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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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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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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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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I'm only conversant in aikido, which is more like action yoga or something. In that, I've been thrown (usually into a subsequent roll) by guys who were very skilled, and also brutally slammed into the mat by guys who seemed to be channeling a different martial art. At my size (about 177cm, 73 kg) there are women who are both taller and heavier (fewer in Japan) of course. The very skilled akiidoka can move you (me) even if I resist, male or female. The regular rando is like an unbalanced sack of oranges. Reading your updates makes me want to try BJJ though the prospect of abject humiliation is always mildly daunting.
I'm 185cm and 100+kg (yes, I know, sigh) and I've been doing Aikido for a while, and I've seen women than could unbalance me reliably. If they know what they are doing, it's definitely possible, and strength has very little to do with it, more speed and precision. Of course, BJJ has very different modality, Aikido techniques usually end where BJJ is beginning :) And yes, somebody who did not practice maintaining balance is usually really easy to unbalance and really uncomfortable when the balance is broken - it's one of the challenges when working with novices, they do weirdest things when the balance is gone.
I don't think "humiliation" should be a part of it. I mean, if you didn't do BJJ what you expect to happen when you come to the practice first? Of course everybody would be better than you - I mean, if they aren't, you should seek another place to practice, since here people obviously are wasting their time! So, there's nothing humiliating in it - it's like if you tried to learn Japanese and discovered after a week you are not good at it yet. If you practiced for 10 years and kept losing to everybody, that'd be humiliating. But as a beginner, literally nothing - at least nothing related to not being good in BJJ - should be humiliating.
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An older dude who used to do Aikido joined recently, and I will say he definitely learned something in the way of balance and body positioning from his aikido practice, he's very tough to off balance and he's got strong resistance. But at times he is a little goofy with his technical choices.
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