Shawn Williams BJJ

Leveling up!!! 🔥🔥🔥

Wonderful belt promotion this past weekend!
Honored to have 3 new black belts 🥋🥋🥋 on the mats, as well as many more blues, purples and a brown.

Joey Torres, Will Caplenor and Mark Gerdesmeier have all put in such intelligent, hard, consistent, dedicated time into their training and it shows! I’m very excited for their journey ahead and continued growth! Congratulations to each one of you. I’m blessed to share the mats with you!

It was also a special time to share the mats with our incredible community and everyone that could make it to the class! 🙏🏼🙏🏼.

Getting to share time, and learn again with my Master Instructor always reminds me of how fortunate I was to walk in to his academy back in 1996. Renzo is one of a kind! A story he told my class this weekend reminded me of just how unique his mind is in Jiu jitsu… back in the day, he would often come into the academy and call a few of over to see a technique that he had dreamed of or thought about… And boom… we had a new technique, or variation or piece of a puzzle that we would add on to something else to make it complete. I was also reminded the last 2 days, of another highly unique characteristic that I firmly believe contributes to his talent as a master teacher… his passion for people and their story. It was one selfless act after another… a napkin rose for an elderly woman on oxygen in a wheelchair sharing dinner with her friends, a chat with a man of about 60 in a foot cast with his family making sure he was not the one who was footlocked in the fight the night before🤣🤣…. But then proceeded to have a great conversation with them all, and enjoying every minute…. Then on to share his knowledge and time with my students here in Nashville… absolute World Class… took me back to the “good ole days”. 🔥🔥

It was an honor to share time, techniques, stories, and good fun today. It’s priceless to me that I get to give back to someone in that has given me so much and made such a massive contribution to my game, my teaching style and my life! Matt is seriously one of the best to ever do it. So great catching up on current life and the Jiu jitsu/MMA scene, and of course reminisce about the good old days… 💥💥🔝🔝. Andrew (my other longtime friend in the picture) was literally the reason why I began training unlimited when it became offered by He was already beating me up when I first joined, but after one month of training unlimited vs my 2x/wk… it was like he became Superman… and he just proceeded to annihilate me at will…. So… unlimited… never looked back! 😂😂.

Thank you to everyone who attended, it was such a pleasure to meet you all, see familiar faces and share our time! 🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼. Until next time!!!



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Yesterday I had the honor of promoting my long time student and friend Takuya Sato to black belt. I remember him coming into my Hollywood school in 2005 like it was yesterday! Why so memorable? His work ethic, willingness and openness to learn are second to none! It was great having him visit us here in Nashville, and even with so much time and distance between us, my students here all said the same thing… “wow, it feels like Shawn Williams jiu jitsu!” 🙌🏻🙌🏻🙌🏻 He has done an incredible job of continuing to grow his skills with the wonderful jiu jitsu community in Kyoto whist keeping up to date with what we are doing here! 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻. 🥋

Look forward to another visit soon!!!

What an experience! It was a such an honor to host my teacher, Renzo Gracie yesterday. For me, getting to see all of my students light up from his presence and method of teaching (and storytelling of course) was exceptionally special. It also reminded me of how truly lucky I was to decide to brave the rickety old elevator on 27th street way back in September of 1996 on my way up to my first class. His method of teaching was the foundation that set all of us up that came from that generation to systematize our jiu jitsu and find relationships and commonalities in the tools used in the art to make learning, understanding and application so much easier. 🚀🚀🔥

Thank you to all of you who were able to attend! 🙏🏼

What a special day! …oh yes, and I was promoted to 5th degree 🥋😬.