Disparity in Jiu-jitsu: How the Lack of Governing Body Creates a Widely Varied Landscape of Practitioners

Jiu-jitsu as a sport or martial art is incredibly widely varied. For example within 2 miles of my house there are 4 different Jiu-jitsu gyms all on the same road. They are at most one mile apart from each other. These gyms are all widely varied in culture, technique, and level of instruction. This is largely due to the somewhat “wild west” nature of Jiu-jitsu and the fact that it has no individual governing body to create more cohesion.

Almost every other sport has an international governing body that provides guidance and rules for their more localized governing bodies. In fact, for sports to qualify for the Olympics, they have to have an international federation that does this function. So sorry we will not be seeing Jiu-jitsu as an official Olympic sport any time soon. These international federations, charged with maintaining the integrity of their sport, provide information and supervision to localized national federations. While this does not mean that every single iteration of each location doing the sport is going to be cookie cutter copies of each other location, it does create at least some uniformity and guidelines for the sports and levels of each sport making it easier for an outsider to understand the different levels of the sport.

What about the International Brazilian Jiu-jitsu Federation (IBJJF)? They often act as they are the international governing body for Brazilian Jiu-jitsu and they put out guidance on promotion as well as belt ranking. However, the IBJJF is a for-profit organization whose main goal is operating various tournaments and collecting revenue from those tournaments. The IBJJF was created by Carlos Gracie Jr., the founder of Gracie Barra, one of the largest Brazilian Jiu-jitsu Associations in the world. This means that the IBJJF is not independent for purposes of acting as a governing body and they do not have affiliate national bodies that they dispense information down to.

Why does this matter? Because Brazilian Jiu-jitsu has an identity crisis. People join Jiu-jitsu for many different reasons and their reasons for practicing Jiu-jitsu can change over time, but one of the things that has not changed is people disparaging other practitioners because of their reasons for joining Jiu-jitsu. These debates of Sport vs. Self-defense, or Gi vs. No Gi has been going on as long as I have been practicing Jiu-jitsu and probably longer. I have been practicing Jiu-jitsu for the majority of my life. These are not new arguments. They stem from the fact that Jiu-jitsu is almost entirely un-regulated outside of what each individual school wants to teach. Because there is no governing body of Jiu-jitsu this creates a vast disparity in the techniques and ideals of practitioners. It also fuels the identity crisis which Jiu-jitsu suffers from. People generally want to think of their Jiu-jitsu as the best and often that creates a situation where people think that anything beyond their school as lesser than.

Additionally, it has created a situation where any behavior “has” to be tolerated or at least the perception of that situation. There are open fascists and racists involved in Jiu-jitsu and openly using it as a recruiting ground for followers. While it is not the only reason, the lack of a governing body in Jiu-jitsu allows this behavior to flourish. A governing body would act as a barrier to entry for these groups and help keep bad actors outside of our sport.

The lack of the governing body also contributes to the disparity in the perception of black belts. Often people view the top competitor black belts as the standard that all black belts should be held up to. However, this is not true, like I said earlier, I have been involved in Jiu-jitsu for a very long time and I have been fortunate enough to attend many seminars with many different people. A not insignificant number of seminars I have attended with “top level black belts” have been not great at best. Many top level competitors are gifted athletically and cannot teach what they do because it comes mostly naturally to them. I have been to a number of seminars with random black belts you have never heard of, and I still utilize much of the techniques I learned in those seminars in my Jiu-jitsu today. Because there is not a standardized governing body to set a minimum standard for teaching or being a black belt this creates a situation where the regular black belts in your town are not looked on as favorably, despite the fact they may be fantastic.

Is this problem solvable? The truth is I don’t know, the Jiu-jitsu community is so disparate and fractured that creating a governing body now might not be a feasible task. I would imagine that even if someone tried, there would be significant push back against the idea within the community and it might just fail to launch. Or maybe this is something that will happen later as more and more people get their black belt and want to contribute to bettering the community.