Rolling Through Life
Rodrigo Freitas and His Passion for Jiu-Jitsu
“[Jiu-jitsu] helped me to learn about myself. It helps you accept your weaknesses. But at the same time, it helps you understand all the good things you have. I always tell people it’s like therapy.” — Rodrigo Freitas
His day begins with the shrill sound of a 5 a.m. alarm. Within minutes, Rodrigo Freitas is hustling out the door and into his car for the nearly 90-minute commute from Anaheim to Northridge. But something is fueling him to face the daunting hour and long journey with vigor.
Jiu-jitsu.
As soon as Freitas steps onto the mat and begins training with the jiu-jitsu black belt competition team on this typical morning, any lingering frustration about Los Angeles traffic melts away. And then he’s right into the routine — a blend of technique drills, live-action training, and tough sparring.
It’s about 9 a.m., and he’s already drained. “This is just the best,” he thinks to himself as he piles up in his car with several of the other black belts to try and get a quick half hour of rest before their next training session. Then that one begins, and he’s drained again.
After showering and eating as much as he can — it’s tough to maintain weight as a high-level athlete — he’s in the car for another traffic-laden journey to Manhattan Beach. This one is a little over an hour on a good day.
After arriving, his other self comes out — teacher, coach, mentor. His afternoons and evenings are packed with training others. Kids first, then adults — with yes, another training session of his own mixed in. He loves what is referred to in the sport as the “jiu-jitsu lifestyle” — a philosophy of continuous improvement, discipline, and respect that influences all areas of one’s life. And he loves helping to instill this love in others as well.
By 8:30 p.m., especially after a whirlwind like that, most would call it a day. But not Freitas. He caps off his evenings with a private lesson that stretches until 10 p.m. or later. The next day, he’ll wake up and do it all over again — except maybe this time he’ll squeeze in a CrossFit training minutes after waking up. He needs to keep his whole body strong after all.
“That was insane,” he says, reflecting on the time in his life when a day like that was his norm. This relentless schedule was the backbone of Freitas’s life during his peak competitive years as a jiu-jitsu athlete and teacher. “I look back, and I’m like, ‘Oh my God.’ There were some days that I would have a severe fever before I went to sleep! But I would wake up and be fine.”
Known for his killer open guard — and this characteristic consistency — Freitas is a legendary jiu-jitsu athlete, one of the top competitors of his generation with gold medals from prestigious championships like the No Gi Pan American Championship and the American Nationals. He’s reached the podium on the national and international stage — meaning he’s medaled in either first, second, or third place — dozens of times.
And aside from his own athletic achievements, he’s also known for changing lives as a coach and mentor.Together with his wife, Michele, he teaches up-and-coming jiu-jitsu practitioners at Rodrigo Freitas Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu in Manhattan Beach, California.
But more than all that, he is passionate — standing out for this quality in a sport already known for the intensive enthusiasm of its participants.
I first met him through my own jiu-jitsu coach, Jason Hunt — the head of Meraki Jiu Jitsu and Freitas’s long-time training partner. Hunt told me that Freitas was one of the most dedicated and passionate jiu-jitsu practitioners he knows, which I knew he wasn’t saying lightly.
“I’ve been training jiu-jitsu for almost thirty years,” Freitas shared during one of our early conversations after the competition class I regularly attend on Friday mornings at his academy. “And I still love it.”
***
In Freitas’s story, we are reminded that passion has the power not only to inspire and energize, but also to help us to overcome and persevere in the face of our struggles.
Like his challenge during his childhood in Brazil — hyperactivity.
“I just couldn’t sit still as a kid,” he tells me when we sit down after competition class. “I always wanted to move around. I was very hyped up.”
Kicked out of his school for the resulting behavior over and over again, Freitas’s parents tried everything — therapy, art classes, sports, and beyond.
But it wasn’t until martial arts entered the picture — which his mom had heard was an ideal outlet for kids with boundless energy and a penchant for mischief and which he seemed to naturally resonate with at some level — that things finally started to shift.
Freitas grew up watching movies with martial arts legends such as Jean-Claude Van Damme, Jackie Chan, and Bruce Lee, which fueled his dream of being a fighter himself. He tried judo but found it too constrained. Then he tried kung fu and karate for a while. But nothing fully clicked until he was watching a UFC match with his father when around age 13. He and his father were spellbound as renowned but compact jiu-jitsu fighter Royce Gracie defeated opponents far bigger and stronger.
“Man,” Freitas remembers thinking to himself, “he choked that big guy!’”
Inspired by Gracie’s victories, especially as a skinny kid growing up in an area notorious for bullying, he wanted to try it out himself.
He lucked out. The Freitas family soon discovered there was an academy just three blocks from their home in Belo Horizonte, a vibrant city surrounded by mountains in the southeastern region of Brazil. It only took one trial class with his first and only coach, Aldo Januário, for him to fall in love.
“Judo was very disciplined, like, ‘Hey, you cannot talk, you cannot do this,’” he says. “But with jiu-jitsu, we do the technique, we laugh, we’re always kind of playing. It was fun.”
But it wasn’t easy. Freitas would often find himself in a position where he had to acknowledge defeat to prevent injury — known as being submitted — several times in a single five-minute roll. Sometimes, he would go home crying.
At the time, he couldn’t fully comprehend that the reason he was having a hard time was because he was new in a sport and training with adults who were stronger and more experienced than him — he just knew he kept getting beat (or in jiu-jitsu terms, smashed).
Still, he kept going back. His passion for jiu-jitsu was stronger than any difficulty he faced at the gym. He loved the training, the community, and the growing sense of confidence that it was giving him. He trained nearly every day for the next five years.
Still, it was a hobby, at least by his standards — he remembers, for example, enjoying his social life a bit too much during this period. At 14, he already had a fake ID. “I was going to parties… trying to date girls” — until, that is, he got his brown belt in his sixth year of training. That’s no small feat; it’s the final belt before the coveted black.
“If I want to do this for real, I gotta step up. I really have to take it super serious,’” he remembers thinking at the time.
Specifically, he realized — around the time he met his future wife Michele, who was “way more mature” than him (“on another level,” he adds for good measure) — that he didn’t like what the “halfway jiu-jitsu and halfway school” way of living. He wanted to go all in.
As part of On Fire, there has been one throughline: passion. But sometimes, that has come in the form of hobbies or amateur pursuits. In the case of Freitas, we see that, sometimes to realize the potential of what you love, you need to make it a profession. To take the leap. Freitas was already obsessively consistent. But he hadn’t yet made the choice that would change everything: to make jiu-jitsu his career, not only calling.
His parents were skeptical.
“How are you going to survive? How are you going to make money?” they asked him. But his attitude was different: ‘Man, how can I not make money with this? It’s so good.”
He would find a way.
***
Freitas stepped up his training while also competing as much as he could — and, soon, he was becoming known for his killer open guard. By the time his coach, known as “Caveirinha” (which translates to “little skull” in English), awarded Freitas his black belt, Freitas’s love and dedication to the sport and jiu-jitsu lifestyle was undeniable.
That reputation led to an invitation soon to teach seminars in Europe, an achievement that firmly validated his decision — it provided a crucial source of income.
So he kept taking risks. A few years later, Freitas moved from Brazil to the United States. He didn't speak English, had no job offer, and had nowhere to live.
Yet his faith in jiu-jitsu never faltered. It was this connection to a sport he loved that propelled him forward, turning obstacles into opportunities and skepticism into support.
“I was doing everything,” he says. “I was teaching, competing, being a referee, everything.”
He’s not exaggerating. Freitas is known as one of the most consistent and dedicated jiu-jitsu practitioners in the sport for a reason. While his days no longer revolve around him driving hours across Los Angeles (now 40, he has earned the right to have people come to him) —he now follows a more reasonable schedule of once-daily jiu-jitsu training sessions and twice-a-week lifting — he remains known across the sport for living his message.
He still competes regularly — and recently. Just yesterday, he brought home the gold in his division at the Los Angeles IBJJF Open while his teammates cheered him on.
Freitas has never let up in his almost three decades of training. “I feel good,” he says. And he never wants to. He says his goal is to be able to keep training this way into his sixties — and hopefully — beyond.
Of course, even the most passionate among us still have days when we don’t want to do the thing we love.
“There are days when I’m burned out,” he says when I ask him if he’s ever fallen out of love with jiu-jitsu. “There are days when I don’t want to do it.”
That’s when the discipline comes in — a principle that, in spite of his early pushback of it, Freitas doesn’t just practice but embodies. He understands that his rigorous routine is not just about him. It’s a path he carves not only for himself but to inspire everyone who is a part of his journey — his kids, his peers in the sport, and his students like me.
But what does he love most about jiu-jitsu — a sport that becomes a lifestyle for those who become passionate about it? What's his why?
“It helped me to learn about myself,” Freitas says. Then he pauses to take a deep breath and wipe a few tears from his eyes. “It helps you accept your weaknesses. But at the same time, it helps you understand all the good things you have. I always tell people it’s like therapy.”
I can second this. In the mere two years I’ve been training in the sport (I celebrated that milestone just last week!), I have grown so much — not only as an athlete, but also as a human being.
The sport has become the perfect arena for applying all the psychology concepts I study to real life in real time. I can’t imagine my life without it.
And then there’s the flow — that feeling we get when we’re performing at our best and all feels right with the world.
“The training days that I hit the floor and just turn it on and I’m able to flow… it’s the best,” he says. “Just the best.”
Takeaways
Here is one big thing I learned this week about passion, one exercise you can do to stoke your own inner fire, and one aspect of Freitas’s intense enthusiasm that rubbed off on me — and that I now want to learn more about, too!
One Lesson: The Reality of Halfway Commitments
Rodrigo Freitas's journey from jiu-jitsu hobbyist to world-class athlete and coach underscores a critical lesson: committing to our passion halfway can only get us so far. Not all of us can (or even want to) make our passion our career — but taking the leap to “go all in” like Freitas did is really the only way to see what our true potential is. Fully committing to our passions not only maximizes our growth but also opens doors to opportunities that might remain unreachable if we only engage halfway.One Exercise: Passion to Profession Reality Check
Consider a passion you're deeply invested in. For one week, approach this passion with the intensity and dedication of a full-time commitment. Document the challenges, the learning curves, and any moments of satisfaction or achievement. This exercise is not just about gauging your enjoyment but evaluating the practicality of transitioning your passion into a sustainable career.
One Curiosity: Open Guard
Freitas is known for his open guard, which is notoriously tough to pass (jiu-jitsu terminology for getting past the knees to secure points and reach a more dominant position). Every time I see him train, I’m inspired to work on my own open guard (versus closed guard, the technique I’ve mainly focused on so far in my jiu-jitsu training).