During a recent conversation on the Joe Rogan Experience UFC London Companion podcast, Gordon Ryan offered a somewhat different perspective on the role of cardio in BJJ.
According to Ryan, success in BJJ isn’t just about running sprints or having an elite VO2 max – it’s about your work rate.
In other words, it is about using less energy through better technique:
Most important thing is the work rate.
It doesn’t matter how good your cardio is, like how high your VO2 max is.
If you’re working twice as hard as I am, you’re gonna get tired faster than I am.
Ryan explained that his ability to control matches while remaining efficient forces his opponents into a frantic pace just to keep up:
Because I’m so much more technical, because the gap in skill is so big between being the next best guy, their work rate is always three, four, or five times as high as mine…
They have to explode, they have to move quickly.
He continued to explain the importance of efficiency on the mats:
It doesn’t matter how good your cardio is.
If I ran a mile it would be impressive, but because I’m so much more efficient, the work rate is so much higher for my opponents that they just fatigue a lot faster.
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