What Is the Berimbolo? How Rafael Mendes Modernized Jiu Jitsu
The spinning back-take that made jiu jitsu modern. What the berimbolo actually is, the tangled Portuguese slang behind the name, and how Rafael Mendes turned an experiment into six world titles — and a new way of thinking about the guard.
Every art has a moment when it visibly becomes modern — when someone moves in a way that makes everything before it look like a different era. For Brazilian jiu jitsu, that moment spins. It starts in De la Riva guard, drops under an opponent, rotates around his hips like a satellite, and comes out the other side attached to his back. It's called the berimbolo, and it's the signature technique of jiu jitsu's modern age.
No one embodies that evolution more than Rafael Mendes, the featherweight who turned the berimbolo from an experiment into a championship system and, in doing so, helped drag the whole sport into its dynamic, inverted, fast-scrambling present. This is what the berimbolo actually is, what the word means, and how it modernized the gentle art.
The Short Answer
The berimbolo is a back-take from De la Riva guard: the bottom player drops to their shoulders, inverts, and spins underneath a standing or kneeling opponent — following their base like a shadow — until they come out the other side attached to the back. The name comes from Brazilian Portuguese slang for tangling something into a scrambled mess, which is exactly what it feels like to be on the receiving end. It grew out of Brazil's competition academies in the 2000s, was systemized and proven at the highest level by Rafael Mendes and the Mendes brothers, and was pushed to its logical extreme by the Miyao brothers. Today it's a cornerstone of modern jiu jitsu, taught everywhere from world-champion competition rooms to kids classes.
How to Say It (and What It Means)
Berimbolo is pronounced beh-reeng-BOH-loo. It isn't a technical term from Japanese judo or classical jiu jitsu — it's pure Brazilian academy slang, cousin to the verb embolar: to tangle, to ball up, to get two things so wrapped around each other you can't tell where one ends and the other begins. Brazilians use embolar for tangled headphone cables and scrambled soccer plays. On the mats, the word became the perfect label for a move where two bodies briefly turn into one rolling knot — and only one of them knows which way it's going to unroll.
What Actually Happens in a Berimbolo
Strip away the mystique and the berimbolo is a brilliant answer to a modern problem: how does a smaller, faster player reach the back — jiu jitsu's most dominant position — against an opponent too disciplined to give it up? It starts from De la Riva guard, the bottom position where one leg hooks behind the opponent's lead knee, named for Rio black belt Ricardo De la Riva. From there, the bottom player grips the opponent's belt or pants, breaks their base, and then does the counterintuitive part: instead of sweeping forward, they roll backward over their own shoulder, inverting underneath the opponent and spinning around their hips.
Done correctly, the spin ends with the bottom player behind the opponent, hooks in, chest glued to their back — arriving by a route no one could see coming. What looks like chaos is actually precision: the berimbolo isn't one movement but a chain of tiny adjustments in rotation, grip, and timing, which is why it rewards the obsessive. The players who mastered it drilled it thousands of times, and turned jiu jitsu's understanding of inversion, base, and back control years ahead in the process.
Rafael Mendes: The Innovator Who Proved It
Inversions had been floating around Brazilian academies for years — no one invented the berimbolo in a laboratory. But it was Rafael Mendes who turned a curiosity into a championship system. Between 2010 and 2016, Rafa won six IBJJF black belt world titles at featherweight, plus two ADCC golds, with the berimbolo and the leg drag as the twin engines of his game. Opponents knew it was coming. Seminars broke it down frame by frame. It kept working anyway — the mark of a technique that has crossed from novelty to fundamental.
What made Rafa's berimbolo revolutionary was that it never existed alone. If you defended the spin, you got leg-dragged. If you defended the leg drag, the spin returned. Every reaction fed the next attack — a closed-loop system, engineered and refined nightly, that made jiu jitsu look less like a collection of moves and more like modern game design. That laboratory mindset became the DNA of the academy he and his brother Gui built, Art of Jiu Jitsu, where the berimbolo is now — tellingly — part of the kids curriculum.
A New Kind of Jiu Jitsu
The berimbolo's real legacy is bigger than one back-take: it changed what jiu jitsu looks like. It proved the bottom player could be the one dictating the match — attacking, spinning, hunting the back — instead of waiting to sweep and hold. It made rotation and inversion core athletic skills rather than party tricks. It rewired how competitors think about grips, base, and the transitions between positions. Watch any modern lightweight match — the constant motion, the leg entanglements, the scrambles that flip three times in five seconds — and you're watching the sport the berimbolo generation built.
Was it controversial? For a while, sure — every real innovation is. Some older-generation black belts dismissed inversions as sport-only gymnastics, and the debate even became merchandise, with Keenan Cornelius's tongue-in-cheek "You can't berimbolo everyone" shirts capturing the era. But the argument aged the way arguments against evolution usually do. The berimbolo produced world champions, forced every serious competitor to learn its mechanics and defenses, and expanded the art. Like the gi versus no-gi conversation, it stopped being a debate and became part of the landscape.
The Berimbolo Today
Today the berimbolo is simply part of the language. The Miyao brothers turned it into a complete competitive philosophy, lighter divisions treat it as required study, kids from São Paulo to San Diego hit it in their first year, and its no-gi adaptations show up on grappling's biggest stages. The slang word became a vocabulary word — which, in jiu jitsu, is how you know an innovation became the tradition.
Portuguese Vocabulary for the Modern Guard
The berimbolo was born speaking Portuguese. Five words from its world:
| Portuguese | Pronunciation | English |
|---|---|---|
| berimbolo | beh-reeng-BOH-loo | the spinning back-take |
| inverter | een-vehr-TEHR | to invert |
| girar | zhee-RAHR | to rotate |
| costas | KOHS-tahs | back |
| raspagem | hahs-PAH-zhayng | sweep |
Every word above — and hundreds more — is taught with native-speaker audio and mat-ready phrases in the Fala BJJ app.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a berimbolo in BJJ? A back-take from De la Riva guard in which the bottom player inverts — rolls under the opponent over their own shoulder — and spins around their hips to arrive at back control. It is one of the defining techniques of modern jiu jitsu.
What does the word berimbolo mean? It's Brazilian academy slang related to the verb embolar — to tangle or ball things up into a mess. Pronounced beh-reeng-BOH-loo.
Who invented the berimbolo? No single person — inverted spins to the back grew out of Brazil's De la Riva guard scene in the 2000s. Rafael Mendes and the Mendes brothers systemized it and proved it at the black belt world championship level, and the Miyao brothers built an entire competitive style around it.
How did the berimbolo change jiu jitsu? It made the guard an offensive weapon — the bottom player hunting the back instead of waiting to sweep — and turned inversion, rotation, and scrambling into core skills of the modern game. Much of today's fast, dynamic lightweight style traces back to it.
Does the berimbolo work in no-gi? It's harder without pant and belt grips, which is why it was born a gi technique — but modern competitors have adapted the entry and the spin to no-gi, and the underlying back-take mechanics show up everywhere in submission grappling.
Is the berimbolo good for beginners? Most coaches teach base, posture, and fundamental guard first — the berimbolo demands inversion mechanics and timing that take mat time to build. But at competition-focused academies, including AOJ, kids drill it early and safely as part of the modern curriculum.
The Bottom Line
The berimbolo is jiu jitsu's proof that the art is still alive and still evolving: a piece of tangled Portuguese slang that became a world-championship system, a new way of thinking about the guard, and finally a fundamental taught to eight-year-olds. Rafael Mendes didn't just win with it — he showed what modern jiu jitsu could be, and the sport followed him there.
And notice what carried it around the world: a Portuguese word. Jiu jitsu's innovations travel inside its language — berimbolo, raspagem, pegada — and Fala BJJ teaches that language in short daily lessons built for grapplers, so the next time your coach says he's about to show "the bolo," you'll know exactly what's coming. Almost.
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