How to Improve Hip Strength and Mobility for BJJ

Brazilian jiu-jitsu is a game that doesn’t just involve a great strategy and technique but also complete control over your body. This is the reason you will see a lot of different workouts that mainly help in acquiring control over your body. BJJ is usually defined as a method that helps you to acquire control over your opponent by using chokes and holds. In other words, unlike traditional boxing styles where you need to have control over the speed and pace of your punches only, this will be a completely different experience. You will be required to not only use the right technique but also the right pressure and right method to acquire control.

Experts say that although your upper body strength plays a vital role in BJJ without acquiring control over your hips you will not be able to swiftly move. Even if you look at the fights and matches you will see that the fighter has to switch and turn in order to escape the grip of the opponent. Apart from this, to acquire dominance you cannot just tighten the choke or hold over the neck, you also need to have full pressure over the lower body to give very less to your opponent to move. Your hold needs to be extremely tight and your movement should be swift and robust so that your opponent finds it hard to come up with a counter plan. All these things are impossible without having control over your upper body as well as your lower body.

With the help of this article, we will mainly highlight how you can work on lower body strength, since our goal is to offer a functional solution, we will also look into simple ways to make your hip muscles stronger so you can have a better grip.

Top 5 Strength Based Exercises for Better Hip Strength

Full body strength is very important but hip strength will help you to hold your opponent and pin him down in all conditions. To help beginners start their BJJ journey, here are some of the best workouts that you should try for better and swift hip mobility.

Bridge Exercise

The bridge exercise is a famous yoga pose where you will be lifting the weight of your torso on your feet and shoulders, your head will be on the ground while your shoulders will offer full support and your torso will be in the air. The idea is to hold this pose for as long as you can.

Hip Thrust

The hip thrust is a very simple workout where you will be taking support from the bench. Your shoulders should be on the bench while your feet will be on the ground. The goal is to push your hip region in the air and keep it there for at least 2 seconds and then bring it back. You need to keep repeating but if you want to increase the intensity the goal is to use weight.

Squat

The squat is a simple workout that helps you work on the strength of your legs as well as increase the cushion of your hips. All you need to do is pose like you are sitting on an invisible chair. Your legs and feet will be holding the weight of your body. The focus is to detain this position for at least 2 seconds before you get back to the initial position.

Butterfly Pose

Butterfly pose is very simple yet it offers you the opportunity to work on the strength of your hip muscles and increase flexibility. This pose will help you to keep your spine straight while you overlap your legs on top of each other. The goal is to keep your knees touching the ground. This will be very difficult at first but as you will start to carry on you will feel that there will be progress and the stretching will become effortless.

Lunges

Lunges is a great stretching exercise that will essentially help you to strengthen the grip in the hip region. For lunges, you will be only following the walking style but your focus will be on maximizing the distance. In short, your strides will be bigger and your leg behind will be fully stretched. You also need to take a full dip so that your knee touches the ground.

Bottom Line

To sum it all up, BJJ is evolving and with that, the trends of the game are also getting better. We see a lot of grappling moves becoming illegal because of their danger whereas we also see so many moves making it back to style because of the improvement. For people who are starting their grappling journey, it is much better to start training their whole body rather than practicing just a certain number of moves so that they can play better. The idea is to work the strength of every body part so that you do not have to suffer when certain moves are not used. Apart from this, it is better to start with a warm-up and stretching exercise that will help you improve the strength of your hips and lower body because in almost all the chokes and holds, you will be using a lot of lower body strength to control your opponent.