The Intersection of Motion

Why More Outdoor Athletes Are Doing BJJ

GT | 6/11/25 | training

What do outdoor sports like skiing / snowboarding, mountain biking, trail running, and rock climbing have to do with submission grappling? Superficially, they are pretty distinct, and the people who crave release through open trails, vertiginous cliffs, and epic landscapes are not always the same as those who seek the intensity of a close contact martial art, but more and more athletes doing the former are also doing the latter.

What do these seemingly opposing interests have in common and how are the outdoor athletes finding a shared purpose with the mat warriors in Brazilian Jujitsu? Let’s roll into it!

Refining Movement

Mastering kinetic movement is critical to athletic training, and the refinement of physical awareness improves performance and reduces likelihood of injury. Demanding athletic activities require flexibility, strength, endurance, and body awareness. BJJ emphasizes each one of these in abundance. In fact, these are reinforced so much that it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to consistently do jujitsu without developing each of these attributes.

There are important distinctions in the requirements for something like skiing or rock climbing and BJJ. There are equipment and non-negligible environmental variables that don’t exist in jujitsu, so when talking about cross-training and the intersection between the sports, we focus on the physical and mental confluences.

From a purely physical perspective, BJJ is a complete movement framework. From hip and spinal flexibility to shoulders, neck, joints, tendons, and musculature, your first sessions on the mats expose every corporeal advantage and limitation. For many outdoor athletes, BJJ starts to become a a perfect way to get stronger, more flexible, and more kinetically developed. Enhanced spacial awareness and reflexes translate well to any sport, particularly things like skiing, climbing, and mountain biking.

Mental Toughness

One notable way in which BJJ tends to ‘filter’ people is by revealing the ego in a very honest way. It can be psychologically difficult to be controlled and submitted by another person, often one smaller and physically ‘weaker’. Many people try BJJ and quickly lose interest due to this ‘ego test’. If you come to the mats with a high regard for your physical capabilities and have never done a martial art with a focus on intense sparring, it can be an abrupt ego check to realize that a skilled grappler can quite easily overcome your attributes with basic technique.

For the first 6 months to a year, this continues regularly as you over and over are dominated and ‘tapped’ by more proficient opponents, until, gradually, you begin to develop pattern recognition, technique, and awareness in identifying danger and creating escape opportunities to protect yourself. Eventually, you begin submitting others and you are suddenly hooked. This is all a part of the mental model of skill acquisition. You are broken down and rebuilt - in a (mostly) gentle way, of course.

Outdoor athletes who must perform in challenging environmental conditions can take this mental conditioning and apply it to their sports. There’s a difference between pushing on through a snowstorm when you’re tired and hungry or completing a grueling climb in heat, wind, and resisting and ‘surviving’ a hard sparring round where your opponent is trying to choke, join lock, and generally crush your will, however, the mental toughness you develop in BJJ will always translate positively to other sports and life situations. You learn calm, patience, timing, resistance, the resilience to keep yourself alive, and the power of counter attack.

Community Vibes

A great day skiing, mountain biking or climbing at the crag is a social occasion as much as it is a time to push your limits and develop your skills in a sport. Jujitsu can be the same. You make friends and become part of a community at the same time you’re developing a skill. Like overcoming a hard challenge with your climbing partner, the shared ‘hardship’ of training jujitsu can fortify friendships in a way that resembles outdoor sports. Training with and learning from the same group of people week after week forms bonds that strengthen over time. The culture in jujitsu of training to immobilize and inflict some (controlled) pain on your opponent to get them to tap, then bumping fists, having a laugh and bullshitting after the roll can seem a little strange, but its precisely this physical adversity that so effectively cultivates community.

The allure of jujitsu is powerful right now. The sport is growing fast in popularity. Outdoor athletes are experiencing the advantages of cross training in BJJ in improved strength, flexibility, mental clarity, and making some new friends in the process. For maximum style and comfort from the trails to the gym, check out our Evolved to Roll t-shirt.

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