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've been attending BJJ for about a month now, with a gap around the holidays for of in-laws followed by a gap for illness. I attend between three and four classes a week. I'd like to push closer to five, but work obligations get in the way, along with injury avoidance. When I do back to back days especially a night class followed by a morning class from Friday to Saturday, I tend to back off on rolling after a couple of rounds. My buddy who I started with has already had to skip two or three separate weeks with different injuries he picked up, though I think it's worse for him because he did enough martial arts back in high school to have some idea what he's doing, so his mind is telling his body to do things his body isn't ready for.
Fitness wise, it's been a tremendously good decision for me. The workout I get out of rolling is so completely different than what I was doing before, that I really see the value. Some of that is probably just a matter of new movement patterns and angles, but it's also cardio in a way I've historically been bad at forcing myself to do. Hopefully, it will also provide the motivation to do more cardio at home, because I clearly need to improve my conditioning to survive rolling longer, especially as I'm relying on strength to escape, pretty constantly. The coordination and proprioception aspects are also weaknesses of mine, and I hope to see improvement over time.
The relationship of strength to technique in BJJ has been interesting. The lore of BJJ has always been that strength doesn't matter, size doesn't matter, with enough technique experience and intelligence will always win out. This is often true, I've been choked out by guys I outweighed by a lot. But, the value of strength is also immediately apparent to me. While obviously I do suck, I would suck a lot worse if I were weak on top of everything else, I watch other newbies suffer even getting through the warmups, I'm grateful to my past self for spending so much time lifting/climbing/rowing. My belief has been reinforced that strength is the master category, and will improve your experience in any activity.
My biggest concerns to progress at this point beyond conditioning and injury avoidance are related to metrics and tracking. I miss the feedback of the weightroom, numbers go up good. I've always tended towards something like the Bulgarian Lite system, and it has kept me motivated over the years. In BJJ at this point, it's hard to figure out what a good day looks like for me, because I'm getting my ass handed to me over and over. My coaches, who are great guys but perhaps not the most introspective, would with certainty reply to this question with something like "Just keep coming you'll get better." Which is probably true, and the fact that this is a mental problem for me at all is probably the reason I never made it as an athlete, I know I'm the one who is wrong here. At one point a couple weeks back, when I was getting a little down about just getting worked in every roll, I wrote in my notebook the goal of landing one submission by the end of January, and that I would wait until then to reassess. Funnily enough, the next day I went to class and managed to surprise a guy by hitting a throw, taking his back, and sinking the RNC. With that hurdle overcome (my k/d isn't zero!), looking forward I need to figure out what's next. After yesterday's class, I wrote down in my lifting notebook a quick count of submissions I hit cleanly, clean sweeps, and successful guard passes. The fact that I could write that down more or less from memory after ten rounds should tell you a lot about how I was doing, I was mostly in survival mode trying to get to half guard from side control or mount. I'll see if this is a practical way to track progress, or if it at least salves my feelings of inadequacy long enough to get to a point where I'm making real progress.
I feel like you're the healthiest most badass motherfucker on here.
I think it's funny that you say that, because based on your stories about your life I tend to imagine you as a sort of Errol Flynn figure. Just going around to different exotic places and seducing beautiful women there, lol.
I've always felt like our George was the kind of guy who genuinely looks good in a hat.
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I bask in your praise, but I'm probably just the guy who uses this place as an accountability journal. I'm not sure anyone reads my workout posts, making them helps me stay on track for goals I've claimed I'm going to meet.
I read 'em even if I don't really have anything to say about them. They're good! You're not just yelling into the void.
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Just make sure that you wear long rashguards, shower after each session and get a wrestling headgear to avoid long-term issues. You may not even need extra cardio work, in time you would be able to get through your rounds without being winded. I had to sit down in my car and wait for 5 minutes before I could drive back home my first wrestling practice. Modern BJJ is submission wrestling where the takedown is a big part, rash guards and MMA have made the sport far more fun.
As long as you avoid injuries, staph and always try to be on top, you are golden. BJJ is notoriously slow in terms of belt progression but it is the only martial art you can do till you drop dead. I cannot rejoin MMA for now due to my shoulder and time constraints.
Not sure, but if you care enough to track then you will be Demian Maia among those with the same mat time. Most are just floating in a state of trance, caring this much alone makes a big difference. Many people just butt-scoot and play guard. Getting a takedown to a fully locked choke is good.
It can be demoralising, as you get better, you will start rolling with pros which is even more demoralising but we all get better. Do not get down about this though, many in your area who join are people who have wrestled before, some have judo bases so they know some ground game. Great update regardless man, I hope to hear how this month goes.
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