You have decided to train Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Good. This article is not about whether you should, and it is not about which gym to pick. It is about what actually happens once you step on the mat, so that nothing in your first three months catches you off guard.
Most beginners quit in the first eight weeks, and almost never because the training was too hard. They quit because something felt strange and unexplained and they assumed it meant BJJ was not for them. Nearly all of it is normal.
What to wear and bring on day one
Ask your academy what to wear before you buy anything. Most schools will happily let a new person train in athletic clothes for the first few sessions.
For your first class, you need:
- A t-shirt or rash guard with no zippers, buttons, or pockets. Zippers catch fingers.
- Shorts or athletic pants, again with no pockets or drawstring toggles.
- A water bottle.
- A towel.
- Short fingernails and toenails. This is not optional. Everything in BJJ involves grabbing.
Buy a gi after a few classes, once you know you are staying and once someone at the gym can tell you what size you actually are. There is no rush.
Leave jewellery at home. If you wear contacts, expect to lose one eventually.
How a class is structured
The shape is fairly consistent across academies.
Warm-up. Movement, mobility, sometimes drills that look nothing like fighting. Hip escapes and bridges will show up constantly. They are not filler. They are the actual mechanics of everything you will do later.
Technique. The coach demonstrates a position and a sequence, usually a few times, at different speeds. You will not remember all of it. Nobody does. Watch for the detail the coach repeats, because that is the part that makes it work.
Drilling. You and a partner take turns doing the technique on each other with no resistance. This is where the learning happens. Resist the urge to go fast. Slow, correct repetitions beat quick sloppy ones.
Positional work or rolling. Live practice against a resisting partner, usually in timed rounds. Some coaches start beginners with positional rounds where you begin from a specific spot with a specific goal, which is far more useful than open sparring at the start.
Mat etiquette, plainly stated
Every gym has small rituals and nobody writes them down. Here are the ones that are near universal.
Shoes off on the mat. Shoes on off the mat. Never walk to the washroom barefoot and then back onto the mats.
Show up clean. Wash your gi after every session. Wash yourself too. This is a contact sport and hygiene is a shared responsibility.
If you are sick or have a skin issue, stay home. Everyone will thank you.
Be on time. If you are late, wait at the edge of the mat until the coach waves you on.
Do not coach other people. Even if you know the answer. Especially in your first year.
Ask before you join a round. And be gracious if someone declines.
Communicate injuries. A quick "my left shoulder is cranky" before a round prevents most problems.
Tapping is the most important skill you will learn
New students often treat the tap as a defeat. It is not. It is the safety mechanism that makes it possible to train a genuinely dangerous art at full resistance without getting hurt.
Tap early. Tap with your hand on your partner clearly, two or three times, or tap verbally if your hands are trapped. Your partner releases immediately, you reset, you go again.
The people who get injured in their first year are almost always the ones who refused to tap to a submission they were never going to escape. There is no prize for being stubborn. There is a very real cost, which is six weeks off the mat.
Month one: total confusion
Expect to understand almost nothing. Positions will have names you forget on the drive home. You will use enormous amounts of strength and get nowhere. You will be more tired after five minutes than you have been in years.
Everyone smaller than you will beat you, and that is precisely the demonstration of why you came.
Your only jobs this month are: show up, breathe, tap early, and go light. Do not try to win. Try to survive calmly.
Month two: the panic drops
Something changes around week six. You stop flailing. You start noticing what is happening rather than reacting to all of it at once.
You will begin recognizing positions in real time. You will remember one or two escapes reliably. You will still lose almost every round, but you will lose them slower, and you will know roughly why.
This is also the month your body complains. Grip fatigue, sore neck, bruised feet. It settles. Train through it lightly rather than pushing hard and taking two weeks off.
Month three: the first thing that works
At some point in month three, you will hit something you drilled. An escape, a sweep, a grip break against a real opponent who was trying to stop you.
It is a small moment and it is completely disproportionate in how good it feels. That moment is why people train for decades.
By now you will also have training partners, which matters more than technique for staying in the sport. You will know who rolls safely, who to ask questions of, and who will be there on a Tuesday.
Practical advice for making it past month three
Two classes a week, consistently. More is fine if your body handles it. Fewer than two and each session is spent re-learning the last one.
Go to the same class times. You build relationships with the people who train when you train.
Ask one question per class. Just one, of the coach or an upper belt, about the thing that confused you most.
Do not add a second martial art yet. Give BJJ your full attention for six months.
Take notes, briefly. Three lines after class about what you learned will do more than you expect.
Expect plateaus. Weeks where you feel worse than the month before are usually the weeks your strength stopped compensating and your technique has not caught up. It is progress that feels like regression.
Training BJJ in Maple Ridge
Emerald Rolling Academy is a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu academy in Maple Ridge, founded in 2023 by Sean and Lataya Mooney. The adult program is open to anyone 13 and up and runs both gi and no-gi, so you can experience both before deciding which you prefer. There is also a women's only class if that is a more comfortable place to begin.
If you have been thinking about it for a while, the hardest class is the first one. Check the schedule, pick a time you can make twice a week, and come try it. Everyone on that mat was exactly where you are.