Data and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu

 BJJ Gym Attendance Data Analysis As a part-time Brazilian Jiu Jitsu instructor I sometimes use my data skills to assist the gym owners with answering gym business questions by providing metrics and analysis tools with their data. The dashboard below is a recent remake of an old bespoke analysis done for a gym a few years ago.  All data in the dashboard was pulled from Zen Planner and has been anonymized.  Zen Planner is an attendance tracking application that gyms can install on a tablet.  Customers use the tablet to check in when they arrive at the gym and select the class(es) they are attending.

The Power Bar Theory of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu  It started with a variation of question that I often hear. How does a hypothetical 150 Pound - 60 years old Blackbelt with average athleticism fare against a super athletic 250 pound 25 year old guy on the street ? After many variations of what if, It led to the creation of a normalized data set to examine a lot of these What Ifs and the tool hyperlinked here to visualize and explore those scenarios.   < The way I have always thought about this is that each person has a natural power bar that represents their base athleticism.  Absent any training the biggest power bar winds in a fight.  Not all Power Bars are the same even when the person is the same age, weight, and gender because people have different levels of natural athleticism (speed, strength, timing, etc).   A given person could range from being naturally very unathletic to being naturally very athletic and the proportion of folks that fall al...

 A Brief Early History of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu:   Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ) is a descendent and derivative of modern Judo with influence from western wrestling, that has been shaped into a distinct and constantly evolving martial art since its initial introduction to Brazil in 1909.  Japanese Samurai Origins of BJJ:  Jujutsu is the general term applied to traditional Samurai fighting arts that existed prior to the Meiji Restoration in Japan and included techniques for striking, grappling, pinning, throwing, and systems of armed combat using a variety of weapons and armor with an emphasis upon swordsmanship. Judo was founded by Kano Jiguro as an amalgamation of two traditional Japanese Jujutsu schools that existed prior to 1876 when efforts of the Meiji Restoration effectively outlawed the Samurai class in Japan, most visibly, by forbidding the wear of a sword. Kano’s Judo also included techniques adapted from western wrestling such as kataguruma (“shoul...