Changes You’ll Start Making for Jiu Jitsu

Whether you intend to or not, you’ll start to make changes in your life for jiu jitsu: and the thing is, they won’t happen all at once.

Maybe you’ll stop going to that happy hour that all of your non-jiu jitsu friends love to go to, or maybe you’ll find yourself ordering less fried food takeout when you realize that it really just makes you feel like trash the next day and it keeps you from training the way you usually do. You find yourself running on a treadmill maybe, or picking up a weight lifting program to help your strength and cardio while you train.

I know that I’ve stopped a good deal of bad habits because really, I just don’t have the time or energy to feel like junk as often as I used to. I barely drink that much alcohol anymore, and I’m pretty sure the time in between eating something from McDonald’s can be measured in years at this point rather than days. And a number of these changes were unintentional- meaning there was no moment where I sat and thought “I will not be eating this entire bag of potato chips because it may potentially impede my jiu jitsu”. It’s a little more intuitive than that: you start to think about how you’ll feel gross, or sick to your stomach, and who has time for that, really….

That’s not to say that you won’t make some intentional changes in your life for the sport. And in fact, that may be the spark that lends to the other changes in your life. I have found a number of times a good, hard, intentional push during competition training leads to picking up some healthier habits during the off season.

All of this is natural, and good! You are making jiu jitsu a priority in your life (if that’s what you want to do) and you are prioritizing healthy habits which are more likely to lead to better training and a longer, healthier life for yourself, rather than still sticking to bad habits that in the short term may be gratifying, but in the long run may not be beneficial for you and your health.

Now if anyone has a good remedy for breaking a chocolate chip cookie habit, let me know: asking for a friend (kind of…. not really).

Let me know what healthy habits you have intentionally, or unintentionally picked up since starting jiu jitsu- otherwise, have a great day!

The Long Journey of Fitness and Weight Loss

I realized I think so much about where I want to be, that I sometimes forget about how far I have come. In my current shape, I feel better on my worst days than I did on my best before I started jiu jitsu and all this delightful craziness. I think I promised then and now pictures before, but today you are totally getting photos of me in all my pre-jiu jitsu glory.

I untagged myself from a lot of photos my friends posted up from my college years, when I was the heaviest, because in many ways I was embarrassed that I had let myself get that large, telling myself that “it wasn’t that bad”. It wasn’t so much the lack of physical activity, as it was my diet that caused such a dramatic weight gain.

Most of my facebook friends have seen the first photo: it was a graduation party for my friend and right around the time I started jiu jitsu. They second photo is about 5 years later with my dad at Lake Tahoe.

  

 

I have lost a good deal of weight (obviously) and gained a whole bunch of muscle mass in the process from jiu jitsu, kettlebells, and laying off the fried food.

There have been a lot of ups and downs, and I still feel like I have a bit more to go but I think I have come a long way and I need to honor that- as I am sure many others have experienced, I have at times stepped completely out of my comfort zone, traveled, met all sorts of new people, in addition to greatly improving my chances for a long and healthy life.

Just as long as my joints hold out-fingers crossed!