About Aiuchi Jiu Jitsu

We have a wide-ranging syllabus against which you can be graded if you train with us, however our art is never considered to be fully finished and new techniques are explored and added regularly whenever they fit. Trained well, our style is a great base for self defence and can be widely applied in many jobs where such skills are required, including policing and medical work. The core components to our art can be broken down loosely into the following groups:

Striking and blocking

Although we are primarily a grappling art, we need to teach our students how to punch and kick so that we can learn to defend against those attacks. Learning to block attacks is integral with most of our other training, but is sometimes covered in isolation to improve ability in this vital skill.

Falling

Everyone falls over from time to time, and most of the time this doesn’t hurt too much. Falling over safely from height or with force is not so easy, and so we have techniques designed to improve the safety of such falls. Learning to fall over well has numerous benefits, including conditioning your body to take hits, increasing your stamina and - arguably most important of all - allowing you to train the rest of our art safely.

Throwing

Once you have successfully blocked an incoming strike, it is useful to be able to do something to finish the fight. Striking back is one option, but we generally prefer to end the fight by throwing an opponent to the ground. Throws make up a very large part of our training, using balance and weight to make the technique happen rather than strength. This allows a smaller person to throw a larger, stronger foe with enough force to give an opportunity to escape.

Locking

In some circumstances, it may be appropriate to restrain an opponent, either for their own good or because you fear the consequences of letting them go. In such circumstances, locking a joint may be the best option. This involves putting stress on a joint in such a way that it causes pain - typically this pain is enough to encourage compliance. Locks can also be used to disarm weapons if an attacker was armed, or to take someone off balance if simple weight application is not quite sufficient. We learn locks to arms, wrists, legs, ankles, shoulders and the neck.

Weapons

We learn about the realities of weapon attacks and the difficulty of dealing with them, but we also learn some techniques which can be used to disarm someone when all options of escape have been exhausted. Our training gives us experience of dealing with sticks (short and long), chains, baseball bats, chairs, knuckledusters and other blunt instruments. We also train against swords and knives, though we would stress to anyone facing such weapons that escape should be the top priority because of the danger of trying to fight an edged weapon using their bare hands.