John Danaher has never been shy about identifying the cracks in Brazilian jiu-jitsu’s foundation, and in a recent interview with BJJ Fanatics, he laid out exactly why the sport’s standing game remains so underdeveloped.
His diagnosis is blunt. Most BJJ schools treat the standing position as a formality before the real work begins.
“Most coaches tend to treat the standing position as a warm-up,” Danaher said. “Class begins, you practice a couple of takedowns, and then you get into the serious part of class, which is the ground.”
The result is that sparring time in the standing position is almost nonexistent in the average school, leaving students with nowhere to develop functional standing skills.
This is what Danaher calls the training problem, and it’s one of three major issues he believes are holding BJJ practitioners back. The second is the coaching problem, which involves two specific traps. The first is the fragment fallacy, where takedowns are taught as isolated techniques rather than as skills embedded within a larger system.
“You can’t learn jiu-jitsu in fragments,” he said. “You have to learn the whole thing.”
A student who only drills a takedown without learning the stance, gripping, motion, and balance-breaking skills that set it up will fail the moment they face a resisting opponent.
The second coaching trap is what Danaher calls the add-on fallacy, where instructors borrow moves from wrestling or judo and drop them into a BJJ context without accounting for the rule differences.
Wrestling setups designed for a no-gi environment often fall apart when everyone is wearing a gi. High-amplitude judo throws that are protected by referee intervention in judo can become disasters in BJJ, where a failed throw can leave a competitor on the bottom with a full match still to go.
The first problem, and perhaps the most stubborn, is motivational.
“You can be a world champion in jiu-jitsu without knowing a single takedown,” Danaher acknowledged.
That reality makes it genuinely difficult to convince students to invest training time in their standing game when the ground is where matches are decided and where the curriculum is deepest.
Danaher draws a direct parallel to leg locks. A decade ago, leg locks were widely considered BJJ’s biggest weakness. Now they are a defining strength of the sport.
He believes the same transformation is possible for the standing position, but only if schools stop relegating takedown practice to the first five minutes of class and start treating it as a serious discipline in its own right.
