7 Things No One Tells You About Doing Jiu-Jitsu "Professionally"

It ain't all gold medals and bottomless açaí.

Full-time Jiu-Jitsu is so crazy I shaved off all the hair that I have been dying for years. Jeez.

When I started getting really into Jiu-Jitsu at around 18 years old, I quickly realized that martial arts were something that I wanted to make a career out of.

I wanted a job where I was “in a gi all day”.

It’s ironic that most of my training nowadays is without the gi.

The biggest problem with this dream was that there wasn’t exactly a career blueprint for becoming “a professional Jiu-Jitsu athlete”. At the time, it seemed like the 2 options were to win a black belt world title as soon as possible or to open an academy.

Because of this lack of blueprint, I spent most of my time in college studying different ways to make money on the internet, learning new Jiu-Jitsu techniques, and catching up on sleep from being tired from training. 5 years later, Jiu-Jitsu is “my job”.

However, the reality of doing Jiu-Jitsu all day isn’t really how it looks on the internet. It’s everything and nothing how I pictured it would be, and it’s freaking wild.

Here 7 things that I wasn’t expecting to happen when I began this pursuit.