Best Dressed

In many martial arts uniforms are worn. The traditional one is called a gi. It's the one that looks kinda like a pair of Japanese pyjamas.

That is what we wear at our Jiu-Jitsu school. As Gracie Jiu-Jitsu people we are mandated to only wear white ones. This is exactly what I like.

There are many opposing ideas out there. Some people complain that wearing a gi is unrealistic, or they do wear gis, but of all sorts of colours. There are good reasons to stick to a plain old gi.

Let's talk uniform colour first. I recently visited a sport Jiu-Jitsu school where they wore whatever colour they wanted. Some wore white, but the rest were in a mix of blue, black, and even purple. Being an old timer, I noticed something there that I didn't like.

Some of the uniforms looked as if they had not been recently washed. This is a big deal in a grappling activity. It's hard to see this in a dark gi, which is a problem. In a white gi, you can see it from across the room.

In a class like ours, where a dirty gi stands out like a sore thumb, there is no problem. The expectation is that we wear a fresh uniform for each session. A gi soaked in fresh sweat is not an issue, but one that has been sweated in for several days in a row is. It's just gross, and stinks.

If you can't be bothered to train in clean clothes, stay home.

Score one for wearing white gi uniforms.

As to gi training being realistic, I can understand that logic even if I disagree with it. The idea is that if you are ever attacked out in the real world, it won't be by somebody wearing a gi, at least probably not.

So far the argument makes sense, but the next step in the chain doesn't. To keep things real, proponents of this view therefore train wearing shorts and rashguards. In case you don't know, a rashguard is a stretchy-material shirt that is worn skin tight, and that is quite slippery. It is meant to represent someone not wearing any shirt at all.

I suppose the logic for rashguards is that out in the real world, an attacker is most likely to come at you either A. Wearing a rashguard or B. Bare chested. Somehow, I don't believe that gangstas out there are ever A. Wearing rashguards or B. Jumping people while bare-chested.

Most likely they will be wearing something like a shirt, or hoodie, or perhaps a jacket of some sort, or at least a tshirt. While none of these things are the same as a gi, nor are they the same as a rashguard and shorts.

If you're talking competition training, that's different. Of course you should wear what you'll be competing in.

But getting back to self-defence, if you are a grappler you'll probably want to be good at using your opponent's clothing against them. Personally, I love doing collar chokes. They work great if the other guy has on a gi, but also if he has on a ski jacket, blazer, sweatshirt, or hoodie. The counter argument is that if he's only got on a tshirt they won't work as the shirt will just tear away.

No question that a tshirt might tear, but it will rarely rip away altogether. If you use it to choke, it will tend to all twisted up around your hands and your opponent's neck with any tearing being around the edges of the vital area. What will likely happen is that the bad guy will end up unconscious, and have a wrecked shirt as well. Just the other day at my school some people did an “old clothes” training session. Scott was sure he could rip his way out of a tshirt choke, kept going beyond where he would normally tap, and actually blacked out. He's goofy that way. By the way, the shirt was trashed.

But let's chat about another issue altogether.

I used be be involved in the coaching of a high-school wrestling team. Wrestlers compete in a garment called a singlet, and are forbidden from doing anything even approximating a choke. You'd think that they would want to practice in their singlets, but they hated them. They mostly wore baggy sweatpants and baggy shirts. In effect, they were dressing in a fashion nearer to what gi people train in, rather than what no-gi people prefer. Why would this be?

Let us imagine that there were a group that wished to avoid use of clothing in their training as much as possilbe, and therefore chose to train naked.

Would you want to train there? I wouldn't, but perhaps that's just silly. Nobody would train naked. Let's say they wear speedos. I still wouldn't want to train there.

I don't much like the feel of rolling around with some big, heavy, sweaty guy wearing a rashguard either, but I do it sometimes. We train here no-gi once a week. It's just creepy, and I'm not being sexist here. Rolling around with under-dressed women is just as creepy.

There is something about big, baggy clothing that eliminates the creepiness as much as is humanly possible.

If you disagree, let's try the following experiment. Towards the end of a vigorous workout, you lay down on your back. I lay down with my naked, hairy, sweaty chest crushing down onto your face. You give the experience a yuck rating. We repeat this with me now wearing a rashguard. Likely you will consider it more pleasant. We do it yet again, with me wearing a gi. I think the gi will get a definite thumbs up. If it doesn't....ew....

In less intense situations it still gets a thumbs up from most people. In general rolling around, hands and faces and armpits and groins and boobs are all constantly getting smushed up together. In light clothing it somehow seems much more blatant. In a gi, it's almost as if you're fighting another person, but that neither of you have any private bits at all. Your brain just edits it all out effortlessly, and allows you to train properly. I think about inappropriate contact as much when I'm working with a grappling dummy.

Plus, a gi makes you look like practitioner of a mysterious Asian art of some kind, and that's always cool. A rashguard and shorts just makes you just look like a surfer, but without the tan.

How lame is that?