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THE QUESTION
“It’s common knowledge that resistance training is necessary to build bone/joint strength, but I’ve also heard that lifting heavy weights for years destroys joints. Others say that high volume, repetitive bodyweight exercises — like hundreds of bodyweight squats, for example — are what wears down joints. As a martial artist looking to avoid long-term joint/bone damage and get conditioned for combat, should I be doing more heavy lifts at low reps, or more high-rep bodyweight exercises? And is there anything I should avoid altogether?”
THE EXPERT
Matt Jones teaches reality-based self-defence and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu at his own full-time martial arts academy, ISOHEALTH, located in Adelaide, South Australia. Jones is a BJJ Purple-belt and has produced numerous champions and medal-winners at State, Australian and Pan-Pacific level in BJJ. His ISOHEALTH BJJ team is South Australia’s 2010 State Champion Team. Jones is also a qualified personal trainer with 15 years of fitness industry experience, during which time he has coached elite competitors from various sports, including Olympic athletes. Jones can be contacted via his website at www.isohealth.com.au
His answer
My answer is based on years of experience and observation rather than any recent studies. I am 35 years old and I started working in gyms when I was 18, so I’ve been fortunate to see a lot of things and train countless numbers of people. In that time, I’ve noticed that heavy lifting is perfectly healthy right through the aging process, providing that it is performed with excellent posture and technique. On the other hand, I’ve also noticed that hugely high-rep bodyweight exercises can tend to take their toll over the long haul even if they are performed with excellent posture and technique.
Therefore, I recommend heavy lifting to build strength, but for endurance training it’s best to use training protocols that are very effective but still force you to work within time frames that prevent the total number of reps from getting way out of hand. For example, you could do something as simple as using two sets of five reps, or five sets of three reps, for your strength work. Then for your endurance work, rather than do half an hour of Hindu squats with hundreds of reps, you could instead perform bodyweight squats using the Tabata Protocol. This dictates that you do 20 seconds of exercise at all-out intensity followed by 10 seconds of rest, then repeat this eight times. Due to the intense nature of a Tabata-style squat workout, it will still give you great conditioning while limiting your total squat reps to more reasonable numbers, thus sparing your joints from excessive repetitive movements.
Also try to ensure your endurance exercises are not ones that lock you into a movement groove like a machine would — e.g. do free squats rather than leg-presses or Smith Machine squats. Machines can make the movement so rigid that you are more likely to get into a very set, repetitive groove that can cause more wear and tear than the free-weight style squats, where even with perfect form there is always some degree of stabilising and deviation, which reduces the chances of repetitive strain injury (RSI) or what popular author Paul Chek calls ‘pattern overload’.
I also recommend that if you wish to reduce the chance of sustaining overuse injuries, it’s worth varying your forms of cardio; don’t become a slave to the bike or the running track, or the pool. Try to vary things by rotating through various forms of cardio when possible. If you do cardio five times per week on top of your martial arts training, then consider trying the following:
• Monday: sled-dragging
• Tuesday: rowing
• Wednesday: running
• Thursday: swimming
• Friday: cycling
This schedule gives you great workouts and minimises repetitive motions. You may even find that in using this variety of cardio you actually get better results because your body is unlikely to become super efficient at each form of exercise (and thus be forced to work harder) than if you always used the same form of cardio every session. If you couple this cardio with a heavy strength session three or four times per fortnight and throw in some Tabata-style push-ups and squats at the end of your heavy strength sessions, you should be rather pleased with the results you get!
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