Jiu Jitsu & Me - Part 1

My first experience with martial arts was a short-lived one. As a young child, I spent a few years doing Taekwondo before eventually trading it for football. That became my absolute obsession until I was about 16 years old. Eventually, in 2010, while I was still living in Exeter, a friend and I decided that we’d try this thing called "MMA" because it sounded pretty cool. It turns out there was a lot of being punched in the face involved in MMA.

However, I did learn that part of MMA was grappling and that you needed to know BJJ to be able to do it. So, we went to that club’s BJJ classes and I found that I much preferred rolling around on the floor to the face-punching. That was that: I went all-in on Jiu Jitsu from then on. At this point in time, there weren’t many black belts easily accessible outside of big cities like London, Birmingham, and Manchester, so the coach was a Blue Belt and pretty much all my training partners were white belts.

In 2012, I went to University in Portsmouth and initially struggled to find a BJJ gym, so I joined the University’s MMA club (back to the face-punching). Although it was a University club, it ran out of a place called Gym 01, which was a place that offered classes in MMA, Kickboxing, Boxing and, as I later learned, BJJ as well. I eventually mustered up the courage to go to their BJJ classes and met my first proper BJJ instructor, Colin Howells, who was a Brown Belt under Vitor ‘Shaolin’ Ribeiro. This was the first time I’d seen anyone more senior than a Blue Belt in person! Between 2012 and 2016, I trained at Gym 01 and, when I travelled back to Exeter outside of term-time, I found Exeter BJJ, which was run by a Black Belt (😱😱) called James Hodges.

In 2015, as part of my degree, I did a year studying abroad. The first part of this was six months at the University of Toulouse in France and the second six months was at the University of Malaga in Spain. As any 20-year-old would be, I was pretty excited to go and live abroad and experience student life, which consisted of a fair bit of partying, but I also had to find new places to train in both cities. As a broke student, I couldn’t afford to do BJJ in Toulouse as it cost 100€ per month. That was a real shame, as I had seen that there was a really good club in Toulouse called Association Aranha which was linked to my club in Portsmouth, as they are part of the "Nova Uniao" affiliation linked to Vitor ‘Shaolin’ Ribeiro.

Sadly, this was out of my budget, so instead I trained twice a week at the University’s free Judo club. I had never done any Judo before, but I knew that Judo was massive in France and I understood how much it would help my BJJ if I got better at it. Although I didn’t plan on it, training at that club for six months was one of my favourite parts of the experience, as they were so welcoming and really gave me a sense of belonging which is sorely needed when you’re feeling a bit homesick living abroad.

In Malaga, fortunately, BJJ was far cheaper than in Toulouse, so I managed to find a club (by complete chance, also part of the same global association as my club in Portsmouth) where I could train. Improving my BJJ and learning the some Spanish BJJ vocabulary later on turned out to be quite useful… more on this in part 2!