brazilian jiu jitsu

so i'm trying this out. tonight was my 3rd ever class. it's intense. and a little intimidating. i don't have great spatial awareness so it's hard to get right but i pushed through and hacked it out as best i could. teachers have been calm and kind and generous so far but they're also hardasses in ways i'm unused to. there is definitely a rush involved. afterward though my body feels roughed up in maybe a not good way. nerves jangled like i've been in a car crash. i'm intrigued though, enough to try a few more classes and see where it leads me. in the first half of the class today we worked on break falls which as the teacher explained is a very useful skill to have in daily life. "when you get older and start falling" *teacher glances at me*.

the class was all men which is a little weird at first but i relaxed and enjoyed it. i was peeking in at the class before us, a women's jiu jitsu class. they looked like they were having a great time. they all lined up at the end of the class for a selfie with arms around shoulders, it was cute.

anyway does anyone here f with jiu jitsu?

I did it from about 2012 to 2019 and got two stripes up blue belt, but fell off after the pandemic, fairly typical blue belt wheel-spinning malaise I think.

I've occasionally thought about going back but now that I'm well north of 40 I don't really want to spend loads of time travelling to a good gym or tempt fate with knee or shoulder injuries. I just lift weights in a local gym because I know I'll actually go.

BJJ is really insanely good cardio though, and depending on the school you're at it can be a really nice community/social thing. The women's class at my club grew a lot while I was there and was really good at welcoming new/curious people in gently while also training up a lot of people who could win comps.

I really appreciated the immense technical complexity of it, and the satisfaction of hitting a complex technique you've painstakingly learnt against a resistant opponent in sparring is hard to beat. this was generally rare for me because I was one of the smaller men in the class and I spent a lot of time getting my chest caved in while slowly suffocating in a mounted triangle.

after sparring my hands would always shake like mad from adrenaline and possibly some kind of thrumming low-level existential terror

I never got hurt-hurt tbf, though I did train through some body parts turning purple, and one particularly memorable neck injury from a powerbomb, that I probably shouldn't have

underhooking a guy's leg and getting a sleeve grip so you can pull him down into an omoplata which you immediately transition into a mounted triangle: classic or dud

oh that's cool, thanks for sharing your experience! yes i was feeling the cardio intensity pretty soon after starting the cross-mat drills at the start of class. honestly it's one of the big reasons i'm trying it out. throughout the class there was some really good jammy rock playing (really!) and unexpectedly lou reed's "perfect day" started playing right as we were wrapping up. i think i heard some brian jonestown massacre in there too. so at least the instructor has good taste in music.