Introduction

A quick introduction then right into the meat of things. I've always loved martial arts. As a kid I watched ninja movies, ninja Turtles, Karate Kid, Kung Fu (The movie AND the series) everything. When I was 13 I started taking Tae Kwon Do. I love it. I loved flying kicks, I loved spinning kicks, I loved flying spinning kicks. I got pretty good at it, at one time I was ranked 8th in the nation in my division for sparring. Even back then I knew that just being able to do flying spinning side kicks wasn't all there was to Martial Arts though. When I was 16 I joined the wrestling team at my high school and I SUCKED. Three years of TKD had given me huge legs and little bitty arms. I had no upper body strength. Our wrestling coaches were both brand new, and had no idea how to help me get past that. So I spent a lot of time lifting weights. I went 0 and 23 during my wrestling career. The highlight of which was managing to last a full 6 minutes with the guy who pretty much won state every year in my weightclass. Of course the low point was making it into the record books for getting pinned in under 20 seconds by this same guy the month before. But I LIKED wrestling and I took a few things away from it. I didn't panic on the ground and I knew that I didn't want to have the other guy on top of me.

Fast forward a little and I got my 1st Dan black belt in TKD. Then I graduated from high school and moved up north where I took some funky Kung Fu style stuff, again it was fun, and I learned a few things that I still find useful about posture and balance. Then I moved back down to Georgia from another couple of years of TKD, then down to Florida where I took TKD from a few different schools. Then back up to Georgia where I rejoined my old TKD school. I expected that the school would have progressed in the intervening years, but I was vastly disappointed. The school was pandering to non-contact and light contact kids classes almost entirely. Gone were all of the hard hitting guys from my original time there. After about 10 months of watching this fiasco and trying to rekindle the passion I used to have for TKD I was introduced to a website called bullshido.net. They opened me up to all kinds of new concepts like Aliveness (Just google Matt Thornton). The kind of training they talked about was the kind of training I WANTED. So I talked to some Bullies in the area and they recommended The Hardcore Gym.

I had met the guys from Hardcore when they originally opened the school several years back and remembered them being very nice guys, so I visited them and was immediately hooked. I started out just taking the standup classes which quickly became boring. I'd been doing standup for years already. So I tried the BJJ class and it was just like being a white belt again. Everything was like a magic trick. So fast forward 10 months and here I am. I love BJJ. I love grappling. It's just plain more fun than the standup. So I've decided to start documenting my progress, mostly to help me see how far I've come, and partially so that others can learn from my experience transitioning from Taekwondo to BJJ, from dead training methods to Alive ones.