It’s 2019, but apparently this is still a question.
Gym owner and black belt Chewjitsu has been answering viewer questions on his channel for a long while now, but this may be the first time he actually encourages viewers to go watch something else to prove his point. That something else? Worldstar, or anything like it.
See, a Chewjitsu viewer was thinking of finally taking up BJJ when a “friend” stepped in and explained how jiu-jitsu is a “waste of time” and far inferior to boxing in street fight situation. This didn’t sound exactly right to the viewer, so he reached out (wisely) to an expert to be sure.
Now. This is a jiu-jitsu site. So it should be fairly obvious what our brutally biased opinion on the use of grappling in street fighting will be. Chewjitsu, however, is a philosopher as well as a submission machine, so his response is more nuanced.
“There are a lot of techniques that are in other martial arts that aren’t nearly as effective [as grappling] because of the training environments they’re used in,” explains Chewy. He sites an old internet video where a Kung Fu or Wing Chun student demonstrates knowledge of martial arts technique but no experience with live fighting. “He’s done katas, but he’s never had someone try to hit him.”
Boxers and grapplers both live spar almost every time they train. They also have competitions semi-regularly. That adds up to hours upon hours of simulated fighting and “stress innoculation” depending on how long a student trains. As a result, Chewy says, anyone studying combat sports in a structured setting, period, is light years ahead of the average person in a street altercation.
That said, Chewy reminds us, there was this whole UFC…thing, which began as a way for fighters from differently disciplines to see how their craft stacks up against other disciplines and has since become an international phenomenon that churns out assault specialists, and it seems to have already conclusively shown that BJJ isn’t a total waste in the street.
You can watch Chewy’s full answer to this age old question here:
