Unprepared.

Unprepared for culture shock.

Unprepared for reality versus expectations.

And I'd injured my hip flexor a couple of weeks prior and was barely able to fit in just enough physio that I could walk upright onto the plane.

The injury took months to heal, and that's OK, because finding a gym was an ordeal.

First off, I couldn't work the Korean internet. Because I was illiterate.

When I found someone who wanted to help, they didn't know what jiu-jitsu or MMA (격투기) was.

When we were finally on the same page they started calling around for me (as in, on the phone) and it turned out everyone taught jiu-jitsu and MMA.

Every single gym.

Every TKD club. Every hapkido club.

It wasn't true.

There was never any jiu-jitsu and the striking was all unusual. I'd stick around long enough to follow some of the other students out the door after class to ask if they knew anything about the kind of gym I was actually looking for.

Eventually I got a name: TEAM MAX in Incheon.

When I arrived at the address I found they'd moved to 일산. The current club was teaching jiu-jitsu, but there was something unusual going on. The instructor was a dentist by day, and an accomplished sambo athlete.

Also forlorn.

His business was failing.

Nobody wanted to learn sambo and his jiu-jitsu instruction was unusual. When he showed me his marketing materials he had one of the highlight knockouts from a K-1 event as the hero image for his kids program.

We discussed this as he demoed leglock after leglock on me, explaining that nobody wanted to learn them. I asked about the wisdom of using a kickboxing image for a jiu-jitsu club and especially for one developing a kids program. This went on for about 90 minutes.

On the way out one of the students gave me the name of a kickboxing gym back my way to look into, who had another student that gave me the name of the club I'd eventually wind up at, and still consider my home club, in my Korean hometown:

Bucheon Blue Dragon

There were a few more hoops to jump through.

One of my English students offered to help. She tracked down the phone number, made a call, discovered that the place was only a couple of blocks from her house and walked me over after class one evening.

We walked into an old, generic 90s-era building and down and into the basement where the head student was waiting for us. The two of them helped me with the paperwork and got me signed up.

I could barely say hello and count to ten.

But I recognized the jiu-jitsu so I kept showing up.

I did no-gi and kickboxing classes there for the first several months.

Then winter rolled in and 관장님 handed me a gi for the first time.

The club I started with in Kelowna had a little bit of contempt for the gi at the time and that attitude lingered. I was skeptical, but it was a lot more comfortable playing jiu-jitsu in a gi in the cold.

And also maddening.

And fun.

My fingertips and cuticles split and bled all over the place the first time I tried. Once they got toughened up enough, it was finger and then wrist and forearm, and then elbow and shoulder pain from all of the gripping.

My friends patiently helped me along.

I had Korean friends.

I didn't even really realize it happened. They invited Jessica along when we'd go out drinking or out to eat (usually the two overlap). We attended every SpiritMC event held in Seoul, met the fighters, met the ring girls, hung out with the sponsors.

We had Korean friends.

We moved back to Canada in 2008, but the pattern of those relationships stuck with me. It's the metric I use to judge every gym I've walked into since then.

A Two-Way Relationship

After Canada and Korea, I tried a gym in Mexico City in 2023. It was good.

I probably won't go back.

Busy gyms rushing people off the mats I understand, if there's another class coming in. But I've been to gyms that were great in every other way, where everyone is ushered off the mats after class for no reason I could figure out.

It feels transactional.

Without realizing it I've always sought out gyms where class ends and there are stragglers sticking around to roll and a bunch of other people just sitting around, hanging out.

The place in Mexico City had great people, good instruction and a very nice facility. It just didn't fit me.

It was a Nolan problem.

If it was the only choice, I'd have stuck with it, but it wasn't.

In Korea in 2005 I had a checklist of things I was looking for, but it was mostly just "good jiu-jitsu nearby."

The autumn before we moved back to Canada, I had been sick and away from the gym for weeks. When I was certain I wasn't going to spread any germs around I stopped by after a class with my student who helped me find the place a couple of years earlier.

Just to say hi to everyone.

관장님 came over, asked me where I had been, and I pointed at my nose and stomach, trying to explain that I wasn't feeling well. He walked over to his bag, pulled out a small food container, took out some sort of root and told me to eat it. Bitter and astringent, but when I was leaving afterwards, the congestion in my head was gone and my stomach had started to feel a lot better.

That wasn't a part of the transaction. He didn't owe me a remedy. He offered because he noticed I was missing.

Dropping into a gym for a few classes while travelling is one thing, but when I'm looking for a place to build my hobby around, the people, the instruction and the facility are important—but what makes me pay any price or travel any distance is something else:

It's a place where our absence is noticed.

It's why I never use the V-word to describe how I eat.

Almost everything I've learned about doing plant-based is built on those people experimenting on themselves since the Vegan Society split from the Vegetarians during wartime rationing in November 1944.

Their position is a moral one encompassing more than just food and I don't want to do anything to dilute the meaning of the term.

It's Jiu-Jitsu's Fault

In the autumn of 2019 I finished rolling for the day and noticed something strange—skipping meat for one day gave me what felt like superhuman stamina the next.

It wasn't a deliberate thing—I actually panicked the second time it happened and had to check my notes before I realized what was probably going on.

It was Penn Jillette's doing.

I've listened to his podcast from the beginning and read his book about losing 100 pounds on a monodiet of potatoes. I haven't stopped reading about plant-based since.

Jessica and I had been trying out plant-based food for a while, but that was the first moment breakfast, lunch and dinner clicked.

So I did it again. On purpose this time.

I thought to myself that if I feel better when I'm playing jiu-jitsu, when I'm at my (modest) physical limits, how would the rest of my life feel when I'm out and about doing the regular? Walking the dogs. Dayjobbing. Hanging out with the wife.

So I decided to give plant-based a proper shot.

I'd just ask around and then go buy the manual that helps people switch to plant-based.

How Hard Could It Be?

It turns out that there was no instruction manual.

And it's also really hard.

I heard that one of the guys at the gym was a vegan, so I went to him for advice.

The very first thing he told me was, "you can't be lazy."

All the books I'd read echoed this. I just accepted it and got to work.

I was doing it—but I was cooking almost every meal we ate.

And there were stumbling blocks:

The main one was impulse control problems between dinner and bedtime—I get hit by the munchies hard, and if marijuana is involved, I start behaving like I'm about to starve unless I have some cake or potato chips.

And the others were just the failures of a beginner—I'd run out of the food I wanted to eat.

I figured this would sort itself out, but a couple of months into it I realized that I was using motivation to pull all of this off and that none of it was sustainable.

I Needed A Different Approach

I had a couple of months of data in front of me and started unpacking the problem of omnivore to plant-based.

It occurred to me that every book on my shelf, every YouTube video, every podcast I listened to was about why and what.

Morality and health benefits.

Recipes and where to eat.

How was being discussed, but never seriously. Never with any depth.

My background in corporate sales and pest control is all about training people to obsess over how to fix a problem rather than dwelling on the symptoms. I'm trained to keep people focused on the solution.

What if I applied that thinking to plant-based?

The thought gave me a shot of optimism—it felt good.

Next, I realized jiu-jitsu has never frustrated me the way this diet change had. I'd been reading so much vegan and health literature that I'd inadvertently been building plant-based as an identity.

But what if I treated it like jiu-jitsu instead—as a skill?

I'd only fail if I stopped.

As long as I kept showing up—kept trying—I'd just be unskilled. Learning. I'd get better at it every day, every time I practiced it.

More optimism—it felt really good.

I was still figuring out how to put it all together—the manual—when I dumbassed my way into the silver bullet.

Convenience First

I'm leaving a grocery store after doing some work and grab a "protein bar". At the checkout I see a Wunderbar and grab that too, because I'm a glutton. I'm in the truck eating one after the other and it hits me—these choices were equally convenient.

In that moment, with a mouthful of candy bar, time felt like it slowed.

If there were options that were equally convenient, there would be options that were more convenient, and also less convenient.

All the meal prep. All the running around town to try different restaurants and specialty stores. All the deep diving into vitamins and supplements.

Until then everything I'd been doing was less convenient—no, actually much harder than what I'd been doing before.

And all at once, all of it haphazardly.

And from my research, it's what almost everyone does.

So I flipped it, and it occurred to me that I wouldn't even have to start with what was most convenient—I'd start with what I'd never have to give up, and three things popped into my mind immediately:

• black coffee
• Oreo cookies
• yellow mustard

It wasn't all about sacrifice.

Then I got to work where I was—where I still am—weakest: snacks.

In the most convenient and gluttonous way possible—I tried everything from all the grocery stores I work at.

Then I got my breakfast really right, then lunches and then Jessica sorted out dinner.

And at six months I had been 100% strict plant-based for several weeks—more than a month—and I didn't even realize it.

We Walked It Back

The final sticking point was sacrifice.

Korean fried chicken. BBQ with friends. Pizza. Cheese. Wunderbars.

I'd think about them and feel anxious.

It was the literature again.

I'm not trying to be vegan, and I'm getting enough of the benefits of plant-based that I can say good enough—jiu-jitsu has felt great since the switch and the day to day stuff is noticeably better too.

So we took the pressure off.

And discovered something unexpected.

The old favourites didn't satisfy in the same way any longer.

A burger was just a burger. A bag of chips or that Wunderbar was more about the packaging than the food inside.

Korean fried chicken and BBQ is just the venue to share a meal with friends. Ugly Duckling is something special to enjoy with the person I've shared my life with for 23 years now.

Plant-Based Made My Jiu-Jitsu Habit Easier—YMMV

First it improved my stamina—a night and day difference.

Then I applied the thinking—the obsession with how and convenience to everything I do off the mats. Attending class—being on the mats—has become as frictionless as eating that Wunderbar in my truck.

It worked.

I could have done all of this without the diet change, but I wouldn’t have.

The deep dive into plant-based was the catalyst for all of this.

The irony is that the approach is diet-agnostic.

The biggest hurdle in retrospect was the constant pull to conflate what we eat with who we are. Once I stopped doing that, all I was left with was the how.

And that’s just another skill to practice.

YMMV.

In Victoria, British Columbia?

Lolakana Martial Arts has 20+ classes a week for both adults and kids in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, No-Gi Jiu-Jitsu and Kickboxing.

Free parking.

We're Indigenous-owned.

Unlimited Free Trial Week: https://lolakana.com/contact/

We've used these... forever? I don't remember when we started.

I'm going to share a secret here: Jessica has always chosen the laundry detergent that we use. She explained to me once that it's important to have some coloured detergent in the packs (the purple stuff) because it counteracts yellowing.

Jessica's Notes:

I actually don't remember having this conversation!

I like the Oxy cleaners for counteracting the yellow. Both the Tide Sport Pods we use for Nolan's stuff and the Gain pods I use for mine have it, and both also have the blue/purple detergent.

One thing I do know about laundry—our stuff gets washed by the water. Detergent just helps.

Water quality wherever you are will drastically affect how your laundry comes out. We're in Victoria, BC and every time I've tested the water coming out of the tap the needle barely moves. Total dissolved solids (TDS— the mineral content) is pretty low compared to other places we've lived.

Additional chemical softeners are sometimes needed.

If your laundry isn't coming out how you imagine it should—if your whites aren't staying white—there's probably a missing piece. A setting on the washer, a different product that better suits the location, or too much or little.

Ask around. It's something you'll solve once and just autopilot forevermore.

Zippered Laundry Bags

We put our gis in the dryer. (Pro-tip: buy pre-shrunk gis if you want to use the dryer.)

Most of my gis have been the same brand over the past ten years. Professor put some stripes on my belt a few weeks back and although I have no problem washing a belt with stripes, running one through a dryer seemed like it would be a problem.

So I've always just hung them up.

Jessica did my laundry the other day and I couldn't find my belt and she showed me this little dryer bag. It has a zipper that tucks away and even if the tape does melt off it's trapped in the bag.

Jessica's Notes:

This is a delicates bag.

I roll the belt up into it—stripes on the inside of the roll—and then put it into the washer/dryer like that. The stripes don't seem to move. They're protected by the outside of the belt and the bag holds it all together.

Gain Dryer Sheets

Dryer sheets make our stuff a little slippery to the touch, add an additional scent and help prevent static from collecting our clothes into a lump filled with little lightning bolts.

Jessica had never heard about slippery laundry before.

Jessica's Notes:

I do not find that they make the laundry slippery.

Definitely softer and definitely smelling good.

We use the Gain Flings sheets because I like how our gis smell with them.

I never use these for our regular laundry, they're too scented for me day-to-day, but for the gi I like them (and no, you don't smell like a perfumed gi or anything)

Back in the day I sold water softeners and reverse osmosis systems for homes door-to-door. Part of the pitch was shit-talking dryer sheets.

That's where I learned they make things "slippery."

Probably.

I had to know, so I looked up what's actually in them:

• the sheet itself is often polyester, but cellulose and other plant-based materials are gaining popularity due to environmental concerns
• Cationic Surfactants are anti-static agents that neutralize positive charges
• Lubricants & Softeners coat fibers to reduce friction in the dryer. These are the products that create "slipperiness".
• Rheology Modifiers—a type of clay that controls the viscosity of the other chemicals as they melt during the dryer cycle
• Fragrances—the research describes these as "systems"—they not only give us the scent that's on the label but mask the natural odours of the ingredients
• Preservatives—added to control microbial growth during storage

Slipperiness definitely came from the sales training.

If you're curious the Gemini research is here.

Skin Care

Our skin is the heaviest organ in our body—15% of our total weight.

You'd think more people would take better care of it.

Especially as jiu-jitsu players.

I've seen too many people over the years scratching at dry, itchy skin. Sunburns. Feet that look like potato chips.

The key hazards in jiu-jitsu are staph and ringworm. Sanitation at the club matters. How we launder our gear matters. Wiping out our gym bag and letting it dry matters.

But the actual medium that contains the infections—our skin—matters just as much.

Here's what we use to keep it healthy—all inexpensive and easy to find:

Face Wash

Look, soap is fine.

Jessica's Notes:

Eek! Soap is going to dry out your skin!

Cetaphil is gentle, yet effective on many skin types. It's been recommended to me by dermatologists both in Canada and South Korea

She's had me use this stuff for years now:

It's foamy and soft and I actually do feel a difference between it and when I just use the hand soap on the counter.

Face Lotion

We use another Cetaphil product on our face:

Jessica's Notes:

We use the Cetaphil lotion because it's light and hydrating, and in Victoria we can use it year round. It doesn't break me out or make my face greasy, and the products are reasonably priced.

I like it.

But if she wasn't here directing traffic, I'd probably just use one of these:

Body Lotion

We use this from the neck to our ankles:

There's actually two bottles in the bathroom and I had to ask why.

Jessica's Notes:

One is a thicker lotion best for dryer skin/winter, the other is a thinner one that absorbs faster and isn't as heavy. I alternate depending on how my skin is feeling.

I usually just use the one on the left.

Foot Lotion

We use this on our feet:

I'm in workboots all day long.

Before I put socks on and after I get out of the shower I rub this into my feet.

Dry, cracked and calloused feet are harbourage for athletes foot, which is a number of species of different fungi that also cause ringworm.

And we gotta keep that off the mats.

Sunscreen

I wear sunscreen every day, rain or shine, whether I'm indoors or out.

A habit is automatic and decision-making is not.

But...

I gotta be honest here—the motivation for creating this habit came from when I was watching a Korean makeup show with Jessica years ago and the panel was trying to guess the age of this beautiful woman. I assumed late thirties—she was in her sixties.

Nearly flawless skin.

She explained that while artificial light sources don't cause sunburn and DNA damage, they can contribute the symptoms of aging.

My vanity kicked in.

This is the stuff we use on our faces:

Jessica's Notes:

I like how this is a lightweight SPF 60.

I wear makeup during the day so I don't want something that slides off my face, and over the years I've tried lots and this one seems to do the trick

I keep this other stuff in the truck for reapplication during the day:

I've had ringworm only a couple of times, and staph once, which is a major problem for me because I'm allergic to most antibiotics.

After I stepped up my post-shower skincare routine with the products above, there's been no more skin infections, which were rare, but I immediately noticed any sort of itching sensation throughout the day under my clothes or on my feet almost completely stopped.

It actually feels pretty good when our skin is healthy.

Food

People are seriously hypersensitive about the food we eat.

Food is more than just nutrition.

This is a total third rail and I don't have a lot to say here.

Aeropress

I really want a La Pavoni pump handle espresso machine.

But I'd need an almost equally expensive grinder for the thing, and both would take up an enormous amount of counter space in our small kitchen and there's always just been other priorities.

And here's the other problem.

The Aeropress makes really great coffee. So good in fact that I don't really mind not having espresso in the morning.

This is one of the greatest consumer products of my lifetime. They're inexpensive, robust, portable and there's a fun culture surrounding them that's accessible and inclusive because the barrier to entry is so low.

Espresso Sticks

These are instant coffee sticks.

I know that espresso is a process. The manager at one of the local places we frequent explained to me that "espresso by the grind" is a thing...

(I probably have that phrasing wrong.)

Regardless, it's an excellent facsimile and the aroma instantly triggers memories of sipping coffee on sunny, chill mornings in Korea and Japan.

A Meal Prep Service

This is a big one for us, and I tell everyone I can about it.

These services deliver (or you can pickup—we do) a bunch of meals that you put in the refrigerator and microwave when it's time to eat.

We've tried a few different options in the space but the place we've stuck with for years [how long?] is a local one in the neighbourhood called Freebeets.

We use it for weeknight dinners and it saves us 78 hours a year. We can dayjob, then go help out at the gym, come home have dinner ready in three minutes, eat, relax and then back to the gym for the late class.

It's no exaggeration when I say that it's the greatest lifestyle intervention of my life.

Your Turn

What's the stuff in your routine that makes jiu-jitsu sustainable?

Not the sexy gear. The boring stuff that keeps you healthy and on the mats.

Leave a comment below.

In Victoria, British Columbia?

Lolakana Martial Arts has 20+ classes a week for both adults and kids in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, No-Gi Jiu-Jitsu and Kickboxing.

Free parking.

We're Indigenous-owned.

Unlimited Free Trial Week: https://lolakana.com/contact/

But mostly I'd see people passed out on the subway.

It was a natural spot to pause and take a physical break from the hurry-hurry culture. Add the the non-stop droning white noise, the rhythmic clack-clack and vibration with a mild hypnotic effect and the weight hits your eyelids.

Riding from Songnae to Gyulhyeon (and later Gyeyang) station to a job in Pungmu-dong three days a week I started trying.

But instead of owning it, I told myself I was just "shutting my eyes".

I'd listen for the announced stops to time myself... Did this three days a week for a couple of years. One ear always open, never fully asleep.

And I got good at it.

When I'd get to my stop I'd hear the announcement and open my eyes and they weren't as heavy anymore.

I'd have to wake people up occasionally at the end of the line where I'd get off because they'd completely pass out and no one had any idea what happened if you stayed on the train after the last stop. The lights would switch off and it would just roll down the tracks slowly, but no one knows where it would go.

Probably oblivion.

Anyways, I kept it up.

When we moved back to Canada I was pretty good at "shutting my eyes" in the truck. I'd put on the radio and time myself by listening to a certain number of songs and then open my eyes and get going.

I remember telling Jessica this and she just asked why I didn't set my alarm.

It was shame... or something. Fear maybe? Concern what people might think if they knew I napped in the truck. 

I set the alarm.

And my whole world changed.

My dayjob became instantly more tolerable. I started earning more and picking up more responsibilities. I could endure the stressful accounts and challenging customers.

I'd wake up and it wasn't just relief from the heavy eyelids.

I felt alert. Well rested even.

I drive around all day. The nature of pest control work means I'd arrive at accounts with time to kill before appointments.

Sometimes 15 minutes, sometimes 7, sometimes 5. I'd set the alarm for whatever time I had and shut my eyes. Eventually I figured out the minimum: 11 minutes. I can almost always fall asleep in that time.

Often with time dilation. Sometimes with dreams—more on this point later.

My alarm goes off and it feels like I've been asleep for hours.

But it's only been 11 minutes.

A New Skill

Here's what I realized late into all of this:

I'd been practicing napping.

Like it was a skill.

First, by telling myself it was OK.

Next with "just shutting my eyes" on the subway, one ear open, listening for the stops.

Eventually I could fall asleep almost anywhere.

The weird part?

The best place to learn is in public.

The subway in Incheon. My truck in parking lots. Benches in client facilities late at night where I can lie down flat.

Not because these spaces are comfortable—they just need to be good enough.

It's because napping in the thick of it has built in urgency—you're in the middle of something when you stop and when your alarm goes off you're back in it again.

There's a job to start or resume. An appointment to make. A call to hop on.

No transition, just go.

We're already where we need to be.

And now we're sharp.

It's Caffeine's Fault

If caffeine actually did what we all go around saying it does, I wouldn't have to nap.

None of us would.

We'd all be alert and clear-eyed, making sober, rational decisions on a few hours of sleep, permanently. We'd drink our coffee or energy drink and sit down and go on a marathon of deep focused work until lunch time. 

Then everyone would get back to work for the latter half of the day, repeat the same, and we'd all live happily ever after.

We can be forgiven for thinking it should work that way.

The data are real—increased time to exhaustion, increased accuracy, increased reaction time, potential gains in preserving and enhancing memory.

Caffeine does something.

Just not what we think it does.

When we get into our first coffee of the day, we feel aroused and alert. Ready to work.

And we conflate that feeling with intelligence. With productivity. With having actual "energy".

But caffeine doesn't do any of that.

It just blocks the signal that tells us we're tired.

Our brains produce adenosine throughout the day. It's the molecule that basically makes us feel fatigued, which then causes us to slow down, and then when we're asleep it breaks down.

Caffeine's molecular structure is similar enough that it can bind to the same receptors—but without activating them.

It's not waking us up.

It's just preventing us from feeling how tired we already are.

But here's the part that got me:

Caffeine doesn't just block our fatigue signals.

It inflates our confidence.

Research by Kilpeläinen et al. (2010) and Lohi et al. (2007) found subjects consistently believe they've performed better than they actually have. They feel fluent, sharp, on top of things.

Meanwhile the actual performance is unchanged. Sometimes worse.

It's called the "hard-easy" effect—the stimulant makes us feel like we're crushing it, which we mistake for actually crushing it.

We can't accurately judge our performance anymore.

And when we drink coffee every day? Our brains adapt and create more adenosine receptors to compensate for the blocked ones.

Which means our baseline shifts.

Our morning coffee isn't boosting us above normal. It's reversing the withdrawal symptoms from yesterday's dose. We're just getting back to zero.

Except we feel like we're 110%.

So yes, there are benefits to caffeine. The data show that.

But the tradeoff?

We're running on a system that lies to us about how tired we are and makes us overconfident about how well we're actually performing.

What I was—what I am—actually looking for—real alertness, actual recovery, accurate judgement about whether I could train in the morning after working all night—

That didn't come from caffeine.

It came from a nap.

Jiu-Jitsu Hobbyists Should Cross-Train Napping

Morning classes would be rough without a nap.

I'm dayjobbing 90 minutes after class ends and I fit either an 11 minute or 22 minute nap in when I get to my first stop of the day before I begin work.

I always thought this was to get me on the right foot for the day ahead.

But one of the standout pieces of information when I was learning about rest last week was how napping can be a critical component of skill consolidation.

Especially for habitual nappers like me. Research shows we consolidate motor learning better than occasional nappers—some studies found naps actually make performance worse for non-nappers (Milner et al., 2006).

So I assumed my routine was working.

Two Assumptions I Got Wrong:

1. I nap after training. Napping after learning produces additive benefits even for well-rested individuals.

The timing matters: Research found that "if you sleep on the same day of training, the long-term memory transfer produces a better result."

1. I sometimes dream in those 11 minutes. Sometimes experience time dilation. I thought this meant deep consolidation was happening.

Here's where I was wrong: Dreaming typically requires 70-90 minutes to reach REM sleep. If I'm dreaming in 11 minutes, that's REM pressure—my body dropping into REM immediately because it's starved for it.

So I assumed my 11-minute truck naps were helping me consolidate techniques from morning class.

Wrong.

Well, half wrong.

What 11 Minutes Actually Does (And What It Doesn't)

Research from Flinders University found that a 10-minute nap provides an immediate spike in vigor and cognitive function that lasts up to 155 minutes.

That's what I'm getting—alertness. The ability to show up ready for my first appointment.

But motor skill consolidation—the kind that hard-wires a crowbar sweep into my nervous system—requires 60 to 90 minutes.

That's when we hit Slow-Wave Sleep (SWS) and REM cycles. That's when procedural memory gets saved.

My 11-minute naps? They're staying in light NREM sleep. Great for clearing mental fatigue. Not enough for technique consolidation.

And the dreaming I thought was proof of deep learning?

That's likely a sign of REM pressure—my body is so starved for REM sleep from previous nights that it drops into it immediately.

But I do actually get six and a half to seven and a half hours of sleep most nights.

I'm going to keep a close eye on this going forward. I have enormous flexibility in my schedule and can tackle all the afterhours work differently than I am.

A New Experiment

So here's what I'm changing:

I'm keeping the 11 and 22 minute naps. They work for alertness and I need those for the dayjob.

But I'm going to add a 90 minute nap in twice a week for February—we do morning BJJ on Wednesday and Friday and both are the days where overnight work begins (and then working through Thursday and Saturday).

Previously I'd been doing the short nap after class, then doing a marathon late morning early afternoon work and getting into bed in the afternoon, sleeping for four hours, then getting up and getting my evening started.

I'm going to modify this.

A 90 minute nap before I start work, then another one in the late afternoon to set up the coming afterhours work.

Psychologist Sara Mednick found that a 90-minute nap—one that hits both SWS and REM—can produce the same magnitude of learning as a full night's sleep. And it avoids sleep inertia if timed right.

For the hobbyist juggling training and work? That's the dose worth finding time for.

It’s A Cultural Sickness We Don’t Nap

We all need breaks, and we all have been getting them wrong for years.

Everyone needs them. It's expected. It's legislated when you're working for someone.

But the culture here makes people think that means coffee. Or a cigarette or vape. Or 15 minutes of doom scrolling.

I tell people I take a nap with the same casualness someone says they need to eat.

Because that's all it is.

A break that actually works.

Research Cited:

• Kilpeläinen et al. (2010) - Effect of Caffeine on Vigilance During Extended Wakefulness - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247502794_Effect_of_Caffeine_on_Vigilance_and_Cognitive_Performance_During_Extended_Wakefulness
• Lohi et al. (2007) - Effects of Low Dose Caffeine on Pilot Performance - Effect of caffeine on simulator flight performance in sleep-deprived military pilot students - PubMed
• Mednick et al. (2003) - Sleep-dependent learning: A nap is as good as a night - Sleep-dependent learning: a nap is as good as a night - PubMed
• Milner et al. (2006) - Habitual napping moderates motor performance improvements - (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7238899_Habitual_napping_moderates_motor_performance_improvements_following_a_short_daytime_nap)
• Flinders University - Nap duration and alertness benefits - A brief afternoon nap following nocturnal sleep restriction: which nap duration is most recuperative? - PubMed

In Victoria, British Columbia?

Lolakana Martial Arts has 20+ classes a week for both adults and kids in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, No-Gi Jiu-Jitsu and Kickboxing.

Free parking.

Indigenous-owned.

Unlimited Free Trial Week: https://lolakana.com/contact/

Attend as many classes as possible.

Go to all the open mats.

I think we've all done our own version of this before.

In 2013 I went for the maximum—four evening classes, five afternoon classes, an open mat and also two judo classes midweek. I was expecting complete burnout or injury but neither happened and it was actually a lot of fun.

Where things began to stretch thin was at the dayjob.

I have a lot of flexibility in my work. It's both the nature of the work and my tenure and experience.

I did not have a good boss at the time—amongst a long list of other issues, completely inattentive, and after a few months of eleven classes a week they called me into the office for a meeting to ask me what the hell was happening with my job performance.

It wasn't working.

Jiu-jitsu was definitely working, insofar that I was having fun, but my hobby was putting pressure on one of the most important parts of my life outside of it—my career.

The customers were happy, but my production numbers showed a downturn that slowed but didn't level off. It was showing up in my paycheque and even the most incompetent administrator I've ever worked under saw it.

The customers were eventually going to see it.

So I cut the afternoon classes, but was still trying to do the maximum and the injuries started happening.

Cauliflower ear. A dislocated pinky finger. A popping noise in my knee and hip. A pectoral tear.

The time off got longer with each injury—days, then a couple of weeks, then a month, then several months.

Recovering from the pectoral tear overlapped with our annual trip to Seoul. I couldn't play jiu-jitsu with my friends. Worse, I'd convinced a couple of my Canadian friends to make the trip with us, so I had to go to the gym and watch everyone else have fun.

We're out drinking afterwards and 관장님 told me outright to quit judo.

Not because it's intrinsically dangerous.

The problem was me, he advised.

I didn't have the battery for everything I was trying to do.

What's the Point?

Just what the hell was I trying to do?

I told myself I was doing more jiu-jitsu because I loved it.

But looking back, I think I was trying to shortcut skill acquisition through volume. More classes = better, faster.

...

Right?

And I think jiu-jitsu became avoidance. The dayjob was stressful. The gym is fun. So I kept forcing it.

But here's the thing: I was trying to skip the struggle.

My version of this was volume.

Volume felt like work. It felt like I was doing something. But I wasn't doing the hard part—the deliberate practice, the focus, the actual learning where I'd be uncomfortable and not knowing what I was doing yet.

I wanted the expertise without earning it.

Everyone saw me having a great time. My coaches saw me training hard. Jessica heard about all of the friends I was hanging out with.

But my jiu-jitsu wasn't actually improving proportional to the time invested.

I was telling myself I was taking the hobby seriously.

But there was no balance. No strategy. Just volume.

And volume in of itself doesn't work for hobbies. Or skill acquisition. Or anything, really.

It's the journey. It's always the jouney.

Maximum volume was trying to skip that.

When I stumbled onto MED it was the effective part that stuck the pin in my memory.

What happened if I started exploring the minimum?

The Research

A couple of weeks back I came across that 4-Hour Body entry in my journal and it went from floating around to suddenly feeling motivation creeping in.

So I started digging.

It turns out I'd completely misunderstood what "practice" means.

The training session isn't the 'dose'.

The dose is Practice + Recovery.

Dosing Jiu-Jitsu

Recovery seems obvious—we all need rest.

But I didn't understand how it related to practice until I found research showing that skill acquisition happens in two phases.

The first phase is fast learning—what happens in class when you drill something and it starts feeling less awkward by the end of the session.

It's a temporary sensation. The thing we feel and think means we're getting better.

The second phase is slow learning—the permanent hard-wiring that happens hours after training.

Specifically, 6 to 8 hours after.

We don't just learn the overhead sweep from collar-and-sleeve in class—the process begins there, but the actual performance gains happen between training sessions.

Especially after sleep.

This is why the maximum—and by that I mean volume—failed me.

Here's the mechanism: Learning requires specific proteins to strengthen connections between neurons. Their supply is limited and typically depletes after 60 to 90 minutes of intense focus. The synapses themselves also become 'saturated'—like a sponge that can't hold any more water. At this point, the brain stops encoding. Everything after is junk volume.

And there's a second problem. When I stacked judo on top of jiu-jitsu on top of open mats, I triggered what's called Retrograde Interference. The brain needs a buffer (roughly 4-6 hours) to stabilize the first skill before it can handle a second without overwriting the progress.

I wasn't giving it that buffer. I was training, eating, training again.

The intense focus of the fast phase sends the signal. But once that signal is sent, more reps while exhausted aren't strengthening it. They're just causing wear and tear.

The 6 to 8 hours after class? That's where the difference gets made.

When I'm supposed to be sleeping.

But this opened another can of worms—I train in the morning nowadays.

And I can't just go to sleep afterwards.

But my jiu-jitsu is improving.

What's going on?

It's the Pauses

In every jiu-jitsu class I've ever been to we drill in pairs. One rep on each side. Then we switch.

Nobody drills for 20 minutes straight.

We do a bunch of reps back and forth, then we sit around. Maybe chat or watch other people. Then back to drilling.

I always thought this was just how classes work. That it was to just keep people from getting bored. (I've never asked where this came from.)

Turns out that this is compatible with learning:

Research from 2021 found that the brain doesn't learn while we're moving.

We learn when we stop.

Specifically, during roughly 10-second pauses.

And here's the part that stunned me:

When we stop drilling for those ten seconds, our brain replays the movement we just did at 20x speed.

In that 10-second break, our brain might replay that overhead sweep from collar-and-sleeve 200 times. Perfectly.

Without that break, we lose those 200 reps.

Even better:

"In contrast to offline, overnight consolidation, which necessitates sleep, wakeful memory consolidation occurring during ten-second breaks is approximately four times more efficient."

We learn four times faster standing still between reps than we do during the slow-learning phase that happens while we sleep.

"wakeful rest plays just as important a role as practice in learning a new skill."

Every gym I've ever trained at has been doing the Minimum Effective Dose all along.

We just didn't know why it worked.

The Shift

The Minimum Effective Dose for the jiu-jitsu hobbyist isn't a specific number of classes per week.

It's understanding that the dose includes the recovery.

Show up to class consistently.

Take the breaks between reps (your brain is working at 20x speed during those pauses).

Sleep well.

And if you train in the morning like I do now? Nap.

I might be a purple belt in jiu-jitsu but I'm a red belt when it comes to napping. Eleven minutes in the truck, seat back, timer set. I wake up alert. Sometimes with time dilation. Sometimes with dreams.

Research shows even a short nap produces similar consolidation benefits to a full night's sleep for motor skills.

The hobbyist advantage: We have to balance jiu-jitsu with the rest of our lives.

Work. Sleep. Relationships.

That constraint forces the MED.

And it turns out that's not a limitation.

It's the actual mechanism of learning.

Your Turn

This is all new to me.

Who are the jiu-jitsu nerds who came across this and have been working on it?

Are there any scientists in this field that are also jiu-jitsu players?

I'd love to hear from you.

What's your Minimum Effective Dose looking like right now?

Research Cited:

• Buch et al. (2021)—The Gap Effect (Your brain replays the move 20x faster when you take 10-second breaks during practice).
• **Karni et al. (1998)—Fast vs. Slow Learning (Your brain cements the skill 6+ hours after practice, primarily during sleep).
• Smolen et al. (2016)—Synaptic Spacing (Chemical pathways for memory have a refractory period; spacing your practice out is biologically required to replenish them).

In Victoria, British Columbia?

Lolakana Martial Arts has 20+ classes a week for both adults and kids in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, No-Gi Jiu-Jitsu and Kickboxing.

Free parking.

Indigenous-owned.

Click here for our Free Unlimited Trial Week

Motivation is a temporary emotional state. Ability is the combination of time, money, physical effort, mental effort and routine that we have available to us. When our position falls below the Action Line, we quit.

In that moment there was a rush of memories—all sorts of things I tried to do throughout my life that were temporary, or some version of on again, off again. At the time it was guitar. Photography. Eating healthfully. Jiu-jitsu.

Thinking back further I understood why stuff like going to the gym to lift, drawing, business ventures, and even the girls I dated before I met my wife didn't work out.

I guessed that the book would give me these answers.

Why I failed at certain things.

Why I was succeeding at others.

And not only the stuff I wanted to do more of, but also the stuff I wanted to do less of.

Snacking. Alcohol. Weed. Porn.

I guessed right.

The solution wasn't more motivation, or rationing it better—trust me, I spent forty years trying that. It's using that temporary high, the buzz of motivation, to do the work that makes the behaviour easier.

Then easier still.

Then, like my jiu-jitsu habit now, almost automatic.

The book gave me the pattern. Here's the link. (Non-affiliate).

The Illusion

We buy the membership and automate the payment.

Choose the classes we want to attend and put them on our calendar and hollow out the time.

We plot out our commute.

We (probably spend too much time) researching and buying the stuff we'll need and probably follow a few extra accounts on social media now that we're committed.

We stage our gym gear in our bag and put it somewhere obvious.

And then we just go.

All the novelty triggers what neuroscientists call a "Positive Reward Prediction Error"—our brains flood dopamine into the system to signal "this is new, pay attention, learn." There's times  I've been in this state and it's like I was high on cocaine the world becomes my oyster. All I could see was the destination—how awesome jiu-jitsu was and how great it would be to fit it into my life permanently.

But our brain learns to predict the outcome, and as the novelty wears off, that dopamine spike flattens and the weight of everything except jiu-jitsu creeps in.

The commute.

Laundry.

Eating.

The knock on effects of adding all of this to our schedule permanently.

Then we get sick, or injured.

Or there's just a holiday.

And slowly, it all falls apart.

I could always feel it.

I can always feel it.

For jiu-jitsu at least, I've done this long enough that the adjustments nowadays are minor and obvious, so I wanted to share some of the bigger changes that have kept it permanent for a long time now.

My Calendar & Checklist

If it's not in my calendar, it doesn't exist. (Thanks Ramit)

I use Fantastical to sync multiple calendars across multiple services. For my checklist I used Things for years, but switched to Todoist when I finally convinced Jessica we needed a shared grocery list. I'm not getting paid by either—I've just used their services for years.

I live by a couple rules from David Allen's Getting Things Done (non-affiliate link):

• If I can do it in less than two minutes, I do it right away
• If it takes longer, I capture it in Todoist, or a text message or index card or scrap of paper and put it into Todoist later
• A task is a single step—anything with multiple steps is a project

Between the two, everything I need to do is captured. Recurring events repeat automatically in both. Every morning starts with a 15 minute journal entry and then a check of both. I'm constantly referring to them throughout the day.

Here's the weird part: once everything was written down, I could finally forget it all.

I used to be forgetful because I didn't have a system. I resisted. What if my calendar wasn't there? What if I lost my checklist? (This started in the 90s when a calendar and checklists were paper things).

But what actually happened was the opposite of what I expected. With the calendar and checklist running, I had a better grasp of everything I needed to do throughout the day. Some days I have fifty or sixty tasks. I can recall almost all of them without looking. But I don't have to. The system holds it for me.

And it never stresses me out. I'm not overwhelmed by the volume because I'm not holding it all in my head. It's just there on recall if I need it, like I suddenly have way more capacity than I used to.

Now here's the part that blew my mind: I had to help a friend with this recently—a grown-ass man with a mortgage who builds submarines and maintains professional certifications—and he didn't know calendars and checklists can repeat recurring events automatically. It was obvious to me. It isn't to a lot of people.

That's the sort of unsexy stuff I spend my motivation on.

Proximity

The commute might be the hardest part for most people. At least it was for me.

When we lived in Korea, I'd walk to the subway and then take a taxi to the gym, and then walk back to the subway after class. 35 minutes there. Upwards of an hour back. Eventually my friends found out how I was getting there.

Wide-eyed disbelief.

They explained there's a bus outside the gym that drops me off outside my place and walked me to the stop and made me get on.

But even after that, the weight of the lifestyle there would weigh on me.

Extra heavy in monsoon season. The constant humidity. Hot summers and brutal winters—even for a Canadian. My attendance would be spotty, on-again, off-again until I was ready to start the whole process over—I never figured this out before we moved back.

I settled into my next gym—either a fifteen minute walk or drive away. Then we moved a little further away and it would take me 20 minutes to drive to the same place.

Totally manageable.

But then we dumbassed into something much better.

Our landlord sold the duplex we were living in. We needed a new place that allowed pets during one of Victoria's proper housing shortages.

We were panicking.

Jessica mentioned this to a friend of hers who had a condo with a tenant moving out. We looked at it and although it was smaller than we were used to it was literally behind the gym.

A two minute walk.

A few years later the gym moved, and the commute was ugly.

An annoying left turn near a busy intersection, then through the busy intersection and across a bridge and then nothing but congestion the whole way there.

I endured it. I loved my gym.

Then our friend sold the condo.

Homeless again.

But we didn't have the dogs any longer and there was much more flexibility in what was available to us.

Jessica suggested we try the same thing again—live within walking distance to the gym. It was closer to her workplace and the parking would be easier for me.

Now we're five minutes from class.

No traffic. It's almost impossible to run late. No motivation, whatever. Proximity gets me there.

What's For Dinner?

This is the worst question.

Be with someone for as long as Jessica and I have (>23 years) and it's probably one of the questions that comes up the most. It's a problem deciding what to eat if we go out. But cooking? That's also shopping, prep, pickup and cleanup.

It's time consuming and expensive.

So we did the trendy thing and tried the meal kit delivery services, which cut down on a lot of the grocery shopping.

But now we were cooking unfamiliar meals with unfamiliar ingredients that we never really enjoyed, and we were still spending sixty to ninety minutes a night making dinner for ourselves.

And I didn't really enjoy any of the meals we were making. Some were OK, but the ingredients all seemed like repackaged stuff from Sysco or items I wouldn't select myself at the grocery store.

And then we went plant-based and everything "vegetarian" we tried out could have been better described as "cheese-based".

Jessica looked at the prices we were paying and did some homework and found FreeBeets—a local meal prep service using local ingredients. Done-for-you meals that are delivered on Sunday for the week ahead that are refrigerated and microwaved when it's time to eat.

We've done collabs with them because I genuinely love the service. I'll pitch them to anyone who will listen, and if you're in Victoria, give Igor a shout if you're as frustrated as I was with "what's for dinner?"

We went from sixty to ninety minutes a night to three minutes each to heat each meal, then ten minutes of eating, then sixty seconds of cleanup.

And we love the food.

I did the math and it saves us upwards of 78 hours a year—more than three days of kitchen time.

Here's what it means for jiu-jitsu—I can help out at the kids class, come home, microwave dinner and still make the late night session. Before FreeBeets this would have been impossible.

The Pattern

All of these changes came from one insight: use the motivation buzz to systematically remove friction. Then let it compound.

When I'm in the state of motivation, everything seems possible. That little euphoria hits and I think what I'm trying to do will be easy.

I used to try and ration that feeling. Stretch it out. Make it last.

It was the wrong move.

The correct move is to recognize it's a temporary thing and use it to hunt for friction.

When motivation is high, I look at the Chain of Ability:

• Time - Where are the savings? What can I automate or eliminate?
• Money - Can I afford this? Do I need to find ways to save money or spend more here?
• Physical Effort - How can I make this easier?
• Mental Effort - What decisions can I remove?
• Routine - how does this fit into what I do? Where does it create friction?

Attending class became easier.

Now it feels automatic. 

Next week: the Minimum Effective Dose

In Victoria, British Columbia?

Lolakana Martial Arts has 20+ classes a week for both adults and kids in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, No-Gi Jiu-Jitsu and Kickboxing.

Free parking.

Indigenous-owned.

Come check us out.

Let's play jiu-jitsu.

We love to practice the sport, but when we go around telling outsiders we're practitioners—it makes jiu-jitsu sound like some sort of quackery alternative medicine.

And saying we 'train jiu-jitsu' sounds like we're begging to be asked 'what for?'

And we have to stop telling people we 'do' jiu-jitsu—it's not a code word for hard drugs.

The Blank Stare

I was a do-er:

Back in the early 2000s, when someone asked about my weekend and I mentioned jiu-jitsu, I'd get blank stares. This was before MMA went mainstream—outsiders who knew anything called it "ultimate fighting." I'd explain (poorly) that jiu-jitsu was like wrestling but you could attack necks and joints to make opponents give up.

That didn't help.

I'm a salesperson. I started treating this like a marketing problem—watching how other people who had been around longer than me talked about the sport.

Glazed eyes. Polite-but-curt nods. Eye rolls and snickering once people walked away. Symptoms of confusion, boredom, contempt.

We were really getting this wrong.

Even after The Ultimate Fighter launched in 2005 and MMA went mainstream, we were still confusing people with our phrasing. Worse—we came across as cheesy, trying too hard to sound legitimate.

I couldn't let it go.

Most of us are hobbyists who want to share something we love without sounding like we're training for an MMA fight.

The words we use shape how we think. Without language for fundamentals—guard, passing, sweeps, submissions—we couldn't even practice the sport. Someone had to name those things first.

But we were still stuck stepping onto a linguistic obstacle course just trying to share our enthusiasm.

The answer was right there in how the Japanese talked about it.

The Problem With 柔術

It's a noun.

That's really the problem.

Sports that are verbs become agent nouns in English with an -er suffix—a wrestler, a racer, a runner. There are a few nouns that do this too, like cricketer and footballer, but no one goes around calling themselves a jiu-jitsu-er.

It's a romanized loan word from Japanese, and they actually have their own version of the same problem. Casual conversation gets phrasing like shugyosha (修行者, trainee) or BJJの人, (literally BJJ-person.)

Maybe you're like me and watch Olympic judo and the IJF highlights and think you know a solution—the -ka (家) suffix, literally 'person of'. And Neil Adams, the Voice of Judo describes athletes and competitors as judoka all the time.

But English speakers took that without asking. And we didn't bother with the notes. Its usage is nuanced—expertise, a life built around an art. Career professional, not a hobbyist. Japanese MMA promotions started using it occasionally when describing skillsets, but most of the time it's reserved for headlines and documentation more than speech.

But we don't want to be jiu-jitsu-ka (柔術家) anyways.

Trust me. It'll get romanized and mispronounced (especially the third syllable) and the English-speaking world will become the laughing stock of the jiu-jitsu community.

The Solution

The Japanese have the answer—and the English translation gives us ours:

When broadcasters need a neutral term that works for hobbyists and professionals? They use senshu (選手)—a competitor, an athlete, or...

A player.

Senshu and player aren't just neutral—they're useful. There's no judgement about mastery, and no pretense about "artistry" (yes, I'm making air quotes). And they answer the two questions every outsider asks:

• What do you do? → I play jiu-jitsu
• What are you? → I'm a jiu-jitsu player

The Payoff

Go ahead and tell someone you're a jiu-jitsu player. Watch what happens.

"You say play!", blurted out a colleague at a meeting most recently.

"You play jiu-jitsu?", asked a new boss a couple of years ago.

Both wanted the same clarification: why play?

Curiosity. Not confusion, not boredom, not contempt—curiosity.

But the real proof came years earlier, starting with my wife Jessica noticing this sticker I was working on back in 2017:

This was after years of me and our friends talking about jiu-jitsu at brunch—getting punched in the face by spazzy white belts, catching random elbows and knees to the groin, smashing and crushing and destroying souls. All hyperbolic war language that makes outsiders think we're psychotic.

It killed a lot of the interest. But 'play' kept a door open—even through years of the same brunch war stories.

Then 2020 happened.

COVID shut down her spin and dance classes. She went stir crazy. When the gym opened first, we finally got her on the mats.

She didn't spaz. Didn't poke me in the eyes. Didn't injure herself.

She's a retired competitive rhythmic gymnast and dancer—she takes instruction well. Asks questions. Sees the connections between positions, techniques and movement.

She glimpsed the intellectual part of the sport immediately.

She experienced what being a jiu-jitsu player means. Not the war stories.

Now she's a casual player who shows up when she feels like it and has fun on the mats.

And she's brought others: a coworker first, then her sister.

Play opens doors. Then it opens more doors.

Verbal Jiu-Jitsu

So try it.

It sounds weird at first. But then it doesn't.

It's like verbal jiu-jitsu—a technique you practice until it becomes automatic. It doesn't need to be drilled hundreds of times like a butterfly sweep, but you do need to remember to use it the first few times someone asks.

Say it aloud:

I'm a jiu-jitsu player.

I play jiu-jitsu.

Watch what happens.

Next week: Motivation Fades. Systems Don't.

In Victoria, British Columbia?

Lolakana Martial Arts has 20+ classes a week for both adults and kids in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, No-Gi Jiu-Jitsu and Kickboxing.

Free parking.

Indigenous-owned.

Come check us out.

The Hobbyist Mindset Shift

Here's what happens when you approach jiu-jitsu as a hobby instead of a calling:

First, your friends get on board. Not "you should come train with me", but "you should try out this class with me".

Way less intimidating.

Second, you build sustainable consistency into your life. Not "I need to train 6 days a week to get good", but "I can make it three times a week and that's enough."

Even once a week works. Spreading four sessions across a month beats cramming them into four days.

Third, you don't burn out.

Because you're not trying to be a champion. You're trying to keep showing up.

This isn't a profession. You're not getting paid to sacrifice your body.

And it's not a vocation. It's a sport, not a calling.

It's a hobby. Which means it gets to stay fun.

People that disappear might not be bad fits—they just didn't have permission to be hobbyists. They thought they needed to be all-in or nothing.

So they picked nothing.

The Problem

It’s the algorithm’s fault.

Experts explaining complicated situations over and over again. Techniques. Training routines. Competition breakdowns. Championship prep.

It’s all about what happens ON the mats.

But here’s what I’ve never found: Consistent content about what happens OFF the mats.

Unlike guitar or cooking or reading a book, we can’t just watch something on our phones while on the sofa at night in our pyjamas and go do it. Jiu-jitsu doesn’t work like that.

(The people with mats and someone to practice a technique on in the middle of the night? Minority outliers. And just like every other outlier, a little weird.)

How do you manage your life outside the gym so you can actually show up consistently?

You have to hollow out time in your schedule to do this week after week. That’s what matters most.

It’s one thing to add a few morning classes to your schedule—you’ll just get up early. But that means going to bed earlier, which upsets your evening routine.

What are you sacrificing? What’s the one or two things you need to get right to make this happen over and over? When will you eat? Do the laundry? What about travel time? Will you be leaving class during rush hour?

These are real constraints. The hobby has to fit around them, not the other way around. And the ingenuity that takes? Nobody shares it.

I’ve watched this pattern since 1999—I’ve lived it more than once. People show up once or twice, then wash out. A few streak for months, then disappear.

You show up to class expecting to see that friend from last time—whose name you can’t quite remember—and they’re just… gone.

People wash out. Some are bad fits. But a lot of them? They just didn’t have permission to be hobbyists.

My Credibility

I can’t give back with technique videos—I’m a hobbyist purple belt, not an instructor.

A few years ago I started making playlists for class.

Here’s the thing about the past 26 years: a lot of it was spent goofing around, not being a diligent student. Making every mistake that makes people quit—injuries, laziness, the shiny new thing… life.

I’ve made them all.

90-day streaks followed by 60-day gaps because of burnout and illness.

Waking up to find all my motivation is gone and it didn’t leave notes.

Getting swamped with work and overwhelmed by responsibility—parking jiu-jitsu while I put out fires. Realizing it’s been a month since I’ve been to class. My routine, the habit that makes it automatic, has seized up. I’m going to have to rebuild that inertia from scratch.

The difference?

I kept coming back.

My actual expertise? Making 6:30am class three days a week. Full-time pest control with lots of overtime. Since the summer, gym ownership. 23 years with my wife Jessica.

When Jessica and I travel—Seoul, Mexico City, Tokyo, Los Angeles (we like big cities)—I’m a photographer again. When we’re back, I’m on the mats.

I’m consistent with jiu-jitsu because it fits into my life, not because my life fits around it.

What This Newsletter Is

Things nobody writes about. The off-the-mats stuff that actually matters.

I’m a jiu-jitsu hobbyist. Maybe you are too.

This newsletter is for us.

Next week: Let’s play jiu-jitsu.

In Victoria, British Columbia?

Lolakana Martial Arts has 20+ classes a week for both adults and kids in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, No-Gi Jiu-Jitsu and Kickboxing.

Free parking.

Indigenous-owned.

Come check us out.