There’s a number of prominent BJJ personalities that have made substantial weight gains during their careers. Perhaps the most obvious transformations are those of Andre Galvao and Gordon Ryan. Each of them went from competing at 170lbs to being well over 220lbs.
This is a part of a reason why there’s a widely spread belief that everyone in professional Grappling is using PEDs.
While Ryan never openly admitted PED use, he’s never claimed to be natural which is more than we can say for many others. His friend, Joe Rogan, even went public on a podcast saying that Ryan is upfront about his PED use.
“And that’s like where a lot of sports are right now. There’s certain sports like Grappling. Gordon Ryan, who’s the greatest grappler of all time, openly admits to taking PEDs, openly talks about it because everybody’s doing it.”
“And he’s just honest. He’s just like, yeah, I take them. Everybody’s taking them. They’re not illegal in our sport. And if you look at him, he looks like a guy who takes PEDs. He looks like a f***ing Greek god. But you can’t look at him. That’s Gordon Ryan.”
A clip that recently went viral online features Ryan’s coach John Danaher giving a measured evaluation of team Atos, that was helping Felipe Pena face Gordon Ryan for the 4th time.
Danaher goes on to say:
“In addition, (Galvao) has many talented students, and I’m sure they provide very, very hard training for Felipe, probably much harder than he would have got in his home gym in Brazil. They also have a very, very strong physical training and supplement program. And so I’m sure he’ll be in top physical condition for the match. His strength and endurance will be, I think, improved over the previous match.”
