Training Methods

In Part I of this series, we looked at the diet and weight cut strategies we used with Matheus Diniz for his 2024 Craig Jones Invitational prep. Our nutrition coach, Bianca Franqui, contributed to not only that article, but his nutrition plan during that time. Matheus, his team, and myself couldn’t have been happier with how that part of his preparation turned out.

The other half of our engagement is actually how Matheus and I came to meet in the first place: to game plan and execute his strength and conditioning camp.

A Quick ASIDE...

The world of professional jiu jitsu changes constantly, and its recent growth has been exponential. I don’t think everyone understands that there is now a professional class of jiu jitsu athlete that stands a length ahead of the former “professional” rank.

What I mean is, every single athlete that took part in CJI conducted themselves like a professional athlete in any other major sport would. Trust me when I say, I’ve been around this sport for over 10 years and this was not always the case.

Every athlete in the room at weigh-ins had a strength and conditioning coach, someone professionally handling their nutrition, some kind of professional assistance to tend to their injuries and physical maintenance, and most of all — competition was their top priority.

Previous to this new cutting edge class of professional jiu jitsu athlete, many of the top competitors were indeed professionals and amazing at jiu jitsu. However, they were also school owners or had other jobs, and their sponsors were not likely to carry the financial burden of their professional career. I predict that in the next few years, more competitors will resemble those you saw at CJI and ADCC 2024 in that they’re truly full-time athletes.

Jiu jitsu has very much arrived in this regard. My experience at CJI taught me this lesson: if you want to compete on the biggest stages of jiu jitsu for big prize money, you will need to treat your career and life the same way. It will be too hard to be competitive if you’re not living the life of a professional athlete.

Laying the Foundation

When an athlete who is known for their physical prowess and stature like Matheus Diniz comes to work on their strength and conditioning, there is a temptation to pre-judge certain physical and athletic qualities. As a coach, you need to check the hype at the door and first look at the person in front of you and assess.

In that regard, we started Matheus’ camp the same way we would start any one else’s.

Needs Assessment

I always say this, and I’ll keep repeating it: no matter the level of the athlete in front of you, they are still people first. Like any client who walks into our gym, we always gather as much physical information as we can, and more importantly, get to know them as people.

In the case of professional athletes, you should always ask them what they’re feeling: what they feel they’re good at, and where they feel they’re lacking. They know their bodies remarkably well in most cases, and you’d be wise to listen to things they’ve done that have worked, didn’t work, and everything in between. Even if it’s in conflict with your own paradigm, the best results come from coaches who know how to adapt and work with the person in front of them.

More importantly, you begin to build trust. As Charles Poliquin used to say, “relationships are built at the speed of trust.” To work with an athlete at a high earning level or potential means that you two need to really be on the same page.

With Matheus, it was obvious I had a strong, powerful athlete in front of me. He’s taken on everyone from Gordon Ryan, Lucas Barbosa (nicknamed “Hulk” if that tells you anything), and Nicholas Meragali, but never has physically been outmatched, even in his losses. He was strong, and whatever we did to improve his strength would be strategic.

Conditioning Needs Analysis

When you evaluate an athlete’s overall conditioning, you need to look at more than just the “zones” and heart rate in a vacuum.

I like to use this analogy: zones and heart rate monitors are like a speedometer in your car. They tell you how fast you’re going, but that’s about it. They don’t tell you about your suspension, your fuel economy, whether you need an oil change…you see where I’m going. It’s a useful reading, but in isolation, it can leave you with questions when things start blowing up in your face.

So with that in mind, we have a few factors we look at when addressing conditioning with athletes. It involves examining their structure, efficiency, and power output, among other things.

We evaluated these factors through my conditioning assessment (which I plan to elaborate more on in a future article) in order to understand how fast Matheus could work himself to a recovered heart rate after a bout of difficult exertion, and also how his power output and HR data looked overall.

We found the most room for improvement in this particular area and it became most important to us in getting him ready.

Structural Balance

The first phase of any training program at DiSalvo Performance is meant to address the lowest hanging fruit: whether those are your imbalances between limbs, strength discrepancies, or anything that is most physically lacking. To not address these things will only rob you of progress later, as your structure won’t be able to adequately progress. Your weak links will literally undermine you.

An example of this is having really weak hamstrings and poor hinging mobility, or poor posture that robs you of the ability to properly lock out a deadlift.

With Matheus, he was remarkably healthy, and stayed that way throughout camp.

Strength Training

General Strength and Maintenance

To address the little aches and pains that pop up through training jiu jitsu, as well as keeping some of the important muscles and functions literally functional, our strength training would revolve around doing a version of Matt Wenning’s Wenning Warm Up and using accessories that addressed the rear delts, neck, upper back, hamstrings, and calves, among other things.

This may look like bodybuilding to outsiders and it often is. I can recall the look on Matheus’ face the first time I asked him to do a standing calf raise. He later revealed he was worried I was going to do “some body building s**t.” In reality, it was meant to better support the function of his knee through his gastrocnemius. He still laughs about this when he talks about it with training partners and coaches, however, it’s a great example of trust building: once he saw the results, it was easy to ask him to do things he may have previously written off. It’s also how we achieve and maintain the structural balance I describe above.

I would also put maintenance of the core and lower back here as well. For that, we used the GHD and a landmine setup at least once per week.

Maximum Strength

Maximum strength, and its expression and practice, is important for all athletes. I believe that in a few years, this will be a “trendy buzz concept” for athletes in nearly all sports. Why? Because to maximally recruit all of your muscles and synchronize your body to move something near your body’s strength capacity is the ultimate form of coordination. The implements you use and how you do it is another story entirely, but I can say that we aimed to hit a max effort lift twice per week with Matheus: one for his upper body, and one for his lower body.

Historically with grapplers, I have used weighted pull-ups as one of these movements, but we used the bench press and floor press almost exclusively for the upper body. Lower body rotated between deadlift and squat variations, with and without chains or bands, depending on the week.

Sled Work

We did a lot of sled work, not just as a conditioning tool, but also for strength. The sled is an interesting tool, especially when you use it thoughtfully. It provides a constant resistance as you push it in a very specific direction (or “force vector” as it’s sometimes called), much in the way you grind against an opponent when standing in a wrestling exchange. Historically, sleds are used in many wrestling strength and conditioning circles. This was an important consideration for us, as we originally were planning for Matheus to compete in ADCC. As many know who are reading this, ADCC scoring looks very favorably to those who can initiate and complete takedowns. When Matheus won ADCC in 2019, he did so by scoring quite a bit on his feet.

I also surmised that the setup for CJI, specifically “the pit,” [pictured below] would encourage a lot of action on the feet, as no one would want to willingly be pushed into the wall. I wanted Matheus to be as prepared as possible to show all his strength on his feet so he could execute his techniques.

We got feedback during his camp almost immediately: Matheus was called to be a training partner for Yuri Simoes and his camp for his ADCC Superfight with Gordon Ryan. Matheus, as you know, was cutting and losing weight by the week, while Yuri and his training partners stayed over 220lbs. Matheus was reporting feeling extremely strong, despite the ever-increasing size difference, and his training partners told me the same.

Organization

I tended to organize his training in 3-4 week blocks. By the time we were 2 months into training, I found that 3 weeks were about all we needed to get whatever increases and gains we were looking for. At that point, we would rotate main movements/max effort movements. In the case of the accessories, I often program around muscles and movements, and I’m less married to the exercises themselves. In other words, I use a high degree of variety. For combat athletes, this is essential. In practice and in sparring or rolling, they’re repeatedly using the same movement patterns. To do that in the gym is only going to add mileage. One way you can mitigate wear and tear is to switch up the exercises often, while maintaining the movements and muscle stimulation you want. This requires a good working knowledge of both anatomy and having a deep exercise library. It’s a good thing we love accessories and I am partial to conjugate styles of training— we are never short on exercise ideas!

Conditioning

Through our earlier tests, as well as his own feedback, this was where I felt we had the most room to contribute to Matheus’ performance on the mats through his work in the gym.

We found that Matheus could exhibit a large amount of power over various time intervals, as measured by his wattage reading on a fan bike, but his ability to keep that pressure on wasn’t quite there. Some people have issues “blowing their wad” on a blitz, and being unable to repeat it. Matheus actually could repeat these efforts, but not as quickly as we both felt was appropriate and required for his style of constantly walking someone down. This type of conditioning gives you confidence: no grappler wants to feel like if they miss or mess up a takedown that they’ll be too gassed to respond.

I also found that his ability to regulate his heart rate for longer, modestly intense intervals, and subsequently recover from those bouts, could use work. To me, this is often a sign of someone needing help breathing and more constant exposure to consistently intense stimuli. The hard part as a professional athlete is that depending on your training partner’s skill level, you may not be able to expose yourself consistently enough to the stimuli to build the level of endurance we’re talking about. In Matheus’ case, he had a room of great training partners, but he still found himself lacking here when we started. That should tell you how important this type of condition is to develop and how it’s hard to so on the mats alone.

Impaired breathing due to injury is often a result of nose breaks, broken ribs, bad posture, etc. Structurally, Matheus was healthy, and a simple primer on efficient respiration helped him quite a bit. We taught him to make sure he was nasal breathing at the right times and never holding his breath.

One lesson I’ve learned in the last year is that the best conditioning and strength gains happen in the offseason for grappling athletes. This comes with some experience: working with former Team USA World Team member and current Philippines Team wrestler Arian Carpio for her Paris Olympic Games prep, I found that the best progress in the gym happens when you have a dedicated time and priority to train in the gym. That is to say, a true “off-season” is the time for the gym to shine brightest. You can most certainly use the gym and a good strength and conditioning program in your competitive season, but you’ll get far more out of 2-3 dedicated months with less mat time than you will trying to stuff it all in at the same time.

The same was true for Matheus. We began training for ADCC (and eventually CJI) in early April 2024. We considered the real “start of the camp” to be the end of June. So from April until late June, we conquered a lot of weaknesses, increased his strength metrics, and drastically improved his overall conditioning and gas tank. We kept up that conditioning work once the CJI prep officially begun, but the reality is— once you’re in the final 8-10 weeks of prep for a massive fight, the athlete’s attention shifts to the mats, and as a strength coach, you need to be ready to adapt and put their skills training first.

Power

When you have an athlete like Matheus with great strength and ability, their power and explosiveness is important. Having watched his game over the years, I knew this was important to develop and foster in him.

Power training has a hidden benefit to grapplers as it increases their ability to absorb force. The faster you can contract and relax a muscle, I find, correlates to things like frames, defensive postures, and reactions in situations like grip fighting. Of course, explosive athletes make better offensive athletes too. We do this type of training to support throws, takedowns, and more.

We accomplished this by doing weekly speed work, on 1 or 2 days per week, depending on where we were in the preparation phase. We used everything from a barbell speed squats with bands and chains, landmine rotational work at different speeds and intensities, box jumps, bounds, etc.

If he was particularly fatigued from training earlier that day, we would regress as far down the ladder as needed in order to get the exercises in. Examples of this are instead of doing a speed pull/deadlift, we would instead do a series of heavy kettlebell swings with maximum intent. Sometimes knowing when not to do something is just as important as doing it.

I’ll admit that the jury is out a little on what is the most effective power exercises for grapplers. This is where I go back to individual styles, training history and finding the right movements for the person, not necessarily the sport.

***

In the end, things didn’t go Matheus’ way at CJI, but we were both immensely proud of his preparation. My only regret was that we didn’t get to see more of the conditioning and gas tank that we built for that format. His physical condition, preparation, and attitude couldn’t have been better. Matheus is a professional’s professional.

As I said earlier in this article, the world of jiu jitsu is changing and the class of top level professionals is changing and elevating. If you’re a younger athlete aspiring to be on these stages, you’d do well to not only model your preparation after Matheus', but also the class and dignity he showed at all steps of the process.

I was honored to be part of this process and be involved in the first $1M prize in the sports history— and what’s even more exciting is that I know it won’t be the last.

About the Author: Mark DiSalvo, CSCS

Mark is the founder and owner of DiSalvo Performance Training. He brings over a decade of experience training clients and athletes of all backgrounds and is the strength and conditioning coach to grapplers of all levels and disciplines: from youth to professional and Olympic-level. He is currently a purple belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu himself, with 10 years of experience in the sport. You can read more about him here.

A graduate of Northeastern University, he’s an NSCA Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist (CSCS) and Sports Performance Expert with a specialty in combat sports. He’s also a Steve Maxwell Certified Kettlebell Instructor (Levels 1 & 2).

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