Blog & News

Though we train Brazilian Jiu Jitsu in New York, we train MMA in New York and we train kickboxing in New York, everything that we do is tied to a larger body of work, with its own history and development cycle. This includes a rich, international history of variation, distillation and competition that informs what we do in the here and now.

The internet is a great resource for Brazilian Jiu-jitsu and Submission Grappling in general. It connects players who are practicing and rolling from Denmark to Japan, from Rio to right here in Manhattan.

Here at Ronin Athletics, we encourage all of our team members to compete. We have a strong Competition Team, with many of us consistently bringing home hardware. We acknowledge that competition isn’t for everyone, but we feel that if you can fit it into your schedule, you should enter one of the many tournaments, both for Submission Grappling and BJJ in NYC and the surrounding areas.

Rolling, or grappling with resistance, is a crucial part of BJJ’s pedagogical model. At any of the many MMA / BJJ schools in NYC, you will see rolling. It’s fundamental to one’s ability to implement techniques and internalize the concepts of Jiu-jitsu. Like in much of life, a person needs to undergo stress tests to be sure that they’re really competent at a skill.

In many of the classes here at Ronin Athletics, you will often hear terms like lever, structure and angle thrown around. It can seem weird to discuss something as obviously physical by using such cerebral concepts. But at the same time, we’re applying the science of physics and its principles on the mat every day. By noticing and thinking about that, we can better wrap our heads around BJJ.

Coach Christian and Junny Ocasio recently competed at a bjj and grappling tournament in upstate New York and took home a bunch of medals to our gym in NYC. Junny’s been working super hard, and as we all know, Christian’s been competing a lot this season. Congrats to them both!

For the longest time, if you were to ask me what I do for a living, I would tell you that “I teach Mixed Martial Arts,” more specifically Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. But I’ve noticed that recently (and by that, I mean in the past few years) my response has changed to “I’m a BJJ Coach” or “I Coach Mixed Martial Arts.”

A student asked me this question recently. He’d just seen one of my old amateur fights on YouTube. Despite losing the decision, it was one of the best performances I ever had, and I was still an amateur (though this was before the big push to regulate Professional MMA via state sanctioning bodies, as is today’s standard).

Mixed martial arts fights are legal in forty-nine states, with New York being the only state that banned the sport. Now that’s set to change since New York’s state legislature has finally approved legalizing professional MMA.