Judo for Jiu Jitsu with Jimmy Pedro
When we filmed Jimmy Pedro a decade ago walking through Tai Otoshi and the small tweaks he uses for jiu jitsu players, the standup game in BJJ was — to be honest — a bit of a national…
Words: Jiu Jitsu Style
When we filmed Jimmy Pedro a decade ago walking through Tai Otoshi and the small tweaks he uses for jiu jitsu players, the standup game in BJJ was — to be honest — a bit of a national embarrassment. Most matches still started with a guard pull from one side and a reluctant nod from the other, and the average black belt's takedown library topped out at a double-leg they hadn't drilled since blue. Pedro, a four-time Olympian and the head coach of the US Judo team at the London 2012 games, sat down with us anyway. The clip wasn't a sales pitch. It was a quiet reminder that the first phase of every grappling match still belongs to whichever player has actually trained for it.
For anyone who never met him on a mat, Pedro is judo royalty. Four Olympic teams in a row, a World Championship gold in 1999, and — by the time he was coaching rather than competing — the man who guided Kayla Harrison to back-to-back Olympic golds and Travis Stevens to silver in Rio. The Pedro family dojo in Wakefield, Massachusetts has been quietly turning out players who can grip-fight at the highest level for forty years now. So when he started adapting throws for the jiu jitsu market, he wasn't dabbling in something adjacent — he was bringing world-class judo into a room that, frankly, needed it.
Tai Otoshi is the throw Pedro picked for a reason. It's a body-drop where the thrower's leg cuts across the opponent's foot rather than scooping behind it, which makes it remarkably forgiving against an opponent who's expecting a leg attack and braced against one. In a gi it works off the same cross-grip most BJJ players are already comfortable with. It loads quickly, finishes low, and — crucially — leaves you in a good top position rather than ankle-deep in a scramble. The adaptation he showed in the clip was small but pointed: shorter steps, less commitment to the rotation, and a finishing position designed for the side-control transition every BJJ player already knows what to do with.
Ten years on, the case Pedro was making has more or less won. ADCC's evolving ruleset has put a real cost on a passive guard pull. The IBJJF's standup penalties have done the same on the gi side. The result is a generation of players you'd struggle to imagine pulling guard in a final — Felipe Pena and Roberto Jimenez carrying a real judo base into the open weight bracket, Nicholas Meregali setting up uchi-mata-style entries off the cross-grip, Ffion Davies bringing a serious judo background into the women's lightweight division at the highest level. The Ruotolo brothers have started matches on their feet for years now. Travis Stevens, retired from competition, has spent his second career teaching judo to jiu jitsu rooms full-time. The cross-pollination of judo and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu that Pedro was pushing in 2014 is the default in 2026.
For the rest of us, the takeaway is the same one Pedro has been quietly making for thirty years. You don't need to become a judoka to use judo. You need a small handful of throws that suit your body, a grip game that doesn't crumble the first time someone fights for the lapel, and the willingness to drill the entry until it costs you nothing to commit to it. Pick a throw — Tai Otoshi is a fine place to start — and live in it for a year. Find a judo room one night a week if there's one in your town. The clip Pedro shot for the magazine all those years ago wasn't about Tai Otoshi at all, in the end. It was about whether you were going to keep treating the first phase of a match as something that happens to you, or something you do.
See you on the mats.
Originally published in Jiu Jitsu Style. Refreshed for 2026.