Strong is useless if you can’t hold the right position when it matters.

When we started working with some of the best Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu athletes in the world, we found something interesting.

These guys were killers on the mat. World-class skill. Years of training. More mat time than most people will accumulate in a lifetime, but put them in the weight room and it was a different story.

Their general physical preparation was nowhere near their technical ability. They lacked trunk strength. Their glutes and hamstrings were underdeveloped. Basic athletic positions were foreign to them. Conditioning outside of rolling was almost nonexistent.

That’s not a knock on them. It’s what happens when you spend years getting incredibly good at one thing while assuming doing more of that thing will solve every physical problem. It won’t.

The weight room should fill the gaps your sport creates. That starts with positional strength.

Can You Own the Position?

Most people think trunk training means making their abs burn. Sit-ups. Crunches. Leg raises. Hundreds of reps chasing fatigue.

That wasn’t what these athletes needed. They needed to be able to create and maintain tension while forces tried to pull them out of position. So we hammered isometric trunk work across the sagittal, frontal and transverse planes.

The goal was simple: teach them to own their position.

Pull the top of the abs down. Squeeze the glutes. Lock the rib cage and pelvis together. Create tension and don’t let an external force change that relationship. That position matters because your trunk is the connection between the force you put into the ground and what happens through the rest of your body.

If that connection folds, rotates or extends every time you encounter force, you’re leaking power. And in a contact sport, somebody else gets to decide when and where that force arrives.

The takeaway is simple: stop treating trunk work like an ab workout. Train your trunk to resist movement.

Build exercises into your week that challenge you to maintain position against extension, rotation and lateral flexion. The exercise matters less than your ability to hold the position when the resistance starts trying to steal it.

If your “core exercise” turns into a wrestling match between your lower back and the weight, you missed the point.

Build the Ass Behind the Athlete

The next problem was impossible to miss. These guys were flat in the ass and weak through the hamstrings.

That makes sense when you look at the positions many grapplers spend thousands of hours occupying. Knees forward. Weight forward. Lots of time folded into positions that never ask the posterior chain to produce meaningful force through a strong hip hinge. So we attacked it.

One of our primary tools was the Romanian Deadlift. Not because the RDL is magical, but because it teaches something these athletes desperately needed: how to load the hips without surrendering position.

Push the hips back. Maintain the trunk. Load the hamstrings. Finish with the glutes. No reaching for the floor. No turning it into a shitty squat. No adding range of motion you can’t control because you think touching the plates to the ground earns extra credit.

The objective is to create tension through the posterior chain and then produce force from that position. That ability carries everywhere. Sprint. Jump. Wrestle. Tackle. Change direction. Pick something heavy off the floor. Drive another human being backwards.

If your sport constantly pulls you forward, your training needs to give you the strength to fight back.

Stop Practicing Bad Positions

Here’s where the transfer became really obvious. We teach what we call the Universal Athletic Position: feet forward, knees tracking over the insteps and the body organized so the athlete can effectively load the hips and apply force into the ground.

We reinforce that position everywhere. Squats. Trap bar deadlifts. Jumps. Kettlebell swings. It isn’t a “squat stance.” It’s a position.

When some of our BJJ athletes started doing more wrestling as they transitioned toward no-gi competition, something clicked. They came back and told us the stance their wrestling coaches had been trying to teach them was the same position we had been drilling in the weight room. Exactly. That’s the point.

Strength training shouldn’t just build bigger numbers. It should give athletes positions they recognize when chaos shows up.

If you squat one way, jump another way and completely abandon those positions when you compete, you have to ask what the hell you’re actually practicing.

Good training creates patterns you can take with you.

Your Sport Is Not Your Conditioning Program

This was another glaring hole. The athletes rolled constantly, but that didn’t mean their conditioning was complete. So we added dedicated conditioning work.

We used Echo Bikes and different interval protocols, including Tabata-style work, to build capacity without piling more eccentric stress onto bodies already taking a beating on the mat.

Why? Because competition eventually asks a question skill alone can’t answer: Can you still execute when you’re tired?

A 15 or 20-minute match can be tactical for long stretches and then suddenly demand that you empty the tank. You may have a minute left and need to attack. That’s a bad time to discover your conditioning consisted entirely of hoping your sport would take care of it.

Dedicated conditioning gave these athletes another gear and, just as importantly, confidence that the gear would be there when they needed it. You don’t need to turn every training session into a death march. You need enough aerobic capacity to recover and enough high-output conditioning to repeatedly produce force when competition demands it.

Those are different qualities. Train them accordingly.

Strength Training Should Make You More Mobile, Not Less

One concern from the BJJ coaches was that adding muscle would make the athletes stiff. The opposite happened. Their coach reported that their hips were more mobile and they were stronger in their end ranges than before.

That shouldn’t be surprising. Mobility without strength is just access to a position. The goal is to own that position.

A properly performed RDL doesn’t just strengthen the hamstrings. It asks you to control a lengthened hamstring position under load. A properly coached squat asks you to create and maintain tension through a range of motion. Good trunk work teaches you to organize your pelvis and rib cage while resisting forces trying to pull them apart.

That’s usable mobility. Don’t chase range for the sake of range. Earn it. Then get strong there.

Fill the Gaps Your Sport Leaves Behind

This is the real lesson. Your sport creates adaptations. Some are useful. Some aren’t.

Spend enough time doing anything and your body will get very good at solving the problems you repeatedly give it. But it will also expose holes in the qualities you don’t train.

For these BJJ athletes, we attacked those holes with:

Trunk strength that allowed them to maintain position against force.

Posterior chain development that gave them stronger glutes, hamstrings and hip extension.

Universal athletic positions that transferred from the weight room into wrestling and competition.

Dedicated conditioning that gave them the capacity to push when matches got ugly.

Strength through range of motion so increased strength didn’t come at the expense of movement.

None of this was complicated. That’s important. When an athlete already spends hours practicing their sport, the answer usually isn’t another circus act disguised as “sport-specific” training.

You don’t need to mimic jiu-jitsu with a cable machine. You need to identify what the sport isn’t giving you and build it. That is what the weight room is for. Build the qualities your sport exposes but doesn’t develop.

Get strong. Own your positions. Build an engine. Then go back to your sport and use the damn thing.

Get the right training for the athlete you’re trying to become. The Power Athlete All Access gives you all 10 of our training programs under one membership. Pick the program that attacks your weaknesses, build what’s missing, and switch when the job changes.

RELATED CONTENT

BLOG: Serious Trunk Training for Serious Athletes

BLOG: Why You Should Never Skip Trunk Training

POD: Ep 852 – How to Bulletproof Your Body w/ Dr. John Rusin