Every BJJ practitioner has the same fantasy at some point. You’re looking at the map, you see a cluster of academies in a state you’ve never trained in, and you start thinking: what if I just drove through and hit all of them?
Maybe it’s a long weekend down the Florida coast. Maybe it’s a week-long swing through Texas. Maybe you’re already planning a family vacation and you’re quietly figuring out how to sneak in three gym visits without anyone noticing. Whatever the version, the BJJ road trip is one of the best experiences this sport has to offer. Walking into a gym where nobody knows you, shaking hands with the coach, and getting thrown into a room full of strangers who all want to test their game against someone new. There’s nothing else like it.
BJJ Recon has a built-in road trip planner designed to make that whole process painless.
Build Your Route, Stop by Stop
You can create up to two named road trips at a time. Each trip is its own route with its own list of stops. Want to plan a Florida Coast run and a Texas Triangle at the same time? Name them, build them separately, and switch between them with a tab at the top.
Adding stops is straightforward. Browse the map, find a gym you want to visit, and add it to your trip. As you add stops, they stack up in order on your route list. The route builds itself as you go, so you can see the shape of your trip forming in real time.
Drag to Reorder
Here’s where it gets practical. Once you have your stops loaded in, you can drag them to reorder the route. Maybe you added gyms in the order you found them, but the actual driving route makes more sense in a different sequence. Grab a stop, drag it up or down, and the route adjusts. No need to delete and re-add anything.
This is the kind of detail that matters when you’re planning a real road trip and not just daydreaming. The difference between hitting gyms in the right order versus backtracking three hours because your route zigzags across the state is the difference between a great trip and an exhausting one.
Set Your Starting Point
Every road trip starts somewhere. You can set your starting point by searching any city or address using the built-in geocoder, or you can use your home gym or home address if you’ve set one in your profile. The route calculates from there, so your first stop is always relative to where you’re actually starting.
This also makes the planner useful for people who aren’t doing a classic road trip. If you’re traveling for work and you want to find the three closest gyms to your hotel, set the hotel address as your start point, add the gyms, and you’ve got a mini-route for training between meetings.
Open in Apple Maps or Google Maps
Once your route is set, you can open it directly in Apple Maps or Google Maps with one tap. The stops transfer over with the correct sequence, so you get turn-by-turn navigation from stop to stop without re-entering anything. This was a feature we were adamant about including because nobody wants to manually type gym addresses into a navigation app when the data is already sitting right there in the planner.
On iPhone, Apple Maps opens natively. On Android, Google Maps handles it. Either way, you go from planning to driving without friction.
Share Your Trip with Training Partners
Road trips are better with a crew. Once you’ve built a route, you can share it via URL with your training partners. They get a view of your planned stops in order, and if they have BJJ Recon accounts, they can see the gym details for each stop along the way.
This is especially useful for group road trips. One person builds the route, shares the link, and everyone has the same plan. No group chat debates about which gym to hit first. No confusion about the order of stops. Just one shared route that everyone follows.
Bucket List Integration
The road trip planner connects naturally with BJJ Recon’s bucket list feature. If you’ve been saving gyms to your bucket list as you browse the map, those saved gyms become obvious candidates for road trip stops. You can think of the bucket list as your “someday” list and the road trip planner as the tool that turns “someday” into “next weekend.”
Over time, as you visit gyms on your bucket list and check them off, you build a travel history that’s uniquely yours. Some people collect pins on a corkboard map. This is the digital version of that, except it also tracks your check-ins and training sessions at each stop.
The Fly Feature
Not every gym visit requires a car. If you’re looking at an academy across the country and driving isn’t practical, the Fly feature on BJJ Recon lets you search for flights. Enter your origin city, and it hands off to Google Flights with the destination pre-populated based on the gym’s location. It’s a shortcut for the practitioners who think of training as a legitimate reason to book airfare.
This feature lives on individual gym info cards and in the sidebar. If you’ve ever found yourself on Google Flights at midnight pricing out a trip to San Diego because you heard the training there is unreal, the Fly feature just cuts out a few steps.
The Road Trip Mindset
Here’s the thing about training at different gyms: it makes you better in ways that training at one gym simply cannot. Every academy has its own style, its own culture, its own approach to jiu jitsu. The gym in Austin might have killers from the top. The school in Portland might have the most creative guard players you’ve ever rolled with. The academy in Miami might humble you from positions you thought you owned.
That diversity of experience accelerates your growth because it forces you to adapt in real time. You can’t rely on your usual setups when nobody plays the game you’re used to. And when you come home from a road trip and get back to your regular training, you bring all of those experiences with you.
Start planning your next BJJ road trip on BJJ Recon. The features page has a full overview of the planner, and the how-to guide walks you through building your first route.
The gyms are out there waiting. Go find them.
