[Sports Illustrated, 1985]: Article on Michael Spinks and Shilstone

Which isn't developed until the 50s or 60s, IIRC.

Although strength training exercises aren't just about hypertrophy. Gymnasts need to stay light, and they've been doing that kind of thing for a while. (Often with their own bodyweight, but getting into weird enough positions that there's a lot of resistance.)

 

It depends how advanced really, at what point does it become periodisation? When I looked for newspapers on Battling Nelson's training, the idea of taking it easy at times to avoid staleness.

Even in Tom Cribb's training he slowly built up the volume, which you could say is a type periodisation, at which point it's pretty inseperable from training at all.

 

I personally don’t think it useless. I just believe it was probably decided that the time it took up could be better spent doing other things. The risk of straining a muscle or injuring something or the fear of the boxers over doing it outweighed the rewads compared to other activities where an athlete can still build strength whilst staying more supple needing less recovery.

 

I think that's like asking, "When did wolves become dogs?"

You can't point to one single moment where it happened, or one single criterion, but one looks a lot different from the other.

Similarly, Tudor Bompa's periodization looks a lot different from Captain Barclay's crazy dehydrated training program.

 

What other strength building activities would you give as examples?

Weight training is pretty time efficient and low injury, assuming you're being taught by somebody who knows what they're doing.

 

Medicine ball training, floor excersizes, chin ups, press ups etc. These idiot proof activities where bodyweight only is used as resistance.

Dynamic tension was also used by Joe Louis and others.

 

Once you get over 15 repetitions on the exercises you mentioned, you're no longer building strength. You're building endurance. And I bet Joe Louis could do more than 15 pushups.

That being said, those are all almost indistinguishable from weight training exercises. You are doing movements against weighted resistance. Medicine ball training is weight training, even by an ultra-strict definition, since the medicine ball is a weight. Heck, you can increase the resistance on most of the bodyweight ones by resting a weight on your shoulders, or holding one between your feet. So even if Joe Louis was a 98 pound weakling who could only do 15 pushups, the pushups' effect would be no different from weight training anyway.

I think the prevalence of these exercises has less to do with being amazing, and more with how cheap they are. Dynamic tension costs nothing. Chinups, pushups, situps, etc. cost nothing. Medicine balls were probably cheap, too. Very important when you're an early/mid 20th century boxer, who is poor, whose gym is poor, and whose teammates might have learned calisthenics in the army.

Finally, I don't think weight training is in competition with stamina-building exercises like running. You can (and should) do both. Weight training is primarily in competition with other methods of building strength.

 

Now, it would be a little more interesting to argue about whether the turn-of-the-century wrestling that Jeffries et. al. did would have been a better strength builder than weight training, within the context of the training demands imposed by early boxing.

 

Interesting point, especially considering the limitations of strength training at the time. You'd also have the benefits of training skills useful to boxing.

 

Exactly. You could at least have an argument about whether the combination of hypertrophy and skill carryover would be enough to justify shoving some wrestling into the regimen. But that would depend on how much strength and size you can actually get *just* from wrestling.

 

I think the question is more in where the balance should lie in the resources of different training methods. Even just running a good amount and lifting weights isn't the entirely simple to pull off, without all the other training of a boxer. Not a simple question, I think it has to depend on what's going to translate into better performance, which will depend on style, talent and training history.

e.g. if you had a fighter that wins using skills and hard counter punches, they could get away with less focus on stamina than a swarmer, then again not if they've lost fights due to gassing.

And ideally it'll have a mix of base training and peaking, but even 3 times a years is getting to the point where it's going to hard to have that much periodisation in terms of types of training.

Which means I think a lot of base aerobic developement really needs to be done as early as possible, ideally long before they turn pro. Strength training too for a heavyweight.

 

People are immensely different when it comes to how they respond to various training and diet. Testing an individual would mean next to nothing. Testing a reasonably sized number of athletes would be a much better barometer.

 

There must be a another reason other than cost as to why these exercises were naturally selected over using heavy weights that had always been around. Building extra strength to the point of effecting mobility must have been seen as a danger to be avoided. Heavily muscled strong men gassed out because of all the extra oxygen they used up. Heavier arms get heavy in a fight, or used to. Perhaps PEDs got around this?

Certainly some weight training must be beneficial, but the dangers of over doing it in the past must have been realised at an early point.

 

Yes I think you are absolutely right about that. Testing a bunch of athletes to take part in the same programme that Spinks went through would be a better barometer. It would be interesting to see if The extra 25lb with less body fat could be reproduced on all of the athletes over the same short period.

 

Shilstone wrote a book about testing the program on a bunch of people in a study, I believe published in 2006 or 2007. I don't own it, but you could probably read it and see.