I’ve mentioned that when I started training Jiu-Jitsu I weighed a good 240 pounds. Since then, I’ve lost somewhere around 65-70 pounds, putting me somewhere between 170-175. Not sure if you can imagine, but that’s quite a few pounds to lose, and it happened in about a course of a year and a half. I got the question all the time. What else do you do? There were two life choices I made, first being training Jiu-Jitsu and second was intermittent fasting.
I know that Jiu-Jitsu cannot encompass all of my fitness wellbeing. And I do train occasionally off the mats. One thing I’ve, for some reason, enjoyed in the past and continue to enjoy is rucking. For those who may not be familiar with the term, rucking is, at its most basic form, walking under weight, typically in a backpack of some sort. It sounds simple, because, well.. it is simple. But it’s not necessarily easy. My roots of rucking go back to the military. If there wasn’t a Humvee or cattle truck to haul us around, we were on foot and we were taking all our crap with us. We were rucking.
Simple vs. easy. I said just a moment ago that rucking is simple, but not easy. It’s one of those things that boils down to you. You put in what you want to get out. Tossing a 5 pound weight in a back pack and going for a walk will not yield the same results as humping a 60 pound pack. You may have to start at 5 or 10 pounds, but it’s definitely a progressive thing. The longer you do it, the more weight you’ll need to get a good workout in.
So rucking and jits, that’s it? Well, actually, no.
Another thing I like to train for and do each year is The Murph workout. Again, if you don’t know what that is, it’s a workout where you are to run 1 mile, do 100 pull-ups, 200 pushups and 300 squats then run another mile all with a 20 lb. vest on. It’s a “hero WOD” in honor of Lt. Michael Murphy, a Navy SEAL that died in Afghanistan. We did this just a few weeks ago.
What this actually entails for me is about two or three months of countless pull-ups, pushups and squats leading up to Memorial. Then I do the Murph, with or without company, and then it’s another 8 months before I think about the workout again. I should be better. I should get to a point that I can do a Murph with little to no prep time. And maybe someday I’ll get there. I’m just not there right now.
And honestly, that’s about it for me. I occasionally run, as it is required for the Murph, but I am by no means a runner. These few things, rucking, pull-ups, pushups and squats, in my opinion, round out my fitness level while complimenting Jiu-Jitsu. Plus, training to do hundreds of pull-ups will do miracles for your grip strength, and can lead to some quite comical moments while rolling.
So that’s it for me. What is your fitness routine outside Jiu-Jitsu?
Thanks for reading.
Thinking Through Jiu-Jitsu 