Time and attention are our most valuable resources, with effort being a close third. This is so much the case that we often use them to accumulate more general mediums of exchange (like money).
Strength and conditioning training often compete with sport specific training. This isn’t just true of active training time on the calendar, but also recovery resources — time, sleep, mental capacity, etc.
But, what if I told you these were conditional variables?
Let’s get a few things clear first.
What should you train most? The thing you want to get good at.
If there’s time and energy left, what else should I train? Things that will help you keep doing the thing you want to be good at.
Okay, but what about adding X, Y, or Z? Most of that is probably junk in the sense that it will distract and detract from your main objective. However, there is something to be said for maintenance of skills or attributes as well as motivational sources… you know, like having fun.
Can all athletes benefit from strength and conditioning? Yes.
Jiu Jitsu has a lot of growing up to do because the great marketing lie that refuses to die is that “strength and size don’t matter, and technique conquers all.” Well, I’m sorry, that’s not how physics or biology work.
Physicality, the ability to apply physical attributes, is absolutely a weapon and skill that you absolutely should leverage — by training it. Of course, there is a “point of diminishing returns”; but this is often a matter of re-assessing direction and undulating intensity.
I’ve written before about “skill” or “sport” training as it’s own “energy system.” That should be obvious. If you want to get good at jiu jitsu, do jiu jitsu. Lifters lift. Climbers climb. Fighters fight. Etc.
In the early stages of any athlete’s development, it’s often the case that adding some muscle mass, strength (recruitment), and aerobic efficiency will be great contributors to their overall fatigue resistance and recoverability.
For example, I may be able to train my sport 2x per week instead of 1x. Or I may be able to get 7 or 8 sparring rounds in a session instead of 3 or 4.
At later stages, a lot of “fitness” training for sport likely has to do with injury prevention and rehabbing (or ideally preventing) overuse injuries — the aforementioned supportive training.
There are myriads more I could write on “armor building”, shedding some body fat, strengthening end ranges, and controlled articulation — and we haven’t even mentioned that god-awful word “longevity” yet.
However, those are topics for another day.
One of the things that we do have to be careful of is that fitness — a general term I’ll use for training our physicality — is often enacted in a synthetic environment for the purposes of training it.
If this is done intelligently, it’s a good thing. We isolate and develop specific movement patterns or energy systems rather than trying to do everything all at once.
In grappling, we shouldn’t be only doing live rounds and calling that training. We drill, scrimmage from specific positions, and concoct “games” to isolate and develop skills in a similar fashion.
In fitness, those synthetic environments often expose us to easily quantifiable metrics — load, time, distance, sets, reps, etc. This can become a race to the bottom and very distracting from our original goal of sport skill development.
In case you forgot; running, powerlifting, Olympic weightlifting, and more are their own OLYMPIC sports and as such, skills to be developed on their own.
That hardly means that in proper dosages they aren’t helpful to other sports, but I digress.
So, how can we measure progress in something as complex as grappling, or even the proxy of strength and conditioning training?
For years, my training logs have included the resources mentioned above — time and effort. This could be as simple as noting hours and RPE (rated perceived effort).
Even this is deceptive though. Certainly, not all “hours” are created or practiced equally (based on effort exerted or attention give during them).
Alternatively, a “composite difficulty” might look something like time x RPE. In theory, this is adequate. In practice, not so much.
For example, I’ve done workouts where the “work” segment was exactly 10 minutes and afterwards I laid on the floor for another 20 minutes. If you have 3 x 5 minute matches at a competition, is that only 15 minutes of training?
Obviously not.
This algorithm gets even more complicated when we start thinking about “active recovery” — that is, training session that improve our ability to train rather than beating us up more.
Worse yet, there are all sorts of wearable tech gadgets and apps that will purport to outsource this process for you.
I’m afraid that I don’t have a clear answer for this. Heart rate monitors, macro / food trackers, sleep trackers, etc. can all be helpful initially to “calibrate” your intuition. However, staying reliant on them means you haven’t really learned to listen to yourself yet; much less conclude an answer for your questions and solutions to your goals.
Outcomes matter more than output. Often times, we’re told to “embrace the grind”, fitness becomes a sport of it’s own rather than intentionally general “cross-training” for application a-cross sports.
We then find ourselves in a classic state of so-called overtraining — a session “feels” hard, but our output is sub-par. How does that factor into RPE? Does getting good at getting beat up sound like a good training plan? No.
Usually we have to go too far and cross a boundary to find out where it is. Conversely, to “know” a limit is to set one for yourself.
To that end then, we owe ourselves a reality check more than a progress check. Is what I’m doing working? Is it bringing me closer to my goals, or dragging me further from them?
The word “sustainable” is as relative as “difficult” or “necessary.” Sustainable for how long? To what end? At what cost? Classical periodisation is, by design, unsustainable — hence most sports have “seasons.”
Pick a direction. Make a plan. Go hard. Let go. Relax. Look back. Analyze and adapt.
Repeat for 10 years.