In life it’s funny what ends up making a lasting impression on you. An offhand comment can stick with you for years and years, and have an effect way beyond anything the original person intended.

There’s a phrase like that that pops up in my mind often when I’m thinking about BJJ. But it originated in a very different place.

In fact this comment got stuck in my brain more than 20 years ago when I was taking a biochemistry class at McGill University of all places… The material we were covering was pretty technical stuff: metabolic cycles, enzymatic pathways, DNA repair mechanisms (i.e. standard, everyday water-cooler discussion topics).

The lecturer – Dr. Nishioka – was very precise and proper, and spoke with a heavy Japanese accent.

The exact details aren’t important, but at one point he was describing the mechanisms cells use to recover from damage inflicted to their DNA by chemicals or radiation. For the sake of this discussion it’s enough to know that if DNA gets smashed up then there often is a way to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

One of the key points of the lecture was that these repair mechanisms aren’t perfect. Sometimes mistakes get made and things don’t get put back together exactly the right way. This can lead to all sorts of interesting side-effects, most of which are bad for the cell in question.

But, Dr Nishioka reminded us, poorly repaired DNA was the lesser of two evils. The other alternative was being dead.

Or, as he put it so philosophically in his broken English, “Having something… is better… than having nothing.”

And that gets us to the crux of what I want to talk about today…

Having something is better than having nothing.

People often make the mistake of all-or-nothing thinking in their training. They want to do things the right way, but if they can’t do things perfectly then sometimes they decide not to do things at all…

People might have great plans of how they’re going to train 5 days a week. Or they want to eat healthy, starting every day with kale smoothies and finishing it with a giant multicolour salad. Or they map out the perfect fitness program including cardio, strength-building, flexibility and recovery components.

But no plan of action survives contact with the enemy. Real life has a way of making a hash of all your best intentions. Or as the old proverb so succinctly states, “Man makes plans and God laughs.”

So nothing is ever going to go exactly according to plan. And this can be very frustrating.

So frustrating in fact that some people just say, “Screw it, I’m not going to do anything then until I can do it perfectly.” But this is a HUGE mistake.

Let’s say you were planning to train really hard for a competition, but early in your training camp you badly hurt your shoulder (again). That sucks, but don’t go and sulk. Maybe you can’t train as hard or as often as you were planning. Maybe you can’t even compete this time. But you can still do some controlled one-handed drilling, study an aspect of the game that you need work on, start running stair sprints, or do something else to get at least a little bit better.

Having something is better than having nothing.

Maybe you’ve gotten really, really busy at work. Perhaps you’re working on some giant project that requires 12 hour days, including weekends, for several months. And this insane work schedule has completely nuked your training regimen. Then, just to make things worse, the one time that you did make it to class (late) your timing was way off, your conditioning was non-existent, and you got murdered by the training partners that you used to be able to hang with.

This is pretty discouraging, and I would understand if you wanted to throw in the towel for a while.

But BJJ is a marathon, not a sprint, and you can’t go full speed all the time anyway. So hang in there, go once a week if that’s all you can manage, and just do a little bit – it’ll pay off, I promise. Training once a week is a hundred times better than training zero times a week; it’ll keep your head in the game and make things SO much easier when you finally get back to regular training.

Having something is better than having nothing.

Maybe you used to go to the gym 3 times a week, and really enjoyed the feeling of being fit and strong. But now you’ve got a newborn child in the house, plus her two year old brother suddenly became über-needy and needs even more of your attention all the time. You love your kids and want to do the right thing, but dammit, you also miss your two hour workouts.

At this point being a gym rat may no longer be in the cards for a few years, but maybe you can still load a kid in a baby-jogger a couple times a week and prevent your cardio from absolutely going in the toilet (here is the quick default cardio workout I used when my own kids were young) .

Doing even a little bit of fitness activity is much, much better than doing zero fitness.

Or, as Dr. Nishioka would say, having something is better than having nothing.

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