[quote]rg73 wrote:
bigjoey wrote:
sharetrader wrote:
John S. wrote:
How about the fact that when you do a upper body pushing movement(like punching) your chest is one of the main factors. and besides you don’t want strength imbalances.
Most of your power for punching comes from the hips.
Depends on how you punch.
This is true. If you have awful technique and hit like a sissy, sure, you won’t use your legs, hips and back. If you punch correctly, you’re not going to punch from your chest.
A short range punch or a straight one like those taught in Wing Chun would be helped by a lot of pec and triceps power (even if technique is probably a lot more important in this case).
Seriously, who does those wing chun punches anymore? That’s so fucking 80s.
And even a hook punch, the arm is coming accross the body.
Sure. But, like any other punch, it starts from the legs/hips. If you’re throwing hooks using just chest you don’t know how to throw a hook.
Heavyweight boxers seem to have pretty decent chest size.
No they don’t in fact. Look at Ali, smallish pecs. Tyson, smallish pecs. Joe Lewis, Lennox Lewis, Marciano, Hollyfield, Frazier, Foreman…I could go down the line of top heavyweights historically and none of them has large pecs by bodybuilding standards.
Fact is, look at guys in strongman - which seems to be all about functional strength - they all have big chests. And biceps for that matter.
They have big chests because they’re big guys. Again, from a bodybuilding perspective, I don’t think very many of the top strongmen have huge pecs. I rarely see a guy in one of those competitons and think he has a huge chest, while I am routinely impressed at the size on their arms and backs.
Frankly I’m sick of the ‘such and such a bodypart isnt important for functional strength’ debate. Every skeletal muscle group is ‘functional’ or you wouldn’t have it.
Sure, every bodypart is important, it’d be foolish to argue otherwise. But it is possible that various athletes don’t emphasize pec-specific movements such that they get significant hypertrophy in their chest. That isn’t to say they can’t bench a lot or that they have no muscle there at all. But clearly a bodybuilder is going to hit the chest a lot more than a boxer, or a strongman, or a number of other athletes. Bodybuilders want size and symmetry (I imagine that most of us want those two things as well). A boxer just doesn’t have time to spend on building big pecs–if bigger pecs helped, boxers would spend more time on the bench and less at the bag.
That different groups of people train different muscles in different ways doesn’t mean one ought to ignore a muscle group completely–it simply means that for certain athletic activities their might be diminishing returns past a certain amount of hypertrophy for certain muscle groups. [/quote]
Boxers have decent chest mass in proportion to the rest of their bodies. I remember before I started reading bodybuilding magazines thinking Lennox Lewis had a massive chest. They don’t have chests as big as bodybuilders because they aren’t bodybuilders. For bodybuilders, building muscle mass is SPP, for a boxer it’s gpp. And yes, of course they spend more time practicing their sport than on the bench - but you can be sure that a significant proportion of their weights training would be spent bench pressing.
I would still have to disagree with you about the strongman athletes. Sure, maybe a lot of them have proportionally bigger arms and backs (the same way a lot of bodybuilders have proportionally bigger arms and backs), but they still have massive chests.
A hook punch doesn’t use ‘just’ your chest, same way a bench press doesn’t use ‘just’ your chest, but it helps.
As for Wing CHun punches being ‘so 80’s’ - I don’t get it. Maybe they aren’t in vogue in fightsports at the moment but they can be damn useful in a streetfight. I don’t really gauge the usefulness of a fighting technique or a fighting style by its appearance or not in fightsports. I’m sure that some of the best streetfighters in the world have never even entered a competition.
I don’t disagree that bodybuilders might hit the pecs more than a lot of athletes; or that certain athletes will emphasise different bodyparts to a different extent depending on the requirements of their sport. But the original poster asked ‘what’s the strength application of having big powerful pecs’, and I was trying to provide an answer.