Jimmy Pedro's Fireman's Carry: A Judo Takedown for BJJ

Words: Jiu Jitsu Style

When we shared Jimmy Pedro's fireman's carry on Jiu Jitsu Style on New Year's Eve 2015, we ran it with barely a caption — it sat in the feed right next to a Kyle Dake wrestling highlight reel, and between the two clips the message wrote itself. Here was one of the great American judoka — four Olympic teams, two Olympic bronze medals, a World Championship gold in 1999 — teaching a takedown most of us associated with the wrestling room, aimed squarely at a BJJ audience that, at the time, mostly started its matches by sitting down. A decade on, the clip has only become more relevant, because the takedown Pedro was teaching has quietly become one of the most jiu-jitsu-friendly throws there is.

Watch it: Jimmy Pedro's fireman's carry for Jiu Jitsu.

For anyone who never met him on a mat, Pedro is judo royalty. Beyond his own competitive record, he's the coach who guided Kayla Harrison to back-to-back Olympic golds and Travis Stevens to silver in Rio, and the Pedro family dojo in Wakefield, Massachusetts has been producing world-class grip fighters for forty years. So when he chose the fireman's carry to show a Jiu Jitsu readership, it wasn't a novelty pick. It was a judgement call from a man who knows exactly which techniques survive contact with which rulesets.

How the Fireman's Carry Works

Judo calls it kata guruma — the shoulder wheel. Wrestling calls it the fireman's carry. Here is the version Pedro actually walks through in the clip, step by step.

It starts with the grip, and this is the part he spends the most time on. From a normal collar-and-sleeve tie-up, he lets go of the lapel with one hand and wraps it around the outside of his opponent's arm — always working from the inside to the outside. The reason matters: coming over the top like that traps the arm underneath his own, so when he attacks he has full control of the opponent's upper body. Start on the outside instead, he warns, and the moment your opponent lets go you have nothing — no control, and the throw slips away. Inside to outside first, every time.

From that inside grip he gets his opponent moving — a step, a little forward pressure — then comes to the outside, ducks under the trapped arm, and jumps his body weight all the way underneath the opponent's centre of gravity. The whole time he's pulling down as hard as he can with the arm that's wrapped up top. Everything stays tight and connected; there's no gap for the opponent to slide out of. As the opponent's weight transfers forward and over him, Pedro spins off his legs and takes both of their feet clean off the floor.

Then he stands the load back up and finishes. In judo, he notes, the goal is to drive the man flat onto his back as hard as you can. Pedro's own finish is to come all the way back to his feet and roll through with a somersault to complete the throw. Run at full speed it's four beats: inside grip, make him move, step underneath, come up.

The detail worth stealing is that Pedro doesn't muscle the entry — he makes his opponent's own forward weight do the loading. That's what makes the carry such a natural fit for grapplers: the exact moment an opponent drives into you to fight grips is the moment they've committed their weight forward. If your standup currently consists of stiff-arming until someone pulls guard, the fireman's carry is a reason to start reading pressure instead of just surviving it.

Why This Throw Belongs to Jiu Jitsu Now

There's a line in the clip that's easy to miss: Pedro calls kata guruma a technique that's now banned from his sport, "because you're not allowed to attack the legs." He's right, and it's worth unpacking, because it's the whole reason this throw has drifted over to our side of the mat.

The classic entries into kata guruma reach for the leg or the trouser to help load the opponent up, and that's exactly what the IJF outlawed. The federation's ban on leg grabs — phased in from 2010 and total by 2013 — stripped kata guruma, te guruma and the ankle picks out of international judo overnight. There's been movement since: Japan's own federation reinstated a restricted, single-leg version of leg grabs domestically in 2025, on the condition you establish an upper-body grip first. But at the international, Olympic level the ban still stands, so in the sport Pedro built his career in, the fireman's carry remains sidelined.

In BJJ and no-gi grappling, it's a different story — the throw is fair game. The IBJJF allows it at every belt, and it's a staple of modern no-gi. The one thing to mind is the finish: our rules don't reward planting someone on their head, so trade Pedro's "land him as hard as you can" judo ending for a controlled roll-through that lands you in top position. Same throw, softer landing, points on the board. One of judo's oldest takedowns now lives almost entirely in our sport, which makes Pedro's decision to teach it to jiu-jitsu players look less like cross-promotion and more like a rehoming.

And the sport he rehomed it into has grown to meet it. The wrestling-flavoured standup that felt exotic in 2015 is everywhere in 2026 — the Ruotolo brothers start matches on their feet as a matter of habit, ADCC's ruleset punishes the passive guard pull, and level-change attacks on the legs are as much a part of modern Brazilian Jiu Jitsu as the berimbolo ever was. Learning it has never been easier either: Pedro and Travis Stevens have put their entire American Judo System on BJJ Fanatics, and YouTube will serve you a hundred fireman's carry breakdowns before breakfast. Pick the version that suits your grips, find a partner who pushes back, and drill the level change until the entry costs you nothing. The carry was a gift from judo to BJJ. The least we can do is use it.

See you on the mats.

Originally published in Jiu Jitsu Style, 31 December 2015. Refreshed for 2026.