Remembering Chuck Norris

Chuck Norris in the late 1980s

Some Personal Thoughts and Remembrances on Chuck Norris, Including His Training and Workouts

     The essay that follows are some of my personal thoughts and memories on Chuck Norris, including his influence on me as a young martial artist in the early to mid ‘80s, and my own opinions on his training, particularly his lifting workouts, when I look back on it with my current knowledge.  I have done very little research for this post, other than looking up the year a movie was made or the title of a film I may have forgotten, which means that I may be incorrect about a few things—whatever historical mistakes I may have made in what follows, then, I apologize for.  I hope, however, that you find my remembrances informative and, perhaps, entertaining.  I hope my lack of research is made up for in the personal style—I tried to write it as if I was just having a conversation with a friend and telling him about my love of all things Chuck as I remember him.  Some of what follows you may disagree with, especially if you love Norris and have your own fond memories of him, and that’s perfectly fine.

     I suppose the first martial arts movie stars that I was aware of were either Chuck Norris or Bruce Lee.  Perhaps both of them at the same time when I watched Way of the Dragon as a young man.  I wrote in my last essay on Bodhisattvas of Budo about my early love of Hong Kong Shaw Brothers kung-fu movies in the ‘80s.  But I watched those after my family had moved to Alabama in 1983, and I distinctly recall watching both Enter the Dragon and Way of the Dragon when we still lived in Arkansas, which would have been pre-’83.  At that time, Way of the Dragon was known, in America, as “Return of the Dragon.”  Though it was released in HK in ‘72, it wasn’t released in the states until after Enter the Dragon, which came out in ‘73, made Bruce Lee a household name, and resulted in his international stardom.  His untimely death the same year probably helped his fame.

     Chuck Norris was a bona fide, real martial arts champion in the ‘60s and early ‘70s, but his inclusion in Way made him known to the public outside of martial arts circles.  He and Bruce Lee were friends before filming the movie, and it was Lee who insisted that he was cast as the villain.  Their final showdown, filmed in the actual Roman Colosseum, is still, to this day, one of the great fight scenes for the silver screen, showcasing both of their real-world martial abilities.  Apparently, the movie crew even had to bribe local officials to gain access.

     In the ‘80s, once I took up martial arts training myself and then began lifting weights when I was 13, I really fell in love with martial arts movies, and watched every single Chuck Norris movie that I could get my hands on or any that came on television.  When my father bought our family a VHS player/recorder in 1983—I’m pretty sure he paid around $500 for it, a huge sum of money at the time for a device such as that—I would go to all of the local movie rental businesses, and rented just about every martial arts film, American or International, that those stores had in stock, assuming I could scrabble together enough money from chores or cutting grass.  At the same time, the action movie was on the ascension, particularly with the movies of Arnold and Stallone.  Though Norris’s films were filled with fight scenes, they were really just action movies that happened to contain martial arts.  Cannon films—they deserve an essay of their own if I was writing about ‘80s action movies alone—signed Norris as their answer to Sly and Schwarzenegger.  The Missing in Action franchise was little more than a cash-grab to take advantage of the success of Stallone’s Rambo series.  Missing in Action 2: The Beginning, for some reason, was my personal favorite as a kid, though I definitely enjoyed Invasion U.S.A. and Delta Force.  I also rented Norris’s pre-Cannon* movies such as Good Guys Wear Black, Force of One, The Octagon, Forced Vengeance, and Lone Wolf McQuade.  Looking back on his early movies, none of them were what you could legitimately call “good,” with, perhaps the exception of The Octagon, which introduced me to ninjas—if you were a Gen-X kid, you can probably well remember the ninja craze of the ‘80s.  Of those movies, my favorite was Forced Vengeance.  It’s almost entirely forgotten about today—I had forgotten about it myself until I started penning this and remembered just how much I loved it, and the numerous times that I watched it.  I imagine it wouldn’t be seen in a good light nowadays, seeing as how it has a hard-to-stomach rape scene. If Norris actually did make one great film, it was 1985’s Code of Silence, a neo-noir action thriller directed by Andrew Davis and originally intended to be the 4th Dirty Harry movie.

     Norris’s physique evolved, from the hairy, pasty white, muscular-but-kinda-soft build in Way of the Dragon, to his much bigger-but-more-ripped frame that he eventually possessed in Delta Force 2 in 1990.  For that one, he was big yet still lean.  I knew a little about physical training by that point, and I suspected then, as I do now, that for DF2 he had a little “help” to acquire his build.  Lou Ferrigno trained him for that one, and he never looked quite that good before or after.  He did have a well-built physique, however, in a movie he made the year before, Hero and the Terror.  For it, he was trained by Benny Podda.  If you have never heard of Podda, then I would suggest looking him up.  If I start writing some “classic bodybuilding” articles on ‘80s bodybuilders, I will be sure to include one on him.  Podda even had a Vice article written about him around a decade ago, when he was living in a cave and had become one part medicine man, one part Taoist chi kung practitioner, and one part Steve Justa-style lifter.

     In the ‘80s, Norris’s training—before Podda and then Ferrigno—consisted of 3 days per week of full-body workouts interspersed with 3 days per week of cardio and martial arts.  His weight workouts were usually circuit-training affairs consisting of your basic, “big” lifts done for 3 to 4 sets of 10-12 reps.

     If you’re younger than me, or were never more than a casual fan or observer, you might primarily think of the TV show Walker, Texas Ranger, which ran from 1993 to 2001.  It gave the world a more toned-down, family-friendly Chuck Norris.  Or, when it comes to training, you might think of the “Total Gym.”  In the late ‘90s, throughout the early ‘00s, he and Christie Brinkley appeared in numerous infomercials hocking the piece of home-training equipment.  My Uncle Kirk—who is now 75, and who my sons say is the best-built “old man” they’ve ever laid eyes upon—was always a hardcore, old-school powerlifter who used full-body workouts centered around the “big 3” a la Bill Starr and plenty of free-weight movements, along with stone lifting, tire flipping, and other odd lifts, but he was also a fan of Norris.  When Norris became a spokesman for Total Gym, my Uncle purchased one.  That was around 30 years ago.  He still has it, and still uses it when he needs a higher-rep, joint-friendly program.  I mention that only because it’s my sole experience of the machine.  When I head out to Texas for a vacation at my family’s cattle ranch, I typically train with a combination of free weights and the Total Gym.  I’m still not sure exactly what to think of it, but if you like training with ultra high reps and/or you enjoy bodyweight-centric workouts, you might find it worthwhile.  I mainly like it for arm work, both biceps and triceps, and like to combine that with bodyweight work, such as push-ups, chins, and bodyweight squats.

     As far as martial arts training was concerned, I never personally thought much of Norris.  Now, do not get me wrong here!  Norris was the real deal, and he was probably the greatest fighter to ever become a movie star.  There were other great fighters who starred in movies, such as Bill “Superfoot” Wallace and Benny “The Jet” Urquidez, but they weren’t movie stars.  Other movie stars, such as Jean Claude Van Damme, Steven Seagal, or Asian ones like Jet Li and Jackie Chan, might have also been skilled martial artists.  Chuck Norris in his heyday would have mopped the floor with every single one of them, and it wouldn’t have been close.  I’m simply talking about technique, and what he was capable of aesthetically.  For aesthetics, I’d take Jet Li every time.  Heck, I’d take Van Damme.  As a teenager, since I was highly flexible—I can still do a full split with a bit of warming up even in my 50s—I admired Van Damme.  Chuck Norris might have been able to kick the living crap out of my 17-year-old self.  But, hey, I could out kick the man.  Still can. (The video below is from a few years ago, right around the time I turned 50.)

     Unfortunately, for anyone who grew up in the age of the internet, such as my Gen-Z sons, when they think of Norris, they think of all of those stupid memes that seemed to be everywhere around a decade ago.  Some of them were funny.  I’ll admit that.  I had a colleague at work around then who would always send out emails with them to me and my fellow co-workers.  My favorite was: “Chuck Norris went to the Virgin Islands.  Now, they’re just the Islands.”  But Norris was too great of a martial artist, movie star, and person to be reduced to such frivolity.

     In this century, Norris might be best known for his “Conservative” politics and his embrace of low-church, evangelical Protestant Christianity.  In 2012, he campaigned for—and hit the campaign trail with—the Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, a former Baptist preacher himself.  Now, in what follows, I do not mean to imply that there is anything “wrong” with that.  Norris was always a Republican, the same as many other action movie stars of the ‘80s, such as Bruce Willis, Mel Gibson, and Norris’s “competitors,” Arnold and Sly.  But in recent years, he was a far cry from the beer guzzling, womanizing, Zen-sitting (see cover poster for Force of One) idol of my youth.  That’s fine.  Everything’s impermanent, after all.  We all change, decade-to-decade, year-to-year, moment-to-moment.  If you reach my age, and you’re the same person you were in your youth, well, something’s wrong.  You were either a very wise, mature young person, or, most likely, you have never matured.  I’ve seen folks like that on occasion.  It’s a sad, pitiful sight—50-year old men who cling to their youth and are still hanging out at bars, chasing women half their age (or, heck, their age).  You see that in lifting and martial arts circles, as well.  Guys my age who take high levels of testosterone so that they can still move the heavy iron, or who stare at themselves in the mirror each morning, and tell themselves that they’re still the toughest guys in town.  Norris was always a patriotic Republican, and a man of honor and integrity, it seems—I suppose he just embraced that more as he aged.

     I only own one book of Norris’s—The Secret Power Within: Zen Solutions to Real Problems, written in the mid ‘90s.  I have it somewhere in my attic-filled library of books and magazines.  I tried to find it while I was working on this essay.  No luck.  From what I remember of it, however, I wasn’t that impressed.  Not that it didn’t have some good advice, and a few interesting stories from his acting and fighting days.  But it didn’t have very much to do with real Zen.  It was, however, similar to the kind of stuff that you always hear about Zen in American Karate dojos—the kind of thoughts that have more to do with modern self-help books from guys like Tony Robbins or Wayne Dyer than any of the myriad of Zen patriarchs down through the ages.  If you like Norris, and don’t know anything about Zen in the first place, I also suppose you might find it interesting.  I’d give it a thumbs-sideways.

     Ultimately, when I think of Chuck Norris, I can’t help but think of my youth, my innocence, my self-indulgent love for pretty bad action movies.  I think of Missing in Action 2, when the Vietnamese decide to torture his character Braddock by placing a hungry rat inside of a burlap sack, then tying that sack tight around Braddock’s neck.  They then hang Braddock upside down, and the next thing you know, the entire sack is filled with blood.  The Viet Cong, of course, think that the rat has killed Braddock by chewing out his eyes, or eating away at his throat, or some other such nonsense.  When the sack is removed, the rat is, of course, dead inside of Chuck’s bloody teeth.  Man, it was a great scene for a 12-year old me.  Or, I think of some of his best one-liners.  Such as the simple and straight-to-the-point one from Invasion U.S.A.: “Restov, it’s time to die.”  But maybe, just maybe, the greatest is from Code of Silence: “If I want your opinion, I’ll beat it out of you.”

     Norris, in truth, could have beat it out of just about everyone of us.  Maybe that’s how he should be remembered—as a man who, in real life, was just about as tough as any of the characters he played.  Most action stars couldn’t say that.  Chuck Norris could.

*It’s a possibility that some of these were Cannon films and I’m mistaken.