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Weight Lifting & Martial Arts?
October 17, 2006
Should You Add Supplementary Weight Training to your
Martial Arts Training?
There are four things you should consider before you add
supplementary weight training into your workout schedule:
• Speed
• Flexibility
• Endurance
• Strength
Martial arts training will naturally help you improve in
all of these areas, but many people wonder if they need to
add supplementary weight training to increase these areas.
The answer is maybe.
The first determination of whether or not you should do
separate weight training is how it will affect your martial
arts training. If weight training will take the place of
your martial arts training, then I don’t recommend it
(especially for beginners). Advanced martial arts students
can make the determination depending on their personal
goals.
When you’re making the decision, consider this:
• You can add weights if you have your martial arts
training regime down cold – you don’t want your martial
arts training to suffer so that you can weight train on the
side.
• If you do choose to weight train, educate yourself or get
a trainer so that you get the most out of your training.
• Make a plan before you begin anything.
To make a plan, you need to figure out where you want to
improve. You need a balanced body to be a good martial
artist, so if you do decide to add supplemental training,
it should be to improve this balance. Is there a part of
your body that is not up to par with the rest of your body?
Do you have plenty of endurance but lack speed?
Here’s an example of what I mean. I had a student that had
perfect form. She was worried that her technique wouldn’t
work in a real situation. She practiced slow and accurate
movements, so the answer for her was to start training for
power or speed to make her movements more real-world
applicable.
In the “old days” martial artists were not purists if they
did strength training along with it. The thing is, even in
the Shaolin temples, the Kung Fu practitioners had
exercises like moving granite balls and doing hundreds of
movements with iron rings on their arms – it sounds like a
form of weight training to me.
If anyone tells you that weight training will harm your
martial arts training, they are only right if you stop or
reduce your martial arts training to weight train. If you
break your training down into sections and focus on the
parts of your body or goals that you need to balance your
body, then you can train accordingly without affecting your
martial arts training. If you’re still not sure whether or
not you’re weight training affectively, just make sure you
do an hour and a half of martial arts training for every
hour of weight training you do.
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