Month: June 2020

Tips for buying a womens BJJ gi as a small player

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If your default is extra small, this post is for you.

Before we begin, let me be clear: This is not a buyer’s guide. If you’ve never bought a gi before or buying one after a long time, I highly recommend doing a Google search and reading the top handful of results that show up before continuing with this post.  I will not be going over general best practices – this post is meant to be an addendum to those guides.

Finished? Great.

Some background: As of this writing, it’s been 10 years since my first BJJ class and since then, I’ve gone through dozens of gis.  Not hundreds, as I’m not swimming in money and also because I’ve learned a couple things so I’m not swimming in my gis.

This post is a collection of those learnings, a handful of practical tips that have saved me both money and frustration – because let’s face it, BJJ is hard enough without your gi working against you.

This post will consist of two parts: Getting a gi that fits, and extra money saving tips.

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Pandemic perspectives

Every one of us has been affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, especially with regards to training BJJ. Curious as to how others were dealing, I reached out to several women in the BJJ community to find out how they’ve been facing this unprecedented time. The short answer: Head on. The long answer: It’s complicated, it varies, and it’s likely to change.  

An accompaniment to the article Lessons in Lockdown for Girls in Gis, the below is a Covid-19 style asynchronous, social-distanced round-table crafted from the reflections of three women navigating this uncertain moment in our world.  

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Training without a gym: Pre-mortem

Previously, we discussed using mental exercises such as the Feynman technique and 6 degrees to deepen knowledge in a particular aspect of BJJ and find connections between different areas (respectively). In doing these exercises – and training BJJ in general – it can be easy to feel overwhelmed with all the details, variations, and situational nuances. To help level-set and remember the core ideas and concepts, I suggest performing a pre-mortem.

Pre-mortem

From Wikipedia:

A pre-mortem, or premortem, is a managerial strategy in which a project team imagines that a project or organization has failed, and then works backward to determine what potentially could lead to the failure of the project or organization.

The beauty of a pre-mortem is that it can be adjusted based on your needs at the moment. A light version can be performed to quickly review what you’ve learned and identify the core ideas and concepts to focus on. In contrast, a more in-depth version can be performed while preparing for a competition, identifying the most important areas of your game to solidify and key opportunities to take advantage of while you still have time to train.

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