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Jiu-Jitsu Unleashed: A Comprehensive Guide to the World's Hottest Martial Arts Discipline
An introduction to jiu-jitsu from one of its most dominant stars Thanks to the dominance of its practitioners at Ultimate Fighting Championships and other mixed martial arts tournaments, jiu-jitsu has become one of the most popular forms of martial arts in the United States. This fighting technique features ground fighting and submission moves that bewilder even the most ferocious opponents. In Jiu-Jitsu Unleashed , expert Eddie Bravo teaches you the moves that he used to defeat legendary Royler Gracie--a member of the reigning family of jiujitsu--the victory that made him one of the sport's most feared competitors. Jiu-Jitsu Unleashed
216 pages, Paperback
First published September 13, 2005
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
September 7, 2011
I have no real way of telling how good or bad this book is from just reading it. It's one of those books that is meant to be practiced and applied. Sadly, or not, I normally have no way of trying out the things in a book like this unless I go to my fighting class. This is something I haven't done in a couple of weeks because of my dental problems of the past couple of weeks. Tonight though, I get to return to fighting class, and maybe I'll be able to remember enough of the details in some of the more basic moves to try to break someone's arm or cut off the blood and oxygen supply to their brain and make them pass out. Here's hoping, right? But since I haven't gone to class for two weeks, and I've been very sedentary in my time off I'll probably just be gasping for air trying to do everything in my weakened powers to fend off having someone try to choke me out or break my arm.
This book heralds itself as being sort of ground-breaking. I'm not familiar enough with all of the different schools of Brazilian jiu-jitsu (bjj) to know how much of what Eddie Bravo is showing in this book is as cool as he says it is, or how much of it is sort of empty superlatives. One thing I have learned in the world of mixed martial-arts, especially when you watch the fights, superlatives are tossed around like a drunk sorority girl at a raging frat party. Everyone is the best (x) out there, every champion in every weight class is 'undoubtedly the greatest pound for pound fighter in the world', every submission specialist is the best in the their weight class, every striker is either the most technical striker in the game today, or the best brawler since Wanderlei 'the Ax-Murderer' Silva. Eddie Bravo's official best-friend, UFC commentator and Fear Factor host Joe Rogan calls him a phenom (this is another word that gets brandied about in mma, is this even a real word?) in the introduction he wrote (and if you have some weird desire to see Joe Rogan topless this book will more than satisfy you, in almost 3/4's of the book he's the victim Bravo is demonstrating his moves on) he extols the revolutionary moves that Bravo has created. Rogan isn't as guilty of misusing superlatives as his co-commentator Mike Goldberg but he's been known to overuse adjectives on occasion.
Because I know my goodreads friends are on the edge of their seats wondering how revolutionary Eddie Bravo is I better not keep you all waiting too long (the one person who is possibly still reading and hasn't just blindly clicked 'like' and written this off as another of my boring fighting book reviews). There are two (or three, but I'll stick with two) big things that Bravo presents in this book. The first is he developed a no-gi system of fighting. This might not be huge anymore, but it could have been when he first started working on it. Traditionally bjj is done with a gi, and many of the moves utilize the fact that you and the other person are wearing those martial arts pajamas into the moves. You learn to choke someone grabbing someone's left-side collar with your right hand and pull your arm tight across their neck while pulling down on the opposite collar with your left hand (I can't do this, but it's been done on me and it's quite effective). This is just one example, there are a ton though. The problem is that when you leave bjj and enter into mma there are no longer gis and many of the moves you've learned aren't that functional anymore (this is why the Royce Gracie was such a powerhouse when the UFC started. No one he was fighting had any defense against his jiu-jitsu, but as soon as people learned the rudiments of escaping from submissions his dominance waned and he was eclipsed by world-class wrestlers who weren't nearly as technical when it came to jiu-jitsu but used the rudiments of it and added it the traditional arsenal of the various styles of wrestling). Traditional bjj loses effectiveness if other ways of setting up for positions and moves aren't incorporated for the lack of a gi.
The second, and I think more important thing Bravo presents in this book (it's inevitable that no-gi moves incorporating wrestling moves would have to be included in a sport that has no handy jacket to grab on to) is the importance of the half-guard position. As I said above I'm not familiar with all the different schools of bjj and who has created what, but Bravo is the first person I've come across who stresses the offensive importance of the half-guard. In the human fighting chess game that is bjj this is a pretty cool development and gives quite a bit of things to think about in developing plans of attack. Up until reading this book I thought of the half-guard as kind of an awful transitional place where both people were trying to pass to better positions. It wasn't a strong defensive position and you kind of used it to keep your opponent from getting into a much better position while you tried to manipulate things so that you could get back into full guard. If I knew more about chess I'd make some analogy here but I don't know what I'm talking about, vaguely it's like learning that some formerly weak opening position can actually be developed into a powerful offensive position with the right way of thinking about the possibilities in front of you.
I originally thought I'd write a review explaining how much like chess bjj is but I have lost the motivation for writing that review, and I don't know enough about chess to really make that kind of review work. Instead I'll just say it's similar in the way that you have to be able to think several moves ahead and be able to outthink what your opponent is going to do. Unlike chess though you have to be able to think where you are going to move all the various pieces (which are your body parts, and there is not just one king, there are so many points on a human body that can be used to achieve victory) but you have to have the physical ability to make the moves, and you have to think of this crap while you have someone else trying to make you as physically uncomfortable as possible.
Maybe I'll write more about that in the future. For now I have to get ready to get beaten up a bit.
This book heralds itself as being sort of ground-breaking. I'm not familiar enough with all of the different schools of Brazilian jiu-jitsu (bjj) to know how much of what Eddie Bravo is showing in this book is as cool as he says it is, or how much of it is sort of empty superlatives. One thing I have learned in the world of mixed martial-arts, especially when you watch the fights, superlatives are tossed around like a drunk sorority girl at a raging frat party. Everyone is the best (x) out there, every champion in every weight class is 'undoubtedly the greatest pound for pound fighter in the world', every submission specialist is the best in the their weight class, every striker is either the most technical striker in the game today, or the best brawler since Wanderlei 'the Ax-Murderer' Silva. Eddie Bravo's official best-friend, UFC commentator and Fear Factor host Joe Rogan calls him a phenom (this is another word that gets brandied about in mma, is this even a real word?) in the introduction he wrote (and if you have some weird desire to see Joe Rogan topless this book will more than satisfy you, in almost 3/4's of the book he's the victim Bravo is demonstrating his moves on) he extols the revolutionary moves that Bravo has created. Rogan isn't as guilty of misusing superlatives as his co-commentator Mike Goldberg but he's been known to overuse adjectives on occasion.
Because I know my goodreads friends are on the edge of their seats wondering how revolutionary Eddie Bravo is I better not keep you all waiting too long (the one person who is possibly still reading and hasn't just blindly clicked 'like' and written this off as another of my boring fighting book reviews). There are two (or three, but I'll stick with two) big things that Bravo presents in this book. The first is he developed a no-gi system of fighting. This might not be huge anymore, but it could have been when he first started working on it. Traditionally bjj is done with a gi, and many of the moves utilize the fact that you and the other person are wearing those martial arts pajamas into the moves. You learn to choke someone grabbing someone's left-side collar with your right hand and pull your arm tight across their neck while pulling down on the opposite collar with your left hand (I can't do this, but it's been done on me and it's quite effective). This is just one example, there are a ton though. The problem is that when you leave bjj and enter into mma there are no longer gis and many of the moves you've learned aren't that functional anymore (this is why the Royce Gracie was such a powerhouse when the UFC started. No one he was fighting had any defense against his jiu-jitsu, but as soon as people learned the rudiments of escaping from submissions his dominance waned and he was eclipsed by world-class wrestlers who weren't nearly as technical when it came to jiu-jitsu but used the rudiments of it and added it the traditional arsenal of the various styles of wrestling). Traditional bjj loses effectiveness if other ways of setting up for positions and moves aren't incorporated for the lack of a gi.
The second, and I think more important thing Bravo presents in this book (it's inevitable that no-gi moves incorporating wrestling moves would have to be included in a sport that has no handy jacket to grab on to) is the importance of the half-guard position. As I said above I'm not familiar with all the different schools of bjj and who has created what, but Bravo is the first person I've come across who stresses the offensive importance of the half-guard. In the human fighting chess game that is bjj this is a pretty cool development and gives quite a bit of things to think about in developing plans of attack. Up until reading this book I thought of the half-guard as kind of an awful transitional place where both people were trying to pass to better positions. It wasn't a strong defensive position and you kind of used it to keep your opponent from getting into a much better position while you tried to manipulate things so that you could get back into full guard. If I knew more about chess I'd make some analogy here but I don't know what I'm talking about, vaguely it's like learning that some formerly weak opening position can actually be developed into a powerful offensive position with the right way of thinking about the possibilities in front of you.
I originally thought I'd write a review explaining how much like chess bjj is but I have lost the motivation for writing that review, and I don't know enough about chess to really make that kind of review work. Instead I'll just say it's similar in the way that you have to be able to think several moves ahead and be able to outthink what your opponent is going to do. Unlike chess though you have to be able to think where you are going to move all the various pieces (which are your body parts, and there is not just one king, there are so many points on a human body that can be used to achieve victory) but you have to have the physical ability to make the moves, and you have to think of this crap while you have someone else trying to make you as physically uncomfortable as possible.
Maybe I'll write more about that in the future. For now I have to get ready to get beaten up a bit.
April 9, 2007
First off, yes, I did read this book before taking on one of Eddie Bravo's students at Grappler's Quest. And yes, I did dismantle the guy and shrug off every attempt he made at getting Bravo's patented "lockdown" on me, even as Bravo himself screamed at the guy to do so from the edge of the mat. It was actually a lot like that scene in "Patton" where George Patton defeats Erwin Rommel after reading his book "The Tank in Battle". I even shouted, "Bravo, you magnificent son of a bitch, I read your book!" after the victory (not really).
That being said, the book is pretty sweet. You get to hear all about Eddie Bravo's music career (irrelevant? yes. hilarious? of course) and you learn what was going through his mind before his first match in the Abu Dhabi Championships (the words "dude" and "totally" are peppered throughout).
I recommend it for the serious grappler as well as for the part-time enthusiast.
That being said, the book is pretty sweet. You get to hear all about Eddie Bravo's music career (irrelevant? yes. hilarious? of course) and you learn what was going through his mind before his first match in the Abu Dhabi Championships (the words "dude" and "totally" are peppered throughout).
I recommend it for the serious grappler as well as for the part-time enthusiast.
May 15, 2011
Eddie Bravo's approach to jiu-jitsu is novel, and something that anyone could beneficially incorporate into his or her own jiu-jitsu game. That being said, I would say that this book isn't really geared toward the beginner. Eddie doesn't go over the basics of jiu-jitsu. Rather, he assumes you know the basics and are looking to add something new to your game. Furthermore, being in the 150 pound weightclass himself, Eddie has a lot of good advice for those practitioners that are in the lightweight category. The book is filled with large, black and white pictures. Too often jiu-jitsu books are filled with small pictures in which you cannot see the details of the moves. In "Jiu-jitsu Unleashed", although black and white, nearly every picture is at least a half-page in size, and many are a full page.
In the introduction, Eddie tells his personal jiu-jitsu story, from high school wrestling up to his defeat of Royler Gracie in ADCC and on to his creation of the 10th Planet Jiu-jitsu school. As a self-described "150 pound weakling", his story is inspiring. And he makes a very, very strong case for training without the gi, his argument being that avoidance of gi training is responsible for his meteoric rise in the ranks of the submission grappling world. I don't think this is the whole story, however, as Joe Rogan points out (correctly in my opinion) in his introduction that what makes Eddie Bravo great is that he is naturally creative and not afraid to experiment and invent new techniques. In my opinion, Eddie's personal story alone makes this book worth the price of admission.
Next comes the instructional segment of the book, which is the majority of the book. Eddie begins with the half-guard, and here he asks: since so often players spend so much time and energy attempting to reposition from the half-guard to the full-guard, why not just learn to fight from the half-guard? I think this is a great approach.
From the beginning, Eddie sets a precedent for the rest of the book. He first explains why he is about to teach you what he's going to teach you, and when it is to be used. Then he explains how to do it. And finally, if it doesn't work, he goes on to the next move, which is "plan B", then to "plan C", and so on. In this way, I feel he has done an excellent job in building up the jiu-jitsu game like it really is: a sequence of moves that act like a flowchart, giving you options for the various possibilities that arise in a real grappling situation.
Next, Eddie discusses his variant of the full guard, called the rubber guard. This is essentially a clever version of the guard that allows you to trap your opponent in your guard without relying on grabbing ahold of the gi to do so. Rubber guard has become quite common and can be seen often in mixed martial arts matches like UFC. This move, like many in the book, is victim to a cheesy name. Even if all of these moves do become popular and ubiquitous, I hope the names don't stick.
In the third chapter, Eddie introduces his trademark move, The Twister. I appreciate the fact that Eddie is not selfish with his winning moves. Throughout this book he takes on a very selfless attitude in which he bares all in the hopes that everyone will learn jiu-jitsu as well as he has.
In the fourth and fifth chapters, Eddie goes over some submissions from the mount and from back mount, respectively. Chapter six deals with guard passing. Compared to the first three chapters, these are pretty much standard jiu-jitsu fare, though I like his over-under approach to back mount.
In chapter seven, Eddie brings the entire book together. As anyone that's done jiu-jitsu knows, things never work out in reality like they do "in the playbooks". Therefore, you must be prepared to move from one strategy to the next. In the last chapter, Eddie does just that, by showing you how to transition between each of the positions he's described in the book and back again. This chapter really ties the book together, and gives a reason for the inclusion of chapters four through six.
The only reason I'm not giving this book 5 stars is that I felt it lacks as an "all-around" guide to jiu-jitsu as advertised in the subtitle. Really, the primary focus of the book is half-guard, rubber-guard, and the Twister. Don't buy this book if you want to learn jiu-jitsu basics and the entire jiu-jitsu game (for that I might recommend Royce Gracie's new 2-volume book series, or something by Royler and/or Renzo Gracie).
I highly recommend this book to anyone that is looking to add something new and interesting to their offensive jiu-jitsu game.
In the introduction, Eddie tells his personal jiu-jitsu story, from high school wrestling up to his defeat of Royler Gracie in ADCC and on to his creation of the 10th Planet Jiu-jitsu school. As a self-described "150 pound weakling", his story is inspiring. And he makes a very, very strong case for training without the gi, his argument being that avoidance of gi training is responsible for his meteoric rise in the ranks of the submission grappling world. I don't think this is the whole story, however, as Joe Rogan points out (correctly in my opinion) in his introduction that what makes Eddie Bravo great is that he is naturally creative and not afraid to experiment and invent new techniques. In my opinion, Eddie's personal story alone makes this book worth the price of admission.
Next comes the instructional segment of the book, which is the majority of the book. Eddie begins with the half-guard, and here he asks: since so often players spend so much time and energy attempting to reposition from the half-guard to the full-guard, why not just learn to fight from the half-guard? I think this is a great approach.
From the beginning, Eddie sets a precedent for the rest of the book. He first explains why he is about to teach you what he's going to teach you, and when it is to be used. Then he explains how to do it. And finally, if it doesn't work, he goes on to the next move, which is "plan B", then to "plan C", and so on. In this way, I feel he has done an excellent job in building up the jiu-jitsu game like it really is: a sequence of moves that act like a flowchart, giving you options for the various possibilities that arise in a real grappling situation.
Next, Eddie discusses his variant of the full guard, called the rubber guard. This is essentially a clever version of the guard that allows you to trap your opponent in your guard without relying on grabbing ahold of the gi to do so. Rubber guard has become quite common and can be seen often in mixed martial arts matches like UFC. This move, like many in the book, is victim to a cheesy name. Even if all of these moves do become popular and ubiquitous, I hope the names don't stick.
In the third chapter, Eddie introduces his trademark move, The Twister. I appreciate the fact that Eddie is not selfish with his winning moves. Throughout this book he takes on a very selfless attitude in which he bares all in the hopes that everyone will learn jiu-jitsu as well as he has.
In the fourth and fifth chapters, Eddie goes over some submissions from the mount and from back mount, respectively. Chapter six deals with guard passing. Compared to the first three chapters, these are pretty much standard jiu-jitsu fare, though I like his over-under approach to back mount.
In chapter seven, Eddie brings the entire book together. As anyone that's done jiu-jitsu knows, things never work out in reality like they do "in the playbooks". Therefore, you must be prepared to move from one strategy to the next. In the last chapter, Eddie does just that, by showing you how to transition between each of the positions he's described in the book and back again. This chapter really ties the book together, and gives a reason for the inclusion of chapters four through six.
The only reason I'm not giving this book 5 stars is that I felt it lacks as an "all-around" guide to jiu-jitsu as advertised in the subtitle. Really, the primary focus of the book is half-guard, rubber-guard, and the Twister. Don't buy this book if you want to learn jiu-jitsu basics and the entire jiu-jitsu game (for that I might recommend Royce Gracie's new 2-volume book series, or something by Royler and/or Renzo Gracie).
I highly recommend this book to anyone that is looking to add something new and interesting to their offensive jiu-jitsu game.
September 20, 2020
Like reading a forbidden text. Krauss and Eddie clearly outlines the history of developing Eddie's style and the reason behind how each unique position was created.
Do not be fooled into thinking this is an anthology of techniques. Read into the history and enjoy the why's and when's of Eddie's development of a style that uses wrestling techniques to tear down the walls of brazilian jiu jitsu and expand the world of grappling.
Do not be fooled into thinking this is an anthology of techniques. Read into the history and enjoy the why's and when's of Eddie's development of a style that uses wrestling techniques to tear down the walls of brazilian jiu jitsu and expand the world of grappling.
October 26, 2018
Great explanation of the moves and positions, very well written
April 13, 2023
A little bit too complicated for a beginner like me. So I just go through it quickly, to look for the key fundamentals first. I can come back to this again later.
January 15, 2024
Written well great book.
June 4, 2007
i know from this book that bravo's jiu-jitsu is not like the ordinary bjj i've known. you will see some 'bravo's' techniques like 'new york', 'rubber guard' and so on in this book. in my opinion, they are little bit complicated in position... phew.. eddie bravo, he is an inventor..
June 2, 2008
Great book with some really un-orthodox techniques.
August 27, 2008
So far it gives a different background BJJ. The book is a good reference when grappling w/o the gi.
November 15, 2008
This one is no good.
December 10, 2013
Eddie Bravo develops a cool no-gi guard system based around "the rubber guard." I'm not sure how well this works in no-gi competition or in MMA, but the creativity and ideas make it worth reading.
October 25, 2015
Excellent introduction to the 10th planet system. A bit heavy of praising Eddie but a good starter book.
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September 2, 2017PROS:
- Really liked the first chapter where Eddie describes his personal story.
CONS:
- Like all the sports book, IMHO all the added value of such book it to form a mental look of the overall system - however this is no substitute for training and takes away time from repetitions.
- Really liked the first chapter where Eddie describes his personal story.
CONS:
- Like all the sports book, IMHO all the added value of such book it to form a mental look of the overall system - however this is no substitute for training and takes away time from repetitions.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews