Why Jiu-Jitsu Helps Trivium's Matt Heafy Look To The Future

Throughout seven albums Florida quartet Trivium have gradually transformed their audience from media darlings and metal pin-up boys to a broad cross-section of heavy music devotees. After spending many years honing instrumental prowess and establishing a profile, vocalist/guitarist Matt Heafy has revelled in building another craft from the ground up: Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

"It's really cool, it's a community kind of like metal," he gushes. "I've met a lot of people on the road that I've become close to, purely from training. It's been an amazing experience. I've been singing and playing guitar since I was about 13 years old, so I haven't really known what it is to have to learn something new and develop a skill in a short amount of time.

"What jiu-jitsu's done for me, as far as being in Trivium, is shown me what it is to create a regiment and practice schedule again."

"When I first started it was one of the most difficult things I've ever done. The first couple of months all I wanted to do was quit. I was always sore, it didn't make any sense to me. After seeing the proper amount of time it started to click, to make sense. It's my escape from everything and the only thing in life where my brain isn't going a million miles per hour. When I'm playing guitar and singing at a show, I can still be thinking about other things. But when I'm doing jiu-jitsu, nothing else is there. Which I really love."

He says the sport's extensive, multi-tiered belt system means there's always goals to strive for, akin to continually seeking to improve as a musician. "To be a great jiu-jitsu practitioner, there's absolutely no shortcuts. The only way you get good at it is putting in tonnes of work and time.

"What jiu-jitsu's done for me, as far as being in Trivium, is shown me what it is to create a regiment and practice schedule again. One of my favourite songs to sing, that I'm not going to sing publicly yet because there's still a lot of work to do, is For The Greater Good Of God by Iron Maiden. That's something I am committed to being able to sing perfectly. Not to be as good as Bruce [Dickinson], but to be able to sing it well. What jiu-jitsu's done for me is shown me that it is important to have goals... I think it's a positive/futile, but great way to live your life, to set impossibly high goals and work towards them."

This newfound outlook has likely enhanced Heafy's onstage stamina as they support latest release Silence In The Snow. He talks to The Music after a two-month US tour amid freezing conditions in long-untapped markets. The frontman doesn't wish to be so self-important as to suggest they've arrived in a major fashion, but believes their following is perpetually growing. "As the band gets bigger, you play more concentrated shows with more people coming out to specific shows, versus you playing scattered around. But the last US tour was more than what we used to do in the early days, because we decided to play a bunch of towns, cities and venues that we'd never played before. So it was kinda back to the basics of being a band again on the last run."