BJJ for Slow, Fat, Old White Belts: My Guide to Not Quitting Week

So you went for your first or first few Brazilian Jiu Jitsu classes, and maybe you’re feeling a combination of excitement and fear, wanting more, but also feeling totally out of your depth. If you are feeling that way, congratulations, that’s how you are supposed to feel, and you have now started your journey with the initial realisation of how truly physically helpless you are against an experienced practitioner of BJJ.

At the time of writing, your author is a white belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (I hate to brag, but that’s a white belt with one stripe, actually). As such, unlike most of the instructors you find out there in BJJ gyms or online, the memory of being a helpless panic-stricken white belt is not a long way back in time for me – I am still that guy, although I am a few months into my journey and have thus had time to develop some ways of managing being so thoroughly physically dominated by my training partners.

I founded this book for people like me to share some coping strategies for surviving BJJ, you see like many people who start this incredible art, I am totally hooked, and won’t be stopping in a hurry, but I still find myself fighting to stay in the game as my class mates progress faster than me, and ragdoll me around despite me sometimes being twice as big as they are!

I’m old enough to have been learning martial arts before the first UFC tournament showed how effective grappling, but especially Brazilian Jiu Jitsu could be against other styles of fighting arts.

Today everybody who has spent 5 minutes studying modern fighting knows that you need in effect a mix of 3 skillsets to be an effective fighter:

1.       The ability to hit – which can be kicking, punching and even elbow striking, leading to victory by rendering your opponent unconscious or unable to continue at least, while rendering their attempts to strike you ineffective.

2.       The ability to control your opponent’s body via grappling, to be able to take your opponent down to the ground, combined with the ability to resist your opponent’s attempts to take you down to the ground.

3.       The ability to outmanoeuvre and out skill your opponent on the ground leading to victory via strikes from a dominant position or a submission.

Most martial artists didn’t know those 3 key skillsets were what mattered before the UFC came along and pitted style against style. I wasted a lot of time learning techniques that didn’t work, with well-meaning but misguided instructors and styles because we didn’t really know what worked in reality back when I was younger, it hadn’t yet been proven. So we wasted a lot of time, years in some cases, learning ineffective styles & techniques that were ultimately of little practical use in a real fight. But at the same time as I regret having wasted time and energy on ineffective fighting arts, so I also feel lucky to have seen the eventual dawning of reality over myth.

I was born back in 1975, which was the era of Bruce Lee mania. Bruce had died in 1973, but not before he had indelibly cast his mark on the public consciousness. As a kid I remember everyone having Bruce Lee posters. Then in 1984, a massive moment in my life came along with The Karate Kid move being released in 1984. I vividly remember my friend and I watching the original movie, and then him turning round and punching me straight in the balls!

As Mr. Miyagi & Daniel san eventually prevailed over the baddies from Cobra Kai, so many in martial arts circles switched their obsession from Chinese Kung Fu towards Japanese (or Okinawan) Karate. And so it was that at the age of 9, much to the annoyance of my pacifist mother I took 2 buses across town to a Karate class in a public swimming baths to learn how to beat the bullies with honour and skill.

I arrived an hour early by mistake & thus got to do the preceding Judo class first. This was a mixed blessing, as (unsurprisingly) my class ended when I was face planted into some not very spongy ‘old skool’ gymnasium mats by someone who was bigger than me and knew what they were doing. I then lumbered through some basic Karate moves while nursing a headache and a squashed nose, and needless to say I was hooked forever more.

From there, I pursued a variety of martial arts & fight sports. Moving around a lot with work meant that I got to try many styles for a year or two before moving on again to the next place and the next style. Styles I trained in before I found Brazilian Jiu Jitsu include: 5 different iterations of Karate, Muay Thai, Savate (French Kickboxing), Kickboxing, Judo, Kung Fu x 2 versions, sword fighting, Tai Chi, Boxing, Aikido and 3 different iterations of Japanese Jiu Jitsu.

This is not one of those books where the author describes a meteoric rise in the arts they study, I am athletically below average, slow and prone to being overweight – a classic endomorph body type, and also a strange mindset combination of meathead and total geek. When I was younger, I had a fairly quick mind and thought well under pressure, so I developed fight intelligence fairly well – I would say I was above average mentally with regards to fighting and an ability to absorb punishment, but well below average physically and athletically.

Nevertheless I tested myself, entering competitions across the country, I have had my ass whupped by people of all types and sizes, and also won (just about) more than I lost. From rings in nightclubs with accompanying baying crowds of drunken blood thirsty fight fans, to aged mats in school halls and leisure centres I took my turn at being routinely humbled and also feeling the glory of victory. At one point in time I even won a national title in a small federation, but that was mostly just because I turned up to all the events and beat the lower-level fighters. The good guys still beat me but didn’t turn up to enough events to secure the title! Technically that result should have qualified me for a national team place in the world or European championships, but nobody even bothered to speak to me about that because I was so clearly sub-international standard! While it sounds impressive on paper – National Heavyweight Champion – it was as much an embarrassment as an achievement because I was really very average at that particular combat sport (that’s not false modesty, if you had seen my big lumbering flailing frame mid-combat your first thought would not have been ‘champion’!

Despite sometimes not training in any martial arts for a few years at a time, I have easily done 20 years of martial arts training overall. I love ‘play fighting’ for fun, and also love the buzz of real fighting, although it’s my belief that it is not wise or good for your health to get beaten up properly on an ongoing basis – some would call me weak or soft for minimising so called 'hard sparring', but I’ll take my relative lack of brain damage to the bank thanks!

And now finally, here’s where this introduction starts to get specific to Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. None of the above helped me AT ALL when I started BJJ. Even having studied multiple versions of Japanese Jiu Jitsu (which is basically a lot of the same techniques) did not help me at all, because when I learned those styles the drills were performed without resistance – the technical term for that being training with a fully compliant uke (or training partner). The internet is full of videos of experienced black belt instructors in various throwing or grappling arts repeatedly throwing someone who is clearly complying i.e. allowing themselves to be thrown, even aiding the throw in some instances versus trying to actively resist it.

When you learn a technique in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, you then get to try to apply it to someone who is resisting and it nearly never works at first, because your training partner or sparring opponent resists and doesn’t do what they are supposed to do. It can take years to refine the small points of techniques and the strategies required to effectively deploy the submission techniques which are so critical to the style.

In my first Brazilian Jiu Jitsu class, the other people were of mixed abilities with a few white belts like myself through to black and purple belts. I did not get a very gentle introduction to the art. In retrospect, I should have attended a new starters fundamentals class for a few weeks or even months before the baptism by fire, but I didn’t! And as a result, 10 seconds after beginning my first sparring round in my first class I had a very physical armed forces guy pinning me down in a suffocating high mount which reminded me of something quite important I had forgotten to consider before starting the class – I have (or more accurately HAD) crippling claustrophobia. Going to work meetings, I would meet a client in the reception, and then have them show me some stairs, walk 12 flight & meet them at the top sweating & out of breath because I hated small spaces like lifts/elevators so much!

The source of my claustrophobia (as well as my interest in learning how to fight and defend myself I guess) came from growing up around some very rough characters. One of the kids who used to come and play at my house is currently in jail for several gang related murders he was convicted of (note that I have it on good authority that there were numerous other unproven murders he is yet to be held to account for). Another guy went on to become an armed street robber in his teens. Many of the kids I grew up with have been in and out of jail most of their adult lives. I could continue painting the rogue’s gallery, but let’s not get distracted by that – back to what caused my claustrophobia: one day when I was about 7, two of the older local tearaway kids knocked on the door to my house & pushed past me & ran amok through our house. This ‘fun’ experience culminated in them pinning me down so that I could not move at all and whacking me, which triggered a serious asthma attack, which delighted them even more. They then started singing ‘Asthma ambulance’ in the rhythm of the slaps and punches they were giving me. From that date, aside from being a little prone to asthma induced breathing panic attacks I have always been very claustrophobic (or to correct myself again, I HAD been before I started Brazilian Jiu Jitsu).

So anyway you can imagine the impact when I found myself pinned down by someone weighing c. 220 pounds with good Jiu Jitsu technique who was muscular, fit and aggressive. By the way he is a really decent guy, he was only doing what we do in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, I just wasn’t psychologically ready for it!

The first two months I trained BJJ, I was literally terrified beforehand on my way to the class, I was literally trembling in the car beforehand, because I was not just fighting the usual battle against a damaged ego after being humbled every time, or the physical exhaustion, or the exposure to how helpless I would be against an attack by a skilled practitioner of this incredible art. I was also fighting the fight to rid myself of my chronic claustrophobia. When you begin training in this noble art, you will normally end up in submissive physical positions where your training partner is using their body to pin you down and physically dominate you. So every time I made my way to the class my mind and body pre-empted the session with adrenaline, fear and I am not ashamed to admit a degree of sheer panic. But I persevered, because I really wanted to get further into understanding the art of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, in many ways BJJ represented the final jigsaw piece in my lifelong journey into learning martial arts.

In case you’re wondering how I got through this initial phase, eventually, one good realisation you come to in BJJ is that you can tap any time you like during a sparring roll. It doesn’t have to be because your opponent is in the process of bending something the wrong way or robbing you of your consciousness. No, it can be for any of the following reasons:

1. Their intensity level is too much for you at the stage of development you are at.

2. As per myself you are feeling claustrophobic while on the bottom.

3. You are totally gassed i.e. you are running out of breath due to physical endeavour.

That’s actually the joy of BJJ, we can train at various levels of intensity. You may go light and technical, your opponent might be going fast and intense, but as soon as you tap it stops and you reset. The same guy I mentioned who I rolled with in my first class would routinely get off me when I tapped due to claustrophobia and was actually very supportive of me when I was clearly melting down with self-hatred at my inability to cope.

As far as the claustrophobia thing is concerned – I’m not saying I am completely cured, but I have made huge progress thanks to training BJJ with respectful training partners who got off me when I was clearly panicking or when I tapped.

If you’ve ever done striking martial arts, the best styles build up the intensity of physical contact slowly so that it is not a total shock when you get to full contact. In effect you get acclimatised to each level of physical contact, and in good gyms and with good trainers, you should not be going anywhere near full contact until you are mentally, physically and technically ready.

The issue with BJJ is that we don’t make that distinction – you go full on into sparring in many cases right from the start. The way I began to cope with the claustrophobic feelings of being pinned at the bottom was to repeatedly put myself in that position. My training partners were mostly better than me, so normally got me into positions where they were dominant anyway, but often to their annoyance I would start to adopt a passive bottom position to begin and then firstly try to get comfortable with being in that position, secondly I would learn the small survival techniques which over time you pick up i.e. if you’re on the bottom, or your opponent has you in side control it feels less crushing/less claustrophobic if you are on your side versus flat on your back, and then finally, I would eventually stop getting submitted so much from those positions, learn the escapes and sweeps which worked for me to allow me to reverse positions. In short, I became comfortable with uncomfortable positions. I found that if I was really struggling when someone was full mounting me (i.e. sat on top of me), then I could ‘give them my back’, which means that while they are controlling your body from behind, they don’t tend to have their bodyweight on you pinning you down. I then got really good (comparatively speaking) at not being submitted from that position and eventually at escaping.

If I met those same kids who pinned me down when I was younger today, I would cope with that situation better, and even though my BJJ skill levels are still low, I would probably manage to roll them and reverse positions. So I feel like I have already won thanks to Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, although I know there are many more challenges to come. The point is that I really do understand how difficult it can feel at the start of your journey with BJJ. Even though I had so much other martial arts experience, none of it was really of much use to me when I started ground fighting. In many ways I was beginning from scratch, but that is one of the things I like most about this sport or combat art – it really humbles you if you are determined enough to accept that humbling and if your ego is not so fragile that you can’t cope with being demonstrably incapable of defending yourself.

We’re all fighting our own internal battles. BJJ is not an easy hobby or sport, because it so fundamentally requires you to be ok with repeatedly having your ass handed to you. Even as you get better, those you train with also get better, and some will get better quicker than you. I miss quite a lot of sessions due to travelling for work, and I miss more sessions than average due to being injured as I am older than most students and already have a lot of built-up physical damage I am managing.

Also due to age I think I learn techniques about half the speed of younger players. Therefore it is going to take me something like four or five times as long as some of my training partners to learn things and progress. They will always be better than me, regardless of my own progress. Although I don’t look at it that way, for me this is a case of me being the tortoise and them being the hare – I will plod along persistently and with a quiet grit until I am too old or broken to do this, I will not quit, whereas many of my more advanced training partners will due to life pressures and other things they want to do in life.

This is an incredible thing you are doing, but I don’t want you to be one of those people who quits at the first sign of hardship, this is a tough but ultimately hugely rewarding journey, and you have my utmost respect for getting off the couch and giving this a go! The technique and skill will come if you stick at this, I just want to help you get through the initial phase where skill and technique are not available to you!

Jimmy Rose, 2024 - lifelong human punchbag and BJJ enthusiast