What attribute do you focus on with your strength and conditioning?

[Ivan]

I‘ve been curious about what attribute people focus on when dedicating themselves to martial arts when they go to the gym. Personally, I am focusing on building up my chest muscles, so hypertrophy, as my chest is too small and makes my physique look uneven. In a few months when it has grown a bit, I will be slimming down as much fat as I can and focus on total strength, power and flexibility. What aspects do you focus on? My philosophy for the long term is that I wish to be above average in every area as fighters need to be adaptable to any technique and situation. Here are all the attributes I could think of:

• Flexibility
• Overall strength - how much weight you can move in ratio to your own weight
• Power - how quickly you can move a certain weight
• Speed - how quickly you can move yourself
• Mobility - how well you can manipulate your own body weight (think calisthenic stuff)
• Muscle mass

I personally have been focusing a lot on overall strength for this year. I have used powerlifting workouts, focusing on low reps, low sets, with a high amount of weight. Right now, like I said I am focusing on hypertrophy around my chest, so I am using a Mike Mentzer type workout: 1 huge drop set of the bench press, starting at 90% of my 1RM, and dropping by 5kg after near failure of each weight, until I have achieved total failure. I also have goals I have set for myself in terms of all these attributes except for muscle mass - so long as I look strong, I’m happy. I’ve already achieved some of my long term goals: I recently hit 100kg on the bench press for the first time, and I am also able to do 1 arm pushups relatively easily. My goals right now are:

1. Full splits
2. Pistol squats
3. Muscle ups
4. 140kg bench
5. Handstand hold and handstand pushups
6. 30 minute horse stance hold

Keep in mind these are all long term goals for myself. I know that some of these, especially the bench press, will most likely take me years to accomplish. I am just curious what the goals of other people on this forum are, and what they focus on with their strength and conditioning training sessions.

 

[frank raud]

I'm working on strength, goal is 345 squat, 225 bench, not sure about deadlift as it is giving me challenges for now. Once I get to my goals, intend to maintain that level of strength and focus more on cardio.

 

[MetalBoar]

I‘ve been curious about what attribute people focus on when dedicating themselves to martial arts when they go to the gym. Personally, I am focusing on building up my chest muscles, so hypertrophy, as my chest is too small and makes my physique look uneven. In a few months when it has grown a bit, I will be slimming down as much fat as I can and focus on total strength, power and flexibility. What aspects do you focus on? My philosophy for the long term is that I wish to be above average in every area as fighters need to be adaptable to any technique and situation. Here are all the attributes I could think of:

• Flexibility
• Overall strength - how much weight you can move in ratio to your own weight
• Power - how quickly you can move a certain weight
• Speed - how quickly you can move yourself
• Mobility - how well you can manipulate your own body weight (think calisthenic stuff)
• Muscle mass

I personally have been focusing a lot on overall strength for this year. I have used powerlifting workouts, focusing on low reps, low sets, with a high amount of weight. Right now, like I said I am focusing on hypertrophy around my chest, so I am using a Mike Mentzer type workout: 1 huge drop set of the bench press, starting at 90% of my 1RM, and dropping by 5kg after near failure of each weight, until I have achieved total failure. I also have goals I have set for myself in terms of all these attributes except for muscle mass - so long as I look strong, I’m happy. I’ve already achieved some of my long term goals: I recently hit 100kg on the bench press for the first time, and I am also able to do 1 arm pushups relatively easily. My goals right now are:

1. Full splits
2. Pistol squats
3. Muscle ups
4. 140kg bench
5. Handstand hold and handstand pushups
6. 30 minute horse stance hold

Keep in mind these are all long term goals for myself. I know that some of these, especially the bench press, will most likely take me years to accomplish. I am just curious what the goals of other people on this forum are, and what they focus on with their strength and conditioning training sessions.

I think you've got a great strength training program. I'm a big proponent of high intensity, low volume, training and I think you're on a good path with what you're doing.

Right now I'm focused on mobility/flexibility. I've never been flexible, at all, it's not in my genes, but normally, just the combination of weight lifting and martial arts has been sufficient to keep me flexible/mobile enough, though not what I'd need to do an art with high kicks like TKD or even Muay Thai. With the pandemic, working a fully remote desk job for the last couple of years, and entering my 50's, my mobility/flexibility is at an all time low, so that's my current focus. I'm still doing resistance training, but I'm satisfied enough with my strength that I don't feel like I need to focus on that in a big way right now.
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My unasked for, extended response:

My take on these categories is a little different. I'm not trying to be pedantic but I think that how we model these things can compromise or improve our training methods.

• Flexibility:
  • I think we probably define this the same way: your unrestricted range of motion.
  • I don't think it's very useful to talk about flexibility by itself. I believe that flexibility is only meaningful in context*. Are you flexible enough to do the physical activities that you wish to do without being limited by your flexibility? If you are then there is no benefit, and there may be drawbacks, to becoming more flexible.
• Overall strength:
  • I think we largely agree on what strength is, though it's important to note that "how much weight you can move in ratio to your own weight" is also skill dependent and that accurately measuring strength in isolation or in some absolute or overall way is tough.
  • Of the things on your list, I believe that strength is the most important for overall functional ability and injury prevention.
  • If this is below par it should be the first area that someone addresses.
  • Building strength will improve every other item on this list, though it may not be sufficient by itself to achieve all of the results one might want for every item.
• Power:
  • I know this gets talked about a lot in fitness and athletic circles . I think it's largely a made up concept, or more accurately, it's mistaking the combination of skill, overall strength, and to a lesser degree, flexibility and genetics, with some sort of base attribute.
  • To expand on that:
    • If you improve your strength, your "power" will improve.
    • If you improve your skill at whatever movement is being measured for "power", your power will improve.
    • There is nothing we can do (at this time) to improve our genetics.
    • Assuming you aren't limited by insufficient flexibility, you can not do anything other than improve your strength or your skill to improve "power".
      • If anyone disagrees, please tell me how you can improve "power" without improving skill, strength or likely both.
  • To sum up; If you want to improve the "power" of your striking, for instance, the way to do this is to improve your strength and practice your striking, and perhaps if your range of movement is hampered by poor flexibility, improve that. There's no other button to push or dial to turn to get more "power".
• Speed:
  • Similar to power. Speed is largely a matter of skill and strength.
  • Just like power, you need sufficient flexibility to move freely through the complete range of motion required and your genetics will play a role to some degree as well.
  • This is an area where adiposity, and to some degree total body size/weight of all types, can play a noticeable role. Lose 20 pounds of fat and your speed will likely improve significantly.
• Mobility:
  • I define mobility as how freely you can perform a desired movement.
  • *I think of this as flexibility in context.
  • Strength is also a big part of mobility. Even if you have sufficient flexibility to perform a movement you still need the strength to support and propel your body through that movement.
  • Skill can play a big role in mobility when we talk about specific movements, but general mobility is primarily a matter of strength and flexibility.
• Muscle mass:
  • People talk a lot about this as if it can be disconnected from strength. That's largely false.
  • If you provide sufficient stimulus, rest and nutrition to a muscle for it to grow stronger, it will grow larger as well.
  • Assuming a healthy muscle, the larger the muscle the stronger it will be and vice versa - for a given individual.
    • If you had an identical twin you would both need to have roughly the same muscle mass if you both wanted to be similarly strong.
    • Your (unrelated) next door neighbor might be much larger or significantly smaller at that same level of strength depending on their genetics.
      • How you and they trained would have very little to zero impact on this.
  • You can play some minor games with this if aesthetics are really important to you, but for the most part, if you resistance train you're going to be the size that you're going to be for a given strength level and that size is largely pre-determined by your genes.

 

[Kung Fu Wang]

I am just curious what the goals of other people on this forum are, and what they focus on with their strength and conditioning training sessions.

I'm not in my development mode. I'm in my maintenace mode QAQ.

 

[Bill Mattocks]

I‘ve been curious about what attribute people focus on when dedicating themselves to martial arts when they go to the gym. Personally, I am focusing on building up my chest muscles, so hypertrophy, as my chest is too small and makes my physique look uneven. In a few months when it has grown a bit, I will be slimming down as much fat as I can and focus on total strength, power and flexibility. What aspects do you focus on? My philosophy for the long term is that I wish to be above average in every area as fighters need to be adaptable to any technique and situation. Here are all the attributes I could think of:

• Flexibility
• Overall strength - how much weight you can move in ratio to your own weight
• Power - how quickly you can move a certain weight
• Speed - how quickly you can move yourself
• Mobility - how well you can manipulate your own body weight (think calisthenic stuff)
• Muscle mass

I personally have been focusing a lot on overall strength for this year. I have used powerlifting workouts, focusing on low reps, low sets, with a high amount of weight. Right now, like I said I am focusing on hypertrophy around my chest, so I am using a Mike Mentzer type workout: 1 huge drop set of the bench press, starting at 90% of my 1RM, and dropping by 5kg after near failure of each weight, until I have achieved total failure. I also have goals I have set for myself in terms of all these attributes except for muscle mass - so long as I look strong, I’m happy. I’ve already achieved some of my long term goals: I recently hit 100kg on the bench press for the first time, and I am also able to do 1 arm pushups relatively easily. My goals right now are:

1. Full splits
2. Pistol squats
3. Muscle ups
4. 140kg bench
5. Handstand hold and handstand pushups
6. 30 minute horse stance hold

Keep in mind these are all long term goals for myself. I know that some of these, especially the bench press, will most likely take me years to accomplish. I am just curious what the goals of other people on this forum are, and what they focus on with their strength and conditioning training sessions.

I try to remain vertical. Mostly I succeed.

 

[Gyakuto]

I started doing weight training to make my martial art effortless (at least appear so) particularly moving up from a kneeling position and the devilish ‘tate hiza’ position. But I also wanted to avoid the risk of injury to my knee joints while weight training (particularly the knee cartilages) since I‘ve looked around and seen so many martial artists and exercisers in general who have ‘bad knees’. I’m really thinking about longevity after all, I’ve seen very few people in their 70s who can do handstand push ups or hold a horse stance for 30mins, so there seemed little point in me pushing huge weights.

So I started with a piffling 95kg strict-form squat (209lbs, 5 sets of 10 reps) and after two years have only increased this to 110kg (243lbs) and don’t intend to increase this any further as it’s more than I need for my art and to save my knees, long term. I also use a ‘sissy squat’ device (since my gym doesn’t have a leg extension machine) whilst holding 40kg (88lbs).

For the rest of my body, I use progressive resistance training (eg staring biceps curls were 10kg, now 22.5kg 5x10) and that’s been due to the addiction of ‘seeing results’….yes I know that’s shallow of me.

In between sets I stretch my hamstrings, leg adductors, calves, shoulders (monkey bar hanging) and the so called ‘Asian squat’.

It’s simple and it’s really helped my art, plus I have now a good looking musculature…superficial as that is!

 

[HighKick]

I‘ve been curious about what attribute people focus on when dedicating themselves to martial arts when they go to the gym. Personally, I am focusing on building up my chest muscles, so hypertrophy, as my chest is too small and makes my physique look uneven. In a few months when it has grown a bit, I will be slimming down as much fat as I can and focus on total strength, power and flexibility. What aspects do you focus on? My philosophy for the long term is that I wish to be above average in every area as fighters need to be adaptable to any technique and situation. Here are all the attributes I could think of:

• Flexibility
• Overall strength - how much weight you can move in ratio to your own weight
• Power - how quickly you can move a certain weight
• Speed - how quickly you can move yourself
• Mobility - how well you can manipulate your own body weight (think calisthenic stuff)
• Muscle mass

I personally have been focusing a lot on overall strength for this year. I have used powerlifting workouts, focusing on low reps, low sets, with a high amount of weight. Right now, like I said I am focusing on hypertrophy around my chest, so I am using a Mike Mentzer type workout: 1 huge drop set of the bench press, starting at 90% of my 1RM, and dropping by 5kg after near failure of each weight, until I have achieved total failure. I also have goals I have set for myself in terms of all these attributes except for muscle mass - so long as I look strong, I’m happy. I’ve already achieved some of my long term goals: I recently hit 100kg on the bench press for the first time, and I am also able to do 1 arm pushups relatively easily. My goals right now are:

1. Full splits
2. Pistol squats
3. Muscle ups
4. 140kg bench
5. Handstand hold and handstand pushups
6. 30 minute horse stance hold

Keep in mind these are all long term goals for myself. I know that some of these, especially the bench press, will most likely take me years to accomplish. I am just curious what the goals of other people on this forum are, and what they focus on with their strength and conditioning training sessions.

When I was heavily competing, there were parts of the year that would be 4-6 days/wk sparring & strategy and 4-5 days/wk in the gym. Combined was about 6-hours/day. I had a trainer for both. We never looked at hard weight numbers as a goal. Instead, we looked at where I was the previous week or month. Certain traditional weight training methods we learned had little to no value for the type of competition. Speed and twitch were more important than raw power, since a lot of the power generation comes from great punching/kicking technique in a dynamic environment. Stretching varies daily for almost everyone so again, hard numbers were never used. Instead, diet and recovery were huge, and we learned what to eat and what Not to do leading up to a competition. Always, hydration, hydration, hydration.

Numeric goals are fine and good. But it is always more about what can you do with your raw strength that matters.
Stay at it.

 

[isshinryuronin]

I'm working a lot on my core: Back extensions, sit ups, twisting with the pulley weights, side bends holding a 45lb weight. All of these aid in takedowns and standup grappling. I'm also paying attention to my legs more than I used to. The other benefit is that at 72 I want to stay mobile when I get old and able to withstand the physical demands of a fight. Cardio should be a top priority but I hate it, doing just the minimum to keep my heart in good shape. Throughout my 50 min. gym workout (4/wk) I keep my heart beat at 115-130/min with a couple of peaks at 140. I no longer squeeze out that last gut-wrenching rep or go beyond 145 beats/min, making some concessions to my age. It doesn't make sense to take silly risks just to work out.

 

[Kung Fu Wang]

There are 2 different ways to do the weight training.

1. You do the weight training. You have no combat application in mind.
2. You have combat application in mind. You use weight training to enhance your combat ability.

Example for 2.

 

[JowGaWolf]

I focus on the function aspects that I need and I try to either get stronger or improve functionality.

 

[Kung Fu Wang]

I focus on the function aspects that I need and I try to either get stronger or improve functionality.

Having talked to many gym instructors. None of them understand the meaning of functional training. In their mind, "muscle group isolation" is the only thing that they care about. When I used my body to pull the pulley in the gym, some gym instructors even said that I did it all wrong

This work out is functional. Not suggest to those people who has spine issue.

 

[JowGaWolf]

I focus on the function aspects that I need and I try to either get stronger or improve functionality.

Having talked to many gym instructors. None of them understand the meaning of functional training. In their mind, "muscle group isolation" is the only thing that they care about. When I used my body to pull the pulley in the gym, some gym instructors even said that I did it all wrong

View attachment 30032

This work out is functional. Not suggest to those people who has spine issue.

Function to me means that every muscle that is used in that movement is strengthen as a group for that motion.

I try to work as many muscles as a group as safely as possible.

 

[MetalBoar]

Having talked to many gym instructors. None of them understand the meaning of functional training. In their mind, "muscle group isolation" is the only thing that they care about.

This work out is functional. Not suggest to those people who has spine issue.

As a one time gym owner and instructor who's had this discussion with you before, I understand what you mean, I just disagree with you.

I prefer to separate skill acquisition from strength training. It allows me to gain overall, general, strength (which includes the specific strength needed to do any MA movement) faster and more safely. I have more control over the weight, so I can lift heavier weights and train to a deeper level of inroad which creates a greater stimulus and therefor (assuming proper rest and nutrition) leads to a greater adaptive response. It also allows me to focus on skill development without confusing the matter with extraneous weight that is (often) irrelevant to the technique. Unless things have changed substantially since the last time I looked into it the science is pretty clear that this is the faster way to develop skills.

Edit: I should also add that I do agree that "muscle group isolation" isn't desirable if you mean single joint rotary movements. If you mean isolating a large muscle group, such as say, pretty much everything in the lower body, as you would with a good leg press or squat, then I guess I still disagree.

 

[MetalBoar]

I focus on the function aspects that I need and I try to either get stronger or improve functionality.

Function to me means that every muscle that is used in that movement is strengthen as a group for that motion.

I try to work as many muscles as a group as safely as possible.

I agree with this. Doing big, compound, movements is a more effective and efficient method than doing single joint rotary movements or spending a lot of time trying to work small groups of muscles individually.

 

[marvin8]