Musings from the BJJ Gi #1; Background

My first taste of BJJ came at around the year 2000, as a lanky 19 year old, motivated by a perhaps ironic ego-influenced decision to become employed as a bouncer or security guard of some description. Fresh out of school, as green as could be, with zero martial arts knowledge or experience, and weighing in at an “imposing” 65KG/143 pounds soaking wet, it seemed like a wise decision at that point to learn how to defend myself, if self-preservation was indeed of some interest to me. After doing the free introductory classes at a handful of local freestyle karate schools, myself and my friend Andrew (equally keen to learn a realistic martial art), luckily stumbled across a local BJJ academy, (one of the original Peter De Been academies). It only took one free class before we were signed up, training 3 times per week, and watching rented video tapes (yes, I’m that old) of Royce Gracie in the first 4 UFC’s, and scratchy copies of the original ‘Gracies in Action’ challenge match footage, in every chunk of spare time we had. Utterly. Addicted.

This newfound obsession certainly changed our lives for the better, in innumerable ways, to be honest. As funny as it sounds, it was a big moment for me when I dominated my older (and heavier) brother in a ‘play’ fight for the first time in my life, then getting my arse handed to me in match 1 of my first ever BJJ competition, but managing to walk away from my second competition with a bronze medal in my weight division. I’d simply never experienced such triumph and growth in any other area of my life at that point (2004, age 23). Definitely on the lower rungs of the self-confidence ladder, this was really my first ever totally independent significant achievement, unquestionably the result of my own hard work. I had learned how to make another fully resisting adult opponent tap out in a submission grappling tournament. No-one could take that away from me. I felt proud of myself.

Training BJJ was also a significant factor contributing to my scrawny green 20 year old self having the nerve to get a job in 2001, (which turned into a 12 year career path of sorts), working as a prison officer in a maximum security adult custodial facility; tasked at times with supervising yards full of hardened criminals, some of which had done more time than I had even been alive for, and whose heavily tattooed bovine quads often had a thicker circumference than my waist. But I digress. I can definitely say that I ‘earned my stripes’, in both my time in that particular career path, and my time in that wonderful BJJ academy (albeit it we didn’t actually receive belt stripes in that academy, just the solid belt colours). Both were equally an experience of being thrown into the deep end of a figurative shark tank, crashing head first into a learning curve so steep that it was just a vertical line for the first couple of years. Both made me feel afraid, both made me sweat and bleed, both intermittently made me question my decision to engage in the activity in the first place, and both made me consider quitting numerous times. It’s no secret these days that to engage in the constant voluntary struggle that is training Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, is to simultaneously engage in practicing a form of resilience which is infinitely transferrable to all other areas of your life. Practicing how to see a significantly intimidating challenge and charge towards it rather than shying away, is a lesson which will serve you well in anything that you take your hand to for the rest of your life.

That first academy I trained at was a very small scale rural academy, and it unfortunately had to close down in 2004 for a variety of reasons, almost immediately after I (and Andrew simultaneously) received our hard-earned blue belts. This unfortunately left me with nowhere to continue training BJJ at the time, unless I engaged in hours of round trip travel (perhaps around 2 hours each way). My training accordingly ceased, without thought or hope for resumption, for pretty much bang on 10 years. In 2014 however, my friend Ash told me about Gracie University. I had never heard about it before, and the idea of not only resuming BJJ training, but also learning self-defence based BJJ (I’m far more interested in self-defence than sportive BJJ), directly from the Gracie family lineage excited us both. So we went halves in a Gracie University account, and after about 12 months of consistently training an average of 3 times per week on jigsaw mats in my garage, following the online Gracie Combatives curriculum via Gracie University, we eventually filmed and submitted each of our 5 grading test videos, received grading scores of 93/100 (Ash) and 92/100 (me), and accordingly passed the Gracie Combatives program. We eventually received our certificates, and what at the time was called a ‘technical blue belt’, which has since changed and is now equivalent to a Combatives belt. Once you’ve trained in the Gracie University Master Cycle for at least 6 months, you can be tested in-person for your full official blue belt by a certified Gracie Academy instructor at a Gracie certified training centre (CTC). We continued to train 1-on-1 in the garage intermittently throughout 2016 and 2017, following the Master Cycle (blue belt stripe 1) curriculum via Gracie University, and that essentially brings me up to the present day, and concludes the summary of the main points in my BJJ background to kick off this blog.

Thanks for reading and for any feedback, my intention is to start training at a new academy within the next fortnight or so, so I’ll write one more blog post before that to delve a bit more into my experiences with using Gracie University, and also what my plans and hopes are for the future of my training. From then on, it’ll primarily be lesson-to-lesson updates and experiences from the new academy. Cheers guys,

• David.