Is it possible for me, a 120 lb male, to match strength with my larger friends?

Question

I'm a very light guy who's nearly done growing and stands at 5 foot 7. I've always done well when competing with people near my weight, such as in wrestling.

Is there anything I can do, maybe along the lines of strength training or martial arts, that will allow me to near the strength of my taller and heavier friends?

Answer 1

Yeah, you can obviously work out, it may be harder cause of your high metablosim (im thinking you have) but... the key is... Eat more calories then you burn, ull gain weight... most then work out.. converted into muscle.

Answer 2

yes, strength training will help even the field. and learning a martial art would make you more lethal than they are because you would know all kinds of techniques that they wouldn't. technique is huge in mortal kombat.  

Answer 3

start lifting wieghts and focus on your lower back by dead lifting

look on youtube for how to dead lift properley

Answer 4

trust me im a 120 lb girl and 5' and i can take guys  that are like 6' and over 200 lbs. so trust me weight doesnt matter. My advice is to study the human body and learn how nerves affect other people find where in the spinal cord the nerves originate for the parts of the body, learn joint locks, and pressure points, and then size really doesn't matter at all.

trust me im not that strong a person but also if you take martial arts classes train with someone who's going to go harder on you and push your limits, I found it's the only way to improve work with someone of higher rank or with more experience, im testing for my 2nd dan in Kenpo soon and work with white and gold belts alot of times to help them improve then I work with 2nd and 3rd degrees for my curriculum.

keep working and good luck

Answer 5

Maybe I'm misunderstanding: Yes, while you could strength train, it's unlikely that you could reach results equal to a larger framed person doing the same routines with similar gains.

Generally, strength against strength is a bad way to compete -- the physically smaller individual is likely to lose. However, as most martial artists can tell you, it's not about strength: if you can use your body weight effectively, it's more about ADT (Angle, Distance, and Timing). There's more than one way to fell a giant, Jack, and strength always it.

Answer 6

You have just discovered the drawback to being the small guy when it comes to having large friends .While the larger stronger guys can horse play around with you and get away with it you can't with them unless you are willing to hurt them.Then they get mad and try harder and you hurt them more then they get really serious and you hurt them bad. Good bye friends .

Lifting weights is good and if you can reach the level where you can bench press your own body weight ten times rapidly without getting winded you will be stronger than them even tho they are larger .Then just by strength you can horse play back and they will learn to respect your superior strength

"He is small but strong as a horse"just don't be as dumb as a horse.

Answer 7

Well it's not all about strength, I am very large, 310lbs I'm fat but I have alot of muscle.  I do martial arts, i have been beaten by a 90lb girl before.  It is alot about technique and skill, not just strength.

Answer 8

Yes you can!!!

Work on strength but with your disadvantage of weight your speed will need to be faster and along with properly taught technique you should have a chance, but remember it's the mental attitude/ toughness that can win a fight so take that into considerration also.

Best wishes and good luck :)***

Answer 9

Uh, you could.

But, a while ago I finally told myself that I'm just not naturally a powerful guy. And I really worked out hard. Enough that if a normal person did it they would look like a balloon fish. But, I suppose genetics just wasn't letting me add muscle like I was supposed to. So from their on out I quit trying so hard on just making muscle, (although I still workout some) and I started focusing on speed and technique.

Answer 10

hang out with weak friends?

Answer 11

Yes, you could lift weights and eat the right amount of protein with the right amount of carbohydrate to gain weight and develop muscles. But what would work better than that is to learn good technique. Technique almost always beat strength. With the right technique a small child can bring down a large man.

Answer 12

Lift some weights and you'll get stronger and gain mass.

Answer 13

Well, think of this in two ways: You can do your best to improve your power through functional training methods, or you could practice martial arts that nullify weight classes. A little bit of both can only be a good thing, Allow me to explain...

Strength and power are (to a great extent) functions of mass, and lean body mass at that. However, simply getting bulkier (i.e. encouraging hypertrophy for hypertrophy's sake) will not necessarily increase your power. You want to train in a way that will maximize the development and training of your accessory muscles, to learn to use all your muscles together in whatever activity you're doing, and to increase the speed with which you perform those actions. Believe it or not, sometimes bodyweight-oriented functional training can do much more for you than the high-reps/medium-intensity exercise that most guys do at the gym. Working on your core, integrating full body exercises into your routine (squats with curls, balance-driven pushes and pulls, Crossfit/GymJones type workouts) will at the very least increase your functional strength/power without adding too much to your bulk (and thus you have less to carry around and less to worry about nourishing with blood and oxygen). And remember, you'll only get as big (naturally) as your genetics will allow.

Now, in a fight, be it sport or street, there are several tools at your disposal to remove the advantage of size from your opponents. As far as sport is concerned, standing toe to toe with someone much larger than you probably won't do you any favors (unless you are the superb striker). Taking someone to the ground and employing techniques from Brazilian Ju Jitsu will go a long way.

BJJ is about using leverage and positioning over strength. By hitting the proper joint locks, by knowing how to escape and transition through the various positions, and by learning how to off-balance or shift your opponent, you can use BJJ to greatly reduce your opponent's size and strength advantage. The sorts of techniques you find in BJJ generally depend much less on raw strength than those found in wrestling.

In the street, however, it's rarely advisable to take someone to the ground (think of it as a last resort). Instead, the street fighter must rely on what JKD (Jeet Kune Do Concepts) calls "dirty tactics". While some people may think of dirty tactics as "cheap" or dishonorable, let us be realistic-- in a street fight, there are no rules and there is no place for honor or ego. That said, dirty tactics can range from the common eye jabs/eye strikes to blind an opponent, to secohs/limb destructions to break the knuckles or damage nerves in the arms and legs, to biting, ear-slapping, pinching, small joint locks (to break fingers), angling off center-line and switching leads, taking the opponents back while upright, head butts, groin shots, stomping on toes and smashing through knees, etc..

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There are also some methods of upright Filipino wrestling (called Dumog, found in Filipino Martial Arts and JKD/PFS) that effectively use the opponent’s size and strength against him. For instance, when yanking on someone’s arm to bring them forward, you may find that a strong opponent resists by pulling away-- in this case, you switch to shoving the opponents shoulder into his ear. These sorts of off-balancing techniques work very well against larger, stronger foes.

Anything that will destroy or inhibit your opponent's ability to do harm will diminish if not destroy size and strength advantages. Some pain is simply too great to overcome!

Answer 14

mixed martial arts will definitely give you an advantage over larger  opponents