How To Improve Jiu Jitsu Off The Mats

As a Jiu Jitsu athlete, you have many factors to consider when trying to improve at the sport. The technical side alone can be daunting. When you factor in cardio, weight cutting, strength training, competition strategy and tournament selection, the factors to keep in mind are never ending.

This blog will clear up some of the guess work off the mats.

The most effective use of time to improve your game off the mats is, surprise, surprise, being more athletic to execute your game!

Athleticism is a combination of different skills. They can be broken down to speed, strength, quickness, power, reactivity, endurance and flexibility to name a few. While everyone is born with different capabilities, they are all trainable.

The one skill that greatly influences the others is strength. Yes, how much ya bench does have diminishing returns when you reach 2 times your body weight, but you'll be grateful that you have this in your back pocket when you're stuck in bottom side control.

No, I'm not suggesting that you "muscle out" for all your escapes, but it would be foolish to say that having horsepower behind your frames isn't helpful.

Simply imagine all the different movements we do in Jiu Jitsu, then imagine how much better they can be executed with more strength... An arm drag with more horsepower gets to the back easier... a rear naked choke with more power to squeeze gets the tap quicker...

The list goes on. One of the often overlooked qualities of strength is how it contributes to injury prevention. Shielding your body with more muscle is legitimate armor around your vulnerable joints, ligaments and bones.

We have all been trapped in a triangle. Technique is king in the escape, no doubt. When your coach is yelling for you to throw the legs to one side and get on top, I can guarantee all that time spent on rotational movements will be a godsend when you're trying to spin their body off yours.

All of these reasons contribute to why I focus on having my athletes gain strength as their first priority when starting their programs, before we identify other areas to improve.

An important factor in increasing strength is lifting close to failure. Much research has come out recently that suggests that coming close to failure (with sufficient volume) is a HUGE determining factor in growth. So while you don't need to fail each set, coming within 1 to 2 reps in reserve (reps you can still do) each set is important!

I typically have my athletes work at 5 sets of 3-5 reps per exercise, getting between 10-20 sets on a body part per week to obtain optimal growth.

Lasevicius T, Schoenfeld BJ, Silva-Batista C, Barros TS, Aihara AY, Brendon H, Longo AR, Tricoli V, Peres BA, Teixeira EL. Muscle Failure Promotes Greater Muscle Hypertrophy in Low-Load but Not in High-Load Resistance Training. J Strength Cond Res. 2022 Feb 1;36(2):346-351. doi: 10.1519/JSC.0000000000003454. PMID: 31895290.