Daily Inspiration: Meet Jerry Liu

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jerry Liu

Hi Jerry, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
In 2012, I got back into martial arts after a long break. Martial arts had been a big part of my life since age 5, but I got injured when I was 11. The injury consistently bothered me for a few years, and it lead to me taking a break from training in high school and college. I felt something was missing during those years, but I couldn’t pinpoint the reason. In 2012 when I restarted my martial arts journey, I realized that I wanted to be a lifelong martial artist and somehow create a career doing it. Being a “YouTuber” was an emerging career at the time, and I had this idea that one day I could create a YouTube channel on this journey to explore all the martial arts that I wanted to explore. It took me four years to commit to this idea, and what finally got me to start the channel was when I moved to LA in 2015 and saw how many successful YouTubers there were. In 2016, I created Fight Commentary Breakdowns.

I called the channel this name because the word “commentary” felt a little more casual, and the word “breakdowns” felt more in-depth. Therefore, the name implied that sometimes we’d be more casual and funny, and sometimes we’d be more technical. The goal of the channel besides exploring martial arts was also to be a place for anyone who needed encouragement in their martial arts journey. Whether one just needed some new ideas, wanted to question old assumptions, or just needed a lighthearted laugh after a long day, Fight Commentary Breakdowns would be a place to go. At this point, The more I explored martial arts on the channel, the more I wanted to train more. After all, how could I be a good commentator or analyst on martial arts if I wasn’t constantly learning, improving, and challenging my own assumptions? In 2018, I was able to make enough money to quit my full-time job and commit to being a “full-time” YouTuber. I’ve been a “professional YouTuber” since 2018.

The life of a professional YouTuber is a lot like the life of a martial artist. There’s constant ups and downs, and you need to take breaks often. However, you stay on the path because you see yourself growing mentally (and you pick up a few cool tricks in the process). One of the biggest positives that came from this career path was that I discovered the right physical therapy and workout regimens to fix lingering imbalances in my body. In fact, that issue in my body that caused me to take a break from martial arts as a teen was finally fixed in 2020. As of this interview, Fight Commentary Breakdowns is at 208,000 subscribers on YouTube. I always tell people this: your body is so powerful if you give it the right input to be powerful. Everyone should learn some martial arts too. It really helps the mind and the body.

In late 2023, something felt like it was missing again, and I realized that this was the same feeling that was nagging me more than ten years ago that got me to restart my martial arts journey. Through some soul searching, I got inspired by a childhood friend who was a chess prodigy. I realized that I’ve had an interest in chess since I was 10, but I never pursued that interest because I didn’t think I was smart enough. However, in November of 2023, I realized that I wanted to challenge this limiting belief, so it was time to grow the mind again. I started studying chess to the point where sometimes my martial arts channel was taking a backseat. It paid off in the summer of 2024 when I finally beat my chess prodigy friend in chess for the first time ever. I also won a game against a self-proclaimed chess coach on the Third Street Promenade after he insisted he wanted to charge me money to coach me. I declined his offer after our game. Oftentimes, I start my mornings now studying chess or xiangqi (Chinese chess).

My life is at a cross roads right now, and I think the answer is to fuse the two interests. I know quite a lot of martial artists play chess because the skills transfer over not just to martial arts but to many aspects of life. Think about how much tactical thinking and the ability to look at problems from many different angles could help in many situations. Knowing that many martial artists play chess or could get interested in chess, how could these two interest fuse? That’s where I am now in my story. There has been certain sports that have tried to combine chess and fighting (search up Chessboxing for those of you interested). However, I know there’s something more that can be done, and the inspiration will come to me one of these days. As my favorite singer Frank Sinatra sang: the best is yet to come!

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
There have been physical and mental obstacles in my journey. The physical obstacles come from injuries. A persistent glute issue stopped my martial arts journey in high school. And then when I got back into martial arts, there were some more injuries along the way. The most major physical obstacle these last five years was a neck injury in the summer of 2019. My neck throbbed and hurt every waking moment for almost eight months afterwards. In fact, when the 2020 pandemic happened, everyone’s fears were on my back-burner because my primary goal was to get my neck healed and strong. Thankfully, 2020 was also the year that a lot of things went right. I found the right physical therapist who helped me strengthen my neck. Then he helped me strengthen my glutes and knees. So through a lot of strengthening, I was able to spar and take punches to the face again in the fall of 2020.

The other big obstacle was something mental that started happening in 2023. One day when crossing the street, I suddenly felt like fainting. And that was the start of anxiety that I’m still dealing with. It got so bad that certain days I couldn’t even walk outside or cross busy streets. Though debilitating for a few months, this was a blessing in disguise because I chose to start therapy to work through my problems. I also took a step back to look at what I was doing and what I could be missing in my life. That’s how I reconnected with some childhood friends, including the chess prodigy that got me into chess. I still don’t exactly know why the anxiety started, but I suspect it had to do with the 2020-2022 pandemic lockdown in the LA area. Whereas most people seemed to have forgotten it happened, I think my mind is still traumatized from it, and I just buried it through a lot of body strengthening and martial arts training. Likely I buried it until my mind couldn’t bury it anymore. So this is also a great place to tell people to pay attention to their mental health. Just like a physical injury, mental stuff happens and can be overcome with the right attitude, prompt action, and the right education.

A lot of my happiness is tied to how healthy my body is, and I’m slowly working through this limiting belief. There’s a lot more in life to find fulfillment. This is a thought pattern that I’m still overcoming.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I run more than 10 YouTube channels, but the one channel that supports me financially is Fight Commentary Breakdowns. Making money from YouTube (or any social media platform for that matter) is not easy. You’re constantly trying to figure out what your viewers want. On top of that, the YouTube platform changes their notorious “algorithm” constantly, so you never can expect your viewership to be constant. However, I’m very proud of the fact that my channel has always bounced back every time I saw a downturn in income or views. Fight Commentary Breakdowns is on year eight and still going strong! I am also more than willing to share the lessons from being a social media person. People who have followed my advice (including my roommate) have reached millions of people through their content.

Any big plans?
Besides continuing my martial arts training and working on my YouTube channels, I also signed up for my first chess tournament in August. Whether I enjoy this tournament or not and decide to do more, I know that the prep for it will drastically improve my chess playing. It will also help improve my martial arts because one of my challenges when sparring in martial arts is exactly the same challenge when I play chess: I don’t attack enough. So by learning to strategically attack more in chess, it should help my mentality in sparring too. On top of this, I already see my memory improving from these past months of chess study. I’m slowly building a YouTube channel on my chess journey too.

From the things I do and enjoy, it seems like “pattern recognition” is the phrase to describe what I love. So I plan to continue exploring ways to apply this love of pattern recognition into more hobbies and careers.

The other big plan I have is to improve the relationship I have with my body. I have been recovering from a hurt wrist at the point of this interview, and the doctor says it’s going to take at least 2 more months to recover. I realized through this current ordeal that my mental state is overly dependent on how functional my body feels at any moment. I need to continue therapy to understand how I can build more mental resiliency when my body isn’t 100%. As we know, accidents sometimes do happen. So continuing to identify, reprocess, and replace some negative cognitions with positive ones will be something I work on mentally for a long time.

Contact Info:

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