Wanted! White Belt Stories

Shout out to BJJPROBLEMS  for having some of the
best memes in the game. 

A couple weeks back I was scrolling through my Facebook news-feed and saw a particular JiuJitsu meme. Ya'll know I love my memes (I might just have a Google Drive folder filled with them 😳) I chuckled at this one and shared it, but it got me thinking. I have had some recent conversations with people that are within some of their first weeks of training, and some of the things that they said really surprised me.

One new student told me that they didn't want to roll with colored belts because they felt like they were wasting their training time. This really shocked me! I thought about that comment a lot, it made me think back to being a white belt and sometimes feeling the same way. It made me wonder what else over the years I had forgotten about being a beginner.

I think JiuJitsu can be an intimidating thing to get into, taking that first class is often the biggest obstacle to getting started. It was a bit easier for me to get into because I had already made the jump into martial arts and was training Kyuki-Do. My very first class was when Jeff Curran came in and taught a seminar at my academy. It was at a place that I was already comfortable with, and I took the class with people that I had already established a relationship with. I know that there are people that drive past an academy every day and think "I've always wanted to try that out." Or they think the same thing when they see their friends posting training pictures on social media.

I think it's easy to listen to black belts give advice and think "Well yeah of course, you are so good at this stuff." It's hard to picture your instructor clumsily fumbling through their first attempt at an armbar or choke because they are so incredibly proficient at it. So the thought was, who better to talk to about opening that academy door for the first time, than the white belts that just recently did it.
My idea is to share stories from white belts of all different backgrounds so someone can read it and say "Oh! that person is pretty similar to me! If they did it, I think I can too."

So I need your help! If you are a white belt in your 0-12 months of training, I would love a chance to capture your story. I'd love to get your answers to things like:

-How old are you and how long have you been training?

-What is your background? What kind of work do you do, what other hobbies/interests/passions to you have outside of JiuJitsu?

-What got you to try your first JiuJitsu class?

-What has been the hardest part about training so far? What have you found to overcome that challenge?

-What do you enjoy the most about training? What have you enjoyed the most about the particular place/instructor/team where you train at. (I love giving shout outs to people doing great things!)

-Do you have any particular goals in regards to training? Such as getting in shape/competition/achieving a black belt/self defense.

-And anything else that you want to add about yourself that you would want to share. I love when an individual's personality can be shared in their interview. I think Preston and Braulio did just that and I had just a complete blast doing it with them.

If that sounds like something you'd be interested in doing, please shoot me a message! I eventually want to start doing these as a short video series, but for now they will be in a text format on here, so please be prepared to include some photos to add to the interview.

Happy rolling!

About the Author:

Steven McMahon earned his Kyuki-Do Black Belt in 2011 from Grand Master Kim at Kim's Black Belt Academy and his  BJJ Purple Belt in January 2017 under Professor Charles Nunley. He currently trains out of Wakizashi BJJ  in Oak Harbor under Professor Eli Trevino. He is an active competitor at Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and Army Combative tournaments.