“The real level is to be kind”: ten no-gi rounds with Professor Igor Lunyakov

A black belt from Russia came to train, and we did what jiu-jitsu people do: three-minute rounds with everybody.

Professor Igor Lunyakov is a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt under Professor Roy Dean and the head instructor of Ronin Family in Russia. He earned his belt in the first online black belt demonstration Roy Dean ever held, and he has competed at the Abu Dhabi World Masters. Last week he was in New Delhi, and he came to our mats in Defence Colony.

Nobody announced anything. He changed, warmed up, and started rolling. Ten rounds, no gi, three minutes each, with whoever was next in line.

What a visiting black belt actually looks like

The thing worth watching here is not a technique. It is a temperature.

Ten rounds against a room full of people who all want to do well in front of a visitor is a hard way to spend half an hour, and at no point does he speed up to match anyone. He lets the scramble arrive instead of chasing it. He takes the position that is available rather than the one that would look best. He smiles through most of it.

Our students, to their credit, went at him properly. Nobody held back to be polite, which is the correct way to honour somebody who has come to roll. Round after round you can watch the same pattern: a burst of effort, a calm answer, and then the position quietly belongs to him.

That gap is the whole lesson, and it is not made of secrets. It is made of not panicking.

“The real level is to be kind”

At the end he spoke to the room. The line that stayed with us:

“The real level is to be flexible, to be kind, and still, in the same moment, be technical.”

We teach under a phrase of our own — kindness over toughness — and it is sometimes mistaken for softness, usually by people who have not trained. Here was a black belt who had just rolled ten straight rounds saying the same thing in his own words, to a room that had just felt the difference.

Kind is not the opposite of technical. It is what becomes possible once you are technical enough not to need force.

Why visitors matter to a studio in Delhi

Jiu-jitsu travels better than almost any sport. A person who trains in Moscow can walk into a room in New Delhi, bow in, and be understood completely without a shared language — which is the ordinary magic of this art and still worth saying out loud.

People have come to these mats from Belfast, São Paulo, Kazakhstan, Kathmandu, and now Moscow. Every one of them leaves something behind in how our students move, and every one of them makes the room a little less provincial.

If you train and you are passing through Delhi, you are welcome. Message us before you come and we will tell you which class suits the day you are here. Bring a rash guard; we have mats, water and a room full of people who will be glad you came.

Thank you, Professor Igor. Our mats are always open for you.

Where to start, if you are reading this and have never trained

You do not begin by rolling ten rounds with a black belt. You begin with a free first class, in which somebody shows you how to fall down without hurting yourself and how to get back up. Everything in that video grew out of that one class, for every single person in it.

We teach gi and no-gi seven days a week in Defence Colony, South Delhi, and the first class is always free. If you would like to see what a full session looks like before you come, we filmed one from start to finish.