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Seven Things I’ve Learned After Seven Months Training Jiu-Jitsu
I attended my first Brazilian jiu-jitsu class a little over seven months ago. If you don’t know much about it, jiu-jitsu is a martial art based on ground fighting and is one of the fastest-growing combat sports in the world.
Jiu-jitsu attracts a passionate and dedicated community, which is one of the reasons I first became intrigued by the sport. People who train it become obsessed with it. You wouldn’t know it until you started paying attention, but nearly one in five gyms in the U.S. has a jiu-jitsu program. I started partly because I wanted to know what all the hype was all about.
On a personal level, I was also looking for a challenge. I wanted to see what it would feel like to start as a complete beginner in a sport in which I had zero experience. And I wanted to write about the learning process along the way.
It’s been quite the journey so far. I’ve quickly come to appreciate the sport — or, the “gentle art” as it’s often called — and have developed a deeper love for it than I ever expected. That doesn’t mean it has come easy to me. Although I have days where things feel like they’re starting to click — days when I leave training with a big, dorky smile on my face, excited about the prospect of progress — those days are rare. More often, I leave feeling frustrated and incompetent…
