Finding A Fun Hobby
Have you been looking for a fun hobby to add enjoyment to your life? If you have thought about starting BJJ for fun, we highly encourage you to try it out. When it comes to living a happy, fulfilled, and successful life, we cannot understate the importance of participation in activities we enjoy. For many of us, BJJ provides a fun hobby that is quite different from your typical recreational activities. In fact, the vast majority of BJJ artists train out of sheer enjoyment for the activity itself. For most regulars at any Brazilian Jiu Jitsu gym, BJJ is primarily a fun hobby they engage in recreationally. Even among the competitive athletes in BJJ, the art is first and foremost enjoyable in itself.
BJJ is a great option if you are looking for a fun hobby for several reasons. Furthermore, BJJ has many additional benefits, even for the recreational trainee, when compared to other common hobbies. Of course, the bottom line for anything we do for fun is that we must enjoy it. For those of us bitten by the so-called ‘BJJ bug,’ training jiujitsu takes the cake.
Why is BJJ so Fun?
There are nearly endless recreational activities you can choose from if you are looking for a fun hobby. From traditional arts to hiking to recreational badminton, the list goes on and on. When it comes to physical, athletic hobbies, BJJ offers several things that other recreational sports do not. The following are just a few of the top reasons you may find BJJ a more enjoyable, beneficial activity.
BJJ Offers a Friendly Opportunity for 1-on-1 Competition as a Fun Hobby
Whether you do BJJ as a competitor or just for a fun hobby, one thing is certain. BJJ is a competitive activity. Regardless of your deeper goals in the sport, every time you roll, you are pitting your wits, skill, and ego against another person in a similar frame of mind. Many physical hobbies shun any sense of competition. Sure, things like yoga, step aerobics, and hiking offer personal physical and emotional growth. However, in most cases, a recreational hiker, aerobics enthusiast, or yoga practitioner never faces any pretense of competition during the course of the activity itself.
With BJJ, the competitive aspect is baked-in to the very nature of the practice. Even if you are casually ‘flow rolling’ with a longtime training partner, the end goal is competitive in nature. You are ultimately trying to submit the other person through leverage, technique, and physical dominance. If the specific roll is not that competitive, you are still trying to improve your ability to submit an opponent to your will. Does this mean training BJJ is always stressful if you are not the ‘competitive type?’ Not necessarily. Once you develop your ability to manage your ego, the competitive aspect greatly increases the intrinsic reward in the activity. In fact, we argue that this competitive aspect makes BJJ more fun than non-competitive physical activities. Don’t get us wrong. Self-esteem and not turning everything into a life-or-death competition is important for mental health. However, at the end of the day, your deeper reward system responds to the structure of competition. A healthy sense of competition makes BJJ more fun.
BJJ Represents a Deeper Physical Reality
When push comes to shove, combat sports are a different beast from traditional sports activities. Traditional sports are, at the end of the day, a game. Of course, combat sports have rules that separate them from true life-or-death violence. Despite that, a combat sport is more representative of the outcome of a real fight than traditional sporting activities. As humans, we inherently understand the implication of a combat sports outcome. If I lose to you in badminton or soccer, that does not really say much about who would win in a real fight.
On the other hand, if I choke you out in BJJ, the implication is that you are unconscious (or worse). If it were a real-life encounter, you would now be at my mercy. Obviously, the stakes are not that high, even in BJJ competition. But we still have a deeper emotional understanding of what it means to lose in a combat sport. Many of us do not find traditional sports as engaging for the simple fact that the rules are entirely contrived. On the other hand, the real-world implication of BJJ is more interesting and ultimately makes for a more fun hobby.
BJJ Offers the Opportunity to Truly Test Your Ego
BJJ is a fun hobby in large part because it offers the opportunity to truly test your ego on a deeper level. This may seem off-putting at first. However, in the long run, this opportunity makes BJJ much more fun than most other run-of-the-mill physical hobbies. This does depend in large part on your disposition towards competition and conflict. However, in BJJ you face yourself as much as your training partner or opponent.
As we mentioned in our previous points, you cannot hide from the reality that BJJ represents. It is virtually impossible to train BJJ and convince yourself that you are as good as anyone else when you’re a newbie. Based on the above, it may sound like BJJ would be less fun as a hobby than other activities. This may be partially true initially. BJJ is frustrating. However, that makes the intrinsic reward of improvement at BJJ more satisfying and fulfilling than other activities that seem easier at first. In the long run, the depth of BJJ makes it a much more fun hobby than other recreational endeavors. If you are not willing to face your own limitations and fears, you will perpetually limit personal growth. This fact brings us to the second reason we see BJJ as a fun hobby with more benefits than other common activities.
BJJ Offers Endless Room for Improvement
You probably have the notion that a black belt is a ‘master’ at BJJ. This is, in many ways, a true enough statement. However, ask any BJJ black belt, especially those at a high level, and they will tell you they are constantly working to improve their game. Brazilian Jiu Jitsu has no endpoint. There are so many positions, details, intricacies, and opponents. The moment you feel you have mastered one thing, someone will come along and blast a hole straight through it. Even if you excel in a certain position, there are undoubtedly other areas of the game you can improve.
The truth about BJJ is that you can always improve. Even as you age out of your strongest, fastest, and most athletic stage of life, there’s room to get better. You will always be able to improve your angles, pressure, and details that make or break the positions in BJJ. For example, Grandmaster Helio Gracie trained BJJ into his 80s. While others his age had likely long given up on physical improvement, Helio continued to roll with world champions. Could he beat them? Well, he probably was not submitting a world champion at 80. However, he could always work on survival, defense, and of course, improving his student’s knowledge. As five-time Black Belt World Champion Saulo Ribeiro describes in his seminal work Jiu Jitsu University, Grandmaster Helio would tease world champion black belts as an 80-year-old man. He would not say that he could beat them. But he would tell them “I don’t think you can beat me.” Most of them could not tap him out despite being decades younger and BJJ world champions themselves. The point of this anecdote? BJJ never gets old.
Is BJJ a Fun Hobby for Everyone?
We have laid out our main reasons we think BJJ is a great activity if you need a fun hobby. You may still be wondering ‘Is BJJ really fun for everyone?’ We are going to be honest… BJJ is not for everyone. To really enjoy BJJ requires grit, determination, and a willingness to push through discomfort for self-improvement. When you are drilling and rolling live, BJJ is not always a ‘relaxing’ experience. Depending on who you are rolling with and how hard you are going, it may be quite the opposite. For many, it takes a good investment of time and energy to reach the point where BJJ is ‘fun.’ But it’s worth it. Once you get to the point where you can reach a ‘flow state’ in BJJ, the intrinsic rewards are insane. Sometimes, you may see two long-time training partners roll with no timer long past the end of class. They have lost all sense of time and are entirely in the moment, completely engaged in the act of trying to choke each other out. Guess what? They are probably having a really good time.
The fact is anyone can get good enough at BJJ to make it a fun hobby. You do not have to be a master to reach the point of flow in BJJ. You just need to stick with it long enough to have a few moves from each position. Once you reach the point where you do not have to think your way through every position, BJJ gets really fun. The initial hump to get to mid-blue belt is probably the most frustrating time in BJJ. At more advanced ranks, the dynamic changes, and training gets more and more fun. If you reach a point of coaching in BJJ, the rewards can be even greater as you watch your students grow… but that is far down the line.
How Long Does It Take for BJJ to Be a Fun Hobby?
We have established that BJJ is a fun hobby for reasons not common to other activities. You’re also now aware that it may take some time to reap the ‘fun rewards’ of training BJJ. But how long does it take for it to get fun. There really is no exact answer to this question. For many people, and hopefully you, BJJ can be a fun hobby starting on day one. All the frustrations we discussed earlier still apply, but that does not mean you will not have fun or feel the satisfaction of BJJ training. BJJ should be fun from day one, frustrations aside. Once you really hit your stride after a few months of training, it gets even better. Establishing solid training partners is also vital to this process. The training partners and community will be a large part of what makes BJJ a fun hobby.
Since we are being 100% honest with you... You will reach a point in BJJ where you can tap out bigger, stronger guys and girls with ease. While BJJ is not *only* about tapping people out, there is no denying the satisfaction and, dare we say, fun of controlling and submitting a large resisting opponent. Yes, it is fun to tap people out. We cannot say specifically how long it will take before you reach the ‘new people don’t have a chance’ phase of your training, but it will happen if you stick with BJJ. The sooner you start training BJJ, the sooner you will reach this point.
Start BJJ to Find a Fun Hobby!
The only way to know for sure if you will enjoy BJJ is to start training and stick with it long enough to find out. While we cannot guarantee it will be your ultimate hobby, you may be surprised. BJJ is spreading fast and gaining popularity for a reason. Sure, it's an effective form of self-defense and necessary for MMA. But at the end of the day, most people who train BJJ do so for the pure joy of grappling itself. We encourage you to do a trial class of BJJ and stick with it for a little to see how you like it. You can always stop if it is not for you. However, if training BJJ is something you have been thinking about for a while, we highly recommend trying it as soon as possible. The sooner you start BJJ, the sooner you will reap the rewards of this fun hobby.