Long before stepping into a gym, Matt became fascinated with this “new” form of grappling that made its appearance in the early days of the UFC. To see men exhibit complete control and submit larger strikers and brawlers was eye-opening. Self-defense was no longer learning kata at your local McDojo or ordering low-quality fighting system videos from a catalog, and martial arts was no longer strictly a striker’s game.

Matt began his study of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu in 2015 as a way to learn effective self-defense while augmenting his routine workouts. He soon found that the benefits reached far beyond the gym. Besides the positive physical impacts, the mental strength and resilience that comes from training until you’re sore and tired, facing opponents of all sizes, and showing up when you don’t want to turns down the volume knob on the rest of the noise in life.

When he isn’t training, Matt works as a mechanical engineer and before that, a math and physics tutor. He brings the same mindset to the gym, finding the most effective ways to teach individual students how to solve the numerous problems Brazilian Jiu Jitsu will throw at them.