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Home » Starting BJJ » Should I train BJJ in the gi if I want to do MMA?
1

Should I train BJJ in the gi if I want to do MMA?

- John Q. Whitebelt

Posted by John Q. Whitebelt in Starting BJJ | 1 comment

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  1. This solution has been deemed correct by the post author

    76
    7-18-13
    Aesopian says:

    How much training in the gi will help you depends on your goals for MMA, and how BJJ fits into that.

    If you really want to do MMA, then you need to be training for MMA, not just cobbling together classes at a BJJ school, a Muay Thai gym, and dusting off your old high school wrestling. That’s not to say that BJJ or Muay Thai (or any martial art) on its own isn’t going to help you in MMA. But you don’t see successful MMA fighters just signing up at a local gym so they can get stripes on their white belts.

    If you have serious ambitions of being a professional UFC fighter, then it’s unlikely you’re reading this. You would have already found a gym that produces top fighters and proven you’re worth joining their team.

    If your ambitions are to do amateur or local MMA, that is within most people’s grasp if they dedicate themselves and take training seriously. That’s the kind of MMA you can get into by doing mostly BJJ with a splash of MMA.

    Back to the issue of whether training in the gi helps with MMA.

    Many top MMA fighters do some gi training. This is often because they want to train with the best submission grapplers, and most of those are BJJ black belts who train in the gi. Did the gi make these black belts more technical, or would they be technical without it? That is always debated, but a lot of them say the gi made them more technical.

    How does the gi help make you more technical? The increased friction and grips slows the game down, and it makes certain positions and submission harder to escape. The gi also makes it harder to explode or slip out of bad positions, so you have to be more mindful about what you’re doing. And the gi grips can highlight points of leverage and control that are harder to illustrate when you’re slipping and sliding all over in no-gi.

    The criticism against gi training is that it can give you habits that aren’t good for MMA. While that’s true if you do nothing but learn moves with sleeve and collar grips and never care about if a position could get you punched in face, if you have half a brain you should be able to figure out which moves will translate to MMA.

    I’m going to call out a pet peeve here. I can’t stand when someone has the choice of a sketchy MMA gym or a good but traditional BJJ gym, and they choose the worse of two because they want to “learn UFC.” A lot of low level MMA clubs are awful at everything and good at nothing. Even if playing UFC Undisputed on XBOX made you dream of being the next Anderson Silva, resist the urge to choose bad MMA over good BJJ. 

    As long as you are training seriously with a good coach and good training partners, you will be improving your game, regardless of what you’re wearing. It will be up to you to know your goals, be realistic about them, and take advantage of whatever opportunities are available to you.

    You should also read the answers to these:

    • Should I train gi or no-gi?
    • Is no-gi more realistic than BJJ in the gi?
    • Do you have to be a BJJ black belt to fight in the UFC?
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