Strength Training and White Belts (by Owen)

I'd been training for about 6 months when one of my friends asked me to lift some weights with him. As I'd usually turn up to class early I thought I’d give it a go. Within 6 months I found that I became much stronger. In fact, I went from benching 60kgs to benching 100kg. This newfound strength also came in handy on the mat. I found myself powering out of submissions and getting tapped much less. However, this short term success came at a price.

These short term gains ended up holding me back. As my classmates became more technical I became less technical, relying on my new strength to get me out of tough situations. After coming to this realization, I stopped strength and conditioning training until I received my purple belt. I probably could have started a bit earlier but at that point I could fully understand how to apply my strength technically. This effectively made my progress through though purple belt very fast.

There is no point having a fast car if you don’t know how to drive. First develop the technical foundations which BJJ is all about, then reinforce them with some Strength and Conditioning. As every white belt gets told, "forget about your strength", I too had to find out the hard way.

 

How to Improve Fuel/Motivation Economy When Driving/Training

You have a full gas tank that has just enough petrol to take you home. There isn’t enough petrol to take you any further. In fact, driving incorrectly may cause the fuel to run out quicker. Things like accelerating too much, or driving faster than you need to will increase fuel consumption.

As a result, you slow down as you approach red lights long before you reach them, you don’t accelerate when you don’t need to and you drive according to the legal speed limit (my mum is smiling right now…).

Had you accelerated unnecessarily or exceeded the speed limit you may not have reached home, or you may have crashed along the way.

Right now you are probably thinking ‘WTF’, but bear with us because we haven’t lost the plot (yet…). The above excerpt applies to driving, but is also a perfect training analogy. All we have to do is substitute a few things: home = goal, fuel/petrol = motivation, car = you, red lights = injury/burnout, acceleration = big increments, speeding = too frequent…

Your motivation is just enough to take you to your end goal (whatever it may be). Training incorrectly may cause you to burn-out, and subsequently miss your goal. Things like training too frequently or overloading incorrectly will be too much for your CNS and your motivation will decline quickly, causing burnout.

As a result, you slow down before you are even close to feeling burnt out or injured, you increase with steady increments and you allow enough recovery time between sessions (you didn’t progress too fast).

Had you aimed for huge daily improvements or trained too frequently you would probably have lost motivation and not reached your goal (or become injured).

But, now you are out of fuel does that mean when you reach your goal that’s it? Definitely not! There is a petrol station near your house that can top you up.

The shift from BJJ 'Practitioner' to BJJ 'Athlete'...

In our last article, Owen spoke about how supplementary training has not only become accepted to improve sporting performance in BJJ, it is now a necessity. Don't jump in the car and head to the gym just yet. It's important to understand the metabolic demands of your sport before creating your training program. Below is a basic breakdown of what we think are the dominant fitness parameters in BJJ.

Competitors are categorized in weight-classes and matches go for anywhere between 6 and 10minutes. Because there are weight restrictions, being the strongest in your weight-class is advantageous (Relative Strength). However, this isn't enough. Strength means nothing if you can't maintain your output - Muscular Endurance is essential. The goal is to be as strong in the last minute as you are in the first. There is more to the equation - you also need to make sure you are anaerobically fit. The pace of combat sports is high, so it is important you train above your anaerobic threshold (>80% of your MHR). The traditional approach of going for a 45-minute run to improve your cardio is losing its credibility - fighting is intermittent, chaotic with every movement performed with maximal intensity. Long-distance running does not match this tempo!

Gi and No-Gi are a little bit different. Gi tends to place a bigger emphasis on muscular endurance. If you have ever competed in a Gi tournament you will have probably experienced this first hand, when your forearms feel like they have doubled in size because you have been gripping so hard. Because there are less grips in No-Gi, you can move around a little easier and subsequently the match pace has the potential to be a lot faster. No-Gi requires a greater emphasis on anaerobic-cardiovascular endurance.

Time to dig a little deeper. We also believe that the importance of certain fitness parameters varies according to weight-class. Heavyweights are expected to be strong. With competitors in lighter divisions like Bantamweight, Featherweight and Lightweight, the expectation to be strong is lower. The percentage of 'strong' competitors in these divisions is less than the heavyweight division. By focusing on fitness parameters that your fellow competitors haven't refined puts you at an advantage. But, don't forget about what everyone else is good at! If you are in the lightweight division and you have neglected your cardiovascular endurance because you thought strength was the weight-class weakness, you may be in for a surprise. First, make sure you have adequately developed the fitness parameters competitors in your weight-class are expected to possess, then focus on weight-class weaknesses!

Technique over strength. But what happens when technique is equal?

Back when I started BJJ, the sport was all about technique. Most of the BJJ practitioners that I knew almost exclusively trained BJJ. There were a few guys who did some strength work, but these guys tended to improve more slowly as they missed the whole point of BJJ. Whilst the concepts of BJJ haven't changed (like using leverage, your opponents weight and timing), the practitioners who participate in the sport even at a social level have. Becoming more mainstream means that a greater array of participants now practice BJJ including those who have athletic backgrounds. Now, more than ever is technical perfection (or as close to perfection as possible) essential, but what happens when your opponent is technically as proficient as you.

This is the new breed of Jiu-Jitsu practitioner. Have a look at the Mundials or Pan Ams. Rarely do you see an athlete who doesn't have a strength and conditioning coach or program. Check their Facebook fan pages or tweets and you'll see heaps of posts and videos of battling ropes, conditioning circuits, kettlebells, tyre flipping and much more. About the only athlete who doesn't advocate some form of cross training is Kron Gracie, and with his linage it's understandable why, and even without this his accomplishments are impressive. However I can't help but wonder what he'd accomplish if he did...

This shift to including supplementary work to compliment sporting performance was bound to happen. In Olympic Sports, coaches have used non-specific drills to improve athleticism for decades. Here comes the next problem - How do you actually improve sporting performance from BJJ? Understanding the demands of your sport before you begin training is critical. The goal of your S&C program is to maximize your sporting performance, and this can only take place when you identify the dominant fitness parameters and then program accordingly. In RT's next article, they will break down which fitness parameters you need to develop for BJJ success.

Here is a nice video of Cobrinha training for the ADCC in 2009. 


Great exercises, but be careful about blindly following another person's training regimen just because they are a professional athlete. After all, I could have posted this video...

Fatigue: The Double Agent

In our last post, Owen talked about his personal experience of how perseverance through a decline in performance ultimately led to ‘overtraining’. We are going to dig a little deeper and show you that there is a big grey area when it comes to overtraining.


Revision: Exercise causes a disruption to the body’s homeostasis resulting in an acute decline in performance. When given adequate rest, the body will recover and performance will increase. When we do not give the body adequate rest, this is where problems start to arise…

Firstly, don’t think that the second you get tired you are overtrained. Also, realize that there are a few intermediate steps before you develop Overtraining Syndrome (OTS). The level of ‘overtraining’ is categorized according to the time it takes to restore performance. Now for some new terms:

• Functional Overreaching (FOR): allowing fatigue to accumulate from consecutive training bouts, knowing they will be followed by a recovery period.  This can be recovered from in around a week.
• Non-Functional Overreaching (NFOR): Ignoring that recovery period when you have overreached. This can take up to months to recover from. If you continue to train, this will eventually lead to Overtraining Syndrome (OTS), which can take years to recover from.

Time to throw another spanner in the works. Studies have shown that endurance training and resistance training lead to different types of overtraining. Parasympathetic overtraining (thought to arise from endurance training) affects the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis and alters levels of cortisol, testosterone and catecholamines. Sympatheitc overtraining (thought to arise from resistance training) increases excitability and has been linked with restlessness and irritability.
 

Other symptoms of overtraining include:

-       decreased sex drive, loss of appetite, decrease in enthusiasm

-       alterations to resting heart rate, reduced sympathetic drive, reduced heart rate variability.

Hopefully you now realize that temporary declines in performance are the precursor to performance gain. Be careful because this decline in performance is a double agent. If you don’t watch it carefully, it can quickly lead to overreaching and eventually Overtraining Syndrome. In our next article, we are going to talk about ways to avoid OTS. Stay tuned!

You can't push through overtaining...

Being a BJJ practitioner is like being in a war of attrition. You accept very early on that you are going to have lots of days where you get beaten down. There's a saying that "some days you are the hammer, some days the nail". You learn that being the nail is part of the course, and that the days you are the hammer are few and far between and you savor these moments for months if not years. This mindset leads to you considering yourself mentally tough and you learn that even when things don't go your way you must keep grinding through and this can be a metaphor for life. These are great qualities that BJJ has instilled in me but once I added strength and conditioning to the mix the extra workload carried with it some risk.

After my first article I explained that there was a dip in my performance whilst my body became accustomed to the new training regime. When I came out the other side it felt like I could adapt to whatever workload was thrown at me. Training hard twice a day was no problem and I kept up a high work rate for nearly 2 years.

At this point, I found that whilst my body was coping ok with the work, I started to notice that I was flat at training. I was just going through the motions and getting from session to session. My mind wanted to train hard but concentrating and every effort I made didn't seem to yield the same results as previous. Whilst I was grinding to a halt my mindset told me to keep plugging along and maybe even increase my workload to combat my stalling progress. If it wasn't for my strength and conditioning coach (Jason Gulati from Real training) recognizing this as overtraining I would have continued to toil away for next to no reward or worse, at the risk of injuring myself due to inattention or lack of concentration. So how do you recognize overtraining and how can you tell if it's affecting you? See Jason's next article on recognizing the signs.

The next problem is what to do about it? Basically there are no shortcuts, your body needs a break and the length of this break depends on how long and how overtrained you are. Do yourself a favour and take a holiday from everything, don't even think about your sport. Maybe even take up a new one? I started boxing with a great coach and friend Eddy Kaliboti, and that really freshened up my mind forcing it to think and calculate new problems making my my brain accept the return to Jiu jitsu more readily. The result, a short well earned break, new skills and a new found hunger for my chosen sport. Win win win!!!

By Owen Gee Kee
Co-Owner of Underdog Gracie Jiu-Jitsu and Underdog Fight Gear

You can't shoot a cannon-ball from a canoe

Do you think you could effectively shoot a cannonball from a canoe? Core training is much the same concept and this metaphor has long been used to describe the importance of training the core. How can we expect to deliver maximal force in any sport or exercise if we are not properly stabilized to deliver that movement. We need to be stable before we can move effectively and with power.

What is the core? Without getting into too much detail, the National Academy of Sports Medicine describes the core as simply "where your centre of gravity is located". It is where movement begins and is made up of a variety of stablizing muscles.  Core strength allows your kinetic chain (the synchronization of all muscles, nerves and bones) to work together. You need the cannon and canoe to work in synchronization to shoot that cannonball far. If your "core" is not functioning correctly, this chain will be disturbed.

What is proper functioning of the core? This simply means that our deeper muscles (our core muscles - TA, Diaphraghm etc) are working together in unison with our "bigger muscles" (glutes etc).  If these two systems are not working properly together, compensation and muscle imbalances will occur - meaning less power in the short term, and muscle imbalances and injury in the long run.

So how do you effectively train the core? Before deciding to just do any exercises labelled as a core exercise a person should understand the different components of core control and the core continuum.

1. At the lowest level a person should be able to use their diaphrahm to breathe correctly,  isolate other deep stabilizing muscles, and have the ability to keep a neutral pelvis and spine in low level exercises such as kneeling floor planks or bridges.

2. The next step is to work on your specific weak links (this gets complicated but relates to a persons ability to prevent movement of the spine when force is applied - such as doing  swiss ball rotations or landmines). For instance, if you cant keep a neutral spine during a front plank, thinking you can do this when doing a back squat = injury.

3. Next comes putting it all together. Integrating this stability means linking this ability to stabilize your spine with your core muscles, and matching this together with your movement system. This is the part where you put the cannon on the canoe. It can take the form of exercise in which your stability, core muscles and movement system is challenged simultaneously. For example, during the split squat, the body is forced to resist movement in a multitude of planes, as well as execute correct breathing technique, while the leg muscles (among others) are responsible for moving the weight. In this way they work together to finish the lift.

This is why doing big compound lifts can also be considered training the core. However,  it is important to recognise that a person should have the ability to isolate the deep stabilizing muscles - without initial core strength, no integration can occur, and injury and compensations will develop, not to mention much less power output.

Written by Mark Baskin
Mark operates his own personal training business out of Dover Heights and preaches a similar training philosophy to ours. Mark has an undefeated MMA record of 3-0, has his Cert III and IV in fitness and is studying Exercise Science at UTS.