Jiu-Jitsu University by Saulo Ribeiro, Kevin Howell
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Book Reviews of Jiu-Jitsu University
Book Review: Saulo Ribeiro's BJJ Philosophy and Course
Summary: 5 Stars
This book has deservedly received a lot of great reviews. There are a couple factors that distinguish this book from other jiu-jitsu books covering different areas of the game (guard passing, maintaining guard, escapes, submissions, etc.):
1. Each technique is one that has been successfully applied against top notch competition by Saulo or his brother Xande Ribeiro, who is also a world champion in BJJ.
2. Each technique is shaped by Saulo's approach to BJJ, where emphasis is placed on obtaining good posture and position to facilitate both defense and attack. Attacks launched from bad positions are not going to succeed against a strong opponent. Instead, such suspect attacks will leave one open to a much more devastating counter.
The benefit of launching attacks from strong positions is (a) they are more likely to succeed; (b) even if the attack fails, you are less vulnerable to a counter; and (c) establishing good posture and position is also critical to maintaining a successful defense. In short, what Saulo attempts to do is establish core techniques which put you in good position to both defend and attack.
3. Saulo explains the risk minimization benefits of each technique, and also shows "mistakes" that, in his experience, hurt you. Ironically, some of those "mistakes" are standard moves. Basically, Saulo is saying that jiujitsu has evolved; don't stick with yesterday's moves against today's competition when the counter is well known. Saulo also shows positional reasons why he thinks some of the standard moves don't work as well as they used to.
4. Not all, but several of the techniques are linked together so you have a clear roadmap of what to do.
This book also has an interesting philosophy to organizing techniques, although I'm not sure I agree fully with it. Saulo sets goals for each belt. White belt is about survival (i.e., avoid submissions), blue belt escapes, purple belt The Guard, brown belt Passing the Guard, black belt Submissions.
This unique belt organization system has a couple of benefits. First, it makes the techniques incredibly easy to organize. If you have a half guard question, open up to the purple tabs in the book. If you're looking for an escape, check out the blue tab portions of the book. Second, this unique way of looking at belts meshes with Saulo's philosophy, that good offense is based on good posture, position and defense, because you can launch your offense confident that you are not vulnerable to counter, and even if you are countered, you know how to avoid submission and/or escape. Based on this philosophy, it makes sense to focus on survival (i.e., avoiding submissions) and escapes before learning top and bottom guard game and submissions.
The drawbacks to Saulo's belt system are that it's unrealistic. I can't see going through white belt level knowing only how to survive. This system may work if, as a white belt, you are only sparring with purple belts and above, but if you are also sparring with other white belts, somebody has to know how to launch an attack, pull guard or pass guard. Saulo seems to acknowledge this problem as he states somewhere in the book that he does provide his white belts with tools other than just survival techniques.
I am not trying to be critical of Saulo's belt system, despite some inherent drawbacks. Every approach to presenting the vast body of work that is BJJ has its pluses and minuses, and Saulo's unique approach is as good as any I've seen, and better than presenting random techniques.
It was also interesting to note Saulo's philosophy on The Guard position, which IMO is unique to BJJ and what made me interested in this martial art in the first place. Saulo believes that The Guard should be viewed as an inherently disadvantageous position because you are fighting both your opponent and gravity; therefore be aggressive in your guard. The standard attacks from the Guard and the counters to them are well known and not as successful as they used to be. Saulo believes that if you maintain good defense and posture on top and frustrate bottom's attacks, you should be able to wear bottom out with the help of gravity. Saulo is also a black belt in judo and he makes it clear that he prefers to dominate on top, not unusual for a BJJer with a judo background.
I don't think Saulo is alone in his assessment that standard Guard techniques are not as effective as they used to be. Eddie Bravo in Mastering Rubber Guard and Marcelo Garcia in X Guard basically say the same thing; they developed their specialty guard positions because they weren't satisfied with the declining results from standard guard positions. I guess as BJJ evolves the X Guard and Rubber Guard will also see declining success.
I only have three criticisms of this book:
A. No takedown section. It's not critical IMO because BJJ has always been about the ground game. However, without a few takedowns Jiu-Jitsu University cannot be called a complete book. You can always supplement with Dave Camarillo's Guerrilla Jiujitsu, which focuses on using judo's standup game to takedown and then transition to BJJ techniques to get the submission or an advantageous top game.
B. Most of the time (like 95%) Saulo is doing the action wearing a blue gi, but sometimes the white gi is performing the technique. It only takes a second to figure out, "Oh, it's the white gi this time," so it's a minor point. However, this book is so good and has such a high production value, it would have been nice to get these little details perfect.
C. Black belt submissions section is basic. Submissions are covered, but they are shown how to be done from one position. It would have been nice to see how each submission could be done from various guard positions, or while passing guard. However, it may not be possible to cover that much ground with each of the submissions shown.
In conclusion, this book is just phenomenal and it's obvious a lot of work was put into this book. The criticisms I make are really minor compared to the overall incredible quality and depth of knowledge presented. If you had to get just one book on BJJ, this would be it.
Both Saulo Ribeiro and Victory Belt should be commended for publishing the new gold standard in BJJ books.
Book Review: Best Jiu-Jitsu book as of 2009
Summary: 5 Stars
If this is not the best book on Jiu-Jitsu then I want to buy whatever is better.
Everyone has pretty much given the run-down on this superb book so I will just touch on a few points that are of particular importance to me:
The breakdown by CHAPTER==BELT COLOR==GOAL, e.g., white=survival, blue=escape, is ESPECIALLY useful for those just starting jiu-jitsu or those teaching.
The white belt "survival postures" and the blue belt escapes from those postures are worth the cost of the book alone. Saulo Ribeiro has managed to keep the survival postures to a minimum (even for side mount where there are numerous top pinning styles and arm positions) and they all seem to work off the same principals and even a similar pattern.
Frequently, Ribeiro shows a better (according to him and his also multi-time world champion brother Xande [shandee]) way to do common techniques, and also shows the common mistakes including what is wrong with the usually given methods for that same technique.
This book immediately made me almost happy to have my back taken (by a similarly experienced and sized opponent) since the very simple defenses and escapes to those positions worked on the first try even though I messed up some of the details. (Really! -- my training partner is a bit stronger, heavier, younger than I am and he has quite a bit of judo training, but he can no longer hold me FROM THE BACK.)
Although the book stands alone, it is especially useful if you have any of Saulo Ribeiro's Jiu-Jitsu Revolution 1 or 2, or Freestyle Revolution DVD sets. Although you don't "need" one to benefit from the other, the text gives the few CRITICAL points which is good for memorizing the techniques, while the videos show the moving details in case you are having trouble or something doesn't make sense.
Although the DVDs and book overlap, their is no sense of wasting time or money when using both.
(BTW, he in no sense means that you must wait to become a purple belt to learn the guard, but rather that the FOCUS is on a particular goal or position for each belt level. In the case of a purple belt, he is saying this is where you focus on MASTERING the guard.)
Is there anything wrong with it? No index, but the contents is so good this is not a deficiency and the book runs the content RIGHT to the last page wasting no space. Crappy font for cover title but how picky can I get? A VERY FEW mistakes in left-right or picture correspondence -- or maybe clarity and I misunderstood, but that isn't very detracting, although I would offer to edit the 2nd edition if they ever re-publish it.)
The techniques WORKS right out of the box (i.e., book) and if you practice it then it is even more valuable.
Much of it is SPECIFICS on HOW to grapple using the techniques as examples rather than as the only answers -- he is teaching grappling using techniques, not JUST a bunch of (useful) techniques. Saulo is teaching us to fish (do jiu-jitsu) WHILE he feeds us some very fine fish (techniques).
If you are a low rank jiu-jitsu play you MUST buy this book if you buy anything.
If you are teaching jiu-jitsu, you owe it to yourself and your students to have and understand this book.
I am reasonably sure that anyone in between (i.e., teacher and low level) will find this book superb, and probably the best, as well.
Book Review: Must buy
Summary: 5 Stars
I was intially a sceptic of this book and now think it is excellent.
It is one of the best BJJ books and covers so much material and in ways that others never really get into their books in such an understandable way. I really like Saulos way of really granularising positions and movements in a way that anybody training BJJ will instinctively start to do but he actually articulates it extremely well so this book will accelerate your learning curve. An example is his survival positions where you are always trying to make the worst of a bad bottom position and stop it getting worse (ie. his mount survival position prevents being grapevined).
This book is bigger than I thought and is really high quality. I was expecting it to be smaller.
The photo choices are excellent and the techniques chosen really suit a book format as you can normally "play the movie" in your mind quite easily and get a feel for weight distribution and leverage. As opposed to other BJJ books that have too any photos to make sense of the movement easily.
The what NOT to do sections are excellent and also work vice versa in that you can become aware of how to make your opponent pay if he makes one of these mistakes.
At first I didn't want to give this book five stars as I felt it promised to cover virtually everything. Now until that Philosophers Stone arrives I will give my reasons for keeping it at five stars and consider this a must own for anybody into BJJ. If you are a great BJJ hero it would be at least worth to buy it and scoff that you knew all the material included.
The gaps are overshadowed by the fact that he has covered a lot more material than any other BJJ book. Coverage of a large number of guards from both the keeping and passing perspectives. Just naming them and giving them a section of their own is very helpful especially with "open guard" which has so many variations which he covers a lot of with their specific names and characteristics. The preventing the guard pass and guard passing are excellent again splitting the passes very well. An example of this is how very differently you will defend the crossed knee pass compared to a stacking pass.
There is no top control material in this book. Just submissions from the top. The what not to do parts of the escape and survival positions could be used for this a bit. That stuff has been covered elsewhere fairly well whereas the bulk of this book covers stuff which is not, so that was a fair trade off, just kind of goes against what I expected. So something to whine about on the Internet but nothing to really lower the value.
The idea of learning how to survive positions before trying to escape them is well articulated. Similar idea to what he speaks of in some of his DVDs about getting comfortable in maintaining a guard before trying to sweep or submit with it. Other than that the belt level rankings are pretty superfluous in my opinion. Your passing and using a specific guard automatically develop with each other and your top/bottom game becomes pretty mirrored too.
Some of the stuff is a bit different in this book from his DVD series' and I don't know why and really want a chance to sit down with him and say "But Saulo....".
Anyway if you do BJJ I would recommend you buy this book.
Book Review: www.knucklepit.com
Summary: 5 Stars
JIU-JITSU UNIVERSITY
by Saulo Ribeiro
with Kevin Howell (Victory Belt)
© Marc Wickert December 8, 2008
www.knucklepit.com
Saulo Ribeiro became a six-time Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu world champion and a two-time Abu Dhabi Combat Club champion under the tutorage of Royler Gracie. Of Ribeiro, Royler says, "Without a doubt, Saulo is the best black belt I ever graduated in these 24 years of teaching!"
Jiu-Jitsu University sums up Saulo Ribeiro's offering perfectly: It's more of a correspondence course than just a book. Saulo takes his readers/students on a journey from white belt through to black belt, explaining the significance of each grading under his expert tuition.
Word of recommendation: When you purchase a copy of Jiu-Jitsu University, be sure to start reading from the beginning and don't flick through pages. Saulo Ribeiro is not a man to waste words, so every sentence is important.
What makes Ribeiro's book stand out is that his BJJ is thorough and a complete grappling system rather than just a collection of submission techniques. "Most instructors do not spend enough time talking about the importance of keeping the position and defeating your opponent's defense. I see submissions as the result of certain situations where you are in a completely advantageous position and you can choose the proper way to make your opponent give up," says Ribeiro.
Royce Gracie used Gracie Jiu-Jitsu to dominate the early UFCs and no fighting system featured more strongly than BJJ at UFC 91. Saulo Ribeiro is a grappling grand wizard, and Jiu-Jitsu University leaves no thunderstone unturned.
Here is an opportunity to study Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu with the best and know that your training in BJJ is second to none.
Book Review: This is the best BJJ book I have seen.
Summary: 5 Stars
I just got Saulo's book and I am elated. It is definitely the best BJJ book on the market and will take a special place in my BJJ book collection.
This is why I gave it five stars...
Comprehensive: This book covers a complete system of white to black belt and is the first time I have seen the belt system put together in a way that makes sense. Saulo uses the belts as guidelines for what you should learn before you move to the next belt. I wish I had this book 3 years ago when I started. For guys like me that have been around a while, I plan on going back and brushing up on elements that I have missed. This is a great book when it comes to finding the holes in your game.
Troubleshooting: Just like Saulo's popular DVD series, he outlines the do's and don't do's of every move. He explains everything well and I have already had several epiphanies regarding moves that I thought were perfect. I thought these little pointers were game changers.
Scope: If it wasn't enough that Saulo covers the major positions of BJJ, he also adds plenty of "bells and whistles". I like how he shows many current positions and discusses the evolution to and from these positions. Instead of teaching how to pass the standard closed guard or spider guard, he shows how to pass some of the trickiest modern guards out there. Even better, he shows how to use similar body movements to beat just about anything. It felt like a trip into jiu-jitsu theory and application all in one.
I can't wait for Jiu-Jitsu University 2, though I am not sure how much material Saulo would have left. It looks like this one has a lifetime of knowledge invested into it.