people have been demonizing it for most of the AD years i think but it’s quite pleasant really. are there any proven negative effects?
people have been demonizing it for most of the AD years i think but it’s quite pleasant really. are there any proven negative effects?
It’s all old coaches tales. Olympic athletes not only masturbate but actively fuck each other senseless during the Olympics and you don’t see any effect on their performance in the slightest. If you are such a wimp that busting a nut makes you lose your breath sooner when jogging, then you have different medical problems. Cardiac atrophy for example. Masturbating barely even burns calories to begin with.
But to be entirely fair to the guy’s point:
Lots of top athletes have superstitions about abstaining from intercourse prior to events - some are very extreme, with fighters isolating themselves from their spouses and training for months without any release before their MMA fight/boxing match. Some say they do it for, say, just a week ahead of time, etc.
There are a few who have the opposite philosophy and claim to actually do it more in the week leading up to the fight.
It’s really a massive point of contention because some people claim it is a mere superstition while others absolutely will not break their routine.
There is also the famous incident where Bobby Fisher says that he performed poorly at a tournament because he had sex after the first night and the experience totally removed him from his focus…
This might be why it impacts fighters and certain people whose lifting styles are really about maximized performance and not a routine… If concentration is interrupted, it can result in very poor output. Like I can see how someone who is very intense about what they are doing and requires total focus would be interrupted by any form of sexual distraction. This is probably very, very relevant to guys who are fighters…
This might also have to do with perspectives on sexuality - people who ascribe a lot of meaning to it versus those who do not…
Lots of stuff to consider, I think.
That’s a problem with attitudes about sex and lack of impulse control during competition. The same could be said about doing your taxes before a tournament. It can take your focus, but it is not the taxes fault. It’s your lack of impulse control to keep your mind focused on the competition. Bad coaches ignore that there is a strong psychological component to training. But it has nothing to do with the sexual nature of the stimulus, just what you do with it and what is the attitude towards it.
Still, absolutely nothing to do with any physiological element of performance. Jerking one off the night before is not going to knock off anything, much less weight in your lifting personal record, for instance.
I actually think there’s an argument to be made that a lot of top tier athletes are never doing things like their taxes prior to a big match. It’s just really anticlimactic to say “My spouse/manager/dad does all my paperwork and handles my finances before a fight” than to say “I isolate myslf from my spouse and don’t have any orgasms before a fight.”
I also think that they would make the argument that they have plenty of impulse control and focus, it’s just a matter of the extent to which one has it.
It’s one thing to be a man who does not look at p0rn or masturb8 and only sleeps with his wife and another thing to be a monk.
Interestingly if I refrain from ejaculation, the longer I go, the more aggressive my performance is. I was in the camp that it was all BS. This was in my late teens and early 20s. I decided to test this claim after a gym owner/coach/professional bodybuilder gave me his thoughts on his personal journey into gym training, explaining that he would not ejaculate 1 week prior to a set of specific exercises he had planned to PR (hit a new personal record).
I’ve gone so far from refraining to ejaculate (about 6 weeks) that I would literally urinate a mixture of urine and ejaculate - without the orgasm. Reaching this far into refraining, my aggression and focus was noticeable. More interestingly and may have been coincidental, but refraining from ejaculation even eliminated joint pain I had in my elbows from heavy bench and overhead pressing. I’m including this because apparently there’s people who have arthritis (of some sort) and after ejaculation, their arthritis flares up immediately after.
I personally don’t care if people want to call it a myth, but if you’re an athlete, you compete, or simply take weight training seriously, you should maybe test out said myth for yourself.
I joked with my wife that I couldn’t break a 685lbs deadlift, I hit a plateau there - 4 times in a row (4 different sessions) until I decided to refrain from sex for 10 days leading up to my next deadlift session where I was able to smoothly pull a 690, so smooth I debated to go after the 700 (my next milestone) but decided to save it for another time.
That is amazing - really good stuff. I will add that to my anecdotes on this topic.