Powerlifting can be potentially important in grappling, because it develops absolute strength. Absolute strength directly correlates to your ability to perform technique, because it helps to enable good "relative strength," but it does this along with a dependency on body composition.
Good relative strength (your strength/weight ratio) is a prerequisite for good athleticism, especially in grappling sports. IOW, if you're a fat guy with weak legs, good luck with standing guard passes. Likewise, if your abs/glutes are made more of beer than muscle, good luck chasing with an open guard, or getting out of side control, or squatting for mount armbars. A lean guy with a good diet and less fat is going to need less absolute strength to obtain good relative strength, a fat guy is going to need more. You can improve the S/W ratio either by getting stronger or by getting leaner, or both. A lean guy (unless super weak) is going to have good relative strength, and a "fatstrong" guy might too...but the former will have better cardio because his body is simply going to be better at exercise metabolite clearance.
Beyond the point where the body is strong enough [strong relative to body comp, thus "relative" strength] to support the ability to execute techniques correctly, then extra amounts of absolute strength are just a bonus [that can be converted through RFD training to power, and thus greater explosive speed/RFD] but that is not really necessary for the average player for three reasons: 1) because technique tends to be the main differentiation between two "equally fit" (relative strength capable) people of equal weight; 2.) because powerlifting at a high enough frequency in-season (above a maintenance level) tends to interfere with the ability to train BJJ with the necessary frequency and intensity to maintain mat cardio, and 3) because PL gains tend to hit a point of diminishing returns at or above the level of advanced totals*, so you end up doing a lot more work for less recovery and time value.
There is such a thing as "strong enough" when the point of barbells/dumbells/kettles is to support a sport, rather than to be the sport itself. However, that "strong enough" point is higher than a lot of people think, AND, for grappling, it totally depends on your body comp (diet.)
Do you want to know the simple truth? Unless you intend to be a serious BJJ competitor, in a lot of cases because of the way that powerlifting intensity and rolling intensity tend to interfere with each other, you're probably a lot better off chasing relative strength by way of dietary restriction than by trying to get super strong while also rolling a lot. You CAN hit great advanced totals while rolling 3x+/week, but you have to either have great recovery to be able to do it quickly, or else you have to be willing to wait 1-3 years to get there slowly with something like 5/3/1. Not many people can do the Texas method or Madcow and 3x/week BJJ at the same time.
Honestly, wrestlers have known this for a long time. That's why they diet so carefully in-season, because they know they can't just hulk out in the weight room while also having to practice an intense sport. It's also why they hit the weight room twice as hard off season--because that's their chance to make good progress toward "strong enough." Because players with advanced level strength AND advanced level technique usually defeat players with average level strength and advanced level technique.
So you have a few basic choices that can affect your rate of athletic improvement--get strong slowly with a slow progress plan like 5/3/1, get strong faster by creating for yourself a virtual "off-season," and run some kind of self-abusing Smolov or Sheiko shit, or enhance either one with an improved diet and body composition. Frankly, the middle road is probably the smartest.
*Cliffs: Get to 2x/2.2x/1.5x BW PRs in squat/DL/bench (optionally 1.75x/2.0x/1.0x is probably fine) and then from there, just maintain your strength and and build power (5/3/1 is fine, but barbell/kettle power complexes are better) and then focus on BJJ.
Wednesday, May 18, 2016
Wednesday, May 11, 2016
Corrective exercise is what most of us need the most--and the brain needs the most correction of all.
You can probably safely ignore this post if you're a yoga teacher for a living. Or if you're a 15 year old kid who tends to walk 20k steps per day, just as a result of your active school/sport/fun lifestyle. But if you spend 8 hours a day sitting at a desk, unless your posture is perfect and you get up and walk around every 15 minutes (how do people concentrate on deep thinking tasks if they do that?) then chances are you need corrective exercise MORE than any of your favorites.
So many men out there think their arms need to be bigger, their abs need to be flatter, or their chest needs to be puffier. Women tend to think they should cycle through the entire lexicon of available glute exercises until they get a perfect buttock, or they will spend endless amounts of time on an elliptical or treadmill trying to make sure they stay thin.
Both suffer from gender bias. Women's tendencies are actually healthier than men's, but you'd be hard pressed to tell me that obsessing over your ass is inherently LESS vain than obsessing over your biceps, just because it happens to incidentally hit the mark by aiding hip health.
People want to be liked. And accepted, and loved, and fucked, and chosen. They want to stay relevant to their lovers, they want to have the confidence to find new ones. They tend to associate certain self-image stuff with that confidence. For men, it's having a commanding presence. That is almost uniformly associated with a muscular upper body.
On a primal level, our ancestors who were either more naturally endowed up top, or whose rough lifestyles incidentally caused hypertrophy probably WERE better able to defeat other men in a fight. All things being equal (and that includes a complete lack of skill, and the absence of leg training) a guy with a big upper body probably still WILL win an unskilled 1 on 1 fight.
The problem is, that's not the world we live in. That type of self-image, rooted in primal dominance, is only really true in the absence of: 1) grapplers, 2) boxers, MMA fighters, or just about anyone else with skill, 3) guns, gunfire, weapons, etc, 4) friends of your enemy to kick your face, 5) significant differences in leg strength.
It's an outdated vibe. I'm a gen Xer so my generation came right after the Arnold generation, and we probably got the worst of the bodybuilding aesthetic. Everything was mass, size, arms, etc. Bicep day, tricep day, forearm day. I mean some people probably even had a separate forearm day.
The millennials are a little smarter than we are, but not without the benefit of our mistakes and knowledge. People bag on Crossfit but a lot of the fundamental principles are sound for sport science and health--even if individual boxes sometimes do take it to dangerous or frivolous extremes (which comes more down to individual personalities than a problem with the idea itself.)
Now we are in a third, new era. Post-Arnold, post-Yates, post-Coleman, even post-kipup, post-"squat every day", post-"all types of lifting machismo". Stuff like Gray Cook's FMS and the idea of true functional fitness, the value of balanced physical attributes based on personal assessment, is starting to really take firm root.
This is frankly not as important if you are 20 because your body hasn't even been alive long enough to accumulate significant amounts of wear and tear and large muscle imbalances. Where this matters most is for aging athletes.
The saying "Fast is slow, slow is smooth" is popular in the BJJ community. This could not be more true when it comes to attribute self-assessment. Fitness is a concept based on purpose--fitness to a task. Health is a concept based on feeling and well-being. They largely intersect at this balance point. Baseline fitness IS health, and baseline health is fitness--for life.
A strength athlete that can't run 100m is not fit for life. He is not healthy. He is also ultimately not even fit for his sport, because that cardio matters DURING lifts. Likewise, a grappler who sits on his butt for 8-14 hours a day is only suffering from a lack of strength IF strength is the leading attribute that is putting him at risk for either being unfit, or unhealthy. So if you are so pelvic tilted that you look like a centaur, there is no benefit in being able to bench press 405. If you can't touch your toes, you may still be able to wrestle, but if you play guard long enough, you'll get hurt.
A woman who stretches and runs 40 miles a week on a treadmill is not fit for life if she can't hoist a 30lb bag of dog food for her German Shepard and walk it to her car. Given the fucked up world we live in, I am also of the mind that most women are fundamentally unfit for life (police dependent) if they don't either carry a gun, or learn some basic grappling, because a man's upper body is about 50% stronger than a female's, and 1 in 3 women gets raped at some point in her lifetime, so learning to deploy your legs to protect yourself is as essential as other health attributes. As a big guy who lifts weights and fights, I just can't imagine how so many women walk around every day in this bubble of security, while probably 10% of men eyeing them on the street contemplate hurting them. And many don't--some women just walk around, living in fear, almost all the time. And they don't have to. Enough of that tangent.
So in terms of correctives, the most important thing is constant assessment. Where am I? What weakness is my lifestyle and genetics imposing on me, how do I fix it? How can I combine it with the stuff I like? What other attributes need to be emphasized, based on where I would like to compete with others?
In addition to assessment, the second most important thing in the whole world is compliance. How much time do people really spend creating a personal ideology that permanently commits them to the routine practice of exercise? Is it discipline? Belief systems? What can you do to make your exercise programs not only balanced and assessment-based, but also so firmly ingrained in your mind and your values such that doing them is virtually the same as brushing your teeth, or taking a shower--a form of hygiene. An ante, a non-negotiable price of admission for being alive.
These two problems--biased self-assessment, and a lack of long term compliance, are the top two reasons that people never reach their fitness and health goals. So doesn't it make sense that a LOT of energy should be devoted to making sure you end up having a bias toward working on THEM?
Sometimes, smart people hire athletic trainers to help them eliminate their personal bias. This is great. Sometimes people even do it themselves, after enough trial and error (or after an injury.) But when it comes to compliance, you can't rely on a trainer to yell at you long term (unless you're wealthy) and likewise, relying on group exercise is ok, but it's still an external motivator, and as soon as you lose interest in the group, you will probably lose interest in the exercise.
These concepts are not just native to exercise. They are true in life. Success is created by focused hard work. The hard work part is actually easier--nearly anyone can "slave away" at "hard" things they enjoy, in order to feel a sense of movement and accomplishment in life, but that's an illusion. The "focused" part is the actually "difficult" part, because blindly putting a lot of effort into something is neither "focus," nor "difficulty." Anyone can waste energy. We all generally have plenty of it. Willpower, however, is the limited resource. Values generate willpower, but only introspection generates REAL values. Introspection is, therefore, the true "hard" work.
Selectively working "hard" in directions that are mentally easy for you and your ego is tackling intensity, not tackling difficulty. Things that are actually difficult are most often mentally hard to endure in SUBTLE ways that challenge the self-image, not just in a "pain tolerance" manner. The key to balanced success is to develop a personal discipline and dogma that allows you to consistently subject yourself to necessary kinds of pain that you DON'T like, not just the kinds you do. Nobody is fooled when you "sacrifice" for intense "difficulties" which happen to serve your ego and self-image. A lifter who loves to lift intensely is not doing "hard" work by lifting "hard." "Hard" work is the inner work.
Think hard about what you REALLY want out of exercise, obliterate the trite, petty gender normative ego devices and defense mechanisms, dig deep and get a strong "why" for your choices, make it part of your soul, routinely re-examine the biases and skew that creep in, and consistently EXECUTE based on a personal version of self-discipline that doesn't just exist for its own robotic sake, but that is borne of a very strong and EMOTIONAL belief that what you are doing is a very important and permanent part of who you are and who you NEED to be, forever. "God put me here to do this," is not the worst idea an athlete ever had, but even a secular athlete can find equally strong reasons to become who they want to become and to stay who they wanted to be.
So many men out there think their arms need to be bigger, their abs need to be flatter, or their chest needs to be puffier. Women tend to think they should cycle through the entire lexicon of available glute exercises until they get a perfect buttock, or they will spend endless amounts of time on an elliptical or treadmill trying to make sure they stay thin.
Both suffer from gender bias. Women's tendencies are actually healthier than men's, but you'd be hard pressed to tell me that obsessing over your ass is inherently LESS vain than obsessing over your biceps, just because it happens to incidentally hit the mark by aiding hip health.
People want to be liked. And accepted, and loved, and fucked, and chosen. They want to stay relevant to their lovers, they want to have the confidence to find new ones. They tend to associate certain self-image stuff with that confidence. For men, it's having a commanding presence. That is almost uniformly associated with a muscular upper body.
On a primal level, our ancestors who were either more naturally endowed up top, or whose rough lifestyles incidentally caused hypertrophy probably WERE better able to defeat other men in a fight. All things being equal (and that includes a complete lack of skill, and the absence of leg training) a guy with a big upper body probably still WILL win an unskilled 1 on 1 fight.
The problem is, that's not the world we live in. That type of self-image, rooted in primal dominance, is only really true in the absence of: 1) grapplers, 2) boxers, MMA fighters, or just about anyone else with skill, 3) guns, gunfire, weapons, etc, 4) friends of your enemy to kick your face, 5) significant differences in leg strength.
It's an outdated vibe. I'm a gen Xer so my generation came right after the Arnold generation, and we probably got the worst of the bodybuilding aesthetic. Everything was mass, size, arms, etc. Bicep day, tricep day, forearm day. I mean some people probably even had a separate forearm day.
The millennials are a little smarter than we are, but not without the benefit of our mistakes and knowledge. People bag on Crossfit but a lot of the fundamental principles are sound for sport science and health--even if individual boxes sometimes do take it to dangerous or frivolous extremes (which comes more down to individual personalities than a problem with the idea itself.)
Now we are in a third, new era. Post-Arnold, post-Yates, post-Coleman, even post-kipup, post-"squat every day", post-"all types of lifting machismo". Stuff like Gray Cook's FMS and the idea of true functional fitness, the value of balanced physical attributes based on personal assessment, is starting to really take firm root.
This is frankly not as important if you are 20 because your body hasn't even been alive long enough to accumulate significant amounts of wear and tear and large muscle imbalances. Where this matters most is for aging athletes.
The saying "Fast is slow, slow is smooth" is popular in the BJJ community. This could not be more true when it comes to attribute self-assessment. Fitness is a concept based on purpose--fitness to a task. Health is a concept based on feeling and well-being. They largely intersect at this balance point. Baseline fitness IS health, and baseline health is fitness--for life.
A strength athlete that can't run 100m is not fit for life. He is not healthy. He is also ultimately not even fit for his sport, because that cardio matters DURING lifts. Likewise, a grappler who sits on his butt for 8-14 hours a day is only suffering from a lack of strength IF strength is the leading attribute that is putting him at risk for either being unfit, or unhealthy. So if you are so pelvic tilted that you look like a centaur, there is no benefit in being able to bench press 405. If you can't touch your toes, you may still be able to wrestle, but if you play guard long enough, you'll get hurt.
A woman who stretches and runs 40 miles a week on a treadmill is not fit for life if she can't hoist a 30lb bag of dog food for her German Shepard and walk it to her car. Given the fucked up world we live in, I am also of the mind that most women are fundamentally unfit for life (police dependent) if they don't either carry a gun, or learn some basic grappling, because a man's upper body is about 50% stronger than a female's, and 1 in 3 women gets raped at some point in her lifetime, so learning to deploy your legs to protect yourself is as essential as other health attributes. As a big guy who lifts weights and fights, I just can't imagine how so many women walk around every day in this bubble of security, while probably 10% of men eyeing them on the street contemplate hurting them. And many don't--some women just walk around, living in fear, almost all the time. And they don't have to. Enough of that tangent.
So in terms of correctives, the most important thing is constant assessment. Where am I? What weakness is my lifestyle and genetics imposing on me, how do I fix it? How can I combine it with the stuff I like? What other attributes need to be emphasized, based on where I would like to compete with others?
In addition to assessment, the second most important thing in the whole world is compliance. How much time do people really spend creating a personal ideology that permanently commits them to the routine practice of exercise? Is it discipline? Belief systems? What can you do to make your exercise programs not only balanced and assessment-based, but also so firmly ingrained in your mind and your values such that doing them is virtually the same as brushing your teeth, or taking a shower--a form of hygiene. An ante, a non-negotiable price of admission for being alive.
These two problems--biased self-assessment, and a lack of long term compliance, are the top two reasons that people never reach their fitness and health goals. So doesn't it make sense that a LOT of energy should be devoted to making sure you end up having a bias toward working on THEM?
Sometimes, smart people hire athletic trainers to help them eliminate their personal bias. This is great. Sometimes people even do it themselves, after enough trial and error (or after an injury.) But when it comes to compliance, you can't rely on a trainer to yell at you long term (unless you're wealthy) and likewise, relying on group exercise is ok, but it's still an external motivator, and as soon as you lose interest in the group, you will probably lose interest in the exercise.
These concepts are not just native to exercise. They are true in life. Success is created by focused hard work. The hard work part is actually easier--nearly anyone can "slave away" at "hard" things they enjoy, in order to feel a sense of movement and accomplishment in life, but that's an illusion. The "focused" part is the actually "difficult" part, because blindly putting a lot of effort into something is neither "focus," nor "difficulty." Anyone can waste energy. We all generally have plenty of it. Willpower, however, is the limited resource. Values generate willpower, but only introspection generates REAL values. Introspection is, therefore, the true "hard" work.
Selectively working "hard" in directions that are mentally easy for you and your ego is tackling intensity, not tackling difficulty. Things that are actually difficult are most often mentally hard to endure in SUBTLE ways that challenge the self-image, not just in a "pain tolerance" manner. The key to balanced success is to develop a personal discipline and dogma that allows you to consistently subject yourself to necessary kinds of pain that you DON'T like, not just the kinds you do. Nobody is fooled when you "sacrifice" for intense "difficulties" which happen to serve your ego and self-image. A lifter who loves to lift intensely is not doing "hard" work by lifting "hard." "Hard" work is the inner work.
Think hard about what you REALLY want out of exercise, obliterate the trite, petty gender normative ego devices and defense mechanisms, dig deep and get a strong "why" for your choices, make it part of your soul, routinely re-examine the biases and skew that creep in, and consistently EXECUTE based on a personal version of self-discipline that doesn't just exist for its own robotic sake, but that is borne of a very strong and EMOTIONAL belief that what you are doing is a very important and permanent part of who you are and who you NEED to be, forever. "God put me here to do this," is not the worst idea an athlete ever had, but even a secular athlete can find equally strong reasons to become who they want to become and to stay who they wanted to be.
Tuesday, May 10, 2016
Two pairs of eyes vs. "one size for all": The case for personal trainers.
"One size fits all" program discussions are all too common. "What if I modify 5/3/1 into a 1/3/5? Is that ok? What if I invert the Texas method with upside down hanging power cleans as my main lift with squats biweekly?" These discussions ought to be about "How do I find a personal trainer that is right for me so I can make sure I am making the most of my limited training time?"
I see it kind of like the "What is this huge lesion?" or "I really fucked up my ankle, internet doctor needed" kind of threads. I don't understand why people will pay perfectly good money for tons of clothing, frivolous drinks in bars, extra food, movies, and whatever else they spend their disposable cash on, but they will never hire a personal trainer.
Are people afraid of being on the hook and being unable to sever the relationship? It doesn't even have to be like a semi-permanent thing. Like when you go to a psychotherapist, they are invested in your continuing to believe that you need a therapist, and they will often times color the discussion to that extent. Only the best therapists will actually proactively say to you "ok, you're done, you don't need therapy anymore."
Some personal trainers are the same way. But there is a literal flood of online trainers available these days. If you grow tired of online instruction, you just stop payment, and stop communicating. How hard is that?
Maybe it's the glut factor itself--the act of finding a good provider of ANY kind of health care is often a daunting tasks. Even finding a primary care provider. But if people put as much energy into threads discussing and vetting the specializations and traits of personal trainers as they do creating threads asking for non-assessed advice, it'd be pretty easy, and very many people would end up with perfect matches.
And that is the very problem that mandates trainers in the first place--a lack of assessment. People pop up on the internet as little more than a forum username, and immediately tons of users begin recommending things to them without knowing anything at all about that person's age, weight, goals, injury history, muscle imbalances, sleep, diet, recovery capacity, hormone panel, personality and compliance characteristics, etc. Do people actually think none of this stuff matters?
Personalization is everything in athletic training. When you see someone on a forum saying "I've gotten great results on 5/3/1" or whatever else, if they are training themselves, you can pretty much guarantee that they made 10x the number of mistakes on that road than they WOULD have made if they had put a little time into finding an appropriate trainer and then taking advantage of that person's customized experience and expertise. And if they got great results, they probably could have gotten GREATER results.
Even if you are vain enough to think that you're just as good a trainer as someone who went to school for 4+ years and passed tests like the CSCS, you can't outrun the concept of the "blind self." Every person, no matter how self-aware and no matter how intelligent, suffers from blind spots in their knowledge about their own character, tendencies, strenths, and weaknesses. Because of this, a second pair of eyes can make a huge difference to even the most experienced of trainees.
Even the wise old trainer's trainer Dan John uses a personal trainer. Are you smarter than Dan--or just more stubborn?
I see it kind of like the "What is this huge lesion?" or "I really fucked up my ankle, internet doctor needed" kind of threads. I don't understand why people will pay perfectly good money for tons of clothing, frivolous drinks in bars, extra food, movies, and whatever else they spend their disposable cash on, but they will never hire a personal trainer.
Are people afraid of being on the hook and being unable to sever the relationship? It doesn't even have to be like a semi-permanent thing. Like when you go to a psychotherapist, they are invested in your continuing to believe that you need a therapist, and they will often times color the discussion to that extent. Only the best therapists will actually proactively say to you "ok, you're done, you don't need therapy anymore."
Some personal trainers are the same way. But there is a literal flood of online trainers available these days. If you grow tired of online instruction, you just stop payment, and stop communicating. How hard is that?
Maybe it's the glut factor itself--the act of finding a good provider of ANY kind of health care is often a daunting tasks. Even finding a primary care provider. But if people put as much energy into threads discussing and vetting the specializations and traits of personal trainers as they do creating threads asking for non-assessed advice, it'd be pretty easy, and very many people would end up with perfect matches.
And that is the very problem that mandates trainers in the first place--a lack of assessment. People pop up on the internet as little more than a forum username, and immediately tons of users begin recommending things to them without knowing anything at all about that person's age, weight, goals, injury history, muscle imbalances, sleep, diet, recovery capacity, hormone panel, personality and compliance characteristics, etc. Do people actually think none of this stuff matters?
Personalization is everything in athletic training. When you see someone on a forum saying "I've gotten great results on 5/3/1" or whatever else, if they are training themselves, you can pretty much guarantee that they made 10x the number of mistakes on that road than they WOULD have made if they had put a little time into finding an appropriate trainer and then taking advantage of that person's customized experience and expertise. And if they got great results, they probably could have gotten GREATER results.
Even if you are vain enough to think that you're just as good a trainer as someone who went to school for 4+ years and passed tests like the CSCS, you can't outrun the concept of the "blind self." Every person, no matter how self-aware and no matter how intelligent, suffers from blind spots in their knowledge about their own character, tendencies, strenths, and weaknesses. Because of this, a second pair of eyes can make a huge difference to even the most experienced of trainees.
Even the wise old trainer's trainer Dan John uses a personal trainer. Are you smarter than Dan--or just more stubborn?
Thursday, May 5, 2016
"Rickson Gracie never needed weights!"
This kind of outmoded Gracie folklore is the problem with 21st century BJJ. So what? That's like saying a prize winning mathematician can win a high school math competition. How is that relevant to high schoolers who want to win? Rickson destroyed people because he was a technical outlier, at a time when few people had anywhere near as much submission grappling skill. "The best BJJ practitioners" are not most of us, and we will never, ever become half as technical as Rickson.
Technical outliers in just about any sport can defeat just about any dabbler who tries to abuse strength. Tennis, hockey, even in weight lifting. A guy with less muscle mass can often lift more than a guy with more muscle in the snatch, if he has better technique.
However, in contact sports, a slightly better dabbler will almost always lose to a much stronger dabbler, because athleticism is a huge part of the equation. It's not as elegant or as mystical as the martial arts folklore we want to believe, but strength dominates the lower tiers (and often the higher tiers) of contact sports. If it didn't, weight classes would be unnecessary, and you would see lightweights winning the absolute division left and right.
Typically most people in BJJ are a few years in, and are looking for an edge. That edge comes from having a body that is generally physically prepared to practice the sport, and at least, a body that is not a liability to itself. Like I said, this goes against the Gracie marketing dogma, because their intent is and has always been to sell BJJ to the average guy (much bigger market, the base of the pyramid) and not so much to the serious athlete (the middle and top of the pyramid.)
And this dogma is kind of fair in a rote self-defense context; it is indeed true that a bean pole of a kid with 12 months of BJJ can destroy a clueless oaf with 40lbs on him in a fight. But let's not create a false dichotomy wherein everyone is either some physically weak Helio-esque BJJ hero or an untrained oaf--if your intent is to fight other BJJ practitioners at a competitive level, they are not unskilled oafs, and typically they strength train, at least sometimes. They might even be setting their alarm to wake up and tear it up on an Olympic platform. In which case, you might be fucked.
The differential in game-changing skill between two competitive mid-belts is often pretty narrow. Strength and other physical attributes will and always DO play a significant role. If the skill gap is too wide, well, then that player probably belts up. Therefore, if you are competing, you have to bring your physical A game as well as your technical one. It is simply not realistic in 2016 to think that you can show up to a competition as a mushy-bodied dorkus with 2 stripes on your belt, suffering under the delusion that somehow the 2 stripes on your belt confer you a magical advantage over the 2 stripes on the other guy's belt, unless you have a complete gameplan from takedown to submission that you have practiced 500 times.
The athletic dominance advantage enjoyed by a 165lb blue belt with a 450lb deadlift compared to a kid in his weight class with a 200lb deadlift is enormous, it's as pronounced as 2 weight classes, because he's as strong as average players of that size, and probably has the same amount of lean body mass. Now, this weaker kid can choose to train 12x/week to try and neutralize that strength advantage with skill, but he also might slip and fall on a purple belt, and the value of his skills advantage might then be negated. His instructor could just hold him back, but then he risks being accused of sandbagging.
That's one good thing about strength--it can't be sandbagged! A true mongo can show up and hulk smash everyone with little talent, toss them around like the mountain or a giant in Game of Thrones, but the worst that will be said of him is "man, that guy is fuckin strong!" Sandbagger is a really pejorative title that will stick with you, but "ragdoller"...well, dog with sunglasses, lol. "Deal with it." Very few people get sympathy for losing to a stronger opponent in competition. Do you want sympathy, or victory?
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