LEXINGTON, KY — When Chad Merritt, a 31-year-old enterprise software salesman and two-stripe blue belt at Southgate MMA, announced at the start of open mat three weeks ago that he was going to “start rolling more relaxed,” his training partners say they were cautiously optimistic.
That optimism, according to those who witnessed the subsequent seven sessions, was misplaced.
“It’s just not rolling,” said Marcus Webb, a purple belt who has trained alongside Merritt for sixteen months. “I don’t know what else to call it. He shakes his hands out, he does this thing where he rolls his neck around, and then we bump fists, and he immediately goes to turtle and just stays there. I held a clock once. Four minutes and eleven seconds. He made a sound like a whale at one point, but I think that was just his back.”
Webb paused. “He called it flow grappling.”
Merritt, for his part, denies that his approach constitutes an absence of rolling. In a conversation with ThePorra that took place entirely while Merritt was lying on his side in a half-guard he was not defending, he described his methodology in detail.
“The old me would try to win every round,” he said, eyes half-closed. “That’s not what this is about anymore. I’m letting the technique breathe. I’m exploring presence. My instructor Álvaro—Professor Álvaro—he says the best jiu-jitsu happens when you’re not thinking.”
He was tapped eleven seconds later by a sixteen-year-old girl named Briseis who has been training for four months.
“She’s got great technique,” Merritt said, after resetting to standing. Then he went directly to turtle.
The announcement came after what Merritt describes as a “spiritual audit” of his training, prompted by a seventy-two-minute podcast episode about nervous system regulation and high-performance athletes. He had listened to approximately the first nineteen minutes of it while driving to Costco, but describes it as “completely transformative.”
“Something shifted,” he told a group of three purple belts who were not asking him any questions. “I realized I was training from a place of fear. Fear of losing. Fear of getting tapped. Fear of that look people give you when you pull guard immediately every round. This is something different now.”
The purple belts nodded. One of them got up and went to get water.
Over the following three weeks, training partners report that Merritt’s new approach has been consistent, systematic, and almost entirely inactive.
Destiny Pham, a two-stripe blue belt who rolls with Merritt twice a week, says the experience has become a reliable data point in her own training.
“I use Chad as my conditioning drill,” she said. “I’ll take a round with him when I want a rest, because I know nothing will happen. He’ll go to turtle. I’ll apply some pressure. He’ll make that noise—almost like a sigh but lower—and then he’ll ask if we can restart from standing. We stand. He pulls guard immediately. Then he goes back to turtle.”
She shook her head with what appeared to be genuine admiration. “He’s extremely consistent. You have to respect the commitment to a system.”
When asked whether Merritt’s approach has improved his technical development, she thought about it for a long time.
“He’s definitely thinking about jiu-jitsu more,” she said. “He talks about it constantly. Yesterday he explained his positional philosophy to me for, I want to say, twenty-five minutes. He used the phrase ‘connected stillness’ four times.”
Professor Álvaro “Butch” Navarro, who runs Southgate MMA and holds a third-degree black belt under the Figueiredo-Alves lineage, says he’s seen it before.
“Every gym has one,” Navarro said, without specifying what, exactly, a gym has one of. “Chad trains hard. He’s very thoughtful about his jiu-jitsu.” He looked at the mat, where Merritt was currently lying flat on his back while a newer student uncertainly attempted to pass his guard. Merritt’s eyes were open but focused on something approximately sixteen inches above his own face.
“He’s going through a phase,” Navarro added.
Asked whether the phase appeared to be improving Merritt’s game, Navarro watched him get passed, mounted, and submitted in the span of about forty-five seconds.
“He’s exploring,” Navarro said.
Derek Holst, a brown belt who has trained at Southgate for six years, says the shift in Merritt’s approach became noticeable in the first session.
“He came in and immediately started explaining that he was ‘changing his relationship with rolling,’” Holst said. “I thought that maybe meant he was going to compete. Or try leg locks. Something. But then the round started and he just—” Holst paused, searching for the word. “He statued. He turned into a statue.”
“By week two, he started describing it as ‘going to the mat’ instead of rolling. Like it was a destination. Like the mat was Bali and he was going there to heal.”
Holst has since created a metric he calls the Merritt Number: the total elapsed seconds per round during which Merritt is the agent of any action, rather than the recipient.
“His average is about eight seconds per five-minute round,” Holst said. “Six of those are him pulling guard.”
Merritt’s new approach has generated what he describes as “a lot of really great conversations” among his training partners, and what his training partners describe as “Chad explaining things.”
Last Tuesday, Merritt reportedly spent eleven minutes before open mat discussing the work of a jiu-jitsu philosopher he had encountered through a YouTube algorithm, a man named Dr. Darnell Prescott who holds a brown belt and runs a podcast called The Grappler’s Mind: Neurological Mastery in Submission Arts. The podcast, which has 847 subscribers and a banner that reads “WHERE SCIENCE MEETS THE MAT,” has produced two episodes, the most recent of which is titled “Episode 2: Flow State Deep Dive (Part 1 of 6).”
“He’s talking about things most grapplers aren’t ready for yet,” Merritt said, about the person with 847 subscribers. “The idea that inaction is itself a kind of action. That the space between movements contains as much information as the movements themselves.”
Webb, the purple belt, heard this explanation. He sat with it for a moment.
“His guard pass defense is somehow getting worse,” Webb said.
Merritt says he plans to continue developing his approach throughout the month. He recently enrolled in a two-day Flow Rolling Immersion workshop in Nashville hosted by a purple belt named Cody who describes himself as a “movement architect.” The workshop costs $380 and includes an “intention-setting ceremony” and a cold plunge.
He has been telling people at the gym about it for eleven days.
“This is where everything is going,” Merritt said. “The elite guys, they’re doing less. Have you ever watched Caique Furtado roll? He barely moves.”
His training partners were later contacted separately and asked if they had thoughts about Merritt’s upcoming workshop.
“He should go,” said Pham. “It sounds like exactly what he’s looking for.”
She then carefully arranged her features into an expression of sincerity.
“I think it’ll really help him,” she said. “With the presence thing.”
Merritt is currently signed up for no competitions.