Chicken Legs

It's human nature for us to be drawn to our own strengths, as opposed to work on our weaknesses to be more well rounded. Below is an excerpt from the Thoughtful Sensei blog on this topic. The full post may be read here.

189. Samurai Chicken

Having been an athlete since grade school where I ran track as a sprinter before getting into playing competitive football through my high school years, I’ve been in weight rooms and gyms my entire life training before eventually moving into dojo and martial arts.  For me and others like me, staying in shape became an obsession literally decades ago which is why, at age 70 (well, if you count gestation like the Japanese it actually makes me 71) I can easily operate like someone 20 years my junior.

Part of that fitness obsession included a lot of research on what could be called “balanced training” such as nutrition, structuring training routines, and discipline (in their application).  That research covered Japanese concepts that eventually led to a tattoo; speaking to balance.  Ever since being inked, I’ve strived to remember the two mottos (here roughly paraphrased) which are; Ningen Keisei (become a complete human being) and Bun Bu Ryo Dou (living a life in balance).

This includes life in the gym, resistance training, working to stay flexible and limber and also includes the same ideas of “balance” in the dojo as I work through the material.

So today I’m in the gym trying to get back to (and stick with) a regular resistance training routine when I look up and in front of me is a guy preparing to run through sets of chest press using dumbbells.  When I do sets of chest press, my working weight is 40 to 45 pounds per dumb bell (or per hand).  He was working with dumb bells that were 70 pounds each and then he pyramided up to 100 pounds in ten-pound increments.  Impressive for someone who was not a pro football player (based on his size) or an obvious power lifter.

He completed the set and stood up from the bench and since he was wearing shorts, I saw them as he rose.  The legs.  The skinny, scrawny, undeveloped legs. The legs that looked like they had never done any lower body work such as free bar squats, or deadlifts.  His legs were smaller than most peoples’ arms.  It was an amazing moment of cognitive dissonance, this exhibit of upper body over-development and lower body neglect.

Times change as does street slang but when I first began hanging out at gyms and focusing on resistance training the nickname for this was “Bar Body”; someone who hyper-developed the chest, arms, and shoulders so-as to impress someone while buying them a drink.  That was the “kinder” term.  The other term, not quite as nice was “Chicken Man” or sometimes “Turkey Legs”; someone who had a large body (like a good size fryer) but who had the skinny leg bones of a bird.  I still remember once knowing a female co-worker who took one of these specimens’ home from a bar one night and couple of days later at the office, she got talkative and said “WTH …. That’s false advertising.  I was cheated”.  All I could do was laugh.

Martial arts and dojo have much the same issue with many deshi as they come up in rank.  They gain rank, improve ability, move forward in understanding, and one day look up and decide that so-and-so kata set is a little too difficult and uninteresting when compared to other kata (that are easier); much like Chicken Man decided somewhere along the way that chest and shoulders were easier than leg day so they’d do the easy and pass by the hard.