We haven’t been at the gym for over a year and it really has put strains on our life, including our ability to train. But as with the core of jiu-jitsu, everything is in how and you adapt to the situation and overcome it.
How do you handle things when your gym is closed?
I admit that it was a big blow for me at first. So much of my life is on the mat. Training, teaching classes, and I also handle much of the communication both in real life and on social media. If you look on my Instagram, you’ll see that we continued to train at home, which is more than most people can do, but there was a time when we didn’t even do that. I spent that time training my body in other ways, but most importantly, my mind. Let me explain what I mean.
Equal Mind, Equal Body
Sometimes you hear that Jiu-Jitsu is like chess, but a physical one. I thought about that and figured that if I can’t train jiu-jitsu with my body I can at least train with my mind. So I started to look up old notes from seminars and I also did technique research on the internet. Not just ”cool” techniques, but put effort into it to find details and other stuff that would fit into my own, but also Moas, game. The best part about this was that some of my older notes started to make more sense. Stuff that I didn’t really understand at that point in time became more clear with my new understanding of things. Both because I am more experience now, but also because of the way I started to study things.
Do What You Can at Home
The other part was to still keep the body in shape, or at a maintenance level at least. Keep it from losing too much because of the lack of training. So I started with doing some exercises in the morning and in the evening. First I didn’t have any real goals with it, I just wanted to see how many push-ups I could do a day. I admit I might have gone a bit overboard when I hit 200 a day, so I figured I needed more diverse training, and I started to do solo drills. I also bought resistant bands to do other exercises. The thing is, people complain about that they don’t have time to exercise. This is something I hear from everyone, not just BJJ-people, but if you put in 15 min every day, you can get a pretty good workout. If you plan things and keep at it, you will see results pretty fast. Even better if you can put in 30 min, 15 in the morning and 15 in the evening. But I’ll tell you this, EVERYONE has 15 mins to spare every day. You just have to get it into your daily routines. My goal was just to not get totally out of shape so I wouldn’t die when we could hit the mats again, but what happened was that I put on about 8-10 kilos of more muscle on my upper body. This was only because I set things in routine, and I still keep this today. Good workout routines can be found all over internet. Find something that fits you and stick to it.
There is no excuse
Hopefully we can get back to our normal training life, but until then, you just have to find other ways to train. If you can team up with a training partner, buy mats, and train at home as Moa and I did, that is awesome. But if you can’t, you can find other ways to train that will help your jiu-jitsu in the future. You just have to be smart about it and think outside the box. At the end of it, there is no excuse.
