The History and Development of No-Gi Submission Grappling

Opening — Why This History Matters

The history of no-gi submission grappling is the history of practitioners discovering, refining, and eventually articulating a small set of universal mechanical principles. Most of the discoveries were made before there was vocabulary for them. Most of the articulations came after the techniques had already won at world level. The story is not a list of innovations; it is a record of what the human body’s structure has always permitted, slowly emerging into competitive use.

This page tells that story across seven eras, from the catch wrestling roots of the late nineteenth century through to the convergent present where wrestling, judo, and submission grappling are increasingly understood as a single mechanical body with three vocabularies. Each era is framed through the invariants — the structural relationships that govern grappling regardless of style — that the era was discovering or systematising. The catch wrestlers of the 1990s were applying structural loading principles without naming them. Marcelo Garcia’s butterfly guard was a clinic in inside position. The Danaher era’s contribution was less a set of new techniques than the explicit articulation of what had been operating implicitly for half a century.

The page is also a navigational hub. Every named contributor links to their full profile; every mechanical claim links to the relevant invariant page; every named event and ruleset links to the relevant standards page. The competition records cited can be cross-checked against the ADCC database (adcombat.com), BJJ Heroes (bjjheroes.com), and the IBJJF database. Where direct quotation is used, the source is verified; otherwise the line is rendered as paraphrase. This is the longest single page on InGrappling for a reason: the invariants framework that organises the rest of the site is itself a historical product, and understanding where the framework came from clarifies what it is for.

---

Modern no-gi submission grappling has three direct antecedents: catch wrestling out of the British and American carnival circuits, the early Japanese mixed-rules organisations of the 1990s, and the unrestricted ground game that came out of the first Brazilian Vale Tudo and early UFC events. None of these traditions was called “no-gi grappling” at the time. All of them were operating, in their own vocabularies, on the same set of universal mechanical principles.

Catch wrestling and the European submission tradition

The catch wrestling lineage that runs through Billy Robinson, Karl Gotch, and the British carnival circuit was, by the middle of the twentieth century, the only sustained grappling tradition in the West that combined throws, top positions, and a developed submission canon under live-resistance conditions. Catch wrestlers were applying structural loading on the spine and joints — the toe hold, the kneebar, the double-wristlock — without articulating a generalised theory of joint loading. They were applying pin-position underhook control (underhooks with chest contact) in their pinning positions long before chest-to-chest hip coverage was a coaching cue. The mechanical claim is straightforward: the techniques work because the human body has always worked the way it works, and the catch tradition is the West’s longest-running record of practitioners discovering that empirically.

The line from Robinson and Gotch to modern submission grappling runs through Japan. Both coached extensively in the New Japan Pro Wrestling dojo system, where their submission canon was absorbed into the so-called shoot wrestling and shootfighting traditions that produced Pancrase and Shooto in the early 1990s. The submission vocabulary of catch wrestling — heel hooks, kneebars, kimuras, leglocks generally — became standard inside Japanese pro wrestling decades before it became standard in any Western grappling tradition.

Pancrase, Shooto, and the proto-no-gi format

Pancrase (founded 1993) and Shooto (founded as a competitive system in 1986) are the closest things the pre-no-gi era had to dedicated submission grappling competitions. Both used striking but rewarded submissions, and both had rule sets that — in their pure-grappling tournaments and in the technical structure of their rosters — produced submission specialists whose game was largely no-gi-compatible. Bas Rutten, Ken Shamrock, Masakatsu Funaki, and Minoru Suzuki all developed in this environment. Their mechanical contribution to the period is the demonstration that a submission-aware grappler could neutralise larger or more striking-oriented opponents through positional control and submission threat — that is, that the submission canon of catch wrestling, when applied with live-resistance rigour, produced a competitively dominant skill set.

Early UFC and the no-gi default

UFC 1 (November 1993) is the most-cited single event in submission grappling’s modern emergence into Western public consciousness, and the citation is mechanically warranted. Royce Gracie’s submission of three opponents in a single night, while wearing a gi, demonstrated that grappling could neutralise striking under unrestricted rules. What the early UFC events rarely receive credit for, however, is establishing the no-gi default. By UFC 5 (April 1995) most non-Gracie competitors fought in shorts and rashguards or bare-chested, and by the late 1990s the no-gi configuration was the operating standard of the format. The submission grappling that the early UFC popularised was not gi-based grappling; it was the submission-aware, position-first ground game that catch wrestling, shoot wrestling, and Brazilian jiu-jitsu had been developing in parallel.

ADCC 1998 — the founding event

The Abu Dhabi Combat Club World Submission Wrestling Championship — ADCC — held its first event in 1998. The event was, and is, the single most consequential competitive structure in modern no-gi grappling. The format choices made at the founding — no-gi, points for takedowns and positional advancement, full-leg-attack submission ruleset including heel hooks, open-weight absolute division — defined the competitive frame within which the modern sport developed. The 1998 event included Mark Kerr, Jean Jacques Machado, Tito Ortiz, Roberto Traven, and a roster that, in retrospect, was a representative cross-section of every grappling tradition that fed into the modern no-gi field. Kerr’s freestyle wrestling background, Machado’s BJJ lineage, and the catch-and-shoot influences of the Japanese roster competed under a unified rule set for the first time. The event proved that the formats could be unified, the techniques could be tested across traditions, and the result was a coherent sport. The current ADCC ruleset remains the lineal descendant of the 1998 format with relatively modest amendments.

---

The biennial cycle of ADCC events from 2000 through 2007 is the period in which no-gi submission grappling became a genuine sport with a competitive structure, a developing technical canon, and recognisable champions. The defining feature of the era, mechanically, is the gradual articulation of position-first grappling — the recognition that positional advantage is the prerequisite for submission (positional advantage precedes submission) and that connection is the prerequisite for all control (connection precedes control) — across a generation of competitors whose games were built on those principles even where the principles were not yet named.

The early absolutes and the Brazilian dominance pattern

The 2000–2005 cycle was dominated, on the men’s side, by Brazilian competitors with strong gi backgrounds: Mario Sperry, Saulo Ribeiro, Ricardo Arona, Ronaldo “Jacaré” Souza. The technical pattern of the period was a translated BJJ game — closed and open guard work, top-half-guard passing, mount and back attacks — applied to no-gi conditions with grip adaptations. The mechanical proposition the era established empirically is that the BJJ ground game’s underlying principles transferred without remainder: the techniques that worked in the gi continued to work in no-gi when the grip system was substituted appropriately. The gi was a connection vehicle, not a mechanical requirement.

The Gracie lineage at the founding cycle

The Gracie family’s founding-cycle competitive output is the period’s clearest single empirical case for the proposition that the lineage’s gi-cycle ground game transferred without remainder into the no-gi configuration the format established. Royler Gracie’s three consecutive −66kg gold medals (1999, 2000, 2001) made him the first competitor in the event’s history to win the same division three years running and the load-bearing single competitive achievement at the lower weights of the founding cycle. Renzo Gracie’s 1998 −88kg gold at the inaugural ADCC and absolute bronze at 2000 anchored the heavier-weight lineage record. Royce’s earlier UFC and Pride records sit upstream of the period and are documented separately. The lineage’s collective record across the founding cycle, paired with Hélio Gracie’s foundational guard-and-leverage system that produced it, is one of the load-bearing institutional inputs into the broader proposition that the BJJ canon’s underlying invariants transferred cleanly into the no-gi format.

The same period produced two of the most-cited single mixed-rules matches in the sport’s institutional record — Kazushi Sakuraba’s kimura finishes of Royler at Pride 8 (November 1999) and Renzo at Pride 10 (August 2000). The mechanical pattern the two matches made visible — extended top control by a wrestling-fluent opponent denying guard recovery, kimura finish from side control — was, on the available evidence, the field’s earliest sustained empirical input into the proposition that wrestling-fluent standing and top control under no-gi conditions are non-optional elements of an elite no-gi game. The DDS era’s eventual emphasis on standing wrestling and the wrestling-and-submission integration that defines the modern era are, in retrospect, an extended response to a vulnerability the two Sakuraba matches had already exposed.

Marcelo Garcia and the butterfly guard

Marcelo Garcia’s emergence at ADCC 2003 — and his three consecutive ADCC titles in 2003, 2005, and 2007 — is the period’s clearest single example of an athlete operating directly on the invariants. Garcia’s butterfly guard was, viewed mechanically, a clinic in inside-position control and destabilisation precedes control. His distinguishing feature relative to the field was not a novel set of techniques but a higher-fidelity application of principles that other competitors were also using — the underhook, the elevation, the angle change — with greater precision and greater patience. His game also articulated, before the vocabulary existed for it, the principle that the underhook controls the hip on that side: his sweep system from butterfly was an underhook-and-elevation system, not a leg-driven sweep, and the underhook governed which way the opponent went. See butterfly guard system.

Garcia’s career submission rate at ADCC, like Dean Lister’s, sits among the highest in the event’s history — empirical evidence that a game built on invariant principles, applied with high fidelity, produces reliable finishes against elite opposition.

Dean Lister at ADCC 2003 and the leg-attack question

The ADCC 2003 event produced two of the era’s load-bearing competitive moments. The first was Garcia’s emergence. The second was Dean Lister’s late-entry absolute title — a four-match run, three submissions, after losing in the under-99kg bracket. Lister’s run was the first documented case in ADCC history of a competitor whose game was built around finishing rather than scoring winning the open-weight bracket against larger opponents. The mechanical proposition the run made was that submission attacks expressed through invariant principles do not require weight-class parity. The proposition would be restated sixteen years later by Lachlan Giles through a leg-attack-centred game; the lineage is direct.

Lister’s more consequential contribution to the modern game, however, is conversational. In a Stuart Cooper Films interview, Lister articulated the question that John Danaher would later credit as the single most influential prompt in the systematic re-examination of leg attacks:

"

Why would you ignore 50% of the human body?

The mechanical observation underlying the question is that the lower-body submission surface area — knee, ankle, hip — is structurally available in any grappling exchange where the upper-body submission surface area is available, and that the field’s pre-2010s convention of treating lower-body submissions as low-status or unsporting was a cultural fact about the sport, not a mechanical fact about the body. The leg lock canon that the Danaher Death Squad would later formalise is the field’s eventual response to a question Lister had been asking for over a decade. See leg lock system.

Wrestling crossover

The 2000s also saw the early evidence of the wrestling crossover that would, two decades later, define the elite no-gi standing game. Rumina Sato and Hayato Sakurai represented an Asian-format hybrid that married Japanese shoot wrestling and submission grappling with crisp standing entries. On the Western side, the takedown game of the early ADCC events was wrestling-derived in a way that contemporary BJJ gyms generally were not — the freestyle and folkstyle entries were treated, by competitors who had access to them, as a non-optional element of an ADCC-format game. The principle was already operating: level change is the prerequisite for penetration (level change before penetration), even when the technique on the other side of the level change was a guard pass attempt rather than a single-leg finish. The wrestling-and-submission integration the modern era treats as standard was, in the 2000s, the distinguishing feature of the highest-output competitors. See the level-change-as-prerequisite concept page.

The era’s institutional shape

By 2008 the ADCC cycle had produced a recognisable competitive elite, a coherent ruleset, a generation of champions whose technical games were teachable, and a media environment in which results could be discussed. The institutional foundation of modern no-gi grappling was in place. The technical foundation — what would soon be called the invariants — was operating at world level but still implicit. The articulation came in the next era.

---

The 2008–2015 period is the era in which the modern no-gi technical canon was assembled — outside the public spotlight, in a small number of gyms, by a small number of competitors who had decided that the cultural prohibitions on lower-body submissions were mechanically incoherent and had begun to systematise leg attacks as a primary competitive tool. The era’s defining feature is that the technical work was happening underground while the institutional bodies — and, by extension, the public competitive results — were lagging behind it.

Estima, Ribeiro, and the late pre-DDS technical peak

The 2008–2013 cycle produced two of the period’s most-cited single competitive runs at the heavier weights — Braulio Estima’s 2009 ADCC double gold (−88kg and absolute, the latter via a submission run that included Andre Galvao, Marcelo Garcia, and Vinny Magalhães) and Xande Ribeiro’s back-to-back −99kg gold medals in 2007 and 2009. The pair are the period’s clearest single empirical case for the proposition that top pressure and submission rate are register-specific rather than categorically ranked: the 2007 ADCC −99kg final between them (won by Ribeiro on points) and the 2009 absolute final (won by Estima from a weight class below) are the two-match sequence that organises the case. Estima also produced the Estima Lock — the foot-attack mechanic that bears his name and that is one of the period’s clearest single named-technique additions to the modern leg-attack canon — and the 2011 superfight title against Jacaré Souza, the institutional moment at which the superfight title transferred from the founding-era competitive elite to the next generation.

Eddie Bravo and 10th Planet

Eddie Bravo’s 10th Planet system, founded in the early 2000s and increasingly visible through the late 2000s and early 2010s, was the period’s most influential dedicated no-gi system. The 10th Planet vocabulary — rubber guard, lockdown, the truck, the twister — was, on the surface, an idiosyncratic re-naming of techniques that other grapplers also used. Beneath the surface, the system was solving a problem that the gi-derived BJJ canon had never had to solve directly: in the absence of cloth grips, what is the substitute connection? Rubber guard’s mechanical claim is that high leg control combined with hand-to-shin connection produces a sustained closed-guard analogue without requiring sleeve or collar grips — an articulation, in 10th Planet vocabulary, of the principle that connection is not the gi but the sustained mechanical contact that the gi happens to deliver in gi grappling. See connection precedes control (connection is the prerequisite for all control).

Bravo’s institutional contribution was as consequential as the technical contribution. The Eddie Bravo Invitational (EBI), founded in 2014, was the first major dedicated no-gi submission-only event with a sustained run, an evolving format, and an audience that paid attention to it. The EBI overtime structure — back-take or armbar position, attacker tries to finish, escape time wins — was the period’s most successful articulation of the principle that submission-only formats need an explicit anti-stalling mechanism to produce decisive results. The current EBI ruleset page documents the structure as it stands.

The Danaher Death Squad forms

Around 2013, in the basement of the Renzo Gracie Academy in Manhattan, John Danaher began the systematic re-examination of leg attacks that would, within five years, redraw the elite no-gi technical map. The work was prompted by a series of conversations with Dean Lister and others; it was conducted in private, with a small group of senior students whose primary commitment was to high-output competitive output rather than to commercial instruction. The group — which would later be known as the Danaher Death Squad — included Eddie Cummings, Garry Tonon, and others. Gordon Ryan would join the program later in the period.

The mechanical content of the work was the systematisation of leg entanglements as a primary competitive position rather than as a fringe specialty. The principle the system articulated, in due course, is that inside space control identifies the entanglement: the entanglement is determined by the hip-space relationship the attacker establishes with the defender’s leg, not by the grip configuration on the foot. Submissions follow from the entanglement; they do not produce it. heel exposure by position (heel exposure is determined by position, not grip) formalises the second observation. (connection throughout prevents escape) formalises the requirement that the attacker maintain hip-to-hip contact through the entry rather than reaching for the heel before the entanglement consolidates. None of these principles was new in the period — Lister and others had been applying them for years — but the systematic articulation, paired with a dedicated competitive squad applying the system at world level, was new.

Eddie Cummings and the EBI heel-hook campaign

The cleanest empirical demonstration of the new system came through Eddie Cummings, whose run through EBI events 1 through 6 (2014–2015) produced an overwhelming sequence of inside heel hook finishes from cross-ashi and saddle positions. Cummings’ game was, mechanically, the first sustained competitive expression of inside-heel-hook geometric principles applied with the rigour the modern era treats as standard. The matches are an underexamined dataset for the proposition that a single submission system, applied with high fidelity to the underlying invariants, produces reliable finishes regardless of opponent profile. See inside heel hook and cross-ashi.

The EBI events of this period were, simultaneously, the venue in which the Cummings campaign was conducted, the format in which the new system became visible to the public, and the institutional site at which the case for an explicit no-gi submission grappling sport — separate from BJJ, separate from MMA training — was made.

The IBJJF rule lag

The period’s defining institutional fact is that the IBJJF, the largest single competitive body in the broader jiu-jitsu world, continued to prohibit heel hooks across most divisions throughout the era. The prohibition was not a mechanical claim — heel hooks are not categorically more dangerous than other joint submissions when trained appropriately — but a cultural and risk-management one. The effect was to bifurcate the competitive landscape: an athlete who built a leg-lock-centred game could compete at ADCC, EBI, and emerging submission-only events, but was substantially restricted at the largest single competitive cycle in jiu-jitsu. The bifurcation accelerated the development of a no-gi-specific competitive identity. See competition rulesets for the contemporary state of these restrictions.

The era’s contribution

By 2015 the technical canon that would dominate the next period was assembled, articulated within a small group of practitioners, and beginning to produce world-level results. The institutional infrastructure was lagging — the IBJJF still banned the central submissions, the broader BJJ commercial market still treated leg locks as a fringe specialty — but the work was done. What changed in the next era was visibility, not technique.

---

The 2015–2018 period is the era in which the work of the previous period went public, became dominant at world level, and triggered a sport-wide re-examination of what the elite no-gi technical canon should contain. The defining feature of the era is articulation — the explicit formalisation of principles that had been operating implicitly for half a century, paired with the empirical demonstration that a system built on those principles produced overwhelming competitive results.

The DDS becomes visible

By 2016 the Danaher Death Squad — based at the Renzo Gracie Academy and centred on Cummings, Tonon, the Ryan brothers, and a small number of training partners — was the most consistently dominant single team in elite no-gi competition. The team’s distinguishing feature was that every member’s competitive game expressed the same underlying mechanical framework. Different athletes finished different submissions, but the position progression, the entry mechanics, and the principle of inside-position control through every transition were uniform. The team’s results — multiple ADCC medals, sustained EBI dominance, and increasing public visibility through instructional output — established the framework as the operating standard of elite no-gi.

Garry Tonon’s EBI run

Garry Tonon’s ten-event EBI title run, beginning at EBI 2 in 2014 and running through the format’s peak years, is the era’s clearest single example of an athlete operating the new system at maximum output. Tonon’s game was a complete expression of the framework: takedown threat through wrestling entries, position-first guard passing, leg entanglement entries from any position the opponent gave him, back attacks from every entry point, and a submission rate that cleared the field. Tonon was demonstrating, match after match, that the system could be expressed by a single athlete across an extended competitive run rather than only by a team in aggregate. See his profile.

Gordon Ryan’s first ADCC

Gordon Ryan’s first ADCC appearance came at the 2017 World Championship, where he won under-88kg as a debut competitor. The result was, at the time, a notable upset; in retrospect it was the start of a competitive run that would define the next eight years of elite no-gi grappling. Ryan’s game expressed the same underlying framework as Tonon’s, with two distinguishing features: a more developed back-attack system as a primary finish rather than as a transitional position, and a passing game that was in due course built around the body lock and headquarters approaches that would dominate elite passing in the following decade. The 2017 result also was the public proof, in front of the largest single audience the sport had at the time, that the DDS framework was reproducible across athletes.

The Leg Lock Anthology

Danaher’s Leg Lock Anthology: Ashi Garami instructional series (2017) was the period’s most consequential single piece of instructional material. The contribution was not the individual techniques — most existed previously and most were already in elite competitive use — but the organisation of leg entanglements as an integrated system whose mechanical structure could be taught explicitly. Within a single competitive cycle, the canon shifted: leg locks moved from a fringe specialty to a mandatory component of any elite no-gi game. The shift was not produced by a change in what worked; it was produced by the public articulation of what had already been working in private.

The Anthology also formalised the broader framework that organises the modern submission canon: six interconnected attack hubs — back attacks, the front headlock and guillotine system, the triangle system, the kimura system, the armbar system, and leg entanglements — whose entries and counters share more structure than the surface vocabulary suggests. The hub framework is the operating taxonomy of InGrappling itself; every technique page on this site identifies the hubs the technique belongs to, and that field exists because Danaher’s framework exists.

Position before submission as principle

The era’s most-cited single articulation — Danaher’s pedagogical insistence that submission attempts from inferior position are mechanically less reliable than position-first approaches — is, in plain language, the same claim that connection precedes control (connection is the prerequisite for all control) and positional advantage articulate in invariant vocabulary. Submissions executed from incomplete connection are submissions against an opponent whose body has the structural space to defend. Submissions from positions of complete connection are submissions against an opponent who cannot generate independent movement. The principle is the invariant.

Metamoris and the production-value template

The Metamoris promotion, founded by Ralek Gracie and running from 2012 through 2016, was the period’s most consequential single broadcast format development before WNO’s 2020 launch. The format’s mechanical content was modest — submission-only, no points, fixed-length single matches with a draw as a possible regulation outcome — but its production-value template was institutionally consequential: single-match cards, premium production, headline competitor billing, and the proposition that elite submission grappling could draw a paying audience as a standalone broadcast product. The single most-watched match in the promotion’s history was the Metamoris 3 rematch between Royler Gracie and Eddie Bravo (March 2014), the rematch of the 2003 ADCC quarter-final — the match ended in a draw at the close of regulation. The promotion’s documented financial collapse by 2017 — including public competitor non-payment allegations across the late editions — is part of the broader institutional record on the commercial structure of standalone submission grappling promotions, and is part of the recurring institutional question on athlete compensation that the field has continued to test empirically across the period since. The current Metamoris ruleset page documents the format and its legacy.

The era’s empirical record

By the end of 2018 the leg lock canon was non-optional at world level. ADCC 2017 medal output was leg-lock-heavy. The IBJJF lag was increasingly visible as a commercial constraint rather than a technical one. The DDS framework, articulated through Danaher’s instructional output and demonstrated through competitive results, had become the operating standard against which other systems were measured. The next era was the period in which the standard met an environment large enough to test it across a broader population of competitors than a single team.

---

The 2018–2022 period is the era in which no-gi submission grappling moved from a specialised competitive niche into a sport with sustained commercial infrastructure, weekly broadcast events, an audience large enough to support full-time professionals, and a level of public visibility that made elite competitors recognisable beyond the gym. The defining feature of the era, mechanically, is the field broadening: the principles articulated by the DDS in the previous period entered the general competitive population, and a generation of athletes who had trained with leg attacks from the beginning of their grappling lives entered elite competition.

Gordon Ryan at ADCC 2019

Gordon Ryan’s ADCC 2019 performance — three weight classes (under-99kg, absolute, superfight — though the bracket details are best cross-referenced against the official ADCC record) and a generationally complete display of the DDS framework — is the era’s most-cited single competitive achievement. The mechanical pattern across the matches was uniform: standing exchanges resolved into rear body lock entries; passing through the body lock and headquarters; back exposure converted into the seatbelt and body triangle; finishes from the rear naked choke when the strangle was clean and from the leg entanglement when the strangle was contested. The matches were a public proof of the framework’s reproducibility against the highest available level of opposition. See seatbelt, body triangle, and rear naked choke / back attack system.

Lachlan Giles’ absolute bronze

The single most-cited competitive run of the era from a leg-attack-first competitor came not from a DDS member but from Lachlan Giles, the Australian competitor whose ADCC 2019 absolute bronze was produced through three sequential inside heel hook finishes — Mahamed Aly, Patrick Gaudio, and Kaynan Duarte. Giles, competing as a sub-200lb athlete in the open-weight bracket, produced three finishes from the same mechanical sequence: K-guard (a seated leg entanglement position) entry, cross-ashi establishment, inside heel hook. The matches are an unusually clean dataset for the proposition that a leg attack system depends on invariant relationships rather than on attribute parity between attacker and opponent. The same system finished three structurally different opponents because the invariants the system expresses do not vary with opponent profile. See K-guard entanglement, heel hook system, and the inside-vs-outside-standing concept page that documents the mechanical distinction Giles’ broader system relies on.

Giles’ run is also the era’s clearest articulation of the alternative to a predominantly inside-position framework: outside-position attacks as first-class options paired with inside-position attacks, denying the defender a stable position to retreat to. The K-guard itself is an outside-position entry that produces an inside-position destination at cross-ashi; the structural argument is that pairing outside and inside lines of attack is mechanically more complete than either line alone. See his profile for the full articulation.

The DDS dissolution and the formation of B-Team

In late 2021 the Danaher Death Squad effectively dissolved. Danaher and Gordon Ryan relocated and continued under the New Wave Jiu-Jitsu banner; Craig Jones, Garry Tonon, Nicky Ryan, Ethan Crelinsten, and several training partners formed B-Team Jiu-Jitsu in Austin, Texas. The split, which was personal rather than technical, divided a single dominant team into two. The mechanical consequence was modest — both groups continued to operate the framework that had produced the previous cycle’s results — but the institutional consequence was substantial. Two centres of gravity at the elite level produced more coverage, more cross-team competition, and more variation in the surface expression of the underlying system than a single team had produced. Craig Jones’ subsequent commercial visibility, instructional output, and event promotion would, three years later, produce the Craig Jones Invitational. See his profile for the full record.

Crelinsten’s distinguishing technical contribution within B-Team is a leg entanglement entry system that chains directly into back attacks rather than terminating in a heel-hook finish — the same architectural pattern as the broader DDS framework, applied with a higher rate of conversion from leg engagement to seatbelt and body triangle. The B-Team grouping the split produced is not a single technical voice but three: Jones at heavyweight, Crelinsten in the middle weights, and Nicky Ryan at the lighter end. The team’s continued elite competitive output across CJI, WNO, and ADCC events is the institutional outcome the split made possible. See his profile for the full record.

Galvao and the Atos era

The same period in which the DDS framework was producing its world-level cycle was also the period in which Andre Galvao assembled the longest single sustained competitive run in ADCC history. Galvao’s six ADCC titles — 2011 −88kg gold, 2011 absolute gold, and four consecutive superfight wins (2013, 2015, 2017, 2019) — make him, on the available record, the most decorated ADCC competitor in the event’s history; the nine-year superfight reign that ended in the 2022 loss to Ryan is the longest single period of sustained dominance in the event’s competitive record. The career bridges the founding ADCC era of Marcelo Garcia and Roger Gracie, the technical era of Estima and Ribeiro, and the system era of the DDS — and his coaching record at Atos Jiu-Jitsu has been the institutional vehicle through which the most consistently dominant single team at world-level no-gi events across the 2022–2025 cycle has been produced. Galvao’s own public statements that he learned wrestling as an adult after relocating to the United States are part of the era’s broader empirical record on the wrestling-and-no-gi integration thesis.

The Ruotolos emerge

The 2020–2022 cycle produced the first generation of competitors who had access to systematised leg lock and back attack instruction from the beginning of their training rather than having to find it retrospectively. Kade Ruotolo and Tye Ruotolo, twin brothers who had trained at Atos under Andre Galvao since childhood, are the cleanest single example of this generation’s distinguishing technical profile. Their game expressed deep wrestling competence — takedowns, scrambles, top-game pressure — paired with a leg lock and back attack canon that they treated as part of the technical baseline rather than as a specialised study. The Ruotolos’ emergence at world level — Kade’s submission-only event wins, the brothers’ joint signing with ONE Championship, and ultimately Kade’s ADCC 2022 under-77kg gold — was the period’s clearest signal that the leg lock canon had completed its transition from a specialty to part of the standard kit.

WNO launches

The launch of WNO (Who’s Number One) by FloGrappling in 2020 produced, for the first time in the sport’s history, a consistent broadcast cadence for elite no-gi submission grappling. The format — single matches between elite competitors, predominantly submission-only with overtime, broadcast monthly — established the institutional infrastructure that the previous era’s technical canon had been ready for since at least 2017. The athlete pool, the audience, the production values, and the prize money all consolidated in the WNO years. The current WNO ruleset documents the format as it stands.

Submission-only events proliferate

The 2018–2022 period also produced a proliferation of submission-only events — Submission Underground (UFC Fight Pass), Combat Jiu-Jitsu, Polaris, and a long tail of regional and independent promotions. The institutional pattern was that the format’s appetite ran ahead of its athlete pool: more events than the elite roster could fully populate, which produced a deeper bench of professional competitors than any previous cycle had supported. The mechanical consequence was that a generation of athletes could now build careers on submission grappling without an MMA or BJJ-tournament secondary income. The professionalisation of the sport, in the strict sense of athletes being able to make a living from submission grappling alone, is a development of this era.

Rule pressure on the standing exchange

The 2019 ADCC and subsequent rule cycles introduced increasing penalties for stalling, guard pulling, and passive opening minutes. The selection pressure produced was on athletes who could produce takedowns or genuine takedown threat from standing — that is, on the application of level-change-as-prerequisite and (hip access is the functional goal of all single-leg attacks). The wrestling-heavy generation that would define the next era — the Ruotolos, Nicky Rodriguez, the broader cohort of folkstyle and freestyle converts — is the field’s response to the selection pressure the rules had created. Rodriguez’s 2019 ADCC −99kg silver, produced as a BJJ blue belt with roughly 18 months of dedicated no-gi training and a collegiate wrestling base, is one of the period’s clearest single empirical cases for the proposition that elite wrestling translates directly into world-level no-gi submission grappling without intermediate BJJ specialisation.

---

The 2022–present period is the era in which the standing exchange — the takedown, the throw, the clinch, the level change — becomes a non-optional element of the elite no-gi game in a way that earlier eras had treated as desirable rather than mandatory. The defining feature of the era is convergence: wrestling’s contribution to the standing exchange has been clear since the 2000s, but the integration of judo’s throwing canon into the no-gi field is the era’s distinguishing technical movement. The mechanical proposition the era is testing empirically is that the throws of judo and the takedowns of wrestling are not separate technical traditions but related expressions of the same underlying invariants, applied through different connection systems.

ADCC 2022 — the Ryan superfight and the Ruotolo gold

ADCC 2022 in Las Vegas produced two of the era’s load-bearing competitive moments. Gordon Ryan defeated André Galvão in the superfight; Kade Ruotolo won under-77kg at age 19; Tye Ruotolo won under-88kg; and Yuri Simoes won the absolute. The Ruotolo brothers’ gold medals in their first ADCC senior cycle — both produced through wrestling-heavy games paired with leg lock and back attack threat — was the era’s clearest single signal that the next generation had arrived with a complete game from the start. The Ryan superfight was, in retrospect, the late peak of his competitive dominance; his subsequent retirement (announced February 2026) was foreshadowed by the ongoing health issues that limited his post-2022 schedule.

ADCC 2024 — the wrestling era confirmed

ADCC 2024 in Las Vegas produced the clearest single empirical case for the era’s defining proposition. Mica Galvão’s under-77kg double-gold run — paired with his Super Grand Slam (IBJJF Worlds plus ADCC in the same calendar year, achieved at approximately age 21) — combined elite wrestling, including foot sweeps and sasae-tsurikomi-ashi entries that are uncommon at world-level no-gi events, with submission threat across both upper and lower body. Kaynan Duarte’s third consecutive under-99kg gold — eight matches, eight wins, seven submissions — was a complete expression of body-lock passing, headquarters control, and choke-based finishing that produced the technical highlight of the event. The 2024 cycle’s broader pattern, documented in detail in the State of No-Gi 2026 annual review, was that lower-limb submissions as a share of all finishes dropped from approximately 28–30% in the 2016–2022 cycle to 22% — not because leg attacks were declining in importance but because elite defences had matured. The leg lock canon entered a new phase: more sophisticated setups, novel chaining, position-specific variants. Chokes remained the highest-percentage finishing tools at 65% of all submissions, with the rear naked choke and guillotine continuing to lead.

The Craig Jones Invitational

CJI 1, held in August 2024 on the same weekend as ADCC 2024, was the era’s most consequential structural development before UFC BJJ. Craig Jones’ decision to run a competing event with substantial prize money, a curated bracket, and a format explicitly designed to incentivise engagement was the first serious commercial challenge to ADCC’s institutional position in the sport’s history. The format — pit structure with curved walls preventing resets, submission-only with timed periods, large purses — drew a substantial portion of the elite competitive roster and produced a weekend in which the sport had two simultaneous world-level events. The current CJI ruleset documents the format. The mechanical pressure the format applied — for sustained engagement, for finishes, for active rather than positional play — has begun to shape how athletes prepare across the broader cycle.

UFC BJJ launches

UFC BJJ’s first event in June 2025 was the era’s most consequential institutional development. The UFC’s commitment of $10–12 million to grappling development, quarterly events at the UFC Apex, and the use of a pit structure derived from CJI signalled that submission grappling had been validated at the highest level of combat sports promotion. Mikey Musumeci’s acrimonious departure from ONE Championship in late 2024 and his signing as UFC BJJ’s flagship competitor produced the first defining figure of the format. Musumeci’s UFC BJJ run — winning the inaugural Bantamweight title with a heel hook, defending it through a finish by Mikey lock, then by foot lock — has been the most-watched sustained competitive run of the period. The implications for the sport’s mainstream visibility, athlete compensation, and institutional positioning are still developing and are documented at length in the State of No-Gi 2026 review.

Higashi and the no-gi judo scene

Shintaro Higashi’s emergence as the most visible advocate for judo throws as a primary no-gi standing solution is the era’s clearest single articulation of the integration the period is broadly producing. Higashi’s mechanical proposition — that the throws of judo do not change between gi and no-gi, that what changes is the connection system — is the load-bearing claim of the InGrappling anchor article on this subject. See judo throws in no-gi: the mechanical case and the no-gi judo grip set concept page. The throws are governed by the same invariants — destabilising the opponent requires controlling the secondary leg, (hip access is the functional goal of all single-leg attacks), kuzushi loads the leg to be removed (kuzushi is sustained loading onto the target leg), bent-over posture is mid-throw (bent-over posture is functionally mid-throw) — whether the connection is a sleeve grip, a collar tie, or an underhook. The gi-vs-no-gi distinction in throws is, mechanically, a connection question and not a throw question.

The female elite consolidates

The 2022–2025 cycle produced the first sustained depth at the elite level on the women’s side that the sport had supported. Ffion Davies’s ADCC 2022 gold and continued elite competitive run; Elisabeth Clay’s emergence as a leg-attack-first competitor at world level; Danielle Kelly’s sustained competitive output through ONE Championship and the broader sub-only circuit; Nathiely de Jesus’s heavyweight submission record across cycles; Beatriz Mesquita’s sustained five-cycle ADCC −60kg medal record and 2017 gold; and Adele Fornarino’s ADCC 2024 double-gold run, the first by a woman since 2007 — together represent a competitive density on the women’s side that no previous era produced. The technical pattern is consistent with the broader era: leg-attack literacy as a baseline expectation, wrestling fluency at the standing exchange, complete submission games rather than specialised single-finish profiles.

The methodology shift

The era has also seen a more diffuse but consequential pedagogical shift: the increasing influence of Greg Souders’s ecological dynamics and constraints-led methodology on how the sport is taught. Souders’ definition of the invariant — what must happen for a position to occur — is the load-bearing concept that organises this site’s framework. The methodology shift is downstream of the technical canon’s maturation: once the principles are explicit, the question of how best to teach them becomes tractable in a way it could not be while the principles were still implicit. The era’s most-cited methodology articulations — Souders’ constraints-led work, parts of the broader competitive-meta discussion, the connection-as-prerequisite-standing concept — are best understood as the field’s response to having a stable set of principles to teach rather than a moving target.

Other contributors of the era

The era has produced a broader cohort of distinguishing competitors whose individual records and contributions are detailed on their profile pages: Jozef Chen (the Atos cohort, complete games at the lower weight classes), Mateusz Szczeciński (European elite, submission-rate records), Jason Rau, Georges St-Pierre (the elite MMA crossover, contributing visibility and methodological cross-pollination from the wrestling and judo traditions). The competitive density of the era is itself the era’s distinguishing feature; the elite roster is broader, deeper, and more technically uniform than at any previous point in the sport’s history.

---

The next decade of no-gi submission grappling is, by the available evidence, a period of convergence and articulation rather than of a fundamental new technical canon. The principles are stable. The institutional infrastructure is broader and more contested than at any previous point. The next generation enters with a more complete technical baseline than any previous generation and faces a competitive environment that rewards completeness rather than specialisation. The expected developments are extensions of patterns the previous decade has already established.

The convergence completes

The mechanical proposition that wrestling, judo, and submission grappling are three vocabularies for one underlying canon — and not three sports that happen to share a mat — is the field’s defining methodological commitment for the next cycle. The connection-system distinction between gi and no-gi grappling is, mechanically, smaller than the surface vocabulary suggests; the throw-and-takedown distinction between judo and wrestling is, mechanically, smaller than the surface vocabulary suggests; the submission-and-position distinction between BJJ and catch wrestling is smaller than the lineage histories suggest. The next decade will likely produce more articulations of this kind — anchor articles, technical-meta pieces, and curriculum frameworks — that treat the canon as one mechanical body rather than as several traditions. See the judo throws in no-gi and inside-vs-outside-standing concept pages for the most-developed articulations available so far.

AI-assisted analysis and the codification of invariants

The increasing use of automated analysis on competitive footage — pose estimation, position detection, finish-rate decomposition by sub-position — will produce a quantitative record of which mechanical claims are robustly supported across the elite competitive sample and which are folklore. The likely consequence is that the invariant framework, which currently rests primarily on theoretical articulation paired with high-level pattern recognition, will be testable empirically across thousands of matches. The framework’s structural shape is unlikely to change; its evidentiary basis will become harder to dismiss.

The next generation

The cohort of elite competitors most likely to define the late 2020s is a generation that has trained leg locks since they could grip; trained no-gi as a primary discipline rather than as a gi-grappling cross-training; and absorbed the wrestling-and-submission integration as a baseline expectation. The Ruotolos, Mica Galvão, and the youngest cohort of ADCC 2024 medallists are the early evidence; the broader pattern will likely produce a competitive elite that is, on average, more complete and more technically uniform than the present elite roster. The distinguishing edge between the top and the second tier will be, by the available evidence, fidelity to invariants and competitive output volume — that is, who has trained more rounds with more intelligent constraints — rather than technical novelty.

The unresolved questions

The sport’s open institutional questions — weight class structure across formats, drug testing infrastructure, athlete representation and compensation across the multi-platform commercial environment, the long-term coexistence of ADCC, CJI, UFC BJJ, and WNO as parallel commercial structures — are the live questions the next decade will resolve, or fail to resolve. The technical canon is stable; the institutional canon is not. The history of the sport’s development from 1998 to 2026 is, looked at from sufficient distance, an alternation between technical breakthroughs and institutional catch-ups. The next phase is institutional.

Each of these questions is explored in more depth on its own page:

---

Conclusion

The history of no-gi submission grappling is a record of practitioners discovering, refining, and finally articulating a small set of universal mechanical principles that the human body has always permitted. The catch wrestlers of the early twentieth century, the Pancrase fighters of the 1990s, the ADCC champions of the 2000s, the Danaher Death Squad of the 2010s, and the wrestling-fluent generation of the 2020s are not separate traditions; they are sequential generations of practitioners doing the same work in different institutional environments and against different competitive pressures. The framework this site is built on — the invariants, the concepts, the hub structure — is the inherited record of that work, organised so that a present-day student does not have to rediscover what previous generations have already established. The story, told mechanically, is the story of how that record came to be.

---

Related Pages

Coaches & theorists. John Danaher · Greg Souders · Eddie Bravo

Competitors. Gordon Ryan · Lachlan Giles · Craig Jones · Roger Gracie · Marcelo Garcia · Andre Galvao · Garry Tonon · Eddie Cummings · Dean Lister · Nicky Ryan · Ethan Crelinsten · Kade Ruotolo · Tye Ruotolo · Shintaro Higashi · Hélio Gracie · Rickson Gracie · Royce Gracie · Royler Gracie · Renzo Gracie · Kazushi Sakuraba · Ken Shamrock · Masakatsu Funaki · Jean Jacques Machado · Mario Sperry · Ricardo Arona · Ronaldo “Jacaré” Souza · Braulio Estima · Xande Ribeiro · Ffion Davies · Nathiely de Jesus · Elisabeth Clay · Danielle Kelly · Beatriz Mesquita · Adele Fornarino · Mikey Musumeci · Mica Galvão · Kaynan Duarte · Nicky Rodriguez · Georges St-Pierre · Jozef Chen · Mateusz Szczeciński · Jason Rau

Invariants (universal). — Connection eliminates space and transfers weight · — Inside position controls the outside · base over the support point — Base is weight distribution over the support point · connection precedes control — Connection is the prerequisite for all control · positional advantage precedes submission — Positional advantage is the prerequisite for submission · — The underhook controls the hip on that side · — Destabilisation precedes control · — Structural loading

Invariants (standing). control the secondary leg — Controlling the secondary leg · — Hip access · level change before penetration — Level change as prerequisite for penetration · kuzushi loads the leg to be removed — Kuzushi as sustained loading · — Bent-over posture is mid-throw

Invariants (leg entanglement). — Inside space control determines the entanglement · heel exposure by position — Heel exposure is determined by position, not grip · — Connection throughout prevents escape

Invariants (submission). strangle both sides simultaneously — Strangles require simultaneous bilateral compression · target limb isolation — Target limb must be isolated · control the secondary anchor — Secondary anchor must be controlled or removed · — Arm-out vs arm-in strangles · joint structural limit — Joint submissions require structural-limit loading

Concepts. Heel hook system · Leg lock system · Rear naked choke / back attack system · Butterfly guard system · Leg-drag passing system · Judo throws in no-gi: the mechanical case · Inside-vs-outside standing · Level change as prerequisite · Connection as prerequisite (standing) · No-gi judo grip set · Post-throw scramble · Judo throw vs leg attack from clinch

Standards (competition rulesets). ADCC and IBJJF format analysis · EBI ruleset · WNO ruleset · CJI ruleset · CBI ruleset · Metamoris ruleset

Selected techniques. Inside heel hook · Outside heel hook · Knee bar · K-guard entanglement · Cross-ashi · Seatbelt · Body triangle · Straitjacket · Rear naked choke · Imanari roll · Flying armbar · Flying triangle · Uchi-mata · Osoto-gari · Double leg · Single leg

Other meta pages. State of competitive no-gi 2026 · Leg entanglement meta · Back attack meta · Guard meta

Unresolved-questions meta pages. Weight classes in no-gi grappling · Drug testing in submission wrestling · Athlete compensation in no-gi grappling · The multi-platform commercial structure

---

References

This page is one of a small number of pages on this site where external citation is warranted. Most pages are mechanical and self-sourcing — the techniques work because the body works the way it works. A historical pillar is different: dates, results, and quoted statements need verification. The sources below are the primary references for the factual claims made above.

• ADCC official competitive records — adcombat.com — primary source for all ADCC event results, brackets, and finish methods cited from 1998 through 2024 cycles.
• BJJ Heroes — bjjheroes.com — secondary source for biographical detail, lineage, and event reconstruction across competitors covered.
• IBJJF database — ibjjf.com — primary source for IBJJF No-Gi Worlds and adult black-belt competitive records cited.
• Stuart Cooper Films, “Dean Lister — Why Would You Ignore 50% Of The Human Body” — interview source for the verified wording of the most-cited articulation in the modern leg lock canon’s pre-history. The wording cited above (“Why would you ignore 50% of the human body?”) is the form delivered in this interview.
• FloGrappling event coverage — flograppling.com — secondary source for WNO results, interview material, and event reconstruction across the 2018–2025 cycle.
• UFC BJJ official records — ufc.com / UFC Fight Pass — primary source for UFC BJJ event results, format details, and competitor roster from the format’s June 2025 launch onward.
• Public statements from John Danaher across multiple podcast and interview appearances, attributing the prompt for the leg-lock systematisation work to conversations with Dean Lister.
• Profile pages on this site for each named contributor — these pages carry the more detailed biographical, technical, and contribution claims summarised above. Where the pillar’s claims and a profile’s claims differ, the profile is authoritative.