Martial Arts
Straight talk and proven systems for managing and growing martial arts schools.
Alex Cuevas found out you weigh in wearing your gi shortly before he had to weigh in wearing his gi.
"I'm not even sure how much this gi weighs. I weighed in before, and I was fine. But I don't know if this thing weighs two pounds, three pounds, five pounds. So I hope I make the weight."
He made it. First BJJ tournament of his life, at 49, in a room with fourteen mats and more than a thousand people in it.
His son Neo got hurt partway through the day. There was an açaí stand next to the Gymdesk booth, which Alex mentions on camera and rates highly.
Two matches. His first opponent never showed.
"My arms are so burnt. When I got up here, I felt like I had just done a one-hour training session, even though I only did two matches."
Then the referee raised his hand, and Alex stood on the top step of the podium with a gold medal.
A few days later he drove out to Etobicoke to interview the man who ran the whole thing. Gym owners have one question about in-house tournaments, and Alex asked it in the first ten minutes.
A Sky the Color of Weak Tea
The drive in wasn't scenic. Wildfires were burning six or seven hours away and the whole Toronto area had gone the color of a nicotine stain.
"It's so yellow out here… I think the fires are like six, seven, eight hours away… But, man, it is gray. Kind of scratchy throat."
Alex also couldn't pronounce Etobicoke.
He gave it three tries in the car, landed on something like "Ibita Coke," walked in, and got corrected inside of a minute.
Then he trained.
An hour of rolling with a team that turned out to be very good at flattening him out from closed guard, which he brings up later with the specific enthusiasm of a man who got beaten up in a way he found educational.
"I was very impressed with their ability for them in a closed guard to just wreck my posture. I couldn't hold them up, man."
Jorge Britto owns Etobicoke BJJ, about 250 members, three years open. He's also been head instructor at Toronto BJJ since May 2008—seventeen years, and he's still there.
He founded the tournament Alex had just competed in. Ten years old that weekend, and sold out.
So Alex asked the obvious thing. Did you start with in-house tournaments and grow from there?
Well, I Disagree With That
The answer took about three seconds to stop being a yes. Here's how Jorge puts it:
"The problem is a lot of people feel like, oh, it's worth it. I put my students to compete at my events and give me my money. Well, I disagree with that."
That first sentence is him doing an impression of a gym owner. You watch entry fees leave the building every time your students drive to an open tournament, and you think: I could just keep that.
Britto has run the numbers on keeping it.
"Sometimes you go and you run in-house tournaments and you make a couple hundred dollars extra on that month. They will not be worth it."
A couple hundred dollars is not nothing. Look at what it costs to earn: a Saturday, your mats, your staff, and a room full of members you already pay rent to serve.
His objection runs through one principle.
"I feel like the student retention is your key to be successful in your gym."
Everything else is downstream of that. If an event helps retention, run it forever. If it works against retention, the couple hundred dollars is a rounding error on the wrong side of the ledger.
What Happens to a Room When You Make It Hostile
Your gym is the one place your gym community feels safe getting beaten up. They walk in, they lose to a purple belt for an hour, they laugh about it, they come back Thursday.
An in-house tournament changes what the room is.
You're now transforming the space where they are comfortable in an environment that people feel a little bit more hostile. You might create rivalism between your students that they're not necessary.
Students roll against each other every day, and he's got no problem with friction.
"They're always going to have those little beef here and there, and that's normal of human beings. But if you have a good guidance, you encourage them to achieve something real."
He says real four times in that one answer.
An in-house bracket puts a student through every nerve of competition and hands them a result that stops mattering at your front door.
"When they go in an outlet that is actually made for that, they are able to experience the full thing. Not just that could be real, but that was not real. And then when they see the real ones, they feel like they're so away from achieving. It's kind of like you're handicapping your students."
And then, immediately:
"With all due respect to everybody."
Where an Opinion Like That Comes From
Britto grew up in Rio de Janeiro and started training in the early '90s. When his first instructor moved away for work he ended up at Gracie Tijuca, a branch so large it stopped him at the door.
"As soon as I walk in, I probably had the same kind of feeling as your son. Like, wow, that's the Disneyland of Jiu-Jitsu."
He couldn't really afford to be there. His mother worked in a laundry, so he worked out a sponsorship arrangement with it.
When the World Championship was held in Brazil and the visiting athletes needed their gis washed between sessions, he washed them and charged for it. That's how a teenager paid his membership at one of the biggest academies in Latin America.
Wellington "Megaton" Dias—coral belt, father of UFC fighter Mackenzie Dern—was translating for him at those camps. One day he sat down beside him.
"Do you like my lifestyle? Like, I train, I compete, I can pay my bills comfortably. But it's not just being a champion… If you learn how to speak English and learn how to teach, you're going to open way more opportunities for yourself."
Then he worked the second World Championship as staff, back when the scores were on flipboards and the puzzle mats were brand new. Carlos Gracie Jr. walked in and told the crew this was only the beginning.
"And I go home and, like, mom, I'm not going back to school. I'm going to be a jiu-jitsu professor. I'm going to leave out of Brazil. I'm going to move to California."
His mother had raised him alone since his father died when he was eight. She took it about as well as you'd expect. He ended up in Toronto.
So when Britto says an in-house tournament is the wrong container for a student's first real test, he isn't guessing at what a real one does to a person. Tournaments are why he has a career at all, and why it's in Canada.
We'll keep you in the loop with fresh content, podcasts, how-to guides, tool reviews, and product exclusives.
The One Job an In-House Tournament Is Actually Good At
KEY TAKEAWAY:
An in-house tournament is a rehearsal for your staff, not a showcase for your students. Run one to find out who panics when two divisions run long, who can tell a parent no, and how many people the score table actually needs.
Ask what the event is teaching and who it's teaching. The day the honest answer is "nothing new," it has finished its job.
The answer comes out sideways, halfway through a story about something else.
Britto did run an in-house event before his first public tournament in Ontario. He is specific about why, and it has nothing to do with his students.
"So first I ran an in-house, but my purpose to do the in-house was to build stuff to make the bigger one."
The in-house event was a rehearsal for the staff.
"So I built an in-house just to like teach the guys how to—"
Alex finishes the sentence for him: "Yeah, like dry run, getting used to it, practice."
"This is how you do, select people to do it. And we're going to do a real one. You guys already know. So I have a person to manage this, person to manage that."
Nobody pitches in-house tournaments this way.
The standard case is that they're an on-ramp for nervous white belts, which the in-house tournaments guide covers properly and which holds up in one situation: when there's no real bracket your students can reach.
Britto names that exception himself further down. His version is that the in-house is an on-ramp for your table crew.
Running a bracket teaches you things no checklist will.
Who panics when two divisions run long. Who's good at telling a parent no. How many people you actually need on the score table versus how many you thought.
Whether your weigh-in line can move sixty kids in forty minutes.
You want to learn all of that on a Saturday where the only people watching are your own members. Then you take that same crew somewhere with a real bracket and they already know their jobs.
So ask what the event is teaching, and who it's teaching. Once the honest answer is "nothing new," it has finished its work.
Two Decades From Hand-Drawn to Thirty Minutes
The first tournaments Britto ran were four editions of a local event in his own neighborhood in Rio.
Then he moved to Canada and started over, and put on a public event in Ontario in 2008 or 2009 that he believes was the first in the country to take pre-registration.
Pre-registration meant a second website that didn't talk to the first one.
"I did all the brackets by my hand… And I remember I put like, it was the first ever tournament probably in Canada that was a pre-registration. And to make the pre-registration in one different website, oh my God, everything was so hard."
Alex brought this up because he'd overheard Britto on the mic at NextGen, talking up Smoothcomp while Alex was changing for his own match in the bathroom. Which is a very normal way to learn what software a promoter loves.
"Oh my God, Smoothcomp. It was a revolution, right?"
He first saw it working overseas as a federation's in-house system, wanted it for everybody, and has run NextGen on it ever since.
"I was like, wow, man, imagine if this is for everybody. And then eventually it was out. And then right away, I put in a NextGen. Today I open a registration of one tournament. Just today, like in maybe 30 minutes, boom, tournament's out."
Thirty minutes now. The same man was drawing brackets by hand and duct-taping two websites together the better part of two decades earlier.
Smoothcomp handles his tournament. Gymdesk handles his gym, where he used to write down every student's name by hand at promotion time.
The manual tax gets paid either way. Britto paid it himself for years, at the tournament and in the gym.
The Rung Almost Every Gym Skips
The jump from a Saturday in your gym to a thousand-person open is enormous.
Fourteen mats and a room that loud is a long way from your own back room, and Britto doesn't ask his students to make that jump in one step.
His association runs its own event for members. Smaller, low-key, and one detail makes it work.
So our guys have like a small event, but it's not in a gym. It's out. It's a different venue.
Off the home mats. Same friendly faces, same forgiving stakes, and a strange room with a real bracket in it.
"So the expectation is like you go there, try yourself, put the feet in the water, because some people don't want it. And then that way you keep people like getting a little bit out of their comfortable zone."
If your in-house event is popular and you're wondering what comes after it, this is the rung.
It's also, for most gyms, the better first taste—your beginner gets the nerves and a result that counts, without a five-hour drive.
Book a community hall. Split the cost with two friendly gyms.
Nobody has to travel five hours, and nobody's home mat becomes the site of their worst afternoon.
When In-House Tournaments Are Still the Right Call
There's one case where Britto says keep running it.
"If you're in the city that the only tournament is hundreds of thousands of kilometers of distance and your students have no way to go, you might want to do in-house."
Geography wins. If you're four hours from the nearest open, your choice is an in-house event or offering no competition at all.
Run it. The guide to running in-house events covers this case in detail, including a Colorado gym that has run them for nearly a decade for exactly this reason.
Then he adds a condition.
"But then as soon as you build some structure, put that event outside."
Ten Thousand People Who Know They Won't Win
So where does the money come back? Britto answers with runners.
"There's marathons that over 10,000 people run the marathon. Who's going to win the marathon? Three, four guys? … People want to participate because that's a sport that they dedicate. If they complete the marathon, they're already very, very proud."
A marathon works because ten thousand people show up knowing they won't win and go anyway.
Then, in the same breath:
"By any means, I'm going to say like, oh, that's okay to lose. No, we hate to lose. We want our students to win every single match. I'm very competitive. But we know it's impossible. I don't prioritize competition, but it is very, very, very important to compete."
He'd watched it happen at his own event that weekend, on one of those fourteen mats.
"This tournament, this weekend, we have a guy that was amputee and he won his division. So how inspired is that?"
That competitor is not in your gym.
Neither are the three gyms from two towns over, the cousins, the coworkers, or the parents who came to watch and left thinking about signing up.
"Put that event outside. Because it's also going to bring people to watch and increase the quality of what you're doing so it will spread more. So more people go to your gym."
An in-house tournament reaches people who already pay you. A public event reaches everyone they know, which makes it the cheapest marketing you'll run all year.
And it keeps going:
"You're teaching people how to use jiu-jitsu as that tool of self-development will make them engage more with the arts. So they're going to train more. They're going to buy more gis. They're going to buy more privates."
Asked flatly whether competition drives retention, he doesn't qualify it: "100%."
Swimming, and Other Non-Negotiables
Parents ask him constantly whether their kid should compete. He answers with a swimming pool.
Look, you have to see jiu-jitsu as just swimming for a kid right now. In my home, it's non-negotiable until they're 16. Swimming and jiu-jitsu. Because in the pool of life, you need to know how to swim.
You put a kid in the water so that the day the boat goes down, they have a chance. Same with a fight. He wants his daughter able to handle herself with nobody around to help, so he puts her in brackets, including one against a taller, heavier boy.
She'd lost her first match that weekend and come to him crying.
"I just want you to understand that you can face the challenge. If we're going to win or not, we want to see there, how we're going to behave, but you are capable to face the challenge."
She beat the boy. He says the win wasn't the point, and then he goes and finds her after the match to make sure she understood which part was.
If your kids program only ever tests a child in the room where everyone already likes them, you're not testing much.
Spend the Saturday on the Phone Call Instead
Retiring the in-house event frees up a Saturday and a couple hundred dollars. Britto would spend both on the least glamorous job in the building.
If the guy misses one, two classes, this time to a phone call, to an email, saying, hey, what's up? Is everything okay? Because sometimes the students think that we don't notice them, and they need to understand that we notice you.
One or two missed classes, not a month.
That's a tighter loop than most gyms run, and it catches people well before the fifth-class cliff.
It's also the loop that decides whether a nervous first-timer ever makes it to a real tournament at all. And it's the loop that catches the student who competed once, lost badly, and quietly stopped coming.
No bracket you run in your own gym will find that person. A phone call on Wednesday will.
The catch is that you can only call the people you noticed. Britto has run a gym at a scale where noticing broke down.
"At Toronto BJJ, we had a point that we have like 900 members. And every time that I come back on my promotions, it was a nightmare.
This is before Gymdesk. I have to go to each student, write down each name, Jesus Christ. And then promotion and you miss some student, right on the spot, you see the guy there, sad because you forgot him and then you message him later. That was terrible."
You skip a kid at a belt promotion and he's standing right there when it happens.
Which is the only reason to name the software in a story like this: it exists so the noticing happens on its own and the call still gets made on Wednesday.
Attendance tracking surfaces who dropped off this week, while reaching out still means something.
Promotion eligibility by class count means nobody gets skipped for training Tuesdays when you teach Mondays—a multi-instructor blind spot Britto raises unprompted.
He gives gym software a real endorsement and then undercuts it in the same sentence:
"If your gym don't have it, you should consider that highly, because it just takes, I would say, 75% of the whole work."
You still have to do your homework. The tool removes the paperwork, not the relationship.
What He's Actually Counting
Ask Britto what he counts and he goes right past headcount and the thousand people at his tournament.
My success as a instructor is when people come here as a white belt and leave as a black belt. That's the highest achievement.
And when they go in and open their own gym, it's even better. That's what I really see—multiply. If you're good at multiply, a good leader, like build other leaders.
He had two black belts opening their own academies within two months of that conversation. A black belt in BJJ is commonly a ten-year project, and then they leave to go do it themselves.
Whatever you're counting in your own gym, that one takes a decade to move.
Send Them Somewhere That Counts
Run the in-house tournament. Britto did.
Just be honest about what it's for: a dry run for the crew who'll one day run you something bigger, and a first taste for beginners only when there's no real bracket within reach.
Both jobs have an end date, and neither of them is "extra revenue."
So the answer to when to stop running in-house tournaments is: when it's finished teaching anybody anything.
When the nearest real tournament is reachable, send them. When your event outgrows your mats, move it off them. And when a student stops showing up two weeks after their first competition, call them.
That phone call is worth more than every entry fee you ever collected.
Alex drove home from Toronto with a gold medal and two burnt arms. He also had a banged-up kid and a list of holes in his game he hadn't known were there.
He'd have found none of that in a bracket at his own gym.
The full conversation is on the Gymdesk Originals episode.
