Not sure if this is a Veeky Forums question or a Veeky Forums question.
We all have the concept of any serious medieval warrior being in top physical fitness and fairly jacked. But back then, going to the gym for recreation obviously didn't exist as we know it.
My question is this: how did Veeky Forums warriors keep their bodies in shape? Obviously they trained in mock personal combat which acts as intense cardio, but was there any knowledge of exercises explicitly for building muscle, such as pushups? How well was nutrition understood - did they know that eating more meat (which was more scarce back then) would help achieve better gains?
FYI, Optimum Nutrition's 5 lb whey jug is big enough to make a helmet.
Parker Gonzalez
Hellenistic greeks would lift and throw rocks or javelins and wrestle so they were probably really sinewy and explosive
Jaxon Sanchez
They trained a lot, ate a lot and fucked a lot. They also lived in a very high test environment which made their gains even better.
Dylan Campbell
people wrestled and did manual labor the bulky people with huge chests and shoulders arms that we see today were probably non existent people worked long hours and ate clean high fiber food warriors were probably lean with small chests decent shoulders and big forearms emphasis on forearms because of how everybody worked manual labor hard manual labor look at african construction workers
Nicholas Hill
>was there any knowledge of exercises explicitly for building muscle, such as pushups? Yes, there are tapestries of squires doing pullups and handstand pushups as part of their training. Convict Conditioning or a program like that would probably be close to what they would have done. >How well was nutrition understood - did they know that eating more meat (which was more scarce back then) would help achieve better gains? Yes, it's well documented that athletes in ancient Greece ate more meat than non athletes as part of their training. Beyond that I have no idea.
David Young
Historyfag here.
Medieval warriors are modern-day fantasies. In the feudal system, knights rarely saw real combat. Instead they sent their vassels off to die. Imagine peasants. Now imagine peasants all fighting each other to the death in a big field, using simple knives, long spears, and bashing each other with rocks.
Once it seemed like more of your own people were left standing, the archers would just start raining arrows down to clear the field. Yeah, some of your own will die, but you've got numbers on your side, you're just trying to make sure if they've got zero left, then you've still got a dozen.
The exception to this is when there was problem with royal succession. But even still, they weren't experts at warfare, they just rode around on horses and charged at each other with their swords drawn.. 50% of the time, both would die.
Gavin Wright
Is that John Morrison?
Adam Jones
>magNEETo
Brandon Bailey
They were dyel but bigger than peasants, jacked warriors are a myth. Look at olympic records just a hundred years ago. Their height also was much shorter than now
David Cook
You're shit at being a historyfag. You don't send your peasants off to die, that'd be economic suicide. It isn't until the development of the national armies in the modern era that peasants took the field in large numbers in wars that weren't peasant rebellions. You'd have sword practice, calisthenics, wrestling, conditioning exercises in armor, and then all the horsemanship stuff.
And that's on top of the kind of things that boys did for fun before the invention of recreational reading, TV, Radio, Vidya, etc.
Landon Reyes
FYI the guy in your picture is a literal and unironic cuckold.
John Cruz
name?
Nolan Harris
You are both wrong.
It was common for peasants to be conscripted as levies and it was true that the comprised the bulk of most medieval battlefields. However knights saw routine combat since that was the whole point of being a knight. Difference mainly was the numbers, equipment and training a knight would have compared to some random spearman.
Archers were primarily used as skirmishers in the start of the battle to whittle away at enemy numbers before the main line engagement. There are no real accounts of shooting your own men as a battlefield tactic.
Lastly, most of the casualties in pitched battles were caused when an army routed and were cut down running away not during the actual 'fight' part of the battle. Rarely did an army wipe out another in open combat.
Jayden Gonzalez
strongman stuff and body weight, along with training and sparring
Hudson Ward
Holy shit, learn to use the period.
Kayden Wood
They worked regular jobs, carried their heavy shit around, marched, sparred, and from what I have heard is that Roman soldiers would March 2000 miles at times before running into battle. >tFW I carried 45 lbs for 3 miles in 44 minutes yesterday for the firefighter pack test, but a Roman centurion would have done the same thing with 1.5 times that weight for 2000 miles....
Zawisza Czarny did pullups on citys gate with his horse attached
Tyler Green
>My question is this: how did Veeky Forums warriors keep their bodies in shape? Exercise didn't exist, they did what they wanted to be good at, artifically more difficult.
This means: Wanna be good at fencing? fence. But with sword 2x as heavy as the real thing. Wanna box? Then just box a bag filled with sand (hard as stone). Wanna run? Then fucking run. Maybe with some guy trying to hold you back.
And so on.
Usually, medieval training was: Jumping, Running, Throwing (rocks, javelins, etc) and combat (armed, unarmed, etc). You also had to do dancing (think those weird Eastern Euro jump dances) and stuff like that. In armor.
And no, we don't have any routines from that time, unfortunately.
