Erik Paulson has trained under roughly 45 coaches, holds credentials across catch wrestling, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, Muay Thai, Filipino martial arts, and more, and became the first American to win a Shooto World Championship.

After nearly two decades running a full-time combat team, coaching five nights a week and running weekend seminars on top of it, Paulson eventually handed the program over to another coach after his athletes started pushing back on the standards he set.

He shared the rules for his BJJ academy:

I don’t mind giving the team away and letting someone else coach. But here’s the deal.
These are five things that I don’t want you to do here.

Number one, profanity. Watch your mouth. Number two, show up on time. Don’t show up late. Don’t show up stoned.
You know, you’re an athlete – you don’t need to smoke pot before training.

Number three, run. Stay off your cell phones. When you walk in the door, phones are off.
And then last thing, girls are off limits. If there’s a girl in the room, she’s your teammate.

That’s it.

According to Paulson, the athletes didn’t respect the rules:

All (of them are) defiant. And then I walked in, I go, “Listen, I asked you guys not to. And now I’m commanding that you don’t do any of these things. So, I’m just going to say one more time, this is not allowed. If you do it, your time is limited.”

The ongoing defiance ended things for good, though:

I just go, “I’m sorry. I don’t want this in my school anymore.”

I started practice 25 years ago. I trained some of the best athletes in the world and I said, and you guys, you’re demeaning just coming in doing this stuff.

You know, you guys can do that if you want to be that way and do that stuff, that’s fine, but don’t do it in my school.

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