Rhadi Ferguson and Grip Fighting

Bengoshi Waza

Essay Ten .....................................................................................................................................................................................................
Grip Fighting

Rhadi Ferguson got attention for two products: The Grind and his Grip Fighting sequence. Professionally he is well known as a strength and conditioning coach for world class athletes (including a number of Olympians) and as a mixed martial arts coach and trainer. His most useful materials (if you are not a Judoka) are those that teach professionalism, planning, discipline and focus. Things like his Chump Repellant, Gold Mettle Plan and similar products. His bodyweight and other exercise programs are apparently often copied. A passion of his (especially when he got to the Olympics and found himself left high and dry in this regards) is scouting -- both yourself and your competition.
All of that said, what about grip fighting?
When I was young, gripping wasn't an issue (that was back in '68). Then, later, it was more "strange grips" than it was grip fighting. That is, people would use strange grips, grabbing onto each other in weird or unusual ways. That was followed by variations of stiff-arming and grip denial (where the other guy lets you grab his lapel so he can grab your arm, but won't let you have a grip on his arm). My approach to both kind of shows through in the Responsive Throwing seminar materials here.
Well, Judo has now caught up with Wrestling. Just as wrestlers "hand fight" Judoka "grip fight." The same fingers out, pushing each other off, complete avoidance of a grip altogether sort of thing.
Is it good for the sport? I'm just a spectator these days. Are the various rule changes going to do anything to change or get rid of grip fighting? I don't know. Probably not.
However, I do know the following points:

If you want to understand what you are seeing as a spectator, learning about grip fighting really helps.
Beginners should not be taught much about grip fighting -- it will cause them to not learn other things and then they will find themselves without core skills when they are more experienced.
Everyone needs to understand it, if they compete, so that they know what is happening and have an idea of how to deal with it -- if you are going to do a SWOT analysis, you probably need to do a gripfighting unit as part of it.
There really is not much out there on the topic.

I like http://www.rhadi.com/gripfighting_university/index.html as a starting point and I like http://rhadi.com/ngtw/ as a starting product. But that has to do with the way I learn and what I am intending to learn.
If you go to Amazon.com you will see:

Grips (Judo Masterclass Techniques)

and

Drills for Grapplers: Training Drills And Games You Can Do On The Mat For Jujitsu, Judo And Submission Grappling

None of the other products show up on Amazon.com right now. Google will give you things like Underground Gripfighting Secrets Trailer - LiveVideo.com and Youtube has some excerpts by Rhadi Ferguson (e.g. YouTube - Grip Fighting Secrets) but there isn't much else.
Which is amazing, really. Every match you see grip fighting in action, yet no one is really writing or talking about it, other than the random review, such as http://judoforum.com/index.php?showtopic=21484, or complaints about it (and yes, people complain -- they seem to hate it as much as I did when i was playing Judo rather than watching it). http://technorati.com/videos/tag/gripfighting shows you what Technorati has -- and if you click over to the blog post tags it shows (as of 10/31/2008) no posts with the tag. Zero. I did find one using search engines, gripfighting and push hands. There is part of Jeon's video (which I bought and someone else has now ... without paying for it -- though if I really wanted a copy I'd just buy another or another of Koga's), which helps point out just how much grip fighting is a part of modern matches at all levels.
So, do I endorse gripfighting? Not really, but I do think it is worth learning about at some point, especially for spectators. You can listen to the alternative position [here] and catch a good excerpt [here].

On books: go to your library, use interlibrary loan, and you can order almost anything. You should never buy a martial arts book until you've read it twice for free. On Masterclass Judo books, there are much cheaper places to buy them than Amazon, but it is a great place to read about them. As for the Grip Like a World Champion DVD -- it is the only product I've seen so far with a money back guarantee -- other than Rhadi Ferguson's other products. He buys everything back that people want to return. That so little gets returned, and so little ends up on e-bay, sends an interesting message. .

Link to home page:

http://adrr.com/bengoshi/index.htm