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. The mechanics Pedro walked through in the clip are the same either way: control the arm, change your level as your opponent pushes in, shoot your free arm between their legs or behind the knee, and load them across your shoulders like the name suggests. Then you don't lift so much as wheel — their body rotates over yours and arrives on the mat with you already attached to the top position. Done properly it costs remarkably little strength, because your opponent's forward pressure does most of the loading for you. Done at Pedro's level it looks less like a throw and more like a trapdoor opening.

The detail worth stealing is the timing. Pedro doesn't muscle into the entry — he waits for the push. 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 loaded themselves. 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

Here's the twist the original post never spelled out: judo itself can no longer use this technique in competition. The IJF's ban on leg grabs — phased in from 2010 and total by 2013 — outlawed the classic kata guruma entry at every judo tournament on earth. In BJJ and no-gi grappling, it remains perfectly legal. One of judo's oldest throws 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.