Bulletproof For BJJ Podcast
Discussions on improving your BJJ, navigating mat-politics and all aspects of the jiu jitsu lifestyle. Multiple weekly episodes for grapplers of any level. Hosted by JT and Joey - Australian jiu jitsu black belts, strength coaches, and creators of Bulletproof For BJJ App. Based out of Sydney, Australia
Bulletproof For BJJ Podcast
Victor Hugo Takes Nicky Rods Lunch Money
Two shocking upsets rocked the combat sports world this past weekend, revealing fascinating patterns about championship mindsets and what it truly takes to stay on top. Victor Hugo stunned the grappling community by defeating Nicky Rod, the million-dollar champion whose dominance seemed beyond question after his flawless CJI tournament run. And then Magomed Ankalaev took down the seemingly unstoppable Poatan. Is this a story of flying too close to the sun? Or is it just new champions evolving past the old guard?
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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another Bulletproof for BJJ podcast. Today we are talking about the colossal match between the million-dollar grappler, nicky Rod, and previous world champion, victor Hugo. The match that was meant to happen, all the things that happened. What's the result? What's it mean? Also, we talk about the huge match which occurred in the UFC between Alex Beherda and Ankolev, and what does that mean now for the world of the UFC? We also unpack this a little bit more to discuss how success can affect the performance of an athlete and what that can mean for anybody trying to be successful and improve in jiu-jitsu. Let's get into it now. Also, while you're there, you're watching the show. We know you watch for a little while, but you're not subscribed. That's cool, we can respect it. But if you can do us that small favor of just taking the five seconds, hit that subscribe button, we would appreciate it. It will bring much good karma. Your direction, your direction, better listen very carefully. A good martial artist does not become tense, but ready. Essentially, at this point the fight is over, so you pretty much flow with the goal. Who is worthy to be trusted with the secret to limitless power? I'm ready, god damn. Victor Hugo beats the million dollar grappler, nicky Rod Dang, and fucking puts Lucas Kennard in position as the world's best Pound for pound Heavyweight millionaire grappler. Oh my God, nicky Rod owes Lucas a mil. Well, people are saying that Lucas owes Victor a mil. Why? Because Lucas beat Victor Hugo. If he hadn't beaten him, he could have gone through and beat him, right. So just on that, Just for context, fight Pass was on the weekend.
Speaker 1:What are we talking about? Ufc Fight Pass and If you brought the CJI, last year's CJI winner, the million dollar grappler yeah, he, look, I mean, it went to overtime, right. So, spoiler alert if you didn't watch it, the highlights are all over the internet and, look, you know it was Victor Hugo. Did you watch the match? I didn't. I just saw highlights. Yeah, no, no, no. But I I've kind of watched different grabs, right, lots of people illegally. I've watched a lot of people like just filming on their phone.
Speaker 1:I didn't pay for the UFC fight pass but from what I could see, it was a, was a lot of um, like half guard stuff from victor hugo, which he's amazing at, and nikki rod trying to get the body lock right, like a lot of that. Not a super eventful match, but in overtime, using a bit of old mate nogi judo bit, a bit of uchi flip, was able to kind of bring Nicky Rod down and in that moment, kind of as anything like you get that scramble point where you're not quite, the takedown was not secured, but Nicky Rod's instinct is to come up and wrestle. But in the process of him trying to come up to wrestle, victor Hugo jumps on his back and then it's pretty quickly game over from there. And yeah, man, I think, all things said and done, victor hugo is a big, strong human and I don't I don't know if nikki's getting pushed physically, I don't know if there's many big heavyweights smashing nikki rod. A lot of the talk out of b team is how hard it is to deal with Nicky Rod, right, and so this is the curse of being the biggest, strongest grappler in New Gym.
Speaker 1:Just for clarity, on the Lucas Canard mention yes, he beat Victor Hugo Via heel hook In like within like 20 seconds at CJI. So that was you know. Hence the fucking thing. But, and Victor Hugo was like a big favorite to get to the final, yeah For sure, the biggest upset of the tournament it was, yeah, I mean, fuck right, it's after Nicky Rhodes performance in CJI. He, he submitted everyone. Yeah, I believe he took the back and choked everybody. Yeah, he competed against Even if he didn't submit. He was dominant, like he never looked in trouble the whole thing. No, and then, and the way he won and the composure he came in, it was just like, oh my God, this dude's on another level right now. And so then when you see someone like that lose, you're like, oh shit, they can lose, yeah. But I think this is the thing also Different people have different styles to make fights right, like people have kryptonite.
Speaker 1:What I've seen consistently in no-gi jiu-jitsu is someone who has really good no-gi jiu-jitsu sorry, really elite no-gi judo dealing with wrestlers quite well, if someone is the better wrestler, they will do better. But if someone has really elite judo skills and you see it a lot more now like hip tosses, uchimatas, like even with the Rotolo brothers, they do a lot of kind of stand-up no-gi judo stuff and it's very effective. And so people, a lot of people, are like traditionalists, are like, oh, like it's a win for the gi because very traditionally Victor Hugo was a gi champion Right and under Shanji and you know all of that, yeah. So what does this mean for jiu-jitsu right now Is Victor Hugo the number one guy. Like, could we see? Uh, could they run it back? Or could we see a match between gordon ryan and victor hugo? Like what does that look like? Is gordon still in the picture? I haven't heard anything about gordon. Well, no, since adcc. Yeah, I mean he's kind of off the radar a little bit. He's still training, like there's plenty of footage of him training. I'm just not sure how healthy he is, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 1:But new wave is in for CJI 2. That is confirmed. Wow, they have a team. Yeah, so CJI 2 is going to be team's event, team's event. So Gordon, well, well, you would assume he's going to be. You would guess that that's possible. That's huge. And what there's no adcc this year is no, there's no two years. Yeah, what a time, what an opportunity for cji. Oh, mate, teams event. Quintet, fucking. Yeah, it's going to be great. If you've never seen quintet, it's my favorite grappling event ever. Watch it, you'll get it, maybe. You know.
Speaker 1:Hopefully cgr is probably going to be somewhat close to that and, in my opinion, some of craig's best work. If you look at craig's run when he was against 10th planet, not 10th planet against um, like sub, like the russians in a row, the sumbo team, whoever the fuck they were, yeah, he fucking ran a train on those guys broke all their legs. Wow, they were like, oh yeah, like, yeah, leg locks not working in sumbo guys, bro, you know, hold my beer fucking that. You know, shout out on that man. If you go back and you just put in craig jones, uh, um destroys russian mobsters. No, that might be something different. That's a different. Yeah, you might not be able to find that on normal YouTube, but no, it's just Quintet's a great format, fucking exciting.
Speaker 1:And so another thing happened on the weekend Boom, boom, boom. Poetan loses to Anka Live. Why'd you have to bring that up? Well, I just want to spoil your day, joe.
Speaker 1:No, I think this is a chat about what success can do to a person, and we all know it. It doesn't mean their skills aren't there. We have seen alex beheader just do amazing cyborg level shit, and he didn't look like he showed up on the weekend. That's that would be. You know, he was eating shots like he didn't look. He's normal, like terminator-esque, coming forward, like even when he was taking shots from khalil roundtree, he was coming forward, you know, yeah, eating them and come, they weren't, they weren't having an effect. He wasn't backing up, yeah, and he wasn't slowing down, yeah, it looked. I mean again, I only saw highlights, but it looked like uncle live was like piecing him up pretty well. First round, perreira looked good. It was like, oh okay, perreira's going to win. He slowed right down, man, and just got slower and it just, you know, like obviously he's tough as hell. But I mean, I believe that if we and look, maybe it is a style thing, but I think you look at that and you go what has Alex Beherda not done in the last 10 years? The guy has just won. He's just winning everything. It would be very difficult to expect that he wouldn't at some point have a little dip. I'm not saying it's the end, but-.
Speaker 1:The sponsor of today's show is Sodi. Sodi is the best hydration salts you can get Now. If you're about convenience, you can get the sachet, the baggie oh yeah, flavor pineapple. Or if you're about the value and the control, you go with the tub. Another great option If you want to improve your performance for jujitsu on the mat, get Sodi, get hydrated sodicomau, and use the code Bulletproof15 for 15% off. Shoo. No, that's right, I mean it's yeah.
Speaker 1:As a fan, it's that odd thing that happens, like I said with Nick Robb, where you just kind of get used to them winning yeah, and then they don't win. You're like what, what the fuck went wrong. And you're like, wait, how dare you, they can't win forever. No, yeah, and because it takes a toll right to to especially him the way he would show up. He was so consistent, he had his whole ritual, the fucking firing an arrow thing and screaming, which is fucking sick. It's boss.
Speaker 1:Um, like he's got this whole thing. He's like super consistent, like like a cyborg. Yes, you're like this motherfucker's a robot. Um, that takes energy to to be that every time, doesn't it? But he's had wild level, like since being the champion and being where he is now, the level of endorsements he has, the level of I don't know what's going on in his private life.
Speaker 1:I'm not saying he's partying, but you could not help but think, once you hit a certain level of money, recognition and distraction that comes with success, then maybe you're eyes off the prize a little bit. Yeah, it's probably harder to have the focus and perhaps intensity that you once had yeah, you're not like Because that was all you had. That's all it was. And I think the same could be said for Nicky Rod, if he truly believes, like no one's going to touch me now. There is a certain level of lack of hunger there that you think you've arrived and it's like maybe there's somebody lurking in the shadows who's coming to steal your fucking lunch. And I think that we did see that. But you know me, joe, I like to take some random points and reference points and cobble them together into some kind of semi-cohesive idea slash narrative.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you listen to all the guys at B-Team and no one is pushing Nicky Rod. I mean, they've got plenty of good big guys there. They've got Jay Bear, they've got fucking Declan Moody. It's not that they don't have big, good guys, but no one bigger than Nicky and no one better than him. Yeah, to push him right. And I think what you would see with Victor Hugo is he's surrounded by plenty of very good, very big training partners who can physically push him Right.
Speaker 1:And this is maybe a weakness in because something else that's kind of observed like I've spoken to a few people who um have been in the roca training room and they just talk about how big it is. That's danaher's crew, danaher's crew, right, it's a big guy, gym, right, right. And I'm not saying merengali, merengali, gordon, geo dan minosauro, um uh, bordoni, oh, yep, right, like. And who's the? Gio Dan Minassoio, bordone, yep, right. And who's the Japanese judo champion, satoshi, ishii, satoshi, oh my God, that guy's a fucking monster, right, brick with eyes. He's got a head like that Coffee table bro. It's wild.
Speaker 1:Yeah, big units, the smaller units in that room have suffered. You know, yeah, their, yeah, the, the, the smaller units in that room have suffered. You know, like they their training hasn't done as well. If you go to B team, there is a greater amount of lighter weight humans in that room. The smaller grapplers, like the lighter weight grapplers, have done dramatically better. And it's not that, oh, nikki Rod's not doing well.
Speaker 1:He was able to beat so many heavyweights, but I wonder if him having a lack of bigger, stronger, just as good people to push him might be his limiting factor. And I think the same could be true, maybe, of Poitin. Like, how many people can push Alex Behera in sparring? Fuck, all. Like you know, it would be difficult for them to find people. I believe like I've only seen some training clips of him sparring, but short of him just doing pure boxing against a pure boxer or him doing just pure kickboxing not MMA training against like a heavyweight kickboxing champ, it would be difficult to find people to push you, whereas I'm sure there is untold leagues of heavyweights in Dagestan that are just, you know, fighting to the death to to see who's the best, and and Kalaev comes up as being the best of those guys. Yeah, it's a fair question, for sure it it's.
Speaker 1:It's gotta be a challenge, huh, when you're in that, when you're in that, when you're like one of the bigger cats and the best, like undisputably one of the best in the world, yeah, so yeah, man, I mean it is it. It's sad to see I don't really have a horse in the race. Really I don't, I don't care who's the heavyweight champions for jujitsu or mma, or like middle heavy, should we say, but it is interesting to see that there is like a bit of a change and maybe this makes the game more interesting. Yeah, I mean I'm sad, legitimately, to see Poiton lose the belt, because I fucking love that guy and it's such a hill to climb in MMAs To be the champ To try and return to. It's just so hard to try and get the belt back.
Speaker 1:But you know, for Nicky Rod, and I think it's awesome, actually I'm like fuck, because I just I was spewing for victor hugo at cji, yeah, I was cheering for lucas, right, that was amazing. But you're like, I really like victor hugo. It was a shame that he, you know, he just didn't get to show his jiu-jitsu and um, and so this is like oh fuck, yeah, a new player has entered the game. It opens it back up, yeah, makes shit exciting, yeah, and I and I think that this is often the problem when you get one single dominant champion, even though people like to like bet on that favorite, it makes it makes the game not as interesting, yeah. And so now, with a bit of uh, with a bit of mixing it up, a bit of diversity, I think. I think it's, it's open and that means the next 12 months can be very interesting for both MMA and jiu-jitsu.
Speaker 1:Boom, boom. There it is Now. If you'd like to hear us talk and ramble and you've gotten to this point in the video please like, subscribe, follow. It means a lot to us, helps us and we appreciate it. You.
