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.