Finding Your Way Back to the Thinking Brain

Heidi Garwood started jiu-jitsu in rural Montana after watching her daughter train. A doctor's wake-up call pushed her onto the mat herself: what she was doing was not enough, and if she wanted to see her daughters grow up, she needed to do more. Training as a busy mom came with its own lessons (“Mom, it's not that easy”), and she spent a full year in women's-only classes before she rolled with men. By blue belt, quitting had become impossible.

Her day job is clinical social work in the trauma field, and it shapes how she teaches. She explains the brain in three parts — thinking, emotional, and survival — and how fast a roll can drag you from the first to the last. If you've trained for more than a week, she says, you know that in five minutes your brain can go from thinking to survival; the mats teach you to work your way back. She shares the breath and grounding tools she borrows from her trauma work, the idea of educated instincts, and the difference between interoception and exteroception.

She moved to Las Vegas in 2019 and built Carlson Gracie Green Valley around women and kids. When her husband told her a gym like that wouldn't be sustainable, her answer was “watch me.” She also talks about competition — including having to beat her own sister in Boise — and a match she'll never forget: a quiet, controlled loss to Roxanne Modafferi at Master's Worlds, which showed her the difference between elegant and frantic jiu-jitsu.

The most personal part of the conversation is her oldest daughter, who started training at seven and is now the gym's head instructor. The person she is today, Heidi says, she would never have become without jiu-jitsu. The episode closes on stones in a pond — the way one person's practice ripples outward — with a word from Pedro Sauer.