Have you ever wondered how Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, through the eyes of a little person, looks? I’ve always wondered if big people see things differently from us, but I can only talk about what I know.

Among all the adults that I’ve met in my 5 years of doing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, I’ve met a grand total of two people who are lighter than me. So I think I’m fairly qualified to talk a little bit about how it feels like to be always be the smallest person in the room, usually by a fairly large margin, too.

For contextual purposes, I stand at 153cm/5’ tall, walking around at 47-48kg/105lbs. On good day, I get to train with featherweight women; on a bad day, with middleweight men. As a rule I try to avoid anything above that because when you weigh as much as someone else’s leg, things can get a little dangerous. There are exceptions to this rule of course. When a really big guy is also very technical and has good control, it can be a fun little flow roll. They’re rarely particularly helpful though.

When I first started doing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, I never really thought much about size. I’d always been short even in my home country of Singapore, where people are much smaller in size on average as compared to in the UK. I was around 52kg at that time, the heaviest I’d been in my entire life. Moving to the UK, I put on 6kg in a year and I was devastated. Everyone here in the UK insisted that I was being ridiculous but back home everyone was calling me fat. That’s another story for another day but I got it in my head that I wasn’t that light, lol. You know that Brazilian Jiu Jitsu meme of a little puppy looking in the mirror and seeing a big, scary dog? That was me. I’d look at other people about 10-20 kilos heavier than me and think, ah, we must be around the same size. I can handle that! Bad idea. Bad, bad idea.

So, what’s the big deal about size? One of the greatest selling points (a myth, in my opinion) of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is that technique overcomes size. Somebody famous once said, “If size mattered, the elephant would be the king of the jungle.” Ha. ha. ha. ha. Tell that to an ant. Lions DO hunt elephants, but 1) they don’t do it alone 2) they pick on the young, old, and sick and wounded stragglers. In a one-on-one, adult vs adult scenario, the king of the jungle would be going home with an empty stomach.

I’d like to suggest a modification to the phrase “size doesn’t matter”.

Size doesn’t matter IF the lighter person’s technique is far superior to the heavier person’s.

I have two arguments to make in support of this modified statement.

Firstly, one commonly sees people from the lighter weight divisions placing or even winning the absolute division. However, this mostly happens in smaller competitions, and almost exclusively in the lower belt divisions. Have you seen the absolute podium at the black belt Worlds? On the other hand, the skill level of coloured belts varies widely across academies and across practitioners. You have hobbyists, occasional competitors, and professional competitors whose skill levels sit at different tiers despite being at the same coloured belt. In most cases, the skill disparity is wide enough for the little person to outmanoeuvre the larger person in competition.

At the elite black belt level, most of the lightweights don’t appear in the absolute division. With a limit of 2 athletes per team in the absolutes, it makes much more sense to send the heavier athletes in. With the lighter athletes, the risk of injury is too great, and the payoff, not great. Especially now that absolute matches run ahead of division matches, it just doesn’t make sense to risk a division title for a dangerous run in the absolute division against monsters (read: big and technical). Somebody go tell Bruno Malfacine that size doesn’t matter. That guy is a 10x World Champion, a legend, and a technical machine. Picture him in a match against Buchecha, who is also a legend, with amazing jiu jitsu, just at the other end of the weight spectrum. Now come back, look me in the eye, and tell me that size doesn’t matter. Or that Buchecha is better than Malfacine. Can you?

To put things simply and in perspective, can you really say that in a sport with 9 weight divisions, size doesn’t matter? Probably not.

Another example. Leandro Lo, one of the best lightweights in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu history, king of Copa Podio, had a dream of becoming absolute champion. What did he do? He bulked up. He put on weight, climbed up 3 divisions and challenged the big guys. Why? Because size matters. He got there in the end. He did it. 2018 Absolute World champion. At what cost? A serious injury that would have stopped him short at the finals had his bro not been so gracious as to step aside to let him have his moment. A moment to go down in the history books, that’s for sure, but also a good lead into my next argument.

Smaller people are more injury prone. My fragile and hypermobile little toothpick limbs don’t stand a chance against your arms and thighs of steel. Many a time has a heavyweight swatted my arm during grip fighting and hyperextended my elbow. True story. Or sometimes, people forget how light you are and slam you by accident because they weren’t expecting you to even come off the ground. I also have a theory that size differentials matter more in the lower weight divisions because the weight difference makes up a more significant percentage of your overall body weight. So somebody 10kg heavier than me would be roughly 20% of my body weight heavier, while the same weight differential for a 80kg guy would be just 12.5% of his body weight. Just my own theorising. Not scientifically proven.

People always say that you should train with everybody to get a realistic feel for self-defence, as you can’t pick your attackers. I’d just like to make it clear once and for all that not everybody trains BJJ for self-defence. I, personally, train because I like it. It’s fun, challenging, and the learning curve never ends. Also, I’m fairly certain that no matter how good I ever get at Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, if a hulking 100kg man ever decides that he wants to assault me, my best bet at survival would be to run and scream. But I digress.

As a small person, I have to pick my training partners very carefully. As a general rule of thumb, I try not to roll with people over 70kg. This rule excludes heavier people who I know are safe to roll with. My 80+kg coach loves to smash me with his nasty cake jitsu but I know he won’t hurt me. Sometimes, when I’m feeling adventurous, and somebody I don’t know asks me to roll, I have a little talk with them before we start. “Don’t go too hard, don’t use too much strength, if at any point during the roll I feel unsafe, I will stop the roll and walk away.” I know that most people genuinely are trying their hardest to be careful with me, while also not being unresponsive jellies. But it’s a hard balance to strike, and it’s takes practice. At the same time, I do need to prioritise my safety. It’s always a struggle between trying not to hurt my partner’s feelings by telling them that I don’t want to roll with them, and being firm with myself that I need to do that in order to continue training. My body is currently broken because I tried too hard to take care of other people’s feelings. The biggest lesson that I’ve learnt over the past 5 years of avoidable injuries is to put my safety as the first priority. Always.

I’m always a little jealous of the normal sized human beings who so freely choose to roll with everyone just because they can. Who wants to be sitting alone in the corner when they could be out there sparring? Sometimes I come home and cry a little bit because I want to be grow bigger and see the world from the eyes of a big person. But then I look at the prices of adult gis and I’m happy to be the size that I am (haha). So nowadays I live vicariously through the big jiu jitsu people in my life. Here at Studio NW2 it’s like a congregation of tall, heavy men. Ironic, considering that coaches Enrique and Keeno are light feather and feather weights. Everyday we drill into their minds the importance of technique and we’re so excited for when these guys can go out there and smash it in competition. It’s like our little dream. We can’t go out there and win the absolute division, but these guys can!

At the end of the day, is it worth it to train Brazilian Jiu Jitsu as a small person? A thousand, no, a billion times over, yes. Yes, yes, and yes. I’ve grown so much as a person (not in size, unfortunately), since I started training. Life has always gone smoothly for me, and humble brag aside, I’ve never really encountered anything that I needed to put too much effort in to succeed. I’ve been lucky. For the first time with Brazilian Jiu Jitsu I experienced what it was like to struggle. Failure after failure in competition, plateaus in learning, getting smashed by everyone in training. Everyday was, and is still, a struggle. But through it all I learned how to deal with adversity, what it’s like to have a team, how to work hard for something that’s important to me. I’m (almost) always going to be the smallest person in the room. I’ll probably always look at the absolute podium with a little bit of jealousy and envy. But within my ability, I’m going to keep training and working hard to become as technical as possible, so that one day I can that little menace who gives everyone, regardless of size, a tough as hell roll.