Ok, assuming you lift and train on the same day, what order do you do it in?
First I would assume that lifting should go first, because you want the most energy to go towards improving your strength.
But then, I was like, no, you probably want the most energy and concentration for perfecting your techniques, so MA training should go first. Plus, if you MA first, your jow has a chance to go to work while you’re lifting afterwards before you take a shower and it gets washed off
But then, I was like “well, if you tire out one muscle a lot during MA you won’t be able to perform lifting at max effort.” ie. if you do a million punches and your front deltoid gets tired, you would suck at benching after that, despite that fact that your pecs would be relatively fresh.
Or do you do one in the morning and one in the afternoon?
I’ve always wondered how to combine to get the best of both worlds.
People who alternate days don’t need to respond to this one.
Personally, I don’t normally do both on the same day, but when i was working out with Ian (my san da friend) we did.
We’d always lift first.
Part of martial arts is to maintain good technique even when you’re tired. You need to be able to hold up in the later rounds. We made real sure we were still doing good technique in whatever we did, and tried not to slop through anything. On top of that, we usually didn’t lift that long, and tried to keep the total workout under 20 sets.
This wasn’t easy at first though, we’d usually have to take a break before starting on MA training and maybe eat a powerbar or something. Once we got going we’d stretch a lot and warm up slowly. I think eventually we got used to it, because I don’t remember taking as many breaks toward the end.
If you train properly, there aint much left to weight train properly. So why bother.
If you have the gumption to do both on the same day, then it won’t matter much. Do either one according to how your body reacts. Trial and error..no better teacher out there.
My advice: Don’t lift and spar on the same day but lifting and doing forms are all right. But lift in the morning, then do forms in the afternoon/night to let your body recover. You can also do light forms before you lift to stretch. A decent book to read on the subject is “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Kickboxng”.
Peace and good fortune,
Zen_Celt
zen_cult - I’ve got that book. Guy Mezger’s kind of becoming a hero of mine. They showed a ton of his fighting clips on MTV when he was talking about why he likes Kid Rock.
nospam - I hate to say this, but in a year in my last kung fu class, going almost everyday and doing my best to train outside of class (when i could actually walk) I didn’t make near the gains in strength or endurance that I got from about 6 months of weight training every other day and jogging a few times a week. I was constantly overtrained sticking with the traditional class workout that I was doing before. I’m a big guy and a lot of stuff in class was aimed at skinny guys- I always tried (in vain) to keep up with them. Life became a continual blur of limping, injuries, and leg pain. After the year back at college (6 months of getting fat 6 months of working out) I went back and could participate in kung fu class as well as or better than before. Even the age-old addage about weightlifters not being able to do horse stance didn’t apply, because I was able to do it as long or longer without having practised it. There’s something to be said for western training methods- though that doesn’t mean I’m ready to give up on kung fu & traditional training. I don’t mind doing the traditional work out (with supplementation) once I’m living near a school again. For right now though, it’s weight training, jogging, and trying to maintain some of the san da techniques I learned in 2 months training with my friend. I may start training horse stance again, not sure. I should probably practise my old forms, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be doing a different system when I move so I’m not sure why I should bother. BTW- when I say “traditional work out” I’m talking more than just forms. The term “calisthenics from he!!” would probably be more appropriate.
I had a consultation with Charles Poliquin last year, and he told me that as long as you wait 4-5 hours between each, then there shouldn’t be a problem.
but when i do both, i do them when i have the time i dont lift til failure either so that leaves me more fresh after lifting for kung fu… which is wing chun so your not supposed to be muscling thru anything anyhow - (so this helps me stay relaxed)
usually after a few hours of chi sau i feel like im ready to go run a marathon anyhow, so lifting afterwards works fine for me too
however if i was doing wrestling or something i dont think i could do that:)
peace
trav
if you never get into a fight,
you can never be defeated,
if you can never be defeated,
you are invincible
weight training may be very good for building strength and muscle tone, but weights often reduce flexibility and your speed doesn’t benefit from it too much, either (which is essential for a martial artist). a technique which many martial artists (including me) prefer is dynamic strength (or tension) training. it needs no equipment and works by having different muscle groups work against each other. there are lots of good books on this, just go to amazon.com. dynamic strength is perfect for the martial artist!
Weight training does not decrease flexibility or speed, if you dont beleive me ask any speed skater, sprinter,gymnast etc. The only time this will happen is if you get so large your muscles get in the way of each other or if you put on the mass in an extremely short period of time ie. (steroids) and even that can be fixed with enough stretching. Isometrics are fine when added to a weight training program but you wont get nearly as strong doing them alone.
I generally train with weights about three to four times a week, and cardio about three times a week in addition to my MA training. I do the cardio and lifting in the morning before I go to work, and go to MA practice in the evening (usually only for about an hour to hour and a half). I train about five times a week.
As for losing flexibility and speed by lifting, well I can assure you that I am more flexible now and perhaps faster than when I didn’t work out with weights.
I think the key is to lift for functional strength not mass. This is generally done without working to failure. I only do three or four different types of lifts right now, which include the deadlift, sidepress, curls and on occasion benchpress. Obviously the curls and the bp are for asthetics, rather than functional strength. (I am a huge fan of Pavel Tsatsouline’s methods and if you haven’t heard of him, you may want to check out a magazine called Muscle Media or the following website: www.dragondoor.com, his books and videos are great)
Every two weeks or so I cycle my routine, so my muscles don’t have time to adapt. For instance, for the next two weeks I am only doing push ups, dips and abs, and squats similar to the hindu squats). I am using Pavel’s push up program, which is pretty hard core, if you’re interested I can post it here or you can check the latest issue of Muscle Media magazine. I also got his Russian Kettlebell challenge video and have been throwing those in as well. WOW, what a great workout. I can pretty much say I’m constantly sore…
Just some thoughts from the cheapseats.
KG
[This message was edited by Kempo Guy on 07-24-01 at 11:26 AM.]
I train with weights in the early part of the day or late at night. I do my MA training at the opposite end of the day. I don’t train to failure so I don’t feel sore unless I do my MA training then weights right away. The other way around is fine though. Hey Kempo Man, let’s hear that push up program.
uluru-
I agree with almost everything Kempo Guy says and have achieved the same results. The key is to stay limber in-between sets and before & after the workout. I said in another thread, I’ve still got the same horse stance I did when I stopped doing it regularly about a year ago, just from weights.
The program outlined below is fairly self-explanatory. Just drop and do the specified percentage of your last personal best at given time intervals during the day. For instance if you managed 50 push-ups on you test, do 25 on the day that calls for 50% relative intensity. On Mondays, test yourself for one set and do easy sets for the rest of the day. As you see the time intervals are fairly frequent and you may not be able to do them at that frequency, I was told not to sweat it if you miss a few through out the day as long as you try to get in as many as you can. They also recommend that you do no other upper-body work with the exception of pull-ups or chin-ups.
There are two programs, and I’ll outline both of them.
Well, this is the program in a nutshell. I’m not going to go over the proper way to do push ups with you obviously, you can mix them up with wide width, regular width and narrow width push ups. Let me know if you have any questions in regards to this.
BTW, You could do a similar type of program doing pull-ups, dips, hindu-squats etc.
Today is my second day on the push up program and it’s killing me. I thought I was fairly strong (my max was at 92 push ups) but having to do 50% of that every hour is starting to get me fatigued. It should be interesting tomorrow when I have to up it to 60% of max and do it every 45 minutes.
I’m gonna try this with pull ups and the squats later on… I definintely would not recommend doing them concurrently.
Let’s compare this pushup program with the long one I posted. I’m not quite sure how we’d compare the results, but hey, comparing cycles is always fun.
How’s PTP working for you. I’ve only done one cycle so far, but got really good gains in overall strength. Next cycle I’ll probably do the “Bear”.
I just got my KB’s in yesterday so I’ll be messing around with those as well. Should be fun!
Ironfist,
Where did you post your push up program at?
Are you familiar with Scrapper’s workout? I did that one for a while and got pretty strong. Had to stop doing it when I injured my shoulder four months ago.
i dont lift til failure either so that leaves me more fresh after lifting for kung fu… which is wing chun so your not supposed to be muscling thru anything anyhow - (so this helps me stay relaxed)