Max Lindblad, a Swedish jiu-jitsu black belt, revealed that his unwavering commitment to jiu-jitsu cost him most of his friendships outside the sport as his peers couldn’t understand his priorities.
“My friends didn’t get it. They wanted to party and have fun, and I was just in training. So eventually I lost basically all of my friends,” Lindblad explained in appearance on Halpin’s podcast. “All the friends I have now are the ones I made through jiu-jitsu.”
The Stockholm-based athlete, who now runs his own gym with nearly 200 members, described how his journey began with a gut decision to drop out of chiropractor school to pursue jiu-jitsu full-time. Despite pushback from his parents, who weren’t happy about him “dropping school for a sport nobody ever heard about,” Lindblad followed his passion.
“Jiu-jitsu was the funniest thing I ever done and gave a sense of purpose to my life,” he said. Initially, he wasn’t focused on winning world medals but simply wanted to train. The competitive drive developed later after participating in local tournaments.
Lindblad noted that people outside the sport couldn’t distinguish between different levels of competition. “People outside the sport don’t realize any difference between having a medal from the Europeans or winning Scandinavian Open,” he said.
To support himself through his training years, Lindblad worked various jobs including bouncing, caring for elderly people, cleaning, and for the past six years, working at a juvenile prison—a job that, while mentally draining, offers him the flexibility to train five days a week.
Despite the sacrifices, Lindblad has no regrets. “If you want to have something, you need to sacrifice something else,” he reflected. “I had to sacrifice my friends to be able to do jiu-jitsu.”
Now running his own successful gym alongside his wife, Lindblad continues to compete at the black belt level while building what he hopes will become “the best team in the nationals.”
