hi everyone,
i need to improve my performance in martial arts by weight raining, but i don't know how should i start it. I need your suggestion and advice in weight training. i need it for strenth , endurance, and a good looking body.
Hi Pancasona---
I've been weight training for ten years, starting as a pretty out-of-shape ectormorph and adding upwards of twenty-five pounds of muscle over that time. Gaining muscle is very difficult for me---I have a fast metabolism that's showing no signs of slowing down and no genetic advantages whatever!---so what worked for me might do the trick for you.
From early on I followed the Pete Sysco/John Little `Power Factor' system which emphasises using
very heavy weights over
very short reps which are confined to your strongest range. Their explanation for this is a bit too detailed and technical to go into here, but the short story is, the heavier the weights you lift, the more neural motor units you recruit to fire, and the more motor units fire, the more the body responds to resistance that's just a bit outside what you can do comfortably. So the idea is, instead of a `full stretch' rep in a bench press which descends well below your zone of maximum leverage, confining your lifting to the top couple of inches of your strongest range and you can pretty much add another 80-100 lbs. to your benching right off the top.
The catch is, you
must work in a power rack. Set the pins as close as you can to the bottom of your strongest range and lift to just below lock-out. That will for a standard bench press often be nothing more than a couple of inches, but if you do the reps fast, as they recommend, you'll be covering the same distance in the same time as a normal full-range rep, except with way more weight on the bar. You strive to increase the total weight you can lift during a fixed time period, and your strength increases steadily, and (if you're lucky and have the right DNA) fairly quickly. The other important point is, you train infrequently---really heavy weights demand corresponding recovery times.
My lifting routine involves training two different muscle groups, with workouts alternating between the two and each workout separated from the other by two to three weeks; any more frequent and I found my performance at the gym suffered, but if I kept to that schedule, I made progress virtually every workout. When I was at my best a few years ago, I was using 400 lb benches over a
very short range, doing weighted dips the same way carrying 120 lbs on a dipping chain around my waist, and so with seated shoulder presses, weighted chins for biceps, and leg presses (squats hurt like hell, even using a MantaRay, and I worried about spinal compression, so I avoid them).
I started doing this kind of routine ten years back, when I was fifty. I had a bad accident doing a shoulder press a few years ago that slowed me down a bit---my fault entirely, lost track of what was where in the power rack in the gym I'd switched to when we moved, and had a 200 lb. barbell go back over my head and behind me because I'd neglected to set the pins high enough. But if you don't make stupid mistakes like that, the training system Sysco and Little describe is absolutely safe---power racks are great things, much more reliable than any human spotter!---and you can see your strength and mass increasing enough to forstall frustration.
I found that the strength I gained from doing all this was just what I needed for TKD when I started doing MA, and I was quicker after a few years of weight training than I'd ever been before---I just don't buy the idea that naturally acquired muscle mass slows you down one little bit (steroid based enhancement is different, but with that stuff, slowness will be the least of your worries if you do it for any length of time). It also can change the way you think about yourself, in some very positive ways...
Take a look at a couple of Sysco and Little's books and see if what they say might make sense for you. Good luck with your training!
