The Judo Journey
I started posting about my Judo journey because I wanted to inspire my clients to go out and try new things and be OK with failing. When I tell potential clients about my fitness journey, I tell them that I have tried body building- for a week before I hurt my back-, I have done vertical jump programs, I bought a belt and tried power lifting for a winter, and I kept trying different programs/methods of training for about a year until one stuck: Judo. If you throw a bunch of stuff at the wall, something will stick. My job is to help you find something that will stick.
For someone who knows what it is like to compete in a sport every day of your life and have that suddenly cut off, it is important for people like us to find something new to maintain a healthy mental and physical balance. Imagine the amount of people like us who played high school or college sports, then get out into the “real world” and get lost and lose that same energy. This population is part of the people that I speak to.
I intentionally look like an idiot in my first Judo post. “You will be a black belt in no time with these sweet moves,” my brother commented.
However, I thought about the people who saw that first post, acting like a fool. Those same people are the ones who saw me win my first competition, five months later. “Yo that’s sick,” my friends direct messaged me.
“Before you learn how to throw, you have to learn how to fall.” This is the caption from my first Judo post on Instagram on July 1, 2019.
I never had a huge weight transformation; I never lost 300 lbs, that is not my fitness story. I have been an athlete my whole life. My first day of Judo I was 198 lbs and could barely put my right front in front of the other because my mom cooked for me every night and all I did was dead lift, squat, and bench press all week. I was much stronger than I had ever been, but I sacrificed that for athleticism and coordination.
It took me a couple of classes to decide whether I wanted to stand in an orthodox or unorthodox stance because in grappling an orthodox stance is when the right foot is forward and the left foot is back. In boxing and even baseball, an orthodox or right stance is when the left foot is forward and the right foot is back. I am a lot stronger with my left foot forward because that is what I have been used to my entire life. I had to decide whether I wanted to fight with my right foot forward and balance out my chains or whether I wanted to stick with what I know and launch some people faster.
As any professional trainer would decide, I opted to launch people faster.
If you scroll back far enough in my Instagram posts, all you see is me doing ridiculously basic movements like forward rolls, backwards rolls, and hip escapes (also called shrimps). In the beginning, I sucked and my sensei probably couldn’t understand why I would post something looking so ridiculous, but the truth is that I always had a plan.
