I am a current blue belt and I train three times a week, twice gi and once no gi. It doesn't have to be expensive. If you go to an expensive, globally branded school (Like Gracie Barra), you will get ripped off and will have to drink from the kool aid to get by (buying their vastly overpriced Gi and merchandise, getting pressurised into attending expensive seminars etc). A smaller, independent club will be cheaper, have a more underground feel about it (like a secret fight club!!), and most likely will have very nice people...
I love BJJ, the only thing I dont like about it, is that it destroys any muscle mass I build in the gym as it burns so many damn calories, it eats your body.
LETS ROLL THOUGH
Tried to send you a PM, but I'm not sure it went through. Any suggestions on balancing weights and BJJ? I have been obsessively googling how to do both without burning out and losing my gains from many years in the weight room.
Comes down to having more calories in than out, which is very hard to do if you are rolling and lifting in a combined week, every week. Eating enough of the right food to put on more size has always been the harder bit for me than training, you have to consume so many calories.
I had good luck by doing the following:
- Lift pretty low volume but heavy. Strip your weight routine down to the bare essentials. Squat, bench, deadlift, overhead press, weighted pullups, power cleans Do a few warmup sets, then move into your working weights. Four sets of five reps seemed to be the sweet spot for me. No lifting session should last more than an hour, and I'd do only three sessions a week.
- Protein powder immediately after every time you roll in BJJ. It makes a noticeable difference in the speed you recover, and helps you keep the muscle you've built on your frame. Try to eat some real food as soon as you can as well.
- Roll soft. Really focus on relaxing and not using strength when you don't have to while rolling. Don't pussy foot around, you still have to be fast . . . but always try to keep relaxed and flow rather than force things. This makes you a much better BJJ guy, and it also saves you energy. (Note - you do still want to have several sessions a week where you go against a partner who is better/bigger than you as hard as you physically can.)
- Visualize stuff at home. You're not going to get into as many classes as you want to each week, but if you mentally think your way through a sequence of moves, you can lock them into your mind when you're not in class so you spend less time thinking about where to put what arm and leg, and more time applying technique. Bonus - visualization doesn't burn energy the way that even gentle practicing with a partner does.
- Eat a ton. Carbs before workout sessions, lots of fats and protein afterwards. Don't just assume you know what you're eating. Actually track everything for a couple weeks. I thought I was eating a lot more than I really was. I ate plenty of fruit every day - avocados, bananas, mangos, pineapples, dates, coconuts . . . but pretty much swore off raw veggies as they made me too full for the caloric content. I needed 4 - 6000 calories a day to gain, and that's hard to hit, but tried to limit garbage food to once or twice a week.
- Eat more on days you work harder. I'd do an hour and a half BJJ session on Mon-Fri-Sat, a double session on Wed, and would lift for about an hour on Tues-Thurs-Sat. Wednesday and Saturday were usually gorging on crap food nights.
- Be lazy as fuck when you can. When you're not lifting or doing BJJ, be resting. FORCE yourself to take one full day off a week, no matter how much you don't think you need it.
- Sleep. I'd try to get 9 hours of sleep a night.
I came to BJJ after doing Muay Thai for a while at a very lean 6' and 170 lbs. After four years I was regularly competing under 195 and hadn't gained any fat.