State of Competitive No-Gi Grappling — 2026
Annual analysis of competitive no-gi grappling — ADCC 2024 results, technical trends, format developments, and what the data means for the sport in 2026.
This is InGrappling’s first annual State of the Sport report — a document we intend to publish each year to give competitors, coaches, and students a coherent picture of where the competitive game stands, how it has moved, and what the data actually says versus what the discourse assumes. It will be updated annually and reviewed when significant events warrant it.
The competitive meta section is time-sensitive by design. Canon technique content is evergreen — the mechanical principles that make an armbar work are not changed by a WNO result. This section is different. What is working at elite level reflects who is competing, what defences have been developed, and which techniques have been tested at the highest pressure. It is necessarily a snapshot, not a permanent record.
The Defining Story: Gordon Ryan Retires
Gordon Ryan announced his official retirement from competition in February 2026. He cited ongoing severe health struggles — long-term gastroparesis and related conditions that have limited his ability to train and compete for an extended period. His coach, John Danaher, stated publicly in early 2026 that Ryan was “very sick at this point” and that a competitive return was not expected.
Ryan’s final competitive appearance was ADCC 2024, where he won two superfights: defeating Felipe Pena 2-0 and Yuri Simoes 21-0 on points. His final record at ADCC stands at seven titles — a number unlikely to be approached for a generation. His retirement simultaneously vacated the WNO heavyweight title he had held since the belt’s inception.
The significance of Ryan’s departure extends beyond the results column. For nearly a decade, no-gi grappling discourse was organised, to an unusual degree, around what Ryan was doing and what his competitors were doing in response. The technical vocabulary of the modern game — the rear body lock as a back-take entry, the systematic development of the leg entanglement system, the institutional framing of the “both-ends” attack-and-defence approach — all carry his influence. The sport has absorbed and distributed that influence. The question heading into 2026 is not who replaces him — it is whether the competitive ecosystem that developed in response to him continues to generate the same level of technical development without a dominant figure as its organising principle.
The answer, based on the evidence so far, appears to be yes. But that is worth watching carefully.
ADCC 2024 — What the Data Actually Says
ADCC 2024 took place in Las Vegas in August 2024. The headline results are documented elsewhere; what matters here is what the data from the event reveals about where the competitive game stands.
The heel hook narrative requires revision
The dominant discourse in submission grappling for the past several years has been organised around heel hooks — their lethality, their rapid adoption, the way they reshaped position hierarchies. The 2024 ADCC data complicates this narrative significantly.
Heel hook finishes across the entire tournament numbered four. Lower-limb submissions as a share of all finishes dropped from approximately 28–30% in the 2016–2022 cycle to 22% in 2024. This is not a small variation — it is a directional shift, and it is consistent with what analytical observers had been noting: elite defences have caught up with elite attacks. The inside heel hook from saddle/cross-ashi, which was effectively a primary finishing position at the 2017 and 2019 ADCC events, is now defended at high rates by elite competitors who have trained the escapes systematically.
The implication is not that leg entanglements are declining in importance — they remain a mandatory component of any elite game, and the positional control they create is valuable regardless of whether they produce direct submissions. The implication is that heel hooks as a fast-track finishing mechanism, against opponents who have specifically prepared for them, are no longer reliable in the way they were. The leg entanglement game is mature. It requires increasingly sophisticated setup, combination attacks, and chaining to novel variants (the “Junny Lock” outside-position variant, William Tackett and Owen Jones’s novel leg entanglement chains) to produce finishes against elite opponents.
For the majority of grapplers below elite level, this changes nothing about the curriculum priority of heel hooks — the gap between recreational and elite defence remains substantial. For coaches and competitors who want their training to reflect the current elite game rather than the 2019 elite game, it is important context.
Chokes dominate, consistently
Sixty-five percent of ADCC 2024 submissions were chokes. The rear naked choke and the guillotine remain, unambiguously, the highest-percentage finishing tools in the sport. This has been true across every ADCC cycle; 2024 confirms it is still true in a field that has had a decade to develop leg lock defences. The front headlock system specifically — the guillotine and its variants — continues to be both underestimated in the discourse (which tends to focus on leg locks) and overrepresented in actual finishes.
The practical implication for curriculum and training prioritisation is clear: an athlete whose guillotine and rear naked choke systems are underdeveloped relative to their leg lock game is leaving high-percentage submission opportunities on the mat.
Guard passing: body lock, headquarters, outside approaches
The body lock pass recorded a finish rate of over 40% in high-level ADCC 2024 matches. This makes it the most reliable guard-passing approach in the data — not because it is new, but because it consistently neutralises the guard bottom systems (K-guard, reverse De La Riva, heel hook entries from guard) that dominate the current defensive landscape.
Kaynan Duarte’s use of the “headquarters” passing position — a structure that pins guard players in place, neutralises their sweep and submission threats, and allows the passer to dictate timing — was arguably the technical highlight of the event. Duarte won eight matches by submission, finishing seven — one submission short of Roger Gracie’s 2005 all-time record — with finishes distributed across guillotines, rear naked chokes, and armlocks. His ability to neutralise leg entanglement entries while maintaining submission threat from the top game represented the most complete display of technical grappling in the tournament.
Outside passing (moving to north-south rather than crashing into side control) is increasingly the preference at elite level. The rationale is consistent with the invariables: it maintains connection while avoiding the leg entanglement entries that become available when the passer moves directly to side control from within the guard player’s hip line.
The Athletes Defining the Current Cycle
Mica Galvao
The most significant competitive development of the 2024–2025 cycle is the emergence of Mica Galvao as the leading candidate for the title of best no-gi grappler in the world. At ADCC 2024, Galvao became only the second competitor in history to complete the Super Grand Slam — IBJJF Grand Slam plus ADCC World title in the same calendar year — joining Rubens “Cobrinha” Charles, and doing so at approximately 21 years old (17 years younger than Charles was when he achieved it). He won double gold, competing in and winning two weight classes.
Galvao’s technical profile is unusual: he combines elite wrestling (foot sweeps, sasae tsurikomi ashi — techniques uncommon at high-level no-gi events) with submission hunting across both the upper and lower body. By mid-2025 he had also become WNO two-division champion. He is the closest the sport has to a successor to Ryan’s competitive dominance — with the significant caveat that he is younger, stylistically distinct, and operating in a more competitively dense environment than Ryan typically faced at the peak of his dominance.
Kaynan Duarte
Three consecutive ADCC titles at -99kg. Eight matches at ADCC 2024, eight wins, seven submissions. The numbers speak for themselves. Duarte’s game — systematic passing, body lock control, submission through choke chains rather than leg locks — is a technical model for completeness over specialisation. He may be the most underrated elite competitor in the sport relative to his results, partly because his game is less visually spectacular than Ryan’s and partly because he competes in a weight class that receives less coverage than the lighter divisions.
Adele Fornarino
Double gold at ADCC 2024 — the first woman to achieve the feat since 2007. First Australian to win ADCC gold. Fornarino’s result was the most complete women’s performance at an ADCC event in nearly two decades. Women’s grappling at the highest level has had a genuine emergence over the 2022–2024 cycle, with Fornarino, Helena Crevar (silver at -65kg at ADCC 2024 as a teenager), and Rafaela Guedes (+65kg winner) representing a depth of competition that the women’s divisions had not consistently produced in earlier cycles.
Mikey Musumeci
The most significant individual transition of the 2024–2025 period after Ryan’s retirement. Musumeci departed ONE Championship in November 2024 — acrimoniously, after being stripped of his flyweight title at ONE 168 when asked to drop 35 pounds in under a week to make weight for an unrelated bout. He signed exclusively with UFC Fight Pass and became the face of the UFC’s grappling product.
At UFC BJJ 1 (June 2025), Musumeci won the inaugural UFC BJJ Bantamweight Championship with a heel hook. He has defended the title twice since — including a finish by Mikey lock at UFC BJJ 3 and a foot lock at UFC BJJ 5 in February 2026. He is, at the time of this writing, undefeated in the UFC BJJ format and the most visible active competitor in the sport to a mainstream combat sports audience.
Emerging competition — the next generation
The 2024–2025 cycle produced clear evidence of the competitive tier below the established elite developing rapidly. At ADCC 2024, Elijah Dorsey defeated both Dante Leon and JT Torres in the same tournament to reach the semi-final at -88kg. Helena Crevar competed as a teenager and won silver in the women’s division. Michael Pixley submitted Nicholas Meregali — widely considered one of the biggest upsets in ADCC history. Ryan Aitken submitted Pedro Marinho with an inside heel hook. These are not flukes — they reflect a generation of practitioners who have had access to systematised leg lock and back attack instruction from the beginning of their training, rather than having to find it retrospectively.
The Major Structural Development: UFC BJJ
The most consequential structural development in the sport’s commercial landscape in 2025 was the launch of UFC BJJ. The UFC committed $10–12 million to grappling development, running events quarterly at the UFC Apex in Las Vegas. The format uses submission-only rules in a pit structure (curved walls that prevent resets and force continuous engagement, adapted from Craig Jones Invitational) with the specific intent to eliminate the stalling and position-holding that characterises some submission-only events.
The significance of UFC BJJ is not primarily competitive — the athlete pool, at launch, is strong but not yet ADCC-depth — it is institutional. The UFC’s entry signals that submission grappling as a standalone commercial product has been validated at the highest level of combat sports promotion. Dana White’s personal investment in the project (he has attended events, featured on promotional content, and spoken about grappling as a sport rather than a training supplement) is a departure from the UFC’s historical posture toward grappling as a support discipline for MMA rather than a primary product.
The practical implications for the sport’s development are twofold. First, the talent market has changed: athletes now have a third major platform (alongside WNO/FloGrappling and ONE Championship) competing for exclusive signings. Mikey Musumeci being the headline example illustrates both the opportunity (major platform, mainstream audience) and the tension (potential exclusivity limiting cross-platform competition). Second, the UFC’s mainstream reach means that submission grappling is being introduced to an audience that is primarily MMA-oriented — which has implications for how the sport is perceived, framed, and reported, and may accelerate its emergence from a niche within a niche toward a standalone sport.
Technical Trends to Watch in 2026
The post-heel hook generation of leg attacks. The consolidation of elite defences against standard inside heel hooks is producing the next wave of leg entanglement development: novel chaining (Owen Jones, William Tackett), position-specific variants (Junny Lock), and increased attention to knee bar and toe hold entries that become available when the inside heel hook is the expected threat. This is the same developmental pattern that followed every previous submission family as defences caught up — the technique does not disappear, it evolves.
Wrestling’s growing influence on standing and scramble games. Mica Galvao’s foot sweeps and Kaynan Duarte’s body lock game both reflect deep wrestling competence. Kit Dale’s wrestling-based victory over Xande Ribeiro at WNO 28 was another data point. Athletes who developed in wrestling before transitioning to submission grappling are increasingly competitive — not as a novelty but as a baseline technical expectation at the elite level.
The guillotine system as an underestimated priority. Sixty-five percent of ADCC 2024 submissions were chokes. The guillotine and its variants remain high-percentage at every level of the sport, and the front headlock system continues to be underrepresented in explicit curriculum relative to its finishing rate. This is not a new observation — it is a persistent gap that the data continues to support.
The heavyweight division’s open question. Gordon Ryan’s retirement leaves a power vacuum in the +99kg and heavyweight divisions that will take a competitive cycle to resolve. Felipe Pena vs. Luke Griffith for the WNO heavyweight title is the current storyline. Whether a new dominant figure emerges at heavyweight, or whether the division develops into a genuinely contested tier with multiple credible champions, will be one of the defining developments of the 2026–2028 cycle.
Format competition for elite talent. WNO/FloGrappling, UFC BJJ, and ONE Championship are now competing for exclusive access to the same athlete pool. This may produce better athlete compensation and higher production values; it may also fragment the competitive landscape in ways that make meaningful cross-comparison harder. The sport has benefited from a period in which most elite competitors competed on a single platform (FloGrappling/WNO). Whether that concentration persists through the UFC BJJ era is an open question.
What This Means for Training and Competition Preparation
The data from this cycle has clear implications for how coaches and competitors should think about their development priorities:
Do not neglect upper body attacks in favour of leg locks. The finishing data is unambiguous. If your rear naked choke and guillotine systems are underdeveloped relative to your leg entanglement game, you are misallocating training time relative to where elite submissions are actually occurring.
Passing fluency matters more than ever at the upper end of competition. The body lock and headquarters approaches that dominated ADCC 2024 passing require genuine investment — they are not simple techniques that can be bolted onto an existing game in a training camp. If you compete in points formats, guard passing proficiency is one of the highest-leverage skills you can develop.
Heel hook currency has not expired — it has changed denomination. The inside heel hook remains a mandatory technique and a live threat at every level below elite. The development trend at elite level is toward more sophisticated setup, chaining, and novel variants — not away from leg entanglements. But training the inside heel hook as a primary finishing mechanism without developing the chaining and positional sophistication that makes it work against prepared opponents is increasingly insufficient for competitive performance.
Know your ruleset specifically. UFC BJJ, WNO, and ADCC all create different games. The heel hook data from ADCC 2024 does not translate directly to submission-only formats where leg lock finishes occur at higher rates. If you are competing across formats, the preparation gap between them requires explicit attention. See the ruleset comparison guide for the specifics.
This report covers events and developments through April 2026. The competitive meta section is reviewed annually. For updates between reviews, see the competitive meta index. For the underlying mechanical principles that remain relevant regardless of the current meta, see the invariables and the technique canon.