OK guys, I really need some advice here. I've wanted to learn some BJJ for quite a while. I'm definitely not an aspiring competitor, and just thought it would be interesting to learn a bit of BJJ and maybe improve my fitness and have a bit of fun along the way. Also I'm pretty small and kind of a wimp, and work all day in a busy office. Anyway as luck would have it the town I'm currently living in has a couple of BJJ clubs. So I checked out 1 club, but everyone there was into no-gi competition and some of them were professional kickboxers etc, and people wanting to compete in professional MMA competitions, definitely not the sort of place I should be messing with. I checked out another place, and the instructor and the other students seemed friendlier although a lot of them were into competing mostly on an amateur basis and mostly more traditional BJJ competitions.
Not having much other choice I started training there, at first most people took it pretty easy since I had just started, and I enjoyed learning the techniques and doing some light rolling. But after a couple of months, a few of them decided I'd had it easy long enough and decided to go pretty full on during most of the drills and rolling. Since some of them are a lot heavier and a lot more skilled than me, and I ended up kind of bruised and battered. I didn't say anything, but maybe my facial expression caused some of them to give me a variation of a speech I heard years before while training at a judo club with lots of competitors. In other words "you learn BJJ by getting tapped", "if I take it easy on you I'm not doing you any favors", "you need to get used to this if you want to win in competition or on the street", "i'm not being tough on you ... just realistic".
Now there maybe some truth in what they are saying, and if you want to compete and win then maybe a certain amount of agression is need during training. But for me, I just work in an office, am not that young or athletic, and want to learn a bit of BJJ for fun and to get a bit of exercise after busting my ass all day at work. I don't want to compete, I don't expect to ever be able to kickass in a street fight, in fact I don't even have an expectation of gaining any belt-rank in jiu-jitsu.
So anyway now I feel demoralised and have lost any interest in training. Fortunately I haven't lost any money, as I was only paying a per lesson charge.
My question is this, and I promise you guys this is not a troll, is there a place for wimps to learn a bit of BJJ? Are all BJJ clubs full of competitors, aspiring professional MMA fighters, bouncers etc? Should I keep looking around or just forget about BJJ as the role of BJJ training is to weed out the pussies ?
The other thing I was thinking about is looking around and see if I can find an instructor or knowledgeable student who is willing to teach me some BJJ with a less tough style more oriented to what I'm interested in. What do you think?
What is the going rate for privates? I don't necessarily need to learn from a black-belt, in fact a good blue-belt could teach me plenty. So what do you think I should be prepared to pay if I want private lessons from a blue-belt compared to a black-belt?
Thanks for your help guys, I really appreciate any advice you can give me. I thought I could get something out of BJJ, but maybe the truth is, I'm just not cut out for this sort of thing.