What Makes Jiujitsu different from other types of Exercise?

The most common reason people struggle with getting fit is it doesn’t engage our brains. Lifting weights or running on a treadmill is fine if your end goal is to lose a few pounds but a lot of us struggle with the mental side of it. How often have you found yourself drifting off into a daydream while running on a treadmill?

You Learn a Skill While Exercising

Training Brazilian Jiujitsu is a completely different process to a regular gym workout, it stimulates and challenges our brains making us think about what our body is doing while also giving us a workout. Due to the mentally engaging factor, an hour spent training Jiujitsu can feel like 10 minutes, and you don’t even realise you’ve put in that much time improving your strength, flexibility and fitness. Not to mention that Jiujitsu is a brilliant form of self-defence so you learn a useful skill while exercising.

Your Analytical Thinking Will Improve

The mental aspect of Jiujitsu can help sharpen your brain. From day one you’ve to figure out and remember a large number of moves. You’ll notice a meditative effect as you start to forget your worries from everyday life as you focus all your energy on defending submissions and landing the technique of the day.

If you want to progress in Jiujitsu you have to think about the techniques your learning and how it fits into the overall picture of other techniques that you’ve learned. Sometimes you’ll come up blank and have questions, which your coach will be happy to answer. It’s important that you get in the habit of asking questions and thinking about Jiujitsu,

You’ll Make New Friends

When training Jiujitsu your social network will grow as you hang out with a group of individuals with a core similar interest making it easy to make new friends. You’ll be surprised by the number of job opportunities and referrals for services that will open up for you. When your team trains, competes and grows together it’s hard not to get along with the rest of your team.

You’ll make healthy lifestyle choices

If you go on to Instagram and look at #bjjlifestyle you’ll see thousands of posts. This is largely due to people using the hashtag on every single post relating to Jiujitsu but the Jiujitsu Lifestyle isn’t a myth. We all have bad habits like drinking fizzy drinks or eating a lot of convenience foods. You can try to keep these habits while training Jiujitsu but in reality, it will become hard because after eating poorly you’ll notice you’re sluggish during training. This will probably make you less keen on that Chinese takeaway after work on a Friday (not always).

You’ll Learn to Overcome Adversity

Jiujitsu has a lot of benefits, but it’s not easy. You will have to continually put in work to get these rewards. There will be days where you will perform terribly and feel like the worst person in the gym. You’ll forget techniques and you will definitely get tapped out (a lot). It’s is all part of the process, the more consistent you are and the more classes you attend, the more you will grow.

Jiujitsu is one of the best things you can start to do today. Don’t wait to sign up, check out your local gym or one of our classes