Muscular fighters losing their snap

Discussion in 'Classic Boxing Forum' started by jabber74, Aug 12, 2022.



  1. Journeyman92

    Journeyman92 I’m become seeker of milk Full Member

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    I don’t think it matters. You’re big or you’re not there isn’t a difference between it all it’s the same contractile tissue. A 210-220lbs guy at 5ft9ish cannot be called anything less then muscle bound when he looks like Mike. Wether you’re born with it or build it, it isn’t “natural or un-natural” babies build muscle by crawling would you say that’s un-natural?
     
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  2. Journeyman92

    Journeyman92 I’m become seeker of milk Full Member

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    Some people do seem to think that.
     
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  3. Journeyman92

    Journeyman92 I’m become seeker of milk Full Member

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    It doesn’t matter how it got there. It is all the same contractile tissue. Anything you build with weights is not somehow different to the muscle you’re born with or the mass you build moving hay bails. There is no such thing as “different types of muscle” there is categorises of mass within your body and muscle but everyone has them Mike may have a different allocation etc but it’s all the same building material so to speak.
     
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  4. cross_trainer

    cross_trainer Liston was good, but no "Tire Iron" Jones Full Member

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    Yeah; I'd be curious to read any medical sources that claim muscle built with weight training is always a different type of tissue from whatever you've got naturally.
     
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  5. Journeyman92

    Journeyman92 I’m become seeker of milk Full Member

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    But what defines natural to people that believe it? If you stop walking your legs aren’t stimulated and wither away, babies build upper body strength by crawling…
     
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  6. cross_trainer

    cross_trainer Liston was good, but no "Tire Iron" Jones Full Member

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    Nonsense. Muscles built by lifting barbell-shaped objects are silicon-based.
     
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  7. cross_trainer

    cross_trainer Liston was good, but no "Tire Iron" Jones Full Member

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    No idea.

    Farm work is profoundly unnatural in a broad evolutionary sense. I guess you could argue there's been some adaptation among agricultural populations over the last 10,000 years, but that would imply current/recent hunter-gatherers like the !San and Aborigines can only build "fake" muscle with farm work. Which would be right peculiar.
     
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  8. Journeyman92

    Journeyman92 I’m become seeker of milk Full Member

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    Right on it, I’d also like to say you hear “you won’t lose your snap if you box still and don’t bulk up too fast” (variations of that pseudo science) it’s like if you’re a boxer you’re going to be boxing and building muscle isn’t like putting on a suit you don’t just go “oops got to buff” it’s multiple year long process for untrained folks.
     
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  9. cross_trainer

    cross_trainer Liston was good, but no "Tire Iron" Jones Full Member

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    I mean, there's probably a point at which gaining further muscle becomes detrimental, for whatever reason. Four examples I've seen cited in less-pseudosciency discussions are:

    1) There's some sort of energy system / metabolic reason why a body of a certain size has trouble fuelling high-intensity effort when you've shoved too much muscle onto its frame.

    2) Arm muscle strength might not grow proportionately to arm muscle weight, so that even though strength and power will increase, the movement of the arm itself will be slower. (Which is also, I guess, why heavyweights don't move as quickly as lightweights.)

    3) Certain types of bodybuilding workouts don't always emphasize stimulating the right types of fibers.

    4) When you get really huge, the muscles literally interfere with proper boxing stance -- as one can see with, say, Mariusz Pudzianowski.



    ...But as I said, it's been a while since I took the time to cite check a lot of the stuff I encounter on this topic, so you takes your chances on accuracy. Some of them seem plausible, though, and explain to a degree why smaller fighters can't always bodybuild into viable heavyweights.
     
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  10. cross_trainer

    cross_trainer Liston was good, but no "Tire Iron" Jones Full Member

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    As an aside, sometimes traditions will give good advice, but bad explanations for that advice.

    "Don't lift weights" might have been one of those good-ideas-but-with-a-bad-explanation up to the 1970s or so. They were wrong about weights from a factual standpoint of understanding what weights do, but "skip the weights" wasn't really bad advice in an era before the details had been worked out for modern periodized sports regimens. Especially if you're also doing lots of cardio, technical training, etc. Traditional boxing conditioning was easy to administer and time-tested. Weight workouts were not, and the likely result of a 70s weightlifting program for boxing probably would have been something close to Ron Marchini's nightmarish attempt to create a karate weight training regimen in the 70s.
     
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  11. cross_trainer

    cross_trainer Liston was good, but no "Tire Iron" Jones Full Member

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  12. Journeyman92

    Journeyman92 I’m become seeker of milk Full Member

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    Mm. There’s stuff I agree with but in case with Pudz he’s a walking chemist, that’s NOT a natural quantity of muscle and pushes the limit of one’s frame which makes sense to be a problem.

    The third point you made I’d need you to explain more I’m a bit of a potato. I’d say bodybuilding would be good to some capacity, it’s a lot of high rep muscular endurance area of training not unlike the 100s of push up fighters allegedly do really.

    It’s just a whole body thing, pair that with trying to cut weight and it could be beneficial, when you’re not eating enough and you’re lifting weights your holding onto your lean tissue opposed to losing it because your body thinks you need it due to the training. In my experience anyways.

    I think you could say bodybuilding style training paired with a different mindset and or goal could be very beneficial look at Ricky Hatton.
     
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  13. Journeyman92

    Journeyman92 I’m become seeker of milk Full Member

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    T
    That’s an ugly routine and incredibly dumb in parts. I skimmed but as I read “rest as you need” well… 1rm tricep extensions sounds like the most awful thing in the world…. But not all round terrible. Just the basics really. You know in the ye old days you’d do only one set after your warm up per movement Reg Park made many sets cool and then Arnold took it further.
     
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  14. Journeyman92

    Journeyman92 I’m become seeker of milk Full Member

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    My personal belief has always been that they believed it’d push the little guys into higher weight classes. I noticed plenty of HWs in the ye old days did weight training or made a conscious effort to get stronger. Johnson, Jeffries’s, John L etc.
     
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  15. cross_trainer

    cross_trainer Liston was good, but no "Tire Iron" Jones Full Member

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    Yeah, there's more evidence of turn of the century guys doing it. Probably in part because they had to wrestle so much, and took training methods from wrestlers like Muldoon.

    By the 1960s and 70s, most of that seems to have been out-competed by a fairly universal style of training that "old school" traditionalists would recognize: the holy litany of jog - heavybag - speedbag - jumprope - calisthenics - sparring - medicine ball.

    Source: Patterson, Ali, Frazier, Dempsey, Norton, Spinks, and Louis describe doing pretty much the same stuff. Although intriguingly, Patterson suggests weights for younger people who haven't fully grown muscles yet...
     
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