[Sports Illustrated, 1985]: Article on Michael Spinks and Shilstone

Yeah, there is always the KO in boxing. But the refusal to believe that changes for the better have happened... That there isn't a good reason for them even though they have endured for decades. Maybe that belief also is wide spread when it comes to other traditional martial arts. It doesn't seem to be for MMA, though.

It so strange to see posters here twist themselves in knots in their refusal. Claiming that new methods who have taken place over the whole spectrum of sports are beneficial everywhere except in boxing...

 

Some agreements, some disagreements:

1) MMA -- Yes. It's interesting that Rickson is the last guy who doesn't have much film of his prime career. Lots of sparring stories, gym and backroom fights, etc. He's also the guy who some MMA fans still believe would beat the best guys today. I think Rickson is a good example of hero worship in the absence of good film, which should be a warning to modern fans who idolize the unfilmed fighters of the 1910s and earlier.

2) TMAs -- Yes. Traditional martial arts are much more likely to have legends about the older guys. I sometimes wonder whether Kimura gets this treatment among the judo community, but I'm not familiar enough with that community to say.

3) One major difference between boxing and a lot of these sports is its age. Boxing has over 200 years of historical lineage behind it. (As a sidenote: It's actually very surprising how much we know. We have a good idea how Cribb trained for Molyneux, for example, and we know roughly how Mendoza fought.) 200+ years of professional sport performance is long enough to produce a few anomalies -- guys born with really abnormal abilities, like Henry Armstrong's perpetual motion stamina, Ali's combination of reflexes, speed, and durability, or (you might disagree with me on this one) Fitzsimmons's punching power. So even if our era is better overall, we wouldn't expect a complete monopoly on freakish fighters, because they haven't all been born in this era.

4) Boxing is different because so much depends on skill, mental toughness, and your opponent's technique. Throwing a shot put is straightforward. Throwing punches at a guy who is trying to throw punches back at you is not straightforward. You might be a much better athlete than your opponent, but if he has the right style, if he's stubborn and mean, and if he knows you're a sucker for a particular technique, you're in trouble. Guys who support the old-timers sometimes point to their allegedly greater experience as professionals, or the tougher culture that produced them. I think that these claims have some validity. The best athlete is not always the guy who wins a fight.

5) The earlier you go, the more boxing really DOES look like a different sport. There's no delusion in claiming that Fitzsimmons would be very dangerous to Roy Jones under turn of the century rules -- just as it wouldn't be unreasonable to ask whether Federer could beat a professional badminton player from 1920. [Full disclosure: I have no idea whether professional badminton even existed in 1920, but it's an analogy, so I'll run with it.]

6) Yes, the rejection of modern sports medicine looks a lot like myopia to me. I think BitPlayerVesti's approach makes some sense -- to allow for tradition to have a voice, but to put heavy weight on scientific studies and actual evidence.

 

In somewhat related news, Shilstone is all over the news today due to people noticing actor John Goodman's dramatic weight loss (about 100 lbs), which was due to him getting Shilstone as his personal trainer. That's in some ways more impressive than what he did for Spinks. Taking a 29 year old who's a great athlete and building him up in size is one thing, but taking a nearly 70 year old recovering alcoholic and helping him lose 100 lbs is more difficult in a lot of ways.

 

Tennis, football and golf also have long traditions. And plenty of technique as well as mental dimension.

But I don't rule out that exceptional fighters of the past would be succeful today. I refrain from being firm in those predictions. I just think it's odd to claim that no advancements have been made.

 

That explains *some* of the popularity of weight training among athletes, but not among coaches or the sports science field.

 

I think an interesting question is would it look different between say:
The 1920's boxing being better than now
The 1920's boxing being about the same as now
The 1920's boxing being worse than now

I don't think the old cameras, and especially the degraded footage, pick up enough of the nuances to tell from footage

It's true as well, that all the small changes over the decades add up to it looking like a different sport, and to compare them at all takes a leap of imagination.

I think a big issue is the relationship between tradational knowledge and sports science is really disfunctional (massively generalising of course). The guys with the tradional knowledge rarely have any scientific backround, and a lot of the sports science guys don't seem to have any real traditional training knowledge. I don't get why more sports scientists don't start with what the coaches were already doing, and understanding that, before trying to change it. And both sides can end up seeing each other as out of touch fools.

Though the difference in football as you go back is probably even more dramatic than boxing. The mob football games were basically just excuses to have a big fight, bordering a riot, and I've heard the earliest reference is to it being banned (which I think supports Glaukos's idea that boxing was continuous through the middle ages, though I don't think there's enough evidence to say either way).

 

A counter would be, what are most of those sports scientists doing themselves? (even before getting invloved with it)

I doubt most of them are scrambling out mountains, and swimming in lakes.

 

So I was a bit curious after reading your post, and I googled Federer and Borg together. From my very cursory search, it looks like some tennis fans do give Borg a chance, or pick him to win, especially in his own era with both sides forced to use primitive racquet technology.

Also, I think mindset, toughness, and the like are more important in boxing than most other sports. Football being a possible exception.

Does football really have technical refinements close to boxing's level, and are its techniques as opponent dependent?

 

If we're using that argument, we can eventually wipe out all of our accumulated sports knowledge.

Why do boxers use so much long, slow distance running in heart rate zones designed for fat loss? Because they want to look lean and attractive! And so do their personal trainers, and all the sports scientists who say that running is good for stamina. Like weight training, what looks on the surface like a heavily evidenced, widespread training technique is actually just a delusion caused by mass narcissism.

 

Well I don't think the argument is that weights are useless (certainly not what I think), but just there is likely a bias, which could cause their usefullness to be overstated, or atleast their superiority to other methods. A bias certainly doesn't make the information useless, if that's the case beyond sports knowledge, you've wiped out most scientific knowledge too! But it is something to be aware of and consider.

I don't think it's impossible either that a fair number of the training changes are much of a muchness, and they're basically just achieving the same things in different ways, using popular methods of the day, and what's familar to the coach.

https://streamable.com/rsf0c
Like this doesn't look like something you'd see in modern training.

https://streamable.com/oaasv
But how different is it really from this?

https://streamable.com/m0wwf
And how is this

https://streamable.com/33cc4
Practically different than this?

 

So there are two different arguments in your post. I'll address the one about narcissism for now:

At this point, I think you bear a pretty heavy burden of proof. If you want to allege that there's a systemic, irrational pro-weights bias, driven by narcissism, across the entirety of sports science, you're going to have to pull out more than the observation that lots of people train with weights to look good. Especially since exactly the same charge can be leveled against running, but you aren't ready to downgrade the effectiveness of running.

 

I don't think you have to nearly that far, as maybe Unforgiven did.

Would you agree weight training is popular, especially amoung the type of people doing Sports Science? I don't think that's very contentious. It also doesn't matter why it's popular, or if there's anything wrong with doing it (which I certainly don't think there is)

And that could cause bias in various ways. They'll know how to implement weight training better, which means they'll tend to get better results from it. They'll be more aware of it than other methods, meaning it's weights that'll be studied more for benefits, or they'll see benefits from it and be unaware that existing methods get these benefits (in some cases better). And overall, it means basing your training off that is going to cause it to tend more to weights than otherwise.

Like I said, it doesn't make it worthless or anything, it's just a bias, which exist in basically all research to varying degrees. The pharmaceutical have a much stronger bias in studying their own products, and this has caused problems, but that's what there's to work with, and it doesn't mean you throw out medicine.

 

All of these sources of bias would have some evidence beyond the mere fact that they use weights themselves, though. I have no problem with you showing that one of more of these sources of bias exist, but you'd still have to show it.

And again, it wouldn't just apply to weight training. Tons of people run, too. Running is very popular. Why wouldn't running have exactly the same problem?

 

Well you could look to see if anyone has researched, I consider it a pretty minor point anyway, though an interesting one.

I mean what ways would you look into it? A systematic review of sports science litature, looking at the prevelence of difference methods, the competancy of the implementation (though how you'd measure that without bias in itself is a tricky one), and publication bias. Maybe include a large scale survey of sports scientists, to find out their backgrounds and familarity with different training methods. I mean maybe I could do it for my thesis, if I decided to do a PhD.

As for bias with running, yeah maybe, though while running is popular, hardly anyone does anything like proper running training. That probably has influenced the research on running to some extent, like there's been studies on plyometrics improving running, but (atleast from the studies I've seen), they don't include strides in the control group, even though elite and college runners all do them, but for some reason hardly any recreational runners do them.

Honestly another counter this argument, is that from what I've seen strength coaches are mostly pretty critical of how strength training is implemented in studies too. Though I mean it also depends if you're training to improve training or just understand exercise phisiology.

 

Whether 20's boxing was better or worse than the current one is really a separate argument from the one we're having. This is strictly an argument whether the methods that were introduced by Shilton and others, and which have been refined since then, were an improvement or not.

If we're talking about the whole arc of boxing's development other factors might plausible come into play as well. As for example numer of pro fights, talent pool etc. But that's not what's being discussed here.