In the world of no-gi grappling and mma, wrestling is seen as the key to controlling a fight. If you are a good striker, you use wrestling defensively to keep the fight up on its feet so you can bang it out. If you’re a super slick submission expert then wrestling is what will get you to the ground and let you work your game. And if you just like to ground and pound people into a bloody mess then wrestling will get you into that top control position that you need to finish the fight.

Now something that sucks major ass in the UK is that we dont have much in the way of wrestling. Yeah, we have a couple of good clubs dotted around the country and a British team but, compared to the Americans who spend most of their high school days shooting double legs, we ain’t got much!

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(Georges St-Pierre performing a snatch)

[Pro MMA fighter, BJJ brown belt and head coach of Caged Steel Gym Danny Mitchell founded his blog "The Tao of Dan-Jitsu" in 2010, and will be continuing it here at www.YourMMA.tv in 2011. To get you up to speed, we are reposting his most significant entries prior to his return.]

I have been involved in martial arts for roughly 14 years now and been competing in full contact matches of varying types for about 12 of those years.

For years I experimented with different bodyweight exercises; squats, push ups and sit ups were the mainstay of my program, and for years I barely touched a dumbbell or even graced the weights gym with my presence.

Competing on a regular basis, I found that my superior technique was enough to win fights and I would often beat guys who were more than twice as strong as me just through having a better knowledge than them and by using the classic martial arts theory of ‘using their strength against them’ like something out of a dodgy Segal film. This pretty much threw me into the mindset that, ‘I do not need to do weights, they will make me slow and take away from my technical approach to fights’. And that was how it stayed for a long time.

As the competition got better and better coaches became available in the UK, fights got harder and opponents got more intelligent. Then shit started to get tough. A new breed of fighters started to appear, fighters that were highly technical, yet highly athletic, strong, fast and agile.
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[Pro MMA fighter, BJJ brown belt and head coach of Caged Steel Gym Danny Mitchell founded his blog "The Tao of Dan-Jitsu" in 2010, and will be continuing it here at www.YourMMA.tv in 2011. To get you up to speed, we are reposting his most significant entries prior to his return.]

Well thought I’d start my blog off with a bang, so there it was.

Welcome friends, aquaintances and enemies to my new blog. I hope that this provides you with some source of entertainment on those lonely nights when facebook no longer satisfies your needs, and even if you do nothing more than crack half a smile at one of my pathetic jokes then it was worth it.

I will try my best to teach you something as I write my blog, whether its about fighting or my philosophy on life in general (yes I have an A-level in philosophy), but most of all this blog is simply here to reflect my intelligent side that many fighters do lack, or even fail to posess.

Over the coming weeks, months and even years, I will delve into the depths of my knowledge and educate you in the art of Dan-Jitsu. Hopefully when I die these words will forever be immortalised and make someone a shit load of money. All I ask is that when that happens you build a huge bronze statue of me and place it in Doncaster town centre for pigeons to crap on.

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