Stefan Ydstie reached his BJJ black belt through a dual line — Bruno Carvalho's Team Carvalho and Vidar Sandene's Grenland room — that effectively unites two of the central technical sources in the eastern and southern Norwegian scene. He now serves as the head coach for the advanced programme at Grenland BJJ & Wrestling in Skien and Porsgrunn.
His mat life sits on top of fifteen years in MMA and grappling and three years of judo, with an active career across submission wrestling, MMA, Muay Thai and kickboxing. The cross-discipline work shows up in his teaching at Grenland — pressure-heavy top game and clean stand-up transitions, the way a former pro builds a curriculum.
For Telemark BJJ, where Grenland has slowly emerged as the regional anchor academy, Ydstie is one of the two main on-mat figures who turned a small Porsgrunn club into a serious black-belt-producing room.