The Real Reason I Still Do Jiu-Jitsu

And I always thought about like why do I do jiu-jitsu because you know, it inevitably comes up because you have these injuries that you know, people are like why are you doing this? You know, a good example is uh two of the people that were in the line, you know, I I pick up my kid from school and uh two the kids two the people in line are like, "Yeah, I feel the best I've ever felt, you know, like uh at their ages." And they're both in their 40s and I I'm 39 and I'm like, "I feel like I'm destroyed and I can barely walk today." It was after a hard jiu-jitsu training session and just everything hurt. And and and and also at the time I had a broken finger, so that was fun. I had and I was still training. I just tape up the finger and continue to train with it. And like, "Why would you do that? You know what I mean?" And uh I don't have a great answer for it, to be honest with you, but I can tell you there was a point in time that I was thinking about quitting doing jiu-jitsu altogether. And uh one of my buddies at jiu-jitsu kept reaching out to me over and over again being like, "Why are you not here?" Right? Cuz I I am one of I at the time I was still one of the upper belts, right? I'm a brown belt at the end of my brown belt now and at the time I was I was just becoming a brown belt. I didn't feel like I deserved the brown belt, which is part of the problem. And I was trying to work on getting the leanest and fittest I've ever been. So you know, at that point in time I was like uh you know, I was not making it a priority. I was trying to That was during that whole weight loss uh journey of going down from 250 the whole way down to 180 lb, right? That I document on my website and I you know, I kind of document it everywhere. Let me see if I can find the So here here was 230. This is So I realized I was 250 lb at one point in time. I wouldn't take the picture anytime I went above 230 lbs. Like like this was disgusting, but realize I looked more disgusting than this. So, like realize that's what I looked like at one point in time and you can actually see um like you can see my weight, you know, my weight over time. It fluctuates greatly. I'm going to have to have this actually updated to to show my weight now because guess what? It's going back down this direction. So, I'll have that uh I'll actually have that updated just so that people can see it. Um but in these progress pictures, right? You can see right? You can see kind of where I ended up like February 2026. What's wild is Look, this is 230 lbs and that's what I wanted to show is like these are the same weights, right? But realize this is 3 years of strength training consistently, right? To go from that to that at the same weight. Um they're just wildly different people, right? And the goal is to get to looking Right now, I'm you know, 217 and I look closer to somewhere between these two pictures, right? A little bit better than this picture. Uh about like this picture, but with you can see the sides going out, but like if we were critiquing my my current weight, um it's just this, you know, this transformation was massive and at the time I I really thought about quitting jiu-jitsu because every time I would go into jiu-jitsu, I would get banged up and I would get moved not as far in this progression chain. So, it was really detrimental to my ability to bodybuild at the time and it's it's really bad in terms of in terms of And you can see this has me at over a million pounds and it's because this guy or or one Yeah, 1 million pounds. This adds in a bunch of lifts that were done off both devices. So, that's why this number is so much different. Um might want to upgrade this so that just so that the numbers match on both places. Um but that's something that's something that I can have have it like have it actually look at and do. But, um you know, my favorite is my wife took a look over this and I put 6 months no excuses. And she's like, "Well, you might not have had any excuses, but you had a lot of complaints." Like realize to do this like it was it was hard on the family for me to do this. Uh for me to do this transformation. This was not easy on the family and was not and I was not a nice person while I was trying to lose that much weight that quickly. It was it was it was definitely stressful. But, I knew I needed to get the weight off so that I could slowly put it back on with more muscle. And uh but yeah, I I thought about quitting. And my buddy who was there, you know, kept coaxing me back and coaxing me back. Well, I had a tree fall on my property and he was over today uh helping me cut up the tree so that it would be off the sidewalk. Uh so that at least people could, you know, at least people could, you know, come and and it's just the the relate What I'm getting at is the relationships that you make in Jiu Jitsu. Um it's one of the few places where you can form relationships with people that are meaningful and impactful as an adult. Uh of course, you could do something like uh you know, you can you can do that at church. Um you can do that at a a bunch of different places, right? There are but like uh but it's just one of the few activities you can do like where it is cardiovascular in its nature. Um and it's not a revolving door of individuals, right? One of the biggest problems is uh you know, anytime you've gone into any kind of like other other thing, you know, a lot of those people come and go very very quickly, whereas Jiu-Jitsu's people tend to stay for a long long time, right? I've been at the same gym for 7 years or so now, something like that, and it's not like people hop Jiu-Jitsu gyms uh with no meaning or no like like there's a real reason if someone switches Jiu-Jitsu gyms, whereas anything else in life you know, if you're doing like yoga or anything like that, you could go to a new yoga facility anytime. It's a little bit more structured around who your coach is. So, I guess what I'm getting at is it's you know, for me it's the people, right? It's actually the people of Jiu-Jitsu that makes me continue to do it, and I had to have a deep thought around it. It's not the training, it's not the it's not you know, I enjoy it. I think it it's mentally it's it's a combination of physically stimulating and mentally stimulating Jiu-Jitsu is. Uh so, it has both aspects of mental and physical. Um and and and the combination of the people, right? I actually enjoy the people that that I meet. And they're all focused around becoming stronger, faster, better. Like they're the one thing at churches is you're not going to have like you'll have people focused obviously on becoming more spiritual, right? Which is meaningful and impactful for a lot of people, but you won't get people who are trying to better themselves athletically. Right? There those will be rarer and smaller subsets of that population, whereas everyone who's at Jiu-Jitsu is trying to better themselves physically. Anyways, that was all I had for today. Uh little bit of AI, a little bit of jujitsu, a little bit of kind of everything that I cover. Uh thank you. I really appreciate it. Um let me know if there's anything else you'd like to hear about. And till next time.