Good workouts for grapplers

My strength and conditioning schedule is an erratic shambles of half ideas and inconsistency at the moment; hampered predominantly by being unable to perform any upper body pushing/pulling movements due to injury and the fact I've put running on the back burner BUT I'd say the best shape I've been in for grappling was when I was doing the following bodyweight exercises:

Hindu squats
Hindu pressups
Regular pressups
Sit-ups
Pull ups
Planks
Bridges

Do those in high volume and stretch well after and you should see the benefit in mat work.

To be honest, when I'm healed up I'm just going to go back to doing the same. It really worked for me YMMV.

 

what's wrong with yoga for grappling? strength (core and otherwise) and flexibility that professional athletes use to stay in shape. kareem abdul jabar credits yoga for him having a 20 year nba career.

what's wrong with parkour? massive balance, flexibility, wind, and agility. you know, kind of like a guard passing drill.

sure, lifting weights sounds great too.

the point i'm making is to work out and be fit.

 

It depends on what your needs are, and what your goals are not every workout was created the same.

Yoga is great but so is a dynamic warm up, it depends on your goals and how long you have.

If you want to get strong and put on muscle the easiest and most time effective methods are big compound movements done a few days a week. That's simply a time tested and proven method. I've never seem anyone suggest yoga for increased strength and muscle mass, injury prevention maybe but that wasn't the question asked.

The best way to get fit for a sport is to do said sport, but the question always is now much of the same type of training can you do before injury's happen, and can you overload your muscular and cardiovascular systems enough to make gains just doing your sport?

The answer after the usual newbie games is generally no, you need to follow a general strength and conditioning programme to develop those gains and then do your sport to carry those gains over

 

Parkour is ridiculously hard on the body, more so for a beginner. Joint impact, while reduced with good technique, is going to be unreal at first, and while traceurs occasionally like to derp and say it requires no strength, only technique (they're worse than many tai chi people in that respect, no offense to either), the movements and positions are effectively high end calisthenics. And let's not even get into the injury risk. I started parkour right around the same time I started lifting, and had to abandon the former as it was beating me up too much, whereas a well-programmed strength training routine (with or without lifting) will be specifically designed to progress at a quick yet sustainable pace, at a noticeable rate, by progressively loading up the same movements, or very overlapping variants thereof (more so the latter for bodyweight training), maximizing technique development in them while minimizing unknown variables. As for yoga, it is not strength training, unless you're doing classical military training back from when yoga was what ancient Indian warriors did. And it involved extremely hard calisthenics, and swinging around huge stone and wood weights, not unlike what Okinawans did, and still do in some karate styles. A possibly esoteric stretching and meditation class, healthy as it may be (that usually being 'very' for most people when done properly) does not quite fit the bill. Strength training is not recommended on a whim, it is recommended because it is a systematic and well-studied activity with literally lifelong benefits to pretty much every area of life

EDIT: (Always keeping in mind that high-performance training is not and will never be fully healthy, be that lifting, parkour, marathon running, or whatever; the body takes a beating regardless )

 

I never knocked yoga, anyone who is doing a strenuous physical activity, sport or martial art regularly should have some kind of mobility routine and yoga works great for that. I do it myself regulerly abd abosloutley the OP should look into it. But when it comes to a programme with the aim of building general preperidness for grappling sports do I really need to tell you which one should take presidence stregnth training or yoga ?

Parkour is an activity/sport in of its self one you would have to do stregnth and conditoning work for specific too that so what it has to do with preparing for a completley different sport I don't know. Its like saying to get ready to join a rugby team you should learn too high jump.

The point I'm making is that just workingout will only take you so far, thats exercise, doing what you feel like that day to feel like you have done somthing. Thats not training, training is planned progression through increasingly more difficult stressors to illecet changes in the bodies physiology with an end goal in mind of improving a physical trait.

 

This is very well said, a couple lf times a week Squat, Pull and Push progressivley heavier weights with some accessory accersies thrown in too correct imbalances and prehab weak potentially injury prone area's while doing either some kind of sport or steady state cardio. For most people it doesn't need to get any more complicated than that

 

i guess it's a thumbs down on parkour. i enjoy it, the little i've done.

so that's fine. i never said i was against lifting weights. the only thing i question about weight training is consistency. you're telling this woman to train with weights to get ready. but once she starts grappling, are the gains going to go away if she can't lift as consistently? grappling and lifting at the same time isn't exactly an easy thing to do for us hobby-ists.

but i'm also a little surprised at the slighting of yoga. yoga poses are basically body weight exercises, with the added benefit of flexibility. i do yoga regularly, and i grapple regularly. for me, it's actually the best training exercise for bjj. i have both the strength and flexibility i need. sure, occasionally i also like to do pushups, pullups, kettle bell workouts (core, legs and back). and i bike and run too to keep my wind in check. also, yoga, you don't need equipment or a spot larger than a mat. you actually don't really even need a mat. once one gets the movements down with a good instructor, shouldn't need anything else.

this is just my opinion. your mileage may vary. about me: 45 year old, blue belt bjj, train 3-5 times per week, compete 1-2 times per year.

 

Some people get freakishly strong doing only bodyweight training it cant be denied but in my opinion these people are the exception not the rule. Past a certain point it becomes alot of hassle to make exercisess progressivley harder requiring you too learn very difficult movements which is enevitabley going to distract from your initial goal of making your body more preparde for a sport. I understand some times its the only option for people but when ever possible its allot simpler and faster too make progress with weights. That being said Ross Eminent's Never Gymless should be required reading for anyone who wants to get stronger or fitter.

 

No one is slighting yoga (unless eric creasey and Robertson have crept into the site by mistake??) Just saying for the stated goals there are more time effective methods of training.

Martial arts are in season sports and anyone's weight lifting should be addressed as such, hence I suggested two days a week while body training sessions, that's what most sports pros suggest to their in season athletes, working at a higher rep range and lighter weights the thread starter will be able to maintain her off season gains and probably make improvements.

I can make good gains in strength and flexibility lifting an hour session two sessions a week and still have time to do grappling and martial arts three or four times a week and do cardio,its not that hard but also as hobbyists f you don't enjoy something there's no real reason to do it ? It's not the end of the world if you don't lift or don't enjoy yoga for example. I enjoy lifting and grappling so make the for both

 

That depends on how often she wants to train, what her goals are but in my orginal post I shared three different articles that illustrated how a simple two day S+C split can be fitted around reguler grappling (or any sport) training and still allow you to make progress. I said I wasn't knocking Yoga, it has its place, its just never going to be the primarey method of physical preperation for a combat sport in any succesful training programme.

 

http://www.scramblestuff.com/lifting-for-the-non-competitive-grappler/

Stregnth training for the non competitve/hobbyist grappler. Good article might be of intreset to some in this thread.

 

for some reason @gripfighter, i can't get to the last article. i could see the previous ones.

 

Think thats it fixed

 

It wasn't so much that I felt stronger (in terms of maximal strength) I just found I could roll more explosivley and for longer periods without getting tired: it made my work rate in rolling skyrocket.

I agree that due to the complicated and taxing nature of the progressions in bodyweight training that weights are a simpler more efficient option for maximal strength.

 

Do animal walks. One CACC great said a long time ago: "do your bear walks every day".

Bear walks, spider walks, crab walks, all that stuff. They are absolute hell:

[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uO8u_3Jmiqw"]30 Animal Grappling Solo Drills in Less Than 7 Min - Jason Scully - YouTube[/ame]

The skipping scorpions (sometimes called kangaroos) are particularly vomitous.

Suicide runs are great too.

If you can do all that, you'll be a beast in randori. On a good day, I can submit younger guys through simple cardio and top pressure. Nothing's better than a young buck saying "stop, stop, I need a rest". :evil: