Alex Sterner, the pioneering strength and conditioning coach behind Electrum Performance who has worked with elite BJJ athletes at Atos, recently delivered a scathing critique of the pseudoscientific training methods that have infiltrated the jiu-jitsu community. Speaking on The Charles Eoghan Experience, Sterner pulled no punches in his assessment of what he calls “snake oil charlatan types” who prey on grapplers unfamiliar with established training principles.
Sterner’s frustration stems from witnessing the spread of unproven methodologies that contradict decades of sports science research.
The coach’s critique extends beyond individual salesmen to the broader cultural issues within jiu-jitsu that make practitioners susceptible to these methods. He identifies two primary factors: the sport’s emphasis on technique over athleticism and what he describes as a “counterculture” mentality among grapplers who may have been less athletic in traditional sports.
“There’s the c0nspiracy theorist crowd, which I think is a bit bigger in jiu-jitsu as well, where they love entertaining these alternative non-mainstream type of things,” Sterner explained.
“Jiu-Jitsu is kind of like one of those things. So, you know, if you got a fascia trainer who says that, oh, the mainstream’s trying to hide the 22 kilos of fascia, then they’re like, yeah, f*** the mainstream type deal.”
“Most people who join jiu-jitsu don’t necessarily… the majority of them didn’t do team sports or make those selective teams. So, they never grew up with that experience,” he noted.
The coach emphasized how these methods exploit people’s desire to be different: “Because jocks are well ingrained into the strength and conditioning atmosphere, they’re like, ‘No, no, we don’t do that stuff.’ And it creates like this counterculture type of feel where they don’t want to do the stuff that the football player who threw them in a locker when they were a freshman was doing.”
This creates fertile ground for questionable training methodologies to flourish, particularly those that promise shortcuts or secret techniques that mainstream sports science supposedly overlooks.
Sterner reserves particular criticism for the fascial training trend, which has gained popularity through social media despite lacking scientific support.
“If you just train for output, you identify different outputs that you want to improve and you train with intent and you practice those motions and get better at them, all of the tissue goes along for the ride,” he argued.
The coach emphasizes that traditional strength training methods already address the alleged benefits of fascial training through proven mechanisms.
The veteran coach’s credentials lend weight to his arguments. Since 2015 he has worked with elite competitors at Atos, including JT Torres and Andre Galvao, developing their strength and conditioning programs using evidence-based methods. His approach focuses on fundamental movement patterns, progressive overload and periodization – principles that have produced results across all major sports.
“Why is muscle so obviously adaptable?” Sterner asks rhetorically. “It changes so much based on the stimuli placed on it. It’s one of the most adaptable tissues in the body. Yet some of these guys will claim the mainstream muscle model is wrong. If you’ve got a hyper-adaptable tissue why would you not train it?”
Sterner’s message to the jiu-jitsu community is clear: embrace proven training methods rather than falling for marketing gimmicks. His success with world-class athletes demonstrates that traditional strength and conditioning principles, when properly applied to jiu-jitsu, produce superior results to any pseudoscientific alternative.
