Does Bodybuilding Make Muscles Forget How to Work?

I agree with this. But it is not completely because of this.

I disagree with this. Actually there is. I played competitive basketball in high school. From my experience, most coaches tell basketball players stay in certain weight range or level of muscularity. With more muscle you gain strength goes up obviously, but your speed, agility, and most importantly your stamina goes down because your body has to pump more blood in. Don’t forget that basketball is still a mostly cardio based sport. To stay in a 48 minutes of a fast paced game takes a lot of stamina. You don’t see a jacked marathon runner. So too much muscle is not good because although you gain strength (an aspect that makes a basketball player great) and lose 4 other aspects that also make a basketball player great (speed, agility, stamina, etc).

There are some instance where relatively muscular basketball players can still maintain their speed, agility, stamina, explosiveness, etc like Zion Williamson (Duke Player) and Karl Malone (NBA HOF). Unless you are a freak of a nature like them, you are better overall athletically at lower body weight and level of muscularity. Even NBA trainers literally told Zion to LOSE MUSCLE before the NBA 2019 draft.

In your case, you think you are a better athlete today because you never focused on being athletic when you were at lower body weight or level of muscularity. An aspect that I agree with you on earlier.

I highly doubt this. Show me a footage. I saw a video of him a while ago tried to shoot some hops from 5 ft away and his movement looked awkward and stiff as fuck.

I don’t believe the original op is talking specially about athletic performance

I dont think Phil can dunk. Hes 5ft 10" and like 250lbs+.

Imgur

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Hafthor was an internationally competitive basketball player. He played for the icelandic national team. Brian Shaw played D1 college basketball. Both guys were huge back then, certainly carrying far more muscle than anyone on this forum. So if you want to argue that there is SOME point where you can have too much muscle, fine, I won’t argue that. But I will say nobody in here is fucking close to that point.

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I mean anyone thats like 7ft tall can probably make the team in basketball.

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i can’t tell if this is a joke. but i can tell you that not every 6’8 guy out there is capable of playing D1 basketball. not even close. And Hafthor was very skilled. He was playing for the national team as a teenager. My only point here was that these guys have displayed a very high degree of athleticism at very high muscularity. I’m not sure what I"m saying that is so hard to agree with. It’s not particularly outlandish, lol.

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I guess what’s really irritating is the pervasive notion that you have to be a walking ball of immobile scar tissue just because you can bench 300 lbs. Hirohito talking about losing athleticism at his level of muscularity is just preposterous. Because with someone like him, we’re definitely not talking about a pro bodybuilder or strongman size.

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I don’t know if you would call this athleticism, as such, but you guys all know that Kai Greene was a professional dancer once upon a time?

If you keep that shit up you don’t lose it. Athleticism is a skill, much like any other. If you neglect that skill to focus on other shit, then you lose it. If you keep it up, you don’t.

John Broz has a dude on his olympic lifting team close to 350lbs who can do a standing backflip. If he can do that, pretty sure everyone in this thread will be just fine…

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a couple other dudes in the 230+ lbs range who come to mind are fbaftermath and jujimufu (both from instagram). Those guys are extremely muscular, and far more athletic than 99.99% of the population.

Yeah totally agree. I do understand why people in this thread are saying they’re losing mobility - there are only so many hours in the day and if you start bodybuilding that’s time you take away from other stuff like building athleticism - but it’s absolutely not a given that you will lose any mobility/athleticism.

Exercises like squats and lunges will actually keep a base level of mobility that sedentary people won’t have, particularly as they age, so you could even argue you were more athletic due to bodybuilding. I know I definitely am, as I didn’t play any sports in my teens (except Olympic level masturbation).

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I think it’s also fair to make the assumption that people born as high level athletes tend to just be more muscular than the average person. If they start looking to build on that, they probably carry that extra size really well, maybe even becoming better athletes along the way before reaching the point of diminishing returns (which 90% or more of people will never reach).

That pic looked photo shopped as hell. With a Flex magazine logo on it is sure very convincing. Might as well believe in Santa Claus. I do not believe he can dunk. I doubt he can even touch the net. Do you really believe a 5’9 250 lbs dude can dunk? I bet you have never got into a basketball court in your life.

Again back to my point, it doesn’t have to be pro bodybuilder size, most NBA players aren’t even close to pro bodybuilders size either and they stay in certain weight range, because at some point if they gain more muscle they get diminishing return (gain strength, lose mobility stamina vertical speed etc). They are doing that for a reason. Unless you define athleticism by mostly strength. Additionally, there is a reason The most athletic basketball players of all time aren’t muscular compared to the most muscular basketball players out there, to name a few Michael Jordan, Andrew Wiggins, and Zach Lavine. They have the highest verticals, quick first-steps, good stamina, and strength to absorb contact in the paint.

Please just talk about the subject that you are familiar yourself. In this mostly strength and powerlifting forum, people will probably agree to your foolish statements and be biased. If you never tried being athletic at a lower level muscularity, then don’t talk. Again strength and explosiveness is just a small subset of athleticism, it seems that you are defining athleticism on mostly those 2 aspects.

-Hirohito out

I’m sure the irony of this statement is lost on you.

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Little background on Phil

Heath was born and raised in Seattle, Washington.[3] He attended Rainier Beach High School, where he was team captain and shooting guard on the varsity basketball team.[3] He attended the University of Denver in Denver, Colorado on an athletic scholarship, where he majored in business administration while playing shooting guard for Denver’s Division I basketball team.[3][4]

Yeah, I like how folks see huge bodybuilders that are 125+kg and seem to struggle with movement and then conclude that muscle hurts your athleticism.

If you are a 125kg anything (140kg offseason) you are going to struggle without working your athleticism.

Not to mention there is hardly an athlete on this planet who doesn’t try to add muscle to their frame. The exceptions being distance runners who need minimal body weight and those guys are hardly athletic.

Very good point.

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I will say I do tend to consider you the authority on possessing lower levels of muscularity.

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giphy

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oh%20you%20bastard
:wink:

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