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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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'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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