The Nunchucks I Never Mention at the Gym

Nobody at any gym I’ve trained at knows I do this.

Not out of strategy. It just never comes up, and I’ve never volunteered it, because “I swing nunchucks in my garage” is a sentence that changes how a room looks at you. So it stays in the garage. It has stayed in the garage for years now.

But it’s probably the single most useful thing I do off the mat, and since this site is supposed to be an honest account of what an adult onset looks like, leaving it out started to feel like a lie of omission.

I didn’t start for jiu-jitsu

I started because I bought a pair for my son.

He seemed like the kind of kid who’d love them, and I was right — for about a month. Then he got bored the way kids get bored with everything, and the training pair ended up in the corner of the garage. Over a few weeks it quietly became mine. There was no plan in it. They were just there, and I was on hold on a lot of conference calls.

What I didn’t expect was what it did for my hands.

I’ve spent my working life on a keyboard. Calls all day, code and documents at night, an airport in between. The bill for that arrives in your hands and forearms in your thirties, quietly, and it doesn’t present as an injury. It presents as your hands feeling like someone else’s when you wake up. Stiffness that takes an hour to shake. That specific ache along the outside of the forearm that shows up after a long day and doesn’t fully leave.

I want to be honest about the timeline, because “picked up nunchucks, hands felt better” makes it sound like a weekend. It took months of consistent practice before I was any good, and the early stretch was mostly hitting myself. I’m into my third year now. That’s the part that never makes it into the before-and-after.

The nice footnote: my son came back to it. Not when I handed them to him — when he watched his dad get genuinely decent at something. Turns out that was the better sales pitch. It started as mine by accident and it’s slowly becoming ours.

What it actually did

Here’s my honest read, years in, and I want to be careful because it’s easy to turn a personal habit into a health claim it can’t support.

My hands feel better on the weeks I swing than the weeks I don’t. I can’t prove that’s causal. I’m one person with no control group, and plenty of other things in my life change week to week. What I can say is the pattern has held long enough that I stopped questioning it.

My working theory is that it’s about rotation. A keyboard holds your wrists in one static, slightly-flexed shape for eight or ten hours. Nunchaku practice drags the wrist through its entire range, in both directions, hundreds of times, under a light moving load. It’s the precise opposite posture. Whether that’s “helping arthritis” in any clinical sense, I genuinely don’t know — but it’s movement, in the joints that need it, on the days I’d otherwise not move them at all.

If you have actual diagnosed arthritis, please go ask a hand therapist rather than a white belt with a blog. Adding repetitive impact to an inflamed joint is a thing you want a professional opinion on, not a thing you want to copy from someone’s journal.

Where it shows up in a roll

This part I’m more confident about, because it’s measurable in a very unglamorous way: my hands don’t quit as early as they used to.

Grip is the thing that fails first when you’re rolling with somebody much bigger than you. You’re holding a sleeve, a collar, a wrist, and around minute four your forearms turn to concrete and your hands simply stop closing. Everything you know how to do stops working, because all of it starts with holding on.

Swinging a weighted object through constant grip changes is grip endurance training that doesn’t feel like grip endurance training. You’re not counting reps on a gripper. You’re catching, releasing, re-catching, adjusting — for twenty minutes, without noticing, because it’s more interesting than a gripper will ever be.

I don’t have to take my own word for it, either. It’s the single most common thing anyone says to me at a new gym, some version of you’ve got a really strong grip — from people who have no idea why, because I’ve never told them. My favourite came from a guy whose first language isn’t English, sitting up after a round and getting his breath back between words: strong hands. Two words. I’ve thought about them more than any other compliment I’ve been paid on a mat.

The second thing is timing. The chuck comes back whether or not you’re ready for it, and reading a moving object and meeting it in the right place is not a million miles from catching a grip mid-scramble. I don’t want to oversell that one. But when I’m inventing frames because everyone outweighs me, the hand that arrives on time is doing a lot of the work.

Why I don’t talk about it

Two reasons, and only one of them is respectable.

The respectable one: it sounds absurd. Walk into a serious room, mention nunchucks, and you’ve spent credibility you didn’t have to spare. White belts don’t have much credit in the bank.

The other one: a late starter accumulates very few advantages. You’re outgunned on athleticism, on mat time, on recovery, on everything that matters. So when you stumble into something that quietly works, you get a bit protective of it. Nobody’s coaching it, nobody’s critiquing it, nobody has opinions about my form. It’s mine.

That’s not a strategy. It’s closer to superstition. But it’s the truth, and the truth is what this site is for.

The part I have to say out loud

I’ve made these available to buy, which means I now have an obligation I didn’t have when this was just a private habit.

Do not start on hardwood. I hit myself constantly for the first year. The strike is never the problem — it’s the return, coming back at your elbow or the back of your own head while you’re admiring the strike. On foam that’s a laugh. On dense wood it’s a night with an ice pack, and occasionally it’s a tooth, which is a subject I already have opinions about.

Learn on foam. Wear eye protection. Train outside or in a garage with real space around you, not in a room with a lamp and a person in it. Move to wood when your returns are boring.

I’m forty, I sit at a computer for a living, and my hands work better now than they did three years ago, before my son got bored and left a pair of nunchucks in my garage. That’s the whole pitch. It took months before I was any good, and I bruised most of my forearm getting there.

Still in the garage. Still not bringing it up at the gym.