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.  

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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 along this spectrum is probably normally distributed with most people closer to the average for their gender, age, and weight. 

With respect to age, that bar grows through young adulthood and starts shrinking naturally as we age.  There are differences in bar size based on size (weight) and of course gender.  
When someone trains - be that physical weight training or cardio they can grow that power bar (or keep from losing it as they get older).  When someone trains  Brazilian Jiu Jitsu they add to their skill in BJJ to the power bar. However, it might be possible that no amount of training for the naturally most unathletic small older person could ever overcome the raw athleticism of some 250 young guy.

I wanted to be able to quantify this and easily compare various scenarios, so I did some research and created a data set.  Then I made the tool above to answer questions exactly like the one posed at the start of this post.

On that note, how does our notional gray-haired black belt do against our notional athletic young big guy?  Well, it seems like he will just be able to edge him out, but it will be close.  That said, imagine if he didn't have any BJJ training at all.. he would get destroyed.  His training is however, allowing him to most likely beat the young buck or at the very least survive what the youngster has to offer.  I would say that makes the training worthwhile.. what about you?


Happy Hypothetical Question Answering using the tool!

~Jason.


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