Vinicius “Draculino” Magalhães is a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu fifth degree black belt under Carlos Gracie, Jr. and also at the same time a brown belt in Judo, and a Muay Thai expert. He has been teaching Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu for over 18 years. He has instructed mixed martial arts and grappling champions. Draculino has produced such talent as Joaquim Ferreira, Romulo Barral, Alberto Crane, Marcelo Azevedo, Cristiano Titi, and Samuel Braga.
Draculino grew up with Ryan Gracie, Ralph Gracie, and Renzo Gracie, taking classes under both Jean Jacques Machado and Carlos Gracie, Jr. at the original Gracie Barra Academy. He began competition early, earning championships from the blue belt upwards. In 2007, Draculino, Ryan Gracie, and Roberto Gordo founded Gracie Fusion MMA team. The unexpected death of Ryan put the fledgling team in question, but Draculino and Gordo kept the team active in tribute to Ryan’s memory.
Accomplishments:
4x Pan American Champion (once in the master division)
Pan American No-Gi Champion in master division
2x Brazilian National Champion
2x Silver Medalist of World BJJ Championships
No-Gi International Master and Senior Champion
Abu-Dhabi Contender
He (along with Renzo Gracie) is also one of the innovators of the Spider guard and one of the first to use it successfully in competition. The spider guard is now a mainstay guard in BJJ with hundreds of sweeps, submissions and variation that come from it.
In an interview with GracieBarra.com, Draculino discussed how long before a major competition should a competitor start preparing:
“GB: Ideally, how long before a major competition should an athlete begin special preparations for the event? How should they change their conditioning and rolling practices to be ready for the tournament?
Professor Draculino: In reality, an athlete must be in decent shape all of the time. He can not be someone who doesn’t train at all or trains too little and then goes in camp. I don’t believe in such things as camps.
I believe in being in constant good shape. Training camps should be for when you get closer to the competition. Train in the time of the rounds that you will be competing – so If your time is 10 minutes, do 10 minute rounds.
I would say 4 weeks or more before the tournament you should do rounds without interruption. Try to do rounds one after the other, changing partners. But from around 3.5 weeks – 2 weeks before the tournament you should give it a break in between every rounds to replicate what is going to happen there.Since you already have your cardio ready and have your timing ready, you should be replicating more than anything exactly what is going to happen there. At least 10 minutes in between rounds and do like 7 rounds.
If you are predicting that you are going to have 4 rounds or 5 rounds to be the champion at a tournament, you should do at least 2 more always. Physical conditioning and all that depends a lot of availability, time, and for each person.
I believe that jiu-jitsu should be training jiu-jitsu of course, jiu-jitsu training should always be number one. It should be that way.”
