When Elisabeth Clay sat down on the Weslee Weighs In podcast to talk about building a career and family in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, the conversation took a sharp turn into the realities of training with your spouse. Specifically, what happens when that spouse refuses to tap to a woman.
Clay, a six-time No-Gi World Champion and one of the top grapplers on the planet, has been training alongside her husband, professional grappler Danilo Moreira, since they met in 2020. The two have very different styles on the mat, and as it turns out, very different approaches to tapping in the early days.
The problem traced back to Danilo’s background.
“It was especially when I met him. He really only trained gi,” she explained. That gi-only mindset came bundled with a particular kind of pride. “He’s like, ‘I’m not tapping to a girl.’ And I pop, pop, pop.”
Clay, known for her leg locks and her ability to find submissions from seemingly anywhere, kept finding his knees. Danilo, unwilling to give ground to a woman, would hold on.
“And then I let go and he’s like, ‘I didn’t tap.’ Oh my, dude, your knee popped like six times.”
The recklessness went both ways. Danilo’s own habits on the mat came with consequences too.
“He broke the bone in my leg from snapping a toe hold,” Clay said, noting that snapping submissions was one of his biggest tendencies she had to deal with.
She pushed back hard on the idea that training intensity justifies that kind of finish.
“Bro, you just snapped the bone in my leg. Calm down. You can go hard. You don’t need to snap my leg.”
Clay acknowledged that Danilo has improved significantly since those early days.
“He’s still a little bad about it, nowhere near like he used to.”
But refusing to tap took longer to shake. Context matters: when they met, Clay was 20 and Danilo was 22.
As she put it, “Both of us fresh black belts that are competing at the highest level.”
They were two pro athletes training together daily, with few high-level partners around, grinding against each other multiple times a day. Clay herself admitted that was “probably not the best thing.”
