For many women, the body exists as a project. We are taught early on that appearance is social currency, and maintaining value can become a labour-intensive ritual: booking nail appointments in advance, meticulously styling our hair and applying make-up every time we leave the house. The body, rather than being a vessel for experience and feeling, becomes something to be managed and presented. Then you walk into a Brazilian jiu-jitsu gym.

The grappling-based martial art has exploded in popularity in recent years. The number of clubs in the UK has increased by over 200 per cent in the last decade, while there’s been a 70 per cent surge in female practitioners, according to the State of BJJ Report 2025. In January, The Times called Brazilian jiu-jitsu “the hot workout for 2026.” 

For women, BJJ offers something increasingly rare: a space where function supersedes aesthetics. While other sports might have more space for moments of glamour (think luxury jewellery on tennis courts or gloriously manicured hands tearing past finish lines), combat sports require you to strip many of those conventions away. Make-up not only doesn’t survive a training session, but it could end up staining somebody else’s white gi, and competitors can be penalised for transferring cosmetics onto an opponent’s uniform. Long nails are equally impractical and need to be trimmed short to avoid scratching training partners. Avoiding disqualification thus quickly becomes a priority over beauty.

“I used to praise myself for being skinny and craved a thigh gap my body shape wouldn’t allow. Now I see what my legs do for me and what I can achieve with them. I actually relate to my body differently” – Kat

And it’s not just the regulations. In BJJ, features of the body that are punished under mainstream beauty ideals become your greatest weapons. “I was definitely preoccupied with how [my body] looked over how it functioned,” black belt and coach Vanessa English says about her mindset before she started training. “I was particularly insecure about my shoulders, arms and hands, and would often hide these parts of myself.” Many years and medals later – English was the first British-born competitor to win the IBJJF World Championships in the adult division – those same features are now her strengths. “Now I know my large hands give me better grip strength, my long arms wrap around necks easier, and my broad shoulders give me great upper body strength.”

Training requires women to take up space, apply force and get comfortable with physical contact. BJJ asks participants to use their strength, not apologise for it. For those socialised to be accommodating and non-threatening, these experiences can feel alien at first. For 28-year-old white belt Eman, it was a big switch. “Jiu-jitsu has really shifted my attention from what a body looks like to what it’s capable of,” she says. “With the focus being on skill rather than appearance, it’s made me appreciate and be super grateful to my body for allowing me to train.”

A similar shift happened for brown belt service designer Kat. Growing up, she struggled with body dysmorphia. “It was always about being thin,” she says. “I just took it as a fact that I needed to be thin and pretty and being those things would make life better.” On the mats, however, those thoughts gradually disappeared. “When you’re fighting someone there’s a million things that go through your mind, but none of them are, ‘Do I look fat right now?’” she says. “When I’m sparring, I have a job to do – protect myself, get them off balance, isolate their limbs, solve the problem. Thinking about your body is too abstract when you have so many other things that require immediate and all-consuming attention.”

For Kat, learning to value her body for what it could do transformed the way she understood it altogether. “I used to praise myself for being skinny and craved a thigh gap my body shape wouldn’t allow. Now I see what my legs do for me and what I can achieve with them. It’s given me a kind of love and appreciation for my body that I didn’t even know I wanted.” Crucially, she doesn’t see this as replacing one beauty ideal with another. “It’s not like I’ve just swapped one standard – skinny – for another – athletic,” she says. “I actually relate to my body differently. The muscles I have are a consequence of my hard work, not my goal.”

Eman shares this newfound emphasis on strength, saying that spending so much time in a martial arts gym has helped her unlearn the idea that women shouldn’t build muscle. “Most of my time now goes into getting stronger and embracing how capable that makes me feel. Who doesn’t love being able to take all the shopping inside on one trip?”

This reframing extends even to the scales. Outside the gym, conversations about weight are often avoided altogether or shrouded in shame. In the BJJ world, they’re merely part of the sport. “In the jiu-jitsu community it’s so normal to ask someone how much they weigh,” says English. “Weight is just a number that determines what division you’re in and points you towards people who’ll be good training partners for you.” That neutrality sets BJJ apart. Numbers on the scale offer context and community. They do not provoke mortification.

“I used to weigh myself in stones and pounds,” says Kat. “I have numbers in my head that are good numbers and numbers that are shameful numbers. But [now] I’m not interested in small; I’m interested in power.” 

Perhaps the clearest illustration of this came in the form of a dress she’d kept for years. Kat had held onto a red Karen Millen dress from university as “a stick to beat [herself] with”. Every time it wouldn’t fit, it reinforced the idea that she’d failed. Years later, after training and preparing for a competition, she tried it on again. It wouldn’t zip over her back. “Instead of feeling shame, I felt proud,” she says. “I laughed because I was too strong to wear that dress anymore.” She has since given the dress away. “That dream was no longer the dream.”