BJJ is a marathon, not a sprint. The average Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt takes at least 10 years of hard training, so if you miss a week of training here or there it’s not going to make a difference in the long run.
But in some scenarios you’re not looking at just missing a week of training. Let’s say that you’ve got a sick kid at home, or that you have to recover from a surgery, or that your company has a huge deadline that they’ve got to meet; in a case like this you might not be able to train for months and months.
What to you do then?
I’ve written about surviving a training layoff before (and you should read that article here) so today I want to talk about a very specific aspect of your layoff survival strategy: not getting fat and out of shape during your hiatus from jiu-jitsu.
Let’s say that you’re normally 7 out of 10 on the fitness scale. You’re not at your ideal level (which would be 10) but you’re not doing too badly either.
What you want to avoid at all costs is letting everything slip: it will be SO much harder to get back to your previous 7/10 level if you sink all the way down to 0/10. If you find a way to stabilise things at 5/10, say, then your return journey will be so much easier.
In the video below I talk in detail about different strategies that I and other people have used to condense their workouts. These include the default cardio workout I did pushing a baby jogger when my kids were young, Tabata sprints, using kettlebell swings to condition the whole body, and 11 minute MMA conditioning workouts.
The video with more details is below.
Remember, all-or-nothing thinking is dangerous. And something is better than nothing, always!