Cheat meal last night.

Woke up so hungry, wasn’t expecting that.

4.30 - Personal Coaching session.

5 x 2 minute shadow sparring rounds, 30 second ‘break’ between.

Break one - maximum tricep pushups

Break two - butterfly sit ups

Break three - squats

Break four - burpees

The sparring was 100%, all weapons, no hesitation and working ringcraft. 

Next up, 5 x 3 minute padwork fatigue rounds. 

Round one - Hands only

30 second ‘break’ of continuous jab crosses. 

Round two - legs only 

30 second ‘break’ of pyramid roundhouses. 

Round three, four and five - hands and legs. 

Breaks included continuous rips and pyramid switches. 

All in all, I got about 2 minutes rest the entire hour. 

Then it was time for a break, a bite to eat and a coffee with Gabby and back off to class.

Class - 6.30 -Mock Grading.

Gladiators warm up.

More shadow sparring.

Combinations to the count. 

More shadow sparring. 

5 x 3 minute padwork rounds, all weapons.

5 x 3 minute rounds of calling pads. 

And that was it. I’m fatigued as hell. Time to shower, sleep and get up early for gym :) 

Past crappy exams, past working crazy hours and back to a happy balance.

Still been kicking my ass in Muay Thai. Almost ready to grade up again thanks to personal coaching. Also, have discussed fighting with my Kru and it’s up to me how soon I want to fight because I’m at the right point at the moment for my first fight, but I don’t feel my mental game is quite there. I also want to step in the ring the fittest and strongest I’ve ever been, so, game on. 

mybeauty-inprocess:

oh god yes.

Ahh, shut the fuck up and train and don’t stuff your face with disgusting food.. And if you do, don’t complain about it cos IT’S YOUR OWN FAULT. Just sayin. Not rocket science here people.

kbai :) 

Game on, bitches. Gonna train like an absolute mofo and I’ve got my new meal plan ready to roll. 

Since I’ve been working a lot I haven’t been eating anywhere near as much. I guess I haven’t been training anywhere near as much though either. Once this exam is done and dusted on thursday nothing will stop me.

Have you ever noticed an athlete in the weight room who is built like Tarzan, yet lifts weights better suited for Jane? Yet, there are other athletes who are every bit as strong and functional as they look. Although an athlete’s genetic make-up is always a factor, the answer to this discrepancy in strength and functionality of the muscle can also be due to the different types of training performed by different athletes. Although two athletes may possess similar physiques, the muscle they have built using their different training methods may not be the same. In other words, all muscular growth was NOT created equal! There are actually two very different types of hypertrophy that can take place within the muscle. Being aware of this helps to answer the question of why some athletes possess superhuman strength and others are “all show, no go.” The two types of hypertrophy to which I am referring are sarcoplasmic and myofibrillar hypertrophy.

Sarcoplasmic Hypertrophy

Sarcoplasmic hypertrophy is an increase in the volume of the non-contractile muscle cell fluid, sarcoplasm. This fluid accounts for 25-30% of the muscle’s size. Although the cross sectional area of the muscle increases, the density of muscle fibers per unit area decreases, and there is no increase in muscular strength (2). This type of hypertrophy is mainly a result of high rep, “bodybuilder-type” training (3).

One of the biggest problems I see with the training of power athletes (football players, baseball players, basketball players, wrestlers and even powerlifters) is too much emphasis on training in the 10 – 15 rep range. This type of training has its place, yet should not be the focal point for these athletes. For example, most football lineman benefit from added bulk to prevent from getting pushed around on the field. “Bodybuilding” methods, using these rep ranges, can be beneficial if incorporated during the season to prevent muscle mass loss, as well as after the season to add bulk, which may have been lost during the season. Also, there is some scientific evidence that states a bigger muscle may have a better chance of becoming a stronger muscle once maximal strength training methods are employed. The key to remember is that this type of hypertrophy has little to do with such explosive movements as hitting, running, throwing, jumping or performing a one-rep max. This is why professional bodybuilders, whose training mainly hypertrophies the Type IIA fibers and causes an increase in the non-contractile components of the muscle (sarcoplasmic volume, capillary density, and mitochondria proliferation) are not the fastest or even the strongest of all athletes. This is despite the fact that they generally have more muscle than any other class of athlete! I consider this type of hypertrophy to be form over function.

Myofibrillar Hypertrophy

Myofibrillar hypertrophy, on the other hand, is an enlargement of the muscle fiber as it gains more myofibrils, which contract and generate tension in the muscle. With this type of hypertrophy, the area density of myofibrils increases and there is a significantly greater ability to exert muscular strength. This type of hypertrophy is best accomplished by training with heavy weights for low reps.
One must remember that the average football play lasts 4.5 seconds, it takes about 3 seconds to complete a 1 RM, it takes less than a second to swing a bat, less than a second to throw a punch and less than a second to jump for a rebound. As you can see, most athletic activities are explosive in nature. This is why it is imperative for athletes to incorporate maximal strength training methods, which train the part of the muscle responsible for these explosive contractions, into their routines. Repetitions in the 1-5 rep range, using 85 – 100% of a 1RM, also have the added benefit of training the nervous system – which I feel is the most overlooked component of training the athlete. Some of the many benefits of training the nervous system are: increased neural drive to the muscle, increased synchronization of motor units, increased activation of the contractile apparatus, and decreased inhibition by the protective mechanisms of the muscle (golgi tendon organ). These training methods also hypertrophy the pure fast twitch fibers – the high-threshold, Type IIB fibers. Incorporating these training methods into your routine at the right time will undoubtedly improve your muscles ability to generate more force and contract maximally during any sporting activity. In essence, myofibrillar hypertrophy is what I would term functional hypertrophy.

Conclusion

Although the human eye cannot tell these two types of hypertrophy apart, the difference will always become quite apparent as soon as it’s time for an athlete to put his/her muscle to use. As athletes and strength professionals, I feel we all have a responsibility to prevent ourselves from getting into the “3 sets of 10” rut. It is our job to educate ourselves, be creative, and put together the most result-producing programs available for our athletes or ourselves. This may mean incorporating both types of hypertrophy training into your routine, depending on your goal and training phase. But remember that no matter how bad those high-rep sets of leg extensions burn, they will never build the strength, power, and functional hypertrophy of a heavy set of squats or deads!

Personally I blogged this because I don’t fancy bodybuilding training compared to powerlifting type training, but I look at it in a performance perspective as a martial artist. If I can train to be strong and fast by training heavy and low reps along with speed days using chains and bands, it’s going to help me more than if I just train to build muscle. Because it is more functional. Full stop. 

1. Do bodybuilding comps stress definition more than usefulness. Yes.

2. Are they at their weakest come comp time? Yes

3. Do they diet to extremes and dehydrate themselves to achieve the desired look? Yes.

4. Does it stress upper body bulk and trim waist? Its more likely to be an overall X shape they look for, so not necissarily.

 5. Is it for the sake of show at comp? Yes.

Now strongman/powerlifters:

1. Are they legit strong? Yep

2. Are they about actual function and not sculpture and the lowest body fat percentage possible? Yes. Although I will say, this doesn’t mean that a lot of strongmen/powerlifters don’t care about their eating habits. Quite a lot don’t but I for one work at a gym where we have a strong line between our bodybuilding training and powerlifting training. While yes, our elite bodybuilders are strong, they have nothing on our world record holding powerlifters. How could they when their sole purpose is to train to be strong? I know someone who did both, won the nationals here as a bodybuilder and decided to move on to powerlifting to get a world record. It’s in the training. A lot of our powerlifters aren’t tubs of shit either. Just genuinely strong people due to their type of training :)  This says nothing about eating shit and not caring. Not wanting to be a highly minimal body fat percentage does not mean a person looks like complete shit.  

3. Both bodybuilders and powerlifters are known to use steriods, so this is kind of irrelevant. 

4. Do they have thick waists compared to bodybuilders? In general, yes. The core is massively important and a thicker waist helps with bigger lifts. 

End rant. 

if-i-should-hand-my-body-over:

squatpilgrimvstheworld:

scienceof8limbs:

I’ve always liked this.  It’s part of why I hate seeing/hearing about guys who don’t do their research, enter a gym and do really non-functional exercises on shitty machines, run on a treadmill, finish with some junk food afterwards and wonder why they aren’t progressing.  Perhaps it’s because I’m constantly seeing photos on facebook of people flexing their really unimpressive physiques for the sake of vanity.

This picture is worse than ineffective training for the sake of aestheticz. Mr. Universe contestants lift heavy as fuck and even at their weakest would shit on the person who made this. There’s no excuse for being a tub of shit unless you’re breaking records.

Completely agree with ^. Bodybuilding does NOT stress upper body bulk in comparison to overall size (size of the lower body is becoming more and more important nowadays). Furthermore, in order to get that muscular in the first place, bodybuilders absolutely HAVE to lift heavy weights. In all honesty, strongmen aren’t that much stronger than bodybuilders. Also, just because you’re “lifting to be strong”, that doesn’t give you an excuse to eat anything you want and look like complete shit. You should be able to do more with your body rather than just waddling up to the squat rack to rep out a single or perform a single rep bench press that covers a distance of only 6 inches because your overwhelming amount of fat on your upper body provides cushioning.

The maker of this picture is clearly an arrogant strongman lifter.

P.S. Strongmen don’t fight bears. They pick things up and put them down.