MY RETURN HAS BEEN REQUESTED Audiobook

MY RETURN HAS BEEN REQUESTED

This is not a jiu-jitsu technique book.

This is not a story about chasing belts or winning medals.

This is a raw, honest memoir about what happens when life breaks your rhythm, your discipline, and your sense of self — and the mat becomes the one place where you can start putting the pieces back together.

Sheldon Howard writes about competition, injury, gym politics, betrayal, personal loss, anger, drift, and the brutal work of coming back after you have already quit.

He does not sugarcoat it. He does not pretend jiu-jitsu is magic. He shows what the mat teaches when life strips away the easy answers.

If you have ever stepped on the mat…

If you have ever walked away…

If you have ever wondered whether it is too late to return…

This book is for you.

The mat does not care why you left.

It only cares whether you are willing to come back.

Your return has been requested.

You will receive:

WAV audiobook file

File size: 442MB

Additional Props

I also want to give real credit to the online teachers and systems that helped me keep learning when I could not always be on the mat.

Jordan Teaches Jiu-Jitsu was the start. Jordan Preisinger helped me see jiu-jitsu as a system, not just a pile of moves. His teaching gave me a way to think through positions, decisions, and failure points.

Matt Arroyo was the bridge. His instruction helped connect the fundamentals to real pressure, especially the kind of pressure that actually works when someone is resisting.

Tristar Gym was the launch. Their online system helped me connect jiu-jitsu and MMA into a bigger picture: structure, pressure, control, and decision-making under stress.

To Roy Dean: thank you for showing what clean progression can look like. Your approach to testing, structure, movement, and rank helped me understand that belts should mean something. Not theater. Not attendance. Not politics. Evidence.

To Jon Thomas BJJ: thank you for the clarity. Your instruction, your online lab, and the way you break down positions gave me a cleaner way to study. Some teachers show moves. You explain the logic behind them.

To John Danaher: thank you for showing what it means to think deeply about the art. Your approach helped me see jiu-jitsu as a system of control, problem-solving, and layered decisions, not just techniques collected one at a time.

And one of my biggest props goes to Big OSS and Marcos Tinoco.

Big OSS made me laugh, understand, and sometimes damn near cry. That material helped me connect with jiu-jitsu in a way that felt human, technical, and alive. It is also where I found one of my favorite chokes: the Canto choke. I studied it, drilled it, carried it back to the mat, and started catching people with it all the way up to brown belt level.

Big OSS.

To Nicolas Gregoriades: thank you for helping me understand what a man is supposed to become through the art. The Black Belt Blueprint helped me stop waiting for the system to tell me who I was. At some point, you have to stop, breathe, pause, and become your own instructor.

I stopped waiting for permission. I stopped waiting for a belt to tell me I was allowed to think seriously, train seriously, and study seriously. Even when I was treated like a hobbyist, even when people thought I barely showed up, I was studying the art like it mattered. I was building my own standard.

That lesson stayed with me: the belt may recognize the work, but it does not create the work.

To Joe Rogan: thank you for the signal. Long before most people took jiu-jitsu seriously, you helped push it into public consciousness and exposed millions of people to the idea that martial arts, conversation, curiosity, and self-development could all exist in the same space.

A lot of people found the mat because of that signal.

I did too.

To the Gracie family and the original roots of Brazilian jiu-jitsu: thank you for preserving and spreading an art built around leverage, survival, adaptation, and control under pressure.

Whatever the politics, arguments, commercialization, or evolution that came later, the core idea survived: a smaller, weaker, or less physically dominant person could learn to survive through timing, structure, patience, and intelligent pressure.

That idea changed lives across the world.

It changed mine too.