The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Three months ago I posted that I signed up for a local BJJ gym. The place opened up down the street, and I thought it would be a fun changeup to my routine of lifting, climbing, kettlebells, etc. I’d always vaguely thought it would be fun and valuable to learn a little BJJ, something I always intended to do in the same way that one day I think I might hike the Appalachian Trail or read Proust. Just one of those things that a well-rounded man ought to do. My best friend wanted to sign up at the same time, so I figured that would give me one friend in the gym. I’ve attended, with a gap of a few weeks for in-law obligations followed by the in-laws giving me COVID, an average of 3-4 times a week since the first week of December. Some overly verbose thoughts I’ve been holding in to avoid embarrassing myself in front of and/or boring the piss out of people in my real life with my infinite thoughts about my hobby I’m shitty at:
— This is the best thing I’ve done for my cardio since I was on the rowing team in undergrad. I feel like if I spent a month jogging I might have to change my name to FourAndAHalfHourMarathon. I feel better on the rowing machine, doing long kettlebell sets, and on the mat it is no question. The first month, one round in going hard I was exhausted. After gutting out one and a half more round, I would go home and be in shell shock. Now I can roll three or four decent rounds, walk off the mat, and go home like nothing really happened. Part of that is more efficient technique and calming down, but a lot of it is pure cardio. I’ve always been bad at forcing myself to do cardio, I have a tendency to go for a two mile run and give up after a mile and a half, or to set a goal or getting on the rower four times a week and half ass it for a while before I stop doing it altogether. BJJ forces me to do ten to twenty minutes of hard cardio at the end of every class, because the other guy is on top of me and there’s nothing I can do about it, I’m not forced to set my own pace because my opponent is setting it for me. My wife has commented that I’m getting a lot leaner, though I’m only down about two pounds my abs are noticeably more visible, and I know it’s happening because my wife didn’t just say I’m looking good, she’s getting self-conscious about the possibility I’m looking better than her. I suspect, looking around the gym, that this is noob gains from trying a completely different format of exercise and that they’ll probably max out by June, but there is a ton of value in changing things up entirely, and rolling BJJ is probably about as far from weightlifting as I can get in formatting.
— While I’m a lifting/climbing/fitness enthusiast always working on some goal or other, it’s amazing how going to BJJ has refocused the rest of my fitness routine. "Fight club gets to be your reason for going to the gym and keeping your hair cut short and cutting your nails.” I’m getting on the rower more, I’m stretching and doing yoga, I’m theragun-ing myself regularly, to make sure I’m in peak condition on the mat. And while climbing and lifting have taken a back seat, I’m trying to sneak them in between, because I can feel how the strength I built over ten years gives me an advantage rolling, and I don’t want to lose the few advantages I have. There’s something so satisfying about feeling the results of the numbers I hit in the weight dungeon out on the mat. This is motivating and centering for me in a way other things haven’t been.
— I finally signed up in large part because my childhood best friend, B, signed up too. We figured we would pretty much go together every time. B did martial arts from like ten years old to twenty one, a mixed-up karate studio from what I recall, and had some grappling experience from that. Beyond that, he’s in great shape, runs around ten or fifteen Spartan races every year, typically hitting the podium for three or four Supers (15+ miles) every year. At our first few classes, he was much better than me, simply knowing more and feeling more comfortable on the ground, and also having much better cardio. I’ve actually only made it to about five classes with him in the past three months. We both have responsible adult jobs, and the ability to make it to an evening class just depends how the day is going, so some of that is just B might make it Monday Thursday and Saturday while I make it Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday. But a lot of it is that he keeps getting hurt. Way too often. B seems to pick up a knock every third or fourth class and then miss four or five days healing up. B seems to be really held back by injuries, most recently his back is so bad that he’s in “I have to really think about tying my shoes” mode. The first few times we rolled when we started he dominated me, the last time we rolled together last week we were close to even but I was consistently taking the offensive on position. In a lot of ways, I think his mixed grappling experience coming in hurt him, because he was able to attempt things that his body wasn’t ready to do yet, and unwilling to get beat even though he was going to get beat eventually. Ego is the cause of most injuries, a good half sports injury stories starts with “I knew I shouldn’t have done that but…” This has me thinking about injuries in two ways. First of all like when signing an NBA star, the most important skill is availability, if you’re injured you’re not training and getting better. We’ve both been signed up for three months, I’ve attended twice as many classes and rolled three times as much, so at this point I’m getting better; an illustration of how injury avoidance is your most important task in any workout. Second, sustainability of BJJ as a hobby is a tough one. Virtually all the regulars who have been there for a while have suffered injuries, many of them severe and semi-permanent. I’m questioning if this will end up being a lifelong hobby for me for that reason. I’ve had a couple of days where Big John caught me in a guillotine and I had a stiff neck afterward, but it only kept me out for a day or two until I healed up enough to roll again and just tell my partner that if he caught me in a choke put it on slow and I’ll tap early. But I’m trying extra hard right now to avoid injuries and just stay in the game.
— It’s tougher to measure progress in BJJ than other sports I’m used to. The gym I’m attending is small and casual and largely unstructured, there’s one “fundamentals” and one “advanced” class each week, but every other day is “all levels adult,” with adult running from local high school wrestling champs to fifty year old black belts who have been grappling for thirty years to thirty something moderately athletic guys like me. The black belts drop in on the fundamentals class and the advanced class is open to everyone, so even those don’t make much difference. There are probably forty or so total members, five to twenty in any given class any given night, and as near as I can tell I’m just about the last real new guy to sign up. So for me, there are a lot of nights I’m just getting beat on. Progress looks like losing slower, like getting caught in fools mate traps less often, like forcing my opponent to methodically take me down, break full guard, pass half guard, and then fight for a submission instead of just rolling over me. To a large extent setting goals has been thwarted by how variable any given night can feel. One practice I might roll with three guys who are just above my level, another I might roll with two black belts and a 260lb former state champ wrestler. Those two practices are so different that the goals I have for each can’t really be compared. The first three months my goals were things like: get one submission. Get a submission from guard. Get a submission from a dominant position. Hunting for those helped encourage me to avoid being totally passive when rolling, and being willing to accept getting subbed as long as my k/d wasn’t zero. Now I’m thinking more in terms of defense, from learning more about the fundamentals, and I want to focus on getting through twenty minutes on the mat, first without getting subbed, and then without losing guard completely. I don't know if these goals are actually achievable, as my opponents probably have been taking it easy on me and have vast reserves of physical and technical ability that they will unleash on me once I resist. But, hey, at least I'll be more fun for them to roll with.
— I didn’t realize people really did steroids. It’s weird realizing first of all that a decent number of guys are on some kind of dosing cycle or other, and second that a lot of them aren’t that strong. It’s really not the difference maker it is often made out to be. I have nothing against mild steroid use morally, it’s something I would consider in another ten years or so, but I’m just surprised to actually see it. It’s one of those things I’m always surprised when I run into people who actually do it, like hard drugs or leaving your wife for a younger woman. I understand that such things are normal, but I kind of assume they happen somewhere off camera statistically, not right in front of me.
-- I avoid rolling with the women in class like the plague. Because I truly have no idea what to do when I'm rolling with them. I don't want to just muscle them around, but I don't want to play pattycake, but I don't want to disrespect them, I don't know. There's just no winning that one.
— I’m dumping so many thoughts here because I’m embarrassed to talk about it too much to friends and family irl because, well, I suck. At what point is it even a remotely interesting hobby? When one enters a tournament? Wins one? After a year? Three? Ten? It just feels so odd to talk about a new hobby one sucks at as an adult.
-- I'm trying to resist the urge to get into BJJ culture. I don't want to read too much about BJJ, get into the debates I hear around the gym that I know are raging somewhere on the internet. I've always over-intellectualized things, this is an experiment for me in just doing the damn thing.
BJJ is very red pilling, you've already alluded to a few ones:
Women are ridiculously weak compared to men. I suck at BJJ and I can easily beat all the women in my gym except for the very best one who is arguably in the top 10 female BJJ fighters in the world. Even if their technique is far better than mine (and it often is), it's so easy to overpower them. I completely sympathize with your neuroses with BJJing with girls, I avoid them at all costs.
People with no fighting experience really do completely suck at fighting. Even though I suck at BJJ, I have had the extremely gratifying experience of destroying a noob during their first week. One particular instance comes to where i fought this gym rat with easily 20+ pounds of muscle on me, and he completely gassed himself and I tapped him three times in five minutes. Again, I suck at BJJ, he just sucked way worse.
People who are good at fighting ARE REALLY FUCKING GOOD AT FIGHTING. There's a guy at my gym who weighs maybe 130 pounds who can absolutely rock anyone under 200 pounds. It's an uncanny experience to fight someone who you can easily overpower but who has just enough strength to use their mastery of BJJ to twist you into pretzels. On the other end, black belts are basically invincible. I don't think there is any level of intoxication short of literally passing out that could let me beat a black belt.
BJJ teaches you how much you suck. Like, you learn how easily other people can push you around, or how those fight moves you saw in movies either don't work in real life or are easily countered or require tremendous skill to actually use. It is extremely humbling to get your ass kicked over and over again by better fighters, and even more humbling to lose to a guy who has been training just as long as you and recognize that he has something you don't.
Steroid use is shockingly common these days among casual athletes, especially in BJJ, and even at pro BJJ levels where real testing is almost nonexistent. But even in random BJJ gyms, you'll role with guys who are crazy strong for their size or have weirdly wide jaws or terrible skin, and it's super obvious once you know what to look for.
Fitness and skill are correlated, but not super strongly. I almost think it's barbelled. The best BJJ guys I know are in insanely good shape, and a lot noobs still hit the regular weights a lot. But the guys in the middle, who are good but not great, often drop weightlifting to focus on BJJ, and they end up with athletic but not very aesthetic bodies, like big arms but underdeveloped chests and maybe even a bit of a belly.
So, every now and again I watch fights when I can catch them. Like, I made the mistake of watching the Tyson v Paul fight, and all the undercards. And the announcers could not stop talking about how stunning and brave the women's match was. I kept wondering what the fuck fight they were watching? It was practically a slapfight where neither opponent was the least bit worried about the other's blows so much as stunning them. And these were both title holders! Even the wannabe actor/boxers in the first fight put on a better show than that. Then at the end they both looked like they were about to cry. It was gross, and it felt like abuse to put them up on a stage for everyone to watch.
I wonder what you'd say about women's professional wrestling.
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Fitness in general is very red-pilling, and especially BJJ, because you are inherently trying at something and improving through your own efforts. You experience trying and succeeding. This is why much of the mainstream left is so suspicious of fitness, weightlifting, sports. Competitive sport is inherently contact with reality, you find things out, and it is dangerous to those trying to sell you illusions. A lost aspect of so many 19th and early 20th century European radical movements was their focus on physical fitness. From Muscular Christianity to radical liberal and socialist Gymnasia to the Nazis mass outdoor calisthenics; exercise is one of the best ways to improve people's agency. It inherently removes illusions enforced on you.
It has a lot, for me, in common with my experience at golf. It is painful to lose so hard for so long, but then you get that one magic moment when you hit the ball pure and on the screws and it flies perfectly and justifies all the struggle up to that point. That's how I feel when I get the rare roll in where I really feel like I'm doing jiu jitsu, where I hit the sweep, pass guard, take mount, and slide right into a head and arm choke. That justifies all the time I've spent getting smashed under a brown belt or fending off the comp team teenager who attacks like a spider monkey from every angle at once.
Contact with reality can, of course, teach you positive or negative things. I honestly don't know if I'd have the character or love of the game to suck a lot more than I do right now. I'm right at the limit where every few weeks I have a day or two where I'm a little down about it. But then I briefly read /r/bjj, and there are always posts from guys talking about being there for two or three years and still describing their experience as similar to mine, no advancement or improvement, and I feel like 100% I would quit at that point. There exist people who just aren't gonna make it, and the red pill of bjj exposes that too. And maybe that they keep going is admirable, they're more zen than I am at getting worked over and over, they're more humble. But I was about three weeks in and already impatient and saying to myself "Ok if I don't hit a single sub in open mat before the end of January, I have to think about quitting." I can't imagine waiting for that moment for another six months, another year, and still bothering to try.
I have a theory from when I ran a rock climbing gym that a lot of it depends on starting points. I'd see guys who climbed similar grades, so achieving the same goal, with very different body types and muscle development. Some of that is genetics, but it also has to do with how two guys with different builds will climb the same wall differently. A guy who starts rock climbing already big and muscular (relatively) will use a lot of muscle when climbing, because he has the strength to just yank himself up, because he needs to the strength to move the additional body weight, and because that's a problem solving method he is used to in the gym. The skinny guy can't yank himself up because he doesn't have the strength, doesn't need as much strength to move his bodyweight, and isn't as used to using raw strength as a solution anyway. So over a year doing the same beginner climbs, the big guy is using the same route as a strength exercise, while the little guy uses them as a technique exercise; the big guy builds more muscle than the little guy doing the same routine.
I wouldn't be surprised to see a similar dynamic in BJJ, where the big meatheads build more muscle because they use more muscle, while the skinny shifty fellas focus on technique because it is what works for them. So in the course of the same 10x2min rolls that we do at the gym, one guy is doing muscle building exercises and the other isn't to the same degree.
This is very me right now. I have a few months more experience than you, but I have a bad feeling that I've plateaued. I knew from the start that I don't have any special aptitude, but I'm starting to feel like I'll never rise above "target a handful of submissions I know and improvise the rest with bad instincts." I think I'll give it another month and seriously consider stepping back if I don't see some sort of improvement, even gradual.
Honestly, learning ankle locks probably hurt too, because it was the one thing I was genuinely good at, so I started shifting my whole game around them to the point of letting the rest of my game atrophy.
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Any tips on a pre-training program? It'll be a while before I move somewhere I can actually take lessons, but my cardio right now is so dogshit I'd need at least a year just to avoid dying on the first day. I can just about wrestle with sheep for a few hours, and they're not usually trying to choke me.
Just start, use supersets when you do strength training. A lot of cardio is specific to the sport anyway, plenty of marathon runners huff and puff on their first class since you're not as efficient when you start out.
As long as you keep getting stronger and do some assault bike training, you'll be alright. Many in MMA and Steve Maxwell swear by HIIT stuff on assault bikes as a time-saving way to get there. It's easy on the joints. I don't do it since my gym lacks an assault bike.
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Echoing @Testing123 , who probably knows more than me as it would be hard to know less, but to add:
-- Flexibility. Get on that 30 Days of Yoga. It's probably the most directly applicable physical activity, you need the flexibility to hit the positions or the rest of it isn't all that useful, and will also accustom you to laying on your back or side and moving your legs around.
-- Don't try to learn moves or techniques in advance, you'll learn them wrong without a partner and a coach. But do try to learn the names of positions and guards a little bit. My first dozen or so classes would have been much easier if I'd known butterfly guard, spider guard, De La Riva, X Guard, single leg X, turtle, etc. I knew a few things, like full guard half guard and back control, from watching UFC fights and whatnot, but I often knew them subtly wrong, and while I've yet to successfully learn something like a sweep or submission from a youtube video, watching a few youtube videos here and there has taught me things that my coaches don't have time to get to in practice, like "oh, in half guard go for the knee shield." The static positions will be easier to memorize without being coached through doing them, and just having some idea what it means when the coach tells you and your partner to get into a DLR will make you feel much more at home.
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I agree with OP on cardio. If your cardio isn't good, your first few weeks of BJJ will be hell, but that's a great way to build cardio so it works out.
Beyond that, I'd recommend at least basic weight lifting or some other athletic thing that builds full body muscles (not just running). BJJ is famous for being the least-muscle dependent of the useful martial arts, but if you truly have no muscle, you'll just get overpowered and clobbered in fights unless your technique is amazing. For what it's worth, when I started BJJ I was a regular normie weightlifter, and that helped, but I was not used to hitting my muscles from 10,000 new directions, so there was a big adjustment period. I now lift about 1/3rd as much as I used to and focus mostly on BJJ.
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