Hephaestus wrote:As I understand it, weight-lifting in itself will not make you huge, slow, and inflexible.
However,
bodybuilding probably will, bodybuilding implying a specialized super-protein diet (as well as other factors) that
will make you huge and slow and inflexible, crammed up with muscle that isn't even necessary (and is mostly useless for anything but lifting weight, as its entirely slow-twitch fiber).
Simple weightlifting does not have the "hugeness" effect unless you have a one-in-a-million metabolism. When considerable attention is paid to full-body stretching, it won't make you inflexible. And when coupled with plyometric exercises, those built up slow-twitch fibers work together with your strong fast-twitch fibers to make a very balanced (and very functional) combination.
Sorry to commandeer the thread a bit, but next time someone starts arguing about how terrible weightlifting is, just remind them of the difference between
weightlifting and
bodybuilding.
This is very true. Go to a place like t-nation and you'll see that weightlifting has many more dimensions than typically assigned it by martial artists. There are ways to build strength without adding mass(few repetitions, few sets, don't work to exhaustiion, no great increase in food consumption), ways to build endurance but little size(light weights done ad infinitum), ways to build mass with strength(medium repetitions, medium number of sets, gigantic increase in eating), and ways to build mass with less strength(far more repetitions and sets, plenty of isolation exercises, gigantic increase in eating). So you see, you can just pick your training style to match your chosen goal. Only the rare person has the genetics to put on huge amounts of muscle without specifically training for it, especially quickly. And even they have to have a calorie excess to do it; nobody can conjure the calories or nitrogen balance to build muscle from thin air. So unless food intake is significantly increased, forget the mass. Yet you may still get the strength!
Also, Arnold Schwartzenegger said that though people always say weightlifters are stiff and inflexible, he was always able to put his hands behind the middle of his(huge) back, fingers pointing up, and press his palms together. Many very skinny martial artists couldn't do the same.
It really depends how you train.
Remember, too, that if you were to see a martial artist who obtained a large or muscular body from simple genetic heritage, you wouldn't write off his ability to be flexible or quick just because he wasn't slender.
And remember also that many great internal martial artists came to the internal arts, or indeed were only accepted as students in the internal arts, after they had built strong and sometimes correspondingly large bodies through learning external styles.
We can't confuse tendencies for reality. Sure, most people will tend not to keep up on their flexibility, and weightlifing can quickly start that downhill process off or make it worse But a tendency doesn't mean the deed has already been done.