100 Submissions

There are some great Japanese BJJ players these days.
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I suppose Tomoyuki Hashimoto and Masahiro Iwasaki are some of the most well-known players with some prestigious achievements, beating A-class players in their division.
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But some Japanese players did well against elite BJJ players before them as well.
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One of them is the late Dai Yoshioka. (Sadly, he killed himself in 2016.)
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His highest achievement was getting a silver medal at the Mundials in 2008 in the light featherweight adult black belt division.
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I have never met Dai, but my coach was his teammate. And if you are familiar with the Japanese BJJ scene in the 2000s (which probably means not many of you), he was one of the famous figures in the scene.
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Especially because he trained like a maniac.
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I heard/read that he would be in the gym from early in the morning till late in the evening and pretty much force anyone who steps into the gym to wear a gi no matter what their experience is like and to roll with him.
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And he would do that all day, every day.
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He didn’t have any sports or martial arts experience, but if I’m not mistaken, he got his black belt after four years (or so) of training, which is still a rare thing… but the amount of time he spent in the gym practicing BJJ, it’s not hard to imagine why he could pull it off.
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One of the training methods he used was “100 submissions” sparring. So, he would find someone who is at the gym for sparring, and they’d spar until either of them gets the 100th submission first.
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He would be seriously mad if the other person went “easy” to get submitted by Dai to end the sparring session quickly.
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Is this the most effective training method out there? I don’t think so. But probably it does represent who Dai was on and off the mat as well.
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p.s. There aren’t many videos of him on the internet, and in the ones you can find on YouTube, he loses to some of the best guys at that time. But you can still see his guard work is extremely difficult to deal with.
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In this video, though, he’s pulling off some nasty submission calmly and stoically.