In the kid's BJJ class yesterday, my Professor did self-defense before getting into the lesson. The attack the uke was simulating was a haymaker punch, the defense was a basic knife-hand block, hook the arm into a head-and-arm throw.
The exact take-down was different than I've typically done in TKD class, but the rest of it (including the uke's attack and the style of the drill) was pretty much the same as punch defense in TKD.
I just think its funny after doing TKD for years and reading how inferior it is to BJJ, then we go and do the exact same stuff.
Yes and no ...
The old-school Gracie jiu-jitsu curriculum could be conceived of as broken down into 3 categories.
1) Grappling (especially ground grappling) against another skilled grappler. This includes techniques and strategies which could be applicable in MMA or self-defense, as well as in sportive grappling competitions. This has always been the most heavily emphasized portion of BJJ training and decades of constant testing and experimentation has produced a constant stream of technical refinements and innovations.
2) Vale Tudo, or tactics for challenge matches including striking against trained fighters, particularly representatives of other martial arts. This was one of the mainstays of how the Gracies built the reputation of the art and it eventually led to the creation of the UFC and from there to modern MMA. Most of this portion of the art
could potentially be applied in a self-defense context, depending on the requirements of the particular situation. Once again, because this curriculum was subject to constant live testing in real fights, it continued to develop for decades. However, in recent years many practitioners who are interested in this aspect have started to split off this portion of their training into MMA classes, while some others who don't care to deal with the possibility of getting punched have stuck just with the pure grappling aspect. So now you have some BJJ practitioners who limit themselves to pure sportive grappling, others who train more comprehensive fighting skills (but only at the level the art was at 30 years ago), others who have continued to progress the vale tudo aspects (but call it MMA), and a small minority who try to incorporate the refinements which have come from the last 30 years of MMA back into their official BJJ classes.
3) "Self-defense". In the old Gracie curriculum this was an assortment of techniques to deal with attacks from an untrained assailant that wouldn't usually come up in the previous two categories - untrained haymakers, headlocks, wrist grabs, bear hugs, standing chokes, knife stabs, etc. These were ... not particularly distinguishable from the "self-defense" techniques you might see in a wide variety of other martial arts including TKD. Because this curriculum was not being regularly tested and refined in competition, real fights, or "self-defense" scenarios, it didn't benefit from the same process of continual refinement and improvement that the other aspects of the art did. Most BJJ practitioners who found themselves having to defend themselves in a street assault typically defaulted to the methods from categories 1 and 2 above. So ... regarding the current state of affairs. Many schools have simply dropped the old Gracie self-defense curriculum entirely. Some have retained it like a traditional museum piece, but primarily just use it for warm-ups or for test requirements (in those schools that have tests). Some have kept parts of it, particularly those which overlap with the vale tudo curriculum. Finally, some of us have reworked the entire concept by taking the lessons from decades of fighting experience in the jiu-jitsu community, looking at the ways that asymmetric, non-consensual violence can occur in the real world, and examining how to modify the tactics we might need to use in those contexts, while still applying the underlying principles that we learn from the rest of our BJJ practice.
