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On nights when I have trouble sleeping, instead of counting sheep, I count ways of choking people: the cross-collar choke, the triangle choke, the inverted triangle, the wrong side triangle, the Ezekiel, the gi-zekiel, the Darce, the anaconda. The list is long, with the setups for them uncountable, and strangles are only one of the dozens of submission holds I practice between four and six times a week at BJJ Fit, a Brazilian jiu-jitsu school in Badalona, Spain.
Jiu-jitsu is hard to write about, principally because it is hard to say what it is. When I first heard of it in the mid-1990s, thanks to Royce Gracie’s groundbreaking victories in the early Ultimate Fighting Championships, I believed the origin myth still common in the thousands of gyms around the world where a photo of his father, Grand Master Helio Gracie, presides over the mats: In the early 20th century, a famed Japanese jiu-jitsu fighter, Mitsuyo Maeda (also known as Count Koma), arrived in the B