"Sapo" approaches and tells Renzo about the surgery he's going to have because of ruptured tendons in his knee. “Don't try to sew up your tendons, they will burst again... What you need to do is put cadaver tendons in place of your own. That's what I did – recovery is fast and you'll never have problems again. I alerted Khabib (Nurmagomedov) when he operated; unfortunately he didn't listen to me and his knee burst again...”, said Renzo. 
 
The break ends, training resumes. They review once again all the movements and situations, doing a step-by-step just talking, sitting on the mat. 

"Every time you hit, you hold him next. Because what is the big danger?”, Renzo asks, replying in sequence: “The counterattack. 9 out of 10 knockouts are counters.”
 
They rise again and resume standing instructions, this time working on knee and elbow strikes, progressing to guillotine execution. The difficulty that Neiman presents is generated by a wrong hip movement, which was preventing him from fitting the strike accurately. Renzo detects the problem, explains the solution, and demonstrates it a few times. Neiman writes down on his cell phone: “So I don't forget”, he says, intently. Then he asks to try again. So the strike is perfectly executed.
 
New questions arise, as if that game could go on for infinite variables. Renzo clarifies each of the possibilities: they are joint movements that, combined in a specific order, lead the body of the opponent to dead ends.
 
More students are arriving for the afternoon training. Those who were already at the gym take squeegees and buckets of water and wipe the sweat off the mat. Pairs form and body games erupt, intensity and grace combined, in different points of the large dojo.
 
RENZO: (smiling) The more you train, the luckier you are.
 
In the gym there's a palpable feeling of brotherhood in the air, something that amalgamates all the fighters who walk around, creating a kind of connection that's hard to explain to anyone outside the métier. A shared sense of belonging. An affirmation of the presence of their bodies, but not only of their bodies – since, being under permanent risk of attack (the state that characterizes a fighter), those bodies request the involvement not only of muscles, tendons and senses, but of minds and spirits. Consciousness and animality, like pen and sword (mind and body, in the metaphor of the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima), united at last.
 
They are men and women who talk, alternating smiles and seriousness, density and lightness, and who cling on the mat, full of proud bruises on their arms, back, legs... Concentrated faces, monastically absorbed in an endless activity of understanding, repetition and improvement of unsuspected movements, which involves and expands their inherent possibilities.
 
(By the way: Neiman Gracie won the match at BELLATOR 246 that took place on September 12 in Connecticut, defeating Jon Fitch via submission in the second round with a heel hook. Renzo was in the corner, guiding his nephew throughout the fight.)