AUSTIN, TX—In findings that observers say call into question the entire premise of grappling pedagogy in the post-DVD era, the National Grappling Research Institute (NGRI) released a longitudinal study Wednesday concluding that the average American jiu-jitsu practitioner spends 4.7 hours per day passively watching instructional video content that will, at a 94 percent confidence interval, never be drilled, never be attempted in live sparring, never be retained for more than 48 hours, and never be referenced again after the first watch.
The 11-month study tracked 3,400 subjects across 47 affiliated academies, combining self-reported watch logs with smart-television telemetry collected through partnerships the report declined to name.
“What we’re documenting here is a nationwide phenomenon of willful, recreational non-learning,” said Dr. Harlan Meekes, NGRI’s lead researcher, a man whose LinkedIn profile lists his credentials as “former BJJ blue belt (2011-2014), current BJJ blue belt.” “The average practitioner in our sample did not just fail to retain the material. They scheduled the failure. They built an entire evening routine around it. One subject watched the same 73-second guard retention concept nineteen times over four months, each time falling asleep at approximately the 61-second mark.”
Among the report’s more alarming findings: the average practitioner abandons a newly purchased $197 instructional at the 11-minute 14-second mark of module one, typically during the first warm-up drill, and returns to the file exactly once, 72 days later, for nine additional minutes, during which they scroll through the chapter list, play 40 seconds of a technique they vaguely remember, and close the tab.
The most-consumed clip across the entire sample, the study found, is the 2-minute 47-second introduction to a heel-hook instructional, which 2,141 subjects watched an average of 3.7 times each, often muttering “yeah, yeah, get to it” under their breath throughout. Of those 2,141 subjects, zero could name a single submission technique the instructional’s main modules covered. When pressed by researchers, subjects were able to correctly identify only the instructor’s hair length, the color of his rash guard, and the species of his dog.
“I know he explains the ashi garami stuff really well because a training partner of mine told me he does,” reported study participant Bryson Keating, 32, a purple belt and regional sales manager from Cincinnati who has purchased 14 instructional videos since 2019 and completed zero of them. “I’ll watch the intro again tonight. I just need to warm up to the commitment. Maybe after dinner. Maybe after the second dinner.”
Deeper in the dataset, researchers identified a subgroup of particular concern: 87 subjects who purchased the “Coach Developer” tier of a no-gi instructional series at a price point of $4,997, and who have, to date, watched a combined 14 hours of the included content. That calculates to $357 per hour of video actually viewed, a figure that, the report notes, is higher than the total annual prize earnings of all but one of this year’s reigning open-weight world champions across the International Submission Wrestling Council and the Continental Open Grappling Series combined.
“I don’t think about it in dollar-per-hour terms,” explained Coach Developer purchaser Dennis Thurwell, 44, a brown belt who runs a small affiliate academy in suburban Denver and has not updated his curriculum since 2021. “I think about it in terms of access. I have access now. When I’m ready, the material will be there. The professor knows I bought it. I think. He might not. But I did. That matters.”
Pressed further on whether any of the Coach Developer material had been incorporated into his own teaching, Thurwell paused, stared into the middle distance for approximately nine seconds, and replied, “I told my blue belts about it once.”
Additional findings in the report include:
- The average subject has 340 GB of jiu-jitsu content stored across laptops, external drives, and iCloud accounts, and has watched 2.3 percent of it.
- 71 percent of participants keep a “watchlist” of instructionals they intend to consume “soon,” with the average entry on those lists being 19 months old.
- The phrase “I’ll get to it this week” was uttered by 94 percent of subjects during exit interviews conducted at the 11-month mark.
- Subjects who purchased a popular pressure-passing instructional in 2017 have, on average, watched it 1.4 times and passed guard in sparring precisely the same number of times.
- One subject, a 38-year-old blue belt from suburban Cleveland, was recorded watching a 47-minute deep-half retention video while simultaneously executing a failed americana on his own pillow. The attempt was ruled “technically incorrect and also sad” by the research team.
At press time, the NGRI’s findings were drawing scrutiny from several corners of the grappling community, with practitioners pointing out that the institute’s published methodology consists of a single two-page document written in Comic Sans, that the institute lists no physical address, that its “partnerships” with smart-television manufacturers cannot be corroborated by any smart-television manufacturer, and that the press release announcing the study was sent from a Hotmail account registered to someone named “grapple_daddy_47.”
“We stand by our findings,” Meekes wrote in a reply to one such inquiry. “Also, have you checked out the new Rogério Vasconcelos heel-hook series? I’ve been meaning to watch it. I probably will.”
He added: “Maybe next week.”