Often, gyms are visited by people doing other sports at a professional level. Learn how to combine bodybuilding and other sports. Situations arise when a person has to combine exercises in the gym with other sports. Most often, they are faced with three main questions:
- Is it really necessary for representatives of other sports to build muscles?
- How to combine bodybuilding and other sports for better results?
- How can retired athletes start training?
Now let's take a closer look at each of these issues.
Why build muscle for athletes from other sports?
It is very common to hear the opinion that large muscle mass can be harmful in other sports. Before refuting or confirming this opinion, it is necessary to understand the tasks that muscles perform.
The main goal of the muscles is to move parts of the skeleton. In any sport, certain parts of the body must move, even in chess, it is necessary to move the pieces with the hand on the board. Most sports are about competition, which of the athletes is faster, stronger or more powerful. In this case, it is the muscles that are of key importance.
Now, many may have a completely natural question, why is there so much information about the negative impact of large muscle mass on the result? The point is that muscles are designed to perform various types of work. The same is the case with training, because you can develop various indicators, and not just gain weight. Thus, there are three main muscle indicators that can be trained:
- Muscle strength (power) - the ability of the muscles to make 1 to 3 high-intensity contractions. Strength is trained using a small number of repetitions at the maximum working weight of the sports equipment. Between sets, you need to take a long pause for rest.
- Muscle endurance - the ability of muscles to perform work for a long period of time without pause. To train this ability, you need to use a large number of repetitions and average working weights.
- Muscle performance - the ability of the muscles to perform long-term strength work with short rest pauses. For training, volumetric work with medium or high working weights is used. The rest pause ranges from 30 to 90 seconds.
The main problem with bodybuilding is that during the competition, athletes are evaluated exclusively for the appearance of the muscles, and not the degree of their training. This is also the main reason for the lack of bodybuilding in the program of the Olympic Games. Since muscles have several parameters of their fitness, under certain circumstances, a large muscle mass will not allow achieving high results. For example, if you need high muscle endurance, a lot of mass can get in the way. This is due to the fact that large muscles imply high performance or, in other words, a low rate of performance. With strength endurance, the muscles are able to maintain a high pace of work for a given length of time, which is completely different from what large muscles can do.
There are also other factors, besides the intensity and magnitude of the load, which differ when training different qualities of the muscles. Perhaps the main one is speed. For this reason, bodybuilders are often presented with claims of "sluggishness" and "pumping" of the muscles. We can agree with this statement, since the speed of movements decreases with the generation of large efforts. This is due to the natural adaptation of the body. Professional bodybuilders understand this fact on an instinctive level. To lift a lot of weight, you need to perform the movements relatively slowly so that the muscles grow in size.
Simply put, the muscles of bodybuilders are sluggish not because they are bad, but because they are designed to perform strength work for a long period of time. They contract slowly as speed is not important in bodybuilding. At the same time, the athlete develops strength performance.
How to combine bodybuilding and other sports?
From all of the above, many have already understood that there is a concept of sports specificity.
- The essence first factor, which should be taken into account when combining, is that the qualities that are being trained develop.
- Second factor - the narrowness of specializations required to achieve high results. In other words, the maximum possible result will be achieved in the load at which the training is carried out. Of course, it is possible to develop all muscle indicators harmoniously, but often the desired result can be achieved only in one direction. All efforts should be concentrated here. Let's say an athlete is doing powerlifting and specializing in the barbell press. In addition, he runs for a while. This is good for the overall development of the body, but bad for maximum results. You should decide and choose one thing.
- The third factor is the degree of remoteness of the trained muscle abilities. One quality is required to win in every sport, and the more often it is trained (closer), the better the results can be.
- Well, the last one, fourth factor - weight category. The muscles have significant weight and with their large size, the athlete may well go beyond his weight category. It is clear that in this case, the chances of a high result, as a rule, are significantly reduced.
Thus, athletes need to determine the priority area of training for themselves. You can't get everything right away. As a result, you will not be able to achieve positive results in any of the sports.
About the competent combination of bodybuilding with other sports, see Denis Borisov in this video:
