David
brown belt
I feel like the older you get, the harder it is to keep up with the bigger guys. Your conditioning might be great, but that gas tank still runs out eventually. A couple of years ago, I rolled with Medina, Chris, and a few other big dudes. The next morning, I woke up and felt like I had been hit by a truck. Yesterday, I did 10 rounds plus half an hour of specific training. But most people were around my weight, so it wasn’t too bad. If I had thrown Howard in there, or Chris, or one of those guys, I would have felt it more. Today I feel fine. I woke up a little stiff, but I’m going to go work out.
DW: You’re obviously in the camp that says strength training is important.
It’s important for many reasons. Lifting heavy weights increases bone density. We’re literally fighting with our bones. If you’re defending an armbar or framing, that’s your bone density and the strength of your arm. Also, as much as size matters, strength matters. It’s about finding a balance. I usually train jiu-jitsu three to four times a week, and I lift four days a week. When I can, I add in yoga or something like that. For jiu-jitsu, everything matters. Are you strong? Are you flexible? Are you mobile? Are you resilient? To get those things, you have to strength train.
You can stretch and it’ll work, but to get actual mobility, you have to train through an extended range of motion. With Cossack squats, I started with my hip and knee at about 90 degrees, parallel to the ground. Over time, I didn’t just work on getting stronger. I worked on getting lower with weight. Now I can get deep into that position and still feel strong. If I can hold it under weight, I can trust it in a roll.
DW: So it’s fair to say if you do jiu-jitsu, you should be weight training?
Strength training. Not all weight training is strength training.
Lifting heavier matters. I’ve never had a client injure themselves while actually lifting weights. It’s usually something outside the gym, or something strange. But you have to pay attention to what specific exercises you’re doing. If someone says, “I hurt my back deadlifting once,” I’m not going to throw deadlifts at them right away. I’ll strengthen their back first, and then maybe we’ll try it.
Overall, the main compound movements matter: squat, bench press, deadlift, lunge, and row. If you’re in side control, you need a bench press to make space. If you’re arm-dragging, you need a row. If you have to stand up from any position, you need a lunge or squat. But then there are also things people dismiss as “that’s for girls,” like the hip adduction machine. How much time do you spend in jiu-jitsu squeezing somebody with your legs?
DW: In clamp guard. Passing from half guard.
Armbars, triangles, closed guard, preventing someone from spinning from a position. Hamstring curls too. When I lock arm bars or triangles, or stop someone from lifting my legs, I’m doing a hamstring curl. Playing spider guard, using a knee lever, leg extension—all these exercises people say aren’t functional for jiu-jitsu actually are.
One thing people should not skip is the hip adduction machine, squeezing the legs together. You spend more time doing that than you think. When someone tries to pass your guard, what are they trying to do? Push your knee down. Then the opposite direction, abduction. Someone dropped down to my legs and tried to squeeze my legs to knock me over. I just did a little quarter squat, pushed my legs out, and they couldn’t get anywhere because my hips were stronger than theirs.
In some positions, it comes down to who’s stronger. That strength training translates.
DW: Anything else obvious that we wouldn’t have thought about?
Think about what you’re doing most in these movements. It’s mostly your hips. Lunges and squats will take care of your quads, glutes, and hips. The accessory exercises take care of the smaller things. Then overall strength: how strong is your bench press? How much can you row? Can you do pull-ups? How many? Can you do them weighted? We’re constantly pulling this way and pulling that way, and we’re constantly pushing to make frames. Then you add shoulder, hip, and spinal mobility.
DW: When you train people virtually, is it still one-on-one, or do you do group sessions?
It’s virtual programming. We have an app for creating workout programs, nutrition plans, and profiles. They complete the workouts on their own and send us weekly check-in videos. They also have 24/7 access to ask me whatever they need. We update things whether they’re traveling or at home.
We get a lot of clients who come to us and say they had terrible experiences with coaches before. Someone told them they couldn’t eat fruit or yelled at them if they went to a Barry’s Bootcamp class instead of doing one of their programmed workouts. And these are people who just want to lose weight. They don’t care if they can lift 400 pounds or survive a five-minute round.
DW: Where can people find you?
JETFitnessTraining.com Most clients come from referrals. I feel like we have a really positive success rate. I’ve had clients lose 20 pounds and then stay around the same weight for a few months, but one told me the other day she’s off her blood pressure medication. Her weight has been the same, but she feels better. We’ve switched strategies. A lot comes down to busy schedules. But having us there keeps them accountable so they don’t go back the other direction.
DW: What brought you to jiu-jitsu originally?
As a teenager, I got into a lot of fights.
DW: Who started those fights?
Who knows? There’s a lot of mutual blame in those things. I thought about that later in life. I was already a blue belt. My friends and I were getting into fights every week, and we all trained.
We were not the ones starting it. One time, one of my friends tapped someone on the shoulder because he thought he knew him. The guy turned around, and my friend said, “Oh, my bad, I thought you were someone else.” The guy said, “Don’t fucking touch me.” My other friend said, “Yo, he said he’s sorry. He thought you were somebody else.” The guy started popping off, and then they wound up fighting. It was things like that.
Now you realize what can happen. Best-case scenario, maybe you walk away with a scrape. In one of my best-case scenarios, I ended up in the hospital because I had cellulitis in my hand. I knocked a guy’s tooth out, and my whole arm got infected. It cost a couple of hundred bucks, but if I hadn’t caught it, I could have died.
One of my friends, who used to get into fights with me all the time, had chronically broken knuckles. We’d get in another fight, he’d use the same hand to punch, and he’d break the knuckle again.
I also trained up because I wanted to fight MMA. And I did. I fought one MMA fight, and then I retired.
DW: When was that?
Almost 20 years ago. It was Chuck Liddell and Tito Ortiz, that era. MMA was still relatively new. We had a whole team, around ten guys. At the time, MMA was unsanctioned in most places, so I had to fly to the IFA in Louisiana with one other guy from my team. The rest of them fought in Texas. I was still a white belt when I fought. I had only been training for seven or eight months. I won by second-round TKO. I put a clinic on the guy. I kept hitting him a few times, taking him down, and mounting him. He would escape, and I’d do the same thing over and over. Eventually, I got the TKO from mount. It was amateur, so the threshold was lower. But there were no shin guards, just regular MMA gloves. Nothing like now, where amateurs fight with headgear, shin guards, thicker gloves. It was basically the same setup as UFC now.
At that point, I was already teaching kids’ classes as a white belt. I kept going from there. I trained from 2007 to 2012, around the same time of year.
DW: What brought you to New York?
My wife. We moved here. We were just dating at the time. She’s a Broadway performer. She was on the tour when we met. She was touring West Palm Beach when Covid happened, and everything shut down. We stayed connected and continued our relationship. When the theater reopened, they brought her straight here to do Hamilton instead of putting her back on tour. So we moved here.
DW: I watched you hurt your knee two years ago. I could tell straight away there was a problem.
Oh yeah. That was nuts. I spent two weeks limping around, then the next six months off the mat. But I increased all my lifts. My squat went up 40 pounds. My deadlift hit an all-time max. I probably could have gone heavier. I was doing Cossack squats with a 70-pound kettlebell. But I still couldn’t train because my knee didn’t have side-to-side stability. That just took time to come back.
DW: If you move back to Florida, who are the training partners you’ll miss the most?
That’s a good question. Some of my favorite training partners, I don’t even train with that often. Sometimes it’s not even the people you train with that you’ll miss most. Those people become more like friends. The people you’re not super close with are sometimes the ones you train with. You’re like, “Hey, you. I don’t know your name, but come here. Let’s go. Let’s see what happens.”
As a higher belt, you’re usually the one picking someone to train with. You’re thinking, “How tired am I? How much effort do I have? How many rounds do I have left?”
Yesterday, halfway through, I saw this guy I didn’t know. Super athletic, blue belt. I had energy, so I went with him. Maybe that’s not your tenth round. If I had just finished training with Howard, I probably wouldn’t have picked him. I might pick someone I know is going to move slower.
That doesn’t mean I need a rest round exactly. “Rest round” is broad. Maybe I just need space here and there to breathe. Or maybe I need a full break. If I roll with Howard and then Brad comes around and says, “Let’s go,” and I’m gassed, I might say yes, but I could use a break in between. I might grab a smaller blue belt or someone who is not super athletic, and close my guard while I catch my breath and still get a good round.
Every rest round isn’t necessarily a rest round. You can have a good round where you’re breathing a little harder at the end, but if someone asks for a hard roll, you’re still okay.
DW: Any final thoughts?
I feel like jiu-jitsu is one of those things where half the time we feel bad and the other half we feel good. You can go anywhere and do jiu-jitsu, but it’s always going to be different. If you go to another state, you might pop into somewhere much more competitive, more meta, doing different stuff, and you’re lost. Then you go somewhere else, and you’re ahead of the game. It’s easy to get lost in comparison.
The main thing is realizing that jiu-jitsu is good for you. It keeps you in shape. It’s good mentally. And it’s important to remember there is always somebody better than you.
This is part of a weekly series drawn from Murder Yoga Cantina, a book about the people, pressure, humor, and hard-earned wisdom of jiu-jitsu culture.
