This is my own take on a realm of training that gets named quite several different things.

Robustness, resiliency, toughness, etc.

What is it?

The capacity of your specific tissues to tolerate/resist load and deformation.

Why is this important?

You have “problem areas” in grappling, areas of high risk that you may frequently injure yourself in. You may have “niggles” in these areas as you read this.

For grappling, the major problem areas are often the neck, the knee, the hips, the low back. We’ll throw the shoulder in too, although in my experience its usually the hip and low back.

To this end, we seek to train these tissues in the gym so that we can prepare them somewhat for the demands of hard grappling.

Neck:

The neck is often not trained, due to general fear and misconception. The neck contains musculature like everything else in the body, it can be trained and progressed in its capacity to deal with loading.

Neck Exercises for Durability: Banded Neck Isometrics

Your knees get a rough time in grappling, news to nobody. Give them some love with exercises such as these:

Knee Exercises for Durability: Natural Leg Extensions, Single Leg Hip Thrusts

Your hips do most of the work in grappling, especially BJJ guard work. There’s lots of muscles in that area, look after them.

Hip Exercises for Durability: Copenhagen Adduction Plank

Your lower back needs some TLC to survive grappling, give it some:

Low Back Exercises for Durability: Reverse Hypers, Back Raises

Our shoulders often get ripped into all sorts of positions due to armbars, kimuras etc. These exercises will introduce some key positions to work through.

Shoulder Exercises for Durability:  IYWT’s, Wall Slides

A note on specific arm work:

Often, I program dedicated arm work into my guys and gals programming, and I usually get messages like this back:

“I’m not a bodybuilder”

“Big arms won’t win me my rolls”

And while these statements are completely true, specific arm work can go a long way to help your elbows and wrists survive grappling long term. As we said above, more muscle in these areas will allow for greater levels of force exposure and force tolerance before an issue arises.

Train your arms, they’re exposed to a lot.