In Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, consistency isn’t just important—it’s everything. According to five-time world champion Bernardo Faria, the single biggest mistake a practitioner can make isn’t training with poor technique or skipping warm-ups. It’s something far more damaging: quitting for a few months.
Faria has witnessed this pattern repeatedly throughout his career. Students train consistently, make solid progress and then life happens. They step away for three months, six months, sometimes nine months or longer. What follows is almost always the same destructive cycle.
“When they come back, the motivation is not the same,”
Faria explains. The reason is simple but harsh: those training partners you were handling well before? Now they’re dominating you. That blue belt who you could control easily has improved while you’ve regressed. The psychological impact of this reversal can be crushing.
Beyond the ego hit, there’s a serious physical component to extended breaks. Your body loses its jiu-jitsu-specific conditioning—the mobility, the muscle memory, the reflexive movements that keep you safe on the mats. Faria points out that returning practitioners often feel stiff and struggle to move the way they once did. This awkwardness isn’t just frustrating; it’s risky.
“You get injured because now the body doesn’t know how to move as good,”
he warns. The loss of muscle mass, flexibility and mat awareness creates a perfect storm for injuries that could have been avoided with consistent training.
Faria’s advice is straightforward but powerful: never quit completely. If life gets busy with work or family obligations, adjust your frequency but maintain some presence on the mats. Can you only train once a week? Train once a week. Every other week? Make it work. Even once a month is better than disappearing entirely. The key is maintaining that thread of connection to the art.
“Try to be consistent on any frequency that you can, according to the time of the life that you’re living,”
Faria advises. This flexible approach acknowledges reality—life does get in the way—while preventing the complete breaks that cause so much damage.
Perhaps the most damaging effect of extended breaks is how they can derail your entire jiu-jitsu journey. Faria notes the frustration of practitioners who remain at purple belt for twelve years, not because they weren’t talented but because they stopped training for two years in the middle. The time lost compounds, affecting not just skill development but confidence and identity as a martial artist.
“Quitting is literally like the biggest mistake any jiu-jitsu practitioner can do in this journey,”
Faria states. His message comes from a place of understanding—he acknowledges that life gets complicated and priorities shift. But the solution isn’t to abandon jiu-jitsu temporarily; it’s to scale it appropriately.
Whether you’re training five times a week or once a month, the act of showing up maintains your connection to the art, preserves your physical conditioning and keeps your motivation alive. When your schedule opens up again, you’ll be ready to increase your frequency rather than starting over from scratch.
In the end, Faria’s two cents might be worth more than gold: keep going, no matter what. Your future self will thank you for it.
