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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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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