 

The arm bar is one of the popular submissions that you may have seen in professional fighting like the UFC.  Another is the chokehold.  What is so good about learning these submissions for a woman?  Well, these submissions utilize a lot of leverage and they are able to be applied successfully on people twice the size of you.  Women are not as strong as men but learning how to do a proper arm lock or chokehold will allow them to easily render their opponent unconscious or debilitated regardless of their size.

It is not feasible to think that a woman could knock a man out with a punch.  If the man is much larger they may not be able to punch hard enough, we see some martial arts that say strike the neck or the eye, but in a real-life combat situation this is not realistic.  A woman is able to choke a man unconscious or break their arm with the proper leverage easily.

Jiu Jitsu also has a lot of live sparring where woman is constantly tested against men regardless of their size.  Although there are not punches or kicking in the sparring the realism in finishing submissions in what makes it so good.  When a woman gets a man in an arm bar in training the man is resisting as much as possible, so the woman will learn how to apply submissions on fully resisting opponents.  This realism is so important for woman.  Check out this sweep below from the guard where the man demonstrates how to lift your opponent using your legs so that a 12 year old could do it to an adult because of all the leverage.

Using Hips

The number one most important muscle group on bjj is the hips.  Women are known to have stronger hips then men.  This is the only muscle group where women are more powerful.  In bjj all of the sweeps, defensive positions, submissions and finishes use the hips in one way or another.  Flexibility is another factor when doing bjj and women tend to be more flexible.  The combination of the hips and flexibility is one of the best attributes someone can have in bjj and many women already possess these attributes, so it is easy for them to learn how to bjj.

So now you want to learn how to do bjj? Or you want to get your wife the gift of self-defense?  Well you are on the right website, we have many different DVD’s that teach the guard and other similar positions but in order to get a very well-rounded perspective on self-defense, check out our DVD “Unarmed and Dangerous by Rob Kahn.”  This is an excellent set because it goes over a lot of bjj but also other elements of self-defense that are important.