this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2026
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I'll always have a bias because I did a bunch of judo and muay thai to account for people who don't come to the ground easily. But I would say that boring and annoying makes for a really good self defense system. In my ideal world I'm an annoying wet blanket until somebody comes to help me. I've also beaten a black belt in competition by way of taking a judo grip which was enough to convince them to pull guard and then keeping relentless pressure after that. Similar for a brown belt; I was in a competition I didn't want to be in so my hope was to throw them immediately to dissuade them from resisting, but they frame 1 pulled guard.
That's a really good way to put it. BJJ people are certainly that, if nothing else. That's an awesome combination of martial arts you have there. I think Judo (along with Sambo) is the next best thing to BJJ for pure grappling (and BJJ is a direct descendant of Judo AFAIK), followed by various styles of wrestling.
I honestly believe that Judo is overpraised. It has a lot more traditional martial arts elements than people realize in my experience (and understanding of how schools keep their lineage to the kodokan alive). I would quickly concede that sambo and wrestling are the superior grappling arts to BJJ in terms of making MMA champions. The caveat being that the programs are only as intense as the institution running them. You can have a middling wrestling program that creates wrestlers who don't bite down on the mouth guard and you can have a hard ass judo school that doesn't require you learn the names of the techniques in Japanese and English.
But at the end of the day, grappling is grappling to some degree. Kill your inner HR that tells you it takes many years of experience to learn a new one if you're good at the other.
I've never tried Judo myself, but I like the traditional martial arts elements as long as they don't detract from the main function of the art. I don't know much about Sambo because it's a relatively rare martial art, other than the general idea that it's like Judo with leg locks. I would concede that wrestling is better than BJJ at stand up grappling, but not on the ground. I agree that different schools of the same martial art can have great variance in the quality of what is taught/learned. Learning the names of the techniques in Japanese doesn't bother me (other than it being a little more difficult to memorize), especially considering that in many cases they have specific names for techniques that don't even have an English name. I also agree that grappling is grappling and that there are a lot of skills that transfer between the various styles.
I have a research project to recommend to you. You should look up why Judo was named as such instead of being named Jujitsu. And inso doing, explain the two pillars of the art. If you get to the heart of that, you'll find the main function of Judo.
Something tells me that it's the art for you.
Thanks. I know a little bit of the background for why Judo split from Jujitsu, but I'll try to learn more. I greatly admire Judo and would have loved to have done it when I was much younger (Muay Thai too), but there are a few issues that have prevented me from trying it: I'm old (and already started BJJ when I was older), very tall, and I stopped BJJ because my fingers/knuckles were suffering with the constant stress on them from gi sparring. I felt that Judo would be the same or worse. I would dearly love to learn all those foot sweep techniques from Judo.
For now, Ive settled on the next best thing for me personally, which is a Japanese Jujitsu style that has many same or similar techniques to Judo and BJJ but no live sparring that I'm aware of. I also just started last night a style of Karate at the same school that also doesn't appear to have live sparring. Yes, I know that not having live sparring limits their utility, but I decided that it was a good balance for me of teaching me some useful techniques while having less risk of getting injured. I've thought about this quite a bit and decided that at some point the self-preservation intent of martial arts could be applied to select martial arts that wouldn't be so punishing on my body. The other nice thing about this school is that it's a community-based non-profit school, so I pay significantly less to learn both JJJ and Karate than I used to pay for just BJJ.
At the risk of giving away the game, there are old people who do judo. There are people who compete in kata competition who never go at shiai pace. It's because the purpose of judo as intended by its creator is not to be the best competitor. In that same vein I'd never look twice if you told me that sparring isn't for you
I'm sure there are old people who do judo. I have looked for and read plenty of Reddit threads asking if old people could do judo. :) It's just that I realized I wouldn't want to do it at anywhere near full speed regularly. If you're saying that I can find a place that would let me go at my own pace, that would be interesting, but I think that even in that case I would benefit from learning many of the techniques at JJJ first. Or are you saying that it's possible to practice judo without sparring? I'm not sure what you mean by your last sentence either. This reminds me, I wish that we had an active martial arts community here on Lemmy.