Gordon Ryan and Helena Crevar are two of the top competitors at New Wave Jiu-Jitsu and footage recently emerged of the pair training together. They are at opposite ends of their respective careers right now, as Ryan has already established himself as one of the best to ever do it and Crevar had her breakout moment at ADCC 2024 just last year. There’s another very notable difference between the two elite grapplers of course; that they occupy significantly different weight classes. Although Crevar competes in the heavier women’s division at under 65kg or 70kg, Ryan is around 30-40kg heavier at any given time.
Although that kind of size difference can be hard to manage for less experienced bigger grapplers, it’s a testament to Ryan’s skill that he’s able to dial it down to match Crevar. They are doing positional sparring from the spiderweb armbar position under the watchful eye of head coach John Danaher, and both of them are doing an excellent job of having a steady work rate throughout. They use the rounds to work on their escapes from the position on the bottom and their ability to cycle through different attacks on the top, demonstrating exactly why positional sparring is such valuable tool for skill development.
It’s not clear why Gordon Ryan and Helena Crevar were focusing on the spiderweb armbar position for a training session, although it is one of the EBI overtime positions. It’s possible that one or both of them are preparing for the possibility of getting to overtime in an upcoming EBI-rules match, and positional sparring is one of the best ways to do that. Alternatively, it could just be that they wanted to work on some holes in their game or prepare for a specific opponent’s strengths. Either way, it’s very useful to see two elite grapplers working through multiple different outcomes from the same scenario.
Gordon Ryan uploaded the footage of him training with Helena Crevar to his official YouTube channel:
