"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.
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