Does Diet Matter for Jiu Jitsu?
I’m sure a lot people are going to get their feeling hurt by this, and a lot will be on one bandwagon or the other. As much as our national health is a wreck in the US, diet doesn’t “fix everything.”
It is a part of the puzzle, and an important one at that. However, it’s level of importance and impact on performance are not the same across a competitive lifespan.
Without delving into any specific dietary dogma, the likes of which I’ve addressed many times before, let’s take a 10,000 foot view of what Rob is recommending in the video above:
1.25g of protein / lb of goal bodyweight
0.7g of fat / lb (down to 0.5)
30-50g carbs (pre-workout)
Rucking 5 days / week
Avoid: seed oils, alcohol, refined sugar
If you’re following along, that’s pretty damn close to what I recommended at the end of the year — with the aforementioned slandering of zealots included.
Macro-nutrients (protein, fat, carbs, and alcohol) are all discussions that warrant their own articles, so I won’t get into them in detail here.
What I do want to chime in on is the relevance of diet and nutrition in grappling.
From time to time, this video from the Lex Friedman podcast will make it’s rounds on social media. Frankly, I love it.
I love it to confront the used-car-salesman tactics of social media influencers touting “so-and-so is on X, Y, or Z diet and look how great they’re doing!” This is literally the same strategy long since employed by shoe companies and supplement companies after them.
On the other hand, the followers of said influencers will claim that the named athletes in this video only achieved their results because of magical steroids. They throw tantrums when someone achieves better results then them, using an alternative, let alone a contradictory, method.
Obviously, diet does matter, some, even a lot depending on one’s conditions. One of which may be longevity in the sport and general health, which I believe was talked about in the above podcast as well.
However, take note, that is not the same as performance. The consequences of those McDonald’s fries may be seen long down the road… after an Olympic Medal. Pick your poison.
To play devil’s advocate, you can correct your health, you only have a few prime years to compete at the highest levels. To really stir the pot, we can also look at how many people not named GSP or Gordon Ryan live on fast food and are not at the pinnacle of their sport.
Performance:
“Optimal bros” will send me all kinds of literature and peer reviewed studies, which I don’t mind. What I do mind is that people seem to have a very hard time understanding that the highest performers are out in the world performing rather than being studied in a lab.
Certainly, I’ve used that argument in the past that “if so and so did X,Y,Z eating garbage, what could they have accomplished if their diet was better?!” We’ll never know, and the point is somewhat moot.
The important point here is that the highest performer (singular), at any given time, in any given sport, will always be an outlier. They’re not good models to draw global assumptions from.
What may be much more interesting is if you looked at (for example) the top 100 grapplers (plural) in the world over the past 10 years (total sample size of 1,000). This is applicable to training, diet, conditioning, anything.
Where / When Does Diet Matter?
Obesity:
Let’s start at the obvious bottom. If you’re very overweight or obese, you probably don’t need me to tell you that. You also don’t need me to tell you that losing a few pounds would help your knee pain, you’d probably sleep better, and have more energy as well.
If your physical health is a limiting factor to how well or how often you can train, that’s obviously a long term performance inhibitor.
Longevity:
As Danaher eludes to, the weight / diet issue becomes more pressing for older athletes. The “consequences” of physical / nutritional choices made over a lifetime become evermore unavoidable.
This isn’t just true of weight and body fat, but also hormones, immune function, and recovery. We all know injury and illness suck. We also know it takes time to get good at anything worth telling folks about.
So, it’d also be really cool to live long enough to get there!
Injury:
The “physical limitations” above aren’t just related to body composition (e.g. percent body fat). They also apply to injuries. Everyone gets injured. Big ones, small ones, eventually it happens to all of us.
There’s not one cell in your body that didn’t come from something you (or your mother) ate, drank, breathed, or otherwise ingested.
You’re not doing your torn ACL any favors by subsisting on Diet Coke and Skittles.
Weight Class:
This seems obvious, but people often need the reminder that it’s really hard to outwork a shitty diet.
The closer you can stay to your competition weight year-round, the less drastic your “weight cut” in-camp or pre-weight-in will have to be.
The best way to do that is in the kitchen, not in the training room. Again, calories, macros, etc. are topics I’ll cover later.
The point we’re hammering on here is that diet and nutrition do have important roles for athletes, grapplers included.
Conclusion:
For a long time I wanted to believe that diet was a magic bullet, that somehow it was a secret I’d found that no one else knew about. I figured that since “we all have to eat, I might as well do it as intelligently as I can.” The later part is still true, and applies here.
The effects of diet on performance are hotly contested in medical and sports science literature. As I mentioned, the greatest of the greats are true outliers and there will always be a tremendous amount of subjectivity and nuance.
It was either GSP or Travis Stephens that said they didn’t eat the McDonald’s food because they knew it was great, but because they knew there would be a McD’s in every country they competed in. Therefore, among jet lag, training camps, and weight cuts, at least the food would stay the same.
“Longevity” is a completely different topic. For some that means losing weight or fat and just “getting started.” For some it’s recovering from an injury or going up / down a weight class. For others it’s fighting off age and other health concerns that would otherwise keep them off the mat.
Be smart. Eat well. Train hard.