BJJ and Wash Day - How Laundry Is your New Hobby

First things first - you must wash your gear every single time you use it. “I didn’t sweat that much” is no longer a valid statement about your new athletic endeavor.

This article will cover:

• Don't be that person
• Take the extra step and sanitize
• Getting rid of the funk

Don't be that person

The very nature of BJJ puts most of us physically closer to relative strangers than we’ve been with our own friends and family members. The submissions and chokes we practice are literally successful due to the lack of space between us and our opponents.

It’s bad enough to get choked or have a limb tweaked the wrong direction. It’s a war crime if the person doing it to you smells like rotted food, mildew, or fermented sweat.

Even worse, you may actually make yourself or your gym partners sick if you don’t come with clean clothes. Staph infections are both common and endemic to dirty clothes, and any open wounds on your body or your partners may pick it up during a roll.

So, it is imperative that you wash any gym clothes you use before you wear them to the academy again. It’s not just a courtesy and respect thing, although that’s part of it.

If you need a more self-serving reason, refusing to wash your gym gear is a very effective way to have a smaller pool of people willing to train with you. Once you get labeled as a stinker, it’s a hard thing to walk back - even if people don’t gossip about it behind your back (and they will).

Pretty soon, you’ll find that it’s difficult to get anyone to slap and bump with you. Ironically enough, even the other people who are considered odorous may decline to train with you.

Take the extra step and sanitize

Because there is a bacterial concern, it is highly recommended that you add an extra ingredient to the wash when you clean your gym gear. Clorox, distilled white vinegar, other detergent brands, and your supermarket’s generic product lines usually sell a laundry sanitizer that you merely add to your washer’s fabric softener inlet.

Then, you wash your clothes as usual. The sanitizer not only kills any bacteria or other nasties growing on your gear, but makes your clothes smell much better.

It’s not the worst thing if you use sanitizer for every load you do, gym gear or not. However, with so many sanitation issues at play when you train BJJ, it’s a near-must for ensuring that you aren’t becoming more known for your aroma than for your moveset.

Getting rid of the funk

Does your rash guard smell fine right out of the dryer but as soon as you start to sweat in it everyone avoids you? Did you forget your wet gi in the trunk of your car after a training session? Let's go over a simple way to get rid of foul odors in your training gear once its too late.

1. Pickup some distilled white vinegar and a 5 gallon bucket from the store.
2. Put the stinky clothes in the bucket
3. Fill the bucket with a 1:4 ratio of vinegar and water until the clothes are submerged
4. Let the clothes soak in this solution for a few hours and throw them in the wash

It's that easy and by the end of this process you should have training clothes that smell as good as new.