“It became cool in tournaments when I would compete. “When people started calling me twister at school, I wanted to put a stop to it,” he said. While it initially may have been rather silly and turned off Bravo, he slowly warmed up to the idea once he started competing and finding success in jiu-jitsu tournaments. It just reminder me of yellow, green and blue dots with kids playing the twister game.” I thought that was the weakest nickname ever. “Finally, they started calling me the twister, and I hated that. And there was already a guillotine in jiu jitsu, so they didn’t call it the guillotine. I told them it was a wrestling move I learned in the ninth grade called the guillotine. “My instructor Jean-Jacques Machado changed the name to the twister, him and his brother. “It was always the guillotine to me,” he said. He brought the guillotine along with him. In his 20s, Bravo began to train in Brazilian jiu jitsu and find his calling. “In wrestling they’re called ‘leg riders.’ Leg riders are usually the ones that are good with the guillotine.” “Us weak wrestlers were forced to use our legs in unorthodox ways,” Bravo said. They both thought it would be ideal for the small-framed Bravo, who lacked a bit in the strength department. It would be two upperclassmen, one junior and one senior, who pulled him aside and taught him the move. It began on the wrestling mats in California at Santa Ana High School, where Bravo was a member of the school’s wrestling team competing in the 119-pound weight division. You have to go all the way back to 1985 to trace the metamorphosis of the wrestling guillotine to the jiu-jitsu twister. They didn’t know what the hell that was.” When people saw the twister in the UFC, that was the whole world watching. “I’m shocked we haven’t seen the twister more in MMA,” Bravo said. Shayna Baszler, Jason Day, Jason Chambers and Nick Thompson all have successfully executed the technique on the regional circuit in recent years, but none executed on a significant platform like Jung did. It was the first twister in the UFC, but there have been four or five other ones in smaller shows.”
“It was actually not the first twister in MMA.
“It was pretty amazing, pretty surreal,” Bravo recently told Radio (after seeing his baby hatch for the first time inside the octagon.
In other words, the timing could not have been better.Īlthough Bravo did not invent the twister, a move that originates in wrestling (in which it is known as the guillotine), he is credited with successfully adapting and popularizing the move in the world of jiu jitsu. Jung stated in his post-fight interview with UFC commentator Joe Rogan he had learned the technique by watching online instructional videos of 10th Planet Jiu-Jitsu’s Eddie Bravo.Īlong with the Internet postings, Bravo already has a book on the market entitled “Mastering the Twister,” and he currently is in the process of finalizing a DVD on the subject set for release in June or July. History was made recently when “The Korean Zombie” Chan Sung Jung forced Leonard Garcia to tap to the first-ever twister submission in the UFC history, which came this past month at UFC Fight Night 24.