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Improving your Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu nutrition will definitely improve your Brazilian Jiu-Jistu performance. Whatever you eat and how you eat has an effect on your health, physical activity, and all other important aspects of your life. But if it has a positive effect or negative effect on all these important aspects, it depends on whether you are eating well or not.
It also depends on how you eat, your eating schedule for a day, and how much you eat because excess of everything is bad. If you are a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu athlete, then nutrition is going to play much more role than you can even imagine. You should keep note of your daily eating schedule, your total calories per day, and what you are eating throughout the day.
- Keeping track of your daily eating plan will help monitor your health. You will also be able to change anything in your daily eating plan to help improve your Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu nutrition and performance. This article will explain all aspects of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu nutrition, what you should eat, and how much you should eat every day to keep your Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu performance optimal. Continue reading to find out what an actual eating plan for BJJ athletes should be.
1. Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Nutrition
Most people think that Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu nutrition is not different than the nutrition required for good health. But you must realize the fact that Jiu-Jitsu nutrition is very different because you are achieving it for different goals.
- Eating for your good performance in the BJJ is not the same as eating for being a bodybuilder, eating for losing weight , or just eating a regular healthy diet. Eating for performance is deliberate and specific nutrition tactics that are going to help you perform better on the mats.
2. Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Nutrition Basics
Before going deep into the optimal Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu nutrition plan, you must know the basics of nutrition. BJJ is a combat sport. It is super dynamic, and it demands a lot from your body. Eating for Jiu-Jitsu is eating for your performance against your opponent. This is different from eating just like a bodybuilder or weight loss diet.
The first thing you need to understand is your total daily energy expenditure. You are burning calories constantly. You are even burning calories right now while reading the article. So, to fuel your body to be able for better Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu performance, you need to make sure you are eating enough calories. You are eating enough to meet your energy demands. Macronutrients make up your total calories.
The three key macronutrients are protein, carbohydrates, and fats. Protein equals four calories per gram. Carbohydrate equals four calories per gram as well, and fat equals nine calories per gram. Learn how to eat to win and give optimal BJJ performance on the mats.
3. Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Nutrition Plan
Following is the complete nutrition plan for your optimal BJJ performance.
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3.1 Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Nutrition: Breakfast
The meal number one is the breakfast wrap with avocado and eggs. This meal has been made through the breakfast builder. Breakfast Builder consists of four categories. It is basically a choose your own adventure model. You have to choose one from each column.
Four columns consist of carbohydrates, proteins , fats, and some greens. Select one nutrition source from each column for Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu nutrition breakfast. Like a breakfast builder, there is a lunch builder and a dinner builder.
This breakfast meal is an awesome combination of proteins, carbs, and greens, with a little bit heavy on fats. The meal combination is heavy on the fat side due to avocado. It is a very nutritious meal.
You can always replace the wrap with the whole meal wrap. You can have it on toast. You can always choose your carbohydrates, proteins, greens, and fats source depending on what suits you the most.
3.2 Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Nutrition: Lunch
It may surprise you, but the lunch consists of steak chips and a salad meal to optimize your Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu nutrition. It is not commonly thought of as the optimum nutrition meal. But you should take it for lunch.
You should cook the steak in a mixture of rosemary, baby spinach, red pepper, and some sweet potato. You can buy the steak from the store. The fat content will vary from cut to cut. But making your diet perfect is not the goal here.
The actual goal for you is to optimize your Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu nutrition for improving your performance. Getting your macros right is not the goal here. You should be more concerned with eating the right food in the right quantity.
The food should be in an acceptable macro range and calorie range. So you can have optimal Jiu-Jitsu nutrition.
3.3 Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Nutrition: Snack
The afternoon snack is recommended to be taken after training. If you train midday or just before training, about two hours before training , you should take this meal. If you are someone who trains Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu in the evenings, you should be using a high-protein yogurt.
You can utilize a dairy-free option, or a Greek yogurt would work as well. A plain Greek yogurt is perfectly fine. You should have some granola. Add some fresh berries on top of the granola. An alternate recipe that you can also take if you have any problems with this meal is found on the nutrition plan.
Most BJJ athletes tend to eat frozen berries, protein powder, and yogurt. You have so many different meal options for snacks. You can have protein balls and peanut butter cups. This last meal is quick and easy.
Unlike other meals, you have different options for snacks which you can take for optimizing your Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu nutrition so you can have better BJJ performance.
3.4 Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Nutrition: Dinner
For dinner, you should cook a lemon salmon dish. This dish is very easy to make. You can make it more intricate. If you like, you can throw in some garlic and some quantity of different herbs and spices. From this dish you can make even a side salad or something like that.
You can find a full recipe that you can follow on the nutrition plan, but for simplicity's sake and to show you how quick and easy it can be, just put some salmon in the pan with some fresh lemon. Add a little bit of broccolini on the side. Take some microwavable rice, or you can also have basmati rice whatever that is easy and convenient for you.
3.5 Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Nutrition: Dessert
Last but not least, you should have dessert on your Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu nutrition plan. For dessert, follow a low-calorie ice cream. For example, choose the ice cream with 320 to 340 calories. You can also go with a high-protein version, such as high-protein ice cream.
Or you can choose from the various recipes, the dessert recipes for the nutrition plan. There are heaps from sorbets to fruit-based desserts, even some mud cakes. All sorts of stuff to choose from the recipes. But make sure of the calorie range or protein if you are going with the protein.
4. How Can You Calculate Your Macros?
4.1 Proteins
You need to figure out your protein, carbohydrate, and fats. The first thing you have to do is to calculate your protein. The reason we begin with protein is because it is very essential to get this macronutrient correct. Most commonly, people are under-eating protein. Not all protein is created equally. The reason that you should get your protein correct is so that you don't go catabolic.
Being catabolic means that your body begins to break down your muscles instead of building it up. When you are training BJJ, particularly if you are going hard for 10 days straight, then you will create some tears in your muscles. In response, your body repairs them. It is because of this process of repair that your muscles build back bigger and stronger.
But if you are not getting enough protein, then your body doesn't have access to the amino acids. It needs to repair your muscles. Your body, in that case, breaks down the protein that you ingest into the substrate of amino acids. Proteins have chains of amino acids. In response to not having enough amino acids from the protein you ingest, your body gains access by breaking down other muscles to repair your damaged muscle.
You have to avoid all this. When your body consumes too much protein, it goes through a process called gluconeogenesis. It means that it converts the excess protein into carbohydrate substrates which can then be used for energy. If you are eating too much protein as well as too many calories then it is converting that protein into lipids or fat.
- So you are basically just storing it as fat, which is what happens when you consume too many calories in general. ISSN (International Standard Serial Number) recommends from 1.5 to 3 gram of protein per kg of your body weight. However, for athletes, sticking with 2 grams is the best. For two grams per kilogram of body weight your protein intake ends up being 160 grams of protein per day if you are 80 kg.
4.2 Fats
The next macronutrient is fats. There is so much research on fat intake. When considering how much fat to take in, we need to consider a few things. Firstly, the ISSN recommends an intake for athletes of approximately 30 percent. Now, if you do your own research, you will find that depending on who you ask and who you are looking into, people recommend anywhere from 20 to 35 of fat intake for athletes.
However, we are going to stick with the ISSN’s recommendation for fat intake for athletes, which is 30. so the way you do this is you calculate 30 percent of your TDEE (total daily energy expenditure), and you divide that by nine. This will give you how many grams of fat you need to make up thirty percent of your total calories from fat. For an 80 kg adult, that ends up being 110 grams of fat per day.
4.3 Carbohydrates
For carbohydrates, you should be aiming for about 50 of your calorie intake daily from carbohydrates when you are an athlete training in Jiu-Jitsu. This is because carbohydrates are going to be your most optimal source of fuel when you're training on the mats. If you are smashing out three sessions a day, then that has a huge glycolytic demand on your body.
You need to make sure that you have glycogen stores ready to go in your muscles. When you are training BJJ, it is essential that you have a decent amount of carbohydrates.
The way you should calculate your carbohydrates is by taking the remaining calories of what's left over once we take into account our protein and our fats. That will give us approximately 50 of our carbohydrate intake. For an 80 kg adult, that gives us 415 grams of carbohydrates per day.
4. Last Words
You may have got some meal inspirations from this article. You can make a nutrition plan on your own. You don’t need to stick to the nutrition plan given in this article. We have just shown one example of the right nutrition plan.
Your nutrition plan doesn't need to be boring. It does not need to be some specific food. You don't need to have boiled broccoli and chicken breast all the time. You can have a variety of different meals.
If you try to calculate how many different combinations of meals and different variations based on the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu nutrition plan, it is going to be in the hundreds. Each Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu nutrition plan will have hundreds of different meal combinations. So, you will never get bored with your nutrition program.
The best thing is that it is specifically tailored toward the goals that you calculate. You can make your own Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu nutrition plan depending on your BJJ performance goals and your likes and dislikes.
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