You BJJ claiming your schools train Takedowns…I truly believe you…BUT 95% do not train live takedowns. It is drilling. Go to any local tournament and you will see exactly what I mean. Unless the BJJ player was a wrestler previously the TD’s are pathetic.
Kron has trained his whole life and looked like a crab scooting around on his butt looking for a takedown.
I’ve trained that a lot of gyms, and almost every single one, starts in the standing position with some kind of wrestling/Judo. Not sure where you train but you have to move lol.
It’s kinda dumb to compare the best grapplers in the world with a typical recreation/ family school where 90+% of the students will probably NEVER compete at the lowest level.
Most BJJ student don’t compete.
Some schools (like mine) have a lot of older guys with careers & families and the big struggle is to just show up to class, at all. Comparing that to essentially pro athletes skills sets just doesn’t make sense, in the real world.
For me, a great student is someone with a decent attitude who consistently comes to class 3x a week. You teach them takedowns as best you can, in a way that suits them; we do them every class. But doing hard takedown sparring, I know from experience, is where MOST injuries come from. Bunch of old guys, many with current knee issues, going 100% on the feet is just not appropriate. There are ways to do drills, that are safe and student appropriate. You can go shot for shot with 25%, 50%, 75 % resistance. Stuff like that is great for people to develop takedowns. They will not be amazing, but they will have some very real level of takedown familiarity and skill.
IF they decide to compete, or god-forbid need to use it in real life, they have something useful there. But no, they’re not going to do takedowns like it’s Sambo-70. Check the average age of ANY room anywhere where people are doing high level wrestling, sambo, judo with hard throws. It’s not old guys for a reason.
But the point of martial arts has never been to develop a tiny group of elite athletes. It’s to improve the lives of regular people who train. And anybody can get a heck of a lot better at takedowns or anything else if they train in a way that suits them and their goals. The fact that they might not be as good as THE BEST FIGHTER on the planet, is obviously immaterial.