The Different Wrestling Styles of the World
I've always loved looking at the different wrestling traditions around the world because they show us just how much the rules and equipment can shape a grappling style.
Change the uniform. Change the grips. Change the rules. Take away one set of grips and give them another. Somehow, people keep finding ways to throw, trip, control and take each other to the ground.
You can almost think about them by looking at what the wrestler is wearing.
Collars, sleeves, pants — Judo.
Collars, sleeves, no pants — Sambo.
No collar, no sleeves, no pants — Wrestling.
Obviously, that's an oversimplification. Each of these traditions has its own history, rules, tactics and technical vocabulary, and reducing an entire wrestling tradition to what you can grab doesn't begin to tell the whole story. But I love the basic idea because it makes the differences immediately visible.
Give a wrestler a collar and sleeve and suddenly the jacket becomes part of the grappling system. The clothing isn't just something you're wearing anymore. It's something you can use to control another person's body. Change the uniform and you change the available grips. Change the grips and you change the ways people learn to create movement, control balance and attack the body.
The human body hasn't changed. The basic problem hasn't really changed either.
Get control of another person and put them where you want them. But change the rules surrounding that problem and, over generations, you can end up with an entirely different wrestling culture.
Wrestling Is Bigger Than Folkstyle
When Americans hear the word wrestling, most of us immediately think about American folkstyle wrestling. That's understandable. It's the wrestling most of us grew up watching and practicing, and it has an enormous place in American sports culture.
But folkstyle is only one branch of a much larger family.
There is freestyle and Greco-Roman wrestling. There are the many regional wrestling traditions that developed independently around the world. Judo, sambo, bokh are just a few of an incredible variety of jacket, belt and folk wrestling traditions that developed in different cultures.
They don't all look the same. They don't have the same rules, the same scoring systems or even the same objectives. Some emphasize throws, some emphasize takedowns, some place enormous importance on maintaining control after the takedown, and others are built around forcing an opponent out of a particular area.
But when you watch them, there is still something familiar.
Someone establishes a grip.
Someone tries to establish position.
Someone creates an imbalance.
Someone resists.
Someone finds an opening.
Eventually, somebody ends up on the ground.
We didn't need a single global wrestling authority to tell every culture how to solve the problem of grappling with another human being. People figured it out everywhere. And because they figured it out under different conditions, they came up with different answers.
The Rules Create the Style
Rules don't simply determine who wins a match. Over time, they determine what people practice. If you can grab the jacket, people become very good at using the jacket. They develop grips, combinations, throws and controls that depend upon being able to manipulate clothing. If you can't grab the jacket, those solutions become unavailable and the wrestler has to find another way to control the body.
The same thing happens with the legs, the mat, the boundaries and the scoring.
Allow certain attacks and eventually people become specialists at creating them. Remove those attacks and other techniques become more important. Reward one kind of control and athletes will spend generations figuring out increasingly sophisticated ways to achieve it.
Eventually, these aren't just individual techniques anymore. They become systems.
They become styles of movement, characteristic grips, preferred positions, specialized attacks and particular ways of thinking about how to wrestle.
That's why I love watching different wrestling traditions. I'm not just watching different techniques. I'm watching different solutions to the same fundamental problem.
The Jacket Changes Everything
Judo is probably one of the clearest examples of this.
The judogi gives you an enormous amount of information and control through the grips. A collar and sleeve aren't just handles. They allow you to manipulate posture, create movement, disrupt balance and control the direction of an opponent's body.
Once you understand that, a lot of judo starts to make sense.
Sambo takes that idea in a different direction. The jacket and pants provide their own possibilities, and the rules create a different technical environment. The ability to manipulate the legs and clothing produces a style that looks familiar to a judoka while still being distinctly its own thing.
Then you start looking at traditions like Mongolian wrestling and the differences become even more interesting.
The grips, clothing and objectives change again, and the wrestlers have developed their own solutions for controlling another person's body.
None of these systems is simply a variation of one universal wrestling technique.
They have been shaped by their environments.
Take Away the Jacket
Then look at wrestling. Take away the jacket and suddenly all of those clothing grips disappear. Now you have to control the body directly. You can't grab a sleeve to pull someone into an attack. You can't grab a collar to manipulate their posture. You can't use their jacket as a handle to create a reaction.
So wrestlers develop other ways to create the same fundamental problems. They learn to control the head, arms, hips and legs. They develop ties, underhooks, wrist control, level changes, penetration steps and an enormous variety of ways to manipulate the body without relying on clothing.
The result looks different from judo. But watch closely and you'll still see the same underlying ideas.
Create an imbalance.
Move the opponent.
Take away their ability to recover.
Put yourself in a better position.
Take them to the ground.
Control them.
The vocabulary is different, but the conversation is remarkably similar.
This Is Why I Love Studying Wrestling Traditions
The older I get, the less interested I am in arguing about which grappling style is "better."
I'm much more interested in understanding why they became what they became.
Why does one wrestling culture spend so much time developing a particular grip?
Why does another place such importance on a particular throw?
Why does one ruleset produce a certain kind of stance while another produces something completely different?
Why do some traditions place enormous value on controlling the opponent after the takedown while others are primarily concerned with the act of putting the opponent down?
Those questions are much more interesting to me than simply asking which style would win. Because once you understand the rules, the techniques start making more sense. The techniques aren't random. They are solutions to problems created by the environment. Change the environment and the solutions change.
We Keep Solving the Same Problem
That's probably the thing I find most fascinating about wrestling around the world.
Human beings in completely different cultures looked at the same basic problem and came up with different answers.
Grab this. Don't grab that.
Use the jacket. Don't use the jacket.
Attack the legs. Don't attack the legs.
Stay inside the circle. Push your opponent outside.
Throw them. Trip them. Lift them.
Control them.
Pin them.
And somehow, despite all of those differences, the underlying principles keep showing up. And, perhaps most importantly, the person you're wrestling is actively trying to prevent you from doing any of it.
They aren't just collections of techniques. They're records of generations of people trying to solve the same physical problem under different rules and different circumstances.
Change the clothes. Change the grips. Change the rules.
The wrestling changes. But somehow, we keep finding our way back to the same basic idea: Control another human being who is doing everything they can to stop you.
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