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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.
I went to a BJJ gym this summer; just visiting to check it out. Some free rolling at the end, and I pulled a muscle, was out of it for a few weeks. Then a HEMA tournament, then a cold, then overtime at work, then a few weeks of single parenting, another HEMA tournament, then a flu...and here comes your post, reminding me of the fact that today, this very evening, I could go to the local (non-Brazilian) Ju-Jutsu gym for another trial visit. I had one scheduled ages ago that didn't materialize due to one of the aforementioned flus. Which means that I need to quickly figure out an excuse as to why I can't go today. Guess I'm still out of sorts from the flu? Didn't get enough sleep last night? Feels bad, but I'll be able to live with it better than with showing up and getting trashed because I'm in just that bad a shape.
So let me derail this a little to talk about the most recent HEMA tournament. Because that one was at my old club, and in the evening - what kinds of madmen start training martial arts at 19:00 and go on until 22:00? Well, we did, back when we were university students. Oh how the sinful life of my past catches up with me now. I was tired before I even got there, and ignoring the signs of the oncoming flu on the two-hour drive.
Normally, when I arrive for a tournament, I gear up as quickly as possible, but do only the lightest of warm-up exercises. Basically just a few fencing steps, a few guard transitions and a handful of strikes. To see whether the gear sits correctly, and to remind myself of which way to hold the sword. Usually this comes with me noticing the same things every time.
The answer to all of those is, of course, "Because you haven't actually trained at all, or done any other sports or athletic exercises with any regularity, since early 2020. And you're getting old.".
Not this time though. Because this tournament simply took up the time slot of a regular training session, and the trainers were present, they started the event with communal warm-up exercises. The stuff that, six years ago when I was still a regular, would have come as naturally to me as climbing a flight of stairs. Well, not anymore. I was close to vomiting by the end of it, heart hammering, drenched in sweat, out of breath and all strength. And of course the schedule was tight and I had to gear up and get ready to fight immediately anyways.
So I went and did the needful. Terrorized some of the newbies with guards they had no idea how to deal with, with creating the illusion of distance to land unexpected thrusts, with letting their strikes repeatedly wiff because they don't actually utilize their range (until I got a very embarassing bonk on the head when I overplayed that hand) and some cheap shots to the hands when separating from a bind and they mistook that for deescalation (Though in one such separation, one of the newbies got a beautiful thrust to my throat in). Notice a theme here? It's all tricks and leveraging experience. When fighting against the more experienced comeptitors (who of course all know me and what I'm up to), they just went all-in and either trashed me through superior strength and/or speed, went into grappling distance and folded me up, or even sprung my own dirty tricks on me. I don't hold up under actual pressure anymore; the muscle memory may be there but the muscle isn't anymore.
I still enjoyed it. It was fun. I recovered somewhat over the course of the evening; the fights themselves being less strenuous than the warm-up. I chide myself for going in without a plan this time and just screwing around; I know I could've performed better because the competition wasn't much stronger than at the last tournament, and there I actually got a lot done purely by merit of having that good plan. I met some old friends I hadn't seen in a while. Felt a sense of homecoming to a familiar place and familiar activities. The chairman even gave me special patch for the ten-year anniversary of my membership. Which I chuckled a little at, because I had been a member for several years prior to that in the predecessor club, but apprently that didn't count for the current-day buerocracy. Nevermind, I really did appreciate that they thought of me and thanked them accordingly.
But of course nothing is the same anymore. For every old friend I met again, there was one stranger and three empty places. More on those empty places later. You can't leave your jacket in the locker room anymore because of rampant theft. Adults are not allowed to be in the locker room at the same time as children anymore. O tempora. But that's marginal. What bothers me is the following. We had always had a culture of stupid jokes. Nothing worth retelling, basically just inside jokes that functioned much like 4chan memes; easily memorized applause lights for socially inept nerds. Some drove that, some were the butt of it, some tried their best to ignore it and focus on the fencing. And I know, I know that I'm a grumpy old man now, and badly out of touch, but those jokes have gotten out of hand. Not worse, or crossing boundaries, but oppressive in their repetitive omnipresence. Every conversation is just a nonstop exchange of meaningless in-group signals. "A game of emote-with-me", this stuff was called recently. Sometimes variety is inejcted by quoting the internet meme du jour. If anyone present was serious about the sport, they didn't show it. Most of the newbies were busy trying to one-up each other with statements meant to showcase how crazy or special each one was. Socially inept nerds still, but I just don't gel with the new generation.
Beyond this point comes the Culture War.
After the tournament, we went to a nearby pizza place. At 10 PM, fuck me, and with a two-hour drive still ahead of me, but I don't get to be there often. Turns out I regretted that part of the evening and I should've just headed straight home. Because the next hour was a non-stop leftist ranting session. It started off with a twenty-minute hate session for the autistic club treasurer who managed to antagonize everyone. Then came the politics. Comparing everyone right of the social democrats to literal Hitler. The anesthesiologist telling us what he would do if he learned that one of his patients was such a "nazi". Someone else recounting how he taught his kid vulgar anti-fascist songs. Condemnations of the EU's relenting on the internal combustion engine ban. A general agreement on the inability of the market to do anything positive, and the need for more regulation. Several rants about how ridiculous it is to exclude foreigners or attribute anything negative to immigration. Three cheers for diversity. By a table manned (and womanned) exclusively by straight upper-middle-class white native Germans who managed to bully all the non-believers out of the club (the working class, the sexist-jokes-maker, the non-vaccinated, the German-paganism-inclined, the Christians, even the one foreigner we used to have) . Oh, and dear Americans, they were not kind to your democratically elected President of the United States. The big orange satan was the ultimate boo-light. And to cap it all of, a big announcement of how the people present finally managed to march through the institutions of larger organization our club is part of to change the statutes so that membership of or support for any right-wing organization will be grounds for immediate exclusion in the future.
Guess who ate his apple chips, kept quiet, and half-pretended to fall asleep in his chair? Please ignore me, I'm just an old fossil trying to die in peace.
Back when, we'd generally not discuss politics. It just wasn't what anyone was there for. Occasionally conversations strayed there, but effectively only in 1-on-1 situations, and then we genuinely did accomplish polite disagreement or laying out differences in basic assumptions, and left it there. But I guess everything is poltical now, and you're either with them or against them. I don't know whether I'll ever make another trek to my old club. It pains me to say this. I paid my dues and earnestly tried to keep up over the last few years, wore my club regalia and all. But given how much of a hassle it is to get there, and how few of the old guard are left, and how much the new people there grate on me...I think I'll just hit daytime tournaments across the region, diassociate myself from the club, and avoid the social get-togethers from now on. This used to be a very important part of my identity, but it just doesn't work anymore.
It's almost funny how the HEMA people I actually had producive sports-centric interactions with over the last few months included honest-to-god flag-waving communists and nonbinary gendersomethings, but the polite good decent moderate people are rabid ideologues whose politicization of previous apolitical institutions disgusts me. They think I'm one of them. I don't want to deceive them, but I really did not come there for a hill to die on, and so I kept quiet. Almost funny, but ultimately I'm just sad.
Sorry for steering this into CW territory. I just wanted to talk sports, but apparently I had some venting to do.
I've been fighting off a series of colds for a month now. It really interferes with things.
Politically my BJJ gym is kind of opposite of my rock climbing gym experiences.
Climbing gyms are self-consciously aggressively blue tribe, but secretly conservative because of the naturally white, elitist, nature of the sport. Serious outdoor sports cannot by nature be really inclusive. They can be friendly, welcoming, but ultimately the nature of the sport is that it revolves around travel to remote locations, the more remote the better, the more difficult to reach the better. No rock climber likes crowds. Rock climbing forwards the myth of complete gender equality (to be fair, rock climbing comes closer than any other real sport), and does its best to promote women's climbing, but if you're going to climb a 5.10 and she only climbs 5.9, sorry. Rock climbing gyms circa 2020 loved to do BLM stuff, often to distasteful extents, but they're all lily white. There are probably more socialists than Republicans in your average gym, but the nature of any workout is that it makes you conservative, correlates your personal development with your personal effort.
My BJJ gym, by contrast, is self-consciously red tribe, but actually very inclusive. It's full of serious Christians, gun nuts, cops, divorced dads, off color jokes, and a full understanding that the women are playing along but in a different class. But, it's also the United Colors of Benneton. The owner is Puerto Rican, the Monday coach that gave him his black belt is white, the Thursday instructor (whose classes I mostly avoid because the moves are too complicated for me) is black, the weekend coaches are two puerto ricans one a doctor and the other a truck driver during the week, the other black belts are bearded white guys. Racist jokes are occasional, but the rules aren't enforced by anyone glaring at you or shaming you, but if you cross a line you risk a bad round with Andre. Gay jokes are constant (how do you even do BJJ without gay jokes), and to my knowledge we don't have any gay guys, but if one joined and played the game, I don't think anyone would really care.
I actually explained this to a friend of my wife's who runs the local LGBTQWERTY youth center, that if she wants to help trans kids who are looking for an athletic outlet, send them to our BJJ gym instead of telling them to join the track team. As long as they don't enter a comp, which 80% of people never do anyway, they'll just be them around the gym, nobody is going to bother them. I'd just understand that if I roll with Pat that I roll harder than I would with a woman, but not as hard as I would with a teenage boy. This is already an adjustment we're all making constantly to accommodate size or experience differences. As long as you show up and try, there's not going to be any hatred.
How fit and strong do you have to be for BJJ to make it enjoyable? Is it a bad sport for someone who picks up injuries easily (tendonitis in various places)? :P
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