Here's a recent interview with Galvao with Caleb of The Fightworks Podcast, including a written transcript
The FightWorks Podcast: When you first started training, did you start competing right away, or did you train for a while and then start competing in tournaments?
Andre Galvao: My first championship, I was a white belt. I had only been training two months and I tried competition. I won two fights and I lost the third fight. The guy caught me in a flying armbar. Then I needed to stop jiu-jitsu to work, as I mentioned. Then I came back to training in 1999 with Careca. Two months after training with him I started to compete and I won every tournament as a white belt. I started to fight early, and I trained every single day, morning, afternoon, and night, every day, when I was a white belt. And I keep training like that.
One of the things that really struck me about the recommendation was a hint that the training Galvao advocates is very similar to the kind of training we did at Gracie Barra Seattle when we first started training circa 2005-2007, sort of pre-Gracie Barra curriculum. I remember talking with someone else a few weeks ago who started training around that time and both of us agreed that while we enjoyed the new standardized Gracie Barra curriculum, we were both VERY grateful for having come up as white belts and blue belts under the "Rodrigo Lopes" curriculum.
Call it the best of both worlds.
