Muscular fighters losing their snap

Sorry to double break on you, but you’re not breaking anything to me champ.

Johnson was a well muscled guy. I gave a listing. Don’t know how big you think 16” should look.

My own arms are about 1/8” shy of that - no big deal. Harold was also listed at 14” (hmm, that’s a big NO) and 15 1/2”. Of course tales of the tape can be inaccurate but 15 1/2” at least passes the eye test for mine in respect of Johnson.

Rather than just dismiss, what’s your own actual estimate on Johnson’s arms and do you have an opinion on whether he lifted or not?

 

Old school bodybuilders of the 1890s floated around 16-17 lean that’s big bud google up Eugene Sandow or Bobby Pandour. I doubt Harold “never lifted a weight in his life” Johnson is sitting near there at his body fat it’s just the way I see it. You can’t eye test these things sure you can say X is big but the eye test don’t take into account the body fat, insertions blah blah blah all that lame stuff to warp what you’re seeing.

 

Okay, so you still haven’t estimated Johnsons’s arm size or state directly if you think he lifted or not. And now the eye test is apparently inadequate.

I’ll just say that Sandow was barely over 5’7” - while he had some decent mass - arms 16 1/2” to 17”, that size will look a lot bigger on the smaller man and he was more about cut, definition and proportion anyway.

Back in his day they were affording him arms as big as 19 1/2” which is still being inexplicably claimed on several contemporary sites.

I’d link some photos of Eugen but, for some reason, my safe search filter won’t allow any Sandow photos through -

 

Per Wiki, 5'9".

 

Dudley Allen Sargent of Harvard University measured Sandow in 1893. I got that info from a FB page as well as the quoted height of 5’7 1/4”.

Saw your post and figured I’d try find the actual measurements in question myself. I got lucky.

Scroll down to 10 of 30 and you’ll see Sandow’s measurement chart.

Note - the chart indicates his height to have actually been 67.7” = 5’7.7” - so the person on the FB page quoted the height incorrectly but at least their reference to Dudley Sargent and the measurements he made in 1893 gave me some lead to the source document. Pretty cool.

https://sportcultures.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/pena-bodyelectric.pdf

 

"My real advice would be this: chop wood, lift hay bales; go back to old-school, natural methods of training. My trainer, Archie Moore, he told me to go away and chop trees for two weeks before a fight – and I did and it made all the difference in the world; all the difference to my life. I’d say doing things like that increases your punching power by at least 25 percent – forget lifting weights, that just makes you muscle-bound and takes away your speed. Weights are no good for you, that’s what I say. Go back to nature when you train, that’s what I did."

- Earnie Shavers


Thoughts? The alleged hardest puncher in history thinks too much weight lifting takes away a fighters speed and prefers old school strength training methods.

 

I think it's absolutely fair. Motions of that manner, while not absolutely specific for boxing, have great carry over two the movements that are. Lifting hay bales is extremely similar to strong man movements, and if they're training that motion explosively then it'll carry over well to the rest of body, and carry over perfectly to net full body explosiveness. Particularly in the mid upper back. Chopping wood on blocks is a movement that needs massive explosiveness, and the muscle groups it'll carry over to are used massively in boxing. The abs, bi of tris depending on how they do it, shoulders, upper back and trains getting leg drive into mostly upper body work. If they cut into a broad tree or stump, it'd train an almost identical movement for throwing a hook and potentially overhand. The rotation aspect of swinging an axe at a tree will unilaterally train the obliques explosively and train the whole body in both power and technique while also in a staggered, athletic stance.

A body builder will build very little explosive power and could potentially put on too much muscle which negatively impacts their BPM. A powerlifter will build a good amount but only at specific joint angles and could still have the same issue with the BPM.

I don't personally don't think there's a motion better for what it does, than cutting into a tree. I suppose the only downsides are that it's very hard to progressively overload and doesn't train through accomodating resistance. But I suppose you could solve the second by doing it with resistance bands, and through the resistance band you could progressively overload it by upping the band tension with thicker bands or stepping away. I suppose a coach could get chopping axes with a specified weight like some sledgehammers you can get. It's hardly easily accessible, though.

If anyone has experience in developing power, it's Archie Moore. In some ways, I doubt he understood why it worked, but through decades of teaching himself and gathering experience found what works and the results speak for themselves. If Archie Moore says something works, and it's clearly not on jest, I don't see many reasons not to listen.

 

We know John L Sullivan trained with William Muldoon to prepare him for his fight with Jake Kilrain this included a lot of partner wrestling conditioning drills using another's person and their own bodyweight resistance and very light dumbbells and Indian Clubs.

James Jefferies and Jack Dempsey were known to use pulleys a bit like resistance bands.

Randolf Turpin weight trained with barbells he did a lot of clean and presses and rowing exercises.

Ken Norton was a member at World Gym in the mid to late 1970s he was friends with bodybuilder and Mr Universe Dennis Tinerino who said they were friends and mentioned seeing him in the gym around the time Norton was filming Mandingo in 1975. So Norton was a member of World Gym what we aren't able to confirm is whether he lifted weights whilst he was a member at World's or if when he was there he would just jump rope , do sit ups etc or if World Gym even had a heavy bag then? We do know he was a marine so he likely did alot sit ups, pull ups and press ups and he played American Football for a little while so he may have had a strength and conditioning coach who would have likely programmed in power cleans , bench presses and squats which were staples for American Football athletes. I can confirm from a magazine I have prior to Norton's rubber match with Muhammad Ali in 1976 he outlines his training program and there is no mention of weight training.

1980s Mike Tyson pre prison ran with a weighted rucksack and did a strictly calisthenics program including dips , press ups , sit ups and neck bridging alongside all the usual boxing specific training. There is even a couple of videos were he says he doesn't do weights when interviewed by Des Lynham and Harry Carpenter.

Frank Bruno was often accused of being muscle bound and fatigued in a lot of his fights and was big into weight training.

Lennox Lewis did strength and conditioning with Courtney Shand as did Evander Holyfield with bodybuilder and Mr Olympia Lee Haney.

 

There's something to be said for Shavers's expertise, obviously. Especially since he got it from Moore, another good puncher.

Then again, there are a whole lot of fighters who did farm work and didn't become Shavers.

These kinds of threads often come down to a fight about expertise, I think. Whether the guys in white lab coats understand the biomechanics and physiology of training for power better than fighters. I tend to side with the scientists, since they appear to be right more often in a wider number of domains than boxers. And the boxers themselves appear to agree (whether we like it or not), since they've adopted weight training en masse.

Of course, it's also possible to respond by claiming the "Hardest Puncher Ever" title for somebody like Klitschko, and declare that his choice to lift weights settled things forever and a Wednesday.

 

I'd be interested to see how closely Norton's regimen in the article you mentioned matched his memory of his workouts in that book published years later.

 

I'll have to write out for you.

 

Thee is a bit of an X factor in these things.

The two hardest punching welterweights of all time, might well be Barbados Joe Walcott and Tommy Hearns.

It would be hard to find two fighters with more different builds.

Strength and stamina also have an X factor to them.

I used to know a skinny guy of average height, who could cuck a 300lb barbell round like it was nothing.

As for endurance, Andy Ruiz probably has better endurance, than prime David Haye for example.

Don't look for a body type associated with success, in any of these categories, because there isn't one!

 

Terrific, informative post. Thanks.

There’s a photo of Norton with his varsity basketball team. It appears the original on-site photo is no longer available so I’ve just linked to search results.

https://tinyurl.com/bdz465rn

 

Yuck