A Short History of Judo

The evolution of bathrobe grappling.

Photo by Marc Rafanell López on Unsplash

I’ve been fascinated by judo for about the last 9 months.

See, admittedly, as someone who grew up in wrestling, I always thought that judo was inferior. I thought that I could stuff any judo throw with a heavy sprawl and put any judoka on their back with an explosive double leg.

And boy oh boy, was I wrong.

I first learned about the joys of judo from watching videos online of the guys from B-Team using it on one another.

I also had a lot of fun researching and writing an article on the history of catch wrestling a few weeks ago, so I thought that today, we could do a dive into the history of judo.

Let’s begin!