The title is a bit limiting, a better term to use is ‘resistance training’ which free us from just weights. So partner resistance drills, impact drills against a punching bag, tensor bands, rubber tubs, body weight, chains, kettlebells and more are all possibilities and each will have its own merit as well as limitations.
Things to remember when you design your own ‘resistance training’ program:
- direction of resistance – are you working the right muscle groups? Free weights by itself always pull down. Therefore, standing upright and punching using of dumbbells and wrist-weights works your shoulder (strength / size) instead of horizontal punching power.
- principle of isolation – to develop the weaker muscles, you have to be able to isolate that muscle group. Otherwise, the larger / stronger muscles will attempt to take over (we sometimes call it cheating). However, do not let the principle of isolation carry over to the fighting side where integration and coordinated use of the whole body is key. You need to understand and use both.
- Principle of inertia and momentum – if you jerk the weights, the maximum workload is at the start point, momentum helps with the rest of it. So depending on your purpose, you may / may not be strengthening the full range of muscle movement. Watch carefully at an example of Olympic power lift (snatch) and see the applicability of some of the principles that we talked about in class.
- Stronger muscles are not equivalent to power by itself – power involves speed, strength can be static. Speed is generated via muscles AND neural and therefore if you don’t train on speed, you will not get power. If you cannot relax the right muscle groups (and therefore not allow the muscle to lengthen in-time), you are working against yourself. Please click on this illustration of the bicep / tricep pair working together in opposites for different purposes.
- Principle of forced adaptation via progressive overload and variations – your muscle and neural system tends to adapt to a specific exercise and therefore its effectiveness diminishes. Furthermore, resistance provided by most resistance systems (like universal gyms) is uniform and controlled (typical exercise involves repetition of the same movement in a controlled manner). In real-life situations, the work load moves and changes on you and forces you to adapt / react. Ability to adapt to changes can be trained.
- Sport or usage specificity – do remember that most skills involves coordination of multiple muscle groups. Designing overload / resistance that best simulates the specific skill is the secret.
