The power clean is one of the best exercises for the combat athlete. Power cleans can be performed with a barbell, with two heavy dumbbells, with a single heavy dumbbell, with a heavy sandbag, with a heavy barrel, or with a heavy log or anvil. Anything heavy and challenging works just fine, so don’t limit yourself to barbell cleans.
Squats are a critical exercise for any strength and power trainer – and that includes any combat athlete. The strongest and most explosive athletes in the world are Olympic weightlifters. If you want to become just as strong and explosive, follow their example in training. These men train almost exclusively on squats, front squats, heavy pulling movements, and heavy overhead lifting. No isolation and specialization movements whatsoever. With such compound and big power movements, you are able to train your body as a unit.
Bench presses are overemphasized in most training programs. Sure, they are a good exercise and a great way to build mass and strength in the upper body, but for combat athletes and martial artists, the standing press performed with barbells is a much better exercise because it’s movement is more natural and more specific for live combat.
Most training programs emphasize the showy muscles of the upper body – arms, pecs, and abs. A combat athlete needs to develop the POWER muscles: legs, hips, lower back, traps, sides, neck, and forearms. The rest of the body will grow bigger and stronger with very little in the way of direct exercise as long as you train the power groups.
On the street, on the mat, or in the ring, strength, power, speed, and condition are what counts. “Cuts” and training for it don’t mean anything and doesn’t make sense to a combat athlete. If you are training for combat and martial arts, forget about “bodybuilding.” Combat athletes need to train in an entirely different manner than posers, pumpers, shapers, toners, and body sculptors.
A good coach learns how to play mental games and change the goal by doing more or fewer reps, changing sequence, exercises, or by just lying to them when telling them the poundage on the bar. Coach, training partner, personal trainer, whoever you are, there is always something you can do to keep a mental edge.
More and more writers and so-called “experts” began to extol the virtues of various training systems that allowed the trainee to use light poundages in his exercises. These are the worst weight training programs ever written, because you neither gain muscle nor strength from it! One such system was the high rep, high set pumping system with limited rest periods between sets. Another was the idea of time-controlled reps, or super slow reps, so you can “feel the burn” and “go for the pump.” To become strong and muscular, you cannot circumvent the fact that you need to train hard and heavy. There’s just no workaround for it, and no amount of slow training or pumping can ever compensate for the tendon strength and overall body power gained from intense and heavy lifting.
The “scientists” and “researchers” who condemned as dangerous virtually all of the basic, result producing exercises also bear full responsibility for the current state of strength and weight training. These researchers claim that squats are bad for the knees and the back, when they themselves haven’t been under the bar. Because they condemn every big movement that uses heavy poundages and label them as dangerous, they have created a world of scrawny and wimpy novices who can’t even lift bodyweight in power movements.
The manufacturers of the fancy, high-tech food supplements played a huge part in convincing gullible lifters that hard work and heavy weights were no longer important. It’s awfully hard to sell a food supplement by telling people that it only works if it is coupled with heavy, hard, back breaking sessions of squats, benches, presses, and deadlifts with lots and lots of iron, so what manufacturers did is to convince its customers that they can get better results with supplements at half the effort.
Supplements are popular because people tend to be lazy, and you can sell almost anything that allows the typical person to avoid hard work and serious effort. It’s much easier to sell fairy tale that the food supplement works no matter how you train or what you load onto the bar.
I have been a competitive powerlifter since college, and my best lifts in a competition include a 235kg squat, 165kg bench, and a 235kg deadlift at the 100kg weight class. Because I\'ve been lifting weights for at least 10 years now, I have a lot of practical experience in training programs, fitness, supplements, and diet and nutrition.
