10th Planet San Diego: inside the system everyone argues about

Quick answer: 10th Planet San Diego is the original 10th Planet school in San Diego County, at 6008 Mission Gorge Road, run by Richie "Boogeyman" Martinez. His brother Geo "Freakahzoid" Martinez runs the Oceanside academy, and the two are known as the Freak Brothers. 10th Planet is Eddie Bravo's no-gi-only system, built after Bravo submitted Royler Gracie at ADCC 2003, and it's known for rubber guard, the lockdown, the truck and the twister. It has been argued about since the day it was founded, and some of that criticism is fair.

Walk into a 10th Planet school and the first thing you notice is what isn't there. No gis on the rack. No belts around anyone's waist. People warm up in rash guards and spats, and if you want to know who the purple belts are you have to ask or find out the hard way.

The San Diego school sits on Mission Gorge Road, between Grantville and Allied Gardens where the auto shops are. It had its grand opening in January 2015 and the team still calls it their original location; Geo Martinez's Oceanside gym is the other half of the operation.

That combination, a niche system with a devoted following and a founder people either love or roll their eyes at, is what makes 10th Planet worth writing about straight instead of politely.

It starts with a brown belt beating Royler Gracie

In 2003, Eddie Bravo went to ADCC as a relative unknown and submitted Royler Gracie with a triangle choke. Royler had won that division in 1999, 2000 and 2001 without losing a match. Bravo pulled guard, worked a guard nobody in the building had a name for, climbed into a position most of his opponents had never had to defend, and got the tap.

He got his black belt from Jean-Jacques Machado after that trip, and opened the first 10th Planet school in Los Angeles that same year. The whole system grew out of one argument: Bravo had been working for the UFC, watching high-level jiu-jitsu players underperform in MMA, and concluded that the gi was part of the problem. Train in a jacket, compete without one, and the grips you spent years building stop existing at the worst possible moment.

So he took the gi out entirely. That was the heresy in 2003. It is very close to conventional wisdom now.

The system, position by position

Strip away the branding and 10th Planet is a set of positions designed to solve the specific problem of holding and attacking a strong, sweaty opponent with nothing to grab.

• Rubber guard. A closed-guard family where you use your own leg, controlled with your hand, as the grip you don't have. It breaks posture, opens up chokes and omoplatas, and demands more hip flexibility than most adults have.

• The lockdown. A half guard leg entanglement that stalls a passer and creates space to come up or attack.

• The truck. A back-adjacent position most gi-raised players have simply never been put in, leading into calf slicers and the twister.

• The twister. A spinal lock lifted from wrestling, and the most recognizable thing 10th Planet has produced.

The naming convention is famously strange, and it's deliberate. Bravo built a vocabulary so the positions could be taught quickly and remembered, which is genuinely useful when you're trying to standardize a curriculum across more than a hundred schools worldwide. It also makes 10th Planet the easiest team in jiu-jitsu to make fun of, and people do.

Ranks still follow the standard belt system. Most schools just don't wear the belts, and some mark rank with colored rash guards instead.

The Freak Brothers

Richie and Geo Martinez grew up in Oceanside and came to grappling from breakdancing, which is not a background you see on many BJJ résumés. Richie's b-boy name, Boogeyman, followed him onto the mats. He started training in 2011 after watching Geo, three months in, tap everyone at a local tournament.

Eddie Bravo promoted Richie to black belt on January 3, 2015, at the grand opening of the San Diego academy. The school and the black belt arrived on the same day.

As a competitor, Richie built a reputation as a finisher, with a Japanese necktie he hit on people who had presumably seen the tape. He was runner-up at the first EBI in 2014, took silver at the IBJJF No-Gi Worlds in the 2016 Master 1 division, and submitted Kazushi Sakuraba with a d'arce at Quintet 2 in 2018, which is one of those results that reads better every year.

Geo's competitive record is arguably stronger. He won EBI three times, placed fourth at the 2015 ADCC in his debut, and beat Jeff Glover in an EBI final that went to overtime and came down to who could hold the back longer. He runs the Oceanside school, and the two academies operate as one team across the county.

On its own locations page, the school quotes Bravo saying he's "very proud of the job that Boogey and Geo have done in San Diego County," and calling them "the perfect guys to make 10th Planet a force in San Diego." Read that as what it is, a coach praising his students on a marketing page, but the county results back it up.

Your first class, if you came from a gi academy

Assume you're a gi blue belt with two decent years in. Here's what happens.

Your grips are gone. Not weakened, gone. Every collar and sleeve control you've built your guard around has evaporated, and the person in front of you is slick with sweat and moving faster than you're used to because there's no jacket friction slowing anything down.

Second, the pace is higher. No-gi scrambles don't have the natural pauses a gi creates. If you've been playing a patient, grip-heavy game, your cardio is about to file a complaint.

Third, everything is closer to your legs. 10th Planet rooms tend to be leg-lock literate early, so positions you were taught to ignore in a gi curriculum are live from round one. If you've never had someone enter on your legs with intent, that is a genuinely disorienting first experience, and worth reading up on before you go. Our no-gi primer for beginners covers the gear and the etiquette differences.

The good news: the specific 10th Planet positions are not a prerequisite. No one expects you to arrive with rubber guard. You will get shown the lockdown, you will do it badly, and that's the normal experience.

Rubber guard in MMA, uneven affiliates, and Bravo himself

10th Planet has been controversial since the day it existed, and pretending otherwise would be silly.

The most substantive complaint is about rubber guard in MMA. It requires flexibility a lot of people don't have, and when it fails against someone determined to posture and punch, you're on your back with your own leg tangled in your arm. That debate has been running for over a decade in fight analysis and it has never been settled.

The second complaint is quality control. There are over a hundred 10th Planet schools worldwide, and consistency across that many affiliates is hard for any team. Some 10th Planet rooms are excellent. Some are not. That is also true of every large affiliation in jiu-jitsu, but 10th Planet takes more heat for it.

The third is Bravo himself. He's spent years on podcasts promoting theories well outside the mainstream, and a lot of people can't separate that from the grappling. Fair or not, it's part of why the team gets mocked, and it has nothing to do with whether the truck works.

The scoreboard is more interesting than either the fandom or the mockery. No-gi-only training, submission-only formats, overtime rules that force a finish, leg locks taught to beginners: every one of those was a 10th Planet position in 2005 and is now normal. Bravo won a lot of the argument, even if he won it by having the sport catch up to him rather than by convincing anyone directly.

Who it's for

If you want to compete in the gi, do IBJJF, and chase a lineage that traces back through the Gracie academies in a straight line, this isn't your school and they won't pretend otherwise.

If you want no-gi, all the time, in a room that treats submission grappling as its own sport rather than the gi's summer job, that's exactly what's on offer. San Diego has become one of the strongest no-gi cities anywhere, and the homegrown American talent has led that shift at the elite level, most visibly through the Ruotolo brothers, who came up in this county on an entirely different team. 10th Planet was pushing the no-gi-first argument here well before that wave arrived.

The takeaway

10th Planet San Diego is a real gym with a real black belt at the front of it, in a system that spent twenty years being treated as a novelty and is now, quietly, most of how modern no-gi is trained. Richie Martinez has been teaching on Mission Gorge Road since the day he got promoted, and the school's competitive record in the county is not a marketing claim.

The system still has its weak points, and you should hear them up front rather than discover them in a fight camp. Rubber guard is not for everybody. The naming is silly. The affiliate network is uneven. None of that stops the room from being a good place to learn to grapple without a jacket.

Go take a class before you decide which camp you're in. Most of the people with the strongest opinions about 10th Planet have never set foot in one.

Find the room and go roll

If you want the details, the location and what they run, we keep a listing for 10th Planet San Diego Jiu Jitsu. Bring shorts and a rash guard, leave the gi in the car.

FAQ

Who runs 10th Planet San Diego? Richie "Boogeyman" Martinez, a black belt under Eddie Bravo, who was promoted at the school's grand opening on January 3, 2015. His brother Geo "Freakahzoid" Martinez, a three-time EBI champion who placed fourth at the 2015 ADCC, runs the Oceanside academy, and the two schools operate as one team under the 10th Planet Freaks banner.

Do you wear a gi at 10th Planet? No. 10th Planet is a no-gi-only system by design. Eddie Bravo built it after concluding that gi grips didn't transfer to MMA, so training is done in rash guards and shorts or spats. Rank still follows the standard belt system, but most schools don't wear belts on the mat.

Is 10th Planet real jiu-jitsu? Yes, in the sense that matters: Eddie Bravo is a legitimate black belt under Jean-Jacques Machado, and the lineage runs back through Carlos Gracie. The debate has always been about the gi and about how well positions like rubber guard hold up under punches, not about whether the art is genuine.

Can I train there as a beginner? Yes. You don't need any 10th Planet-specific knowledge to start, and the school teaches from the ground up. If you're coming from a gi academy, expect your grips to be useless, the pace to be faster, and leg attacks to appear much earlier than you're used to.