📝 The Best Gym In The Jiujitsu Capital Of America

This weekend was largely flop for MMA. The UFC card would not have been noteworthy if it wasn’t their first trip to Azerbaijan, Jon Jones retired through the mouth of Dana White at the post fight press conference, and that announcement was overshadowed by the reports of his most recent run-in with the law.

But things were much different in my world.

The jiujitsu gym I own and teach at won The Austin Chronicle’s “Best Gym in Austin”. Today I want to talk about how we got here and the book that inspired me to ruin my life (for the better).

If you’re only interested in technique talk skip to the end of this one for an update.

Now let’s get into it.

I studied kinesiology at the University of Texas. I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I enrolled, but I had an expiring ticket to college so I had to make the most of it.

Before college all I cared about was combat sports and how the body worked. After college I was in the same position, but I had a few more years training, teaching, and competing in combat sports to go along with the paper I received alluding that I needed to go to grad school to get a good job in the field I was interested in. No one told me that I would need a graduate degree for physical therapy, athletic training, or something similar to work in professional sports doing anything other than sweeping, mopping, and serving food to athletes.

College was fun, not particularly helpful for preparing me for the “real world”. So I took baby steps toward joining the real world. I got a job at a health & wellness center that sold services and products that, previously, only pro athletes could afford. We were making them more accessible so people like me and you could afford them. Just like that I was closer to professional athletics.

Fast forward ~ 7 years.

That health and wellness center I joined had over 150 locations with about another 100 in the pipeline. I had a cushy job that’s kind of fake.

What happens when you’re early at a company that grows at an unbelievable pace is you get shuffled into doing random tasks that you can complete, but, eventually, you’re put into a position where you’re not experienced enough to actually do the job that the company needs. So you end up working with the people that the company needs to hire so you can provide them context on why things work the way they do. Then you just pick up random pieces wherever they fall. I was picking up pieces about the products, devices, and services we used to make people feel healthier and better.

It was my job to research the technology we used in our centers as well as talk to manufacturers and distributors about what else we could provide. I did tons of reading, research, and ran into dead ends daily. The reality is much of the wellness world is basically bullshit. While swimming through the ambiguous rivers of bullshit, my eyes drifted to things that weren’t related to what I was supposed to be working on.

Matthew B. Crawford is a motorcycle mechanic. He also a possesses a PhD from the University of Chicago and does research for the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia.

In 2009 Crawford released one of the most important books I’ll ever read, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into The Value Of Work. In it, Crawford looks at our current state of work and employment, compares it to the work of craftspeople, and makes a case for why more people should break out of the cage that their cubicles can be.

Crawford says, “Despite the beautiful ties I wore, it turned out to be a more proletarian existence than I had known as a manual worker.”

Crawford writes that knowledge work, computer work, or whatever you want to call it, can provide money and a convenient life at the expense of removing your agency and an ability to actually impact change in your day to day experiences.

Most employees perform pieces of processes. Oftentimes they hardly know why they do what they do, let alone what the other steps of the process do. And this abstraction of work actually prevents people from taking control of their situation. It locks them into the process they perpetuate.

That’s bad. It’s killing us from inside the head.

And of course we make concessions. We use the money we collect to pay for our leisure time. As Crawford says:

Reading this passage was equally inspiring and terrifying. It stirred me to action by scaring me away from living an incoherent life that slowly kills me from the inside out.

We all have 24 hours in the day. If we assume 8 of those go to sleep that leaves half of our waking weekly hours dedicated to our job. If you’re completely uninterested in how you live half of your life, what’s the point of living? Is it not your responsibility to do everything in your power to build a life you find worthy of at least paying attention to?

If you can’t be bothered to pay attention to what you’re working on you’ll never understand how it works. And if you don’t understand how something works you’ll never be able to impact it, let alone improve it. When this sense of an inability to impact your environment sets in, you subconsciously resign. This is learned helplessness. It’s a surefire path to a quicker death. It’s how many have decided to operate. Whether they know it or not.

Crawford’s book has a remedy. Pursue crafts and work that you can impact so you do maintain agency. As Crawford says, “We want to feel that our world is intelligible, so we can be responsible for it”.

This is exactly why martial arts, jiujitsu especially, are so captivating for so many. They give you a competitive movement system you can get better at while getting real time feedback on. And they’re fun. A fun way to develop a sense of agency and responsibility. Responsibility to get better and help others do the same.

I’m grateful that my gym won The Best Gym in Austin. Grateful and astonished.

Austin is the capital of no gi jiujitsu. The two biggest team names in the sport, Kingsway and BTeam, are here; but so are 10th Planet, Brazilian Fight Factory, and 6 Blades. Even outside of the jiujitsu gyms, there are tons of world class fitness gyms all around the city. To beat all of them in our first year of business is unbelievable.

Since we’ve won, tons of other people that teach and own jiujitsu gyms have reached out with questions about how to best run a gym. What I can say is many jiujitsu gyms are being run backwards.

There is a gross trend growing out of influencer and personal branding culture. It’s inverting the coaching relationship and it’s turning many people off.

We are incentivized to build brands, record our techniques, and be on camera explaining why we’re the authority. That’s how we attract customer to our businesses. But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything to people when they’re in the room with you. They care if you can help them get better. That’s why they’re there.

Regardless of how successful you are you need to focus on improving your students and your training partners. You’re there for them. It’s not the other way around.

My gym gym exists solely because my partners and I like our craft and we want to give it away to other people. We know it’s valuable and we want more people to benefit from it. That’s why we won Best Gym in Austin. Not because of our social media, minor competitive success, or anything like that. And I think the sport, let alone the art form, would be in a better place if more people internalized that.

I threw away two careers to open the gym because the start-ups I worked for were interested in growing at all costs. And when growth is your priority, quality can only be second at best.

I don’t want to push quality aside. I want things to be better. For myself and you.

Matthew Crawford ends Shop Class As Soulcraft by saying

I don’t think you should necessarily do martial arts, let alone teach. It’s not a glamorous lifestyle, the jobs don’t pay well, and you will get injured. A lot.

But I do know that you should find a craft that interests you so you can try to master it and remember you have agency. Then you should give away what you’ve learned.

Since opening my gym my life has never been busier, I’ve never been more stressed, and I’ve never felt more alive. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

For the past several weeks I’ve been working on a new project. I love writing about what’s going on in combat sports, but I want to make a resource that is longer lasting. One single place for people to study everything they want to learn about grappling.

Sure, a lot of people do rear naked chokes. But what are the best examples of rear naked chokes used in fights? And who should I study to get better at them?

For years I’ve wanted to create a single resource that provides examples of grappling techniques being used in fights, specific guides on how to use them, and shows us who are the best grapplers in MMA as well as submission grappling.

I now have that tool.

From here on out, The Premium Notebook will not only be an archive and extra content, but, also, a single place for you to reference to study grappling. Check it out below 👇

Want to access it? Click here to upgrade to The Premium Notebook.

After that wait a few minutes for us to add you to the subsite. Then follow this link.

I’ll be adding more content to The Premium Notebook every week so you can have one place to learn grappling faster, curriculum to help you teach, and guides on specific themes and athletes.

If you’re ready to ruin your life (for the better) get Shop Class As Soulcraft here.