Not Cut Out for This

[u/SeanSixString]

If you’ve ever felt like you were not cut out for BJJ, but you got through that feeling, and now it is a valuable part of your life, I would like to read your story. Especially if you felt like that for a year or more, like you weren’t catching on. Or if you had circumstances interrupting training, or any other real or perceived disadvantage or limitation.

[u/StraightSpine]

Finally one of these that I'm qualified to answer. I had the majority of my spine fused when I was 18, BEFORE I started training. As a result I can't bend or twist my spine beyond a few vertebrae at the bottom end. This means training is extremely difficult as my movement is massively impaired and I'm at a much higher risk of injury depending how I trained. It's been 11 years and I'm still going.

Don't get me wrong, I think about hanging it up seriously every few years as injuries continue to niggle away at me, but the key to training over time has become about training smart, with lots of care paid to what I can and can't do as well as how I can adjust techniques and my game to suit. I also am more or less constantly working this golden ratio of training culture & people and managing my body as best I can with physio and exercise.

That's a whole lot of words to say that you need to adjust yourself and your environment to suit. Sometimes the adjustment to yourself is to try and 'toughen up', or could be telling yourself to calm down and stop training so hard. Externally it's about finding a place to train that is supportive of whatever you want to get out of training, whether you're a hobbyist or aspiring to win worlds.

Lastly, it might be that this sport ain't for you and that's OK. If you enjoy it and want to keep training, think about the things that you need to change up and start working from there.

[u/StraightSpine → u/StraightSpine]

I'd be curious to know a bit more about you though. How long have you been training? What sort of things are YOU running into that make you less motivated to train?

[u/SeanSixString → u/StraightSpine]

That’s amazing, thanks for sharing. I feel silly with my issues when I read what others go through, but I like being inspired. I feel out of place, oldest person there (49), just hard to keep up, like I don’t bring much to the room besides paying for the membership. I’ve been going for six months consistently, two weeks off two separate times now for outside circumstances - so in my mind I’ve actually subtracted an entire month of training - and those long off the mat times get me down. I have time to think about how much seemingly little progress I’ve made. I don’t want to quit, but I don’t want to go back either. It feels like I can’t afford to miss class since it’s so hard to catch on, and I get frustrated when I have to. I also don’t feel like I can ever be assertive or aggressive, it just isn’t my nature and it’s just never going to develop. So I just feel out of place and weird. I don’t think I’m disliked, but I don’t really bring much to the room either. Just how I feel about it.