How BJJ can change your life and how Jiu Jitsu can help you build confidence
“BJJ changed my life”, “BJJ saved my life!” These sayings are cliché within the jiu jitsu world however they come from a very honest place as trite and short sighted as it may seem. This article will be my personal testimony, thoughts on what I’ve observed throughout the years with my students and my overall observations.
My personal “Jiu Jitsu changed my life” story:
At 19 I moved to Denver from my hometown not knowing anything other than I wanted to ‘be someone’ and it simply wasn’t going to happen in my hometown. A year later I made a lot of personal progress particularly in my weight loss journey but felt lost and directionless. I lost weight by trying out a bunch of different diets and ultimately going vegan for about 6-8 months. I never found an exercise regimen that I could stick to and I knew I had to get something going to excel in my personal life.
Weight Loss
Yes Jiu Jitsu can help you lose fat! This is one of the more obvious things that can happen when you start jiu jitsu. Weight Loss is as simple as calories in/calories out. To lose fat you must burn more calories than you are consuming. Most people will lose fat when they start brazilian jiu jitsu without even changing their eating habits – however after a few years of work and understanding the game jiu jitsu won’t provide the same workout as before and you simply won’t burn the same amount of calories as before. Take advantage of the fact that your new sport requires new energy levels and more forethought about your eating and training schedule to establish cleaner and healthier eating habits from the start to capitalize and see more long term and residual effects.
Discipline
Forcing a mindshift, telling yourself to show up even when you don’t want to will teach you discipline like no other. This might require a ‘fake it til you make it’ situation at first but telling yourself “I am a jiu jitsu practitioner and I go to class at ‘X’ time on ‘YZ’ days”. This can help eliminate friction and help you on your path to creating the discipline necessary to do jiu jitsu.
Resiliency
If you went through the hard part of making jiu jitsu part of your weekly ritual against your lesser nature that’s the start of learning how to be resilient. Once you’re showing up consistently the next battle is going to go through the pains of sucking at jiu jitsu. It’s going to take a real amount of resiliency to learn jiu jitsu and become a competent grappler.
Body Language
Once you know how powerful you actually are. Once you know how things will play out in a worse case hand to hand fighting scenario your subconscious will rest easy. This will have residual effects changing your body language and how you interact with the rest of the world. This is something I experienced and I hope you do too!
This will be a live and working document. For now enjoy my video talking about my personal “Jiu Jitsu Saved My Life” story on youtube.