First Things First

I just finished a cardio experiment after going through ACL surgery and physical therapy. If you’ve ever been injured, want to improve your gas tank, or you just like some good old fashioned bro science, this article is for you.

I’m not a medical professional and this isn’t medical advice. If you have been injured you should work with a trained medical professional to assess your injury and monitor your recovery.

Today’s post is brought to you by Morpheus! Morpheus is the fastest way to improve your cardio. Morpheus turns your lifestyle and recovery data into targeted training zones and weekly goals to build your cardio faster than ever.

I am not paid by Morpheus nor 8 Weeks Out. I contacted their team to ask if they would send me a device in exchange for writing an article about how Brazilian jiu-jitsu athletes can benefit from the system. They agreed to it and I’m a huge fan of everything they do. I strongly encourage everyone to at least read their work about health and performance.

Rebuilding Your Gas Tank For Brazilian Jiu-jitsu

A little more than a year ago I had surgery to repair a ruptured ACL. The return to play timeline my physical therapist gave me was nine months. I took another three months to commit to lifting and becoming more injury resilient.

That whole story is still unfinished. I’m working on getting back to where I was so I’ll have to talk through the whole process another day when the story is done. The important point is, when I did come back from my surgery I was bigger and stronger, but in way worse shape.

The cardio and endurance I used to enjoy had totally fallen off. I used to be able to finish every session in a week without taking so much as a round off. After returning from surgery, I struggled in single sessions after a few rounds in a row.

After a year of physical therapy, lifting, and gaining size I decided that rebuilding my gas tank was the best thing to work on first. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

Assessing And Tracking The Demands Of A Sport

Generally when you’re creating sports training programs you need to think about three separate components:

1. Skill Work: when are you going to practice the movements of the sport itself?

2. Strength & Conditioning: how much force do you need to produce for the sport and how long do you need to sustain that force output?

3. Recovery: when are you going to rest and recover from training so you actually make gains?

Programming for grappling martial arts is complicated. You can drill and do skill work against a willing participant all day and not get tired. But that’s not realistic and it can enforce bad technique.

In grappling sports technical training requires a degree of resistance to be real. That resistance can make skill work much more taxing than skill work is in other sports.

Because of the resistance inherent to grappling training, there’s an idea floating around the jiu-jitsu world that says you don’t need to do additional conditioning, and you can get all the physical preparation work you need by only training Brazilian jiu-jitsu and lifting weights. I studied kinesiology in college and love to experiment so I decided to test that theory on myself.

Could I regain my endurance for Brazilian jiu-jitsu by only doing Brazilian jiu-jitsu and lifting at maintenance? To test this idea I decided to look at four separate metrics:

1. How far can I go in a round? Measured by five minutes on an assault bike.

2. What pace can I sustain? Measured by average wattage during those five minutes.

3. How does Brazilian jiu-jitsu impact my general cardiovascular health?Measured by testing my resting heart rate (RHR) and heart rate variability (HRV) every morning over the weeks.

To measure my experiment I decided to use the Morpheus Training System.

Measure, Manage, And Maximize With Morpheus

For those that don’t know, the Morpheus Training System is a chest strap heart rate monitor and application created by Joel Jameison. Jameison is the coach of Master 2 featherweight brown belt world champion, and all time great UFC champion, Demetrious “Mighty Mouse” Johnson. Johnson is known for having crisp technique everywhere and a seemingly limitless gas tank, thanks in part to Jameison.

I’ve been a fan of Jameison’s work for more than a decade. In an industry ripe with charlatanism and over selling, Jameison is no bullshit. Everything I’ve come across from his team has a well thought out reason based in science and professional experience. All method, no madness.

I started my career in the health and wellness world. There is a lot of bullshit tech floating around. Morpheus is not bullshit for a few reasons.

For starters, chest straps are generally considered more accurate than wrist monitors for evaluating cardio output during exercise. That doesn’t mean wrist trackers are useless for monitoring general health, but I literally cannot think of a single public fitness expert that advocates for using wrist straps in lieu of chest straps. You can read this review of the literature for more, as well as some of the problems you might face when trying to decide on a device.

The thing that I like the most about Morpheus is it’s simple. Like impossibly simple to use to guide your training.

You put Morpheus on in the morning to read your morning heart rate variability and heart rate. It will use that information to determine how recovered you are on a scale of 0 - 100%. You also wear Morpheus during your training sessions so it can monitor how much time you spend in each exercise zone and tell you how that contributes to your overall daily recovery.

The coolest part of Morpheus is how it plans your week. Every Monday Morpheus tells you how much time you should spend in each exercise zone. That means, in theory, you don’t need a conditioning plan. Instead, Morpheus will measure your work rate and tell you how much you should do in a given week. Like I said, impossibly simple.

My plan for the experiment was intentionally general. For eight weeks I would train grappling five times per week. Each session was 90 minutes long with about 40-50 minutes of technique and the rest reserved for sparring. I also lifted three times per week to maintain my strength.

The general outline was what Jameison and Morpheus call a 2/2/2 weekly model. It involves two moderately challenging days, followed by two hard days, and each hard day followed by an easy day to recover. This is what my weeks looked like:

Is this experiment perfectly controlled? Fuck no, I’m not a scientist. I hardly play a bro scientist on the internet! We’re just taking a broad look at the bold claim that you don’t need cardiovascular training if you do Brazilian jiu-jitsu and lift. Here are the results.

Results And Reducing Your Risk Of Injury

After 8 weeks of using Morpheus to guide my work and rest I achieved a modest uptick in all metrics I was testing; HRV, RHR, 5 minute distance, and the average wattage during that 5 minute test.

My total distance improved by just over a hundred meters. Not a lot. But the pace I kept, my average wattage increased just over 13%. More interesting is what happened to my general heart health.

Week 0 was a baseline data collection week. I took the next week off to visit friends for a vacation and de-train. In week four I had to travel again to visit family so I was not training then either. Regardless both trendlines are clear.

The weekly average for my resting heart rate decreased while my heart rate variability increased. That means as time went on my body was responding better to the stress of training.

Does that mean you can get away with only jiu-jitsu for endurance training and cardio vascular health? Yes and no. And this no is a very big no.

All physical activity is governed by the principle of volume and intensity. You can work hard or you can work long, but as one goes up, the other must go down. Of course your work in training, weight lifting, etc. is design to change how much volume and intensity you can handle, but, everyone has a maximum intensity and no one can sustain their’s for very long.

If your one rep max is 500 pounds, by definition you can only do it once before you need to rest. Similarly, if your max heart is 185 beats per minute you can only sustain that for so long before you need to stop and take a break.

So, yes, it’s true that Brazilian jiu-jitsu training adheres to the principle of volume and intensity. So, in theory, you can modify volume and intensity in the training room to give you the appropriate work and recovery ratios to improve your cardiovascular performance and health. But that’s the problem. Jiu-jitsu training and jiu-jitsu culture does nothing to help you do that.

My experiment only trended in the right direction because I proactively chose days to reduce intensity. More importantly, I tried to adhere to the guidelines set by my heart rate monitor.

Does this mean everyone needs to track their heart rate, steps, and everything else they could possibly look at so they can drown in data? Not necessarily.

What’s The Takeaway?

I’ve trained in gyms all over the world. In every one, the training looks the same. Roughly half of the class is dedicated to instruction and drilling with the remaining portion for the hard work, sparring.

Sparring is organized into 5-10 minute rounds with 1-2 minutes of rest between them. Then you repeat. Then you repeat again. And eventually you collapse on the side of the mat when class ends. Then you get ready to come back to do it again the next day.

In any sport other than Brazilian jiu-jitsu that would just be called bad programming.

Chael Sonnen has a famous story about training with Georges St-Pierre. In it he recalls that St-Pierre only trained hard for five five minute rounds in his sessions. Why 25 minutes at a time? His fights were only 25 minutes. You’re not Georges St-Pierre, but you would be better served thinking about training like he does.

Brazilian jiu-jitsu gyms are set up to give you a workout. You need to go out of your way to manage your work and rest over the days, weeks, and years of your training to maximize your health and performance. What does this look like in practice?

Every sport has an off season. In that off season athletes prioritize strength and conditioning gains so they can take those gains into their competition season. Why would Brazilian jiu-jitsu be any different?

If you want to have more healthy competition or training years you need to give up a few months of hard training and competition every year to prioritize building your strength and conditioning base.

You need hard days and you need light days. You can only stack hard days on top of one another indefinitely when you’re young. You will be healthier and happier for longer if you proactively choose days of the week for low intensity training sessions.

Jameison incorporates what he calls Rebound Training into his workouts. Rebound Training is a 30 - 45 minute workout that incorporates breathing and mobilization, light training for about 15 minutes, no more than 10 minutes of moderate intensity work, and a five minute cool down to get your heart rate lower and end the whole thing. This will drive blood flow without adding too much additional stress and improve your overall performance in training.

Individual training sessions are no different from weeks, months, and years. They need an appropriate ratio of work to rest.

When you hit a max effort lift or sprint do you immediately try to do it again? Or, do you take a few minutes off to rest before resuming work? I’m willing to bet you chose the latter. Why would Brazilian jiu-jitsu be any different? It’s all volume and intensity. If you have a training round that approaches your maximum intensity, take the next round off, or at least have a controlled round with someone that’s lighter than you.

Of course you need to work hard. And there are times when you need to push yourself. But that can’t be every round, nor can every training session push you to your breaking point in the same way.

There’s this cliche in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, “Sometimes you’re the hammer, and sometimes you’re the nail.” It mean thats everyone needs to take their lumps. I don’t disagree with that but I prefer to think about George Orwell’s discussion of hammers and anvils, “In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about.”

If you only think about how hard you can swing the hammer, eventually you’ll break. If you don’t program appropriate work to rest ratios and modulate volume and intensity over the days, weeks, and years of your training and competition life you’re going to get injured. It’s only a matter of time.

Learn from my mistake. Don’t give up a year of your life to surgery. Plan your rest before it plans itself.

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