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QUESTION:
Dear Charles,
I read your book Special Topics
in Martial Arts Conditioning which emphatically encourages
weight training for improved martial arts performance. After
implementing a few weight training cycles into my Tae Kwon
Do competition preparation, I ended up slower and feeling
unusually awkward. What do you think I'm doing wrong?
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ANSWER:
Simply moving your pawns, knights,
and bishops forward on the chess board does not assure victory.
Before you decide to quit on you resistance training program, let's
examine a few avoidable mistakes that can contribute
to diminished results on "event day:"
First, timing is everything. Being
undertrained or overtrained on contest day can spell disaster for
any athlete; but if you time it just right you're in the medal
hunt. The proximity of intense resistance training to competition
can even throw off a weightlifter— imagine how that effects
an athlete who must cope with a highly technical skill element!
In an undertrained state, an athlete
has been away from his/her resistance training so long that they
are suffering detraining effects.
The more common obstacle is overtraining,
however — something that martial artists seem to have a patent
on. Intense lifting places great demands
on the nervous system, so intense technical and tactical
training (which also taxes the nervous system) should be placed
on the "back-burner" while strength is increased.
Because strength training debilitates
skill temporarily, reduce and eventually discontinue the strength
training program as the event nears. The closer the contest is the
more refined and specific your training should become.
Sometimes the best intentions hit
a pothole. It's possible that the training was timed perfectly well;
however, exercises selected and the muscles targeted were flawed.
One of my favorite tricks, which I
initially learned from my colleague Charles Poliquin, is to emphasize
the antagonists.
For example— tae kwon do, which
places great emphasis on kicking, encourages athletes to develop
the quadricep, the muscle responsible for extension of the leg.
In the mix, the hamstring, responsible for flexion (in this case
retraction) of the leg is forgotten about.
The quadricep and hamstring have an
'agonist/antagonist' relationship. This means one muscle lengthens
while the other shortens and vise versa. When an agonist/antagonist
relationship exists it becomes incumbent upon the opposing muscles
to 'protect' each other by decelerating the force of the concentric
activity.
Therefore, one possibility is that
your quadricep's ability to deliver force with a kick might be limited
by insufficient hamstring strength.
Feeling awkward
could also reflect a neglect of skill retention during
a strength training phase. Although you should certainly reduce
the total volume of technical training during a phase designated
to strength improvement, basic drills a few times a week for will
help an athlete to adjust to increased muscle mass.
I find that my martial artist clients
who begin a weight training program for the first time must be prodded
to keep up with their technical sessions, since weight training
tends to make you feel heavy and stiff, at least during a hypertrophy
phase.
So, before discounting the benefits
of strength training specific to fighting, consider my advice, and
also look at the trend: athletes such as Rickson Gracie, Lucia Rikert,
and Evander Holyfield carry impressively muscular physiques while
projecting an aura of invincibility around them in the ring.
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