why i train bjj
“If jiu jitsu makes you so miserable, why do you keep doing it?”
This is the question my seventeen year old posed to me the other night as I lay in bed with a few ailments. It’s also a question multiple other family members or clients have asked me, so I wanted to take a moment to try to answer it.
Mind you, I sit here typing with new cauliflower ear on my left side, two black eyes (only one of which I have any idea how it happened - an incidental head-butt), and earlier today, I was thrown on my left shoulder, heard a pop, and while it seems mostly ok, it most definitely hurts.
So, I want to be clear: as much as I dread the question, and bristle at how often I hear it these days, it is a very reasonable question to ask.
The truth is, it’s a hard sport. It’s not made any easier by being forty-five years old, with multiple pre-existing injuries. But, for me, and some others, it’s an amazing sport.
Less than a year ago, a black belt instructor at Mass BJJ in Acton began training at ATC. Luis is a few years younger than me, and an overall pretty great person. Despite a few good reasons why I wasn’t currently training, I suspected that it would only be a matter of time before being sucked back in. And so it finally happened; in early November 2022, I returned. Not triumphantly.
I was not a stranger to the sport. I had trained in it way back in 2006, even opening a small BJJ gym in Hudson around 2009 (I was not an instructor, merely a partner). It failed, and the manner in which it failed left too bitter a taste in my mouth to stick around. I opened ATC shortly after, focused strictly on strength and conditioning, and didn’t much look back. In early 2016, I attempted to train in the sport again (at Mass BJJ), but could not overcome a surgery-needing injury to my right shoulder sustained elsewhere. It was only a three-week stint.
Based on all of this, I will tell you that I was not particularly optimistic that I’d sustain any longevity in the sport when I returned in November. I was re-entering with no PCL or LCL in my left knee, bilateral inguinal hernias, and a subluxation of my right biceps tendon. Oh, and there was also the matter of a little genetic heart condition called Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy that would normally exclude someone from any type of activity like this (I’m incredibly lucky with my particular expression of it, and will someday explain it fully in another blog).
All that said, with patience and grace from Luis and other instructors, as well as some great training partners, I have, thus far, sustained.
But why? Why sustain in the face of near constant discomfort and relatively frequent injuries?
BJJ is a great foundation for real self-defense. It’s a very effective workout that requires some movement patterns that are hard to replicate anywhere else. It’s an amazing if not sometimes odd, niche community that really welcomes you if you welcome it. These are just some of the huge rewards to training in it. But none of them are as profound as what it does for my mental health.
Simply, BJJ is the only activity (almost) that can shut my brain off. I LOVE to strength train, I love to trail run, cycle, and hike. But BJJ is the only sport where I can be exactly still in that moment, with no thoughts of anything else that may be great or awful in other parts of my life. For me, I’ve found no meditation, breathing exercise, recreational or pharmaceutical drug that can accomplish what ninety minutes on the mat a few times each week can do.
So for sure, the discomfort and injuries, which can range from constant dull aching to sharp acute stabs, can be nothing short of exhausting. But it will be a trade I make as long as I can. I’m happy to be back.
Mass BJJ in Acton
