How Strong Is Strong Enough?
Establishing some fitness guidelines for Martial Arts and Life
There's a lot of marketing pushing for a total overhaul of your frame, and while I'm not fond of marketing, it's not unreasonable to set a lofty athletic goal for your health and performance (provided you don't slide into body dysmorphic disorder issues and complications). However, in the martial arts world, so many people are convinced that training athletically will harm their skill progress and ability to perform. I remember, when I was a teenager, emailing a fitness guy for advice on how to get reasonably stronger without becoming stiff and inflexible and “muscle bound” (I don’t believe I used that word, but it’s a common word in some of the older martial arts texts admonishing people of strength training). Where did I get that idea? Pretty much every martial arts teacher and coach. I had been lifting with my dad for a few years at that point, but we were always being careful to no go too hard. These were the bro-science lifting days. And either you were a bodybuilder or an athlete, and athletes were always told not to get too big or go too heavy (except for football players…) It turns out that was all misguided, but the old wives tale persists.
So, what if I still don’t want to train that hard?
What if you just want to avoid health complications? You might just want to hit a point of getting off the early mortality train. Well, We've got some special sauce for you too!
While I still think the standards are woefully low, and the breadth and depth of research is a bit wanting, there is an even more attainable standard for just "not dying".
We all know that BMI is predictive of just about nothing other than where you sit on a bell-curve, but the addition of a simple measure of your waist correlates to risk of Type II Diabetes and CVD. And that is, just be under 40 inches around as an adult male, or under 35 inches as an adult female. Those are really easy numbers to hit.
Layman's terms:
CDC report: https://www.cdc.gov/healthyweight/assessing/index.html
NHLBI Report (who the CDC References): https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/educational/lose_wt/risk.htm
More NHLBI: https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health-pro/guidelines/current/obesity-guidelines/e_textbook/txgd/4142.htm
Some research has been done to show Body Fat Percentage correlates even better for risk assessment, but measuring is problematic and expensive.
Body Fat Percentage Study 1: https://www.practiceupdate.com/content/relationship-of-body-fat-percentage-bmi-and-all-cause-mortality/37986
BF% Study 2: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4511447/
Trouble with BF% measurement: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK235961/
And then there are exercise guidelines to help you get there, again, woefully underdosed, but hey, not dead, right? Basically you need to exercise to the tune of roughly 8 Metabolic Equivalents regularly, which is like climbing a couple of flights of stairs and not having a heart attack.
Layman's Terms (at 13:41):
CDC Guidelines: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6217a2.htm
European research on exercise and morbidity: https://academic.oup.com/eurheartj/article/38/20/1534/3836083
So basically try to be a normal weight, and failing that, make sure your waist is below 40 inches or 35 inches (men and women respectively),
or body fat percentage below 22% or 35% (men and women respectively), and make sure you can climb a few flights of stairs without much trouble.
And before you go all 50 Shades of Christian Bale on me, being underweight is problematic too.
Or, you know, become Ronnie Coleman. Whatever floats your boat.
What about if you're strong enough for your own tastes, but you'd like to lose a little weight without losing much muscle? There's a simple, rough formula to figure out how fast you can lose weight without cutting too deep into your muscle stores. It's just your body fat percentage divided by 20. Whatever the result, that's what percent of your weight you can lose each week without carving off muscle. Greg Nuckols goes into the math of it in this video:
So if you're 20% body fat, that means you can lose 1% of your weight per week. As we've established previously, there's no need to go below 10% body fat unless you're a competitive bodybuilder, and upwards of 20% is within the boundaries of normal health (no increased risk of mortality based on weight and complications). If you're a woman with 35% fat, and would like to get down to 20% or so, and let's assume you're in the ballpark of 165 lbs, this means you can lose 1.75%, or 2.9 pounds per week, and preserve muscle mass. If you're a 250 pound male with 25% fat, you can lose 1.25% or 3.1 pounds per week. As you lose fat, your ratio will change, and you'll have to recalculate periodically. So in the case of our female trying to get down to 20%, if she loses an average of 2 pounds per week, and she's preserving muscle pretty well, she'll need to lose about 25 pounds to get to that 20%. if the 2#/wk stays consistent, she'll take 12-13 weeks to reach her goal. Of course, there are other factors that will throw this number off a bit, but we're going to ignore those for the moment. The next question is, "is 2# per week sustainable as we approach 20%?" Well, that makes the ratio 1%, or 1.4 pounds at the new weight of 140 pounds@20%. Going from a rough 2.9 to 1.4, or rounding down to 2-1, the progress will slow as time progresses. Which might push the weight loss into 15 or even 20 weeks. But this is OK. It's a lot better than burning out and feeling weak. Slow, sustainable progress is what keeps us on our goals. Extremes burn hot and extinguish fast. So take 5 seconds to do a little math, and make the progress you need to make it last.
I recently did a bit of a tl;dr video on the minimums with some easy numbers and not too much math:
^Rumble video link: Absolute Minimum Fitness Standards For Martial Arts (And Life!)
Now, lets get to the real recommendations.