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Notes -
Two Notes on Women in BJJ
I went up to New England to visit my in laws over the weekend. While there I visited a local BJJ gym three times. It was great to get a new flow, some new partners, some different tricks thrown at me and some more success with stuff I normally can't hit. But two funny things happened:
Sunday night, after too many cocktails, we were sitting around with some of her older family members and we were chatting about the new gym I had found up there. And I was trying to explain the sport, and naturally this turned into "Show us something on Mrs. Fivehour!" So I have her get on top of me on the ground, and slap me like she's throwing punches. Then, gently and smoothly, just to demonstrate not with any force or intent to harm, I swung her into closed guard, tied up her hands, and then went for the triangle choke. I never even fully locked the triangle, I was just bringing it around to lock it in casually when she tapped as hard as she could and let out a yelp. I untangled myself and she was flabbergasted "Holy shit I couldn't breathe, oh my God, wow, that was terrifying! How did you do that? You can just do that?" I'm not particularly good, and I certainly wasn't abusing my strength, I was just playing around; but I have pretty thick hamstrings and I often catch training partners earlier in a triangle before it is "technically" closed. Everyone laughed, we talked more about it, totally normal.
That night, we go to bed, to set the scene when we're in New England at her parent's house we sleep in Lucy and Ricky style single beds next to each other. She comes over to my bed and says, hey, FiveHour, can we snuggle? I was really freaked out when you choked me earlier. She said she's looking at me differently because she suddenly realized how easily I could kill her, that just for a second the air had been completely cut off and she was terrified. She said it was like when she saw our dog murder a rabbit, and she suddenly realized the dog was capable of that, that she'd never realized I could do that to her.
Now, Mrs. FiveHour is a very strong athletic woman. I shit you not, I have seen men on the motte or similar internet forums talk about their lifts when they're doing Starting Strength who were months in and still squatting less than her. And we lift together so she knows I can knock out deadlifts that are better than twice hers. But still, she wasn't ready for just how easy it was for me.
Point for those who claim that the male-female gender gap isn't sufficiently understood by most people.
On the other hand, Monday morning I went to the gym, and I rolled with everyone at the new gym, and I tried not to be overly aggressive because I was new. And at any gym, I basically never turn down a roll unless I'm injured. I do typically avoid the girls at my home gym, but mostly just by positioning myself away from them when everyone is pairing up, if they ask me to drill or roll I will. More of a Pence Rule thing than anything.
Well we were doing positional 2 minute rounds starting with one partner in front headlock position, and a nice young woman about eight inches shorter and eighty pounds lighter than me asked me to roll with her. I let her get the front headlock, and I probably let her get it in a little deeper before we started than I would have let a man. And I tried to avoid using any muscle or weight, just flowing through the moves and trying to use good technique, letting her work. And the little bitch managed to tap me out. I gave her too much slack and she hanged me with it. It's the first time I've been tapped by a woman, and for several seconds I couldn't believe it. She got me in a perfect front headlock strangle, and there was no way I was getting out of it without trying something desperate and more likely to injure someone than escape smoothly. And anyway, she had earned it, she had the strangle on tight, and I tapped. She was the only one to tap me that practice.
So on the other hand, that was humbling, a point for women in the battle of the sexes: there is a point at which a woman can submit me, if I'm not at least a little careful.
I've actually started, when rolling with partners who are much smaller/weaker/estrogenic, listening to one of the coaches and once we are in contact on the ground in guard, I'll close my eyes and try to flow roll without looking, trying to feel their bodyweight shifting and reacting to mine. I'm not sure if it has "helped," but it is a really neat experience.
Two points
and
seem to be illustrative here. Now I know nothing about BJJ and I expect I'd be out squatted by Mrs. 5hr. But in my experience, at least in cases where there is clearly a size difference (as you describe), the woman gets the advantage from the tenderheartedness (for lack of a better term) on the part of the man. There's no way around that I think unless you just turn that off (which I don't know how to do short of rage, which is unhelpful). Closing your eyes is probably instructive in a sort of Obi Wan way, but I suspect hobbles you as you lose an important sense. Interesting though.
I mean yes, I was handicapping myself significantly. Which is actually true in like 1/4-1/3 of the rounds I spar most days, I'm a large man and there are a limited number of opponents that I can go 100% against, and then even the ones I could go 100% against often choose to go light. I go light against smaller men, though less so than I do against a woman, and I go easy on people less experienced than me, though there aren't a ton of those, and I roll light with guys who want to roll light due to injury or to work on something. I've miscalculated against new guys before and gotten tapped out for my trouble. But never against a woman!
This is entirely a case of me underestimating her ability and overshooting the amount I had to handicap myself in order to have a productive round with her. But that's still me discovering something, in that up to this point I wasn't entirely sure there existed a point at which I would have handicapped myself too much to escape from a woman's submission hold. She had that sucker sunk, there was no way I was going to be confident in getting out of it. Which genuinely, I couldn't believe, I sat there (not) breathing for a couple seconds just sort of stunned before I tapped. Because up until this point while I occasionally let a girl get a dominant position, if I turned up the strength slightly I easily found my way out of it. But there's some point of advantage at which that would no longer hold. This was a discovery.
Unfortunately, up until now I've only rolled with women who I was close to even with in technical skill. I hope at some point to have the opportunity to roll with a female opponent with a significant experience/technique advantage over me, so I can fill out that quadrant of the square. Obviously strength is good, but I get tapped by guys I am bigger/stronger than regularly. What margin of experience would be enough to worry about? I'm pretty sure I couldn't take Adele Fornarino, but where does the line sit?
Also, closing your eyes is useful when rolling in that it trains you to grapple by feel. When you're locked up on the ground in guard, there's a lot of stuff you can't see because it's behind you or because the motion is too small to really perceive a difference, but that makes a big difference. I can't necessarily tell what my opponent's hands are doing behind my back, or how his weight is distributed between his legs, with my eyes. But I can feel it, and if I can learn to feel it and react to it that's more information I'm gathering.
I actually managed to hit a few sweeps and one triangle choke on other full grown men with my eyes closed. Which, among other things, allowed me to talk shit on them about beating them with my eyes closed.
I'm only conversant in aikido, which is more like action yoga or something. In that, I've been thrown (usually into a subsequent roll) by guys who were very skilled, and also brutally slammed into the mat by guys who seemed to be channeling a different martial art. At my size (about 177cm, 73 kg) there are women who are both taller and heavier (fewer in Japan) of course. The very skilled akiidoka can move you (me) even if I resist, male or female. The regular rando is like an unbalanced sack of oranges. Reading your updates makes me want to try BJJ though the prospect of abject humiliation is always mildly daunting.
I'm 185cm and 100+kg (yes, I know, sigh) and I've been doing Aikido for a while, and I've seen women than could unbalance me reliably. If they know what they are doing, it's definitely possible, and strength has very little to do with it, more speed and precision. Of course, BJJ has very different modality, Aikido techniques usually end where BJJ is beginning :) And yes, somebody who did not practice maintaining balance is usually really easy to unbalance and really uncomfortable when the balance is broken - it's one of the challenges when working with novices, they do weirdest things when the balance is gone.
I don't think "humiliation" should be a part of it. I mean, if you didn't do BJJ what you expect to happen when you come to the practice first? Of course everybody would be better than you - I mean, if they aren't, you should seek another place to practice, since here people obviously are wasting their time! So, there's nothing humiliating in it - it's like if you tried to learn Japanese and discovered after a week you are not good at it yet. If you practiced for 10 years and kept losing to everybody, that'd be humiliating. But as a beginner, literally nothing - at least nothing related to not being good in BJJ - should be humiliating.
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An older dude who used to do Aikido joined recently, and I will say he definitely learned something in the way of balance and body positioning from his aikido practice, he's very tough to off balance and he's got strong resistance. But at times he is a little goofy with his technical choices.
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