[quote]FightinIrish26 wrote:
[quote]Sentoguy wrote:
I really don’t think you can quantify or compare athletes at the very top of the sport and crown any one group as “the hardest working”. Top level bodybuilder a work extremely hard, especially when you consider the extreme dedication and discipline that their dieting practices require to get to their necessary levels of leanness required to win or even place in a top level show; their bodies are literally near the point of organ failure (bodybuilders a have literally died due to the extremes that some go to in order to reach that level). Top level fighters train like freakin animals and their training and weight cutting practices are equally as extreme; top level swimmers like Michael Phelps train 6 hours a day of intense laps in the pool; top level gymnasts train multiple times a day 6-7 days a week; and the list goes on…
Everyone at the pinnacle of sports trains extremely hard and comparing them is both a waste of time and attempts to belittle the efforts of athletes in other sports IMO.[/quote]
I can agree with that in terms of conditioning and work ethic.
But boxers and those in the striking arts always get more credit with me simply because on top of the typical fanatical pro-athlete training, you’re also getting punched (or kicked) over and over and over and over just because that’s the nature of fighting.
So yea, soccer and swimming are hard and shit, but you didn’t get punched in the liver Monday, get your lights nearly put out on Thursday, and jump right back in the ring on Saturday.
These sports just require guys with a different level of fucked-up-ness.[/quote]
I tend to side with you Irish, and London and Pigeon here too. Fighting as a high level sport is the toughest thing there is from a pain threshold standpoint. No question.
But I do think each sport is tough in its own way. Fighters don’t tend to do the 24/7 thing until fight camps even though they train hard whereas bodybuilders literally live their sport at every minute of every day of almost all year and are slaves to food scales, schedules, all the details that a lot of athletes don’t even think about that literally run your days. That makes the sport tough in a completely different way, mentally speaking, but nowhere near as painful or agonizing as fighting.
Then you have sports like olympic lifting where you train multiple times a day for years on end and train through stress fractures of the bone–in some cases actively trying to induce them in order to calcify the collarbone further by dropping heavy weights on them purposefully (don’t ask…yes this is a real thing). That, my friend, is insane. Also painful :). Or powerlifting where you can quite literally feel your bones bending (trust me, that is an interesting sensation). Or ultra marathoning where your shoes melt to the roadway in death valley and you’re dying of thirst. Or any number of other sports doing other crazy things.
All elite level sports are completely different and all take a level of pain tolerance unique to that sport. I mean, look at what happens when you leg kick a pure boxer…his reaction is agony lol, but a thai guy is just standing there going “yeah, so what was that?”. So it’s very sport specific I think.
I’ve always felt like fighters are the absolute toughest in terms of pain tolerance without question, and I thoroughly agree with Irish about doing it in an arena surrounded by people calling for your blood.
Oh, and Pigeon, a 300 lb bench isn’t anywhere close to what a real bodybuilder is putting up ;). But agree with your point overall though.
boxing is going back to the glory days