When Gordon Ryan recently outlined his technical blueprint for defeating dominant UFC wrestlers like Khamzat Chimaev in pure grappling competition, the response from “Borz” himself was swift and dismissive.
“Their whole thing is that they take their hands nice and high behind your arms, they go into rear chest locks, and they put your hands back on the ground. So every time you try to get up, your hands go to the floor, and you’re carrying their body weight. They can hit you, but you can’t touch them.”
The Brazilian jiu-jitsu icon went further, suggesting that both Chimaev and Khabib would struggle significantly in the specialized world of submission grappling competition.
“They’re not the best freestyle wrestlers in the world. They’re not the best jiu-jitsu guys in the world. If you put those guys into ADCC, they would get beat pretty easily.”
Ryan acknowledged the exceptional nature of these MMA stars within their own domain but drew a clear distinction between MMA grappling and pure submission wrestling.
“What they’re doing is submission grappling for MMA.”
“They have the ability to take people down. They can follow them through transitions, make them carry body weight, keep them on the floor, or return them to the floor when they try to get up, and then do significant damage with punches or submit them from top position.”
“You see everyone tries to do one Granby, like DDP versus Khamzat. You saw DDP try to do one Granby, and Khamzat followed him, covering his hips and keeping him broken down.”
According to Ryan, the solution requires chaining multiple escape sequences together rather than relying on single attempts.
“The combination of heisting, a series of Granbys to get up and away, is the best approach, and then throwing submissions in there, like a leg lock off those Granbys. Using a combination of heisting, submissions, and rolling is the way to beat people.”
Chimaev’s reaction to Ryan’s detailed game plan was characteristically brief and unimpressed. When a social media account tagged him asking him to explain why Ryan’s analysis was nonsense, the Chechen-born MMA star responded with laughing emojis and a succinct dismissal. In another comment, he simply wrote:
“Big bulls***”
Ryan maintained that classical sport jiu-jitsu often fails to prepare practitioners for the specific demands of MMA, where maintaining positions that allow for ground strikes is paramount.
“So that kind of jiu-jitsu, the submission wrestling kind where a guy can put people down and then do damage from top position after keeping them down, is the most important kind of jiu-jitsu.”
