The distaste for strength in martial arts

[Steve]

Hi. I am writing an article on the attitudes towards physical strength in martial arts, and would like to get your perspective on this issue (if it is an issue, I personally feel that it is) in martial arts, since you're all much more experienced than me. Every since I started training, I saw that there were many students and professors alike that seemed to have a sort of chip on their shoulders when it came to physical strength. I specifically noticed this in traditional martial arts; while my professors in Jiujitsu seemed to have an issue with strong people, my professors in more modern arts and combat sports seemed to lean towards it. This issue was most prevalent during my fleeting time in Shorinji Kempo, and it was one of the main reasons I quit.

People there seemed to have this sense of superiority towards me because I spend a lot of time working out at the gym and lifting weights, and many jokes and mockery and criticism by both students and senseis aside at people who spend their time training at the gym. Much of it came from the idea that using strength to fight was brutish and perhaps even a little uneducated or simply stupid. Although modern combat sports and martial arts tend to supplement (and in some cases even rely on) strength training for their techniques, this is not to say that they are bereft of such attitudes. I have come across one or two individuals that have this mentality of superiority in my BJJ gym too, and there is even the running joke amongst the online BJJ community where calling someone strong is an insult in a way, as they have no technique worthy of a compliment.

Personally however, I dislike this mentality a lot. I would even go as far as to argue that strength is a technique too - I wasn't born with my strength, and I worked a very long time to get to the level I am in terms of weightlifting today. If it just so happens that it helps me against my opponent, of course I'll use it. I think it is very important to incorporate strength training, whether traditional iron-body type stuff, or modern muscular hypertrophy and development. What are your thoughts on this?

Some people think of strength as a kind of cheat... a way to overcome poor technique through sheer brute force. So, I don't think it's as much as distaste for strength as much as it's a distaste for the idea of settling for poor technique.

In BJJ, it's great to be strong. But the idea is that to develop, you should be working on the weaknesses. So, if you're big, try to work a small guy's game... work on your guard, focus on mobility and the scramble and don't just lock dudes down in a brutal side mount. If you're little, try to play a big guy's game. Use good technique to control position, keep your game tight, and don't always rely on your speed or flexibility to get you out of a jam. If you're strong, don't depend on that to allow you to shortcut techniques by hulking through a solid defense.

It's not just physical traits, either. If you're an experienced wrestler, work on your guard, where you're least comfortable. And so on.

 

[Damien]

I get you.

Ok we've beaten speed to death now. But you got me thinking in another angle..endurance. Another thing about lots of muscle is that it takes more fuel to run. More oxygen, more glycogen. So in any endurance situation, does that suggest the person with less muscle to fuel has an advantage?

Would you agree someone with a lot of muscle will potentially gas out faster than someone who is leaner? I've definitely seen this in sparring, bigger guys struggling after a while, whereas the lighter peeps seem to have endless reserves of spunk.

Not necessarily, amount of muscle and the size of the gas tank are not related, it depends on the exercise you do.

Jacked guys can run marathons or do triathlons, or long rows, that smaller people would completely fail at. You can be big and have muscular endurance, and have the cardio system to support it. Weight training (which over time always comes with at least some increase in muscle size) also increases the number of mitochondria in the muscles that produce energy.

Now in a purely hypothetical situation where you had two identical people, doing identical training and one had much much more muscle mass, then maybe they would gas out faster because they have more weight to shift around, and there comes a point of diminishing returns on power vs mass. However in the real world this would never happen, because if you are identical and have trained identically, you will have the same amount of muscle.

In two separate people there are too many variables to count, but if one person doesn't train their work capacity and another does, it doesn't matter how much muscle they have. If a skinny guy and a muscle bound guy both train work capacity (i.e. cardiovascular and muscular endurance) for 6 months, except in extreme body builder type situations, my money would be on the more muscley guy building a greater work capacity. They have more muscle so are able to work harder, and this is a significant factor in work capacity.

The real question here shouldn't be is getting big muscles bad (I think we have firmly established strength is good). It is clear that trained in the right way big muscles are a good thing, in that they are a natural biproduct and a facilitator of being strong. Yes you can have a certain amount of strength and endurance strength without getting huge, but the larger your muscle mass, the greater the number of possible muscle fibres contracting and therefore the more force that can be exerted. It's why you don't see skinny powerlifters, slim and strong only goes so far.

The real question then should be how should we balance our training time. You can only spend so much time each week training, how much of that should be dedicated to technique, how much to endurance/work capacity, and how much to pure strength. We can't put 100% effort into all of it. So at what point does training strength start to detract from our other training, not because we are too big, but because we lack the time, energy and adequate recovery to make our training effective.

 

[Xue Sheng]

OK just say you can´t . a dead weight is a dead weight you can do it or you can´t.

You're not very good at this goading folks into an argument are you.....

 

[MetalBoar]

If they are developing strenght in slow muscle, I think that muscle won't make them faster. How muscle is trained likely has more impact on speed than how generically strong the person is.

The ratio of slow twitch to fast twitch muscle fibers that an individual has is mostly genetically determined. Training can have a small impact on the proportion of type IIa to type IIb fibers and perhaps some smaller impact on overall muscle composition (last I looked the research wasn't entirely clear on that last bit). Still, about all you can really do to isolate which type of muscle fibers you train is to neglect the faster twitch fibers by never doing anything that requires enough muscular effort to significantly inroad them. If you work the muscles hard enough to inroad the fast twitch fibers the slow twitch fibers will also be significantly engaged.

So, if all you do for exercise is slow jogging and high reps, low weight, nowhere near failure, resistance training, you might fail to significantly develop your faster twitch muscle fibers and bias the fibers that do have plasticity towards type IIa. If you want to strengthen your fast twitch fibers, and bias those that can shift one way or the other towards type IIb, you want to do activities that require significant muscular recruitment and deeply inroad your muscles. As to the absolute, final, one direction or the other, difference your training will make in fiber type ratio is completely, individually, genetically determined and the practical ratio of one fiber type to another is largely genetically determined.

For instance, I'd be curious to see if powerlifting squat champions as a group are very fast, at all, in their footwork.

Power lifters are generally very fast, all things considered. Even the world strong man competitors are pretty fast on their feet. For example, Usain Bolt ran the 40 yard dash in 4.22 seconds on turf during the Super Bowl festivities in 2019. World Strongest Man competitor Martins Licis, at over 350 lbs., did a 40 yard dash in 4.89 seconds, in sand, with no sprint training. NFL offensive lineman (also huge guys, averaging 314 lbs.) do it in under 5 seconds all the time.

I don't know that it's true that the stronger a person is, the faster they are.

There are other things besides strength that go into speed, skill being one huge factor, how symmetrical you are and how well suited your individual anatomy is to the specific activity are also big factors. You can't change your leg or arm length in any useful fashion, but you can develop strength and skill. How much you should focus on strength and how much on skill to get the ideal outcome is the most interesting question. Sill, if you were to take two identical twins with equal skill, but one has 10 lbs. more healthy muscle than the other, I'm going to bet on the more muscular one in a speed competition in just about every circumstance.

 

[AIKIKENJITSU]

Hi. I am writing an article on the attitudes towards physical strength in martial arts, and would like to get your perspective on this issue (if it is an issue, I personally feel that it is) in martial arts, since you're all much more experienced than me. Every since I started training, I saw that there were many students and professors alike that seemed to have a sort of chip on their shoulders when it came to physical strength. I specifically noticed this in traditional martial arts; while my professors in Jiujitsu seemed to have an issue with strong people, my professors in more modern arts and combat sports seemed to lean towards it. This issue was most prevalent during my fleeting time in Shorinji Kempo, and it was one of the main reasons I quit.

People there seemed to have this sense of superiority towards me because I spend a lot of time working out at the gym and lifting weights, and many jokes and mockery and criticism by both students and senseis aside at people who spend their time training at the gym. Much of it came from the idea that using strength to fight was brutish and perhaps even a little uneducated or simply stupid. Although modern combat sports and martial arts tend to supplement (and in some cases even rely on) strength training for their techniques, this is not to say that they are bereft of such attitudes. I have come across one or two individuals that have this mentality of superiority in my BJJ gym too, and there is even the running joke amongst the online BJJ community where calling someone strong is an insult in a way, as they have no technique worthy of a compliment.

Personally however, I dislike this mentality a lot. I would even go as far as to argue that strength is a technique too - I wasn't born with my strength, and I worked a very long time to get to the level I am in terms of weightlifting today. If it just so happens that it helps me against my opponent, of course I'll use it. I think it is very important to incorporate strength training, whether traditional iron-body type stuff, or modern muscular hypertrophy and development. What are your thoughts on this?

Don't let it get to you; there is nothing wrong with working out with weights! They probably envy you.
I have been in martial arts for 50 years and I still lift weights. All it does is make my strikes strong and to apply joint locks more effectively.
I have learned at many studios and eventually studying up to black belt in American Kenpo and Tracy Kenpo and some Aikido.
Sifu
Yes, weights are excellent to build power in martial arts. You keep working out with weights, just make sure you keep your body's ability to do martial arts. That is, stretch after lifting weights and before working out with martial arts.
Sifu
Puyallup, WA

 

[drop bear]

Semantics. Strength is not an on/off switch.

The problem is if you are physically strong you may not seek good timing or mechanical advantage.

And then you have to be stronger than everyone you go up against for any of your stuff to work. Which is a weakness.

 

[SgtBarnes]

The ratio of slow twitch to fast twitch muscle fibers that an individual has is mostly genetically determined. Training can have a small impact on the proportion of type IIa to type IIb fibers and perhaps some smaller impact on overall muscle composition (last I looked the research wasn't entirely clear on that last big). Still, about all you can really do to isolate which type of muscle fibers you train is to neglect the faster twitch fibers by never doing anything that requires enough muscular effort to significantly inroad them. If you work the muscles hard enough to inroad the fast twitch fibers the slow twitch fibers will also be significantly engaged.

So, if all you do for exercise is slow jogging and high reps, low weight, nowhere near failure, resistance training, you might fail to significantly develop your faster twitch muscle fibers and bias the fibers that do have plasticity towards type IIa. If you want to strengthen your fast twitch fibers, and bias those that can shift one way or the other towards type IIb, you want to do activities that require significant muscular recruitment and deeply inroad your muscles. As to the absolute, final, one direction or the other, difference your training will make in fiber type ratio is completely, individually, genetically determined and the practical ratio of one fiber type to another is largely genetically determined.


Power lifters are generally very fast, all things considered. Even the world strong man competitors are pretty fast on their feet. For example, Usain Bolt ran the 40 yard dash in 4.22 seconds on turf during the Super Bowl festivities in 2019. World Strongest Man competitor Martins Licis, at over 350 lbs., did a 40 yard dash in 4.89 seconds, in sand, with no sprint training. NFL offensive lineman (also huge guys, averaging 314 lbs.) do it in under 5 seconds all the time.


There are other things besides strength that go into speed, skill being one huge factor, how symmetrical you are and how well suited your individual anatomy is to the specific activity are also big factors. You can't change your leg or arm length in any useful fashion, but you can develop strength and skill. How much you should focus on strength and how much on skill to get the ideal outcome is the most interesting question. Sill, if you were to take two identical twins with equal skill, but one has 10 lbs. more healthy muscle than the other, I'm going to bet on the more muscular one in a speed competition in just about every circumstance.

outstanding post

 

[Damien]

I'm losing fat. The muscle isn't shrinking. It's becoming more compact. I do what I refer to as Mastering the weight. Basically, when a weight gets easy to lift then I'll rotate the various parts working. So if I'm doing dumbell press then I'll change how lift it by switching my arm position. I'll use my workout as an example. My bench press and workout in general is always 1 minute rounds. I do a wide bench press for reps 1-3. For reps 4 -6 it's narrow press (like a military press) for reps 7-9 I twist the weights. for 10-14 wide press and so on. I crease the number of reps for a specific movement time I go through the full set of 3 positions. I do this instead of increasing the starting weight. At the moment my starting weight is 15 lbs and I'm debating if I want to increase beyond 30 lbs.

In a single session of the dumbell press I probably do a little more than 360 reps total in 5 days I would have done that lift 1800 times.

It seems like it's extreme but it's not. It's less weight than my push ups.

Hey @JowGaWolf , a tip for you based on exercise science for improving muscle endurance. There's a lot of false beliefs and misinformation out there on exercise, I always try to look at what the science actually demonstrates for us; much better than anecdotes.

It sounds like you are doing some crazy high volume, you would probably see better results with heavier weight and fewer reps. More weight is not automatically a bad thing for endurance, provided you aren't dropping into low rep ranges. As you get stronger and more have endurance, you can lift heavier weights for a long time.

It's pretty well established that the optimal zone for building muscular endurance is failure (i.e. can't do any more reps) between 20 and 30 reps. Much more than that and you aren't really working the muscle endurance optimally and so are being far less efficient with your time than you could be.

On number of sets, there is some debate and individuals vary, but around 10-20 sets for a particular muscle per week is an agreed range (i.e. Monday 3 exercises that work chest, Wednesday, 3 exercises that work chest and triceps, Friday 4 exercises that work both would be 10 sets of chest and 7 sets of triceps).

You can still do variations on grip and angles to target different parts of the muscle, but these still fall within the overall volume considerations. I tend to block the variations by set, to avoid having to adjust mid set.

Try upping the weight until you are failing somewhere between 20 and 30 rep range.

 

[Damien]

If you are a MA instructor, someone challenges you arm wrestling in the public, will you accept that challenge?

If you lose in that challenge, your students may lose faith in you. IMO, strength is one thing that you must have if you are a MA instructor.

Why not, arm wrestling and martial arts are 2 different skills and require different attributes. I'm sure Mike Tyson would lose to the world's top arm wrestlers.

Never have too much pride and never assume you can't make a fool of yourself.

Ultimately being a good teacher is different from a good practitioner. It's important that students learn this too. Some of the best fighters out there would be terrible coaches.

 

[Gerry Seymour]

i have to disagree Gerry. His art is very fitness/Strength orientated. Oyama was known to weight train. do you think wrestling with a bull (although not a big one) is just technique?

You seem to have misunderstood my posts on this. I never said you don't use strength. I said you train to not use it, so you can add it on top of technique. This allows you to develop technique that would work without the strength in limited situations, and it's amplified by proper use of the strength.

 

[Gerry Seymour]

It is impossible to move the human body without using strength.

I don't think anyone here is implying you execute technique with zero strength.

 

[Gerry Seymour]

Semantics. Strength is not an on/off switch.

It can be. We all have low strength days. Some days I can lift the whole world, some days I just want to sit and use as little strength as possible. A few of those days, I don't seem to have a choice. Today is one of those.

When it comes to using your strength in combat, it'll be highly dependent on the time, day, year, and your relative muscle fatigue.

Imagine getting jumped the night you lifted for hours. That's my worst martial arts nightmare, dude.

This appears to be one of those situations where we aren't all using the same definition - or perhaps even concept - when we use the word "strength".

If we use it to mean "the force created by muscle activity", then nothing that we do to move our bodies is absent strength.

If we use it to mean something like "powerful force generated by effective muscle use", then there are many things that don't require strength.

For clarity, I'm mostly referring to a combination of these concepts. So, yes, when we move, we use some strength. But when we say someone is "strong", we don't mean they have muscles that work. We mean they have muscles that are capable of considerable work - usually more than average or more than expected. So when I say "practice to not use strength", it's that second concept I'm talking about.

 

[Gerry Seymour]

I gas out sometimes and blame it on the dog. What were we talking about again?

Geez, I hope you're not as bad as my pitbull.

 

[Gerry Seymour]

The ratio of slow twitch to fast twitch muscle fibers that an individual has is mostly genetically determined. Training can have a small impact on the proportion of type IIa to type IIb fibers and perhaps some smaller impact on overall muscle composition (last I looked the research wasn't entirely clear on that last bit). Still, about all you can really do to isolate which type of muscle fibers you train is to neglect the faster twitch fibers by never doing anything that requires enough muscular effort to significantly inroad them. If you work the muscles hard enough to inroad the fast twitch fibers the slow twitch fibers will also be significantly engaged.

So, if all you do for exercise is slow jogging and high reps, low weight, nowhere near failure, resistance training, you might fail to significantly develop your faster twitch muscle fibers and bias the fibers that do have plasticity towards type IIa. If you want to strengthen your fast twitch fibers, and bias those that can shift one way or the other towards type IIb, you want to do activities that require significant muscular recruitment and deeply inroad your muscles. As to the absolute, final, one direction or the other, difference your training will make in fiber type ratio is completely, individually, genetically determined and the practical ratio of one fiber type to another is largely genetically determined.

This is why I said "developing strength in", rather than just "developing". It's my understanding that - as you said - the mix of slow/fast fibers is mostly fixed (some evidence it can be nudged a bit over time, but only a bit). But having that muscle fiber doesn't mean it's developed - that's easy enough to see in the fact that anyone who works on a given activity that calls on muscle will develop in that activity. And if that activity calls for strength, over time they'll see a change in muscle mass (but not significantly in the proportion of types of fibers).

Power lifters are generally very fast, all things considered. Even the world strong man competitors are pretty fast on their feet. For example, Usain Bolt ran the 40 yard dash in 4.22 seconds on turf during the Super Bowl festivities in 2019. World Strongest Man competitor Martins Licis, at over 350 lbs., did a 40 yard dash in 4.89 seconds, in sand, with no sprint training. NFL offensive lineman (also huge guys, averaging 314 lbs.) do it in under 5 seconds all the time.

That is very cool. As I said, I was curious about that. They're developing strength that calls on those fast-twitch muscle fibers, which should apply. Yet what they do doesn't train anything about moving at speed. This leads to all kinds of questions I'm hoping exercise science is working to answer (or has answered, and I just haven't found out yet).

There are other things besides strength that go into speed, skill being one huge factor, how symmetrical you are and how well suited your individual anatomy is to the specific activity are also big factors. You can't change your leg or arm length in any useful fashion, but you can develop strength and skill. How much you should focus on strength and how much on skill to get the ideal outcome is the most interesting question. Sill, if you were to take two identical twins with equal skill, but one has 10 lbs. more healthy muscle than the other, I'm going to bet on the more muscular one in a speed competition in just about every circumstance.

Agreed. This is the "technique" part of speed. And agreed on the twins....assuming that muscle is either equally distributed or focused in the lower body. If dude skipped leg day, I'm betting on the other guy.

 

[Gerry Seymour]

Hey @JowGaWolf , a tip for you based on exercise science for improving muscle endurance. There's a lot of false beliefs and misinformation out there on exercise, I always try to look at what the science actually demonstrates for us; much better than anecdotes.

It sounds like you are doing some crazy high volume, you would probably see better results with heavier weight and fewer reps. More weight is not automatically a bad thing for endurance, provided you aren't dropping into low rep ranges. As you get stronger and more have endurance, you can lift heavier weights for a long time.

It's pretty well established that the optimal zone for building muscular endurance is failure (i.e. can't do any more reps) between 20 and 30 reps. Much more than that and you aren't really working the muscle endurance optimally and so are being far less efficient with your time than you could be.

On number of sets, there is some debate and individuals vary, but around 10-20 sets for a particular muscle per week is an agreed range (i.e. Monday 3 exercises that work chest, Wednesday, 3 exercises that work chest and triceps, Friday 4 exercises that work both would be 10 sets of chest and 7 sets of triceps).

You can still do variations on grip and angles to target different parts of the muscle, but these still fall within the overall volume considerations. I tend to block the variations by set, to avoid having to adjust mid set.

Try upping the weight until you are failing somewhere between 20 and 30 rep range.

Man, I really miss the old "informative" rating.

 

[Damien]

Man, I really miss the old "informative" rating.

You'll just have to post 5 replies in a row quoting it so that people can't miss it!

 

[JowGaWolf]

It sounds like you are doing some crazy high volume, you would probably see better results with heavier weight and fewer reps. More weight is not automatically a bad thing for endurance, provided you aren't dropping into low rep ranges. As you get stronger and more have endurance, you can lift heavier weights for a long time.

It only sounds like crazy high volume. If you were to compare the number of steps that you take to sprint 110 meters with the number of steps that you take to run a mile. You would think that sounded crazy as well.

I lift heavier weights. My current weight increase for dumbbell press is as follows:

15lbs three 1 minute rounds - Fresh arms all 3 rounds
20lbs three 1 minute rounds - Fresh arms the 1st round. 2nd and 3 rounds Fatigue is on the horizon. Not fresh but not totally spent
25lbs three 1 minute rounds - Fatigue visits on the 1st round muscles begins to burn. 2nd and 3rd rounds I'm on fire, with pauses and a drop in reps. Still higher than 10. but I take some mini breaks

The total number of reps that I do by the time I get to 25lbs is lower than what I can do at 15lbs. I will increase the weight once I'm able to do 25lbs without filling the burn and without taking breaks while keeping the rep high.

It's pretty well established that the optimal zone for building muscular endurance is failure (i.e. can't do any more reps) between 20 and 30 reps. Much more than that and you aren't really working the muscle endurance optimally and so are being far less efficient with your time than you could be.

Yep this is where I am at 25lbs on the 3rd round. Sometimes it starts in the 2nd round depending on how fast I start off. The 15 lbs is my warm up weight. It allows me to focus on the technique and I can extend the range of motion a bit more here. In the past I've found it difficult to just go into lifting without a warm up of some sort.


Thanks for the advice by the way. I appreciate it.

 

[JowGaWolf]

Never have too much pride and never assume you can't make a fool of yourself.

I pretty much embrace that the possibility between decision and action, that I will make a fool of myself. It's not a high percentage but it's there lol. I just kinda of roll with it, so long as I don't look like the biggest fool.

 

[Damien]

It only sounds like crazy high volume. If you were to compare the number of steps that you take to sprint 110 meters with the number of steps that you take to run a mile. You would think that sounded crazy as well.

I lift heavier weights. My current weight increase for dumbbell press is as follows:

15lbs three 1 minute rounds - Fresh arms all 3 rounds
20lbs three 1 minute rounds - Fresh arms the 1st round. 2nd and 3 rounds Fatigue is on the horizon. Not fresh but not totally spent
25lbs three 1 minute rounds - Fatigue visits on the 1st round muscles begins to burn. 2nd and 3rd rounds I'm on fire, with pauses and a drop in reps. Still higher than 10. but I take some mini breaks

The total number of reps that I do by the time I get to 25lbs is lower than what I can do at 15lbs. I will increase the weight once I'm able to do 25lbs without filling the burn and without taking breaks while keeping the rep high.


Yep this is where I am at 25lbs on the 3rd round. Sometimes it starts in the 2nd round depending on how fast I start off. The 15 lbs is my warm up weight. It allows me to focus on the technique and I can extend the range of motion a bit more here. In the past I've found it difficult to just go into lifting without a warm up of some sort.


Thanks for the advice by the way. I appreciate it.

Ah that's cool. Yeah warm up sets are definitely important.

Especially as we get older! Gone are the days where I could just jump straight into things. Though I definitely still felt worse after for not doing it!

I still occasionally hear people ask why we spend so much time warming up. They'll learn one day! The place I'm training at at the moment I always show up early to do some extra warm up and mobility work to make sure I'm ready to go.

 

[JowGaWolf]

This appears to be one of those situations where we aren't all using the same definition - or perhaps even concept - when we use the word "strength".

Correct. That has been the case for pages now. I know for me I don't see "Strong" and "Strength" in the same light.

For me strong = body builder someone who can lift some heavy stuff. However, strength = what people who do yoga and gymnast often master.

Not saying it's an accurate definition. It's just how my mind understands the 2 words