Nobody gets mentally tougher by hearing that they should be mentally tougher. You get tougher by spending time in situations you would rather not be in, and finding out you can still think. That is most of what jiu-jitsu is. Someone has your arm pinned across your chest and 200 pounds of their weight on…
Most people who want to try jiu-jitsu sit in their car for a while first. They watch a class through the window, decide everyone in there already knows what they’re doing, and drive home telling themselves they’ll come back once they get in better shape. I’ve had students admit they did this three or four…
Most adults who walk into our gym and mention confidence are not looking for a pep talk. They already know how to talk themselves up. What they want is the feeling that the thing they believe about themselves would survive contact with reality. That is what jiu-jitsu gives you, and it does it in a…
People ask what kind of shape jiu-jitsu gets you in, and the honest answer is: a weird kind. You won’t necessarily look like someone who lifts five days a week. But you’ll be able to hold onto a resisting adult with your hands for six minutes, brace your midsection while someone tries to fold you,…
If you stay at the gym from the last kids class into the first adult class, you’ll notice something funny. A nine-year-old finishes a round, sits up, and immediately starts explaining to his partner exactly where he went wrong. An hour later a 43-year-old contractor does the same thing, in the same tone, with the…
People walk into the academy and tell us they want something practical. It’s probably the most common thing we hear, and it’s a reasonable ask. Asheville is full of people whose jobs and hobbies put them in physical situations: bartenders and servers closing down the South Slope at two in the morning, nurses and techs…
Most of these conversations start the same way. A parent stands at the edge of the mat on Merrimon Ave, watching class, and eventually says some version of: he’s a great kid, but the second something gets hard he shuts down. Or: she’s done soccer, gymnastics, and a season of cross country, and she quit…
Ask anyone who has been training in Western North Carolina for more than a few years and they’ll tell you the same thing: the rooms are fuller than they used to be. Beginner classes that used to run six or eight people are running twenty. Open mats pull in visitors from Weaverville, Hendersonville, Black Mountain,…
There’s a kind of tired that cardio doesn’t touch. You run four miles on the greenway, get home, shower, sit down, and your brain picks up exactly where it left off. The email you should have worded differently. The thing your kid’s teacher said. The invoice that still hasn’t cleared. Your legs are cooked and…
Asheville has no shortage of ways to get sweaty. There are trail networks twenty minutes from downtown, run clubs that meet at breweries, climbing gyms, yoga studios on nearly every corner of the South Slope, and enough cyclists grinding up the Parkway to make the rest of us feel lazy. Most people who move here…
