I’ve heard so much about grappling, so what is it? and whats so important about it???
Ken,
Grappling is any act of grabbing your opponent with the intent of somehow manipulating their body and or balance.
More specifically, grappling refers to take-downs, throws, joint-locks, chokes, and body positioning while groundfighting.
Grappling is so important because not knowing anything about it makes you very susceptible to it. Grappling is all about balance disruption and body immobilization, and these two concepts make striking hard, if executed.
As an overly simple example, say you try to kick me and I step in and grab your leg, and try to trip you. I have disrupted your balance and immobilized a limb all at once. This makes continued striking extremely difficult, because you have to attend to the fact hat you are going to fall over first, and your lack of a good base will inhibit any real power from your fists.
Make sense?
Grappling is generically used for a lot of styles. just because you do Ju jitsu does not mean that you are an on the round grappler,traditionally JJ is 60 to 80% stand up. Because of NHB everyone thinks of these styles as ground fighting only.
if you want to see a bunch of groundfighting/grappling techniques go to www.mixedmartialarts.com and go to the techniques archive.
Grappling is done standing to. Just think wrestling, grappling=non striking movements. Grappling is not a system by itself just like kicking is not a system by itself.
Exactly shaolin… that’s kind of what I was trying to get across… hence the “grabbing” discription. Ground, standing, doesn’t matter 