Valente Bros. Black Belt rolling level?

Yes. Ive been to Roylers seminars a few times and he echos some of the same stuff as well, though he is probably the best sport competitor in the family

Did you feel you level’ed up your grappling after switching schools?

For sure

Even guys coming to legit comp oriented schools from barra have some pretty big deficiencies.

The schools not run by serious competitors tend to be clueless on leglocks especially.

I got my purple and brown under the Valente Brothers and I’ll say the school went through a lot of phases to get where it’s at now as a business.

When I joined you could wear whatever gi and the training was very vale tudo focused. I remember my first week there (I was already a blue belt that had relocated to Miami from a different country) and a black belt threw on some 16oz gloves and they just went “ok he’s going to try and knock you out … take him down”, and that was the warmup drill.

All the sparring started from the feet and while I’m sure I might be romanticizing a bit in my head, I remember the training to be just as “hard” as anywhere else I’ve ever rolled.

It was already a lot of self defense / fight focused training, but it certainly was “alive” to put it in SBG terms. I think I spent quite a few posts on this forum during those years defending the school and how we trained.

However, over the years as the school grew and the business model started to cater more and more to the so-called “for everyone” model. I think that was part business decision but it also had a lot to do with their (as far I as I know, genuine) conviction that it was their calling to preserve the Academia Gracie style of teaching as outlined by Helio and their father.

Which I suppose originally catered to a similar model of “upper class” folks that didn’t necessarily wanted to be in actual fight training. Meaning, sparring and hard training was an optional thing.

That certainly led to a split in the folks who trained there. Where you had smaller groups of folks that sparred hard, cross-trained, competed, etc. but cultivating fighters or competitors wasn’t something that they catered to specifically going forward.

There were also (and still are I think?) Miami VB schools run by other VB blackbelts that would low-key maintain the more vale tudo focused hard training, and folks would split off and spend most of their time at those locations as opposed to HQ.

When I would compete I was basically on my own and the school did not support the endeavor much. The generation before me did actively compete on both the national and Miami scene, so I guess that was another phase of change for the school.

I was pretty far along in my brown when I no longer felt that the direction of the school and my personal training goals aligned. Some of my early training partners and friends had already left the school for similar reasons. Things like uniform restrictions and a very inward focused culture made me feel very excluded from the larger BJJ community.

Since I had friends and coworkers that trained at other places, and I had already trained for 6 years or so before arriving at VB (I was a blue belt for 6 years :P) I did have a lot of exposure to rolling with folks outside of the school and personally I always felt pretty comfortable sparring non-VB folks in terms of skills. So it wasn’t really that I felt I wasn’t developing technically that made me uncomfortable there.

Even with the shift in focus at the school, I could still find plenty of folks that were down to grind it out and try new stuff. It was more that the school didn’t encourage or cater to folks that wanted to train like that. Combined with an increasingly closed-off culture it just started to feel a bit stifling.

To that end I sat down with Pedro around late 2015 (I think, maybe early 2016) to discuss how I was feeling. I’d been training for almost 12 years total and was a pretty seasoned brown belt at this point. I explained where I was at and that I had decided to leave the school.

It was actually a pretty good conversation and he certainly appreciated that I had the sit down with him to explain the reasons I was leaving. We parted ways on good terms and a week later I took the stripes off of my brown belt and started over as a new brown belt under Gordinho (Rafael Lima) at Start Jiu Jitsu.

When I first walked in the door there, I explained to Gordinho that I had completely given up on the idea of ever getting a black belt and that I just wanted to train somewhere with a group of folks that were open to all aspects of the modern jiu jitsu community.

Gordinho and his team took me in with open arms and training under him really rekindled my passion for jiu jitsu. At the time Toti Jordan Pitoco was still teaching there as well (he’s back in Brazil now), and between him and Gordinho they basically troubleshot and expanded my game in a very hands on way. Those reconstructive years were an amazing experience and it expanded my game tremendously. It wasn’t that I couldn’t hang with my existing game in terms of staying in the fight in a roll … but more that the number of options of where I could comfortably go and spend time in my game started to grow much larger.

Gordinho is also a much more hands-on instructor that jumps on the mat with everyone to roll and feel how people are progressing. Not much of that was happening at VB in all my time there and the teaching structure was very top-down.

I will say that Gui and Pedro are fantastic instructors and they run their curriculum at almost a university level. It’s polished, well supported and extremely accessible. Likewise, they have to teach at a scale that most schools don’t deal with. I.e. they have hundreds of students to juggle.

But seeing Gordinho routinely jump in with his students to feel and fix their games and to be so personally involved in the development of every person that walked through his doors, even if they didn’t start with him, was pretty eye opening. It might not scale well, but that’s how you build a team and I immediately felt at home there.

A few years later in late 2018 he surprised me with a promotion and I’m proud to be Gordinho’s 14th black belt.

Unfortunately I had to relocate yet again in 2020 away from Miami, and I’m currently training with another team, but I’m happy that I made the decision to start over when I did.

I don’t regret my time with the Valente Brothers, at all. It gave me a tremendous base in the fundamentals. It got me on the mat with the likes of Royler, Rickson and Relson … and especially in those early years I really enjoyed the training there.

I think Pedro and Gui have built an absolute empire in which they’ve cracked the puzzle for both student retention, sustained growth, and market cornering. They’ve created a niche Universe for their students that is very hard to step outside of … but most folks don’t WANT to step outside of it. So I don’t have any problems with it really. What happens at VB HQ doesn’t really affect my life in any significant way, and I think it’s hard to argue that folks that continue to train there aren’t aware of the other options out there. So it’s ostensibly their choice to train how and where they want.

You might argue that they’ve built more of a Jiu Jitsu Church than they’ve built a Jiu Jitsu School. I think that mental model holds for a lot of aspects of their community and it feels more like a congregation than it does a team. Some folks are into that and they’ve certainly been able to capitalize on that corner of the market.

Having said all that … would I personally ever go back into the VB ecosystem as it currently stands? Not a chance.

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Great post.

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Also, do they invoke Helio in real life as much as they do in their videos?

Yeah, Helio was very much a patriarch to them and their father growing up. The entire school is essentially in service of and a tribute to Helio Gracie.

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great post. thank you.

Fantastic post!

I find it intriguing because we visited VB HQ from Australia in 2015 as members of Royce’s association to test for our Black Belts. The vibe there was interesting to say the least.

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Go on…

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That’s a lot of shiny happy people

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