7 Reasons Athletes Need Bodybuilding
BODYBUILDING GETS A BAD NAME, THE STEROIDS, THE WAXING, THE FAKE TANS AND THE NARCISSISM. I’M NOT HERE TO DEFEND ANY OF THAT.
What I am here to do is to optimise human experience. If that means bodybuilding then it’s time to break out the stringlets, maybe.
Regardless of your performance goals you can learn bodybuilding. Ignoring it might be the reason you still look like you don’t train and can’t do half of what you want to do in the gym, movement or in sport.
I recently spent a weekend with Bayesian Bodybuilding founder Menno Henselmans who doesn’t just look the part. He’s strong as f%^k. He takes from Powerlifting and has a novel approach to mass gain that is worth checking out. This post is inspired in part by the weekend and also by the 5kg of muscle mass I’ve gained this year.
7 REASON’S YOU NEED BODYBUILDING FOR PERFORMANCE.
1. YOU’RE TOO FAT TO PERFORM.
Endurance, acceleration, agility, top speed. They’re all going to be lower if you’re carrying excess fat. 100m runners are just about as lean as bodybuilders without exception. There are no tubby guys that are among the best despite their belly or man boobs.
When you get lean all of a sudden your gymnastics movements will be through the roof, even without gains in strength. You will be able to jump higher and run faster.
Gymnast Hypertrophy
2. YOU CAN’T FLEX BONE
I remember this from Joe DeFranco about 10 years ago. It hit me straight between the eyes. I’ve wanted to be strong as long as I can remember. I started to work on it when I was 12 and haven’t stopped. When I finished high-school at 17 I was 65kg. And weak. You can’t flex bone. Strength increases proportionally to muscle and in drug free body builders and old-time strongmen strength was always the foundation for muscle.
I interned with Ido Portal in 2013 straight after the Grand Final win with Roosters. He is probably the most influential man in performance at the moment. What does he look like? Not like 99% of the people that he inspires. He’s very muscular. I’ve heard him say his bodyweight now is around 65kg where when he was into Charles Poliquin’s work he was 80-85kg. He’s lost a lot of mass but he still holds muscle and low fat. Ido performs at a very high level in strength and power feats. At events he speaks about being a months training away from a 140kg + bench press. I believe it.
On the flip side those wanting to emulate him are not often thinking about emulating his proportions. I tested one of the other guys at the top of the adult gymnastics scene on bench press. It was just over bodyweight. A poor result for any gym goer. This guy was able to perform some advanced gymnastics feats but not close to the level of Ido. He also looked nothing like Ido.
Charlie Francis said, “looks right, flies right.” If you don’t look anything like Ido and his top students the odds are that you’re not going to perform anything like them. Looking the part is also not going to get you 1-arm pull-ups and free standing handstands push-ups. You’re going to need both.
3. TOLERANCE TO VOLUME MATTERS
Mass induced strength increases training volume.
10×3 at 100kg is 3000kg
10×3 at 200kg is 6000kg.
The strong guy is always training more volume which means the stimulus is a lot greater for the strong athlete. Tolerance to volume means room for gains, tapering and overall resilience when things get tough.
The best train more. Bodybuilding contributes to volume and the tolerance to more volume of high force training.
4. BODYBUILDING WORKS FOR REHABILITATION AND INJURY PREVENTION (RESEARCH LINKS).
I love training strength in all forms. So much so that tendon irritation has been a near constant since my mid-teens. What works best in managing these issues is using body building principles. Some slow tempo work, lots of volume, hitting the muscle from different angles. If rest doesn’t work within 2-3 days I’ve always found bodybuilding to be the best approach. Sometimes you have to start very light and slow to avoid irritating the injury excessively. Getting higher and higher quality work done with the same or ideally less pain / swelling is success in a rehab setting. Eventually you will be performing to a high standard again.
I have inside information that many of the Chinese Women’s Weightlifters do an extra hour of hypertrophy volume on the basics after their 2 hour lifting sessions. Why? I suspect for mass, fat loss and injury prevention.
5. FORCE = MASS X ACCELERATION.
If you can give your athlete mass and acceleration then you’re going to have the guys that produce the most force. Sounds simple but most programs aren’t really nailing this. The under-weight athlete can have great relative strength but at some stage they’re in trouble if they can’t produce the total force required to with the contest. In 2010 I calculated the average weight of the squads of all the NRL teams as well as the representative players. What I saw was they average weight was 95-98kg. Extremely interesting was the fact that the correlation of weight to performance on the ladder at the time was amazingly high. To nail home the point representative players were on average a few kg heavier than average for their positions.
Even if you’re shredded and strong relative to bodyweight you’re still going to be praying to your god if Sonny Bill Williams or Jared Waerea-Hargreaves is steaming at you. The acceleration and momentum these guys create is scary when you’re right next to them in full flight.
Bottom line here is that the big boys win in Rugby League. Average weight of an NRL player is around 100kg. If you’re working with a junior athlete that wants to go to the next level you can do all the “functional training” you like but if they’re 5-10kg underweight for their position their chances of success are infinitely less. This is part of the reason for the massive representation of Pacific Island origin athletes in the NRL. They have big bones and much more genetic potential to use them.
6. STEROID SUCCESS LEAVES CLUES
There are a few guys that have supplemented their hormones (medically or steroids) in Rugby League. I’m not going to talk about ethics or medical need for hormones or anything along those lines. Bottom line is that with MORE MUSCLE MASS and recovery capacity these guys DOMINATED the league. You can make the decision for yourself whether this is ethical, healthful or other. The point is that more muscle mass and less fat mass creates a competitive advantage. We can go through the history of weightlifting and athletics and see this over and over. Optimising mass and weight as well as recovery is part of the winning process, regardless of the means.
I don’t encourage steroids but working to get part of what they get through bodybuilding works.
7. MINDSET
In general when you’re big and lean you’re going to take more confidence into a battle of force than if you’re skinny fat. Full shirt sleeves and thick legs are what an athlete wants to feel going into battle. Now there are always the more skill focused smaller athletes but they go into the battle knowing that competing for force and collision is not their best option.
Confidence matters. If you believe that you have a physical advantage, you do.
As a performance coach educator my goal is for you to maximally impact the world. If you can get the body composition of your athletes right then you’re one step closer to success.
Charles Poliquin had huge success as a strength coach through hypertrophying his athletes when others thought mass was irrelevant. Turning mass to performance happens through practicing your sport at high intensity and in the gym. If the athlete doesn’t fit the morphology required to succeed then that should be the primary objective before focussing on neural gains.
CONCLUSION
To be the best you’re going to have to look something like the best. Learn from bodybuilding to make that happen and live the life you want. If you love performance or bodyweight training but don’t look anything like your role-models then make some changes. Get the body, performance and life you want!
Check Out Upper Body Resurrection To Grow Your Upper Body