BJJ PROBLEMS AWAY FROM THE MAT

With 2x European Champion, Emilia Tuukkanen || Instagram @emiliatuukkanen

1. Motor skills in your fingers have pretty much disappeared and you’ve accepted the fact that you may not be able to tie your shoes or eat with chopsticks in the near future.

2. You don't care if your training injuries show or not; who cares if someone assumes you're a victim of domestic abuse, right?

3. You carefully consider what you spend on food, clothes etc, but when it's time to pay for competitions, buy flights or book a hotel, you don't even bat an eye whem spending twice your rent in expenses.

4. You are slowly coming to the painful realisation that most people you meet will never understand the difference between jiu jitsu and karate…

5. You have to make peace with the fact that you need two different wardrobes: one set of clothes for when you are cutting weight and skinny as a skeleton, and other when you don't know for sure when you are competing next and there are no visible differences between you and a baby whale.

6. No matter how tired or busy you are, if you hear the words “jiu jitsu" on the tv or radio, you will drop everything you are doing and listen like your life depended on it.

7. You have lost all hope of waking up without some part of your body feeling as if it is about to fall off. You consider yourself lucky if only one place is hurting instead of the usual every place possible.

8. You can't remember what it was like to be home without wet gis dominating ever clear space within your apartment. It is like a jungle of clean, wet, fight gear really.

9. You develop involuntary 'jiu jitsu poses’ that crop up whenever a camera s pointed at you – on or off the mat. There are countless photos of you throwing-up a shaka at weddings, formal dinners and birthday parties.

10. You can't really enjoy movies with any kind of fight scenes, especially anything even resembling jiu jitsu, without criticising the shit out of them.