How Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu can Save a Police Officer's Life

March 22 - Patrick Head  

There are a number of martial arts that can effectively teach civilians how to protect themselves from attackers, but if you are involved in law enforcement, your aim in a hand-to-hand combat situation is not just to protect yourself from harm, but to protect others from getting hurt as well.  The job of our police officers, many who are students at United MMA in Nederland Texas, is to take control of a hostile situation while doing as little physical harm to the aggressors as possible, and this is exactly what Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is designed to accomplish.  Almost any martial art can teach you how to hurt an opponent badly enough to escape, but if your goal is to protect others as well as yourself, there is absolutely no better combat sport for you to be trained in than Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

Most popular combat sports such as Karate, Boxing, Kickboxing, and Taekwondo involve punching and kicking assailants, which can cause great physical harm for which a police officer could potentially face legal repercussions.  On the other hand, at United MMA, we teach our practitioners how to control their opponents through joint locks and superior positioning without hurting them or exerting any more force than is absolutely necessary.  This minimal application of force makes the moves appropriate and effective to implement on everyone from a violent teenage girl to a two hundred twenty pound adult male.  Because Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu does not require a great deal of physical strength, it is also relatively easy for a police officer who has trained in this martial art to effectively restrain an aggressor who is much larger than he is, as Royce Gracie proved to the world when he used Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu to defeat much larger opponents in the early days of the Ultimate Fighting Championships before the sport had established weight divisions. 

Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is a very versatile sport that includes a variety of moves that can be preformed from almost any position, including both standing and on the ground.  It is much like wrestling in that both sports emphasize superior positioning and control of an opponent’s body, but one major difference between the two is that wrestling puts a much stronger emphasis on takedowns, whereas Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu concentrates more on getting an opponent to surrender from any position.  This makes Jiu-Jitsu much more flexible than wrestling, and it also makes it more practical to implement on the asphalt streets where violent wrestling takedowns could do serious damage. No other martial art can claim this kind of versatility and gentleness in handling violent situations, which is why training Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu at United MMA in Nederland, Texas is so perfect for law enforcement officers. Being able to effectively and yet gently restrain a violent but unarmed attacker without using tasers or weapons is very important for these heroic civil servants who are often put in the difficult position of needing to negotiate between protecting themselves from injury and avoiding being accused of using excessive or inappropriate force.