Goodbye, BJJ. Hello again, Judo.

Thursday I went for a private BJJ lesson with a blue belt I know.  I've been of two minds regarding BJJ for a while now, and I went partly to help settle my thoughts about it. More on that in a bit.

After a warmup, we worked on a shrimping variation that uses the opposite leg you'd normally use to shrimp. It allows you to keep your "top" leg up as a guard against your opponent. Difficult at first, but kind of neat.

We worked on a couple things from having someone in your closed guard; first, we played with sort of a scissor sweep variation, that allowed a really easy arm bar if it failed (or even if it didn't). It depended on sort of a "cheat" though (grabbing the inside of the pants leg), at least by competition rules. Next we worked on survival while under side control, easily one of the most miserable (and frequent) positions I often find myself in. It just involved the basics of trying to build a frame and making top guy as uncomfortable as you are.

I've really been struggling with whether or not I want to pursue BJJ again. On one hand (the "pros" column), it's a magnificent art. Endlessly interesting. And effective within certain constraints. On the other hand, ("cons") it's expensive, and it's a big time investment on weeknights, which are already packed for me. While it's great exercise, I've already been doing much better with exercise lately on my own, and BJJ always makes me feel more like I've been through a meat grinder than that I've had a good workout. One of the biggest "cons" is that all of the BJJ around here is very sport-focused. I'm way more interested in practical self-defense, so I don't care to spend time on X-Guards, using my gi to wrap my opponent's hand, etc.

For these and other reasons, I've decided not to pursue BJJ any more, but to start learning Judo again. It's been a while, so I'm super rusty, and will probably just start from the beginning again. Pat's Judo is more traditional, in that it's more self-defense oriented, not geared for competition. I won't win any BJJ tournaments with it (they're two different things, despite the similarities), but that doesn't align with my goals anyway.