BJJ Home Workout Series: Fat Loss Training

To be honest, dropping fat by doing home workouts might just be the best way of going about it. Being in a gym or running outside does provide different options, but it also provides access to food, and not of the good kind. If you manage to dial in your nutrition (it’s always about the food) you’ll be able to shred while in isolation, if that is your goal. If here’s a positive way to look at the COVID-19 pandemic, it is that it offers you a chance to really work on yourself. Why not put all the hours you have into getting in the best shape of your life with our BJJ home workout series?

Fat loss is actually simple. Spend more energy than you ingest. Not hard at all, right? Well, not quite. When it comes to our metabolisms, everyone’s is different. The common thing is that everyone has to ingest food in order to provide fuel so that metabolism can power the body. In those terms, the work our metabolism does just to keep us awake and go about daily tasks (which are not many these days) is also known as basal metabolism. That is the bare minimum of energy you need to function. It also means that if you ingest the exact amount of food to provide just this type of energy, you’ll neither lose fat nor gain fat. However, this is next to impossible.

Without going into complex mathematics and using various formulas, it’s much better to stick to basics. First, clean up your nutrition. Eliminating processed sugars, for one, will do wonders. Next, eat whatever or however you eat in a day, just a bit less at every meal. Paire with our BJJ home workout series fat loss training methods, you’ll reach your fat loss goal with ease. Moreover, if you want to really look into your nutrition, make sure you include as many thermogenic foods as possible.

One final thing is to consider your eating schedule. Why not give intermittent fasting, or time-restricted eating a try? This will allow you to eat more food in the feeding window that you have. Making your largest meal of the day the one right after your workout is a proven way of leaning out while still eating big. Moreover, if you can pull off your workout (which you can) in a fasted state, you’ll become a fat-burning furnace during the coming weeks of quarantine.

We created the BJJ home workout series in order to provide people with various options of training while isolation lasts. Home workouts can quickly become boring if you don’t have a precise goal or enough variety. Depending on how long this quarantine ends up lasting, you’ll end up having lots of options for different goals. The best thing about the series is that you can combine different workouts to achieve more specific goals if you want to. Or just for fun.

With these workouts, the goal is to provide something for everyone. That’s why we include both no equipment, bodyweight options as well as some options for those that have access to some basic training gear. Combined with some common sense nutrition, there’s no goal you can’t achieve, especially now that you can train every day, and even go for two-a-day training sessions if you feel like you’re up to it.

Fat loss workouts won’t just help you shed off some of the blubbers. Workouts that help you get shredded are usually lactic type interval training workouts. Iн the words they’re the perfect conditioning tool to help you develop the best gas tank for grappling that you’ll ever have. With that in mind, you can feel free to combine some grappling specific stuff like sprawls and penetration steps or animal walks in order to develop BJJ specific adaptations.

Following the pattern in the all-out BJJ home workout series, we offer a few options ranging between simple and a bit more advanced, in terms of programming. We also feature options that include e equipment training, as people tend to have at least some piece of gear around the house. For those that don’t, there are also some great options to use which in fact, can actually offer more variety than equipment training.

То begins with, the staple of bodyweight cardio (sort to speak) – the mighty burpee. And I’m talking full burpee here, squat down low, got a pushup position, do the pushup, squat up and jump up with your hands overhead. Even clap if you need to. This is the core cardio exercise for when you’re completely pressed for equipment and/or space. A great way to program burpee conditioning is with a ladder and pyramids. A ladder is simple – do 1 burpee, catch your breath, do 2 burpees, and so on until you get to ten. A pyramid is a bit more difficult – once you get to 10, you’ll need to go back down to 1. If you’re not used to pyramids, start with a 1-5-1 pyramid and work your way up from there.

There are also other ways to organize your bodyweight conditioning, ones that provide a lot more variety. A great way to organize is to do a metabolic conditioning circuit and a finisher. For the metabolic conditioning circuit, you want one exercise for each of the major compound movements like pushups, squats, handstand pushups, and pullups/bodyweight rows.  A great way to recognize them is in a circuit with 4-5 exercises. Go from exercise to exercise, doing them for 30 seconds each, without rest. Rest a minute or two between two repetitions of the circuit and go for 3-5 reps of the entire circuit. In a week or two, simply do all the exercises for 32 seconds, or change the variations of exercises you’re using.

Finally, the fun part. Get some dice. Actually, you only need one. Now choose a way to finish for each side and roll it. Whatever it says, you’re doing as a finisher at the end of that workout. One side can be a burpees pyramid. Another can sprawl to sit-outs or a Tabata of pushups and lunges. Be creative here.

When it comes to a version of training thаt includes equipment, once again we’ll stick to kettlebells. Most people that are interested in the BJJ home workout series won’t have anything more than a kettlebell or dumbbell anyway. In this case, we expand the “requirements’ to also include a jump rope.

The first option is Hurricane-style sprints. They’re not only one of the best conditioning methods for grapplers and fighters, but also help torch fat in an instant. An example would include sprints on the jump rope, followed by cleans and presses and swings. Three repetitions of this superset are one round. The second one is going to be squats and snatches, and the third Romanian deadlifts and floor presses. If you want to know everything about Hurricane sprints, read this article.

A simpler version, requiring just one kettlebell would be doing density training. This means you’ll do as many repetitions of a circuit in a given period of time, like for example 20 minutes. Don’t let the nature of this type of workout fool you, these are brutal. All you need is one kettlebell, but there’s a catch- you can’t place the kettlebell down for the entirety of the routine. A good option is 5 of each: swings, cleans, presses and snatches. You can go all of them on one side before switching, or switch sides for each set. Once again, take your pick.

Training for fat loss can be fun, although it will never be easy. Nobody likes to be strict with their meal plan while training in a way that actually sheds fat. Once you see, the end result, though, both in terms of aesthetics and performance, you’ll see that it is worth it. Moreover, you can combine other parts of our BJJ home workout series. That way you can also pack on muscle, and/or get better rat grappling as well.