women

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The Best Starter BJJ Gi

Buying Your First BJJ Gi

So you want to start BJJ.  Or maybe you’ve already been training no-gi grappling and you want to start practicing in the gi.

You do a simple Google search and suddenly realize, holy crap, there are a ton of gis to choose from.  Single weave, pearl weave, honey-comb — Are we buying bedsheets? Cereal?!  — not to mention the prices.

With some gis clocking it at an insane $500, all sorts of doubts start to crop up.  “Is it really worth it to buy a gi? What if I decide I only want to practice gi once a week?  What if I decide BJJ isn’t for me altogether?”  After all, you don’t want to invest a couple hundred bucks on a pile of useless fabric.

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Womens BJJ competition

Why should women learn BJJ?

Photo Credit: SLImagesCa via Compfight cc

Why not?

There are a ton of sites that list various reasons why women should learn BJJ. I’ve listed some of my favorites at the bottom of this post because they’re a great reference for any woman interested in starting BJJ classes.

There are also another ton of posts that list why women actually learn BJJ. Subtly different but equally important, these unique stories of women who have become loyal supporters and high-level practitioners serve as motivation and encouragement for other women in BJJ.

But as great as these posts are, it’s always bothered me that they are always titled with some variation of the question, “Why should women learn BJJ?”

It seems like a valid question but what it’s always sounded like to me is a response to an unspoken, and thus supposedly understood, stance that women shouldn’t learn BJJ.

And that, my friends, is BS.

It shouldn’t matter why anyone decides to learn BJJ. That reason is your own and no one has the right to question it. What matters most is how you learn BJJ.

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