How good is your conditioning on the mats? Do you find yourself gassing out too quickly… Or do you think that you still haven’t reached your peak when it comes to cardio?
If that’s the case, then take a listen to what Andrew Wiltse has to say about conditioning. He advises athletes to do two types of cardio, aerobic and anaerobic:
I do anaerobic cardio and aerobic cardio. So, I try to do cardio 4x per week. One day will be hill sprints… And because I have big calves, I’d get shin splits if I did too much running.
[So because I can’t do too much running], I have to replace that with a 40-minute cardio circuit… It’s kind of like interval training, high intensity interval training. [In this case], I’d have 10 exercises and I’d do them 4 times without stopping, so it would be a 40-minute workout. And that’s just my version of aerobic cardio that I do.Your anaerobic systems [dictate] how long you can go, until you can’t continue going anymore. It’s a way to widen your gas tank a little bit more.
He explains which muscle groups you should be hitting while working on your conditioning:
You do want to target muscles that you’ll be using actively in Jiu-Jitsu, but that’s just… Think about which muscles you use, think about which exercises you’d want to do to improve those muscle groups…
And if you don’t know which, then there’s a billion fitness experts on the internet. And lots of people can come up with these workout programs themselves.
Andrew also explains that doing these two types of cardio exercises will go a long way when it comes to your willpower. Namely, when you have a huge gas tank – which you’ve developed through doing aerobic and anaerobic types of exercises, without limiting yourself just to Jiu-Jitsu – you’ll find it easier to push through the moments of almost complete exhaustion.
And it’s not just due to being more physically capable to keep going… It’s also due to the fact that you’ve actually went through so many difficult workouts that you know that you’ll be able to push your body – and more importantly, your mind – a bit further than it thinks it can go.
Watch the video below to hear more on Andrew’s thoughts on conditioning and why he thinks that just rolling isn’t going to make you the best at it:
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