Skip to content
The BJJ Story
Search
Back to people
Two training partners meeting on the mat.Drawn in cream, forest green, and muted terracotta. People and objects are symbolic illustrations.
Portrait unavailable. General BJJ illustration; not a likeness of this person.Illustration: The BJJ Story

Benjamin Kunzle

“Ben”

Source: pushon.foundation

A spinal cord injury in training stopped Ben Kunzle before the 2022 Worlds; he got his black belt from Cyborg Abreu and co-founded the Push On Foundation.

Biography

Benjamin Kunzle, known as Ben, came up at Fight Sports in Miami under Roberto "Cyborg" Abreu and collected IBJJF medals from blue belt to brown. In May 2022, while he was preparing for the IBJJF World Championships, he suffered a spinal cord injury in a training accident. Since then he has received his black belt, taken up wheelchair rugby and other adaptive sports, helped organize a professional grappling event and become chairman of the Push On Foundation, which works to help people with spinal cord injuries stay active. Fight Sports Kunzle started jiu-jitsu at 11. In an Instagram post quoted by BJJ Eastern Europe in December 2022, he remembered walking into a gym almost 13 years earlier, and said the sport had taught him to stand up for himself and to keep going when things got hard. As a teenager he moved to Miami and joined Fight Sports to train under Abreu. IBJJF results trace his progress with the team. At the 2016 Miami Spring International Open he took silver in the blue belt lightweight division and bronze in the open class, the division without a weight limit. By 2018 he was competing at purple belt, and at the 2019 Miami Winter International Open he won the purple belt lightweight division. In 2020, now at middleweight, he won the purple belt division at the Miami Winter, Foley, Atlanta and Orlando International Opens. He also took silver at the American Nationals in both gi and no-gi, that is, with and without the traditional jacket, and reached the open-class podium at Foley and Orlando; Rayron Gracie won that division at both. At the 2021 Miami International Open No-Gi he won both the purple belt medium-heavy division and the purple belt open class. At brown belt he reached the podium at the 2021 Orlando Summer International Open and at Jiu-Jitsu CON International that year, and in 2022 he won the brown belt middleweight division at the Charleston International Open. Looking back after the injury, Grappling Insider described him as having been a high-level brown belt competitor. The injury On May 23, 2022, Kunzle was training with a teammate ahead of the World Championships when an accidental fall injured his neck. By his own later account, it was meant to be his last hard session before the tournament. The spinal cord injury left him with paralysis in his arms and legs. He has since talked openly about what came next. At first he expected to recover within weeks, and when his doctors told him otherwise he shouted at them that they did not know who he was. About three weeks later, watching his first sunset since the injury, he broke down. He was 23, he said, and felt that his life was over. The turn, in Kunzle's telling, came from Abreu. His coach put a choice to him, he told WSVN 7News: he could let the injury beat him, or he could show the world he was a winner. Kunzle chose not to let his situation define him. In a post quoted by Grappling Insider, he later thanked Abreu for coming to the hospital, writing that Abreu's words there made him decide that life would not beat him. He began to treat recovery the way he treated jiu-jitsu, as a series of problems to solve, and approached his rehabilitation like a training camp. Rehabilitation From the hospital he moved to the Christine E. Lynn Rehabilitation Center, arriving in late May able to move very little. Several months of therapy later, his arm strength and control had improved greatly, and he had gone from a power wheelchair to a manual one. A recreation therapist at the center said boxing was one of the main exercises in his rehabilitation and that it improved his balance, strength and upper-body range of motion. Kunzle shared his exercises on Instagram, where he then had more than 20,000 followers, to encourage other people with disabilities. His goals, he told the hospital, were to walk, to be independent and eventually to fight again. Black belt In December 2022, BJJ Eastern Europe reported that Kunzle had been promoted to black belt, and that he had been showing his work toward a return to everyday training on Instagram. When Grappling Insider covered the promotion in January 2024, it said the belt had come from Abreu, his longtime instructor. In the post the site quoted, Kunzle wrote that he had always pictured himself as a black belt competing around the world for his team. Now, he wrote, the belt stood for more than a rank in the sport: "a black belt in life." A new sporting life Kunzle turned to adaptive sport. According to a WSVN report from January 2024, he raced a 5K about eight months after the injury, having trained on a handcycle for a month, and was preparing to take on the Miami Half Marathon in a rugby wheelchair to build his endurance. His main goal, he told the station, was full independence. By then he was also playing wheelchair rugby: in October 2023 the Mayn Idea Podcast introduced him as a black belt under Abreu, a motivational speaker and a player for the South Florida Rattlers. The Push On Foundation's board page says he now competes as a para-athlete in wheelchair rugby, jiu-jitsu and running, coaches other para-athletes toward more active lives and speaks publicly to raise awareness of spinal cord injury. He also stayed in grappling. VF Comunica interviewed him as one of the organizers of the first Blue Collar Fight Club event, set for September 1, 2023, in Fort Myers, Florida, and built around an eight-man grappling grand prix with a $25,000 prize. Kunzle picked Giancarlo Bodoni as one of his two favorites. Bodoni, the reigning ADCC 88 kg champion, won the tournament, defeating Roberto Jimenez in the final after wins over Elder Cruz and Andy Varela. Grappling Insider later wrote that Kunzle had headed up the new professional promotion. Push On Foundation Kunzle co-founded the Push On Foundation with three others and chairs its board. By the foundation's own account, it has run free workout clinics for wheelchair users, sponsored para-athletes, and organized run clubs, aquatic outings and adaptive fitness programs, later adding para jiu-jitsu events and launching Push On Developmental Training, a program for adaptive athletes. In January 2025 it announced Jiu Jitsu Without Walls, an event with Rehab Without Walls planned for February 8, 2025, at Shake-A-Leg Miami, offering an open mat for all levels and training adapted for people with physical and cognitive disabilities. He was also a special guest at a spinal cord injury awareness expo run by Jackson Health together with the Lynn Rehabilitation Center, where he had done his own rehabilitation, and spoke with attendees about his recovery.

Sources for this profile

Lineage

View in lineage tree

Trained under