Nick

blue belt

I train five days a week. I think about it like a job. Weekends are just recovery.

Q: How old are you?

I’m 26 now. I was doing Muay Thai for about three years before I started this jiu-jitsu thing. My friend got me into it actually. We were just starting college. I was a freshman at Syracuse. He was a freshman at American University. And he was having a hard time adjusting — too much partying and all this other stuff. Other things. He called me one day and was like, “I don’t even feel safe going out anymore.” So he took a semester off. I told him, “Let me know what you’re going to do and I’ll be there.”

We both grew up in New York City, so he came back here and started training at the main academy. Joe Sampieri was teaching the Muay Thai program there at the time. He hopped into that. By the time I got back, he was like, “Dude, you have to try this thing. It completely changed me.”

So I started doing that after he told me about it, and I fell in love with it — and then kind of just fell in love with martial arts from there on.

Q: Why the move to jiu-jitsu? And do you still train Muay Thai?

I’ll do it occasionally, but honestly, with how much I’m doing jiu-jitsu, it’s become hard. And that coach ended up leaving HQ for Brooklyn, which just doesn’t work for me schedule-wise. That was the biggest reason, honestly — he left that gym, and they kind of ended up in limbo, not knowing where they were going to go. I dislocated my shoulder around that same time. Surprisingly, just a pickup basketball game. I do all these martial arts, and then that happens. It’s crazy. It’s funny because I tell people, “Oh yeah, Muay Thai, jiu-jitsu,” but I’ve had three shoulder surgeries, and they’re all from basketball.

So when I came back from surgery, I was thinking: Do I want to go find another Muay Thai gym in the city, or do I want to learn something else? I was a big UFC fan from doing Muay Thai, and it always bothered me — I felt confident on my feet, but the idea that someone could just take me down and I’d have no idea what to do… if you put me on my butt, it’s like, “Oh. I have no idea.”

That whole fallout with Joe and that old team — I was very close with them. There was a bunch of drama. They wanted him to change the way he was paid because he had basically built that Muay Thai program. But I think they didn’t expect him to grow it the way he did. It’s known as a jiu-jitsu gym, but there were times I’d come in and they had 30 or more people in class. It was ridiculous. So I think they came to renegotiate, the whole thing fell apart, and all the guys I trained with were like, “We’re not going back.” I already had a relationship with the Renzo Gracie gym. So I came up here and started doing jiu-jitsu.

You can get whatever you want at this gym. You can get competitive rounds. If you want to work technically and not go hard, you can do that too. It’s perfect for someone like me who works full-time.

Q: What do you do that lets you train midday?

I work for a company called Expert Institute. We help attorneys find expert witnesses for their cases. It’s niche. I started four and a half years ago. It was fully in-person, then went hybrid, and now it’s basically whatever works. I have a home setup and use the 12pm class as my lunch break.

When the company started in 2011, they were probably cold-calling doctors. Now we have a big database in Salesforce. Anyone we contact goes into it. We tag specialties. If you need something, we probably have it. Anyone can be an expert witness. We had a case where someone broke his arm during a jiu-jitsu class. The instructor messed up an armbar, so we needed a jiu-jitsu expert. Whether it’s DNA, a jiu-jitsu instructor, or someone to basically break down for a jury: “This is what should have happened in this situation.” Expert witness testimony can persuade a jury either way. We’ve had lawyers come back to us like, “This guy was awful.” He basically swung the jury the other way. And you never want to hear that.

Jiu-jitsu has changed my workday a lot. When I trained at night, the second half of the workday dragged. Now it’s totally different. I feel way less frustrated afterward. Less tension. Calmer. It’s one of the things I love about martial arts. My buddy who got into Muay Thai with me said after his second class, “It feels like I just got high.” There’s a real euphoric release. Especially when you’re new and exerting that much energy. People talk about meditation as being present. Sparring is that. If you’re not present, you get choked or hit.

I’ll go play pickup basketball and the trash talk is crazy — almost what you’d expect at a fight gym. But then you go to a fight gym and everyone’s cooperative and nice. I think when you learn how to actually hurt someone, you don’t want to. The egos in basketball feel like chaos sometimes: “We’re playing basketball, but we could fight if you want.”

Q: There’s that basketball video where a guy swings at a purple belt. The guy puts him in a heel hook and says, “You’re never going to play sports again.” Then he lets him go.

That’s wild. Once you’ve seen real street fights, you realize how unpredictable it is — even compared to this controlled environment. But really, other sports are similar. If you want to get better, you need to play with people better than you. Same skills principle. Same progression. It never stops. Even Steph Curry is probably working on something today.

Q: Favorite training partners?

Sam, I’ve got to give him a shout-out. I’ve been training with him forever; he comes midday all the time, too. He’s super fast, like a Tasmanian devil. And I love training with him because he’s so quick and hard to pin down that I’m like, alright — if I can get a technique that holds him in place, this will definitely work with anyone else.

I love going with Harry, who comes up from Midtown. He only comes up for Sapo’s no-gi classes. But he’s one of the guys who’s really good at heel hooks and ankle locks. So when I go with him, I’m learning those things.

And then Cuervo too. Starting out, he helped me so much. That guy doesn’t rest. And what’s great about him is that he knows how to play. I think what’s very important in your training partners is someone who knows how to play. My coach would talk about that in Muay Thai all the time. One thing I loved about Muay Thai, coming into jiu-jitsu, is that it’s a great foundation for learning how to play — because you have to. Especially with striking, which I’ve always found different from grappling: once you get hit in the face, you go into this fight-or-flight, super-tense mode. So the playing is important — you’ve got to relax, you’ve got to flow, you’ve got to hit. And if you’re both stiff all the time, no one’s improving. You both stay at the same level.

I think wrestling and jiu-jitsu are probably the only things where you can go 100% full blast, the person taps, and you just restart and do it again. You can’t do that in boxing. You can’t do that in taekwondo. You’ll break your hand, you’ll break your head. Elbows and knees are especially dangerous. Incredibly dangerous. If you watch those guys in Thailand, it’s like — the way they turn, the way they spar — it’s basically touch sparring, like flow-sparring. It’s play. And I think that’s the way you have to do it. And coming from that into jiu-jitsu helped me. You want to be a good training partner. Cuervo knows how to play. He’ll go hard maybe for like a minute with me. But once he subs me, if we go again and I’m still learning, he’ll let me get an in — he’ll let me get into something. That’s the best kind of training partner, right? Like: I’m going to work on what I need to work on, but if this person has no idea, let them get to a better position. Let them try. Let them figure something out. It helps.

I love training with Vanessa too. She’s one of my favorite training partners. You don’t want to just muscle everything — it makes you get more technical. And then you realize: some of the women here, the technique is so on point. When I stop using my strength, it’s like — she’s passing, she’s getting to mount easily, she’s very quick… it’s like, oh shit, this is the real thing. I want that.

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This is part of a weekly series on the people who make up jiu-jitsu culture