The warriors of Dragon Ball Z are famous for their intense training tools. Some of their spaceships have gravity multipliers for when the pull of a planet simply isn’t enough gas for them gains. They bend time itself with so-called hyperbolic chambers when there just aren’t enough days before a beatdown. But maybe the most famous DBZ training tool is a simple one — if you wanted to get suped-up like Goku, should you wear weighted clothes?
In my latest episode of Because Science, I’m looking into exercise science to figure out whether or not wearing weighted clothing–shirts (vests), wristbands, and ankle bands–all of the time would really produce a marked increase in strength like the manga and anime consistently show.
A few studies go over the effects of wearing weighted vests all day over the course of a few weeks, but there seems to be little to no research into the efficacy of punching, kicking, and Broly-bashing with ankle and wrist weights. Even so, with a little knowledge about how this clothing changes the forces on our body, I think we can come to a conclusion I’d bet a Senzu bean on.
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