by Wuyizidi on Tue Aug 26, 2008 9:15 am
There is no such thing as the world's one best athlete, one best exercise, one best food, one best car... In the end all trainings have to be geared toward a specific use.
That said, when talking about conditioning, people categorize exercises under general conditioning, and sports-specific conditioning. The general comes first. So if you practice Taiji, and want to work on increasing leg strength, first you do standard two-legged barbell squats. When you get strong enough, or if you need to address imbalance between left and right side, you can also incorporate single leg squats. Barbell, dumbbell, kettlebell, one hand, two hands, one leg, two legs..., each has its advantages and disadvantages, to reach complete development we should incorporate them all.
If you can do those well, the next step is to make your weight resistance exercise be as close to actual type of movement you use in martial art as possible. So in the Taiji example, single leg squats would actually also count as sport-specific training. Because in Taiji Quan form training, most of the time we are balancing all our weight on one leg. The entire form is like one long series of single-leg squats. My teacher and uncles have also done modified barbell squats, where they follow the alignment requirement of Taiji Quan (nose, knee, toes aligned, and the heel is flat against the ground at all times). You cannot go down as low this way as you do in standard barbell squats, but it's a better approximation of real usage.
Wuyizidi
Last edited by
Wuyizidi on Tue Aug 26, 2008 9:17 am, edited 2 times in total.