Humans have fought since time immemorial- we’re an ornery lot. Like other apes, men have fought to establish their position in the pecking order or to kill, but they’ve also fought for money and glory. Over the years, humans have invented more ways to fuck each other up than one could count, ranging in scope and intensity from the on-its-face-ludicrous-but-apparently brutal Russian slap fighting to atomizing each other with nuclear weapons, but they all have one thing in common- the desire to inflict pain and damage upon one’s opponent.
Humans being the apex predators and unrepentant destructive psychotics that we are, have learned over the years that simply practicing technique is not enough when one must stand toe-to-toe with their opponent and attempt to impose their will on them- physical fitness, stamina, and strength are also key elements to victory. As such, just about every style of combat ever developed has a concomitant training program that compliments and enhances it, much like corn starch and MSG takes any basic Chinese takeout from “meh” to “this is the greatest food a human being could ever eat while hungover.”
Before we jump into strength and conditioning training for fighting, however, I’d like to clue you guys into some badass fighting styles that aren’t often discussed, which is tragic because these styles are more obscure than Pantera’s OG rival band Exhorder and even more fucking brutal (seriously though, give Exhorder a listen if you love Pantera).
Random Weird Fight Sports From Around the World
Russian Fist Fight
This Russian martial art usually consists of two teams of Russian psychopaths pairing off and beating the everloving fuck out of each other, because vodka and evil are the primary drivers of every facet of everyday Russian life. Ironically, fist fight is allegedly the progenitor of the John Wayne-esque fight rule everyone thinks of as American as apple pie, the “don’t hit ’em when they’re down,” which is an oddly pragmatic rule for a people seemingly obsessed with being little more than drunken villains from James Bond films.
Should you be into rave music, Little Big’s Russian Hooligans video shows the sport in action.
Purring
Also known as shin-kicking, this English martial art began as part of the Cotswold Olimpick Games in or around 1622. One of several games so fucking weird that they could only have been the produce of bets between people so drunk that locomotion was a distant memory and in which double vision would be considered 20/20.
These games included a bizarre dance competition that featured the village idiot as a referee, called “dwile flonking;” piano smashing (I am not making that up); and sledgehammer throwing, so purring must have seemed like an event dreamed up by Michael Bolton while masturbating to the tune of Christopher Cross’s horrific, worthy-of-being-sent-to-the-camps song “Best That You Can Do” by comparison. It’s likely none of us will ever reach the superhuman level of drunkenness and boredom that must have resulted in these activities, but that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy watching people hurt themselves and one another for our own enjoyment thereafter.
The sport, and I use that term very loosely, was a favorite pastime of the notoriously tough and insane Cornish miners grab each other by the collar and proceed to kick the ever-loving fuck out of each other’s shins until one person quits. Somehow, these fights are determined by the winner of two out of three matches, though I cannot envision how drunk one would have to be to do that more than once. I would guess drunker than Robert Downey Jr when he broke into a neighbor’s house and passed out in their kid’s bed, which would leave me to believe this sport has its roots in drunks trying to liven each other up for the walk home after an epic day of drinking.
These days, as you can see from the above video, the sport has “elevated” itself into a self-defense style, which is tragically unfun in comparison to the balls-crazy original. Given the shortage of crazed, drunken, harder-than-fucking-adamantium coal miners in Cornwall these days, it’s unsurprising that it watered itself down to a palatable point.
Bartitsu
This hundred-plus year old hybrid martial art has recently had a resurgence (possibly due to its popularization by the Art of Manliness website) and was mentioned several times in Sherlock Holmes stories. Invented at the turn of the 20th Century by Edward William Barton-Wright, bartitsu was designed as a method of combat for English gentlemen that made use of stupid shit the English dandies of the time carried, like canes and umbrellas. Equal parts jujitsu, schwingen (Swiss folk wrestling consisting mostly of giving your opponent a gnarly wedgie), savate, canne de combat, judo, and boxing.
With that out of the way, onto training to fight, because knowing how to fight isn’t worth shit if you’re too weak and winded to impose your will on your opponent.
Ancient Greek Pankratiasts
Anyone else miss the old UFC/Vale Tudo rules wherein everything was permitted except eye gouging, fishhooking, and heatbutting? It was a time when Marco Rua used a foot stomp to win a fight, when people used to break their hands pounding their opponents into bloody hamburger, Wanderlei Silva earned his nickname “The Axe Murderer” for headbutting his way through an entire fight and had the ring looking like a scene from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and dumbass felon Kimo carried a massive cross to the cage.
If you were to hold those fights in a sand pit with a referee who was prepared to declare a corpse the victor (as happened with Arrhichton in 564 BC), you’d have the sport pankration, which was introduced to the Olympics in 673 BC and well known for being the most brutal thing going in the ancient world. It was a sport so fucking vicious that it enabled the Spartans to slaughter Persians with nothing more than their bare hands, teeth, and shattered lances at Thermopylae, and it made the Greek hoplites into some of the most fearsome fighters in human history.
Pankration matches were essentially slaughterfests, as crawling away from a fight crippled or dropping dead in the midst of a fight were about as common as shit-filled underwear after a trip to all-you-can-eat Indian restaurants. Pankratists weren’t simply more vicious than a rabid dog with its nuts caught in a mousetrap, either- they were fucking strong, and many could kick straight through a 16 lb bronze and oak aspis (hoplite shield). Given that this shield essentially turned the hoplite into a tank, kicking through one was no small feat, and receiving a kick with that kind of force could be fatal if you caught one in the chest.
Secure in the knowledge that in order to be bone-shatteringly strong, the hyperviolent death machines of ancient Greece heaved around some weights in addition to training techniques and sparring balls out for hours a day. Stone lifting and throwing were two of the favorite strength tests and methods for building the type of strength that would allow them to snap limbs even as they were being strangled to death, ancient Greek fighters, as was the use of proto-dumbbells called halteres. Additionally, they spent a hell of a lot of time stretching, running, shadowboxing, and training their “core” (oh, how I fucking loathe that term).
For the latter, they had a method worth mentioning because it deserves to be featured in Rocky 48- they would strike a punching bag as hard as possible, then tense their body for impact as the rebounding bag would slam into them like a 19 ton truck into a crowd of unsuspecting Europeans (Nurse). Compounding that would be the events of their daily lives, which often included military training and hard physical labor. To develop their strength even further, the athletes of ancient Greece would run at the end of the day and perform rigorous bodyweight exercises to transform their bodies even further into unstoppable, Terminator-esque death machines, which they then used to conquer the known world and defeat the largest army ever assembled to that point (Brown).
Indian Pehlwani
I’ve written an entire series about how the Indians trained and dieted to become some of the most badass wrestlers and strongmen in the world from the dawn of recorded history until the British ripped their balls off and fed them to the Indians like some fucking kobayashi.
Rather than rehash it, go here for the It’s Time to Stop Mocking Indians for their Clubbells series. The formatting on some of them is fucked due to converting from blogspot, and it’s a pain in the ass to redo them, but I’m getting there slowly- in time they’ll all be shiny and fresh, since I edit as I format.
That might be the most comprehensive analysis of badass, old school, sweat-your-fucking-balls-off-and-eat-ghee-like-you’re-getting-paid-to Indian pehlwan training ever written. Matt Furey’s got nothing on me. You’re welcome.
If you want the TLDR version, you need look no further than the epic Indian wrestling badass, a man so fucking tough that wrestling him was akin to attempting to fuck up King Kong while afflicted with turf toe, gingivitis, and full-blownsies AIDS- the Great Gama. Gama was fucking jacked, especially for turn of the 20th century and a region now known for spindly limbs and potbellies. Born in the Punjab in 1878, this one-man-wrecking-crew of mustachioed wrestling glory came to prominence in his very first public match at age 17, in which he fought a literal giant with enough wins under his belt to make Goldberg’s record look less fanciful. Though the match ended in a draw, Gama defeated him in a rematch and was then touted as the next champion and proceeded to lay waste to everyone in India except the Indian champion.
After a quick trip to Europe to trash all of the wrestlers on the continent (his first match was against Benjamin Roller, who had defeated Farmer Burns and Ed “the Strangler” Lewis among others, and Gama pinned Roller in a minute forty), defeated 12 wrestlers in a single day, won a forfeit by legendary strongman and 2-time world champion Stanislaus Zbysko (whom he later beat in under a minute), and then returned to India to mangle the World Champion there. By the time he was 48, Gama held the belt for the World Champion in the United States and India, and retired having fought to a couple of draws but never having been defeated, even when he wrestled over a dozen men in a single day.
Among his victories, Gama counted wins over strongman, Olympic Weightlifter and strongman Maurice Deriaz (who once defeated 44 opponents in a single wrestling tournament), the shredded Swiss champion and all-around badass Johan Lemm, a bunch of judo and jujitsu practitioners, and the greatest wrestlers (and some of the largest humans on the planet) in India.
Undefeated for over 50 years, the Great Gama was renowned for his strength and even fitness fanatic Bruce Lee was reportedly a rabid fanboy of Gama’s workout routine. When I say renowned, I mean he was Mountain-from-GoT-strong. At one point, Gama allegedly lifted a 2.5 foot tall stone weighing 2645 pounds in a bear hug, and his even the strongest of the European strongman wrestlers claimed the Great Gama was the strongest man they had ever faced. Gama was strong in the way a tyrannosaur was strong- his levels of strength and strength endurance seem hardly possible.
To fuel his initial lunacy-tinged training days, Gama reportedly drank two gallons of milk and ate one and a half pounds of crushed almonds a day, which yielded a dead-fat-man-in-Se7en-style 8545 calories, of which are 493g of carbs (and an adult diaper-filling 85g of fiber), 590g of fat, and an impressive 391g of protein. By the time he had moved to England, however, he’d ditched that vegetarian bullshit and was eating a hell of a lot of animal products as well.
“As he grew older his training routine was intensified and his diet upgraded to include meat, butter, clarified butter, and yakhi, which Alter describes as a “boiled down glutinous extract of bones, joints, and tendons, which is regarded by many Muslim wrestlers as being a source of great strength, and being particularly good for the development of knees, ankles, and other joints.” The amounts eaten by the Indian champions were prodigious, and Barkat Ali gives, with what truth I don’t know, the mature Gama’s daily diet as six chickens or an extract of eleven pounds of mutton mixed with a quarter pound of clarified butter, ten litres of milk, half a litre of clarified butter, a pound and a half of crushed almond paste made into a tonic drink, along with fruit juice and other ingredients to promote good digestion” (Noble).
Taking a dramatic turn, it looks like Gama’s diet ranged from sort-of paleo (six whole chickens are 6694 calories, 294 grams of fat and 990g of protein, which is too low in fat to be strictly keto, and what I can only describe as a Mongol’s wet dream.
The mutton/butter/ghee/milk combo would definitely light up the life of anyone on the steppe, and I’m guessing by “extract” the author means a portion of the concoction. After running the numbers, it looks like it’s a week’s worth of Mutton Grease, or whatever they call it, is 5981 calories, with 308g of fat, 66g carbs, and 689g of protein. The almond paste drink would add another 3116 calories to the mix, made up of 189g fat, 325g of carbs (33g fiber), and 61g protein, for a total of about 10000 total split 45% fat / 16% carbs / 39% protein, at least until you factor in fruit juice. Weird, but it worked.
“To give you the scope of his commanding physical presence, Gama had 30-inch thighs and a 56-inch chest. His daily routine is said to have included 3,000 bethaks (free squats), 1,500 dands (jackknifing pushups), and a one-mile run with a 120-pound stone ring around his neck. In 1908, two years before he went to London to compete for the world championship belt, Gama’s regimen was increased to 5,000 bethaks and 3,000 dands.
Every morning he would also work out by wrestling with 40 compatriot wrestlers in the royal court. He also began listing with a 100-pound grindstone and a santola (a wooden barbell made from a tree trunk).
His phenomenal diet and exercise regimen were meant to develop a pervasive and subtle energy rather than just the kinetic power of particular muscle groups. Even at the age of 50, Gama was still doing 6,000 bethaks and 4,000 dands every day and wrestling with 80 compatriots in the royal court” (Shannon 159-160).
And there are the two oldest known, codified fighting systems in the world and their training styles, plus a goofy, hybrid . If you want to jump to the next installment, about catch wrestlers, go here.
And as always, help a motherfucker out and hit up my Patreon if you feel like this shit is worth keeping porn-and-gore filled, rather than sanitized for advertising. If you already do, I really appreciate the support of strength sports counterculture- we’re the only motherfuckers keeping it alive at this point.
Sources:
Brown, Eric. Ancient Greek athletic training. Livestrong. 11 Sep 2017. Web. 24 Sep 2017. http://www.livestrong.com/article/349071-ancient-greek-athletic-training/
Dileep, Srikanth. A forgotten wrestling legend: Perhaps the greatest of them all. http://bleacherreport.com/articles/124884-a-forgotten-legend-perhaps-the-greatest-of-them-all
The Great Gama. Wikipedia. Web. 11 Oct 2017. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Gama
Noble, Graham. The lion of the Punjab- Gama in England, 1910. Journal of Alternative Perspectives. May 2002. Web. 17 Oct 2017. http://ejmas.com/jalt/jaltart_noble_0502.htm
Nurse, Paul McMichael. Pankration: Martial Art of Classical Greece. Fighting Arts. Web. 23 Sep 2017. http://www.fightingarts.com/reading/article.php?id=164
Shannon, Jake. Say Uncle!: Catch-As-Catch Can Wrestling and the Roots of Ultimate Fighting, Pro Wrestling, and Modern Grappling. Toronto: ECW Press, 2011.
