Grappling phenom Nicky Ryan revealed that his stubbornness in refusing to tap to Nicky Rodriguez‘s triangle choke resulted in startling facial injuries that nearly sent him to the hospital.
During a podcast appearance, Ryan detailed the aftermath of what was supposed to be a routine training drill where he started in a fully locked triangle position against the powerhouse that is Nicky Rod. What followed was far from routine.
“I’m in it for like 3 minutes straight and it gets to the point where all of the blood vessels in my face—I’ve never seen this happen—all the blood vessels in my face pop,” Ryan explained. “You just see all these little blood spots.”
The pressure from Rodriguez‘s triangle was so intense that Ryan‘s entire left side of his face “blew up” and became severely swollen. The damage didn’t stop there—Ryan also suffered two black eyes, and his left nostril began bleeding profusely, which finally prompted him to tap out.
“My whole face looked deformed and like there was a bunch of popped blood vessels all over my face for like two days,” Ryan recounted.
The aftermath was so severe that Ryan woke up the following morning to find dried blood all over himself from a nosebleed that had continued while he slept.
This extreme training session challenges the common perception that jiu-jitsu is inherently safe because practitioners can simply tap out to avoid injury. As podcast host pointedly noted,
“This is a great example of how not safe jiu-jitsu is… people will be like ‘oh no you can just get choked out, there’s no health repercussions of that.’ It’s like there’s definitely health repercussions.”
Despite the alarming physical reaction, Ryan wasn’t particularly frightened by the experience, though he was surprised by his body’s response.
“I wasn’t like scared I was going to be fine. But I was just so surprised that I’ve never seen that reaction happen to anybody else.”
The anecdote underscores both the incredible pressure Nicky Rodriguez can generate and the lengths to which high-level competitors will go before admitting defeat, even in a training environment.
