How did warriors and other strong people train before the current knowledge of nutrition and training?

they were all 5'3 swole manlets

kek

gains increase your bone size........manlets wish

>swole

I assume they weren't swole considering the lack of resources. Most people were very short due to poor nutrition, chances are the only people that grew to a modern average size were those genetically gifted. Diets of course varied greatly from region to region, culture to culture. For example, beer was a central part of the Egyptian diet but their beer was more of a thick porridge or oatmeal. It was supposed to be very nutritious so I imagine the pyramids were built on the power of squats, oats and manlets

They increase your bone density you tard.

Swords were heavy as fuck. Try swinging a weight around all day every day

I'd imagine most of their time would be spent on skill work and conditioning

youtube.com/watch?v=q-bnM5SuQkI
Watch this
It was something like crossfit

>Swords were heavy as fuck

For children.

thearma.org/essays/weights.htm#.WbvKt7KGOUk

>the average weight of any one of normal size is between 2.5 lb. and 3.5 lbs. Even the big hand-and-a-half 'war' swords rarely weigh more than 4.5 lbs.

>witnesses Irani troops prepare for upcoming world war
>duuude cool lets watch

Retard, i bet you also think a katana is the most advanced and best sword out there (it isnt its crap)

Good guy user
Although they used training swords which have about double the weight to get quicker when useing the actual one

not entirely wrong

best post of the week

Fuck me sideways if I remembered the name but one Greek lad lifted a newborn calf every day, once it had reached adult weight (progressive overload) he ate it (protons!) and took a new one (deload). Now where to get cheap livestock these days tho.

meant to quote OP sorry

They literally get wider; they don't get longer, you melt.

Came here to post this.

Tfw bodyweight stuff in a fully-body weight vest.

equinenow.com

Horses have broteins too.

KEK

I hate the taste sadly (and cattle is generally heavier, thus better for the task at hand anyway), but thanks for the hearty chortle m8

You can't ride steers to the gym, though.

You can ride a steer to the gym but you can't make it lift

You guys ever look into BotN/HMB full armor combat shit?

I've finally got a fair amount of expendable income and nogf, and there's something that seems deeply appealing about loading up 30kg worth of metal and wrestling another guy.

I just don't want to get a concussion and a fractured vertebrae from a 45 year old Polack with a non-regulation poleaxe.

Not with that attitude.

But cop discount tren in its name m.ebay.co.uk/itm/Component-T-H-Implant-Box-For-Cattle-Beef-Heifers-5-Packs-Trenbolone-/281931744800?epid=0&hash=item41a4710620:g:AkcAAOSw7FRWUJyV&_trkparms=pageci%3Ace8e5248-9a34-11e7-9c74-74dbd1804dac%7Cparentrq%3A866b302215e0a860d1a7eb82ffe31209%7Ciid%3A1

Greeks did squats, leg raises and shoulder raises with progressive overload

Ex of mine did it, fun stuff but those fights are full contact indeed, not a single fight in his 10 year career was over without someone hurting himself, not from rulebending slavs (although that too) but they just go so hard at it that shit happens.

How dangerous would you say it is compared to other contact sports, martial or not?

I mean there's always HEMA, but I did fencing when I was a teenager and it felt real feminine near the end, and HEMA seems to follow the same trends.

Most people werent particularly jacked and were manlets due to poor nutrition.
We can look at ancient greeks tho and conclude that:
>How did warriors and other strong people train before the current knowledge of nutrition and training?
Well, guess what, they would practice wrestling, climbing, swimming, running, carrying and lifting heavy shit, crafting, etc.
>Did they lift stones or something?
Yeah. Lifting and carrying stones was used in various cultures as a strength test. Ancient scots and icelanders did that.
> What did they eat to get swole?
Pretty much same shit we do now. Meat, fish, dairy, eggs, bread. Because there werent really much unhealthy junk foods, people had good eating habits and thus they wouldnt really get fat. Plus they would do fasting to shed weight off.
Estrogen doesnt actually affect your gains at all. The only thing that would actually make you less muscular that you could take would be some kind of androgen blocker. You can look at people who do roids that get aromatised into estradiol, their perfomance doesnt suffer, but they get gyno. You can actually look at people who have really low estrogen for whatever reason, they dont really get crazy ripped, they just get really fucking tall and develop early osteoporosis.

>Ancient Greeks did squats with progressive overload
How?

wrestling and labour

has anyone ever died from it?

Some exercises like body weight squats, push ups, and even muscle ups are ancient. These are foundational movements of gymnastics. Some form of what we'd call gymnastics or tumbling are have been practiced worldwide since before writing.

Stone throwing and lifting is an ancient practice. We see it in Egypt, Greece, China, Japan, and elsewhere in places like Europe and India.

Heavy club/mace (or other weapon) lifting is also a training method seen in many places throughout the ancient world.

Various forms of wrestling, pugilism, and armor mock-combat were popular as well.

Not too comparable, the armor protects you from direct impact fractures and shit but also weighs you down in case you fall or tweak something nasty. Most injuries were concussions, dislocated limbs and once a guy got a blade in between helmet and faulty shoulder pad and boiiii

HEMA is some neat shit too but I have no actual experience in the matter.

there were a couple (not when my ex did it of course), but afaik one had a preexisting condition and the others were due to faulty or rulebreaking equipment, so technically, not directly from the sport as it is meant to be

fuckin manual labor all goddam day.

Why do you think the roman army litterally built a new camp with a trench around it every night?

also, nomatter what anyone tells you, there is no strength like construction worker strength

youtube.com/watch?v=MhQlNwxn5oo
still practised to this day. I think the history behind it makes it even more awesome

There's a big difference between warriors/soldiers and athletes, both in training and diet.
Soldiers did drills, weapons training and endurance marches, while athletes would train for their sport and general conditioning with calisthenics and weights. A soldier's diet was mostly grain based, while an athlete's was more animal based. There are exceptions, of course, as a knight's or a noble's diet and training was far better than the average man at arms.
I guess it's not so different from the situation today. Even if they didn't have our modern nutrition and training science, they did have a lot of time to experiment and see what works over the generations. So you would definitely get various traditions maintaining things that worked.

>also, nomatter what anyone tells you, there is no strength like construction worker strength
Where are all those strength record-breaking construction workers?

>visit grandparents that live in a village
>eastern europe
>significantly less car pollution
>people have big gardens and own land
>they have chicken, cows, sheep, goats, any useful animal
>fresh 100% natural eggs
>fresh meat when needed
>fresh all natural fruits and vegetables
>fresh milk, cheese, cream...
>do physical work almost everyday due to owning a farm

user i've seen dudes train with bricks and got leaner, stronger, healthier than any city boy who buys his food from a grocery store, and they didn't even eat 1kg or whatever per bodyweight, just good quality food.

people in those times were not gluten and lactose free beta males. they had good quality food which wasn't injected with ever drug possible

Working

warrior castes had better food, healthcare, training, they didn't do much manual labor decreasing possible injuries or chronic illness. Repeat this many generations and you have people with better bodies and genetics to fight. The only problem with being of the warrior caste is that there is a high probability to die young.

I prefer to be farmer master race, you are strong, close to nature, good food, girls with big tits and die very old. FUCK WARRIORS, FARMER MASTER RACE.

Its not lift the biggest thing possible kind of strength, its the total moved over the course of 8 hours.

the name dumbbell comes from the original strength training weights being bells (like the ones used in a bell tower) wrapped in cloth so they wouldn't make noise, i.e. the bells were "dumb" (silent)

>Did they lift stones or something?
no you retard.
lots of combat practice with heavy melee weapons and armor. lots of marching too.

>What did they eat to get swole?
they werent swole.
war doesnt require tons of muscle strength. as long as you can effectively wield your weapons and armor, you're good, and those weapons are lighter than even an empty barbell.
war does require a lot of endurance, which they got from tons of combat excercise and marching around.

as to what did they eat - depends on the time and the location. mainly large amounts of carbs - grains, beets, potatoes, that kind of thing. vegetables too. fish if available. cheap meat, but nowhere near the amount that we eat today.

People like you are retarded.
>how did ancients get big and strong if they didn't have peer reviewed studies telling them what to do??
Most ancients that observed nature and human behavior were able to parse out what we know now, just without the scientific confirmation. For fucks sake, the concept of progressive overload has been around since the ancient Greeks (Milo of Croton), and probably before. The folly of modern man lies in how much weight we give to expertise, and how little we give to our own minds. We assume, with incredible hubris, that past generations were essentially idiots, based on the premise that just because they didn't have science as we know it today, they were therefore uninformed and illogical. This is manifestly ridiculous and untrue, they even came to many of the same conclusions we are arriving at today through observation and reason. You don't need a doctor to tell you how to lose weight, you don't need peer reviewed studies to tell you how to get stronger, you don't need a nutritionist to tell you what to eat. Listen to your body, observe what works, and fucking do it.

Google says that the average height of the average European man during the early middle ages was around 173.4 centimeters, which isn't that distant from modern male averages (especially in the US). This average fell to 167 centimeters in the later Middle Ages. Most warriors in history were ordinary men -oftentimes conscripts- who lived a hard, fighting lifestyle. Weapons and emergent technologies were what leveled the playing field in many respects.

>173.4 centimeters
At least I made the knight cutoff.

Everyone thinks that knights were fucking giants; more often than not, they resembled skinnyfat manlets trained to fight from puberty. Reminds me of modern special forces groups.

Some ancient greeks ate cooked blood cakes for strength

However, to counter this point, often noble knights would do a fuck ton of training to compensate, and would have the best skills with a sword or mace, because they'd used it the most.
To add to that, they would have armour, which was OP as fuck, as well as a horse, which added to the OP as fuck nature of mounted knights.
Add to that the fact that they would have a contingent of fellows to support them and cover them from blindsides
PLUS
a horde of their own loyal peasant soldiers
being noble actually btfo'd being a blacksmith who has the power of banging on an anvil all day so he's 1% more strong on one side

>knights were basically average

not if they were good knights

Reminder that any person from ancient civilization would be in no way impressive by today's standard

They were all like 5'5 and 130lb

Fuck you even Master Roshi trained Goku and Krillin with construction work.

Plowing fields and delivering mail isn't construction work.

You realize that knighthood was an inherited station, right? With superior training and military hardware, you don't have to be fuckheuge to win battles.

>cooked blood cakes

WHAT THE FUCK NOBODY HAS COMMENTED ON THIS SHIT. BLOOD CAKES HOLY SHIT

>all knights were The Mountain from Game of Thrones

>you don't have to be fuckheuge to win battles
True, but what about knightly tournaments? Besides jousting, the melees usually wound up as straight up wrestling in armor. Surely the biggest and strongest would have an advantage there.

It doesnt take a genius to realize when you see a man that does physical work everyday that the physical work that requires nutrient energy source and rest equals healthy strong body.

Humans have always had the ability to deduce things.

When there was no fast ways of communication people spoke to each other, changed opinions and their viewpoints of life face to face. Doesnt mean there wasnt knowledge on how you get strong, the information just was more rare and hard to find. Also i dont think people had time to study other people's lifestyles just to inform others about it, there was no merit.

Its bretty common
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_as_food

my farmer co-worker is big as fuck, i once asked him what gym he goes to and he just replied "i just plow hay all day"

>the melees usually wound up as straight up wrestling in armor.
Sure, but that didn't prevent average-sized knights from competing. Depending on experience and the weapons used, smaller armored dudes could contend (or at least challenge) larger knights. Size is definitely an advantage in armored combat but not the be-all end-all.

>All these pseudo-historian retards.

Humans haven't fully understood the practice of progressive overload or putting on lean body mass since the later half of the 20th century. If you look at guys like Rocky Marciano or Jack Dempsey, they weren't jacked, they were just guys who were athletic and also naturally carried a lot of mass on them (including fat).

The vast majority of humans (farmers) have historically never had the macro-nutrients necessary to put on more than a modicum of mass. They probably looked more like the Mexican field hands of today than anything else, albeit skinnier.

The same can be said for the nobility and soldiery, who had a better diet but believed bulk would slow you down. The vast majority of manuscript illustrations show fencers who are skinny but athletic. Unless a swordsman is strapped down with a lot of armor, strength isn't going to do a lot for him, as it doesn't take a ton of strength to stab or cut someone.

Historical incidents tend to also point towards knights not being that strong. At the battle of Agincourt for example, by the time the armored french had ran the 300 yards to the English lines, many of them were too tired to fight or move at all, and either suffocated face-first in the mud or were beaten to death by unarmored longbowmen with mallets.

The amount of wrong in this post makes my head hurt.

What do you think black pudding is? I eat that stuff at least once a week, shit is tasty as fuck.

...

Agincourt was an absolute fucking fluke battle where French knights got bogged down in a a fucking muck swamp. Shitty example, even pro athletes today would tire in full plate running through deep muck for 300 yards

Soldiers were soldiers, they trained to win battles/wars and it would seem anecdotally that the most important things would be
>Speed and skill to get a kill/disable in melee or with a bow to hit targets
>Endurance to keep fighting and march for days
>Discipline to not rout in battle and being drilled for formations (shield wall/pike formations etc)
So basically training hours a day, especially in full armour and holding weapons, would build all that. It's probably a pretty obvious deduction that bigger guys won fights more often, but most soldiers wouldn't be huge because endless training and rations etc. Knights probably could have been because massive feasts and carrying tavern wenches.

Also knights:
>in your knightly practices:
>throwing aпd pushing stones,
>dancing aпd jumping,
>fencing aпd wrestling,
as noted is a good example in writing. And there's some accounts of knights doing more calisthenics style things in armour.
Greeks: did Calisthenics/gymnastics; though that could be more related to wanting aesthetics and better man-love.
Roman Legionnaires: average weight was something like 65kg. Drilling with a heavy shield all day, +40kg for 15 mile hikes, drills. During non-campaign times they would just be a construction crew and build roads non-stop. They enjoyed war-time as a "rest".
English (in 15th-16th? century): professional archers would training every day, that's pulling for hours up to and above 100lb bow in some cases and they had greatly increased bony ridges (tendon attachment points) around arm/shoulder, supposedly some deformed skeletons from doing it too much and only on one side so maybe they didn't know to do rows on the other arm for balance.

So yes they trained strength secondarily by manner of doing what they wanted to be better at and ate because they'd be hungry.

>Surely the biggest and strongest would have an advantage there.
Never said they wouldn't, but armed fighting skill tends to supersede size alone (unless the disparity is overwhelmingly in favor of the bigcunt). There where also events that pitted teams of knights against each other; in these contests superior strategy would prevail.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=QOnYsnmSRzc

>Fluke
>Happened twice before at Crécy and Poitiers.

I'd suggest you all to read "De Re Militari" by Vegetius. It was basically the only military manual during the medieval times. Here's a quote:

"The young soldier, therefore, ought to have a lively eye, should carry his head erect, his chest should be broad, his shoulders muscular and brawny, his fingers long, his arms strong, his waist small, his shape easy, his legs and feet rather nervous than fleshy. When all these marks are found in a recruit, a little height may be dispensed with, since it is of much more importance that a soldier should be strong than tall."

The exercises Vegetius recommends consist of running, jumping, vaulting, javelin throwing, drilling, marching, swimming, and for some troops archery and slinging. Not really stuff that's going to pack on the mass.

The whole thing is a pretty interesting read:

digitalattic.org/home/war/vegetius/

Ahh I see we've got babbys first history book.

Anyway, using Agincourt as a good example of knights "not being that strong" is fucking retarded. In the grand scheme of things being bogged down in any sort of armor will fuck you royally in battle no matter if it was a peasant boy or a modern day NFL player. Its just a stupid example which is a fluke for the time period.

That would make sense if it wasn't complete horse shit

A full set of armor at the time of Agincourt weighted at most 30 KG, which is about as much as a modern soldier carries today. The fact that French knights were consistently exhausted after marching (not running) about 300 yards shows that Medieval knights were not nearly as strong or conditioned as modern soldiers. This happened not only at Agincourt but also Crécy and Poitiers.

The armor worn by the nobility at Agincourt was not yet the true "fullplate" seen later in the century. It was somewhat lighter and more maneuverable. Yet even then it was too heavy and cumbersome for the knights to effectively fight in.
youtube.com/watch?v=I7CUfkGLB48

You seem to be out of your depth.

...

How tall would knights be if they persisted to the present day? I figured 5'9 and up would be most likely.

nigger it gets larger as in width. why are lanklets such stupid little faggots

That's Milo of Croton you are talking about user. He was a 5 time champion wrestler and would consume meat by the kilos.

His death was actually pretty badass. He attempted to split an oak with his barehands, but he got stuck and was eaten by a pack of wolves

Do you think people back then were mentally healthier and happier because their work and suffering gave them true purpose in life

Get a job.

Do you think they were happier because they didn't have alarm clocks and insomnia was basically non-existent

Right, thats the guy, thanks. First lifting motivation right there back in HS history class kek

blood cake? no wonder their empire fell

they were absolutely happier living to 40, having their teeth rot out of their mouths, subsisting on a diet of bread and beer, working 12 hours a day, hard physical labor, and getting tortured by their owner. Life was objectively better.

Uh wtf
We eat that shit at school
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blodplättar
Blood has tons of iron and your mussels love it

>big weights with handles they swing around over their heads

yeah because knights are a completely different race. What kinda idiot are you?

Some of the heaviest swords were the two-handed Scottish claymores, which weighed 10lbs each. Most swords weren't nearly that heavy.

Also I'd like to add that we have this thing too
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mykyrokka
And it tastes fucking awesome. Fatty meats, liver, blood and potatoes. Real Veeky Forums food.

you remind me of a certain guy on Veeky Forums, oh the memories

...but that one doesnt lift so disregard me pls, kek

can confirm. not finfag but very fond of anything offal related, ate this a couple times when I stayed there.

>mfw bulking on 4k kcal worth of haggis back in the UK
those were the days

4/10 for effort

user, even a large broadsword weighed only 2kg.

Indian clubs, Persian meels, those weird little axe things, and the gada mace. That shit will blow your back, chest, and shoulders up, son.