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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I had a terrible month and saw my therapist, I'll be back on track though I've been feeling a little off. My path to getting good at web Dev stuff and math (later ml) is quite long and no one I know irl ever does anything real or cares about it enough. I go out and everyone I meet tries their hardest to seem important.
I'm still doing better, my terrible days still end up with 2-3 hours of focused work, I only log zero if I'm sick and can't get up. Not having friends irl does seem a little wierd to me. I'm a hermit and I really enjoy the satisfaction from a good days work. I'm quite tired right now and it feels great, it means I didn't sit around waste another day of my youth.
India in general is a place where everyone's in a perpetual little league, I do not want to end up that way in the long run. Being isolated feels nice, I get the urge to interact with people and without fail I come back feeling worse about the world around me. People even look at me weird if I tell them that I'm doing math and don't wish to be another soydev.
Even within white collar circles, everyone simply only cares about one upping their colleagues. I've never had a job but I'd be depressed too if I pretended to work all day with toxic co workers. I am quite privileged that my parents allow me as a nearly 25 year old to stay with them and study stuff for better future outcomes but I do get a feeling that most people I know would never do it.
This update is pretty vague, I'm just losing my taste for a lot of things or rather care even less about them. Beyond you folks and some other e friends, everyone I know or meet does fuck all.
Beyond that I also had drama take up some of my mental space. My former oneitis messaged me out of the blue, stating that she met a former friend of mine whose name she didn't reveal. It happened at a party, where this person approached my former oneitis, told her to hat her that she was saying because of me, how I'm a total fucking loser, how I'd go around showing people photos of her and slut shaming her. Etc etc. It wrecked my day since I didn't actually do any of that.
Before I started the whole pickup artistry arc, I was a complete wuss, which is why despite being taller and better looking than average, I never managed to even kiss a girl. I'd tell people about my life quite candidly and even tell them about the girl in question since I was a total chode. My reward for being nice was being as a creepy wierdo.
Now my oneitis and whoever this rested was are irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, they're both strangers so whatever they think is immaterial and I'm not in Delhi but it did sting. I don't go around slut shaming girls but I will avoid talking to ones I'm not hooking up with from now on. That may take a few months but till then I'll try to meditate more to deal with isolation.
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Three months ago I posted that I signed up for a local BJJ gym. The place opened up down the street, and I thought it would be a fun changeup to my routine of lifting, climbing, kettlebells, etc. I’d always vaguely thought it would be fun and valuable to learn a little BJJ, something I always intended to do in the same way that one day I think I might hike the Appalachian Trail or read Proust. Just one of those things that a well-rounded man ought to do. My best friend wanted to sign up at the same time, so I figured that would give me one friend in the gym. I’ve attended, with a gap of a few weeks for in-law obligations followed by the in-laws giving me COVID, an average of 3-4 times a week since the first week of December. Some overly verbose thoughts I’ve been holding in to avoid embarrassing myself in front of and/or boring the piss out of people in my real life with my infinite thoughts about my hobby I’m shitty at:
— This is the best thing I’ve done for my cardio since I was on the rowing team in undergrad. I feel like if I spent a month jogging I might have to change my name to FourAndAHalfHourMarathon. I feel better on the rowing machine, doing long kettlebell sets, and on the mat it is no question. The first month, one round in going hard I was exhausted. After gutting out one and a half more round, I would go home and be in shell shock. Now I can roll three or four decent rounds, walk off the mat, and go home like nothing really happened. Part of that is more efficient technique and calming down, but a lot of it is pure cardio. I’ve always been bad at forcing myself to do cardio, I have a tendency to go for a two mile run and give up after a mile and a half, or to set a goal or getting on the rower four times a week and half ass it for a while before I stop doing it altogether. BJJ forces me to do ten to twenty minutes of hard cardio at the end of every class, because the other guy is on top of me and there’s nothing I can do about it, I’m not forced to set my own pace because my opponent is setting it for me. My wife has commented that I’m getting a lot leaner, though I’m only down about two pounds my abs are noticeably more visible, and I know it’s happening because my wife didn’t just say I’m looking good, she’s getting self-conscious about the possibility I’m looking better than her. I suspect, looking around the gym, that this is noob gains from trying a completely different format of exercise and that they’ll probably max out by June, but there is a ton of value in changing things up entirely, and rolling BJJ is probably about as far from weightlifting as I can get in formatting.
— While I’m a lifting/climbing/fitness enthusiast always working on some goal or other, it’s amazing how going to BJJ has refocused the rest of my fitness routine. "Fight club gets to be your reason for going to the gym and keeping your hair cut short and cutting your nails.” I’m getting on the rower more, I’m stretching and doing yoga, I’m theragun-ing myself regularly, to make sure I’m in peak condition on the mat. And while climbing and lifting have taken a back seat, I’m trying to sneak them in between, because I can feel how the strength I built over ten years gives me an advantage rolling, and I don’t want to lose the few advantages I have. There’s something so satisfying about feeling the results of the numbers I hit in the weight dungeon out on the mat. This is motivating and centering for me in a way other things haven’t been.
— I finally signed up in large part because my childhood best friend, B, signed up too. We figured we would pretty much go together every time. B did martial arts from like ten years old to twenty one, a mixed-up karate studio from what I recall, and had some grappling experience from that. Beyond that, he’s in great shape, runs around ten or fifteen Spartan races every year, typically hitting the podium for three or four Supers (15+ miles) every year. At our first few classes, he was much better than me, simply knowing more and feeling more comfortable on the ground, and also having much better cardio. I’ve actually only made it to about five classes with him in the past three months. We both have responsible adult jobs, and the ability to make it to an evening class just depends how the day is going, so some of that is just B might make it Monday Thursday and Saturday while I make it Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday. But a lot of it is that he keeps getting hurt. Way too often. B seems to pick up a knock every third or fourth class and then miss four or five days healing up. B seems to be really held back by injuries, most recently his back is so bad that he’s in “I have to really think about tying my shoes” mode. The first few times we rolled when we started he dominated me, the last time we rolled together last week we were close to even but I was consistently taking the offensive on position. In a lot of ways, I think his mixed grappling experience coming in hurt him, because he was able to attempt things that his body wasn’t ready to do yet, and unwilling to get beat even though he was going to get beat eventually. Ego is the cause of most injuries, a good half sports injury stories starts with “I knew I shouldn’t have done that but…” This has me thinking about injuries in two ways. First of all like when signing an NBA star, the most important skill is availability, if you’re injured you’re not training and getting better. We’ve both been signed up for three months, I’ve attended twice as many classes and rolled three times as much, so at this point I’m getting better; an illustration of how injury avoidance is your most important task in any workout. Second, sustainability of BJJ as a hobby is a tough one. Virtually all the regulars who have been there for a while have suffered injuries, many of them severe and semi-permanent. I’m questioning if this will end up being a lifelong hobby for me for that reason. I’ve had a couple of days where Big John caught me in a guillotine and I had a stiff neck afterward, but it only kept me out for a day or two until I healed up enough to roll again and just tell my partner that if he caught me in a choke put it on slow and I’ll tap early. But I’m trying extra hard right now to avoid injuries and just stay in the game.
— It’s tougher to measure progress in BJJ than other sports I’m used to. The gym I’m attending is small and casual and largely unstructured, there’s one “fundamentals” and one “advanced” class each week, but every other day is “all levels adult,” with adult running from local high school wrestling champs to fifty year old black belts who have been grappling for thirty years to thirty something moderately athletic guys like me. The black belts drop in on the fundamentals class and the advanced class is open to everyone, so even those don’t make much difference. There are probably forty or so total members, five to twenty in any given class any given night, and as near as I can tell I’m just about the last real new guy to sign up. So for me, there are a lot of nights I’m just getting beat on. Progress looks like losing slower, like getting caught in fools mate traps less often, like forcing my opponent to methodically take me down, break full guard, pass half guard, and then fight for a submission instead of just rolling over me. To a large extent setting goals has been thwarted by how variable any given night can feel. One practice I might roll with three guys who are just above my level, another I might roll with two black belts and a 260lb former state champ wrestler. Those two practices are so different that the goals I have for each can’t really be compared. The first three months my goals were things like: get one submission. Get a submission from guard. Get a submission from a dominant position. Hunting for those helped encourage me to avoid being totally passive when rolling, and being willing to accept getting subbed as long as my k/d wasn’t zero. Now I’m thinking more in terms of defense, from learning more about the fundamentals, and I want to focus on getting through twenty minutes on the mat, first without getting subbed, and then without losing guard completely. I don't know if these goals are actually achievable, as my opponents probably have been taking it easy on me and have vast reserves of physical and technical ability that they will unleash on me once I resist. But, hey, at least I'll be more fun for them to roll with.
— I didn’t realize people really did steroids. It’s weird realizing first of all that a decent number of guys are on some kind of dosing cycle or other, and second that a lot of them aren’t that strong. It’s really not the difference maker it is often made out to be. I have nothing against mild steroid use morally, it’s something I would consider in another ten years or so, but I’m just surprised to actually see it. It’s one of those things I’m always surprised when I run into people who actually do it, like hard drugs or leaving your wife for a younger woman. I understand that such things are normal, but I kind of assume they happen somewhere off camera statistically, not right in front of me.
-- I avoid rolling with the women in class like the plague. Because I truly have no idea what to do when I'm rolling with them. I don't want to just muscle them around, but I don't want to play pattycake, but I don't want to disrespect them, I don't know. There's just no winning that one.
— I’m dumping so many thoughts here because I’m embarrassed to talk about it too much to friends and family irl because, well, I suck. At what point is it even a remotely interesting hobby? When one enters a tournament? Wins one? After a year? Three? Ten? It just feels so odd to talk about a new hobby one sucks at as an adult.
-- I'm trying to resist the urge to get into BJJ culture. I don't want to read too much about BJJ, get into the debates I hear around the gym that I know are raging somewhere on the internet. I've always over-intellectualized things, this is an experiment for me in just doing the damn thing.
The first half of this post filled me with Dread. I have always considered BJJ and to hear the positive side of it, I was convinced I'd have to do it.
I've always been, frankly, scared of stepping into combat sports. I am not a winner at any sport - consistently Luigi to someone's Mario. That's bad enough in things as trivial as racing - applied to combat sports it just sounds like too much of an emasculating exercise.
Then there's keeping to a rigorous schedule which seems impossible with my work and children.
Between that and the potential for injury that would affect now essentially 3 sports I..... Think this is a safe pass on something to take up?
Despite all this I've always considered it so irresponsible to have no martial arts prowress. I'm extremely bad at carrying regularly and your body is a weapon you have with you all the time.
I guess I'm asking a bit for your take on it given all that
I felt very similarly to you. I'd run across the history of BJJ at different times, and considered it a worthy pursuit, and ran into interesting people who did BJJ over and over from Anthony Bourdain to Lex Friedman to Ray Cappo from Youth of Today, and it was one of those vague things I thought I should do at some point. And then this gym opened up nearby and I felt like ok it's going to be tough to do this at 33, knowing I'm going to need to suffer from the ego death of sucking for months before I improve and being used to being good at most things I do during the course of my day. But I'm not getting any younger, and it is worth a shot.
I'm a fellow non-winner, I've never been the best at anything, decent but not great. And I'm not going to lie to you, there are times it is emasculating and embarrassing and anyone who says otherwise is lying. But it's a lot like golf for me. The frustration of sucking pays off in that magic moment when you hit the ball right on the screws smooth and easy and it flies straight and true right where you wanted it to go. I find that personally, as long as I get a win every week or so, I can handle the losses and frame my improvement as meaningful. I take pride in the little things: being difficult to submit, taking longer to submit, never giving it away, always being up to continue the round or roll again. Remember that the original Rocky film doesn't end with Rock winning the fight, but simple making it to the final bell; even in a weekend warrior BJJ class you can feel people give up their arm just because they're exhausted and they want it over with. Not doing that becomes a point of pride, gutting it out when your opponent has you in mount and making him work for the submission.
Beating my brain into shape to make myself do that has become its own goal of this exercise. I've started giving funny nicknames to the guys who always kick my ass, and when I draw them for a round I'll joke about how I love rolling with them for [reason]. And it's cheesy as fuck, but it actually makes a difference, I'm more optimistic in those rolls and I perform better, fake it til you make it I guess.
As for injuries, they accumulate everywhere. No serious sportsman avoids them, I'm convinced I've avoided serious injuries in large part by being non-serious about a lot of things rather than serious about one. The injuries I see around me in BJJ cause me to be cautious, and lead me to question whether I'll keep up three or four classes a week for the next six years rather than the next six months, but realistically powerlifters aren't any better and running clubs are only a touch improved. Injuries are the price we pay for not sitting around on our asses. But in that way, switching to BJJ for six months is probably salutary in that I'm not trying to deadlift 500 or jerk 285 in that time, so a stiff neck or two is a fair trade for the back or shoulder injuries I'd dodge.
I agree, and wouldn't have gone at all if the gym near me didn't have good scheduling, with classes I can attend every day of the week. Even then, I'm lobbying every time I see the head professor to get him to do a 6am class once a week so I can get in another day consistently. if the schedule were worse, I wouldn't bother.
If there's a gym near you, do a trial class. Every gym I've looked at (three around me, plus another four that are near my summer vacation towns that I checked out on the internet) offers the trial class free. That will tell you vastly more than I can; a lot depends on your gym. Do you like how they do things? Do you get along with the people there? I've heard tell of gyms that don't let fresh white belts roll for months, I would probably not have stuck around in those gyms because the fun and workout aspects wouldn't be there for me; where at my gym I rolled the first class I was there, and the only sop to being new that I got was that I didn't get too much shit for quitting midway through the gauntlet. On the flipside, for another student, not rolling for months might help avoid that emasculation problem. How you get on with the instructors and fellows at the gym is a big one. Your experience is just going to vary. Some bigger gyms might limit you to specific newbie classes, which once again might help versus being thrown into the deep end of the pool right away, some days the move of the day is so over my head I get nothing from it; but for me I value being able to get there any day I can with my chaotic schedule, so if I could only go certain days it wouldn't work for me. To a certain extent, I can't tell you whether to do it or not unless you lived in PA and were going to go to my gym.
Final pitch, that sold me at the end of the day: you and I have this in common, neither one of us is gonna make the fucking Olympics in anything. We're JAGs. What's devoting six months of your fitness program to BJJ cost you, in the grand scheme? Now is the best time to do it, you're never going to be younger. And in six months, you'll probably have learned enough that you can at least intelligently dissect a UFC match in a bar, and roll for fun with somebody should the opportunity arise, and defend yourself from takedowns or get back up and run away in a fight against an untrained opponent.
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Congrats on the quarterversary. Grappling is the only combat sport you can do for life and you should be totally fine as long as you can avoid knee, back and staph issues. My resting heart rate was in the 40s when I was doing mma regularly, I remember having to sit in my car for a bit before driving back home after a really hard session, far more intense than anything I've ever done.
Bjj culture is whack and most "cultures" are best avoided though you'd fine craig jones pretty funny. Especially his bjj ruined my life rant.
Rolling and getting subbed by a girl is a right of passage, you can sense that they are super weak yet you get caught by a rear naked choke you saw coming.
I would highly recommend direct neck training and a decent mouth guard. Having a stronger neck helps a lot beyond sub defence.
I really enjoyed the more humbling aspects of rolling too. Do you plan on doing some recreational striking after this. Judo is a great sub in a pinch in case you're out of town or move places.
I've done the same thing, where I'll drive home and just sit in the car for a minute for no particular reason. I've always thought MMA was the peak of athletic activities for that reason: no other sport punishes the lack of either anaerobic or aerobic fitness quite like fight sports. Your opponent sets the pace, and you can't entirely change their mind. That's been really good for me.
I don't think I ever intend to do much live striking. I suffered a really horrendous concussion in high school, and after that gave up boxing. I have an old heavy bag I'll do rounds on, and work on my form in a mirror to make sure I'm not dropping my hands so much that I'd get angry at me in a movie. But I don't intend to get in the ring.
Around here, BJJ places that also offer Judo are more common than pure Judo places, and I've actually looked up BJJ gyms in the places I'll visit this summer to talk to them about open mats and drop-in rates. A brown belt buddy of mine claims that if you call ahead, say you're visiting, and say you plan to buy an overpriced branded rashguard (which I probably should get a few of anyway) from them, they'll normally let you drop in for free.
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There are so many moments like this I've had in my life and I'm sure there will be many more.
Most of the posters attracted to this site aren't the average person. I'm not saying that to say we're better, I'm just saying we're outliers.
So we live our life in our own ways and then we get exposed to what everyone else is doing. Steroids is a thing, but there are so many 'wtf' moments where you're kind of shocked that people live their lives in such a cavalier way.
It''s kind of great. I've run into people that have shown 'you live like that?' on their faces to me too. Makes me laugh
Each to their own, but yeah; wtf.
This is so much a part of my day to day life. Especially when it comes to finances. I can't believe people actually carry credit card balances. I can't believe finance used Range Rovers.
My wife and I still laugh about, some months back, my buddy bought a new pickup, and stopped by while he was driving through our neighborhood with his wife and kid just to say hello and show it off. It was maybe 4:30 on a Saturday, we'd both wrapped up work by 3:00, and we decided to do a Charcuterie board for dinner. Which meant chopping up a couple blocks of cheese, laying out some smoked meats, a little lumpfish roe, some honeycomb, a parbaked baguette, etc. Well, they swing by, and naturally we invite them in for food and we open a bottle of wine, because it's literally already sitting there on the cutting board. And his wife is stunned, because she feels like "these freaks just had this on hand?"
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Since my HEMA club is two hours away by car, and the nearest other club is hardly any closer, I've barely made it to training at all in the last year, and not at all this year since me and my family have been getting sick repeatedly now that my daughter is going to Kindergarten and bringing home all the good stuff (flu, it's always the flu).
So I signed up for a nearby "grappling" (read: BJJ) school a few weeks ago. And never made it there because I'm either sick or taking care of sick people.
By the time I do make it there, I will have been out of serious training for about five years, am thoroughly out of shape and with a few permanent injuries to boot. I can only imagine that the reaction of the people there will be something in between "this guy is made of paper WTF do we do with him" and "please go to the gym first, come back next year".
I highly doubt it. Most gyms are used to people made of paper with bad cardio. I'm bottom tier in natural grace/athleticism/coordination to begin with, and no one has been anything but welcoming, the only shame or difficulty I've faced has been self-inflicted and the only annoyance has been imagined. If you've been doing HEMA, you're going to be used to the coordination of martial arts and that will help you much more than overhead pressing bodyweight in the way of not annoying the piss out of everyone by not getting how to do the thing.
And, if anything, me and the couple of guys who are about at my level (the basement) joke that we desperately want a "little brother" to join so we all move up a spot on the org chart. When I joined, I kind of thought everyone was being nice to me in a fake external way, and actually despised and mocked me in their heart of hearts because I sucked, I was a weird old guy who sucked and couldn't figure out basic stuff. Now I realize that for the other white belts, especially the other big fellas, I was a willing warm body that would let them take the offensive and feel good at BJJ.
Fair point, getting to slowboat technique on a newbie whom you don't need to go with 100% at to stand a chance actually is valuable in its own way.
My coach has said (not to me, as it would be useless advice for me) that, ideally, when prepping for a comp a few months out you should have at least two thirds of your rolls against people worse than you, because you'll be able to try new things and get better at them, where in hard rolls you'll fall back on what you are good at and play conservatively. Against a newbie you can try new things, and figure out how to do them well. Right now, I get that in 1/20 rolls, because the only guys worse than me barely show up, or don't roll that much because they get exhausted after one round.
I can't speak for every gym, but everyone at mine had been welcoming and helpful. The better guys reach out to make sure I'm making progress, keep an eye on me. When they kick my ass they're full of compliments and tips. "This was good, this was stupid, you're actually decent at abc for a second there but you need to add xyz to really pull it off."
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Man, that sounds really fun. At some point the fight just went out of me though. Several broken bones, torn muscles, and a concussion over a 12 year amateur martial arts career just wore me out. To say nothing of the more regular bruises. Just wasn't worth the wear and tear anymore. Felt like I was always healing from something.
But man, you do make it sound fun.
I think a lot of the fun of it is the total changeup it has been for me. I last did any kind of fight sport around fifteen years ago, when I boxed briefly before the bad concussion from a car accident made me rethink that hobby. If you've been-there-done-that-got-the-twenty-five-tournament-t-shirts it might hold less charm.
I do see how people talk about BJJ being relatively sustainable compared to other fight sports, and possible to practice into old age if done right. But then I also look around the little gym and nobody past blue belt seems to be free from a chronic injury or a history of surgeries, so in practice I'm not sure it is as sustainable as we'd like to think.
I initially signed up for six months, which is where the gym sets the commitment to get the lowest membership price, on the theory that if I committed for that long I'd get something out of it and then I could reassess my feelings going forward. I'll see how I feel then. It might still be new and fun, I might be right at the point where I feel like I might be making progress!, or I might be saying I still suck and this mountain just isn't worth climbing for another two years just to maybe get to the point where I'm respectable, or I might be saying man I'm not going to keep dealing with injuries just to pajama-wrestle with a bunch of other dudes. The six month mark provided me with a convenient decision point.
Best of luck! I'm not sure I could stomach sucking at something with little to no improvement for more than six months.
I know one thing that really aged me out of martial arts was the fact that I plateaued, if not moved backwards, and I was watching people with more drive just fly past me. More willing to train 4 hours a day, more willing to train injured, somehow able to keep their adrenaline pounding the whole damned time going 110%. Meanwhile I'd get maybe 40 minutes of high quality training in, and then I was just tired, and my shitty bum ankle with half a tendon didn't want to function properly anymore, and I just didn't feel like getting punched in the head that day or ending up with bruises up and down my arms from hard blocks. But what made it worse was looking at those other guys remembering how I used to be them! Then I decided to just get out of their way.
I'm not sure I could either. Or will. Already within three months I'm anxious for visible signs of improvement, and desperate to find them. On my best days I can tell I'm making progress, on my worst I'm pretty down about it. I suppose learning to manage that is what they mean when they talk about "building character."
I had a similar experience in climbing, where I got to a plateau of around 5.12 indoor after a couple years and the effort required to push further just wasn't in me. You have to start specializing: doing fingerboard work, losing useless weight, training in boring ways that suck instead of just hanging out. I could fake my way up a 5.13a at my best, but I was never going to be much better.
This has been my history with most athletic events, from high school to today: good, but not good enough to be interesting. I suspect if I stick with BJJ for another three years or so, I could get to a blue belt level, but at that point I might as well get it tattoo'ed on my waist because I'll never make it as a master.
Yeah, I'm not sure sucking forever at something you never get better at as a hobby is quite the "building character" Calvin's Dad is always talking about. I mean, if it's something you love, suck away. But otherwise, at a certain point you have to assess if this is a proper use of your limited time on this Earth. "Building character" is only useful when it's overcoming temporary hardship, or going nose to the grindstone for truly necessary hardship. Not for doing something you aren't enjoying and suck at recreationally.
It sucks getting old. I'm not quite to the point where exercise goes from hitting new personal bests, to just trying to slow the inevitable decline and doing it because you have to. But it's within sight. I hope I can maintain my discipline when year by year I'm capable of doing less and less. I hope that inflection point could be 50, or even 55. I'm afraid it could be 45 (I'm 42) or sooner.
Simple, constantly contest new events, inventing them yourself if necessary!
I see you have also discovered the speedrunning community.
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This is the way.
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BJJ is very red pilling, you've already alluded to a few ones:
Women are ridiculously weak compared to men. I suck at BJJ and I can easily beat all the women in my gym except for the very best one who is arguably in the top 10 female BJJ fighters in the world. Even if their technique is far better than mine (and it often is), it's so easy to overpower them. I completely sympathize with your neuroses with BJJing with girls, I avoid them at all costs.
People with no fighting experience really do completely suck at fighting. Even though I suck at BJJ, I have had the extremely gratifying experience of destroying a noob during their first week. One particular instance comes to where i fought this gym rat with easily 20+ pounds of muscle on me, and he completely gassed himself and I tapped him three times in five minutes. Again, I suck at BJJ, he just sucked way worse.
People who are good at fighting ARE REALLY FUCKING GOOD AT FIGHTING. There's a guy at my gym who weighs maybe 130 pounds who can absolutely rock anyone under 200 pounds. It's an uncanny experience to fight someone who you can easily overpower but who has just enough strength to use their mastery of BJJ to twist you into pretzels. On the other end, black belts are basically invincible. I don't think there is any level of intoxication short of literally passing out that could let me beat a black belt.
BJJ teaches you how much you suck. Like, you learn how easily other people can push you around, or how those fight moves you saw in movies either don't work in real life or are easily countered or require tremendous skill to actually use. It is extremely humbling to get your ass kicked over and over again by better fighters, and even more humbling to lose to a guy who has been training just as long as you and recognize that he has something you don't.
Steroid use is shockingly common these days among casual athletes, especially in BJJ, and even at pro BJJ levels where real testing is almost nonexistent. But even in random BJJ gyms, you'll role with guys who are crazy strong for their size or have weirdly wide jaws or terrible skin, and it's super obvious once you know what to look for.
Fitness and skill are correlated, but not super strongly. I almost think it's barbelled. The best BJJ guys I know are in insanely good shape, and a lot noobs still hit the regular weights a lot. But the guys in the middle, who are good but not great, often drop weightlifting to focus on BJJ, and they end up with athletic but not very aesthetic bodies, like big arms but underdeveloped chests and maybe even a bit of a belly.
So, every now and again I watch fights when I can catch them. Like, I made the mistake of watching the Tyson v Paul fight, and all the undercards. And the announcers could not stop talking about how stunning and brave the women's match was. I kept wondering what the fuck fight they were watching? It was practically a slapfight where neither opponent was the least bit worried about the other's blows so much as stunning them. And these were both title holders! Even the wannabe actor/boxers in the first fight put on a better show than that. Then at the end they both looked like they were about to cry. It was gross, and it felt like abuse to put them up on a stage for everyone to watch.
I wonder what you'd say about women's professional wrestling.
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Fitness in general is very red-pilling, and especially BJJ, because you are inherently trying at something and improving through your own efforts. You experience trying and succeeding. This is why much of the mainstream left is so suspicious of fitness, weightlifting, sports. Competitive sport is inherently contact with reality, you find things out, and it is dangerous to those trying to sell you illusions. A lost aspect of so many 19th and early 20th century European radical movements was their focus on physical fitness. From Muscular Christianity to radical liberal and socialist Gymnasia to the Nazis mass outdoor calisthenics; exercise is one of the best ways to improve people's agency. It inherently removes illusions enforced on you.
It has a lot, for me, in common with my experience at golf. It is painful to lose so hard for so long, but then you get that one magic moment when you hit the ball pure and on the screws and it flies perfectly and justifies all the struggle up to that point. That's how I feel when I get the rare roll in where I really feel like I'm doing jiu jitsu, where I hit the sweep, pass guard, take mount, and slide right into a head and arm choke. That justifies all the time I've spent getting smashed under a brown belt or fending off the comp team teenager who attacks like a spider monkey from every angle at once.
Contact with reality can, of course, teach you positive or negative things. I honestly don't know if I'd have the character or love of the game to suck a lot more than I do right now. I'm right at the limit where every few weeks I have a day or two where I'm a little down about it. But then I briefly read /r/bjj, and there are always posts from guys talking about being there for two or three years and still describing their experience as similar to mine, no advancement or improvement, and I feel like 100% I would quit at that point. There exist people who just aren't gonna make it, and the red pill of bjj exposes that too. And maybe that they keep going is admirable, they're more zen than I am at getting worked over and over, they're more humble. But I was about three weeks in and already impatient and saying to myself "Ok if I don't hit a single sub in open mat before the end of January, I have to think about quitting." I can't imagine waiting for that moment for another six months, another year, and still bothering to try.
I have a theory from when I ran a rock climbing gym that a lot of it depends on starting points. I'd see guys who climbed similar grades, so achieving the same goal, with very different body types and muscle development. Some of that is genetics, but it also has to do with how two guys with different builds will climb the same wall differently. A guy who starts rock climbing already big and muscular (relatively) will use a lot of muscle when climbing, because he has the strength to just yank himself up, because he needs to the strength to move the additional body weight, and because that's a problem solving method he is used to in the gym. The skinny guy can't yank himself up because he doesn't have the strength, doesn't need as much strength to move his bodyweight, and isn't as used to using raw strength as a solution anyway. So over a year doing the same beginner climbs, the big guy is using the same route as a strength exercise, while the little guy uses them as a technique exercise; the big guy builds more muscle than the little guy doing the same routine.
I wouldn't be surprised to see a similar dynamic in BJJ, where the big meatheads build more muscle because they use more muscle, while the skinny shifty fellas focus on technique because it is what works for them. So in the course of the same 10x2min rolls that we do at the gym, one guy is doing muscle building exercises and the other isn't to the same degree.
This is very me right now. I have a few months more experience than you, but I have a bad feeling that I've plateaued. I knew from the start that I don't have any special aptitude, but I'm starting to feel like I'll never rise above "target a handful of submissions I know and improvise the rest with bad instincts." I think I'll give it another month and seriously consider stepping back if I don't see some sort of improvement, even gradual.
Honestly, learning ankle locks probably hurt too, because it was the one thing I was genuinely good at, so I started shifting my whole game around them to the point of letting the rest of my game atrophy.
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Any tips on a pre-training program? It'll be a while before I move somewhere I can actually take lessons, but my cardio right now is so dogshit I'd need at least a year just to avoid dying on the first day. I can just about wrestle with sheep for a few hours, and they're not usually trying to choke me.
Just start, use susrsets when you do strength training. A lot of cardio is specific to the sport anyway, plenty of marathon runners huff and puff on their first class since you're not as efficient when you start out.
As long as you keep getting stronger and do some assault bike training, you'll be alright. Many in mma and Steve Maxwell swear by HIIT stuff on assault bikes as a time saving way to get there. It's easy on the joints, I don't do it since my gym lacks an assault bike.
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Echoing @Testing123 , who probably knows more than me as it would be hard to know less, but to add:
-- Flexibility. Get on that 30 Days of Yoga. It's probably the most directly applicable physical activity, you need the flexibility to hit the positions or the rest of it isn't all that useful, and will also accustom you to laying on your back or side and moving your legs around.
-- Don't try to learn moves or techniques in advance, you'll learn them wrong without a partner and a coach. But do try to learn the names of positions and guards a little bit. My first dozen or so classes would have been much easier if I'd known butterfly guard, spider guard, De La Riva, X Guard, single leg X, turtle, etc. I knew a few things, like full guard half guard and back control, from watching UFC fights and whatnot, but I often knew them subtly wrong, and while I've yet to successfully learn something like a sweep or submission from a youtube video, watching a few youtube videos here and there has taught me things that my coaches don't have time to get to in practice, like "oh, in half guard go for the knee shield." The static positions will be easier to memorize without being coached through doing them, and just having some idea what it means when the coach tells you and your partner to get into a DLR will make you feel much more at home.
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I agree with OP on cardio. If your cardio isn't good, your first few weeks of BJJ will be hell, but that's a great way to build cardio so it works out.
Beyond that, I'd recommend at least basic weight lifting or some other athletic thing that builds full body muscles (not just running). BJJ is famous for being the least-muscle dependent of the useful martial arts, but if you truly have no muscle, you'll just get overpowered and clobbered in fights unless your technique is amazing. For what it's worth, when I started BJJ I was a regular normie weightlifter, and that helped, but I was not used to hitting my muscles from 10,000 new directions, so there was a big adjustment period. I now lift about 1/3rd as much as I used to and focus mostly on BJJ.
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My journey to 200 24 kg kettlebell snatches continues. Got up to 116 this week. Been mixing up my training with large sets of 24 kg snatches with good breaks for more endurance before switching hands, and then also some 32 kg work with either one armed swings or maybe a few snatches per side for raw grip strength. It's a slog to keep pushing. My cardio is feeling better, and less like my heart is going to explode in my chest towards the last few reps. But the muscle fatigue, especially in my forearms is intense. I'm smooshing my workout in between work and dinner, so often I sit right down when I'm done with snatches and eat. More than a few times my arms are so shot I can no longer grip a fork, shit just isn't working.
That said, knocking out that first 100 has gotten way easier, and I've modified my technique such that my hands don't feel the least bit tore up anymore. If you've ever done a lot of kettlebell snatches, or maybe rock climbing, you know what I'm talking about. Ripping off callouses, or even just that burning sensation as you beat the hell out of the palm of your hand can be a real show stopper. But I think through better technique I've circumvented that limitation, at least for now. Basically have to bounce the kettlebell between a loose hook grip and your thumb, without letting it roll across your palm. Easy as pie going up, going down I basically have to throw the kettlebell out of the racked position overhead. Not sure how common that is, but it works for me.
Getting older definitely sucks. Takes a lot of stretching to limber up, especially in the shoulders and hips, and then if I don't take a post workout protein shake, I have the worst DOMS I've ever had in my life the next day. But I'll be damned if my daughter grows up with her dad getting old and fat, and hearing about how exercise is one of those things he "used to do".
I still can't imagine hitting 200. After any attempt at 100, even when I miss around 90, I lay on the ground like a fish and just try to recover.
Do you have any online resources about how you're avoiding hand damage? That's always been one of my weaknesses with kettlebells.
Not really. Just lots of personal experimentation and problem solving.
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DOMS?
Delayed onset muscle soreness. Pretty normal, sucks a giant unwashed dick.
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Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness. Basically when your muscles hurt the following day after working out.
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I'm a bad mouth-breather while sleeping, usually due to general nasal congestion (not specifically illness).
Is my best path those nasal strips that are supposed to help you breathe? Mouth tape? Afrin spray? ENT visit? Something else?
Last week I had one night where my nose felt clear and I woke up feeling way better in the morning.
Try jal neti and tape your mouth after a few weeks of doing it twice a day. It's the only ayurvedic thing that works really well and helped me go from being hooked on antibiotics anytime I got a mild cold to not getting sick as frequently.
Ent visit may help but go give jal neti a shot. I shill it because I could never eat or drink cold things since I'd always end up getting sick, it's better now due to my adherence to nasal irrigation.
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I have some form of nasal congestion, it took me til my mid-twenties to figure it out. There could be a number of reasons - having allergens is a common one. Check that your sheets are regularly washed and carpets are regularly vacuumed. I took out an old blanket from storage once which must've released a whole bunch of dust in the house and I had nasal congestion for the next two days. I also noticed that if I ate a lot of heavy foods at night, my body wouldn't have enough water to keep my nasal passages moist. So I've been conscious about eating earlier in the evening and consuming lighter meals. I think that's generally good practice anyways, allowing your body 4+ hours of digestion before going to bed whenever possible. Also perhaps try a humidifier - higher humidity in the room prevents nasal passages from drying out.
Ha. I took an old blanket down to start using my summer cabin early, and spent an hour sneezing and dribbling before going to get an anti- allergen. You don't realize how dusty stuff has gotten until you stick your face in it.
What's humid enough for you? It's usually 40-50% indoors here, which feels about right. Cold snap with a fire running gets it down to 20%, which is enough to dry out my everything.
I'm in coastal California so my humidity meter typically hovers around 50-60% most of the year, sometimes dipping into the 40% range when the regional climate shifts in the wintertime. A small desktop humidifier usually pushes it up about 15% maximum, depending on the setting, which means I'm covered for most of the year. I feel like 65% is the sweet spot between breathability and not having the room feel excessively soggy.
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Do you only have congestion when laying down in your bed? If so it might be dust mites or an allergic reaction to your sheets.
Make sure you take this problem seriously. Poor sleep is really bad. And is easy to get used to.
It's broader than just bed - I have it right now to some extent (not fully plugged up like when I have a bad cold, but just feel resistance to nose breathing). Maybe need to get back on a daily allergy spray and see if that helps.
You might also check for chronic sinusitis.
Huh. That sounds...very promising. Definitely have post-nasal drip and headaches. I'll get an ENT appointment and report back.
Chronic sinusitis is just a descriptive diagnosis. Most doctors will not look much further, perhaps give a medicine that treats the symptoms (but completely ignores the cause, just like your allergy spray. Look up how it functions in the body and tell me that's a good solution unless as a last resort).
It's very likely you can solve the problem with basic systematic problem-solving. Try to figure out when it's worse / better. Is it impacted by what you eat? Do you feel better outside? Inside? Away from the city? After a nasal rinse? Other allergy symptoms? Are other parts of the body inflamed? GERD? Dairy?
Symptoms are just that, symptoms. They tend denote that there is an underlying problem in your body. Right now your sinuses are launching an inflammatory response (a localized fever, in an attempt to deal with something it considers a problem). It could be that the air you are breathing is bad for you (hepa filters are cheap). It could be that your immune system has gotten confused (if so why? why is it not working properly? that seems dangerous? is it getting all the nutrients it needs to function properly?). It could be that there is another problem in the body that has gone unnoticed.
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In my experience, mouth tape won't do you much good if your nose is congested, you'll just remove the tape in your sleep
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