DiSalvo Performance Training

Same-day weigh-ins change everything about how you should approach a weight cut.

Tournaments like IBJJF and most wrestling competitions don’t give you the overnight window to rehydrate. Because of this, you can’t safely or effectively drop large amounts of weight in the days before if you hope to perform your best.

When it comes to weight cuts for same-day weigh ins, our recommendation is no more than 2 to 3% of your bodyweight. Beyond that, you’re not just putting yourself in a precarious position, you’re measurably less powerful. Research is clear that dehydration creates real, quantifiable reductions in power output for every percentage point of bodyweight lost. You’re giving something up on the mat before the match even starts.

But the cut itself is only half the conversation. The more important piece is your rehydration strategy. How you replenish in the window between weigh-ins and between matches in competition, determines how much of yourself you actually bring to the mat. We have seen it be the difference between a win or two on the day and a podium finish for athletes. A smart cut with a poor rehydration plan is still a poor plan.

If you compete in same-day weigh-in formats and don’t have a clear strategy for both sides of this, contact us today.

Force isn’t absorbed. It’s created. And whoever creates more of it moves the other person.

This is one of the most misunderstood concepts in contact sports, and once you see it clearly, you can’t unsee it.

When two athletes collide, the outcome isn’t determined by who “takes the hit better.” It’s determined by who produces more force into the ground and through the contact. The person generating less force moves. It’s physics, not toughness.

This is also why terms like “high impact” and “low impact” are largely meaningless without context. Impact is a description of a collision, but it tells you nothing about who was creating force, how much, or in what direction. Context is everything.

The example shown in the reel above from earlier this season says it all. Matthew Tkachuk goes to hit Crosby and Tkachuk is the one who goes flying. Not because Crosby “absorbed” the hit, but because Crosby created more force. At his size and age, against one of the more physical players in the league, that doesn’t happen by accident. It’s the product of his training.

Strength and force production aren’t just about lifting numbers. They show up exactly like this.

One of the biggest gaps in how grapplers train off the mats: ability to recover during the round

Most athletes train their conditioning in ways that don’t reflect the actual demands of the sport. Sometimes it’s too easy, sometimes it’s too mindlessly intense to “build mental toughness.” Even worse, sometimes they try to mimic the sport too closely to the point where it looks like a re-enactment film with iron and rubber . None of that prepares you for what jiu jitsu actually asks of your body.

Grappling has a specific rhythm. Explosive bursts, brief recoveries, sustained pressure, stalling, more bursts. If you’re never training in ways to support that rhythm, you’re never developing the ability to recover quickly within it. Recovery speed is a skill. It has to be trained like one.

Breathing is a significant part of this. A lot of grapplers can’t breathe efficiently under pressure, and it accelerates everything: heart rate climbs faster, recovery slows down, decision-making suffers. Learning to control your breathing during hard efforts isn’t a mindfulness concept here, it’s a performance variable. If there was ever a way to “build mental toughness” — it’s through making sure you can breathe properly. Ironically, one of the gentlest activities can produce one of the most evasive qualities in combat sports: a calm mind under pressure.

The fix isn’t always more work. It’s smarter structure. Training in work-to-rest ratios that support the sport and its ruleset, and deliberately practicing the skill of coming back down quickly, changes your gas tank in ways that general conditioning work alone simply can’t.

As always, you need a heart rate monitor to assess this accurately!

One of the most common creatine questions we get: will it make me gain weight or hold water?

The answer: it depends on the person.

Many athletes notice no meaningful change in weight or water retention when supplementing with creatine.

Others, particularly when starting out or taking larger doses, may see some initial increase. There’s real individual variation here, and anyone who tells you it’s the same for everyone isn’t giving you the full picture.

The most important rule we have is to never try creatine for the first time before an important tournament. That goes for dosing changes too. The week of a competition is not the time to experiment, regardless of how promising the research is. In the end, those gains are marginal anyway, and to jeopardize your entire camp and prep over a marginal gain from a supplement is just silly and irresponsible.

It’s important to remember, that while creatine is one of the most well-researched supplements available, it may bother your stomach. This isn’t the case for most athletes, but remember at the end of the day, it’s a supplement meant to accompany the efforts your put in your training, nutrition and recovery. A supplement, no matter how researched, can’t take the place of those things.

Zone 2 training is popular and being used by more people every day. But for grappling, it’s being overused.

Zone 2 aerobic training has real value. But a troubling amount of grapplers are treating it as the primary answer to their conditioning problems, when it isn’t.

Here’s the issue: jiu jitsu doesn’t live in Zone 2. The sport takes place at much higher heart rates — scrambles, explosive exchanges, long sustained pressure passing, and tangled guards put a lot more strain on your conditioning than 130 BPM. Training exclusively or heavily in a low heart rate zone doesn’t prepare your body to perform in the zones where the sport actually happens.

That’s why you need to train and get used to higher heart rates. I don’t even like to overly focus on zones personally, but for most, it’s going to be Zones 4 and 5, and being comfortable having your heart rate close to 190 BPM or more.

This all doesn’t mean Zone 2 is useless. In fact, you likely won’t be able to build robust conditioning without being efficient in Zone 2. It is your foundation, after all, but the suggestion by influencers and health gurus that zone 2 is “all you need” has negatively affected the conditioning zeitgeist of jiu jitsu. I can’t tell you how many people have come to my gym and told me that’s all they do, and wonder why they’re on-the-mat gas tank is lacking.

The mistake is confusing general cardiovascular health with sport-specific conditioning. They overlap, but they’re not the same thing. If your rounds are falling apart late, more Zone 2 probably isn’t the fix.

Build the base. But then build on top of it at the speed of sport.

The most common question I get on the mats: “If I lift weights, will I gain weight?”

The short answer: it depends entirely on what you’re eating.

Weight gain or loss comes down to calories. Lifting weights, even in rep ranges designed to build muscle, does not automatically mean you’ll gain weight. If you’re in a caloric deficit, your body doesn’t have the surplus it needs to add mass. You can train for hypertrophy and still lose weight, or stay exactly where you are if your nutrition is dialed in accordingly.

This is one of the most misunderstood concepts we see, especially with grapplers who are managing weight.

The training and the nutrition are separate levers. You control both.

That’s exactly why we have a nutrition coordinator on our team — because the lifting side and the eating side need to work together, and the answer to questions like this one is never just “yes” or “no.” If you have questions, is your best resource. Reach out to her or us if you need any help!

Most grapplers don’t have a conditioning problem. They have a power output problem.

When conditioning breaks down on the mat, the instinct is to do more cardio. More rounds, more running, more time under fatigue. But that often misses the actual issue.

The real limiter for a lot of grapplers is power output, and we measure that in wattage. It’s the amount of force and speed they can produce in a given moment. If your power output is low, you’re not generating enough to be effective in scrambles, finishes, or explosive exchanges.

And if you can produce high power but can’t sustain it, it falls off after a few seconds: that’s a different problem with a different solution.

This can all be trained in different ways, but the simplest (not easiest!) way to do this is on a fan bike. It’s also very easy to measure your progress on it. Wattage gives you an honest number. It tells you exactly how much output you’re producing, and how quickly it drops off when you’re asked to hold it. There are certain metrics you should have depending on where you compete, your age and ability level, etc.

There’s also the heart rate side. Some athletes aren’t used to operating at high heart rates: the body hasn’t been trained to function there. Others physically can’t sustain the demand. Both show up as “gassing out” on the mat, but they have different causes and need to be trained differently.

Understanding which problem you actually have is the first step to fixing it.

In hockey, most of the game happens in small spaces. And small spaces are won by whoever gets there first.

Acceleration — not top speed — is what separates players in those moments. The first two or three steps.
The ability to produce force into the ground quickly and move before the play develops. That’s a trainable quality, and the offseason is when you build it.

We train this explicitly. Short, maximal efforts that demand true acceleration — not just conditioning work dressed up as speed training. There’s a difference between being in shape and being fast, and confusing the two is one of the most common gaps we see in how hockey players train off the ice.

Force plates play a big role here. We can measure how much force an athlete produces, how quickly they produce it, and whether there’s a meaningful difference between legs. That data tells us where the work needs to go — and lets us track whether it’s actually improving over time.

Getting to pucks faster, winning races in tight areas, being the player who arrives first — that comes from deliberate speed and power development. It doesn’t happen by accident, and it doesn’t happen in-season when the priority is showing up fresh to compete.

This is the work. And the offseason is the window to do it.