Benefits from Sport Specific training

To all neck hunting, arm locking, knee reaping fans out there. As a jiu jitsu practitioner, you must maintain the obligation to train effectively so that your jiu jitsu game is solid. I seek to motivate and encourage you, as a progressive practitioner myself, to experiment with different sport specific exercises that are beneficial to your specific jiu jitsu style. I will also explain the benefits you may attain by strengthening core stabilizer muscles to increase your chance in the evolution of your jiu jitsu game. Finally, I will identify some flaws of traditional techniques from my understanding of new jiu jitsu approaches. The art is always evolving and as a progressive practitioner, I seek to motivate you to delve in various sport specific exercises that will complement the jiu jitsu life style/community. All sport specific exercises indirectly or directly empower your mind, body and soul with confidence to overcome unseen limits in your jiu jitsu practice, daily challenges, and other aspects of life.

 Firstly, I seek to redefine sports specific training here to jiu jitsu specific training. I will reach beyond the boundaries of the art so that you may become aware of the inept transaction when you avoid supplementing your jiu jitsu with beneficial workouts that may pay homage to the art itself. You, as a jiu jitsu lover and practitioner, represent the sport so in order to further evolve the practice; you own a responsibility to keep a tentative perspective over how to progress your physical abilities to improve yourself along with your practice of the art. With that said, I will pass on a couple of tools to create opportunities to enhance your jiu jitsu with specific exercises. From these exercises, you will be able to gain strengths alongside, staying safe while you practice self-defense for yourself and others whom train with you.

We as jiu jitsu practitioners have an ample obligation to do what is right for jiu jitsu since it does takes care of us both physically and mentally. If you are like me, you probably do not like to run, stretch, or lift weights. I will discuss a common concern over training jiu jitsu without supplemental workouts that are beneficial to jiu jitsu, as I stubbornly have done in the past, on the one hand, and on the other hand, training for jiu jitsu with a mixture of different sports related exercises that are beneficial to jiu jitsu and will pass on this crucial knowledge to progress the jiu jitsu community.

I will start from the aspect of training jiu jitsu without supplemental workouts. An elite grappler, such as the decorated and 4 time Abu Dhabi Combat Club tournament Champion, Marcelo Garcia would tell you “It may take a couple of lifetimes to learn every aspect of jiu jitsu, so just train jiu jitsu” though, I would say sure this is coming from someone who only has enough time to do just that. If you do not have a job and all you have is time available at your expense, sure, train jiu jitsu twice, three-times, or maybe even four-times a day. By all means, you should solely train jiu jitsu because it would be the only thing you should focus on to increase your success in the sport. But many who train jiu jitsu have day jobs, children, and responsibilities other than jiu jitsu so this may seem impossible to do. Practitioners are not mainly focusing solely on grappling their opponent and reviewing specific techniques day-in-and-day-out until the movements become second nature. They go home and forget about jiu jitsu and then come back to the academy and expect to see progress in their jiu jitsu journey. I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but this type of training is a bad habit that is not beneficial to produce positive results toward your game or the art. If you seriously want to improve your jiu jitsu, you need to start a jiu jitsu specific training regimen outside of jiu jitsu. You need to find the time to find exercises, stretches, and workouts that are beneficial for your specific jiu jitsu style in order to see progress in your jiu jitsu performance.

You may ask, “What type of training is beneficial to jiu jitsu specifically?” Well you are in luck my friend. The way to look at it is this: every human being is different. We all have different body types with weaknesses and strengths; although, we do have similarities as far as bodily structure. Dr. Jeffrey M. Willardson states in the opening of his article published by The Allen Press called Core Stability Training for Healthy Athletes: A Different Paradigm for Fitness Professionals “Fitness trainers will prescribe exercises that they believe to be the most specific or functional, depending on the phase of training and the performance needs of the client.” Now, I am no fitness trainer but from my 3 years of experience in tournament preparation. You may need to try a variety of different exercises that will compliment your jiu jitsu style. From a generalized perspective of jiu jitsu, I will give you a couple of exercises to implement in your new training regimen. I will explain how these two tools are beneficial to jiu jitsu practitioners who implement jiu jitsu specific exercises into their workouts.  I will first establish the importance for an athlete to strengthen core stabilizer muscles or the small group muscles of your core.

A strong athlete’s core is vital to success in any sport. You always hear that you must develop the mystical core. I will attempt to convey two different exercises as tools so that one may use to strengthen their core as it is super vital to the evolution of your jiu jitsu game. According to Dr. Willardson’s article from the Strength and Conditioning Journal on core stability training, an athlete’s main target area to decrease injury should be on the lower back and hip muscle groups. Jiu jitsu practitioners can benefit from this information because we use our lower backs to buck opponents off of ourselves and core stabilizer muscles to regain proper back-to-neck posture. David Behm and Kenneth Anderson reported a study also in the journal of strength and conditioning research titled The Role of Instability with Resistance Training that reports the effectiveness of training the core under unstable circumstances. In relation to jiu jitsu, an athlete cannot fully prepare for the sporadic movements of another human being’s reactions during a live spar session. A jiu jitsu practitioner may prepare their body accordingly to deal with such rapid unstable movements of an opponent. According to Dr. Behm and Anderson the best training for stabilizer muscles comes from “[t]he advantage of an unstable training environment [that] would be based on the importance of neuromuscular adaptations with increases in strength. Strength gains can be attributed to both increases in muscle cross-sectional area and improvements in neuromuscular coordination.” So in attempts to further progress your jiu jitsu, practitioners must understand the vital importance to train core stabilizer muscles in unstable conditions to prepare for the sporadic shifts in body weight and posture during a live sparing session. Behm and Anderson mention pushups on a stability ball, the use of a balance board, and squats while on balance pads as alternative methods to strengthen the core stabilizer muscle groups.

I will introduce another jiu jitsu specific training exercise called kundalini yoga to increase the strength of your core, lung endurance, and temperance that are beneficial to jiu jitsu practice. As the legend of the jiu jitsu world, Rickson Gracie explains the importance of kundalini yoga in his biographical documentary titled Choke. According to the world known jiu jitsu legend, Gracie mentions the benefits to a practitioner’s ability to jiu jitsu. The practice of kundalini yoga offers such benefits as deep concentration, various breathing exercises, and relaxation while activating the core all at once. In an April 2012 edition of Fitness Magazine featured Kevin Harmon’s article called, A Great Complement to Sport-Specific Training. Harmon explains how kundalini yoga is a good art for sport-specific training because it focuses on techniques to have athletes practice proper body posture, breathing techniques, and deep stretches to various small muscle groups that target the core. He adds how it is important for an athlete to develop a strong core because it holds a correlation to increase an athlete’s endurance capacity to any sport. Athletes who practice kundalini yoga possess more muscle endurance and a sense to control breathing, which result in being able to perform a sport longer and more efficiently.

All jiu jitsu practitioners should focus to strengthen their core with unstable resistance core training and kundalini yoga. Your path to a stronger core will empower you with a huge evolution in your jiu jitsu game. A jiu jitsu practitioner who implements kundalini yoga understands the importance to control breathing, mental stability, and core activation. Our sport calls us to participate in the efforts to better our abilities by strengthening the mind, body, and soul. Jiu jitsu practitioners must have a strong core to protect their lungs, heart, and organs from injury. The opponent’s goal during a live spar is to pin and smash another practitioner’s body to the floor. According to Ravinder Jareth and Vernon Barnes, they indicate in their article called Augmentation of Mind-body Therapy and Role of Deep Slow Breathing when we involve ourselves to control the sympathetic nervous system, which is the automatic nervous system that controls heart rate, body temperature, and breathing, through slow breathing exercises shows to decrease hypertension in patients who suffer from high blood pressure. A healthy jiu jitsu practitioner may benefit from this type of control over the auto-response system of the body while exerting the body during wrestling an opponent over a long period of time. This brings me to the evolution of a jiu jitsu practitioner, as well as the art itself.

Alongside the evolution of jiu jitsu, a jiu jitsu practitioner must come to terms with the truth about the flaw of traditional techniques. The reality of the practice is that the greater the window of an opportunity an opponent has the more you will have trouble controlling that opponent. Not to downsize traditional jiu jitsu because if you practice something over 5,000 times you are inevitably going to be an expert. The point here is to enjoy the privilege of options at your disposal. If you owned a restaurant and you only sold one product, do you think your restaurant would be successful compared to others in the market? Your success in jiu jitsu depends on how many transitions and attacks you master. On top of that your clinch game controls the speed of a live spar. The tighter your clinch is the fewer windows of opportunities will be present to your opponent. The main goal of a jiu jitsu practitioner is to keep your opponent from slipping out of your clutches. A scramble is when an opponent is able to free himself from your clutches and is able to solidify a dominant position. Eddie Bravo explains a tentative jiu jitsu system that addresses how to better control an opponent. He reveals various techniques from sister arts of jiu jitsu, such as wrestling/sambo, judo (art of throwing), aikido (art of wristlocking), wing chun (close hand-to-hand Chinese boxing) to reduce the opportunity of a scramble within his book “Advanced Rubber Guard”. Many jiu jitsu players are all practicing the same techniques with the same names and many stalemates occur during competition. Eddie Bravo is hated by many within the jiu jitsu community because of his radical Sapir-Whorfianistic-like approach to change and tweak the names of various traditional moves. Paul Kay and Willett Kempton explain Whorf’s linguistic hypothesis in their article titled American Anthropologist published by the American Anthropological Association. Kay and Kempton explain that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis addresses the truth about reality to exist in the mind of the perceiver through a language taught by a specific group. In Bravo’s case, he renamed many transitional positions merely to perceive and teach his followers his system easier. His controversial system proved to get him the win over a jiu jitsu legend in ADCC where he implemented the use of yoga-like flexibility to immobilize and trap Royler Gracie, who is Rickson Gracie’s brother. His win not only proved to the jiu jitsu community that the convention of training traditional jiu jitsu does not translate when the conditions of the practice changes but Bravo introduces the importance to develop a strong clinch and the ability to maneuver your body around your opponent without allowing space to scramble. He also mentions that flexibility can limit your jiu jitsu game significantly if one lacks the ability. He adds that all practitioners are able to develop flexibility comparable to a learned skill such as driving or climbing up stairs.

With this newfound training perspective all that is left to do is to get up and go out there and work on your core, flexibility, and techniques that specifically suit you. You should look to modify and improve some abilities of your body, i.e. flexible elbows, knees, hip joints, legs. All of your modification from your training will be beneficial specifically for your jiu jitsu style only. From this path, you will empower your mind, body, and soul without ever really knowing it. Now all there is left to do is go out there and train, and remember distract with attacks!

By: Luis A. Martinez

Sources

Advanced Rubber Guard Jiu Jitsu for Mixed Martial Arts Competition

Eddie Bravo

Source type: Book

Published by: Victory Belt Publishing Inc.

Yoga

Kevin Bernard Harmon.

American Fitness 30, no. 2 (March 2012): 52-53. Health Source - Consumer Edition,

EBSCOhost (accessed November 20, 2014)

Core Stability Training

Willardson, Jeffrey M “Core Stability Training For Healthy Athletes: A Different Paradigm For Fitness Professionals” Strength and Conditioning Journal (Allen Press) 29.6 (2007): 42-49. SPORTDiscus with Full Text. Web. 6 Dec. 2014

Instability Resistance Training

Behm, David G, and Kenneth G. Anderson. “The Role of Instability with Resistance Training” Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research (Allen Press Publishing Services Inc.) 20.3 (2006): 716-722 SPORTDiscus with Full Text. Web. 6 Dec. 2014

The role of deep breathing

Jerath, Ravinder, and Vernon A. Barnes “Augmentation of Mind-Body Therapy and Role of Deep Slow Breathing” Journal of Complementary & Integrative Medicine 6.1 (2009): 1-7 SPORTDiscus with Full Text. Web. 6 Dec. 2014

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

Paul Kay and Willet Kempton “American Athropologist” American Anthropological Association,

Vol. 86, No. 1 (Mar., 1984), pp 65-79

Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.uta.edu/stable /679389