It might be due to the Coronavirus crisis, some sort of an injury or a LOT of obligations at work, because of some other troubles you might’ve been experiencing or similar… But the fact of the matter is that you haven’t been on the mats for quite some time! And now you’re coming back.
That’s great! But a word of caution is necessary; you need to be very careful about coming back to BJJ after a long layoff. Here’s why.
NO, YOU CAN’T MAKE UP FOR LOST TIME
We know what you’re thinking. „Well, if I could just train more, then I can make up for all of that lost progress in a much shorter time span!“ And so you might be tempted to train every day of the week, maybe even twice per day.
However, we’re sad to inform you that it doesn’t work like this. You can’t just pile in all of the training sessions from the two months you’ve been away into the next two weeks and expect the same results; your body needs time to make all of that progress possible.
It needs quality training sessions and adequate recovery in-between them, so as to achieve what you want it to achieve. And by doing too much in too short of a time period, there’s a high chance that it won’t be just your improvement that’s left unscraped… But that you’ll scrape yourself as well – that injuries will occur.
Simply enough, you won’t progress as much as you’d like; and you can only make matters worse by trying to make up for the time you’ve lost. What you should do instead is come back to training with ease and focus at the same time.
COMING BACK TO BJJ IN A SMART WAY
As you’re coming back to BJJ, as we’ve discussed above, the biggest risk you’re going to be getting yourself into is doing too much, too soon; and getting injured along the way. Therefore, you need to develop an approach that will keep you out of the „pop-crack-snap“ zone. But you also need an approach which will serve to fulfill your immense desire to be back on the mats and improve.
For that reason, you can set a goal for yourself to start out with 3 training sessions and to focus on their quality.
What you’ll notice is that even these three sessions will leave you gasping for air more often than not; as well as that your techniques and movement are in some instances way rustier than you thought they’d be. So, instead of going to an excess and breaking your body down beyond its capability to recover, rest your aims on executing these three training opportunities to the best of your ability.
Also, use this time to begin training in a much more purpose-driven fashion than you did before. This is a great chance to get rid of those old habits where you’re not paying attention to the coach’s technique demonstration… And of just going through the motions when drilling techniques.
Make it a non-negotiable for yourself that you’re going to give your absolute best at each and every training session from now on; that you’ll continuously strive for improvement in every instance that’s in front of you.
But make it important to rest during the other days as well. You need to grow! And growth doesn’t happen when you’re training; but rather when your muscles and nervous system have an opportunity to rebuild themselves.
Take it easy! And you’ll find it that, after a short while, you’ll be ready to include more training sessions.
Sloth Jiu-Jitsu: you can be slow and unathletic and still kick butt in Jiu-Jitsu.