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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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