Gordon Ryan Says He Used AI to Cure a Staph Infection Without Antibiotics | No-Gi Weekly Oct 12–18, 2026

Two of this week’s biggest stories both circle back to the same guy, which tells you something about where grappling’s attention still lives even with Gordon Ryan out of competition. The rest of the week was a reminder that the sport’s biggest moments don’t all happen on a stage — one came from a mountainside in the Himalayas, one came from a lightweight’s first walk to the ONE cage, and the rest came from a calendar that keeps getting more crowded with regional ADCC Opens and UFC BJJ title fights.

Gordon Ryan Dominates Headlines Again: An AI-Designed Staph Cure and a Judo Historian’s Pushback

Gordon Ryan told Joe Rogan this week that he used xAI’s Grok to design a topical treatment for a recurring staph infection, and that it worked well enough to keep him off oral antibiotics entirely. His approach: apply clindamycin cream to a pad taped over the infected area on his back, then cover it with a heating pad, on the logic that staph bacteria struggle to replicate above body temperature. He changed the medicated pad five to six times a day for roughly two weeks. “Took a little bit longer, but I didn’t have to take any oral stuff,” Ryan said. “I wish I knew this ten years ago before it ruined my life.”

That last line is the real story. Ryan has been blunt for years about how badly years of oral antibiotics for recurring skin infections wrecked his gut health, and this week’s clip is him describing a workaround rather than a miracle cure. It’s also, notably, not medical advice — it’s one athlete’s self-directed experiment, and skin infections in grappling are common enough and serious enough that a staph flare-up still belongs in front of a doctor, not a search bar. Still, for a sport where mat-borne skin infections are one of the most universal occupational hazards going, hearing one of its most dominant athletes describe a treatment path he wishes he’d found a decade earlier is going to get repeated at gyms everywhere this week. If gear and hygiene are on your mind after hearing this, our breakdown of how your gear choices affect skin infection risk in no-gi covers the prevention side of the equation Ryan didn’t have the luxury of relying on this time around.

A day earlier, a different kind of criticism landed on Ryan from outside the grappling world entirely. Judo historian Chadi argued that Ryan’s public conduct — the trash talk, the online feuds, the taunting of rivals — would never survive inside judo’s institutional culture. “You cannot ‘Gordon Ryan’ your way up to the top in judo,” Chadi said, explaining that judo federations weigh an athlete’s behavior on and off the mat as part of belt promotion, and that gloating after a win is treated as a real mark against a competitor, not a personality quirk fans tolerate.

The timing of the two stories next to each other is almost too neat. One day Ryan is being praised, even implicitly, for the kind of relentless self-experimentation that made him the sport’s most dominant competitor. The next, he’s being held up as an example of exactly the kind of athlete culture judo doesn’t want. Both things can be true at once — BJJ’s no-gi scene built its entire modern commercial identity around personalities who talk, and Ryan is simply the biggest one it’s ever produced. For more on how that persona has collided with the sport’s competitive side before, we covered the fallout from Ryan’s involvement in the ADCC 2026 brawl in an earlier roundup.

ONE Samurai 4: Masaki Takeura Submits Yoshinari Fukushima With a Heel Hook in His ONE Debut

ONE Samurai 4 landed in Tokyo on October 17 with mostly MMA, Muay Thai, and kickboxing on the marquee, but the one submission grappling bout on the card delivered the finish of the night. Masaki Takeura, a 31-year-old JTT product making his ONE debut, took the fight to the canvas against fellow Japanese competitor Yoshinari “Garittochu” Fukushima and worked from inside guard before threatening a rear-naked choke. Fukushima survived that attempt, but the ensuing scramble gave Takeura a leg, and he locked up a heel hook that ended it at 5:13 of round one.

It’s a small moment in the context of a stacked kickboxing and Muay Thai card, but it’s exactly the kind of result that matters to the no-gi audience specifically. ONE has used all-Japanese submission grappling bouts as a reliable undercard attraction for years, and Takeura walking in for his promotional debut and immediately producing a clean leg-lock finish is the kind of tape that gets a grappler a second and third look from a promotion that already has a working pipeline for crossover submission talent. The finish itself was mechanically simple — no stalling, no over-committing to the choke before pivoting to the leg — which is usually the difference between a heel hook that lands and one that gets scrambled out of.

ADCC’s Open Series Goes Global: Five Countries, One Week

While the headlines chase star athletes, ADCC’s actual growth engine kept running in the background this week. The ADCC Singapore Open ran October 11 at Dulwich College, and October 17 alone saw the ADCC USA New Jersey Open in Jackson Township, the ADCC Latinoamérica Open in Callao, Peru, the ADCC India North East Open, and the ADCC Austrian Nationals Open in Vienna all run under the same no-gi ruleset on the same day. That’s five countries across two continents producing ADCC-sanctioned competition in a single week, with no qualification required for any of them — kids divisions through masters, white belt through black.

This is the part of ADCC’s business that doesn’t trend on social media the way a Gordon Ryan quote does, but it’s arguably doing more for the sport’s long-term health. The World Championship in Kraków gets the production budget and the superfight money, but the Opens are the actual on-ramp — the events where a purple belt in New Jersey or a first-timer in Vienna gets to compete under the exact positional rule set used at the sport’s biggest stage, with real-time inspiration like Pawel Jaworski’s leg lock run to ADCC 2026 gold as the thing they’re chasing. A sport that gatekeeps its highest-visibility format behind brutal regional trials needs exactly this kind of no-qualifier volume to keep refilling the pipeline, and five countries in one week is a meaningfully different scale than ADCC was operating at even two years ago.

Cesalina Gracie: “Jiu-Jitsu Saved My Life” on the Everest Summit

Cesalina Gracie, granddaughter of BJJ founder Carlos Gracie Sr., described a frightening encounter during her Mount Everest expedition this week. According to her account, the expedition leader made inappropriate comments and then placed his hand on her thigh after she’d already set a boundary. She pushed his hand away and told him directly: “Keep your disrespectful comments to yourself. Don’t ever talk to me like this again.” The leader responded by cutting her off from her support team and assigned guide, and she had to complete the climb relying on another climber and an experienced Nepali mountaineer, Lakpa Dendi, for support.

What makes the story land is Gracie’s own admission that she’d deprioritized jiu-jitsu training heading into the expedition, assuming she wouldn’t need it at 8,000 meters. “The last thing I thought I would need was jiu-jitsu,” she said. “And it’s what saved my life.” The physical confidence to push an unwanted hand away and hold a boundary in an extremely isolated, vulnerable situation is exactly the kind of outcome self-defense advocates inside BJJ have been pointing to for decades, and it’s a much harder story to dismiss coming from inside the Gracie family itself. It’s also a useful reminder for anyone who treats mat time as purely a competition or fitness pursuit — the training doesn’t stop being useful just because the rest of your life has nothing to do with grappling.

UFC BJJ 13 Set for October 29: Two Title Fights on the Line

UFC BJJ confirmed its October 29 card at Meta APEX in Las Vegas will carry two title fights, and both have real stakes. William Tackett defends the middleweight belt against Jay Rodriguez in the main event, with Tackett looking to add to a run that’s included a heel hook finish of Fedor Nikolov at UFC BJJ 10. In the co-main, Jalen Fonacier — who already holds UFC BJJ’s record for the fastest submission victory — defends the bantamweight title against Kleber Barbosa, who punched his ticket by winning a UFC BJJ Open.

Barbosa’s route to the title shot matters here almost as much as the fight itself. UFC BJJ has leaned hard into its Open series as a legitimate feeder system rather than a marketing gimmick, and a fighter grinding through an Open bracket into a bantamweight title shot two cards later is the clearest proof yet that the ladder actually works. Add that to Tackett’s case as arguably UFC BJJ’s signature finisher at middleweight, and October 29 is shaping up as the deepest card the young promotion has put together outside its anniversary shows.

Looking Ahead

The ADCC Open calendar doesn’t slow down — the ADCC Poland Open runs October 24 in Warsaw, adding a sixth country to this month’s Open tally before UFC BJJ 13 closes out the month on October 29 with Tackett-Rodriguez and Fonacier-Barbosa both on the line. Between now and then, expect more fallout from both Gordon Ryan stories to keep circulating, and don’t be surprised if ONE books Masaki Takeura for a quick follow-up booking after a finish that clean in his promotional debut. We’ll have results from all of it in next week’s roundup.

Sources

• Gordon Ryan Claimed AI Finally Taught Him How To Cure His Staph Infection Problem Without Using Oral Antibiotics — BJJDOC
• Judo Historian Says Gordon Ryan’s Behavior Would Not Be Tolerated In Judo — BJJ Eastern Europe
• ONE SAMURAI 4 Results — ONE Championship
• Cesalina Gracie Says Jiu-Jitsu “Saved My Life” On Everest Summit — BJJ Eastern Europe
• ADCC USA New Jersey Open 2026 — ADCC News
• UFC BJJ — UFC.com