Weight and Strength

In recent years, I have taken the time to experiment with weight loss and gain as a method through which I would shift the emphasis of my personal performance from strength to agility, and the like.

Essentially speaking, I began this when I made the decision to move from my personal training to a more structured environment, i.e. joining a kendo dojo. Before that time, I had taken my brief karate training and expanded upon it through personal study and regular physical training. These ‘workouts’ often involved sparring with people who far outclassed me and who (in most cases) had received formal training from one fighting art or another. However, they were mostly what I would call ‘fist and foot’ arts, which traditionally tend to yield the advantage the biggest, strongest, and most durable of competitors. As such, I found that I had a natural advantage over many of my more skilled opponents, and through lifting weights, jumping rope, and working the heavy bag, I was able to approach the level of some of the more powerful of my teachers over time. In almost every case, winning at first appeared to be a matter of skill and speed, but as sparring progressed, it became more evident that real fisticuffs was a matter of hitting hard and enduring hard hits – in other words, no-holds-barred sparring often ended as a matter of situational awareness coupled with brute strength.

At the time, I weighed about 260 pounds at a height of about 6’3”. I did not appear to be of ponderous weight, due to my height and the distribution of my body mass, but I would have guessed myself to be about 60 pounds over my ideal/minimum athletic weight. That said, I rarely found it to be a problem during sparring, whether I was grappling or striking; even my swordsmanship was at the capacity of the average ‘Fist and Foot’ fighter. In fact, it was often advantageous to be so heavy, as I was able to hold my center of gravity against practically any opponent unable to shoulder at least half of my weight. In addition, I have since noted that the relatively even weight distribution (aka: the even fat layer coating my whole body – as opposed to just having a fat belly) added extra mass to my arms and legs, which yielded a higher impact inertia than would be possible with my limbs at lean mass. This, of course, was discovered once I began shedding weight which I will discuss a bit later.

I have seen parallels of this observation in Asian martial arts and sports such as Sumo and Korean wrestling styles, where being what would be considered grossly overweight by social standards is actually desirable because of the proportionate gains in impact force and the ability to retain CG control. A correlation seems to appear in old strongman photos and descriptions and can be observed in powerlifting masters around the world. Most of these men are easily overweight by anywhere between 60 to 100+ pounds, but are able to lift and move enormous loads in addition to their own bodyweight.

Having thought about this quite a bit in recent years, it occurred to me that Hollywood has essentially put the wrong image of strength into the mind of the average westerner. Guys like Arnold are indeed quite strong, but nothing compared to the upper human limits displayed by some of these rotund titans we witness pulling airplanes and throwing small cars. That is, however, not the point of this article. The point is that at 60 pounds overweight, I observed my force output to be higher than it is now that I am down to my ‘Kendo weight’ despite the fact that the muscle is still there and the weight-lifting shows that little strength has been lost.

When I decided to focus more upon pure swordsmanship, I began to reduce my intake and change my diet a bit, thereby losing weight at a regular rate of about 1 or 2 pounds per week, reaching my current weight of around 200lbs. nearly a year later. I recall at first, feeling an exceedingly energetic feeling – something which is commonly descried by dieters after the first 10 of 20 pounds has been shed. This is naturally due to your body still overcompensating for the weight of fat that is no longer present. During the time at which the body regulates muscular output to save energy once wasted carrying those extra pounds, one feels light and energetic, but the status quo eventually creeps in.

With regular exercise and speed training, I found that I was able to offset the ‘Status Quo’ a little, but the training was not the same as wearing the weight 24/7, and a certain loss of output occurred over time. So, while my endurance steadily increased along with my speed and agility, squats seemed to get heavier and the heavy bag seemed harder.

The reader may already be aware that offsetting impact force lost by weight reduction requires an increase in velocity, so that is how I learned to compensate with punches and kicks, but I have found that the balance and ease with which the heavier me rattled the bag in the past is something I have all but completely lost – no matter how fast one swings a claw hammer, a sledge hammer will always hit harder.

That fact aside, I found that once the feeling of ‘I’m lighter and faster now’ degenerated into the feeling that I had always been so, I had the strong desire to regain that lasting ‘unladed’ feeling I experienced at the onset. At that time I was a 210 pound man moving with muscles that were used to hefting 260 pounds day and night – everything was easier then. But as my body grew accustomed to the new weight, it began to save its energy as if it suddenly realized that such effort was no longer required. As a result, I was no longer able to have that degree of muscular output without conscious effort.

So what is the solution? If being heavy gives a fighter a little bit of an advantage in stability at the sacrifice of a bit of endurance and being lighter allows for greater mobility at the sacrifice of stopping power, are they not essentially both void of the completeness a martial artist might inevitably seek? I suppose the answer is yes, but this would be based upon my own personal observation and might be answered differently by different people. The solution would require a simplified explanation of the problem, which is essentially how to maintain the middle ground wherein one still possesses the reflex output of a heavy person, while being able to use that output as excess strength due to the fact that one is not actually as heavy as his body is inclined to think. I believe that it can be achieved by regularly lading the body with the weight it once had and operating with caution until one reaches a comfort level that allows for normal movement under the load. Once the adaptation is complete, a fighter should be able to take advantage of the adaptation at will by removing the burden.

I believe that examples of this type of training have been used by monks in China as well as swordsmen in mountainous areas like Korea. If the burden is borne with regularity, the effects of its removal are more pronounced and last longer. In my own experimentation, I was able to regain my 60 excess pounds in the form of weighted clothes and a backpack full of stones. Weeks of practice with the weight on my body started very slowly. Everything was slow and deliberate at first, but eventually movement became more natural. After months of wearing weight on my ankles all day everyday and wearing a weighted backpack everywhere I walked, I found that I was slowly growing stronger and faster. Whenever I removed the packs and weights, I was able to move as if I weighed 140lbs. My body had become accustomed to carrying that extra load for such a long time that my muscle-memory had accepted the load as my normal bodyweight. I toyed with the idea weeks on and weeks off to determine if there were any side effects, but found none to speak of (provided that one works up slowly to their training weight – the body can handle vast loads, but it will be at the cost of one’s less flexible components. In order for the body to get stronger, the whole must grow together, not just the muscles. For a true change, the training must take place over time).

I will continue my training for the time being and will gradually increase weight until I am able to move freely under the burden of at least half of my bodyweight. According to my experiments to date, this could lend itself to a great deal of power for both swordsmanship and Fist arts. I look forward to seeing the results.