[quote]Xen Nova wrote:
Right, but what makes an exercise functional.
throwing a weighted ball might recreate the exact stress of throwing a baseball and magnify it therefore increasing your strength in throwing a baseball…
sike.
it’ll just mess up your motor unit recruitment patter, fuck up your joints, and do nothing positive for you except put you on the bench.
same with punching with weights. and same with punching with tubing behind your arms.
just teaches you punch with your arms, its all bad.
If you want to be functional the most you can get is to train joint expressions…or how a movement is expressed over the joints and the antagonistic motion (because obviously you’re doing a lot of the former, so strengthening the latter will stop your golgi complex from inhibiting your strength).
for example punching starts at your feet (big toe really) and is expressed through your hands at the end of the motion…notably one hand.
sort of like a dumbbell thruster or a 1 arm overhead jerk or a 1 arm snatch…
likewise the opposing motion is a mixture of pullups and rows… the legs are going through extension similar to deadlifts and front squats great for protagonistic motion and antagonistic… but because the motion is exploding forwards the best exercise for it is sprints.
Or better yet.
Just get fucking strong on the basics!!!
Bench, Row, Deadlift, Squat, Pullups, Dips, Overhead presses, lunges.
Use dumbbells if you want, kettlebells, barbells, what the fuck ever just get stronger.
Then you train the FUCK out of your technique for your chosen sport and implement your newfound strength in/on/around someone’s face. There are plenty of strong guys who hit like bitches till they get their technique right then their strength comes into play. likewise there are guys like joe lauzon who admitted that he can’t even bench 135 but he knocked out jens pulver. His mechanics are right. It takes a GREAT deal of strength to overcome bad mechanics but just a dose of good mechanics to overcome weakness… if you can get best of both worlds you’re a G.
everyone wants to jump into odd implement training and shit like that or specialized stuff when they’re not even strong yet. (1 arm snatches with 35lb dumbbell is bitch weight…get stronger)
very few of us are fucking beasts that need anything outside of the basics before we start worrying about
“what’s functional”
and all that bullshit.
[/quote]
Yes, exactly.
The only thing I’d like to add is that people seem to think of “functional” as a doorway; that is, an exercise either is or is not functional. Rather, I think it might help to think of things as a spectrum.
Say I am a wrestler. I could spend time outside of practice deadlifting in the Hammer Strength shrug machine, doing barbell deadlifts, or picking up a heavy sandbag. I would say the Hammer Strength machine is the least “functional” exercise for this appliction and the sandbag the most “functional.” Obviously a barbell lies between the two.
OTOH, if I got bloody freaking strong at the barbell deadlift as Xen says, then that would be time well spent and would have a carry over to many, many aspects of wrestling, apart from simply picking one’s opponent up. Moreover, there is no need to choose one or the other; you can do many exercises.