Roman Mori recently tackled one of the sport’s most controversial debates: the relationship between elite grapplers and weight training. Speaking on the Coach ‘Em Up Podcast, the Army Ranger-turned-jiu-jitsu competitor addressed head-on the pattern of legendary athletes who’ve publicly distanced themselves from traditional strength training.
The phenomenon Mori discussed centers on several high-profile statements from jiu-jitsu icons. Mikey Musumeci‘s appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience sparked heated discussion when he revealed he “completely stopped lifting weights and doing conditioning” yet claimed he became stronger through body positioning alone. Rafael Mendes echoed this sentiment, stating he “eliminated strength and conditioning entirely” before his final world championship. Marcelo Garcia avoided weight training throughout his career while even Khabib Nurmagomedov—known for supernatural strength—revealed he “rarely lifted heavy weights.” Roger Gracie discovered traditional weightlifting “hurt his recovery and BJJ performance.” Reecently, Merab Dvalishvili claimed he doesn’t lift weights because it ‘makes him tired’.
“There’s this mythology around the Rocky movies and what we believe figh ters do,”
Mori explained. “Like ‘lifting makes you slow’—all these old school mentalities of what they believe training’s effect is on the body.”
He identified this as the sport’s fundamental hurdle:
“The first thing we had to get over in the jiu-jitsu space was get people in the gym because they didn’t want to go.”
Mori’s unique credibility—as both a second-place finisher at Brown Belt World Championships and a former military operator—allows him to challenge these narratives directly.
“When you see a guy with a kettlebell going ‘bodybuilders can’t do this, this is what real warriors do,’ I go, ‘Are you sure about that?’ I was an actual warrior. You know what we did there? Barbell s*it.”
The influencer argues that elite athletes dismissing strength training creates dangerous mixed messages.
“People comment on my jiu-jitsu stuff like ‘you’re not very good, you’re just big and strong,'” he noted. “I’m like, ‘Wait a minute, I do Smith machine bench press and I thought that doesn’t actually get you strong. I thought that’s empty muscle.’ How can you be of the opinion that kettlebell training is best and say mine doesn’t work because it’s not functional, and also be of the opinion that I’m not good at my sport and I’m just big and strong?”
He traced the confusion to bodybuilding’s tainted history:
“We lost the plot about what training does back in the ’70s and ’80s when ster*ids came around. The unspoken part—the part nobody wanted to talk about back then—we correlated bodybuilding training with looking a certain way, missing what actually drove those results.”
Mori’s prescription is straightforward:
“Anywhere from two to four days lifting, push and pull vertically and horizontally, squat, hinge, do some rotation, maybe throw some sprints in. Eighty percent should be general strength work. Ten-rep range because we can get the same stimulus for much less fatigue cost.”
His philosophy centers on “getting the most stimulus for the least work or fatigue” since jiu-jitsu itself is so demanding.
Addressing the elephant in the room, Mori acknowledged that strength absolutely matters in combat sports, despite what some champions claim.
“Anybody that does train at a high level knows being bigger and stronger is a big factor. You have to formulate game plans for people that are big and strong—tire them out first, wear them down. That’s a whole strategy “
He emphasized:
“To deny that it’s a factor is ridiculous.”
William Tackett was quick to agree in an online reaction saying: “If you took 2 grapplers with the same level of technique and mobility and put them against each other the stronger grappler wins – EVERY time.
This mirrors something Chael Sonnen said a while ago, Jiu-jitsu might be in for a real reckoning if more sotrngmen decide to take it up.
The real issue, according to Mori, is that top athletes conflate their exceptional skill with their training choices.
“When somebody does go win something and they’re bigger and stronger, they go ‘oh they’re just bigger and stronger.’ You don’t get to have both.”
The implication being that elite grapplers may succeed despite suboptimal strength training—not because they avoid it.
“People train their whole lives to put on muscle, and natural bodybuilders look the closest to fig hters,”
Mori observed. “A natural bodybuilder on stage might have a little bit more muscle and less fat, but aesthetically, they most look like fig hters.”
The disconnect, he argues, stems from athletes failing to separate bodybuilding as a sport—”essentially the anabolic steroid Olympics”—from bodybuilding movements, which are simply effective training tools.
Looking forward, Mori sees progress:
“We are moving in the right direction. When I post something now, there’s an outpouring of ‘yeah, this is stupid.'”
Still, he remains frustrated by the persistence of what he calls “functional” training fallacies.
“I hate the fact that I have credibility based on the way I look or what I’ve done, but anecdotes definitely kill the counterargument.”
His final word on the matter cuts to the heart of performance itself:
“High performance isn’t healthy. Show me an Olympic athlete who isn’t in shambles virtually 24/7, and I’ll show you someone who isn’t going to podium.”
For Mori, the elite grapplers dismissing weights aren’t providing a roadmap—they’re offering survivorship bias from athletes talented enough to succeed despite leaving gains on the table.
