Seems to be a fair number of BJJ practitioners here. It comes up in most threads on fitness/exercise. I've only just started (6 months now), mostly as a way to force myself to really exercise regularly. Having a positive social environment and forking out $$ each month encourages me to actually attend, versus the (good) free gym available through work.

EDIT: If you really want to know it could be put in as a poll. Ask which martial arts (if any) people here participate in.

Good idea actually, only I'm afraid I couldn't come up with a complete list of (most relevant) martial arts off top of my head. With creating polls comes great responsibility ;)

Brown belt. I've been training over ten years now.

I did for about 6 months. By far one of the most humbling experiences I'd ever had. I just wasn't a fan of the people at that gym.

Same story. Trained for about two years. Loved the sport but had to deal with a lot of bad attitudes and unpleasant "alpha male" types, which is probably the biggest reason I've stopped. It wasn't just that one school; I've trained at several and it's generally the same story to one degree or another.

A lot of practitioners really make the sport as a whole look bad. I'm not a fan of some of the MMA culture that bleeds over into BJJ.

Which is fair, but I give some credit to the MMA training I did for having a "just deal with what's going on, keep moving forward" attitude in my jiu jitsu. In work and life, even.

(I never had an MMA fight, but many of the guys I trained with did, and I helped them prepare.)

> I'm not a fan of some of the MMA culture that bleeds over into BJJ.

Nah, it's the attitude from BJJ that ended up in MMA culture

4-stripe white belt here, train 3-4x per week and completely hooked. If anyone trains in Montreal, you're free to come visit our startup's office, we have mats!

BJJ seems to be pretty popular among nerd/geek types actually. It's a highly intellectual martial art.

(Purple belt here, currently training both BJJ [Gracie Academy] and Judo)

Is it? Well, out of my experience most practicioners aren't really nerdy or super-intellectual :) There could be local specifics though (I live and train in Poland)

Well I'm not saying it's like a University faculty lounge. :) But I've met my fair share of professionals, software engineers, math majors, etc at various BJJ academies. It's a big contrast with, say, a boxing gym.

In fairness, though, it could just be selection bias since at least in the US BJJ training tends to be fairly expensive, while community boxing gyms are cheap or free.

black belt - 20 years

I think there's a lot, white belt two stripes here... Transitioning from Judo to Bjj

Purple belt also. I've been training about five years. Cool to see others on here.

Many years ago in a different life I practiced BJJ for a few years then got into MMA.

Yep. One-stripe blue under Ribeiro here. Cool to see so many others.

Been training since 2007. Started in ATT, now in Boston, training.

Purple belt too, practicing since 2008.

blue belt - about 3 years of training.