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Teaching Milestone

  Recently I reached a milestone in jiujitsu that had only somewhat to do with belt rank: I helped instruct in a class for the first time!   Technically, this is something that you can do at blue belt,  provided that  you can get out of work early enough and come to help teach the children’s class. Well, I can’t get out of work early enough consistently enough to do that so that’s out.  So  the next level of teach is teaching the adult class. We normally have enough black belts and brown belts at our school to cover down on that during our regular classes. This leaves Sunday’s class that specifically teaches blue and white belts about the techniques you learn to become purple belt.  Because I haven’t provided enough caveats, technically I have been asked to help stand in as an instructor for this Sunday class. Twice, but I was given direction to not provide instruction per se, just guide the people there since I was the most senior person in the room. This time, with Steve’s (head inst
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Five Years at FTW - Lessons Learned

 I can’t remember the exact date, but somewhere around 5 years ago this week I walked into the doors of Fight to Win.  I wish I could say I did so because of Steve Hall’s lineage. Nope. It was the closest to my house 🤷🏾‍♂️. I saw a Facebook ad and reached out. Steve said I could come in that Monday and to please let him know if I wasn’t going to make it; don’t waste his time.  I mean, I showed up but I have to leave it to Steve to say if I’ve wasted his time 😂 When I walked through the door there were like 8 purple belts lined up against the wall. I left a school that was run by a purple belt…I felt I was wading into deep waters. Every single one of those purple belts were tough in their own way. I kept in my head what it was like to be a purple belt… Now I am one. Today, I helped teach a 370lb guy how to hip toss. Which means I lifted a 370lb guy and hip tossed him. There was a time I would not have even have the confidence to even try that.  Today, I looked around the room and saw
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Blue Ridge

 So in the end I guess the most important thing is the friends we made along the way. I'm getting ahead of myself. My friend Phil likes a lot of music. All types. I think it's safe to say that metalcore is his favorite. Well, metalcore is not my favorite. Matter of fact, I hadn't really listened to any metalcore until I started hanging out the big guy. I'm still ahead of myself. Phil and I met through jiujitsu. As it turns out, he is a big guy at 6'6" 275 or so and as you can guess, was the biggest guy to walk through the jiujitsu gym. At 6'3" 240 or so I was the biggest guy in the gym and with a little experience under my belt I was paired with Phil a lot.  As things normally go the person you spent time with a lot at the gym is the person you become friends with outside of the gym and I'm certainly no different here. Phil is twenty years younger than I am. Twenty. TWENTY. XX, if you're old school Italian. I can honestly say that while I have
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Getting Political

  In my  oldish  age I definitely have come to realize that not everyone in America is on the same page. I mean, variety is the spice of life right? Nothing wrong with that. What constantly amazes me and saddens me is that America isn’t on the same page as to what freedom means. If you think this is going to get political, you’re probably right but I can at least let you know where I come from when it comes to how I view politics. Ever since I was basically made to pay attention to politics, which has been about 15 years or so now…let me back up. When I was still in the Air Force and stationed in San Antonio I first started paying attention to politics. More pointedly, I would hear some of the guys in the office call things “liberal” when it was a policy point that was ongoing which they disagreed with or if you were a person to say something that wasn’t the way they wanted you to say it they would call you a “liberal”.  I even saw what that was then: if you don’t think like we think w
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Just R Experience

  I’m going to do the military thing where you start with bottom line up front. Here goes: I don’t care much for Joe Rogan. That statement isn’t really much in itself and I’m going to do everything I can to support it but it’s going to be indirect and may not even necessarily be about the man himself. It’s highly possible I do like the dude; if we were somehow to meet without cameras around we would have conversation and I would be blown away by what a complete human he is. Maybe. I try to be open m inded so that is a possibility. With that out of the way: One of the…things that bugs me about, I  dunno  if it’s even endemic to just MMA/ jiujitsu  culture or if it’s widespread to overall “manly” culture…ugh. Let me try this again. I am not the hugest fan of the “image” of being a man. No matter what, there aren’t really a ton of things around that are required for you to be a man anymore. One might say that’s the problem overall with society and I’m not really here to discuss that. What
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BJJ Culture

  It’s hard to believe that it’s been over 7 years total time since I started jiujitsu. I prefa ce total time because with many things that happen in life there are always interruptions, via injury or  idk , moving from one state to the other because your job dried up where you were.  Seven years being a part of something and you definitely get an idea of what the culture is of the thing you’re a part of. Make no mistake about it, jiujitsu has its own culture. That culture is intertwined with MMA culture (mixed martial arts). In no particular order here are a few charact eristics of jiujitsu culture: 1.  Everyone listens to Joe Rogan’s podcast.  Ev .  Er . Y. Bo. Dy. 2.  A whole lot lean to the right side of the aisle politically. A whole lot would describe themselves as being anarchist. 3.  A whole lot love guns. Talking about them, shooting them…talking about shooting them. 4.  Most don’t like watching any other sports but MMA or jiujitsu and oh boy, do they watch a TON of MMA or jiu
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75 hard

  I can tell I haven’t written in forever because somehow I got through the entire 75 hard challenge and didn’t write about it. Lord knows I talked about it enough though   🤣 In case you don’t know 75 hard is a challenge created by Andy  Frisella . The requirements, every day for 75 straight days you have to work out twice a day for at least 45 minutes (one of them outside), drink a gallon of water, stick to a diet, read 10 pages a day of a  non-fiction  book, and no alcohol. Why the hell did I do this? Well, after going through the first half of 2021 in pursuit of a purple belt that I ultimately did get  I kind of  felt like I was just floating. I had a knee injury that I was sure was going to require surgery and so I slowed down a bit in jiujitsu. That does not mean I stopped going, quite the opposite. I kept going but I had to lessen the intensity. Which really bothered me at first, if I am being completely honest but a little feedback from Steve (lead instructor at my school) show
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