Foreman would have probably walked around at least at 250lb during his prime IMO, cutting down to around 225lb is a piece of cake at that size.
Norton said he never lifted weights until he retired from boxing. As far as his physique he said he was just blessed with great genetics.
I'm sure many of us have see people like that, the kind you hate because some of those guys don't even barely exercise, much less lift weights. Some of them become successful bodybuilders.
Frazier was actually often lauded by the top lifters at the time for his ability to use technique and sheer brute strength to lift with best of them. They were shocked because he didn't look that ripped because he had some fat for stamina but when he got his hands on the weights it was like whooooa.
Huh? Ali weighed more than that in his comeback-he was 215 in FOTC, & before long gravitated into the 220's, at 227 in The Thrilla in Manilla, & Futch said that Ali had gotten "too big" for Frazier. Check the Tale of the Tapes. And he was not heavy then. At the start of FOTC you can hear the announcer talk about how Ali had "redistributed" his weight in his comeback. That makes sense; while the filming techniques seem to make folks look different & a bit bigger in the 1970's... Ali was only marginally heavier, literally 2-3 lbs., compared to his last fights near 4 years ago. Yet did not look quite as lean. Thus I think he both added upper body mass, & lost some muscle in his lower body. He had mainly lost much of his supernatural leg speed & endurance in the 70's-so likely what went along with that is shedding some lower body muscle. Does that theory maker sense to you?
If you mean of *apparent* upper body muscle, yes. But not all of them had nearly as much muscle mass as others there. Bruno & Joshua at his heaviest was #2-had the most lean mass per inch. Tua & Tyson are up there too-in lean mass for their height. Carnera had freakish muscularliy before modern bodybuilding & nutritional science-& before steroids were even *invented*. Weaver was not very different from all the other big 80's HW's-he just had very low body fat. Holyfield needed steroids to get fairly big-but his legs never did, so he did not have that much overall mass-compared to other big HWs. Around 60% of a proportionately developed body's mass in below the waist. So if you look at mainly iupper body-like most people-& are impressed with definition... You will get a poor idea of how much muscle mass people have.
Thank you Glass City Cobra, you are an excellent poster. Saddler had a foolish strategy; I wonder if Foreman's stamina & even strength would be GREATER then if he did not have him starving & dehydrating. But I do not think you understood one thing I was getting at-that I doubt anyone had Big George dehydrating then RE-hydrating before any fight. Because for one, there would be absolutely no value of taking off weight then putting it back on again-if you do not need to make weight so you do not fight guys naturally bigger that makes sense-not for any HW. Also they did not have the day before weigh ins, so it would be implausible to do anyway.
The rehydration is speculation on my part. I don't think this was ever explicitly stated in interviews or press conferences. I was extrapolating off of the fact he did indeed cut weight and then Sadler finally gave him water the night before after reaching a target weight. Just with the eye test it seems like that's the only explanation for how two guys can be the same height with similar arm length and only 10 or so lbs apart, yet one looks much bigger and bulkier than the other. I get that genetics plays a role but if neither guy is lifting weights then the only thing I can think of is foreman rehydrated or he weighed WAY more than 224 initially and cut a lot "drying out" to get that low. Meanwhile, Norton was walking around at a much lower weight naturally and simply lost weight due to being in training camp and getting in shape, not overexerting and killing himself like a welterweight. Norton looks smaller at 214 despite being ripped and having the same height as Foreman because that's closer to his natural weight.
