It's kind of a paradox. Getting old. In this context, the sporting context, getting old is specifically defined as "getting old enough that your hormone levels drop significantly, and you DO notice it."
It's like one of those "I never thought it could happen to me." One day in my 30s I was getting drunk 3 times a week, powerlifting 4 times a week, and still somehow making it to work 5 days a week. My lifts went up if I blew on the bar.
Then, around age 38, it all changed. In most cases the typical "old guy" or masters cutoff is 35, but there is some variance between people. I was a late bloomer in puberty so it would make sense that the air would drain out of my recovery balloons (testes? lol) a little late too.
It'd be really easy to indulge the sob story--pity me, young whipper snappers, it's like I have a disease called age where everything I do physically or socially costs me twice as much as it costs you. And it's kind of true, you do notice it. I look at my lifting stats from 10 years ago (and I keep pretty good stats) and I wonder if another person was doing them.
But that shit about aged wisdom is TRUE. And it's not just some automatic thing granted to older people as a consolation prize, or to make younger people feel inferior or stupid. In fact, not all older people become wise. People always advise you to respect your elders, but some truly are not worthy of respect, because they don't do the work--the work to build the wisdom.
Because wisdom comes from examining our failures. People can act like they are born with it, or that there is some magical gene they posses that confers it on them, but that is just narcissism and self-promotion. The only reason older people are wise is because they have been through more shit, and I am not talking about the "good times."
The fun times probably do confer some wisdom in that they remind us that life is precious and that we should cherish the opportunity to share great moments with other people because you never know when that person whose arm yours is around in that photo may be gone forever. But it is more likely the loss of that person, or the loss of health, or the onset of extremely fragile exercise recovery that actually increases and improves the contextual intelligence of older people.
If I had to draw a hard line between the older people who are not wise, and the ones who are, it'd probably be drawn at those who wish they were young again, and those who are happy with where they are. One of the most powerful aspects of wisdom is the loss of concern for regret. You are who you are at the time where you are, in the place where you are, and in the body you have, let's get going.
Our culture is many things. It's complex; there is no "hard urging" or necessarily a sinister influence (that I know of) which strives to make people feel dissatisfied with life (other than advertisers?), but for whatever reason, there is a lot of influence in the direction of wishing and regret. The desire to move backward. Restoration products, movie remakes, reflection, nostalgia, youth worship. Certain segments and voices in our society act like young people are the only people who are worth anything. Maturity and wisdom is the ability to see through all this occluded nonsense, and to clearly envision gratitude for NOW, for where you are, and who you are. Present-mindedness.
In a BJJ context, my view is that elder wisdom means enjoying the social aspect more. People are sharing and risking their bodies with you, being playful in a way that we should have never lost. Enjoy the personalities you meet. Enjoy the opportunity, the privilege, of still being able to move your spine and legs, like so many other people in this world cannot. Even if you move them poorly, even if you get choked over and over. Every time you fail to die when someone chokes you, it should be a reminder that you are still here, and are fortunate enough to still have whatever physical, mental, familial, and social assets you do have.
It can mean being realistic about training frequency, instead of giving into peer pressure and competitive hysteria. Love golfing? Love spending 3x/week watching movies with your wife? Then train less. There is no punishment for training less. The biggest gap in skill, fitness, knowledge, and other rewards exists between training 0 times and training once a week.
Someone who is 20 who happens to have the time and money may train 12x/week. That's fine. Balance is either something you find, or it is something that finds you. If you find it first, it's more kind to you. When it finds you, there are often consequences.
Many people who obsess over one activity or skill at the expense of every other aspect of life that creates a good balance--friends, family, love, spirit, work, health, etc., end up paying for it later on. I know because I used to be one. And I guess the only reason I do know, is because of wisdom. Balance found me. Yet again, nothing special about me, just old enough to have failed. Thus my case for wisdom being a natural feature of the aged landscape, rather than some form of magic.
It's kind of funny though, because younger people rarely seek out the advice of older people. Some are just blind, some are worried that elders will present defeatist, overly "realistic" viewpoints, and they sometimes do. But often they do the opposite. They encourage you to chase what you love, but to also make an effort to stay grounded, and balance is what it is all about.
Clarify what you love, pursue it in an avid but balanced way, and if some day that sentiment changes, don't bother giving into regret--just carefully change course, and pursue something else. Even having the privilege to pursue more than one loved activity in a lifetime is a blessing reserved for the fortunate, most people the world over never get the opportunity to even do really one thing they love.
There is nobody so fortunate in this world as the person who manages to not only master the thing they love, but to make a healthy living off it, all while maintaining enough balance that they still have genuine connection back to their humanity, in the form of friends, love, family, spirit.
Thursday, April 21, 2016
Wednesday, April 20, 2016
"Relative Strength" is everything in BJJ
"Pull your own weight."
One of the biggest reasons that BJJ practitioners are big on pullups is because they are an instant sanity check. Am I strong enough to move my own weight? In sport science, "relative strength" basically means the ability to move your body through space, the ability to move your own weight.
If two deadlifters pull 405, and one weighs 220 and the other weighs 165, the lighter guy has more relative strength, at least in the deadlift and associated musculature. Now his bench might suck, but in general, people who value relative strength tend to often be pretty rounded out and balanced in where they are strong. A lot of "bodyweight fitness" people fall into this category.
I see people recommending bodyweight fitness and kettlebells to BJJ players all the time. First of all, both are great, IF they bring you to a point of excellent relative fitness, coming from an untrained state. But what is excellent? What is acceptable? You should be fit enough to do a high number of pullups (20), pushups (50+), bodyweight squats (50+). The military has historically also used things like situps and crunches, but unnecessary flexion of the lumbar and thoracic spine during strength training is something that is viewed more and more as increasing risk for repetitive stress spine injuries--see just about any interview with Dr. Stuart McGill.
However, there is more than one type of relative strength, because there is more than one body type. A lot of people think that relative strength and fitness has to mean being a super lean and cardio dominant athlete. In BJJ, and in life and health, this strategy CAN work very very well, but like many fitness ideals, this alienates a large percentage of the population, specifically mesomorphic and endomorphic body types.
An ultra-heavyweight who noodles around with goofy looking 60lb kettlebell swings is going to get demolished by an advanced powerlifter of equivalent technical skill. Kettle bells are mostly popular because Pavel Tsatsouline is an confident writer and skilled promoter whose book caught on. The traditional use for kettlebells is throwing them around, not swinging them around. They are good for barbell users who are recovering from an injury, or if they are heavy as shit, but typically in most gyms, they are not. The use of 60lb kettle bells will not get you to a 1.5-2x BW baseline strength level in any of the important movements, excepting maybe OHP. It will get you stronger than a novice, and you will develop a higher than average RFD for your strength, which is good, but you will still only be of intermediate level strength at best.
If you are fat, come from fat genes, with fat folks, fat uncles, etc, the ideal of you ever being the ripped ab guy is bullshit. Your basal metabolic rate just does not work that way, and you will never achieve that without starving yourself. Additionally, a lot of people who CAN achieve that (typically younger people too) manage to be that lean while getting drunk weekly and eating submarine sandwiches. I know because I was like that in my 20s too.
What I am getting at is that the the path to relative strength and thus reliable BJJ performance for older and bigger people goes directly through leg and posterior chain training, period. It does not matter if you weigh 270 lbs if your heart stroke volume is strong, your V02 max is good, you get regular cardio, AND you can squat twice your bodyweight. In fact, you are going to pretty much kill everybody.
Heavyweights with good relative strength are nightmares. One point I keep making and intend to keep making is that our society rewards normal males for buying into the image of the large torso'd man. That's fine, IF your sole purpose in life is to bolster your confidence by LOOKING intimidating and/or sexy (in a somewhat passe way.) But grapplers are not normal males, and real intimidation comes from leg drive. Watch any GOOD wrestler. 0% of them have weak legs, or are pure upper body guys. In 0% will you see legs being a liability, unable to carry whatever's going on up top.
And I hate to say it, but not really--women get this more than we do, by a fair margin, if accidentally. Granted, a lot of the time their own motivation is a comparably narcissistic obsession with the look of their ass, but the funny thing about that is that an ass that looks full and shapely usually DOES imply a higher likelihood of good relative glute strength and hip health, so in effect, the narcissistic ideal of "skinny with a shapely butt" many of them chase ends up resulting in them being inadvertently healthier than us. All of that trendy tread-milling, pilates, yoga, and lunging go a long way toward producing a human with good hip health and good relative strength.
But as men, we tend to want more mass. With roughly 20x the testosterone of women, it is also much easier to build for us, so it makes sense that a majority of us chase it, while a majority of women chase toning, shaping, and leanness. However, functional mass is a real concept, and if you are a fighter, you have no business making the work of your hips, which are the focal point of jiu-jitsu, harder by bloating up your torso like you're Dorian Yates in 1994. You'll still get fuckin choked.
I think there is a stereotype that has developed of the heavyweight as a slower, weaker, flopping frustrated man who gets side controlled, knee on bellied, and basically dominated. This is definitely common, especially when fighting agile, strong middleweights. There ARE a lot of guys like this, partly because our society teaches men to bench press like sheep, but also because sedentary jobs and lives are common, so abdominal fat weight must be accounted for in leg and hip drive. Thus, the combination of being both fat AND strong (aka fatstrong) in the upper body is a double whammy for men who do not do leg or posterior chain work.
The main point here is that if you have a propensity to be fat, AND you like to lift hard upper body, you NEED to squat, deadlift, clean, etc in a ratio that is roughly 2:1 to your upper body work, in order to develop relative strength for BJJ, or else the people who do have that type of mobile strength are going to continue to beat your ass indefinitely.
And as I said before, you could do worse than to drop upper body work entirely, since the deadlift is the answer to most of BJJ's pulling questions. Even if you have a beer gut, if you focus on legs and posterior chain work, you will still move well on the mats, and in relatively short order, you will be a fearsome competitor.
An anecdote from Mark Rippetoe's "Strong Enough" comes to mind where he is talking about a friend of his who is a high level judoka, who recounts how he got his ass ragdolled by a much less skilled judoka because the opponent was at or beyond the cusp of the "elite" level in the powerlifts. This shit happens. Strength is a lot like weight class--being seriously outclassed is dangerous.
On the other hand, becoming elite in lifting is a waste of time for a competitive BJJ practitioner, but so is endless amounts of mat time, below the black belt level. EVERY skill in the world has a learning curve that is asymptotal. Big gains up front, followed by ever diminishing returns. BJJ technique is like that (purple is the sharp curve), powerlifting is like that (advanced strength standards.)
But if you want to become and stay competitive in a sport that is realistically probably 50% skill and 50% strength/athleticism BELOW the black belt level, where technical execution skill in participants is typically separated by less than 2 years of experience, you can't spend all your time trying to claw your way up either one of those two asymptotes (the BJJ skill one, or the lifting one) because optimizing noob gains in both attributes is far, far more efficient. Also, deliberate and accidental sandbagging is a real problem, so at white or blue belt, you could realistically come up against someone with twice your mat time, and if you do, you had better be able to throw that bastard around.
My recommendation for any competitive BJJ practitioner below the unlimited or absolute weight classes is to take up the slack in both learning curves, as rapidly as possible. If you are already very strong, roll a LOT until you are very close to the blue belt or the purple belt. If you are already a good grappler, heed these strength standards and actively pursue the non-bench powerlifts until your totals for your weight class are well into the INTERMEDIATE range. For unlimited and absolute competitors, I recommend actively pursuing the advanced pedigree, even if it means taking some time off to purely train with barbells.
If you're a purple belt, it is going to take you a LOT longer to get a big technical skill boost within the belt, and to get close enough to brown not to get tooled in a regional comp, than it would take to develop intermediate level strength. Anyone without bad genes can go from novice or even untrained totals to intermediate level totals in 6 months to a year. If [especially points-based] BJJ is 50% athleticism, and you can improve your strength and athleticism by 50% in 9 months, that's a 25% overall improvement in your competitiveness without touching a mat. Good luck getting that out of mat time in the same time period without being a 12x/week mat rat--at which point you might end up getting a brown belt by accident and have to start all over again. Lol.
That whole folklore about "Helio beat people up at 110lbs while fighting off asthmatic polio" shit purported by the Gracie family is marketing fluff designed to sell memberships to average Joes, who make up the bulk of any school's admission dues. You're not the average Joe, and Helio was either fighting people who were completely ignorant of BJJ, Judo, and wrestling, or else they had so little skill that it was basically like a coral belt beating up a blue belt. And I bet he was also really STRONG for his WEIGHT.
One of the biggest reasons that BJJ practitioners are big on pullups is because they are an instant sanity check. Am I strong enough to move my own weight? In sport science, "relative strength" basically means the ability to move your body through space, the ability to move your own weight.
If two deadlifters pull 405, and one weighs 220 and the other weighs 165, the lighter guy has more relative strength, at least in the deadlift and associated musculature. Now his bench might suck, but in general, people who value relative strength tend to often be pretty rounded out and balanced in where they are strong. A lot of "bodyweight fitness" people fall into this category.
I see people recommending bodyweight fitness and kettlebells to BJJ players all the time. First of all, both are great, IF they bring you to a point of excellent relative fitness, coming from an untrained state. But what is excellent? What is acceptable? You should be fit enough to do a high number of pullups (20), pushups (50+), bodyweight squats (50+). The military has historically also used things like situps and crunches, but unnecessary flexion of the lumbar and thoracic spine during strength training is something that is viewed more and more as increasing risk for repetitive stress spine injuries--see just about any interview with Dr. Stuart McGill.
However, there is more than one type of relative strength, because there is more than one body type. A lot of people think that relative strength and fitness has to mean being a super lean and cardio dominant athlete. In BJJ, and in life and health, this strategy CAN work very very well, but like many fitness ideals, this alienates a large percentage of the population, specifically mesomorphic and endomorphic body types.
An ultra-heavyweight who noodles around with goofy looking 60lb kettlebell swings is going to get demolished by an advanced powerlifter of equivalent technical skill. Kettle bells are mostly popular because Pavel Tsatsouline is an confident writer and skilled promoter whose book caught on. The traditional use for kettlebells is throwing them around, not swinging them around. They are good for barbell users who are recovering from an injury, or if they are heavy as shit, but typically in most gyms, they are not. The use of 60lb kettle bells will not get you to a 1.5-2x BW baseline strength level in any of the important movements, excepting maybe OHP. It will get you stronger than a novice, and you will develop a higher than average RFD for your strength, which is good, but you will still only be of intermediate level strength at best.
If you are fat, come from fat genes, with fat folks, fat uncles, etc, the ideal of you ever being the ripped ab guy is bullshit. Your basal metabolic rate just does not work that way, and you will never achieve that without starving yourself. Additionally, a lot of people who CAN achieve that (typically younger people too) manage to be that lean while getting drunk weekly and eating submarine sandwiches. I know because I was like that in my 20s too.
What I am getting at is that the the path to relative strength and thus reliable BJJ performance for older and bigger people goes directly through leg and posterior chain training, period. It does not matter if you weigh 270 lbs if your heart stroke volume is strong, your V02 max is good, you get regular cardio, AND you can squat twice your bodyweight. In fact, you are going to pretty much kill everybody.
Heavyweights with good relative strength are nightmares. One point I keep making and intend to keep making is that our society rewards normal males for buying into the image of the large torso'd man. That's fine, IF your sole purpose in life is to bolster your confidence by LOOKING intimidating and/or sexy (in a somewhat passe way.) But grapplers are not normal males, and real intimidation comes from leg drive. Watch any GOOD wrestler. 0% of them have weak legs, or are pure upper body guys. In 0% will you see legs being a liability, unable to carry whatever's going on up top.
And I hate to say it, but not really--women get this more than we do, by a fair margin, if accidentally. Granted, a lot of the time their own motivation is a comparably narcissistic obsession with the look of their ass, but the funny thing about that is that an ass that looks full and shapely usually DOES imply a higher likelihood of good relative glute strength and hip health, so in effect, the narcissistic ideal of "skinny with a shapely butt" many of them chase ends up resulting in them being inadvertently healthier than us. All of that trendy tread-milling, pilates, yoga, and lunging go a long way toward producing a human with good hip health and good relative strength.
But as men, we tend to want more mass. With roughly 20x the testosterone of women, it is also much easier to build for us, so it makes sense that a majority of us chase it, while a majority of women chase toning, shaping, and leanness. However, functional mass is a real concept, and if you are a fighter, you have no business making the work of your hips, which are the focal point of jiu-jitsu, harder by bloating up your torso like you're Dorian Yates in 1994. You'll still get fuckin choked.
I think there is a stereotype that has developed of the heavyweight as a slower, weaker, flopping frustrated man who gets side controlled, knee on bellied, and basically dominated. This is definitely common, especially when fighting agile, strong middleweights. There ARE a lot of guys like this, partly because our society teaches men to bench press like sheep, but also because sedentary jobs and lives are common, so abdominal fat weight must be accounted for in leg and hip drive. Thus, the combination of being both fat AND strong (aka fatstrong) in the upper body is a double whammy for men who do not do leg or posterior chain work.
The main point here is that if you have a propensity to be fat, AND you like to lift hard upper body, you NEED to squat, deadlift, clean, etc in a ratio that is roughly 2:1 to your upper body work, in order to develop relative strength for BJJ, or else the people who do have that type of mobile strength are going to continue to beat your ass indefinitely.
And as I said before, you could do worse than to drop upper body work entirely, since the deadlift is the answer to most of BJJ's pulling questions. Even if you have a beer gut, if you focus on legs and posterior chain work, you will still move well on the mats, and in relatively short order, you will be a fearsome competitor.
An anecdote from Mark Rippetoe's "Strong Enough" comes to mind where he is talking about a friend of his who is a high level judoka, who recounts how he got his ass ragdolled by a much less skilled judoka because the opponent was at or beyond the cusp of the "elite" level in the powerlifts. This shit happens. Strength is a lot like weight class--being seriously outclassed is dangerous.
On the other hand, becoming elite in lifting is a waste of time for a competitive BJJ practitioner, but so is endless amounts of mat time, below the black belt level. EVERY skill in the world has a learning curve that is asymptotal. Big gains up front, followed by ever diminishing returns. BJJ technique is like that (purple is the sharp curve), powerlifting is like that (advanced strength standards.)
But if you want to become and stay competitive in a sport that is realistically probably 50% skill and 50% strength/athleticism BELOW the black belt level, where technical execution skill in participants is typically separated by less than 2 years of experience, you can't spend all your time trying to claw your way up either one of those two asymptotes (the BJJ skill one, or the lifting one) because optimizing noob gains in both attributes is far, far more efficient. Also, deliberate and accidental sandbagging is a real problem, so at white or blue belt, you could realistically come up against someone with twice your mat time, and if you do, you had better be able to throw that bastard around.
My recommendation for any competitive BJJ practitioner below the unlimited or absolute weight classes is to take up the slack in both learning curves, as rapidly as possible. If you are already very strong, roll a LOT until you are very close to the blue belt or the purple belt. If you are already a good grappler, heed these strength standards and actively pursue the non-bench powerlifts until your totals for your weight class are well into the INTERMEDIATE range. For unlimited and absolute competitors, I recommend actively pursuing the advanced pedigree, even if it means taking some time off to purely train with barbells.
If you're a purple belt, it is going to take you a LOT longer to get a big technical skill boost within the belt, and to get close enough to brown not to get tooled in a regional comp, than it would take to develop intermediate level strength. Anyone without bad genes can go from novice or even untrained totals to intermediate level totals in 6 months to a year. If [especially points-based] BJJ is 50% athleticism, and you can improve your strength and athleticism by 50% in 9 months, that's a 25% overall improvement in your competitiveness without touching a mat. Good luck getting that out of mat time in the same time period without being a 12x/week mat rat--at which point you might end up getting a brown belt by accident and have to start all over again. Lol.
That whole folklore about "Helio beat people up at 110lbs while fighting off asthmatic polio" shit purported by the Gracie family is marketing fluff designed to sell memberships to average Joes, who make up the bulk of any school's admission dues. You're not the average Joe, and Helio was either fighting people who were completely ignorant of BJJ, Judo, and wrestling, or else they had so little skill that it was basically like a coral belt beating up a blue belt. And I bet he was also really STRONG for his WEIGHT.
The root of cultism is unquestioned status
I don't know why some people treat black belts like they are sages. These aren't Shaolin Monks. Sure, it takes a particular set of attributes to get to the black belt level--persistence, endurance, love, toughness, grit, luck, temperance...the list goes on. But that doesn't automatically mean that the things a black or upper belt think have any real carry over into day to day life.
I'm relatively certain that a priest or a best selling author of a highly philosophical book could walk onto the mat with a white belt on and some people would still think the black belt is a more spiritual person simply because he's wearing what they want to wear. That kind of attitude causes cultism. Black belts are important people, but keep their identities in perspective. They are teachers of an art. No more, no less. The traditional overly-mystified Hollywood and fake "eastern" ideal of a martial arts master being a master of everything is bullshit at best, and unsubstantiated at worst.
It's highly likely that someone who has mastered an art has a propensity for mastery in other areas of their lives, because focused people tend to succeed repeatedly, but this is not always true. For every black belt who is a special thinker, there is another who is just an average Joe who fixated on a martial art, or worse, an extremely obsessive person who used martial arts to avoid traumatic external realities in their lives, to recover from them, or even to avoid doing inner work. Grappling is a discipline but it also functions quite nicely as a form of escapism, and escapists aren't sages.
I'm relatively certain that a priest or a best selling author of a highly philosophical book could walk onto the mat with a white belt on and some people would still think the black belt is a more spiritual person simply because he's wearing what they want to wear. That kind of attitude causes cultism. Black belts are important people, but keep their identities in perspective. They are teachers of an art. No more, no less. The traditional overly-mystified Hollywood and fake "eastern" ideal of a martial arts master being a master of everything is bullshit at best, and unsubstantiated at worst.
It's highly likely that someone who has mastered an art has a propensity for mastery in other areas of their lives, because focused people tend to succeed repeatedly, but this is not always true. For every black belt who is a special thinker, there is another who is just an average Joe who fixated on a martial art, or worse, an extremely obsessive person who used martial arts to avoid traumatic external realities in their lives, to recover from them, or even to avoid doing inner work. Grappling is a discipline but it also functions quite nicely as a form of escapism, and escapists aren't sages.
Monday, April 18, 2016
The most dangerous muscle is hidden muscle.
This is the hidden muscle BJJ blog. It's semi-anonymous. If people who know me find out I write it, I ultimately don't care much because I have nothing to hide (except muscle), however, I still believe and have always believed that the presumption of anonymity allows people to be more creative and think and write more freely in the conceptual sense. For instance, if you have an interesting, well thought out theory on sprints, and 11 people you know are in the room calling you out on the fact that you, for whatever personal reason, suck at sprints, then that is seriously going to cramp your ability to think and express freely about that topic.
I believe that the fallacy of "evidence basis" is something that kills knowledge and ideas. Not all good ideas come from people who can demonstrate excellence at every single thing they write about--champions don't have a monopoly on relevant thought. Just look at some of the top thought leaders in the weight training space, they're fat and old.
That said, my personal resume is basically this: 6 years of BJJ, and 25 years of weight lifting. I'm not PT certified but I have actively studied PT bodies of knowledge for over 10 years. I've studied and run old programs like Doggcrapp, Westside, 5/3/1, etc. Read numerous books by guys like Bompa, Rippetoe, Cressey, etc. However, I find the eastern European shit these guys read to be insufferably dry. But they are supertrainers, I'm not.
That said, the "hidden" part of this title is not at ALL about my identity, it's about my belief in what makes strong BJJ players. It's very similar to wrestling. Every serious wrestler I have ever known has been someone serious about leg and posterior chain training. Anyone who is serious about weight training is going to say "duh" there, but something I picked up from Rippetoe recently--ALL good ideas bear constant repetition because they are nearly drowning in a sea of bad ones.
I was at the gym yesterday, doing deadlifts and squats. The gym was filled with guys trying to improve their bench press. If you are a guy who wants a poofy chest to try and sleep with girls at the beach, fine, whatever. But if you are a BJJ player, a strong upper body is mainly only good for defending your neck and arms once your shitty guard and shitty legs have been passed. I will go into this in more detail in a later post, but being a BJJ "light bulb" body is better than being a weakling, but is still suboptimal.
Worse, it pushes you up in weight class. In competitive BJJ, every weight class runs the risk of bringing along with it guys whose muscle is optimized for that weight class. So if you're carrying a goofy looking bro bod with huge traps and shoulders, and your chicken legs can barely carry the weight, a guy with the opposite musculature is likely to show up and ragdoll your ass off the takedown, and drive through in any guard pass or scramble situations like a D1 wrestler.
As the former who is trying to become the latter, I look forward to ruining your strength paradigm. The hidden muscle manifesto is all about this. GIVE UP on cosmetic muscle. The most dangerous muscle is hidden muscle. I'm an ultra-heavyweight. At any given point in time, I can run into a guy who dwarfs me, and I HAVE. I can't begin to tell you how powerless it makes you feel when you find yourself basically in a daunting "absolute weight class" situation when you didn't even sign up for absolute.
The KEY is to create that power for yourself. You may never be 6'3", you may never have great genetics, but put your muscle in the RIGHT places, put it in the hidden places. You could do worse than to give up on upper body training altogether. In BJJ, if you're getting armbarred, it's because of 1 of 3 reasons: 1) you're technically inferior, 2) you're gassed, or 3) your posterior chain sucks so you can't get out from under someone who is setting one up. Reason #3 is very related to reason #2, and is even somewhat related to #1.
So that's all for now. Move your muscle to the right locations. Use your RECOVERY for the right reasons. Make your WEIGHT with the right proportions. Embrace the hidden muscle philosophy. Think like a cyclist--my hips and legs are everything. If I need to bench press somebody, I fucked up a long time ago.
I believe that the fallacy of "evidence basis" is something that kills knowledge and ideas. Not all good ideas come from people who can demonstrate excellence at every single thing they write about--champions don't have a monopoly on relevant thought. Just look at some of the top thought leaders in the weight training space, they're fat and old.
That said, my personal resume is basically this: 6 years of BJJ, and 25 years of weight lifting. I'm not PT certified but I have actively studied PT bodies of knowledge for over 10 years. I've studied and run old programs like Doggcrapp, Westside, 5/3/1, etc. Read numerous books by guys like Bompa, Rippetoe, Cressey, etc. However, I find the eastern European shit these guys read to be insufferably dry. But they are supertrainers, I'm not.
That said, the "hidden" part of this title is not at ALL about my identity, it's about my belief in what makes strong BJJ players. It's very similar to wrestling. Every serious wrestler I have ever known has been someone serious about leg and posterior chain training. Anyone who is serious about weight training is going to say "duh" there, but something I picked up from Rippetoe recently--ALL good ideas bear constant repetition because they are nearly drowning in a sea of bad ones.
I was at the gym yesterday, doing deadlifts and squats. The gym was filled with guys trying to improve their bench press. If you are a guy who wants a poofy chest to try and sleep with girls at the beach, fine, whatever. But if you are a BJJ player, a strong upper body is mainly only good for defending your neck and arms once your shitty guard and shitty legs have been passed. I will go into this in more detail in a later post, but being a BJJ "light bulb" body is better than being a weakling, but is still suboptimal.
Worse, it pushes you up in weight class. In competitive BJJ, every weight class runs the risk of bringing along with it guys whose muscle is optimized for that weight class. So if you're carrying a goofy looking bro bod with huge traps and shoulders, and your chicken legs can barely carry the weight, a guy with the opposite musculature is likely to show up and ragdoll your ass off the takedown, and drive through in any guard pass or scramble situations like a D1 wrestler.
As the former who is trying to become the latter, I look forward to ruining your strength paradigm. The hidden muscle manifesto is all about this. GIVE UP on cosmetic muscle. The most dangerous muscle is hidden muscle. I'm an ultra-heavyweight. At any given point in time, I can run into a guy who dwarfs me, and I HAVE. I can't begin to tell you how powerless it makes you feel when you find yourself basically in a daunting "absolute weight class" situation when you didn't even sign up for absolute.
The KEY is to create that power for yourself. You may never be 6'3", you may never have great genetics, but put your muscle in the RIGHT places, put it in the hidden places. You could do worse than to give up on upper body training altogether. In BJJ, if you're getting armbarred, it's because of 1 of 3 reasons: 1) you're technically inferior, 2) you're gassed, or 3) your posterior chain sucks so you can't get out from under someone who is setting one up. Reason #3 is very related to reason #2, and is even somewhat related to #1.
So that's all for now. Move your muscle to the right locations. Use your RECOVERY for the right reasons. Make your WEIGHT with the right proportions. Embrace the hidden muscle philosophy. Think like a cyclist--my hips and legs are everything. If I need to bench press somebody, I fucked up a long time ago.
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