About — who runs it | League Jiu-Jitsu HQ

About

What happens here

This is where it gets made. The games, the curriculum, the seasons and the events are developed and tested at League Jiu-Jitsu HQ before they go anywhere else. The people who train here play everything first.

Why these two

Both of these stand on their own. Hyrox is a complete sport with a global leaderboard. League Jiu-Jitsu is a complete curriculum with a season and a record. Neither needs the other to be worth doing.

But they are not a random pair.

Jiu-Jitsu is a conditioning problem before it is a technical one. Anybody who has trained knows the round where the technique is still there and the body is not. Grip goes first, then the legs, then the decisions. Almost everything that goes wrong in a hard round goes wrong because somebody ran out of gas, not because they forgot what to do.

Hyrox trains exactly what a grappler runs out of. Sustained work under fatigue. Pushing and pulling a loaded sled. Carrying heavy things a long way. Lunging with weight. Getting up off the floor eighty metres in a row. Then running immediately afterwards with your legs already gone.

That is a list of what a hard Jiu-Jitsu round demands. It is also, exactly, the eight stations of a Hyrox race.

And it does it without adding risk. Everything in a Hyrox race is a movement pattern a body already knows: run, push, pull, carry, lunge, throw. There is no barbell technique performed fast against a clock and nothing that punishes a small error with a big injury. A grappler already carries enough training risk. The conditioning should not add to it.

This is not a new idea, it is just newly named. Our founder was programming exactly this kind of work for fighters more than fifteen years ago, long before Hyrox existed. Runs, sleds, carries and loaded lunges, because that is what the sport actually asks for. The sport now has a name, a standard and a leaderboard, which makes it easier to train and far easier to measure.

So the building is not two businesses that happen to share a lease. It is the conditioning and the skill, on either side of the same entrance, on the same clock.

Co-founders

Justin Hall

Founder, League Jiu-Jitsu

Third degree black belt

League Jiu-Jitsu HQ is run by Justin Hall, a third degree black belt.

He received his blue belt from Pedro Sauer. His purple, brown and black belts came from Eddie Camden at Tiger Academy in Roswell, Georgia, and his degrees under the Machados.

He served as Director of the Carlos Machado Jiu-Jitsu Association, where he oversaw all operations and finances for the association and wrote the majority of the curriculum and best practices used by its affiliate schools.

He has owned and run his own academy since 2007, a school of around two hundred students that has operated without his daily involvement for years.

Before Jiu-Jitsu he ran seven restaurant locations. He holds a master's degree in biological anthropology and dual master's degrees in financial planning and financial therapy.

Curriculum is the work

Writing curriculum for an association of affiliate schools teaches you something quickly: technique is the easy part. Getting a student to understand where they are, what their options are, and whether any of it is working is the hard part, and almost nothing in Jiu-Jitsu is built to do it.

He has built full curricula for academies across the United States and Mexico. His work includes forty-week adult fundamentals programmes, thirty-week gi and no-gi progressions, kids programmes and instructor development material.

This academy is what happens when you get to build one from scratch.

Why it is built this way

Jiu-Jitsu is traditionally taught as a collection of techniques. You gather them for a year, then spar and work out for yourself how they fit together. Most people never do.

Every other sport solved this a long time ago. You practise through the week, you play at the end of the week, and the game tells you what is working.

League Jiu-Jitsu is that, built deliberately. Seventeen games, a curriculum designed around them, and a record of every round you play.

Derrick Adkins

Co-Founder, League Jiu-Jitsu

First degree black belt

Derrick "A-Game" Adkins owns and operates Raptor Jiu-Jitsu in Edmond, Oklahoma, where he runs one of the largest kids programmes in the state.

He is an Oklahoma state wrestling champion, a professional boxer and state champion, and a veteran of Bellator, Legacy FC, LFA and Showbox with more than 30 professional fights across mixed martial arts, boxing and kickboxing.

He is a former FCF Lightweight Champion and has cornered UFC, Bellator and LFA fighters. He competed on Season 9 of the PGF with the Phenoms.

He earned his Jiu-Jitsu black belt in 2021 and has coached for more than ten years. He has written curriculum used by over 150 academies.

Where we are

Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico.

Carretera Mérida–Progreso
Temozón Norte, Mérida
Yucatán
Near Prime Center, off the Progreso highway.
+52 999 123 4567
hola@thecompound.mx

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