Hi ! Bobby here. I want to talk about the biggest BJJ Strength & Conditioning Mistakes, I have noticed.

As BJJ has grown in popularity, so has the number of coaches specializing in training athletes for BJJ.

Some things I see are great and other things have me scratching my head.

Long before I started training 6 days a week of BJJ. I spent my adult life, training and conditioning my body.

Not for anything specific but for general strength, muscle building, and endurance.

So, when I really got into BJJ, I had some advantages.

• Strong foundation of fitness and I seemed to pick up things rather quickly.
• Great endurance, never needing rounds off, and feeling 100% recovered in between most rounds at the gym.
• Could train 4-6x a week without much soreness.

As I got into it, I wanted to focus my training on BJJ-specific training.. I tried programs more BJJ specific.

But, these qualities, I just spoke off, seemed to get worse for me.

I realized BJJ is just like any other sport football, basketball , baseball etc.

The biggest benefit you will see……

Lies in your GPP (General Physical Preparedness). And if you have a base level, you’re going to perform well.

Actually, going to specific too much, ends up being overkill and may be ruining your performance .

Next, I’m going to talk bout GPP and how we can develop it.

BJJ Strength & Conditioning Mistakes

GPP Base

GPP is about laying the foundation of physical abilities, so you can perform at a high level.

We want to build a solid base of strength, endurance, mobility, and resiliency.

By doing this we can develop athletic ability, better recovery, and become resilient to injuries.

So we can train at a higher level for years to come.

As you see in this triangle, below. It is the foundation.

Without it, developing specific BJJ skills and staying in this sport.

Will be difficult.

It’s important that we start training, where we are and build the base from there.

What is important to work on with GPP are

• Learn or improve movement quality
• Get strong with the foundation movement patterns
• Build core strength
• Build aerobic fitness
• Address any mobility issues, that are detrimental to your ability to move properly

Start with exercises that you can do efficiently and keep the overall volume (sets and reps) low. Then build up from there.

This will help you get the most out of your training.

Next, I’ll talk about how specific drills you see online can be gimmicky and when to actually use specific training for BJJ

Specialty Exercise Gimmicks

Now I don’t want to say all these special exercises you see on places like Instagram and you tube are dumb.

But, a good amount of them might be overkill. And can be your biggest BJJ Strength & Conditioning Mistakes.

The exercises that are good, are advanced, meaning you really have no business doing them unless you have a high-level GPP.

Take a popular one, I have seen:the GI pull-up. Doing chin-ups or pull ups with your gi.

In theory, it seems like a good idea. But, anyone who has done GI for a while.

Knows how much gi training can mess up your fingers. This exercise will make it worse.

Since your finger and grip will get burned out way before your back and biceps do.

It really isn’t a great exercise.

There are certain exercises I see and tend to like.

These aren’t so much exercises mimicking BJJ, but exercises that address weak points.

A good example is Copenhagen side plank, a great specific exercise to strengthen the groin and the core.

Since your groin gets used often in BJJ, groin pulls are common in the sport.

This is a decent one. But, this is an advanced exercise and unless you have a solid base of strength, you’re not going to do it properly.

Again GPP comes first and should make up the bulk of your training

Defining Your Weakness

Strength and conditioning not just for BJJ, but for anything should be about turning your weakness.

Making them a strength, while maintaining the other qualities.

It is not about mimicking your sport in the gym.

First, you have to determine what your sport requires

For BJJ we need

Strength– We need to be strong enough so that are techniques are easier to pull off and we don’t get winded because we are so weak.

We also want to build strength and stability around our weakest joints. The joints that are constantly attacked and get hurt the most like the: shoulders, neck, knee and lower back

Conditioning – We need a mixture of both aerobic cardio(slow and steady ) and anaerobic cardio(explosive and fast but shorter induration). Aerobic is going to have more upsides. Most of BJJ is using a slower methodical pace. This is mostly the aerobic system. Your aerobic system also is in charge of your body’s ability to recover. So, from that standpoint aerobic training should be prioritized first over anaerobic training

Power Build power so you can dominate the scrambles and take down game. As well as be able to react quickly to the opportunities you see

Mobility You need to be able to have decent movements and mobility to pull off certain moves. Without mobility this might narrow the moves you can do. Plus, being too tight is going to make it all too easy to get banged up and hurt on the mats

I hope this helps you know why, it is important to build basic strength and conditioning principles. Doing so will help your performance on the mat as well as your longevity in the sport.

You started Jiu Jitsu and you love it. But, you feel like your fitness is your weakness. Today I will teach you How to Get in Shape for Jiu Jitsu .

There are 4 major qualities you want to develop, so that you can improve your fitness for Jiu Jitsu

• Power
• Strength
• Aerobic Fitness
• Mobility

How to Get in Shape for Jiu Jitsu

Power

The ability to produce force fast is what power is. Although, BJJ relies on great technique and tension-based moves. There are times when we are required to be explosive and have the ability to read a situation and react fast.

We want to develop power both in the upper and lower body.

Power is not about getting tired or fatigued.

But, producing as much force as possible . So, we keep that focus. We want our sets to be low reps, with sets of 3-8 and rest intervals of 30-60s.

Here are some of my favorite power exercise

• Box jumps
• Sled sprints
• KB Swings
• Plyo push ups
• MB slam and throw variations

• Dynamic effort deadlift and squats

I did a full article on developing power, you can check that out here

Strength

Strength is number 1 in my book. It’s going to have the biggest impact on your jiu-jitsu.

Injury prevention, better performance, and improved conditioning.

Getting strong is going to do a lot for your BJJ.

You want to get strong with decent technique on the 5 fundamental movement patterns

• squat
• Hip hinge aka deadlift
• upper push
• upper pull
• Single leg

Pick variations that don’t beat up your joints.

Train them heavy for reps of 3-12.

I like to start my day with lower rep lifts and towards the end of the workout I’ll do higher reps.

Do 1-4 hard sets per exercise and make sure you rest 60s to 2 minutes. Don’t turn this into circuit training or cardio.

The focus should be on building strength and muscle.

If you want a free strength workout, go here

Aerobic Fitness for Jiu Jitsu

Did you know aerobic fitness controls our ability to recover? So, without proper aerobic fitness:

• The quality of our rounds will go down or we will be forced to sit out
• We will not be able to train frequently for long periods of time.
• We might find ourselves getting beat up and constantly hurt.

Aerobic fitness gives us better endurance and pace.

But, on top of that, it helps us recover better. That helps us BJJ guys. In so many ways.

The most important one, is we can train frequently for years, without burning out.

The more mat time we have, the better we get it.

I wrote an article on aerobic fitness, you can find it here

But, here are the big points to improving it

• Keep your heart rate between 120-150 for 30-60 minutes 1-3x a week.
• Use cyclical exercise like bikes, jogging, elliptical, sled dragging etc
• Use exercise that won’t cause too much wear or tear on your joints.

Mobility

Mobility is important, if your hips and shoulders are too tight. Some moves are just going to be hard to pull off. Which will limit how skilled you can get.

Mobility is different from flexibility. Flexible is how much range of motion you have in certain a joint.

Mobility is how much control you have in that range of motion.

Think of someone who stretches your hamstring out by pushing your leg up, that is your flexibility.

If you try to lift your leg up as high as you can, that is your mobility.

We often get hurt when our limbs are taken to a spot where, we don’t have control.

Mobility that you’ll need the most in Jiu Jitsu are:

• Hip mobility –
• T-spine mobility
• Shoulder mobility

I hate mobility, so I try to put most of this stuff in my warm-up before I lift.

Also when you lift, working through a full range of motion, is going to help your mobility.

These are the 4 things you need to improve on.

Some of these may be in a solid place and some are your weakness.

Determine which one is your most glaring weakness and work on making a strength, while maintaining some of the other attributes.

Any questions on How to Get in Shape for Jiu Jitsu?

If you would like help with that, try this program

My Instagram for quick daily tips

Are you sick of gassing out during rounds and looking for the best BJJ Cardio Workouts to improve your gas tank?

Today, I’m going to give 3 cardio boosting workouts for BJJ.

A couple of months ago, I wrote about how to boost your BJJ cardio, but today I’m going to give you the specifics.

Take all the guesswork out.

If you like to see my original article, check it out here

BJJ Cardio Workouts

How many days of cardio, do you need?

How many days, you need will depend on a a few things.

The first thing is your current BJJ schedule. If you train 1-3 days(BJJ sessions) a week, you could fit 2-3 of these sessions in. I would prioritize the 2 aerobic sessions because they have more upsides. But, if you train BJJ 4-8 sessions per week. Doing 1 aerobic session per week is plenty for most guys.

The second, thing is your current fitness level.

A quick test to see, where you are at, is when you wake up. Measure your resting heart rate. Do this for a few days and take the average.

High 60s+- Your conditioning is something you really want to develop and it is vital to really spend the next 8-12 weeks, hitting 2-3 cardio sessions per week.

Low 60s – You are in a decent place from a cardio standpoint. Depending on how much BJJ you do.

I may do 1 cardio session a week. I would spend 4 weeks on each workout, before moving to the next workout for the following month.

Note, that if your Heart rate is low but your cardio on the mats, is horrible.

Consider a few things outside of the BJJ Cardio Workouts, to work on.

Your technique, your strength levels and your recovery habits.

Those are mostly likely bigger linchpins, than your actual conditioning. I go over these things in the article I posted above.

The last thing to consider, when deciding, how much cardio to do is your overall stress.

Stress is accumulative, relationship stress, lack of sleep, work stress etc…..

These can all limit your recovery ability if you feel your life is very stressful.

I would focus only on the aerobic session for 1-2 x a week. Doing more than that and/or the hard session will do more harm than good.

Aerobic session

This is going to be the foundation of good cardio and overall fitness.

The aerobic energy system, is the system we use and rely on most in our lives.

If you want to live a long and healthy life, you have to take care of your heart.

This training will help your heart be able to pump more oxygenated blood into the rest of your body per pump.

This gives you better endurance, faster recovery and makes sure your heart rate doesn’t go through the roof during training

These are moderate-intensity sessions, we are breathing a little heavier.

But, we should be able to talk normally.

Try to keep your heart rate between 120-150 beats per minute.

Your aerobic training workout

• Air Bike 25 Calories
• Rower 25 Calories
• Planks 30s
• Banded pull parts 20
• 20 minutes 0 rest

This is one way you can, do this style of training. There are a ton of other ways to do this as well.

Another idea is to jump on a machine and go for 30-60 minutes. Many people do this.

But, it is not my style.

The big thing to remember is to keep your heart rate in the proper zone and go for 30-60 minutes.

Aerobic StrongMan

This will develop your aerobic system just, like the last workout, but we are going to use heavy-loaded carries and sled/prowler work to build that energy system.

This will also help build muscular endurance and give you more capacity to hold position/submission for longer, without your muscles getting burned out.

The Workout

• Famer Walk 100 feet as heavy as you can
• Backward sled drag 100 feet
• Forward sled drag 100 feet
• Rest 2 minutes 6 Rounds

These are some of the funnest conditioning workouts to do.

Hard conditioning Day

This is the type of training everyone goes to first but without a good aerobic base and a decent level of strength.

You won’t be able to do it properly and it won’t be effective.

Without strength, you can’t go as hard as you need to for this style of workout.

Without the aerobic base, you won’t be able to do enough quality reps, for it to cause many changes.

These are simple :

Go as hard as you can 5-15 sec with 60- 90 sec of active recovery. 6-12 total rounds.

My favorite exercises to these with are

• Prowler sprints
• Rope Slams
• Air Bike
• KB Swings
• Hill Sprints

The key with these is going as hard as you can.

Followed by enough recovery, so that you can repeat these high efforts.

Without enough intensity, you will not develop the power and explosive burst you need to dominate the scrambles.

But, without proper rest, you will not be able to have high-intensity sets and half your reps will be poor quality.

Don’t think you are doing yourself any favors by resting too little.

These BJJ Cardio Workouts are great for building a huge gas tank. But, will help you recover better, so you can train more frequently and for years to come.

Any question?

Training upper body with bad shoulders , can be done with a few tweaks.

Today, I’m going to go over some tweaks to your training to help you make gains in the upper body, without banging up your shoulders.

Shoulder Function: Training Upper Body With Bad Shoulders

Our joints work a certain way, and when they can no longer do so, they become dysfunctional, and this is when we have problems.

If you look at the shoulder joint, it is a ball and socket joint. That is created by 3 bone structures. Your:

• Collar bone
• humerus (Arm)
• Scapula (shoulder blades)
• T-spine/ ribs (upper back)

The first three create a ball and socket joint. The T-spine or upper back is where your shoulder blade has to move around in order for your shoulder to function. Technically, the T-spine is not part of the shoulder joint, but it does affect its function.

Your shoulder blades move across your back in many ways to keep the joint intact and allows your shoulder to function properly. Some of these are:

• Elevation (moving closer to your neck)
• Depression ( moving away from your neck )
• Abduction (shoulder blades moving away from each other)
• Adduction (shoulder blades moving towards each other)
• Upward rotation
• Dpownard Rotation

If we don’t train the shoulder properly and allow for all these movements, then we may lose the ability to do so, and this can lead to problems done the road.

We tend to run into issues when our tissue is very tight around the shoulder blades, limiting our movement when we move the arm. The big muscles to affect this are our pecs and lats.

This is also why it is vital to do upper body exercise properly, for example, many people row without adducting their scapula together. They just drive their elbows backward.

We need mobile shoulder blades, which is why we can’t just do bench presses all day because we get little shoulder blade movements with those.

We need a good balance of pressing with weight, as well as push-up variations.

One more point, I want to talk about is, how we need the shoulder blades to move for ideal function, and the mobility of our T-spine or upper back plays a crucial part.

A very rounded and tight upper back will make the scapula movements difficult. This is why working on T-spine mobility and posture can really improve shoulder health.

Are you still with me?

I know that was a bit much, Let’s go into some practical tips on what we can do, to improve shoulder health and still have great upper body sessions

Warmin up and mobility

Warm-up keeps you from getting banged up.

Doing a proper warm-up can work as a mini mobility and re-hab routine, that you do every time you workout.

This can help you drive better function out of your shoulder, not just for your workout today but for the rest of your life.

My 3 part warm-up

1. Mobility work is often, done using soft tissue work with a foam roller, various stretches, and mobility drills.

2. Activation work is when we are firing the upper back and weaker shoulder muscles, through body weight drills and band work.

3. Movement work we practice the movements we will be doing in the workout with great form and slow tempo.

This is going to get you ready to train hard but also add years to your shoulders.

Here is what it may look like

• Soft tissue with a foam roller roller on the upper back 60s
• Stretch your pecs and lats with bands or straps for 30s
• T-spine rotation, my favorite is the windmill 2 sets of 5 reps
• For upper back activation, I usually like to pair banded pull-apart and face pulls for rep 10-20 reps for 2-3 sets
• Practice push up with a very slow tempo and perfect form, for 3x 3 10s rest

The warm will set the stage for getting an awesome upper body session without killing your shoulders, do not skip it.

Neutral Grip

If you have achy shoulders, don’t get fancy with different grip angles.

A neutral grip is your pal, this is a better position for your shoulder, neck, and elbow health.

This is not to say pronated grip is bad, but they are not the best option if you have shoulder issues.

When it comes to pressing, that is why Dumbells are great, because you can use a neutral grip.

Training the back is no different, neutral grip handles for rows and pull-downs are going to do wonders.

It’s not that you can never do things like, a wide grip pull down, you might just feel better:

If 80-90% of your work is from neutral grip handles

Slight Angles

We can use a slight angle with pressing movements like a decline or incline.

By putting a bumper plate below either side of the bench.

This angle is thought, to cause less stress on the shoulder, especially reducing stress on your rotator cuffs.

Give, this small tweak a try and see if you notice a difference in your shoulder joint comfort.

Upper Back

A strong upper back can support your shoulder health.

Since we know that the scapula, is a part of shoulder joints, it makes sense that a strong upper back.

Will allow better overall shoulder movements.

Do more total reps with your upper back, to build up and counter the massive tightness most of us have in the pecs and front shoulders.

We want the majority of this work to come from horizontal rowing. Vertical exercises do not have the same external rotation effect as horizontal rowing.

Some of my favorites are

• Ring rows
• Seated Rows
• T-bar row with supports
• 1 arm DB or KB row’

Build the upper back up, it’s the foundation of healthy shoulders.

My exercise library

Exercise Order

It’s typically thought of, as the first exercise of a workout. Should be the hardest and most intense exercise.

You want to be fresh, so you can have masterful form and be able to push it hard.

But, as we get older our joints start getting achy.

It can be very helpful, to do some pump work for the upper back and rear shoulders before we go into this heavy pressing work.

Getting the upper back pumped and warm, will allow for smoother pressing movements and reduce some joint pain.

An example of this might be

Seated rows 4 sets 15, then

DB Incline Bench Press 5x 5

The downside of this, it might affect the weight you can use on the press, but it keeps your shoulder overall healthier.

That may be what is most important to you.

Also when it comes to muscle building, don’t always think of the weight you use, but the intensity you use.

Even if the weight is a little lighter, as long as you still go hard on the sets, you’ll still make gains.

Upward rotation/Overhead Work

As we get older we lose the ability to move our arms overhead.

This can cause problems such as shoulder or neck pain.

We want to have better overhead movement as long as we can.

We want some overhead movements in our workout routine or hybrids(like a landmine press or high-angle row)

For many guys overhead pressing, is just going to wreck the shoulders, so staying away from it might be for the best.

But, one exercise I find for training overhead, so we get the upward rotation of the scapula and good overhead position.

Is neutral grip pulldown

This usually can be done pain-free and we will get many of the benefits of overhead movements.

I also wanted to touch on how important is to have a mobile T-spine/upper back.

Without this, the shoulder blades, do not move well on the upper back. And if your shoulder blades don’t move well. Your shoulder issues will continue….

If and how much overhead exercises you can tolerate will depend on a few things. But, a tight T-spine will definitely limit that capacity.

Be sure to have good posture when you train and work on T-spine mobility as much as possible.

Volume

Sets and reps.

Think of this as volume.

How you do the exercises is important.

But, so is the amount of work you do. If you’re doing too many sets or reps you’re going to get beat up.

Also keep in mind the higher the reps, the more likely those reps will be low quality as you accumulate fatigue.

High reps aren’t always the safest like people think.

For the average person doing 6-10 hard sets, per muscle group, per week is going to drive both strength and muscle gains.

You’ll feel much better if you split those in between a couple of sessions. So, instead of doing 10 sets for the chest in one day.

You are better off splitting it in between two of your sessions. Do 5 sets on Monday and 5 sets on Thursday.

It is always best to start at the low end(6 total sets) and work your way up.

One last thing, I’m a believer that the total reps of back work should be higher than the total reps of chest or shoulder work.

Almost everyone’s shoulders are going to feel better this way.

Those are my best tips for Training Upper Body With Bad Shoulders. Any questions?