Craig Jones Admits PED Use Before ADCC 2017

Craig Jones finally admits what everyone already knew: he was juiced for ADCC 2017, and it never stopped.

In a June 2026 appearance on the Fight Companion podcast with Nathaniel Cho, the leg lock specialist dropped the confession grappling has been waiting for but pretending didn't need to hear. "I do also wholeheartedly believe I am 100% cheating," Jones said, then went full pharmaceutical audit: 200mg testosterone per week, 100mg nandrolone, daily oxandrolone, tadalafil for the work capacity. He "blasted for a 6-month period prior to" ADCC 2017—the tournament that turned him from fast technical grappler to the unstoppable heel hook terminator who would spend the next eight years submitting people like he'd found a cheat code.

Here's the thing: nobody's shocked. Grappling knew. Everyone who watched his rise, everyone who trained against him, everyone at the gym when his training partners whispered about the physical transformation. They all knew something shifted. Not because they're conspiracy theorists, but because variance in dominance doesn't match variance in training opportunity. You don't jump from losing to bigger guys to submitting everyone in eight months through technique alone. You do it through chemistry.

Jones' own reasoning is almost sympathetic. He was "built like a chopstick." Bigger opponents kept beating him. So he did what thousands of combat athletes do: he bought an answer. Testosterone is the obvious solution when you've decided your disadvantage is biological. It works. You get bigger. You recover faster. You hit harder. Then you beat people who were beating you.

The testosterone Jones used during that blast cycle never actually left his body. That's not how recovery works. You build muscle tissue with enhanced protein synthesis, then even after you drop the dose, the tissue stays. The fiber thickness, the motor unit recruitment—it's yours now. He's maintained it with TRT, "monitored through blood work," which is the polite fiction every steroid user tells themselves about their current protocol. It's therapy. It's medical. It's definitely not the same drug he was using before, except it is, and his baseline is still elevated.

The Sport's Open Secret

Grappling's relationship with PEDs has always been: everyone knows it's happening, nobody admits it's happening, the federations run tests that nobody takes seriously, and we move on.

ADCC tests, sure. But the testing gets memed the same way doping tests get memed in every combat sport: the athletes who care least about fairness are often the ones who know the testing schedule best. It's theater. The sport offers testing. The community offers belief.

Walk into any high-level no-gi gym in 2026 and you'll see the physical variance that screams chemistry. A 145-pounder with arm thickness most heavyweight boxers would envy. A 40-year-old brown belt with the muscle tone of a dude who's been running tren since 2008 and sees no reason to stop now. A blue belt who's been training for two years and looks like he's been training for eight. Nobody's testing them. Nobody's asking. The "supplements" on the gym shelf are doing considerably more than making you poop, and everyone's pretending not to notice.

The difference with Jones is he said it. Recorded. With specifics. Which means grappling can't hide behind "well, we don't actually KNOW" anymore. We know. Jones told us.

What This Means for 2017-2024

Here's the conversational move that happens in every sport when an enhanced athlete confesses: "But his technique was still real."

It was. The heel hook positions Jones pioneered, the footlock chains, the 50/50 stand-ups into submissions—that's real technical innovation. That's observation and thousands of reps and understanding geometry in a way most grapplers never will.

But the efficiency that separated him from his peers during his peak included chemistry. Every submission seemed effortless partly because his baseline recovery, his work capacity, his pain tolerance, and his muscle-to-fat ratio were all elevated. The opponents he beat during the 2017-2020 window were competing against someone running a pharmacological advantage. Not everyone was. So the gap between "best technique" and "best performance" isn't a gap at all—it's a dose difference.

We can't rewrite the record. ADCC 2017 happened. The wins count. But we can stop pretending we don't know what we're looking at.

More importantly: every athlete currently competing in that same space knows what they're racing against. Some of them are running their own protocols. Some of them aren't. That variance—pharmaceutical advantage vs. pharmaceutical parity vs. natural—is baked into every match. The leg lock revolution that Jones pioneered happened in an era where some of the dominant athletes were chemically optimized. That doesn't invalidate the technique. It contextualizes the era.

The TRT Epilogue

Jones frames his current testosterone use as different from his blast. It's therapy. It's medical. It's keeping him at "that middle ground."

It's the same drug. TRT is just the cruising dose that keeps you above your natural baseline after you've spiked it with a blast. Once you've proven testosterone works—and it does, devastatingly—you don't voluntarily go back to "chopstick" physiology. You just move the protocol from "enhancement" to "maintenance," then tell yourself it's different because there's a prescription involved.

The distinction between medical and enhancement is one of modern sports' most durable fictions. If you're running testosterone at twice your natural production, you're still running above natural production. It's legal if you have a prescription. It's still a drug.

The Larger Conversation Grappling Won't Have

Jones' admission doesn't change his legacy or his consequence. He's already retired from hard competition. He runs a successful gym. He's been paid. His reputation built itself on leg lock innovation that's genuinely his, even if his peak performance was pharmacologically optimized.

For grappling, though, it's a data point in the reckoning the sport has never had. The leg lock revolution—the technical explosion that changed how the sport is played—happened in an era where some of the dominant voices were definitely enhanced. That doesn't invalidate the technique. It contextualizes it.

The harder question is for current competitors: how many are still playing against phantom advantages? How many of your best training partners are running cycles? How many of the guys beating you at tournaments are operating on a different biological level, and how much of that is technique vs. chemistry?

The answer, given what Jones just admitted, is more than grappling wants to admit.

The Hypocrisy Engine

The real issue is structural. Grappling invites PED use because it has no meaningful testing, no enforcement, no entity with teeth that says "you're out." The UFC at least pretends to have standards. IBJJF runs a belt rank system that theoretically means something.

Grappling? It means "you trained a lot and you were probably better with or without the gear."

You can't watch a decade of international competition and believe everyone competing at the highest level is natural. The skill variance exists, sure. Genetic potential matters, absolutely. But the dominance variance—the ability of one athlete to submit five others in a single tournament, year after year—that doesn't match technique or genetics. That matches pharmaceutical access.

The sport could solve this. Testing infrastructure, enforcement, real consequences. But that would require admitting the problem exists, which would require the community to stop pretending, which would require the athletes to actually care about fairness more than they care about winning.

So it won't happen. Grappling will keep running this theater where testing happens and everyone pretends it's meaningful. Athletes will keep running their cycles. Federations will keep testing. The sport will keep pretending the variance in dominance is natural.

And the next time a dominant athlete admits they were enhanced, everyone will act shocked, then move on. Jones is just the first honest enough to say it out loud. The grappling world is going to pretend that's surprising.

This post was generated by AI. Sources are linked below. Follow @bjj-problems on YouTube for the weekly video digest.

Sources

• Fight Companion Podcast - Nathaniel Cho Interview Series
• LowKickMMA - MMA and Combat Sports Coverage