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:
-
Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Reflections After One Year of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu
-- I recently read our friend @jdizzler's substack for his Infinite Jest review, which linked to his post of ten books he wants to read before he dies.* That's how I felt about BJJ going in. I'd always felt like it was something I should learn before I die, to be a complete person. About since I discovered the UFC on SpikeTV**. At the time, I took up boxing and Muay Thai because those gyms happened to be closer to my house, then fell out of combat sports after a bad concussion senior year of high school left me nervous about accumulating too many. I'd always thought of grappling as something I ought to master at some point in my life, as one of the "true" martial arts. At some point in my life, I needed to, if not master, at least become fluent in BJJ. It was on that list of athletic things I ought to do before I died, like running a marathon, squatting 4 plates, or maybe one day hiking the Appalachian Trail. When a gym opened near me, it seemed I'd finally found the time to do it, and of course being in my mid-thirties I instantly started to regret not starting sooner. Why didn't I start training when I was in college***? Why didn't I join the wrestling team in middle school, which would have been so valuable now****? A year in, I understand most of BJJ, even if I can't execute it. I think another year at least is going to be required to reach the level of learning that is on my bucket list. I may or may not stick with it past that, but it was absolutely worth it for me to reach this level. If, like me, learning Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is somewhere on your bucket list, I highly recommend going for it, and do it soon.
-- What makes BJJ such a compelling hobby is that you get most of the benefits of fighting, with relatively little downside, so you can do it four or five times a week without dying. I couldn't spar this hard in boxing five times a week, I'd probably do permanent damage in a month. In a way I think this is why wrestling and grappling develops across cultures as a practice, it's a way to simulate a fight without killing anyone. For the most part, MMA has shown us that the superior grappler wins the fight 90+% of the time anyway, absent a significant difference in other training or skills. I get to struggle against a real live resisting opponent ten or twenty times a week, and live to tell the tale. The primal rush makes it worth it.
-- "Fight Club became the reason to cut your hair and trim your fingernails." I started BJJ as a kind of adventure in fitness, one more thing I'd do along with all my other fitness interests, and quickly it became the focus of all my fitness interest, it took over my life. While comparison is the thief of joy, avoiding comparisons is impossible in BJJ, you know the hierarchy of the gym, and I know that if I miss class the guys who I roll with are getting better and I'm not. My work schedule is complicated, I couldn't reliably go on certain days, and minor injuries were a constant problem, so I never really got on a solid schedule of when I went to BJJ and when I didn't, and I just went every day that I could go. So between prioritizing going to BJJ whenever I could, and the constant minor injuries, I never really got into much of a workout rhythm. I still lifted and climbed and did weird kettlebell stuff, but every time I tried to start a program or plan, I'd yoink something in my shoulder or throw out my back or get caught in a bad armbar and my elbow hurts or it's guillotine week and the Poconos Gorilla pulled my neck out of line, and then I'd prioritize getting back to class and put the lifting on the backburner. I want to fix that in the second year, my goal is to get into a good rhythm of lifting and jiu jitsu, I'm sort of on a blank slate this particular second as I had about two bad weeks of minor illness and work stress, so I'm fresh to start over. I lost a good ten pounds, I want to work on a 5/3/1 template this winter, and build some more strength. Aim for 3-4 days a week of BJJ, and take proper off days instead of going until I get injured, try to consistently stick to certain days.
-- I'm also considering checking out open mat hours at other gyms, rather than only doing classes at my gym; and then on the flip side being more willing to go to class at my gym and just drill instead of staying to roll every time. We don't do a regular open mat at our gym, but when we do on holidays I find I get more out of that hour than I do out of a typical class. I also need to be better about going just to drill and not rolling, when I don't want to get hurt or don't have much time. I also might try to get a buddy to just drill with me some days. I need to venture outside of the class structure, try to guide my own learning process.
-- I feel like I'm developing a style, and I still can't decide if that's a good thing or a bad thing. I tend to be very "position over submission," a station to station offensive approach: from top I mostly pass full guard by passing to half guard, then passing to side control from there, then aiming for low percentage submissions like americanas to open up higher percentage submissions or advance position; from bottom I mostly try to get to half-guard if I'm stuck in side control or mount, then try to get to a tight waist and sweep or get back to full guard and sweep or submit from there. Half guard is where I win or lose the round. I'm constantly attempting moves that don't give up position, I only go for moves that do give up position when I have a good opening; for a while I joked that attempting an armbar was just how I gave up side control. I don't know to what extent I should lean into my style, versus trying to develop the weaker parts of my game. Probably everything, I mostly just suck.
-- BJJ has definitely proven my theory developed in rock climbing: if you keep at something, you will get better, but you mostly will always feel like you suck exactly as much as you feel like you suck at the start. At first you'll feel like you suck because you don't know anything; when you get better, you feel like you suck because you should know more. At first you feel like you suck because everyone is better than you; when you get better, you'll feel like you suck because he's better than you and started after you, or because you're just at some nowhere gym in PA anyway. This has been my experience with BJJ so far. At first I was the absolute worst, and I hated myself for sucking at it; now I'm more like bottom third or so, and I hate myself for only getting this far in a year. This is pretty much true in all hobbies: you'll feel as weak as you did when you started lifting no matter how many plates you put on the bar, as slow as you felt when you started running, etc.
-- Leglocks: Friend or Foe? is the great debate for BJJ aficionados right now. Are they too dangerous to train? You don't get the same pain feedback before the blow up someone's knee that you get before an armbar goes too far, so it's risky, put it on wrong or too jerky and you can really hurt someone. They are absolutely necessary to train for high level competition. But, you can't use most of them in lower level competitions, and if you go to another gym the "unwritten rule" is that new guys aren't to be trusted with most leg locks until you know them, so you risk causing a scene if you try a heel hook and they don't judge you worthy. As a result, I've more or less given up on using any leg locks except the straight ankle lock live, I haven't committed to competing yet but if I do I see no reason to practice moves that I can't use in a comp and screw up my flow. I also, in general, avoid moves that I have to worry about hurting my partner, because I don't like double-clutching when I'm rolling, I prefer moves where he has plenty of time to tap***** before he gets hurt. I've gotten a pretty wicked straight ankle lock when rolling by focusing on applying it, and it's become my go to in a lot of positions: it's what I fight for in a dueling leg lock, and I sometimes go straight into it from open guard to single leg x or pop it on when I can't get by a knee shield. My coaches, who are deep in the black belt competitive scene, keep encouraging me to do more heel hooks, and I drill them, but I don't really see much use for them yet, I don't really wind up in a position where I can hit the heel hook but not the straight ankle. To be honest, if you take out the straight ankle, the americana/kimura, and the triangle, I probably only finish about three or four subs a week.
-- Goals: Eleven months ago, I was getting depressed at how little progress I felt like I was making, and told myself that if I didn't get a sub by the end of February I'd quit. That night I got lucky against another white belt, pulled off some kind of half-remembered muay thai hip throw from the clinch, got his back, and tapped him on a rear naked choke. Over the next couple of months I set goals of hitting different subs, of hitting a single leg takedown, of tapping a blue belt, and finally last month I managed to, just once, sub one of the coaches. I got lucky on an ankle lock. I'm not sure what my measurable goals are anymore. The one thing I don't like about BJJ is that it's so random, at least at my gym, depending what day I show up and who shows up that day, I can be anywhere from dominant over the other guys, to just struggling to survive, it can be anything from needing to play light to avoid winning too easily to knowing that my opponent is just toying with me. So I'm not sure how to set useful goals, now that "hit X once" has mostly been exhausted. Suggestions?
*Footnote: dizz, while I admire your effort to read books in their original language, within a blog post written in English you should stick to English when giving book titles for consistency. The books were mostly familiar enough to recognize, even for a dirty monolingual, but it kinda threw off the flow, especially with Mishima in English at the end. Also, out of curiosity, do you intend to read the whole Sea of Fertility series? Runaway Horses was one of my favorites, but I stalled out midway through the next book, probably in a teenage boys inability to read books about girls.
**Is that still on? Apparently not, it was "rebranded" to Paramount, which I think is the home of stuff like Yellowstone and other boomer-fantasy TV. I wonder to what extent the audience stayed consistent, or it is only a rebrand in the sense that it's the same like channel number. I used to like Spike when I was a teenager, I wouldn't actually watch it now, but still, a shame.
***I was too busy, when not studying, trying to make the men's eight for the Head of the Charles, drinking, or courting Mrs. FiveHour; all of which seems less important in retrospect now that I see the value of being pretty close to training with early career Jon Danaher.
****Because I liked baseball and basketball better, and all the wrestling kids were juvenile delinquent tough kids who would have beat the piss out of me and stolen my copy of The Return of the King and never given it back.
*****I still shudder thinking about the one roll where I got my partner in an Americana, and started to apply it, what I thought was very slowly, giving him a long time to tap, and then this awful grinding sound came out of his elbow.
It was eye-opening for me to share my closest hobby with a friend and realize this was his meta-philosophy about it. I think it's a very American attitude, and a huge point in Americans' favour. I prefer to just try a bunch of things, find something I'm effortlessly good at, and aura farm there, but people who enjoy being in that place of improvement-oriented awareness of ignorance can bootstrap themselves into anything.
This is just the same point I'm making, but with the valence reversed: You start out feeling good, and you keep feeling good. You get better, no doubt, unless you pick a really stupid hobby with no depth. But at first, you feel good because you are effortlessly succeeding, and isn't that nice to succeed without effort? And then, as you get better, you feel good because you are getting better. Your net self esteem barely changes, even if your talent level improves.
12/2025 FiveHour could absolutely manhandle 12/2024 FiveHour on the mat. I can tell because I dominate the big strong novices that join now. A 6'2" strapping blonde college kid just joined the gym a little before Thanksgiving, and I ran into him for the first time at the Thanksgiving open mat. I don't give new guys too much slack when I first roll with them anymore, got surprised and embarrassed too many times by guys I thought were new who had previously experience, so I tapped him twice pretty quickly with my A game. Arm drag to back take to RNC, then back to the feet snapdown to ankle pick to side control to americana. That all took about a minute and a half. I took a breath and realized that he was really new, and I shouldn't be a dick, and instead work some stuff that I don't normally hit and only take subs on a silver platter. So I laid down and let him work from standing, let him get me in bottom half and bottom side and bottom mount. I still tapped him three more times, just taking stuff that was so obvious and easy I couldn't let it go without making an even bigger fool of him. After, he tells me my guard is "terrifying, I never know what's going to happen."
And that round feels good for a minute or so, it's a huge sense of victory to win a round, even a meaningless open mat in rural PA on Thanksgiving morning. Last year this time I would have been euphoric about that performance, when barely ever hit any subs on anybody. Now, I shrug, I'm still frustrated by some of my performance that day. Because earlier in the open mat I rolled with Chad and while I held him in half guard he dominated me with head pressure all round; and Big John still stumps me and what's the point of my Jiu Jitsu if I can't beat somebody bigger than me? The standard I expect myself to reach has changed.
BJJ is probably also a bad fit for my neuroticism, in that I too quickly (for my own mental well being) recategorize guys from "peer" to "he's smaller/weaker/newer, I shouldn't be a dick to him."
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link