Joe Frazier competes in weight lifting contest

With respect, that is flawed logic.
Firstly Tyson is a genetic outlier. He was bulky with significant muscle without doing any exercise by the time he was 13 at the latest. And his fast twitch muscle fiber saturation, speed & reflexes were freakish-especially considering being that heavily muscled.
What he can do with & without weight training is different from a normal person.

Now I will grant that there are ways that people can attain basic or much greater than normal strength (the latter due in part to genetics or PEDs) without weights, but that involves some type of resistance training, whether informal or accidental & incidental to activities like heavy labor.

For Tyson he did plenty of body weight exercises including specialized ones for his neck.
While what Tyson gets from excercise-& what he needed to be an elite athlete-is different from us, it is true that if we do somethings that are adequate stimulation for muscular strength & endurance, we can get mucho benefits, even without maximizing our absolute potential.

 

Clueless.

 

Joe was probably thinking 'let's see how much weight these chumps can move on the left-hand side of an obliques training machine!'

 

My man would have lifted it with ease.

 

For those lambasting the competition and the relevance of a strength test...Frazier actually scored quite well on pure strength compared to the other athletes. So if weightlifting strength is irrelevant, it's odd that Frazier had a fairly good amount of such strength.

Yes, Frazier is weak by pro athlete standards today. For his time, though, Frazier was pretty solid. He fought in an era of relatively physically weak athletes across the board.

 

Frazier doesn't prove weights do nothing but he does prove one doesn't need to be overly impressive in the strength room to be a great fighter and a feared opponent in the ring who can render you beaten to a pulp.

There's been millions of people stronger than Frazier but how many, ever, could beat him? Probably less than 10 and that's assuming those guys are stronger with weights.

 

Like even "Big" 210-215lbs George Foreman amounts to a relatively weaker cruiser sized guy today.

 

When did Foreman ever weigh 210-215? He was 222lb as a 19 year old amateur ffs. He cut weight to around 217lb when he won the title and neve came in at under 220lbs again. More than likely without any peds. As an old man he was easily stronger than Evander Holyfield and Tommy Morrison, legit roided up athletes.

Foreman couldn’t make cruiser at any stage of his career without cutting a limb off. He was a legit heavyweight.

 

Good points!
Although saying relatively weak athletes for the time implies that the era was an aberration or it happened occasionally.
Actually only compared to the 4 decades since he retired-for the rest of Human History he was strong.
This is because weight training & scientific methods for enhancing muscle expanded dramatically-also how common & effective illegal PEDs have become.

Also considering his lack of technique & how strong he needed to be to be great, he was more than good.
I also do not recall there being a proportionate amount of testing for 60% of the muscle mass of a normal body-Frazier would do better below the waist.

 

I agree that he was pretty strong by most of human history's standards.

Although I do wonder whether boxers from the early 1900s days when they trained grappling a lot and maybe had resistance training might have been stronger on average than the 60s guys.

 

He weighed in with combat boots with jeans on and wasn't dialled in or anything he'd make cruiser.

 

Ab-solutely!
Also part of the cutting was Saddler's crazy dehydration-he was a natural 230 lbs. or so guy.
And being very likely natural, & in his later career pulling trucks, is more impressive by far that the lesser strength the PED & science guys achieved.

That is a very good point!

 

If you trained to man handle guys you'll roll the ones who don't flat on there back. Dempsey would look a lot stronger then Foreman in the clinches and up on the chest. In a no holds barred he'd slam Foreman or Norton etc through the pavement.

 

Naturally 230lbs? Did you see him as a weightlifting old man at 230lbs chubby?

 

I think Foreman was one of those guys like Rahman and Peter who...well, yes, they probably *could* have made cruiser given their heights, assuming they ignored weight training and starved, but really, they're naturally bigger than that.

Joshua with Foreman's Rumble in the Jungle BMI would be about 234, which is still big, but not massively larger than Foreman himself. Foreman was 226-229 when he wasn't dehydrating in his later 70s career (against Ledoux, Young, and Lyle -- none of which were exactly performances of the century, admittedly...) Later 70s Foreman almost had the same BMI as Joshua against Klitschko. This is probably without weights. Add modern weight training to that, and he's probably in the 240s today.

He was a big guy. If what I've heard about his Olympic weight is accurate, his trainers would have been starving and dehydrating him during his pro career. (Which strikes me as nuts, but hey, I'm not a boxing coach.) I think he's more likely to try to bulk up more as a heavyweight than drain down. Not that he *couldn't* drain down, necessarily, but I don't think it would be his best move.