Dragon Ball Training: Strength Training for Martial Arts

it seems to me that no matter who you are or where you're from if you train you probably get inspired by dragon ball even the seemingly most unlikely people at your gym can probably hum falconer's vegeta theme or perform the fusion dance but just how useful is the kind of training depicted in the anime and manga and how do you really go about getting a body that looks and performs like goku or vegeta's and if you're interested in improving martial arts performance as well as strength then how should you train when i think of dragon ball training i tend to think of those scenes where they're training in high gravity using really intense high repetitions of bodyweight movements and this actually makes a ton of sense for martial artists for all sorts of reasons which we're going to discuss in a moment the other type of training often see them doing is more of your kind of old-school kung fu movie which is probably toriyama's influences showing the kind of thing you get in rocky films where they're chasing monkeys around planets or performing tasks and training as a kind of byproduct of that sort of thing and these again kind of make sense vegeta's version of that is going to a abandoned planet and screaming into a meteor storm he's a little bit more hardcore the same kind of thing applies this is training that doesn't necessarily look like training combining these things makes a ton of sense for a martial artist and i'm going to describe how you can adapt that to your own training in a way that doesn't necessarily involve you know extreme gravity or tiny round planets the big question when it comes to strength training and martial arts though is whether you can be packed with muscle and still move powerfully explosively and fluidly there is a common misconception that muscle will slow you down this is a view held by many excellent martial artists and of course we see this in dragon ball z when trunks builds himself up to that massive size against cell but then is actually too slow to be of any use but the problem is not the muscle itself in fact muscles are what generate power every time you punch it comes from muscle by the way i am not a bodybuilder who's also a great martial artist i'm neither a bodybuilder nor a martial artist i'm a jack of all trades it shows in my punches as anyone who has seen the comments section on my youtube will know doing my best to get better grant's giving me some tips but yes this is not the focus of my training take a look at someone like jean-claude van damme for the perfect example of someone who is extremely muscular like goku but who also has snappy powerful punches or how about mike tyson even jackie chan was pretty big at some points in his career anon would accuse him of being slow and stiff jason's statham has been pretty bulky at times too like i said the problem is not the muscle itself the problem is the order and the way in which you coordinate the use of that muscle and here's the issue with something like powerlifting just doing bench press and things because obviously when you punch again this is an approximation because i'm not the best you have to twist your hips and push through your shoulder it's a full body movement a bench press involves lying on your back with your core rigid pushing a heavy weight directly upwards all you're using there is your pecs your shoulders your triceps and arm movement and the body is necessarily rigid in fact it's deactivated you build massive pecs because you're able to isolate those muscles and thereby put all the muscle damage all the metabolic build up all of the fatigue on them but you can't then translate that so easily into a puncture it's an entirely different movement and the issue here is neural maps so you're repeating the same bench press movement over and over again where you learn that to generate power you must go like this push something straight forwards with your body so then when you put someone like that in front of a punch bag what do they do they do the same thing they push straight from the chest keeping their torso rigid instead of generating power from the hips and from the core so and this happened to me because for many years that's how i primarily trained and i'm trying to undo some of that damage and become more fluid once again we see an example of this kind of interference in swimmers one study showed that swimmers were actually worse at jumping than the untrained population in other words if you just sit on the couch all day you'll jump higher than a swimmer because swimming makes you worse at jumping that of course is because you've developed different neural maps and strengthened different muscles that's not to say that a swimmer can't also become very good at other things just look at a triathlete for instance all it means is that the bench press on its own won't translate to a more powerful punch in fact possibly the opposite and so it's appropriate that we don't typically see goku and vegeta lifting weights and it's funny that so many people who are inspired by those guys then spend all the time in the gym doing exactly that so perhaps you should ditch the resistance training altogether why bother building muscle simple because resistance training applied correctly can increase power as well as giving you that goku physique and martial arts looks much cooler when you've got a ripped physique or to put it another way bruce lee trained with weights so so should you specifically adding about 75 of your body weight will allow you to train in an explosive manner while still encouraging greater fast twitch fiber recruitment muscle damage mechanical tension and all that good stuff you get from resistance training in other words we can develop power with just the right amount of resistance and i say 75 of body weight because this won't be so much as to slow the movement down to a grind in one study it was found that sprinters could get faster by training with a heavy sled however this was only effective when pulling up to 75 percent of their body weight the key then is to apply this amount of resistance in a movement pattern that closely mimics the movements we want to train this is simply the law of specificity as seen all across functional training and this is exactly the kind of thing good sports coaches will get their mma fighters doing so that's what we're trying to train we're trying to train the strength and the coordination you can do this by training something like a powerlifting routine and then practicing your skill on top of that but ultimately the two are going to be somewhat working against each other and it's not going to be supporting you because you're not building the powerful obliques you're not creating that motor recruitment in those areas that you need it to be and you're not learning to use it all at once so instead you should use more functional training tools and methods that do involve torque in the waist and the hips and that do involve standing upright jc santana described a bench press as building these massive pecs that were too powerful for your core and saying that that was like trying to fire a cannon from a canoe you might be able to bench press 150 kilograms but if you try and push anything close to that standing up you're going backwards so there's no point on the other hand something like a uh cable punch out or a wood chopper anything like that you're now bracing the core and you're providing that pushing and that pulling movement which allows you to utilize all the muscles together in the way they need to be you're adding on just that little bit of extra resistance to make the movement more powerful more coordinated instead of trying to work against something that's actually going to be slowing you down another move you can use is a medicine ball rotational throw project the weight from your shoulder as you torque the body just as you would throw a punch this is an even more ballistic movement that lets you exert maximum power if you want to move fluidly you need to train fluidly similar principles apply to other movement patterns the bulgarian bag is a fantastic tool for developing the kind of torque and core strength you need for grappling and even works the grip and strength endurance there are other similar movements you can perform with a kettlebell too another trope of dragon ball training is weighted clothing and this is perfect after all using weighted clothing in the real world will typically add just the right amount of resistance we can then use explosive plyometric movements that let us work on rate of force development and explosiveness with the added resistance to increase those gains training explosively with these movements is important whether or not you choose to add weight to begin with your own body weight may be enough on its own to continue building your strength reserves just take a look at the conditioning work grant does i've never seen anyone punch with as much speed and power as him so yeah explosive calisthenics works guys in terms of i guess like conditioning or outside of martial arts would probably be some kind of push-up variation maybe like a jack push-up i quite like those they're very explosive it's where you kind of like go down into a push-up and your legs shoot out at the same time then come back in as you come up it works a lot of your body it's really good for your core it kind of forces you to hold yourself into that position very sturdily as you go down and you can add that onto like a burpee or something as well so i do like those all of these movements where you're kind of like moving from the ground into the air quickly with a jump because like i said before it kind of mimics the movements of martial arts to a degree and it's a lot of the same muscles like explosive core work where you're using your core muscles to kind of pull yourself off the floor into the air that stuff's always really good um i also like kick through burpees as well which are quite uh advanced exercise and yeah all that type of stuff i really like doing i made a whole video explaining the differences between plyometrics and ballistic exercises rest times and things but that doesn't really matter this is the said principle if you want to move quickly then you need to train quickly you need fast intent this will improve rate of force development altering the rate coding such that you learn to recruit the most powerful motor units immediately here we're using compensatory acceleration to generate more force than is needed to move the weight slowly so that when you want it it's there this also helps us to improve strength to weight ratio in other words we're not just strong but strong for our size this is important as it allows us to move quickly and remain agile if you're extremely strong but you can't do a pull-up or jump more than a few inches off the floor it might be time to lighten the load and focus on bar speed instead so what would you say then it is is like a really well spent time in the gym for like a you know basketball player or someone like what do you guys think conditioning yeah or what like um just endurance and the right type of conditioning yeah the right type of cardio if we want to train for martial arts then we need to focus on strength endurance as much as raw power being massively strong is of no use if you tire out after a single punch or if you get out of breath climbing the stairs mma fights and definitely dragon ball fights go on for some time so you need to focus on strength endurance that means conditioning strength endurance is more important in the real world too it's far more useful to be able to carry something a distance than it is to pick up something really heavy just once it's also far more important than sports the military favor strength endurance over max strength and again our explosive calisthenics functional movements and weighted clothing all lend themselves perfectly to this kind of training the aim is to be as explosive as possible through long sets and repeated bouts this also reshapes your body like nothing else remember bodybuilders use high reps because it provides metabolic buildup triggering hypertrophy and as this becomes a type of cardio you'll simultaneously be melting away fat there's another reason why big muscles may appear to slow a fighter down tension in the case of a punch the biceps and lats are pulling the fister back in if you haven't practiced punching you'll struggle to turn off these muscles while you deliver the blow relaxing the muscles that are working in an antagonistic fashion so when you punch your triceps your shoulders your pecs are pushing forwards your bicep and your lats pulling back but what happens if you're not used to this movement pattern if you haven't trained it is that they're going to fight against one another the antagonist muscles are slowing down that movement a pro athlete on the other hand enjoys something called reciprocal inhibition meaning that as the necessary muscles contract the others relax and that's why you'll often hear metaphors like whipping a towel or throwing a ball it's a similar sort of pattern where you'll have you have to try and be relaxed until the moment of impact we actually see this in dragon ball super when whis tells vegeta that he needs to relax while fighting it's also implied that this is one of the reasons ultra instinct is so effective for goku martial artists know this intuitively but it was also confirmed by research conducted on ufc fighters by dr stuart mcgill he found a double pulse occurred in the fighters during a punch an initial contraction to generate the strike and a second pulse to create stiffness in the entire body on impact in tai chi the aim is to move using the minimal amount of tension and as much relaxation as possible so in the opening move of the first form you raise your arms like this and then lower them and as you do that you need to be consciously aware of every muscle in your body and trying to relax anything that isn't absolutely crucial for the movement it's a long time since i did any tai chi say this is probably awful but that's something very different from what most athletes what most even martial artists practice on a regular basis certainly most strength athletes but it gives you that control to not only contract the muscle be powerful when you need to but also to relax the movement the muscle and to be whip-like and water-like when you need to this is difficult due to the irradiation effect tension that we naturally carry and more however learning to relax the muscle is a technique that can develop huge power and martial artists aren't the only ones who have discovered this old-time strongmen like maxic likewise believe this technique could provide huge strength gains so maybe try practicing some tai chi check out my video on quasi isometrics and try performing some passive yielding isometrics hard style kettlebell training can also teach this technique and of course just be mindful of the tension you're carrying during your training tai chi practitioners speak about feeling the flow of energy through the body and this makes sense in this context i actually have a theory that visualizing the flow of chi around the body is a tool used for tapping into the mind muscle connection it helps to visualize the muscle and thereby contract or loosen it as necessary sadly i don't think you'll be able to fire that chi out of your hands like a kamehameha or genki dharma anytime soon genki actually refers to vitality check out some shaolin monks though if you want to see the kinds of things that are possible through this kind of focused will and finally what about all those chores that goku and krillin did for master roshi what about chasing king kai's monkey bubbles or climbing coron tower well actually this type of training is ideal for building more adaptable strength by incorporating a cognitive component by introducing unexpected variables and by mixing things up these kinds of training challenges can actually help to build more robust mental models bruce lee said to fear the man who practiced a single kick a thousand times that's certainly true if you want the sharpest most efficient technique possible but because real life is unpredictable and non-linear you should eventually introduce more unpredictability and variety into your training this way you can apply those skills in a wider variety of situations your body is now prepared for the changes in gradient speed and momentum it's also awesome and fun and if dragon ball teaches us anything it's that training should be awesome and fun so i hope you found this video useful and interesting guys if you did please leave a like and share around i'll be returning to this topic again in future so subscribe and hit the notification bell if you want more like this got some cool stuff from grant on the way too comment down below and let me know how dragon ball influenced your own training and guys if you want much more advice on training for martial arts specifically then be sure to check out grant's own channel i'll put the link to that in the description down below he's an absolute font of knowledge you've seen how talented he is and he gives a lot of that information away completely free so i absolutely recommend going and checking out that stuff you should also check out jc santana and the institute of human performance he trained mma fighters and he's really inspired my own training lately and i'll also be sharing some more conversations that we've been having on different platforms very soon if you're interested in training to improve your performance then you could check out my book functional training and beyond available on amazon and from all good bookstores to learn more alternatively you could check out super functional training that's a huge pdf containing a full training program and ebook with lots of extras this program trains everything from strength and speed to focus mobility and more there's a discount on right now during the pandemic and you can find the link in the description down below either way thanks so much for watching this one guys i really appreciate it and i'll see you next time bye for now

Channel: The Bioneer

Views: 252,165

Keywords: dragon ball training, strength training for martial arts, martial arts training, mma, goku training, vegeta training, train like goku, train like vegeta, dragon ball z, dragon ball z training, functional training, functional fitness

Id: cBBasVNcuds

Length: 16min 22sec (982 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 19 2021