Eddie Bravo Teaches the BJJ 'Swedish Twister'
When we caught up with Eddie Bravo for Jiu Jitsu Style a decade ago to film the "Swedish Twister", we did it because the variation felt, even then, like a small window onto how he actually works.…
Words: Jiu Jitsu Style
When we caught up with Eddie Bravo for Jiu Jitsu Style a decade ago to film the "Swedish Twister", we did it because the variation felt, even then, like a small window onto how he actually works. A familiar move with a regional flavour, named after the place he'd been teaching when the variation took shape — that's vintage Bravo. The Twister, the Truck, the Lockdown, the Rubber Guard — every position in the 10th Planet catalogue is forever sprouting cousins and side projects, each one labelled, drilled, and filed into the system. Ten years on, with the no-gi Jiu Jitsu world looking the way it does in 2026, the habit looks less like branding and more like a working methodology.
The Twister itself needs no real introduction by now. A spinal crank that finishes from a leg-trapped back control, it's the move that put Bravo on the map for most people — the position that made it impossible to keep ignoring 10th Planet, even for instructors who otherwise wanted nothing to do with it. The Korean Zombie hit the first one in the UFC back in 2011 and the clip travelled further than any technique Bravo had drawn on a chalkboard. Brian Ortega found another at the highest level of the featherweight division a few years later. By the time Aaron Pico was hunting it inside the Bellator cage, the question of whether the Twister belonged in serious Jiu Jitsu had quietly stopped being a question.
What Bravo was really showing in that magazine sit-down wasn't the finish, though. It was the chain. The Twister doesn't appear out of thin air — you arrive at it through entries that pass through the Truck, that share footwork with the back take, that branch into calf slicers and back attacks when the spinal lock isn't there. That's the part of Eddie's teaching that tends to land hardest on people who watch him properly for the first time. The "Swedish" prefix is almost beside the point; the variation matters because it's another tile in a much larger mosaic. Drill one of them and you've drilled all of them a little. Pull on a thread and a dozen others move.
Ten years on, the evidence sits everywhere on a Sunday-night card. EBI's overtime format reshaped how the sport thinks about sudden-death rounds, and its DNA shows up at every Who's Number One event, every CJI bracket, every Polaris card that wants a guaranteed submission ending. 10th Planet alumni and affiliates — Geo and Richie Martinez, Nick Rodriguez running off back takes in a world final, the steady wave of black belts coming out of the gyms Bravo seeded — keep landing on the highest podiums. The Twister itself has filtered into BJJ academies that would never put a 10th Planet patch on the wall. And Eddie, now closer to elder statesman than provocateur, has spent the last few years pulling more of the Brazilian Jiu Jitsu world into his orbit rather than the other way around.
For the rest of us, the takeaway from a clip like the Swedish Twister hasn't really changed. The variation in front of the camera is one page in a much thicker manual; what matters is the willingness to commit to a body of work and live in it long enough to see the pattern. Pick a position. Learn its entries, its sweeps, its back takes, its finishes, and the way one quietly hands off to the next. Drill the chain, not the trick. Whether you cosy up to 10th Planet vocabulary or stay in a more traditional Jiu Jitsu camp — gi, no-gi, modern leg game or otherwise — the lesson Eddie was teaching in that magazine spread is the one BJJ keeps proving right: depth in a few positions beats a scrapbook of moves every single time.
See you on the mats.
Originally published in Jiu Jitsu Style, Issue 35 (December 2016). Refreshed for 2026.