The best mind pump you can get 🥋

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Greetings, friends -

Ever since we put out our video on Em going to Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, we've had plenty of friends and viewers reach out to us to ask about the sport. We've even brought some friends along - and the reaction so far has all around been positive!

Em has kept up with classes each week as well, and one thing that stood out to her in particular (which I've also experienced myself) is the amount of focus, concentration, and energy you experience after class, specifically if there was sparring that day at the end of class.

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There are a lot of reasons people have suggested this to be the case. One of the main hypotheses suggests that since sparring is a form of high intensity workout, the subsequent post-workout endorphin release causes a massive spike in energy, while reducing feelings of stress and anxiety.

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However, this explanation doesn't quite explain the entirety of it - we've both done plenty of HIIT workouts, and while there are similarities between conventional HIIT and BJJ, we both feel that there is something about the sense of focused calm (yes, that sounds like an oxymoron, but this is also the only way to describe it) experienced after BJJ which is unique to it as a sport.

Some think that this feeling is due to activation in the sympathetic nervous system, i.e. the fight or flight response we experience by facing dangerous, potentially life threatening situations. If you find yourself in a situation where you need to tap in a sparring session - say, if you're getting choked out - that activates a strong "fight or flight" response, and can make other potentially stressful things in our comparatively mundane lives feel way more chill afterwards.

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One final theory suggests that sparring specifically trains the parts of our brain dedicated to focus. Sparring sessions put you in a relatively high-stress situation, where not focusing on what your opponent is doing will likely lead to you getting submitted. This forces our brains to exercise a high degree of focus on the present moment, and disregard all of the other random thoughts floating around in our heads. While this specific stimulus occurs during the sparring session, the theory is that the focus carries on well after the session, heightening our ability to focus generally for several hours post-training as well.

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In truth, it is likely a combination of all of the above that creates such a positive experience for BJJ practitioners. Em and I are certainly hooked - and if you've been curious about trying BJJ yourself, we can't recommend it enough (provided you find a good gym with qualified trainers!).

If you haven't seen it yet, check out Em's first week at BJJ here.

Something Cool - Lies... all lies!⌚️

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If you've ever worn a fitness tracker, smart watch, or other wearable device on your wrist which tracks your calories burned throughout the course of a day, I have good news and bad news.

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Let's start with the bad news - fitness trackers of this sort are really, really inaccurate. A Stanford study[1] tested seven popular, commercially available trackers of this sort, and showed that their reported calorie burn was off by 27.4 to 92.6% - meaning that the most inaccurate device was overestimating energy expenditure by just under two times.

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The good news? Well, the data isn't entirely useless. Even though the energy expenditure numbers are wrong, they can still be used as a relative measure to indicate how strenuous a workout was.

For example, if your smart watch says you burned 200 calories on Monday, and that same smart watch says you burned 400 calories on Tuesday, then it's a reasonably safe conclusion to draw that your workout on Tuesday was more intense than your workout on Monday.

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As a closing fun fact, the study also found that inaccuracy was significantly higher in males than in females across all devices!

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