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Any tips on a pre-training program? It'll be a while before I move somewhere I can actually take lessons, but my cardio right now is so dogshit I'd need at least a year just to avoid dying on the first day. I can just about wrestle with sheep for a few hours, and they're not usually trying to choke me.
Just start, use supersets when you do strength training. A lot of cardio is specific to the sport anyway, plenty of marathon runners huff and puff on their first class since you're not as efficient when you start out.
As long as you keep getting stronger and do some assault bike training, you'll be alright. Many in MMA and Steve Maxwell swear by HIIT stuff on assault bikes as a time-saving way to get there. It's easy on the joints. I don't do it since my gym lacks an assault bike.
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Echoing @Testing123 , who probably knows more than me as it would be hard to know less, but to add:
-- Flexibility. Get on that 30 Days of Yoga. It's probably the most directly applicable physical activity, you need the flexibility to hit the positions or the rest of it isn't all that useful, and will also accustom you to laying on your back or side and moving your legs around.
-- Don't try to learn moves or techniques in advance, you'll learn them wrong without a partner and a coach. But do try to learn the names of positions and guards a little bit. My first dozen or so classes would have been much easier if I'd known butterfly guard, spider guard, De La Riva, X Guard, single leg X, turtle, etc. I knew a few things, like full guard half guard and back control, from watching UFC fights and whatnot, but I often knew them subtly wrong, and while I've yet to successfully learn something like a sweep or submission from a youtube video, watching a few youtube videos here and there has taught me things that my coaches don't have time to get to in practice, like "oh, in half guard go for the knee shield." The static positions will be easier to memorize without being coached through doing them, and just having some idea what it means when the coach tells you and your partner to get into a DLR will make you feel much more at home.
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I agree with OP on cardio. If your cardio isn't good, your first few weeks of BJJ will be hell, but that's a great way to build cardio so it works out.
Beyond that, I'd recommend at least basic weight lifting or some other athletic thing that builds full body muscles (not just running). BJJ is famous for being the least-muscle dependent of the useful martial arts, but if you truly have no muscle, you'll just get overpowered and clobbered in fights unless your technique is amazing. For what it's worth, when I started BJJ I was a regular normie weightlifter, and that helped, but I was not used to hitting my muscles from 10,000 new directions, so there was a big adjustment period. I now lift about 1/3rd as much as I used to and focus mostly on BJJ.
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