Boxercise Ben

I remember Adam Booth being a similar age to Ben and also being referred to as a glorified fitness first personal trainer when he ‘hit the jackpot’. Ben won his second BBBofC trainer of the year award at the weekend… congratulations to him. If he retired tomorrow, he’s done far more than most ever will in the pro game.

 

Let’s see him train someone from scratch and get them to a world title. Somehow I think that’ll never happen.

 

Hasn’t he been working with Wardley and Moses since they turned over?

Thing is, Ben’s had close to a decade with world-class talent and resources around him. With that amount of time and opportunity, he’s basically where he should be. For many, a decade can be a whole career in itself.

 

The turn around in Leigh Wood once with Ben was impressive tbh

Not from scratch but a huge turnaround

 

Building from scratch is what all these amazing, mainly volunteer amateur coaches do. Elite professional coaches get the pick of the best amateurs and prospects, you’ll be hard pressed to find absolutely anyone taking someone from novice to world champion.

 

I don’t think professional boxing coaching maintains a high standard. It seems like anyone can do it with some ability and the right connections. Peter Fury, Ben Davison, Don Charles etc. I don’t see what they do that surpasses amateur coaches. I think the standard of coaching is low. Many of these men come out with utter nonsense and don’t have a clue about biomechanics. In the 2010s I worked alongside coaches in various sports as a biomechanist. I only spent a total of 9 months with two amateur boxing coaches. I can’t claim that they were very knowledgeable about biomechanics (I was there to augment their coaching through biomechanics) but I was extremely impressed with these two coaches and their desire to learn. They didn’t have much good to say about professional coaches (in general), to put it diplomatically. This seems to filter into nutritionists like Greg Marriott, who, with all due respect, isn’t someone I’d trust to weigh out 100g of rice.

Is Sims really a knowledgable coach? What about that Paddy guy who coached Groves?

 

To be fair, his 2 main ‘success stories’ have been Wood and Wardley, and their big wins have come with 1 punch knockouts when they’ve down on the cards. He didn’t teach them their one punch power.

His instructions when his fighter is losing is pretty clueless tbh. Just repeats ‘feints and fluidity’ over and over.

 

Greg Marriott obviously knows what he's doing from making weight perspective.

 

On the Paddy bit, I always thought that was a mad one. Years ago I had a mate who was close to him and I’d never even heard of the bloke, then he’s suddenly being talked up as the guy working with the heavyweight who’d just KO’d Klitschko for the WBO strap.

He was a decent number 2, but he should never have been anywhere near world-class talent like Groves. I know it was George who brought him in after the split, but I still think it cost him the best years of his career. He actually went backwards under Paddy, and it wasn’t until he’d had a few fights under Shane that he started to find his form again. Even then, his confidence never looked the same after he got Cobra’d.

I honestly believe he beats Froch in the first fight with Booth in the corner, and given how close the Jack fight was, that was winnable too. Fitzpatrick might be a good coach, but he was better as an assistant than the main man, and didn’t seem to know how to prepare an elite athlete for the fights of his life. And wasn’t Sims John Palmer’s henchman in Tenerife back in the day? For me McGuigan is the best coach in the UK, and the way he basically called the Dubois–Joshua ending after Ben’s between-round instructions just shows the gap.