Are athletes really getting faster, better, stronger?

Nope. And not 80 either... and probably not 68, 72, 76... On the plus side, I don't think anyone country or athlete had cornered the market on juice.

 

So Lewis dominated his 84 peers who were also likely on the juice. I guess the best we could say for it is, that it was on a level playing field...

 

This is a good post .. The Super athletes/boxers of today simply just do not exist compared to the athletes of yesteryear. Like I said, there is so much more to being an athlete than bigger, faster, stronger .. Jack Youngblood played the superbowl AND the pro bowl with a broken leg, Ronnie Lott had half his finger amputated so he wouldn't miss any football … Hell, an athlete today will leave the game with a cramp .. The athletes today are so coddled and protected, that the TOUGHNESS in sports has been sucked right out of it

 

I suspect it's the product of a focus on intensity, and a lack of volume.

It's hard to know exactly what athletes are really doing, but a lot of "modern" conditioning methods are honesstly about as wrong as it gets.

High intensity anaerobic workouts beat you up far more than they produce long term aerobic improvements, don't get me wrong, you need some to be prepared, but ideally they should just be used for peaking. The actual way to get really good aerobic fitness is high volume, e.g. lots of roadwork.

From what I've seen, older fighters look like far better runners. A lot of modern ones practically go at a shuffle, like I said it should be relaxed, but you should get to a level where you can run at a decent pace, while relaxed, which the modern guys clearly haven't done.

A lot of old guys did stuff like carrying heavy logs about, or indian clubs, and modern guys do similar stuff, for example kettlebell work. But I think the difference is, the modern guys do that as conditioning, and not only is this stuff generally the type that can't be done with enough volume, but also this stuff has been studied, and that it taxes the muscles more means at the same perceived exertion it's not as effective. While the older guys did stuff like this, it was probably done more for strength, and I think it probably still has it's place at points in training, and for peaking, but it's not effective conditioning.

Another point is, beyond the physiology, long duration training forces you to learn to relax, and not waste energy, so few boxers now have learned any grace and effeciency, and that'll contribute to the stamina issues. They probably should be slightly more speed and power focused for the shorter fights (unless workrate needs to be the focus for the gameplan etc.), but so many fighters drop off a cliff by round 10, it's clearly not optimal.

Modern training is rarely based off of science, people just get ideas and run with them, or base things off of what feels hard. I've said before, tradional training is not optimal, but it sure beats training based off the latest fad some bro cooked up.

 

Srsly tho

This content is protected

What is this actually improving?

 

Based on that vid, I bet he could do better in a slap fight with a kangaroo then Carnera did....

 

I'm not defending bro fad training, any more than I would defend whatever the 1930s equivalent to bro training would be. I am saying that the best training available today is better than the best training available in the 1930s.

For example, I don't think anybody would call this program that Holyfield used before Tyson unscientific bro training:

https://www.sportsci.org/news/news9709/hatfield.html

 

This is exactly the nonsense that I'm talking about.

Thing is, once you've done it for years, you have enough of a base you can get away with neglecting volume, it's the same reason Kenyans you grew up running 100miles per week can get away with much lower mileages. But if you try and do it with someone who hasn't spent years doing "long slow distance work", they'll at best have rubbish stamina, and at worst burn out.

Not to mention the whole Evan Feilds things.

 

You may disagree with him; my point is that it isn't unscientific bro training.

Hatfield had a doctorate in sports science, was president of a major certification body, has written a textbook in his field, applied his knowledge to break records in powerlifting himself, and his training program seems to have worked, since an aging Holyfield manhandled Tyson.

To some extent, the field seems to have moved beyond where Hatfield was in 1997, but he wasn't a clueless bro trainer throwing stuff together without scientific backing.

 

You can find plenty of experts spouting pseudo scientific nonsence, in fact nearly every bit of nonsence has a PhD behind it.

This style of training became popular, and it was a big step back, and I suspect ideas like this is why we are still seeing so many boxers with bad stamina.

Tons of powerlifters have no understanding of endurance training (would you listen to a marathon runner on how to get strong?)

The idea that sprint work is anything new is complete rubbish, The Manassa Mauler Jack Dempsey used to do sprints, Bob Fitzsimmons used to sprint between telegraph poles, then walk as active recovery, hell one of Fitz's opponents, Billy M'Carty used to push wheelbarrows uphill. They just used to also do the easy work to build an aerobic base.

Boxing has bouts of higher intensity, but it's mostly aerobic, and this training style isn't going to get good aerobic improments at all, and improving lactate tolerance is only something to focus on for peaking, because it interferes with strength, explosive and aerobic training, and if you do it for lengthy periods you don't keep improving anyway.

When I said about Evan Feilds, I wasn't just being snarky either, people on stuff can get away with training in ways natuals just can't.

Boxing wasn't the only sport that tried these sorts of ideas either, it happened in running too, where the performance is actually measured, and it coincided with a major drop in performance (in America and the UK), and since then people have gone back to the older style, and gotten better results.

Sorry, but empiracally less effective methods, with no real basis in the actual phisiology are not scientific, no matter who promotes them.

 

Plus when they first used steroids in weightlifting, the attributed the improvement to isometric training.

So it wouldn't be the first time some bull**** "revolutionary" training method was used to explain performance caused by PEDs. Not saying that's what was going on, but possible.

 

But it wasn't pseudoscientific. It was based on the science available in 1997.

If you want to say it was unscientific or pseudoscientific bro training, you'd need a scientific source from around 1997 saying that Dr. Hatfield was a quack.

Ok, but you haven't established that his methods are empirically less effective OR pseudoscientific.

There does seem to be more evidence now that traditional roadwork is useful, contrary to what Dr. Hatfield believed in '97. That doesn't make his program either ineffective or unscientific either, though.

 

The two aren't mutually exclusive. I'm sure Evander's steroids contributed to his longevity mightily. However, I think Evander was on steroids way back in the early 1990s, before Hatfield trained him for Tyson.

 

This sounds interesting. Is there an article or something out there about this?

 

For it being empirically worse. A similar approach of avoiding slow distance work, has been tried in running, and it produced worse results in the 90's accross the board, and was found to be far less effective decades earlier when people were trying all different sorts of training. Lydiard largely figured out aerobic base building and peaking by the 60's, and his methods are still being used at a high level today.

It's a fair counter point about needing sources from then, the main problem being, papers from then are hard to find online, even if you have access to them. And he doesn't cite any research or anything either, making it far harder.

Maybe calling it pseudoscientific was a misstep, but I see no basis for his claims other than his credentials, and things that sound like they make sense (then again plenty of wrong things do), and the anecdotal results with someone we have multiple reasons to think is questionable to extrapolate from. But he basically was claiming something along the lines of "the current concensus is totally wrong", and then just preaches an old tried and failed idea. And a lot of the basis for this stuff is pseudo science.

A classic example of pseudoscience, is VO2 is collerated with performance, this training causes a greater improvement in VO2max, therefore this training is better, and it all comes across as proper and scientific to a lot of people. But they haven't actually shown their training improves performance. For example if running more increases VO2max, and makes you faster, then people that run more will have higher VO2maxes, and will also run faster, but there's a lot more mrelevant adaptions than VO2max, and if these other adaptions matter more, I think you can see how misguided training the way that just gets adaptions there is silly. Worse still studies rarely look at the best way to improve over several years, so something that peaks it, but doesn't really improve it long term, can do better than something that has better long term developement. (VO2max is actually self limited, and by practicing going hard you can "improve" it, just by your body letting you push it higher, but it's not going to improve long term, and even if it did, no one could handle pushing that hard consistently without burning out).

This gives an overview of the history of running training
https://www.scienceofrunning.com/2010/06/evolution-and-history-of-training.html?v=79cba1185463

I've actually picked it up from reading around a lot of different stuff, and I hadn't actually read the first article before.

It doesn't make it clear, but most of them mentioned ran middle distance or trained people who did.

Also Nurmi, Hagg, and Andersson were all banned for competing over accusations of professionalism, which is why I keep bring that up in reference to track records.