What techniques did Helio change to better suit the smaller person?

I notice your still talking shit but the only part of my post you didn't reply to is "where do you train?" Huh, that's funny.... I wonder if that's because your a cowardly troll!

I don't care if your joking... Let me guess, you're you a fucking comedian, too? Doubtfully. The fact is you disrespected Helio in text where we can all read it and now your backtracking about any seriousness behind your joke because cowardly trolls don't defend their beliefs.

Stop telling me the same shit over and over and just admit you often have this problem where diarrhea comes spewing from your mouth and you didn't mean to disregard the contributions Helio has made to martial arts.
Why should he not not disrespect Helio, a man who told a myriad of lies to propagate his style and denigrate judo? His talent as a martial artist does not exempt him from criticism.
 
Actually, take an average of the sizes of opponents he faced, not a world-wide average of males.

Oh... I just read your second line... so you did understand what average I was referring to?? Then what was the point of your post? In case I was referring to a worldwide average? That would have been quite a large average considering how many Asian males populate the world.

First, Helio was indeed slightly below the size of the average male in Brazil in the '30s when he was fighting. That's the average male, not the average fighter. Most fighters were at least 10 lbs above the average Brazilian male.

The average fighter there was a lot larger than they are now before the introduction and spread of BJJ, because the smaller guys would just lose to the larger opponents.

You can research all this and figure it out fairly easily, the information is openly available.

Moral of the story, Master Helio was always the smaller opponent.

You said "An average man is 170-190 lbs."

You didn't add any qualifiers in that sentence.

I corrected your exageration.

Shit even in most gyms I've trained at in modern times average weight of training males over 18 years old is 150-160 lbs.

And the worldwide average for all adult males is lower than that.

That's the reason people often consider 155 the deepest weight class in mma and often complain about shallowness in mma, bjj, and judo at the hw level. There really aren't that many giant guys in the grand scheme of things and 155 really is the closest weight class to the median in most cases.


Helio was a great practitioner. But he wasn't smaller than Caio Terra.

I'm old enough to have seen many "official gracie family" sources list his weight as lower and lower over the years exagerating more and more with each reyelling like an Irish folktale.


He was an average sized or maybe slightly below average sized guy. He was really good and he was a historically renowned innovator.

We do a disservice to his memory by trying to pass of his weight as an elderly man as if he weighed the same at the ages of 25-39.

His story doesn't need embellishment. It is strong enough to stand on its own.
 
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Helio, the inventor of light. The inventor of gravity. The only grandmaster.

Let us teach you...what he taught us.
 
You said "An average man is 170-190 lbs."

You didn't add any qualifiers in that sentence.

I corrected your exageration.

Shit even in most gyms I've trained at in modern times average weight of training males over 18 years old is 150-160 lbs.

And the worldwide average for all adult males is lower than that.

That's the reason people often consider 155 the deepest weight class in mma and often complain about shallowness in mma, bjj, and judo at the hw level. There really aren't that many giant guys in the grand scheme of things and 155 really is the closest weight class to the median in most cases.


Helio was a great practitioner. But he wasn't smaller than Caio Terra.

I'm old enough to have seen many "official gracie family" sources list his weight as lower and lower over the years exagerating more and more with each reyelling like an Irish folktale.


He was an average sized or maybe slightly below average sized guy. He was really good and he was a historically renowned innovator.

We do a disservice to his memory by trying to pass of his weight as an elderly man as if he weighed the same at the ages of 25-39.

His story doesn't need embellishment. It is strong enough to stand on its own.

Yeah, I didn't need any qualifiers because obviously I was making a statement that was relevant to this conversation.... the average male size worldwide would have been irrelevant.

Helio was a little larger than Caio, no one has ever said he was smaller than Caio.

Your rebuttals have both been agreeing with me while appearing to be an argument....

Fact of the matter, once again... Helio was always the smaller opponent.
 
You said "An average man is 170-190 lbs."

You didn't add any qualifiers in that sentence.

I corrected your exageration.

Shit even in most gyms I've trained at in modern times average weight of training males over 18 years old is 150-160 lbs.

And the worldwide average for all adult males is lower than that.

That's the reason people often consider 155 the deepest weight class in mma and often complain about shallowness in mma, bjj, and judo at the hw level. There really aren't that many giant guys in the grand scheme of things and 155 really is the closest weight class to the median in most cases.


Helio was a great practitioner. But he wasn't smaller than Caio Terra.

I'm old enough to have seen many "official gracie family" sources list his weight as lower and lower over the years exagerating more and more with each reyelling like an Irish folktale.


He was an average sized or maybe slightly below average sized guy. He was really good and he was a historically renowned innovator.

We do a disservice to his memory by trying to pass of his weight as an elderly man as if he weighed the same at the ages of 25-39.

His story doesn't need embellishment. It is strong enough to stand on its own.


P.S. I'd love to see how small the guy is that would call 190 lbs a giant....
 
I would say that both Helio and Kano were incredibly important innovators but that neither invented anything.
 
P.S. I'd love to see how small the guy is that would call 190 lbs a giant....

If you're 140 ish 190 is giant.

Kimura was often referred to as a giant in the gracie version of the story and he competed at 187 lbs.


You made a single sentence statement that was exageration at best and false at worst.

I understand your loyalty but be loyal to the art and the man, not loyal to the exageration.

Besides, being the smaller guy may be noble but it's not wise when you get wrecked for challenging a bigger guy just as skilled as you are.

Helio personally admitted that kimura choked him out in the fight.
 
Oh, I think you're right on that count. But the Gracies' version of the story says that Helio found that throws were too reliant on brute strength, and so began to focus very heavily on the ground game. Would you agree that most judo throws require brute strength? I was under the impression that Helio just didn't have the level of instruction necessary to really get all of the standup aspects of the art. Certainly not to the level that Maeda did, for example, as a pure judoka. So he filled in the gaps, as you say, and it turned out that he found it easier to understand leverage on the ground than on the feet.

No, I don't believe that was the Gracies' story. It was that he found the Japanese techniques overall to be too reliant on strength. He relied heavily on the ground game and developed his guard because as a smaller man he was often on bottom, so he developed his strategy to be defensive and based on survival. That is the Gracies' story.
 
Hm, I see. What aspects of the early incarnation of Japanese judo do you figure were too reliant on strength for Helio's tastes?
 
Hm, I see. What aspects of the early incarnation of Japanese judo do you figure were too reliant on strength for Helio's tastes?

I have no idea. It's kind of as I was saying in my original post in this thread, I think in general, when you're not good at a technique, you use strength to fill in the gaps. They could be throws, they could be submissions. But if you haven't learned a technique to mastery level, and it doesn't work on bigger guys, it's natural to blame it on a lack of strength. I think from there Helio had to fill in the details himself. In many cases, he did it the same way it was being done in Japan, sort of independently discovering the same thing. In other ways, he did the same techniques slightly differently than in Judo. For example look at the traditional BJJ way of teaching an armbar from guard, and the traditional Judo way of doing it.
 
Helio was small and fragile as a child. He could never participate in class because he was always sick, so he would jut watch Carlos teach maeda's fusion of jujitsu. One day Carlos wasn't there so helio decided to teach class. He didn't really modify anything, he just picked out the moves that worked for him because of his size. He than began to develope a system around his selected moves with a heavy emphasis on fighting from guard.

Actually that's a myth. Helio did not learn jiu jitsu just from watching it, he actually took classes also. Reila Gracie wrote a great book about the history of the gracie family.
 
Hm, I see. What aspects of the early incarnation of Japanese judo do you figure were too reliant on strength for Helio's tastes?

Groundwork widely regarded in Judo as both easier to learn and requiring different if not less fitness. The main difference is that standing work requires explosive power, whereas groundwork is more static strength. Technique will bridge the gap, but when standing work takes longer to learn, your experience is that throws take more power.

Also, groundwork tends to be slower and like a flowchart, whereas standing work requires instant decision making and many more variables.

Lastly, high explosive power fades from the 20's on, so it's natural to continue on to ground work in your later years.

Given these clues, I think what Helio really did was be one of the early groundwork specialists in Brazil. He termed it as using leverage because he probably didn't recognize when leverage was used in throws, and not all throws are based on leverage. Unlike ground techniques. Thus I don't think Helio actually changed the Judo ground style, except that he focused on submissions for vale tudo.
 
Groundwork widely regarded in Judo as both easier to learn and requiring different if not less fitness. The main difference is that standing work requires explosive power, whereas groundwork is more static strength. Technique will bridge the gap, but when standing work takes longer to learn, your experience is that throws take more power.

Also, groundwork tends to be slower and like a flowchart, whereas standing work requires instant decision making and many more variables.

Lastly, high explosive power fades from the 20's on, so it's natural to continue on to ground work in your later years.

Given these clues, I think what Helio really did was be one of the early groundwork specialists in Brazil. He termed it as using leverage because he probably didn't recognize when leverage was used in throws, and not all throws are based on leverage. Unlike ground techniques. Thus I don't think Helio actually changed the Judo ground style, except that he focused on submissions for vale tudo.

Great explanation. That all makes a lot of sense. Thanks!
 
If you're 140 ish 190 is giant.

Kimura was often referred to as a giant in the gracie version of the story and he competed at 187 lbs.


You made a single sentence statement that was exageration at best and false at worst.

I understand your loyalty but be loyal to the art and the man, not loyal to the exageration.

Besides, being the smaller guy may be noble but it's not wise when you get wrecked for challenging a bigger guy just as skilled as you are.

Helio personally admitted that kimura choked him out in the fight.

No, you misunderstood my sentence because you took it out of the context of this conversation.

This entire debate is simply over whether or not Helio was smaller than the majority of his opponents or not.

You've now acknowledged multiple times that he was smaller, though not as small as he was at the end of his life obviously, yet continue to address me with random charges....

You act like I've stated "Helio was under 130 lbs and frail and it's a miracle he fought over 200 lb giants."

I haven't stated anything even close to resembling myth. I'm not exaggerating. I'm not repeating falsehoods. And I won't be provoked by some jerk who doesn't read carefully and keeps putting words in my mouth. Everything I've stated about Helio is not only realistic, but completely verifiable if you go do some research instead of telling me the same thing over and over here....

Which is, you think the Gracie's exaggerated Helio's size. That's your opinion, and that's great... I've never even debated that. However, it has nothing to do with the simple truth that I'm now having to tell you for the third time:

HELIO WAS SMALLER THAN THE MAJORITY OF HIS OPPONENTS.

I'm unsubscribing from this awful thread before I have to have the same conversation any longer.
 
You haven't really been respectful, actually. You've been pretty abrasive in just about every encounter with other posters in this thread. No one is disrespecting Helio. They're questioning the truth of the many claims made about him. I think that by now we should be able to learn enough from millennia of history and deduce that the memory of a man is rarely an accurate depiction of the man himself. Legends get inflated, and that is what the people you've been arguing with believe happened with Helio Gracie.

Also, it's hard to say with certainty that Helio is responsible for BJJ. Certainly he was very influential in it's inception, but there were a number of people involved that you've given no credit to whatsoever. Does Carlos not have an equal hand in the creation of the style?

The whole argument blew up because Einarr made a joke poking fun at the notion that judo is a brute force art and BJJ is not. You ought to know that neither art is based on brute force, just as both can benefit from the application of strength. That's true with any martial art. Technique beats strength, but technical strength beats all. The case appears to be that Helio simply did not have the proper instruction or understanding of the mechanics of the throws, and so began to specialize in groundwork and submissions. I'm sure there were some things that were developed based on his new focus, but his legend is certainly inflated far beyond its due.


You should really mind your own business or read more slowly because:
A.) No, the person I was debating with (Einarr) had most definitely disrespected Helio, alleging he was a liar and a cheap knock off of Kano.

B.) I know what was being questioned about Helio, and if you had read anything I wrote, you would know that I was not just agreeing with the historical representation of him but explaining the actual reason he is remembered for being smaller.

C.) I have NEVER suggested Helio was solely responsible for BJJ. I have referred to him as a forerunner and a contributor to the art and stated that as such he deserves respect, but I never said he was it's independent creator... which would be silly.

D.) Einarr's joke was humorously indicating that Helio was bigger than most Japanese men, so the recollection of him adapting judo for smaller opponents was therefore unlikely. It wasn't a clever joke and was disrespectful and he needed to know that. Don't worry, I'm sure your friend Einarr will be alright. He doesn't need your help.

I'm sorry you find me abrasive... I find you thoroughly oblivious to where I'm coming from as a martial artist and, more importantly, bjj practitioner.
 
Groundwork widely regarded in Judo as both easier to learn and requiring different if not less fitness. The main difference is that standing work requires explosive power, whereas groundwork is more static strength. Technique will bridge the gap, but when standing work takes longer to learn, your experience is that throws take more power.

Also, groundwork tends to be slower and like a flowchart, whereas standing work requires instant decision making and many more variables.

Lastly, high explosive power fades from the 20's on, so it's natural to continue on to ground work in your later years.

Given these clues, I think what Helio really did was be one of the early groundwork specialists in Brazil. He termed it as using leverage because he probably didn't recognize when leverage was used in throws, and not all throws are based on leverage. Unlike ground techniques. Thus I don't think Helio actually changed the Judo ground style, except that he focused on submissions for vale tudo.

Yep, he focused on what worked for him.... the newaza.
 
I'm going to just post my little essay on this topic from an old thread:

I think that's an excellent theory - certainly sounds plausible to my judo/wrestling eyes.

As a side note, Kano was only 22 when he founded the Kodokan and started judo. As quite a few senior judoka have pointed out through the years, he wasn't a master of anything at that age, and was also learning by trial and error for a long time. For that reason, like Helio he modified a lot of existing techniques without inventing very many (if any), except in the sense of discovering for himself something that someone else had discovered earlier, but which Kano had never seen before.

I think both Helio and Kano's stories sound a bit unbelievable in the days of youtube and the internet, but back then there wasn't that much cross instruction. Kano learned kata guruma (fireman's carry) from a wrestling book - ie from a few pictures with a couple of sentences. He developed the judo version from that - not unlike Helio building on the limited instruction the Gracies got from Madea. Could an experienced wrestler have saved Kano a lot of time? Probably, but the option wasn't there, so he learned by experimentation, and ended up with something slightly different than what you see in wrestling (better for gi, not as good for no-gi ... though of course you can't use it in competition judo anyway the last few years thanks to the IJF :icon_sad:)
 
SuperSuperRambo's intepretation of events is not only the most logical based on the historical record, but also the most logical based on the experience of both progressing from novice to competent grappler and then also coaching people from novice to competent grappler.

The only people who could possible disagree with his interpretation are people who simply don't know the historical facts, have never progressed from novice to competent, have never coached anyone from novice to competent, or who have done all of the above, but simply refuse to believe what's in front of them through blind moronic loyalty to the potted propaganda history on their club's website.

Helio and co were undoubtedly highly talented and innovative individuals to be able to not only reinvent the wheel, but equip their students with the necessary tools to take the wheel and from it build the grappling equivalent of the Bugatti Veyron.

However, it detracts not one iota from their achievement to point out that they not only did re-invent the wheel, but had to for totally logical and reasonable reasons. Then off the back of that to point out that, that process of wheel re-invention could have been the genesis of a creation myth which would go on to become the Helio/leverage/small man cult of modern BJJ.

Judo suffers from exactly the same personality/ leverage/small man cult with Kano.

Indeed it's not at all unreasonable to conceive of Helio and co observing the personality cult that arose around Kano and apeing that for their own personality cult around Helio and associated marketing activity.

After all, how many people truly believe Kano happened to beat a bearish Russian sailor on a cruise ship around the time that Japan was fighting the Russo-Japanese war and beating the Russian navy at sea with the newly invigorated and Westernised Japanese navy? The obvious levels of patriotic allegory are almost too blatant to point out.
 
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