The Best Strength And Conditioning Program For Scrawny BJJ Athletes

What is the No More Skinny Grappler training program?

9 weeks of training in the weight room, designed to put on useful muscle for skinny grapplers and transform them into becoming problems on the mat.

I created the NMSG program to solve some key issues that I knew some of my training partners were having.

The skinny grappler is often caught in a cycle of despair. They go to BJJ class, train hard and get smashed, coming home exhausted. They barely eat enough, don’t have the energy to go and lift weights, and as a result; stay skinny. They go back to class, and the process repeats. Throw some injuries in the mix, too, thanks to being under-recovered and you’re looking at a good portion of any jiujitsu academy’s membership base.

I knew I could help, but I had to address all these elements. Cue the NMSG program.

In the program’s introduction, I explain the importance of being in a caloric surplus in order to feed the body to grow new, useful muscle mass. I give calorie guidelines on what to aim for, when to eat with regards to your training times, and how to go about calculating your intake over 5 days’ worth of training. Protein amounts are covered, too.

The program is broken down into 3 x 3 week waves. Each wave is 3 days per week, and each training session is designed to be 60 minutes or less in duration. I kept the training sessions shorter than some workouts so that energy could be saved for recovering and spending time on the mats doing jiujitsu.

So many programs for grapplers out there are written by either coaches who have never grappled a day in their life, or by coaches who are very new to the sport of jiujitsu and don’t quite ‘get it’, yet. Not NMSG.

This program was written by a coach and grappler, who competes a lot and understands exactly what is a suitable workload in the weight room. There’s no point in trying to run a program that has so much volume, it takes you 90 minutes or more to finish. You’ll never recover in time for your mat sessions. This is a mistake that coaches who do not grapple make. They have these crazy weight room sessions with 10+ exercises that just take forever to complete and leave you feeling worse for your actual sport. Trust me, I’ve run these programs and they just don’t work. Maybe they would work with a shit ton of steroids and being a full-time grappler. But that’s not the majority. The majority of hobbyist grapplers are not taking gear and they do not have 8 hours a day to train and recover. They work a full-time job, want to get on the mats 2-3 times a week, and when they do, they do not want to get smashed or be labelled as the ‘rest round’.

I made NMSG so you can lift 3 times a week, grapple 3 times a week or more, and be sufficiently recovered to maintain this output so that you can build useful muscle on to your frame.

NMSG is an off-season program, meaning it is not designed to prepare you for competition. It’s designed to be implemented when you don’t have any competitions on the calendar for 2-3 months.

The unique benefits of No More Skinny Grappler for BJJ athletes

Reduced injury risk
One major benefit of adding some ‘body armour’ to your frame is reducing the risk of injury. Injuries will never be completely avoided in a sport aimed at maiming limbs. But you can significantly reduce the risk by undertaking an intelligent training program focused on strengthening the supporting musculature that surrounds your joints.
Harder to deal with on the mats
I mentioned earlier that no one wants to be known as the ‘rest round’. The more useful muscle you can put on your frame, the harder you’re going to be to deal with on the mats. It’s that simple. Technique, backed with some intelligent size, is difficult for anyone to deal with. Stop getting crushed from being so scrawny and actually add some size to your frame that will help you.
Recovered for BJJ training
There’s nothing worse than being under recovered for jiu jitsu, going to class, and then realising you have nothing in the tank and there’s 8 rounds of sparring to go. With NMSG, the programming is designed so that you can train normally outside of the weight room. You might have some mild soreness during week 1 of the first wave, but that’s to be expected with anything new.
Short Workouts
NMSG won’t keep you in the weight room for hours. Personally, I start to lose focus and energy after 60 minutes in the gym, anyway. You should be able to tick off the majority of your training sessions in the gym in under an hour, especially after the first week once you’ve become familiar with the exercise and session format.
Useful exercise selection for the grappler
Understand that NMSG isn’t just full of useless exercises for jiu jitsu athletes. You find any Bosu ball snatches, Crossfit-inspired EMOMs, or Arnold-influenced Roid splits. More on what is included in the next section.
One workout per page
NMSG is formatted for convenience. Each training session will fill up a page on your phone screen. So no need to zoom in on awkward boxes or text. Just take your phone to the gym and enjoy the ease of following your training program from the palm of your hand.
Periodised training
One tell-tale sign that a coach doesn’t have a fucking clue what they’re doing when it comes to programming, is that there’s no manageable progression from week to week in the training sessions. They have exercises with the same reps and sets, no advice on how the load progresses, and no references to intensity. You won’t find that in NMSG. Each wave is setup to produce a response; useful muscle mass for the grappler. Providing you do the testing and stick to the program, you will see results.

Exercises featured in the program to build USEFUL muscle

NMSG waves are broken down in to three sections;

Section 1
Triset – 3 exercises back to back, incuding a jump variation, a main focus lift, and a midsection exercises. Rests are 90-120s long between these trisets.
Section 2
Compound sets – these are designed to tax the major muscle groups in such a fashion as to stimulate muscle growth. The first exercise is usually using free weights, the following exercise is usually a bodyweight variation. By hitting the same muscle group twice like this, we can trigger a hypertrophy response so the body knows to grow more muscle, providing adequate recovery is available.
Section 3
Finishers – 3 exercises, again in a triset format, but with minimal rest between exercises and vey short rests between sets, 30 seconds.
These finishers are aimed at the deltoids, neck musculature, and the trapezius muscle on some days, and building the arms on the other days.

Here are some of the exercises that are included across each wave;

WAVE 1

Vertical and Box Jumps
Trap Bar Deadlift
Front Squat
Overhead Press
Copenhagens
Weighted Push Ups

WAVE 2

Squat and Seated Box Jumps
Romanian Deadlift
Zercher Squat
Floor Press
Hanging Windshield Wipers
Ring Push Ups

WAVE 3

Single Leg Box Jump
Single Arm Farmer’s Carry
Ab Rollout
Dumbbell Military Press
Ring Flyes
Wrestler Inverted Rows

Other programs that exist on the market for grapplers

As far as I know, there are no other dedicated programs aimed at increasing useful muscle mass for skinny grapplers.
Lots of good S&C coaches work with their grapplers on a 1-1 basis, and some of the more popular influencers have their cookie cutter programs out there, but I wouldn’t go near them because they’re not founded in improving performance.

Outside of the area of building useful muscle, there are some performance programs for grapplers out there but you’re still going to have to wade through the crap for the most part.