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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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 supersets 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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