What Rickson Academy is all about

Rickson Gracie is on a mission, and Rickson Academy is how he plans to accomplish it. Although he was a legend in the rings and the single most dominant jiujitsu fighter the world will ever see, his online platform is probably not the best for someone looking for the missing piece to become a world champion. 

And while that may be bad news for a small percentage of people, it's good news for basically the entire world, given that jiujitsu can improve anyone's life significantly. Here's how he put it in his own words:

"The way jiujitsu has been evolving, it becomes very clear to me that it's a very special, a very high-performance sport with high-performance athletes in any weight division. You have to be coordinated, you have to be an athlete, you have to be tough, you have to be able to handle stress and hard training. 

"So, for this group, which I feel like cannot go bigger than five percent of the community, that's a great activity that's been evolving since I've known myself. So, even when I stopped competing, the jiujitsu competition still evolved. So, competition is something which brings to us a high performance and a select group of people who's involved with it.

"What I try to bring to the community is a jiujitsu for everybody, is a practice that can start from baby to older people, and they all will feel something: 'Now I'm better; now I have more base; now I have the capacity to handle breathing; now I have more chances to strategize my escape; now I have more patience.' 

"So, giving the tools to people with no experience and with no interest in even competing or fighting, for them to allow themselves to recognize the capacity for them to stay away from a punch, which is not about winning the fight, but deflecting the punch and defending yourself from getting a strike. 

"I guarantee, if you start to become trained on that, you're able to survive, regardless—even though you're not beating your opponent, you're able to survive. So, this is a great tool already for maybe ninety-five percent of the people who are not interested to fight. If they're sure they can survive, if they're sure they can get a better situation, they don't have to learn jiujitsu to become world champions; they have to just develop techniques and protocols that are gonna give them confidence to just live another day, happy. 

"So, the idea for us to create a jiujitsu... not to create, but to bring to you a jiujitsu that is accessible—jiujitsu which allows you to start thinking about your possibilities, thinking about the invisible aspect of your power—that gives you a sense of empowerment that cannot be described; it's priceless. And that's accessible to ninety-five percent of the people who today feel completely inaccessible for the competition jiujitsu which we use today. 

"So I try to make something special and relevant to really become a practice for the future, to cope with the technology, the humanization people pass through technology, internet, robotics. So, just to be able to hug, to breathe, to feel the body, to respond to the energy—this is something that brings you some kind of presence, which is very important these days and very much needed for the high capacity, for you to express yourself and be in charge of your life."