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- Dec 17, 2016
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Oh okay, cool. Hard to gauge, but if you saw and felt improvements that's all that matters. There's no reason not to do it (unless you have certain shoulder issues).
Thanks for the article, a cool read. A lot of relevant stuff in there, but I don't know if it is enough to end the discussion. The only thing that directly pertains to your argument was this part:
"In 1983 B.A. Solovey investigated the effects of exercises with weights as a means of improving hitting speed in young boxers and concluded that the use of weights significantly increased the speed of a single punch thrown by either arm.5"
Unfortunately I can't find the study and a broad statement like that, especially without looking into the source material, is not conclusive enough. Participants, intervention, bias, overall study quality matters and even then it would probably still be inconclusive.
Mostly the author is talking about periodization, plyos and olympic lifts. The Holyfield example was different. They had him tied to the floor with resistance, weight vest on, doing all kinds of shenanigans. His working sets were 8-11 range too and he gained weight with the purpose of going up to HW.
I think we've reached an impass. I don't think we could conclusively prove either of us to be definitively right. My sample size is N=1 so there is room for me to be an outlier. I do believe strength training the whole body would improve power and hand speed. I do believe that that would be best accomplished inside a vacuum where technical work like bags and pads are not involved by performing squats/deads/cleans/presses (which would include pressing in all directions) and upperbody pulls (rows/pull ups). Everything from you foot->hand matters in generating force in a punch but the lower body is more important for sure. I'll try to find more studies but I doubt I'll find anything relevant directly to bench/dips/other form of pressing to hand speed improvements.