![]() ![]() Regardless of what your sport is - it doesn’t matter if you’re a boxer like our buddy Ivan, or if you’re a hockey player - right now, he’s seated, strapped into this chair and isolating the tricep muscle in this movement. You’re working the muscles, natural muscle work.”Įxercise: Drago is seated, working on the same kind of triceps extension you might do in the local gym. I hang a tire with a rope over the chin-up bar over there, and you pull it up, drop it down. My dad, he’d get wood because we had a fireplace, and he’d say, ‘can you chop this wood for me? See, this is great wood. It gets you in good shape, keeps you hot in the summertime and it keeps you warm in the winter.’ But it’s good, because what you’re doing, it’s natural muscle work.”Įxercise: Rocky is pulling on a rope fed through a pulley, attached to a giant cache of rocks. I grew up in the country, just outside of Kitchener. I’d be too afraid they’d chop their hands or their feet off, or something. We’ve got different types of medicine balls on ropes. You have to learn to not just rotate and flex your spine, but brace for the impact of the axe hitting the wood. The buzzword is ‘functional,’ but that’s a more realistic pattern for what you’ll see athletes doing. MN: “We don’t actually go and chop wood, but I would be a big fan of that. They make you heavy, they make you slow, lethargic … long, thin muscles is what you want, not bulky.”Įxercise: Rocky is chopping wood outside their borrowed home in the Soviet Union. So being seated, and flexing your spine, you’ve got compression/flexion, which are the two worst things for the discs in your back.” Any time you’re seated, you’ve got compression of the discs in your lower back, anyway. That’s actually more dangerous than the last exercise that you saw. MN: “We absolutely would never, ever, ever do that. If it doesn’t get easier, then maybe fighting’s not for you.”Įxercise: Drago is grimacing through a seated abdominal crunch. ![]() If you do this stuff every day, it hopefully gets easier. There’s a calculated risk in doing some of these activities … There are some athletes who could tolerate this, but for a lot of them, it would do more harm than good.” A lot of the traditional abdominal training like that, there’s lots of research that’s come out in the last 10 or 20 years - and I actually did my master’s thesis on this - that shows even though you’ve got a great deal of activation of the abdominal wall, it comes at the cost of a lot of compression and sheer force on the spine. We don’t do it hanging from a loft in a barn, or in the gym, for any reason. As a boxer, you step-punch, step-punch, step-punch.”Įxercise: Rocky is doing sit-ups hanging from a loft in the barn, with Paulie keeping Rocky’s feet in place. The hands are turning, the feet have got to work with your hands. Also, with the skipping, you want your hands and feet working together. Because the higher the knees go, the harder the heart works. Johnny Kalbhenn (JK): “It’s great cardio. In addition to being just good cardiovascular warm-up, it also incorporates timing, balance, rhythm, and it’s an intro to biometrics for us.” It doesn’t matter if they’re young kids or pros. And it doesn’t matter if they’re hockey players or football players or basketball players. Matt Nichol (MN): “We incorporate jump rope - or skipping rope - literally every single day into training with our athletes. On separate visits, The Athletic sat down with each expert to answer two simmering questions: Are the exercises Rocky Balboa and Ivan Drago employed during the critical training montage in Rocky IV legitimate? And if so, which fighter was preparing better for the big fight?Įxercise: Rocky is jumping rope in a dusty barn somewhere deep in the Soviet Union. It is spare and clearly focused on one thing: Boxing. Johnny Kalbhenn represented Canada at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, and he is a coach at Cabbagetown Boxing Club, working in a space that is not far removed from the films. Nichol insists they watch “Rocky” movies. He makes a point of instructing his young clients to familiarize themselves with a canon of Hollywood movies that praises such dirty work. “But I like to remind them: Sometimes, when your training environment gets a little too soft and comfortable, you get a little too soft and comfortable.” ![]()
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