Why Isn't Bigger and Stronger Better?

by Scott Sonnon

We’re told to believe that being bigger and stronger is somehow superior. However, in combat sports such as mixed martial arts competitions, smaller and weaker but more athletic fighters specifically conditioned for their sport win the day most frequently. Is this a contradiction, an anomaly, a mistake? To understand what leads people to believe that size and (limit) strength will aid them to victory, let’s explore the underlying myths.

The Myth of Isolation

Both bodybuilding and powerlifting believe that loading specific muscles will make those respective muscles stronger and larger. The belief is accurate in the sense that the local areas do increase in size and strength. It’s inaccurate to believe that it doesn’t impact the entire body. When it comes to the human body, if you impact one place you impact the whole.

Bodybuilding and powerlifting have given the public the impression that the body is like a house, with a strong foundation, sturdy walls and a roof. When a tree falls on your house that corner may crumble but the rest remains unaffected. The body isn’t like this, as we all know intuitively.

The body is a web of intricately woven connective tissue: a sea of continuous tension pulling in with compressive struts (bones) pushing out equally in a harmonious balance that traditional martial arts have referred to as Yin-Yang, and what modern science calls Biotensegrity (reference Buckminster Fuller and Dr. Steven Levin).

A more accurate picture for the human body is of a tree falling on a string of telephone wires. If the wire snaps in half where it’s hit the telephone poles rip free on both sides of the break, creating hanging slack in both directions. If the wire doesn’t snap at the point of impact everything else along the chain becomes super taught, so that anything hitting the high tension along the chain would snap it immediately. How like our bodies this is when we consider the way in which an injury in one part of our body compensates throughout our entire body!

Nothing happens in isolation, because everything is connected! So what happens to our body when we practice a strength system based upon the myth of isolation?

The Dangers of Bodybuilding and Powerlifting

Bodybuilding and powerlifting injure your joints and connective tissue, but for opposite causes: the former due to excessive repetitions and the latter due to excessive tension. The local wear and tear of high volume and intensity causes the connective tissue over joints to become strained, shortened and compressed. Though the muscle tissue is larger and stronger in bodybuilders and powerlifters, weak joints are a catastrophic injury waiting to happen – exactly like the tree fallen over the telephone wire. Eventually anything adding load anywhere along the line will cause a rip!

Bodybuilding and powerlifting are to martial art specific fitness what competing in demolition derbies is to learning how to drive: you do get to steer the car, but ultimately the goal is to get wrecked.

How did the Isolation Myth Come About?

Bodybuilding and powerlifting are based upon a belief system created centuries ago when we first began to forge the discipline of anatomy. Anatomy came from our tools of the time – the knife and the scalpel. When we would butcher an animal after hunting or dissect a cadaver in early medicine, we would ‘cut out the parts.’ However, as we remove the parts we cut the fascia, our connective tissue: the very thing that holds us together, that makes us anti-gravitational and that animates us. By the time the dissection is completed we are left with a pile of parts.

Conventional strength training believes that if you increase the size and strength of each of these parts, somehow magically the whole will become better. Over the years hundred thousand dollar bodybuilding machines evolved to shackle us in place, forcing the load to be localized as much as possible. These machines substituted efficiency for us and they began the neural adaptation of dumbing down our coordination.

Likewise, in order to lift the heaviest possible weight, powerlifting created three ultra-short range gross motor lifts. Like bodybuilding, these so-called power-lifts cause us to move less and less until, through injury and adaptation, one’s mobility becomes non-existent. The belief that isolating these parts would make us bigger and stronger, and would cause us to become more fit and to perform better, is a direct result of this compartmentalized view of anatomy.

But as we all know, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Bodybuilding and powerlifting, moving in isolated planes, fail to address how we move in the real world: three dimensionally. They ignore the rotary, angular/diagonal, as well as the most important synergistic nature of human performance.

We are actually what modern scientists describe as a “double bag” system. The inner bag contains hard tissue: bones and cartilage. Where it is cling-wrapped around the bones it is called periosteum, and where it wraps the ends of bones together it’s called joint capsule. The outer bag contains an electric jelly that we call muscle. Where it wraps the muscle we call it fascia, and where it tacks down to the inner bag we call it a muscle attachment or insertion point.

Forcing the isolation belief onto the reality of our double bag system is like firing a cannon from a canoe: the detonation may happen, but with adverse catastrophic results.

So how can we train to improve the health and fitness of the entire double bag system?

The Shocking Truth of the Isolation Myth

Some schools of traditional martial art subscribe to the notion of “tendon strength,” referring to the ability to hit hard but without being muscle-bound. One can strengthen the connective tissue through short, ballistic shock. Traditional examples of this are Chinese iron body and Russian shock absorption training. Modern science also includes contemporary athletic exercises called plyometrics, which were originally named “shock training.”

Any type of training which isn’t conducted incrementally and with a qualified coach is dangerous, especially shock training. Shock training is akin to jerking a weight that you cannot grind out, such as: an Olympic clean and jerk versus the powerlifting deadlift or squat; a clapping pushup versus a standard one; or a kipping pull-up versus a ‘strict’ pull-up.

The shock absorbs throughout the entire web of connective tissue, increasing bone density, lubricating the joint capsule with nutrition and making the fascia more elastic. It’s akin to the way in which a smaller rubber band can be shot farther than a larger but cracked and brittle one.

The intramuscular coordination developed as a result of shock training cannot be understated. Real-world strength, as we see in any combative outlet such as MMA, is based not upon size and limit strength but upon timing, rhythm and accuracy, which shock training supplies dutifully.

Strength and Flexibility: Two Doorways to Danger

Do you pick doorway #1 or doorway #2? Do you want to be strong or do you want to be flexible? You cannot be very strong and very flexible at the same time, because they are polar opposites. Strength, or muscular tension, is the ability to contract and shorten tissue – flexibility, contrarily, is the ability to release and lengthen tissue.

Moreover, bodybuilding and powerlifting by definition create the “muscle-bound” effect of being unable to relax and lengthen. To generate power one must move from relaxation to tension. If one begins with tension, no power results. Additionally, when the tissue is suddenly and forcibly moved, as in suddenly changing directions, the very fragile connective tissue (due to the shortened, high tension environment) snaps.

Stretching involves the deforming elongation of the tissues, much like overstretching a rubber band, tacking it down, and letting the elasticity leak until it loses its ability to snap back to its former shape. This is highly dangerous for the body, and is why dancers, contortionists and those who static stretch suffer sudden tendon and ligament tears. There’s just no resiliency remaining in the tissue.

Bodybuilders and powerlifters have very little usable range of motion. Contortionists and many dancers have little usable strength. You can, however, avoid both of these deviant extremes through learning “Selective Tension” – appropriate, proportional intramuscular timing of the contraction and relaxation firing sequence of a “tension chain” – a series of muscular actions along the length of the body.

Dynamic range of motion (DROM) drills, either local (such as Intu-Flow™) or global (such as Prasara Body-Flow™) take one through the degrees of freedom that each joint may naturally move into. DROM also aids in the greater elasticity of the tissues while lubricating the joints and washing them with nutrition to heal damage and foster growth - which they cannot receive through conventional weight training.

DROM further compensates for each specific adaptation in a harmonious yin-yang balancing act. For instance, too much forward bending eventually leads to over-specialization problems as the body adapts to that forward bending. Therefore, backward bending balances the progress symmetrically. This gross example illustrates how Selective Tension teaches us to keep in tune with how we are specifically adapting to our conditioning.

Learning the skill of Selective Tension allows one to be appropriately strong and flexible in all skills. This is the truth of how one’s conditioning can ‘carry-over’ into one’s performance. Let’s dispel the myth of carry-over, first of all.

The Myth of Carry-Over

What is the gap between conventional weight training and performance? Why is it that bodybuilding and powerlifting have little to no positive carry-over to performance?

Could anyone possible improve the performance of a golf swing by making the individual muscles stronger and larger? What if you performed lateral deltoid raises, crunches and bench presses? Shouldn’t that make you stronger and bigger and therefore better at your golf swing?

No, the swing is synergistically greater than the sum of its individual actions: a firing sequence which slings tension from one to the next in a sequential summation of movement. Isolating the parts and making them “bigger and stronger” will not improve your performance any more than adding a huge suspension lift kit, monster truck tires and a tractor pull sized engine will help you drive across town through traffic. Sure, you could drive over everyone else in fantasy-land, but in the reality of performance there are always specific parameters, skills and rules. Even the most chaotic environment in existence, the battlefield, has rules of engagement.

Just like the golf swing, your striking, kicking, throws, locks, and hold-downs each comprise a specific firing sequence that ‘slings’ (stores and releases) elastic energy in a domino effect across your body and throughout your entire structure.

Shock training can elicit an adaptation in the body that strengthens the connective tissue system-wide. It can develop the entire fascial web so that it acts like the elastic net that catches a falling trapeze artist and throws him higher into the air depending upon how it is elastically strengthened – in other words, it can develop “Selective Tension.”

To be continued in the next issue of RMAX Magazine…

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