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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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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