Tornado Guard With Cyborg Abreu: The BJJ Position He Built

Words: Jiu Jitsu Style

When Jiu Jitsu Style first shared this Roberto 'Cyborg' Abreu clip in April 2016, in the middle of Abu Dhabi World Pro week, the tornado guard still felt like a position with one owner. Cyborg was the reigning ADCC absolute champion of the era, the head of the ever-dangerous Fight Sports team in Miami, and the only super-heavyweight in BJJ anyone had seen spend whole matches spinning underneath people on purpose. The clip we ran was simple: the man who built the guard, breaking down how it actually works. Ten years later, it's still one of the best introductions to the position you'll find.

Watch it: Cyborg Abreu breaking down the tornado guard.

The tornado guard grows out of half guard, which is part of what makes it so disorienting to deal with. From a fairly ordinary-looking half guard, Cyborg dips his head under his opponent's center of gravity, inverts, and uses his shins and hooks as a coiled spring against the top player's base. When it releases, the effect is exactly what the name promises: the person on top gets picked up and deposited somewhere they did not plan to be, usually with Cyborg already arriving on top or attached to a leg. It behaves less like a single technique and more like a small weather system: sweeps, back takes and submissions all spinning out of the same entry.

What made it genuinely radical is who was doing it. In the mid-2010s, inverting was filed under "flexible lightweight stuff" in most academies, the domain of the berimbolo kids, not hundred-kilo men. Cyborg tore that assumption up. He built the tornado guard around his own body: an enormously strong athlete who was also, improbably, comfortable upside down. The result was a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu guard that giants could play and lightweights could learn from, and it carried him to the biggest absolute title in the sport.

Why the tornado guard still matters in modern Jiu Jitsu

The best measure of the position is how normal it looks now. In 2026, inversion is simply part of the sport's vocabulary at every weight. Mikey Musumeci spins under people as calmly as most of us shrimp. The Ruotolo brothers scramble through upside-down positions that would have been called reckless a decade ago. Watch a modern black belt absolute division and you'll see heavyweights entering on legs and rolling under passes, a sight that was borderline heresy when this clip first aired. The tornado guard wasn't the only reason the culture shifted, but Cyborg proved the concept at the extreme end of the scale, and the rest of BJJ followed.

Cyborg himself has long since done what the modern game asks of its innovators: he documented it. Where in 2016 you had to catch a seminar or squint at competition footage, today the full tornado system sits on BJJ Fanatics and YouTube is full of breakdowns of his best competition finishes. Fight Sports remains a factory for hard, creative grapplers, and the guard remains the house specialty.

What the rest of us can take to the mats

The technique is worth your drilling time, but the better lesson is the one underneath it. Cyborg didn't inherit the tornado guard from a lineage; he built it, rep by rep, around his own attributes and the problems his opponents gave him. That's the invitation in this clip for every Jiu Jitsu player watching it. Your best position comes from noticing what your body does well, finding the half guard exchange where that shows up, and refining it until people who know it's coming still can't stop it. Copying an athlete half your size or twice your flexibility rarely gets you there.

So play with the entry. Get comfortable being briefly upside down under a resisting partner, starting light, with someone patient. And the next time you're told a position isn't for your body type, remember that the most feared inverted guard in BJJ history was invented by its biggest man.

See you on the mats.

Originally published in Jiu Jitsu Style, 22 April 2016. Refreshed for 2026.