Submission Grappling (No-Gi)
Modern jacketless wrestling won by lock or choke; its flagship tournament, the ADCC, has run since 1998.
Quick Facts
Character & Origin
Training
Organisation & Competition
What the style is built from
Editorial rating on a 0–3 scale, based on how much room each area gets in ordinary training.
About Submission Grappling (No-Gi)
Submission grappling is the modern sporting discipline of unarmed, jacketless wrestling in which the win comes from forcing the opponent to submit to a lock or a choke. It did not grow out of one school: it is assembled from Brazilian jiu-jitsu, from Anglo-Saxon catch wrestling, from judo and from freestyle and folkstyle wrestling, each of which brought something different. Jiu-jitsu supplied the work from the back and the guard, catch the leg locks, wrestling the takedowns and top control. With the jacket gone, grips on cloth disappeared, so the fight is faster, more slippery and puts more weight on controlling the body than on holding a grip. The best-known event is the ADCC tournament, which Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan staged in Abu Dhabi in 1998 with his Brazilian jiu-jitsu coach Nelson Monteiro; it is held every two years, with weight classes and an absolute division, and entry comes either through trials or by invitation. The ADCC rules are marked by scoring nothing at all in the first part of the match, with points arriving only in the second half, which pushes competitors to attack for a finish instead of protecting a lead. Hundreds of other tournaments around the world have taken over this format. The discipline has no founder and no year of origin, and this page therefore gives neither; 1998 belongs to the tournament, not to the art.
Similar styles
Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.