Thoughts about physical conditioning

Hi all,

As usual, I’ve been thinking a lot about conditioning, the purpose, the method, the madness… I just want to put up some food for thought in this post.

Training with Weight or External Resistance - this is primarily good for increasing maximum strength.  If you’re adding weight beyond what your body weighs, you’re going for max strength.

Bodyweight Training - Ever try a 1-legged squat?  Have you seen the Steve Cotter vids George posted?  You can achieve incredible levels of strength through bodyweight training.

Specificity of Training Stimulus - the more specific the training stimulus, the less additional weight you’ll use.  Using additional weight in a specific movement usually results in a confusion of the nervous system for that movement.  Essentially, you’re taking a movement you’d usually perform without any resistance (or with significantly less resistance), and adding resistance to it.  Adaptation of the body is EXTREMELY specific to the imposed demands.  E.G. - giving a baseball player a weighted bat - their swing speed slows down, and their CNS records this stimulus, resulting in confusion during actual play.  OR - Shot-putting with heavier-than-competition weight shot.  Same thing.  The movement cannot be achieved explosively, and the only thing gained is a muddling of the movement pattern firing sequence.

General Strength - that being said, general strength gains, when used in conjunction with skill-specific training, can have a very high carryover to performance.  E.G. - Heavy Squats.  As leg strength increases, the ability to generate force from the legs will increase, usually regardless of the “skill.”  You must integrate the strength with the skill, however.  Another example - Reverse Lunges with High Knee Raise - this is a more specific strength movement, but, being weighted, is still focused on gaining strength in the legs.

Isolation Exercises - Don’t waste your time - Grip strength is important to combat athletes.  Some would recommend wrist curls.  But why?  For wrist strength, wrist curls might be ok (though there are better options…see below).  But wrist curls develop the wrist flexors (flexor carpi), NOT the finger flexors (flexor digiti).  Should you use a “gripper?”  Maybe, if your grip is very weak starting out.  However, a better option is to challenge your grip during your conditioning, by doing exercises like pullups, chinups, dumbbell or kettlebell work, etc.  As far as the wrists go, work with a heavy staff.  Be sure to hit every angle.

Superset Opposing Muscle Groups - your body naturally relaxes a muscle opposing a working muscle.  That means you can get a greater contraction in that group if you work it in direct succession.  In your conditioning, do pullups then handstand work, pushups then rows, squats then pulls (from the ground, deadlift, rdl, etc), to take advantage of this mechanism.

Sets and Reps - this is really easy.  As an exercise gets easier, do more reps or add more weight.  If you want explosive power, build strength (max and isometric) first, then do movements in which you can move explosively (clap pushups and the like).  If you want to build max strength, use weights that are very heavy.  If you want to build endurance, do as many as you can for as long as you can…not complicated.

Putting it all together - a physical conditioning program doesn’t have to be complicated.  Take the six most basic exercises - pullup/chinup, squat, pushup, row/pulling, overhead pressing, “core” work (ab/lowback) - and do them.  You don’t even have to alter the variations.  If you just focused on doing the basic version of those six movements every day, you’d become extremely strong in short order.

So, for Bagua - practice first, condition second.  After practice, go through the six basic movement circuit back-to-back, as many times as you can, or break them out across five days and focus on more reps/effort (mon-pullup, tues-squat, weds-pushup, thurs-row, fri-press, every day-core), or break them into opposing movement patterns for a 3-day split (day 1 - pullup/press, day 2 - pushup/row, day 3 - legs, core every day)…

HAVE FUN!

This entry was posted on January 25, 2008 at 1:58 pm and is filed under Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.