Karate black belt and popular YouTube personality Jesse Enkamp just entered a BJJ tournament in order to ‘prove it doesn’t work’. Enkamp runs the channel ‘Karate by Jesse’ and frequently puts his martial arts experience to the test either against or alongside other styles like Muay Thai, Aikido, and many more. Enkamp also has regular training sessions with elite practitioners in their respective arts and even high-level professional MMA fighters like Stephen Thompson. In fact Jesse is actually the brother of UFC veteran and current Bellator fighter Oliver Enkamp, who has the same background in Karate as him even though he’s often regarded as a submission specialist.
Even though his brother Oliver has spent years honing his skills on the ground and training submission grappling at an incredibly high level, Jesse Enkamp went another direction after their introduction to martial arts and he has stuck with Karate throughout his life. In the video, he starts out by stating his belief that BJJ as a martial art only really works ‘if you play along with it’, and engage in the fight on the ground. Instead, he proposes that you should echo the advice of every casual MMA fan since the dawn of time and ‘just stand up’ in order to negate BJJ altogether.
Enkamp quickly gets a real introduction to BJJ in a class, testing out his theory of just standing up against resisting opponents. After he made some adjustments and had a few more sessions of practicing his tactics, the Karate black belt decided it was time to enter a BJJ tournament in a white belt division. His opponent was pulling guard and clearly wanted to play off his back but Enkamp was disengaging repeatedly, enough to even get a penalty for it. His opponent was clearly getting tired and he tried to pull guard again, but Enkamp dropped into mount relatively easily and locked up a cross-collar choke to finish the fight.
Jesse Enkamp uploaded the footage of him entering a BJJ tournament as a Karate black belt in order to ‘prove it doesn’t work’ to his official YouTube channel:
