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About SkinnyD
What is Arcanum?
About SkinnyD
Thank you for visiting my blog. Like all bloggers, I love comments, so please don’t be shy in expressing your thoughts.
Besides being addicted to Brazilian Jiu-jitsu, I am a husband and father, a dancer, a singer, a theatre lover, a wannabe chef, a journalist, a church-goer and a computer nerd. This blog is currently just a record of my thoughts on training BJJ. I hope it will become much more. With luck, it will be the means to meeting new friends and a source of personal and professional enrichment. I have some exciting plans for Arcanum and I hope you will all be a part of them.
I started training Brazilian Jiu-jitsu at age 28 with Dave Johnson, a black belt under Jeff Kunze and Ica Medina, who are both black belts under Rigan Machado.
Ever since I was a little kid, I wanted to be a martial artist. But there was a major obstacle to this: I grew up in rural Wyoming and my family had a tight budget. Consequently, I got my martial arts fix from watching Ninja Turtles and any Chuck Norris movie I could get my hands on, which wasn’t many as an 8-year-old kid. In my young mind, karate was the coolest thing a person could ever do. I remember telling my friends that I was a black belt in karate and had accidentally broken a kid’s arm once. It never bothered me that it was a bold-faced lie; as far as I was concerned, watching Delta Force II and beating Double Dragon on the Nintendo qualified me for a black belt.
Unlike other kids, I never really grew out of the martial arts phase. I did stop acting like a dork (mostly) and pretending to be a black belt, but the fascination never went away.
When I went to college, my brother (who attended the same university as me) bought some shinai swords, and we spent long hours in the ballpark behind our apartment complex beating the snot out each other with bamboo. It wasn’t official training, but this experience was actually very valuable. Our shenanigans opened my eyes to the reality that actual fighting is not like the movies. We discovered very quickly that flashy sword fights are not realistic, and real fights are over in seconds.
My opportunity to take a real martial arts class came when we met a TKD black belt under the Ernie Reyes system. We were some of the first to join the university club he started. We spent around 18 months learning forms for TKD, Escrima, kickboxing and boxing, and doing mild sparring.
Here’s a video of my brother and me trying to spar back then. I am hopping up and down like a caffeinated rabbit while my brother is throwing dorky spin kicks. You can hear the instructor tell us to only go at 50 percent, but I get pissed at my bro when he kicks me in the butt and I don’t hear him telling me to cool down. Good times!
I enjoyed TKD; however, I did have the nagging sensation that much of what I was learning was not valid fighting. I give credit to my instructor and the Ernie Reyes system; he was one of the first to take MMA seriously and incorporate it into TKD. Very ahead of his time. We did learn a lot of valid, brutal self-defense. But when it came to sparring, it was extremely controlled and it bothered me that all the forms I practiced just seemed to go out the window. I now realize that as a three-month BJJ white belt, I could have torn my TKD purple belt self in half.
I also found a judo and aiki-jujitsu club on campus and attended a few of those classes. The judo was fun, but the kid teaching the aiki-jujitsu was more interested in showing everyone how easily he could hurt them rather than teaching. I was unimpressed.
Then one day, my brother invited me to a private “lesson” with his brother-in-law, who trained in Brazilian Jiu-jitsu. Neither of us had any idea what it was, but it sounded cool, so we went. That is how I met my current coach, Dave Johnson.
Dave was a brown belt at the time. He spent two hours showing us early UFC videos and then demonstrating the moves that Royce Gracie did on us. It was scary…but I was impressed with how effective it was. I didn’t know it yet, but I was hooked. During the next two years or so, I had opportunities to “grapple” with a few people and test out what Dave had shown me. To my surprise, I could get it to work…not seamlessly, but I got it to work. I remember arm barring and guillotining a wrestler at college using only the stuff I learned in that one lesson and feeling like I had just won the Olympics.
There was no official BJJ club at my school, but I eventually moved to Utah after graduating and later had the chance to start studying with Dave as a student in the fall of 2008.
It’s been a rough road – injuries and and other setbacks have caused a some long gaps in my training. But my childhood inclinations towards martial arts were right on. I would never have guessed I’d end up being a grappler; I hated wrestling in high school. But I can say with 100 percent conviction that Brazilian jiu-jitsu is my sport. It has influenced my life for the better in ways I never expected and find hard to describe. The Gracie adage is true for me; jiu-jitsu is more than a sport or self defense. It is a way of life.
Arcanum literally means special or hidden knowledge.
Brazilian jiu-jitsu is not mystical. I am convinced that anyone who puts in the time can learn it, whether or not they have talent. That’s the beautiful thing about it; it brings the athlete out of social nerds like me.
The reality is, though, that there is hidden knowledge in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. And it’s not in the technique. It’s in the way it changes people’s lives. Jiu-jitsu empowers people.
There is something about Brazilian jiu-jitsu that reaches inside and brings out a “you” that would never have existed otherwise. I have heard so many stories about how jiu-jitsu has literally turned people’s lives around – helped them overcome depression, addictions, social awkwardness, or just simply feel happier. For me, it is helped improve my overall outlook on life and focus more intensely on achieving my goals. Almost like magic, BJJ training makes a bad day good and a good day better for me.
For those of us addicts, it’s hard to explain to our friends and family why rolling around on the ground and choking people is so amazing. I’m not sure I get it myself. That knowledge must be uncovered experience…by sweat, blood and commitment.
That’s what Arcanum refers to. It’s what BJJ helps you discover about yourself – knowledge that would have otherwise been hidden.
