How does jiu-jitsu with a gi differ from jiu-jitsu without a gi?
With gi jiu-jitsu, you use yanking and pulling to set everything up. You grab the collar and you yank and pull—it’s like a big tug of war. When you’re going no-gi, there’s no yanking and pulling, just clinching and squeezing. It takes a while to get it down. People frequently describe your style of jiu-jitsu as “unorthodox.” What’s so different about your style? If you concentrate just on no-gi jiu-jitsu, the game totally changes: the rubber guard, the twister set-ups, the half-guard stuff—even my mount is different. If you’re working both gi and no-gi, you’re not going to have enough time to develop a pure no-gi style. The only reason I started focusing on no-gi was that if I ever lost my job, I might need to fight to make some money. At the time, I was DJing in a strip club, writing music and training jiu-jitsu. And if I was going to fight, I wanted my jiu-jitsu to be as mixed-martial-arts-ready as possible. MMA is dedicated to grappling and mixed martial arts; I wouldn’t have had en
