In my blog article “The Anchor”, I covered the concept of “anchoring” your training to your primary focus area (i.e., BJJ) and making your program puzzle pieces fit together to help you achieve your most important goals. One concept I didn’t discuss was the actual exercise selection for your workouts.
One thing I make an effort to do is select an exercise that has a multi-purpose/multi-function benefit. Not unlike the trusty Swiss Army knife, the exercises you select for the job are versatile and can accomplish various tasks depending on your goals. Let’s walk through it.
My primary objectives for my MetCon workouts are pretty straight-forward, and I think most of you would agree are fairly common for athletes:
– Improve overall athleticism by practicing athletic attributes like jumping, throwing, sprinting, punching, etc.
– Improve motor-unit recruitment to help in maximal strength training workouts (i.e., train fast to be fast and explosive and to move the weights fast).
– Improve anaerobic work capacity.
– Improve lactate threshold and VO2 MAX (fancy way of saying improve capacity to deal with “the burn” and body’s ability to use oxygen).
For your reference:
– Motor Unit Recruitment:
– Lactate threshold:
– VO2 MAX:
If I can accomplish one (1) of these objectives with my MetCon workouts, I’m happy. Luckily it’s easier to meet more than one of these objectives with your workout than you would think. Something as simple as a 100m sprint can check off many if not all of these objectives. Now, the next important step that adds the icing to the cake, is that I try to select exercises that will also help me improve on my specific focus areas for the year, which are BJJ, Strength Training (i.e., the Deadlift), Mobility, Core, Grip work, and Flexibility.
There are many options for conducting MetCon workouts (e.g., As Many Rounds/Reps as Possible or AMRAP, Reps for time, timed intervals, total # of reps, total distance covered, timed circuits, compound exercises, etc.). Here is how my last workout looked. I’ve also included a brief video below to demonstrate the exercises.
Read the entire article here: Heavyweight BJJ
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