What BJJ Competition Teaches Us About Money

About the author: Brearin Land is the CEO of Irvine Wealth Management and a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt out of Gracie Barra Headquarters. He combines his martial arts background with his work in finance over at the Black Belt of Finance Blog.

You are freaking out. It's the morning of your first BJJ tournament, and when you aren't pacing around the mat waiting for your name to be called, you are pacing around in your head. Oh my god, please do not get submitted in front of my friends.

You're not alone. Not only have I felt this first-hand and watched it in my students, I see a lot of the same fear with my clients in my day job as a financial advisor. They get so overwhelmed by their financial situation that they keep putting it off until "later" and slide into complacency.

Here are a few lessons in the gentle art of saving money that I learned from competing, and that I apply with my clients every day.

You Have to Put in the Training

Look — you're always going to have jitters. Even at the highest level there's an element of pride and vanity that even the best of the best have a hard time shaking. The key to controlling the nerves comes long before fight day. It starts in training.

That was certainly the case for me when I started competing. Was I nervous? Of course I was. But what I realised once the tournament was over was that the bulk of my nerves were not really about the opponents I was set to face — they came from knowing in the back of my mind that I hadn't done as much as I could have to prepare.

Watch the athletes at the top of the game today and the same principle stares back at you. Mikey Musumeci is famously, almost pathologically, organised about his weekly volume. Gordon Ryan's camps are a study in deliberate, repeated detail. Ffion Davies trains like she's already lost the next match and is fighting to fix it. None of them are less nervous than everyone else — they've just used preparation to take the unnecessary nerves off the table.

In personal finance it's no different. Whether you're trying to climb out of debt, build the habit of saving, or get a handle on your investments, the first step is to meet the problem head-on rather than running away from it.

It's still scary just how many people I meet who have no real idea what's inside their savings plan. Selloffs like the 2008 crash, the 2020 pandemic plunge and the 2022 rate-shock drawdown left a lot of investors scratching their heads asking what went wrong. They soon realised they also hadn't done enough to prepare.

Champions Are Not Complacent

One of the things competing taught me is just how hard it can be to cut weight. I'd never had to do it before jiu jitsu, so all I had to go on was the experience of others — and the hard part was being disciplined enough to follow through with their advice.

Anyone can put a diet together. But day after day and week after week of being hungry and avoiding the late-night meals became a tough task for me as a newbie. The few too many cheat meals later cost me the flexibility to eat much of anything in the days leading up to the event.

Whether it's dieting for a competition or saving for financial independence, slow and steady really does seem to be the winning formula. Why, then, do the overwhelming majority of folks get it wrong?

Take our boomers, now retired or staring straight at retirement. Median retirement savings for the late-50s to mid-60s crowd still hovers just over $100,000. For folks in their late 60s and early 70s, it sits just under $150,000. Turn those into an inflation-protected annuity and you're looking at a few hundred dollars of monthly income. If you'd like to live in a trailer in Kincaid, IL (my home town), you'll be fine. If not, you're probably in trouble. And a meaningful chunk of people 55 and older still have no retirement savings and no pension to draw from at all.

The picture for our millennials and Gen Z workers isn't much better — a stubborn share of them still aren't taking part in their employer-sponsored retirement plans, even now that auto-enrollment and target-date funds make opting in about as effortless as it has ever been.

Inherently we know there's a problem, and we understand that whether it's saving early for retirement or being disciplined in your diet leading up to competition, the key is to get after it early and often.

Taking care of these issues early means not having to be so hard on yourself down the road — and that lets stress take a back seat so you can focus on what matters.

Having a Support System in Place

One of the biggest contributors to calming my nerves on fight day was having someone to go along the journey with. When I first started competing I had no idea what I was doing.

I was completely green to cutting weight, so not only had I not started as early or as often as I should have, I was stressing about it and had no experience to pull from to get those last couple of pounds off. Luckily I always had a teammate to fall back on for experience, or at the very least another friend cutting alongside me.

Today's competitor has more support than ever. Between teammates, a coach, a YouTube tab open in the background and any of the big instructional libraries on BJJ Fanatics, the answers are out there if you're willing to chase them down. The part that doesn't change is that you still have to put the reps in. But you don't have to work it out alone.

In the realm of finance I've been lucky enough to work with not just the friends and families I share the mats with, but with dozens of high-net-worth clients here in Orange County. One of the key things I've found the wealthy do differently is that they ALL have a plan in place and they're not going along for the ride alone. They have a CPA, an estate planning attorney and a financial advisor who work together to take their finances to the next level.

Those are resources and systems of support that are available to you regardless of net worth.

Finding the Path of Least Resistance

Everyone's heard the phrase "buy low, sell high," right? It seems like such an easy concept to grasp. Why then, in times of financial stress like 2008, the early-2020 crash or the 2022 selloff, does everyone tend to do the exact opposite?

Because investors, left to their own devices, are inherently emotional in their decision-making. When the market plummets we see people losing 20%, 30%, sometimes 40% of their nest egg. Many had to hold off on retirement. Many were forced back to work. Many more were simply out of luck financially.

Their first mistake is what got them there. Poor decision-making in portfolio allocation meant that what they thought was their risk tolerance didn't match their true appetite for risk at all.

Their second mistake is what kept them there: they let their emotions get in the way of the elementary rule we talked about earlier — buy low, sell high. By selling low and buying high, many locked in their losses and made the road to recovery twice as long.

In a tournament, especially as a beginner, we fall victim to the same emotional mistakes and let our emotions take control of a match. Look around next time you're at a tournament. In the white belt division you can often pick the winner before they even shake hands — not by how big or strong they are, but by how they carry themselves when they step on the mat.

Everyone walking out there has a heavy load of nerves (especially in the beginning). But it's the ability to channel that fear, to put that nervous energy to work, that ultimately decides the match.

How Has BJJ Competition Changed Your Life?

Every day we step on the mat and grind ourselves through the meat grinder, we're met with obstacles and life lessons that end up going far beyond Jiu Jitsu. We call this the BJJ lifestyle, don't we?

This lifestyle fosters healthy eating and exercise. It shapes how we treat our friends and family. The long-term effects of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu mould us into better friends, parents and mentors. Don't forget to let the lifestyle take you to the next level financially too. See you on the mats!

Originally published in Jiu Jitsu Style by Brearin Land. Refreshed for 2026.