Olympic judo coach, Division 1 wrestler, and BJJ black belt Justin Flores recently appeared on an episode of The Ageless Warrior Lab podcast with host Dave Meyer. During the conversation, Flores laid out his thinking on how wrestling, judo, and Brazilian jiu-jitsu relate to one another and where they diverge.
Talking about the core philosophical difference between wrestling and judo, Flores stated, “To me, like if I’m generalizing, wrestling is like, I’m a hammer, you’re a nail. Whereas judo is like, I’m going to pour this pitch of water out and the water’s going to gravitate towards the path of least resistance.”
“So, they’re two completely separate ideologies if you take them from their concepts. But it’s how they mold together. You could use both in the same exchange to me. You could take someone where they don’t want to be taken, but also set traps.”
Rather than treating each discipline as its own isolated system, Flores described how he prefers to find the common ground between all three.
“I wrestled at a high level at the University of Nebraska. I was a high level judoka with the best grapplers on planet Earth in the sport of jiu-jitsu. So I like to relate them to each other, and where if they were on like a Venn diagram where each discipline has a circle and where they overlap, that’s how I like to kind of teach. How these disciplines relate to each other, not how they’re different.”
He also pointed to how competition rule sets have pushed each art onto its own island over time.
“Like this fortification versus the martial arts in its truest practical sense. This is all for self-defense for combat. So once you add rules and time, those things seem to kind of isolate each martial art discipline on an island of its own. Rather than to see how they relate to each other, it’s how they’re different.”
Flores also talked about where he thinks jiu-jitsu practitioners should begin when developing their takedown game.
“I think wrestling is a great place to start as far as the skills you’re developing, the mindset, being able to almost stand where your opponent is standing, if that makes sense, rather than to pull them and drag them and to move them into spaces they’re uncomfortable with.”
