I was training for an in-house amateur fight night but I reinjured a calf and could not continue. Then I threw a pity party for myself and completely derailed my fitness and weight loss that I had progressed on. So ... four weeks ago I started the slow process of inching my body back into being able to go through some workouts. My cardio level is terrible. Fight night is December 7th of this year (2018) and I'm going to sign up to be an alternate in case my calf gives me problems again. I feel my greatest obstacle is my stamina. Sure, EVERYTHING else could be improved but none of that matters If I'm bent over holding my shorts in the first round. I need to focus on stamina while also improving my defense, movement and of course offense. Next I'll talk a bit more on what I think my priorities are, and how I plan to try and verify it.
The local gym I go to has a really good sports performance, power lifting, martial arts, and fitness boxing. Around the time I started to train for the in-house fight night an actual boxing coach with a small stable of fighters asked if the could use the place as a base. His fighters do well locally and from watching him he seems to know what he is doing and is sincere. However, what the hell do I know? He's what we have, so I'm going to use him. Since stamina is my main issue, the few times I've gone to the open gym that the facility now pays for this boxing coach to run, It's been after a class (mitts, etc) and I'm just not in shape enough to get through it easily enough to get full benefit. The "classes" are for fitness and I feel that it's actually a negative for me. The fitness boxing classes certainly have their place, but because they are attempting to get you to burn calories, form is sacrificed. Sure, they work with you a bit on it but "good enough" is all they really need you to do. I respect that. I've decided to get a heavy bag for home and do coach based stuff at the facility, and do bag work at home. I know the coach will have me do bag work at the facility so that will occur, but for things that are all about the work I need to do on my own, it will happen at my house. Plenty I can do there. My plan is to engage with this coach and have him help assess where I am and what I need to do in order to be the best I can be on Fight Night. My defense is terrible so I expect that to be a focus. Sparring, of course, and whatever else he says. I'm researching heavy bags now. I've read a few threads here and aside from the standard side-tracking into arguments, I got some good thoughts.
Current Stats Age: 50 Ht: 6' 2" Wt: 260 lbs In a former life when I'd box (ha!) against my Latino friends in the military, I'd just take the punishment and dish out power. By "power" I mean MY power, not the kind of power that someone that actually has power would show. Back then I didn't mind the contact. I think this would be a terrible strategy now, of course. I tell you all this because I don't have much defense. I did improve when I was marking toward my last fight night, so I have to get that back and go forward from there.
I've been working on fitness, form, and combinations, no sparring yet. Next week I'm going to add a small group session to work on defense. I'll also re-look up some drills I can do at home to reinforce movements. I need to get to where I don't have to think so much about what I'm doing. That makes me hesitate.
Things are going well. I can feel my cardio getting better here and there. I suppose I should say "in better shape" because I'm able to recover quicker. If I train well, do decent nutrition, sleep, etc. then a good mark of fitness is the ability to recover for the next workout, and go harder doing it. For boxing I am focusing on footwork and form, and connecting movement and punches. I do some combos but stay at no more than a three-punch sequence. I'll add more as I go but I want to ensure that I have what I'll use most down very well before trying to get too fancy. My lead hand is my focus. Not just repetitive jabs to the face, but jab-move, move-jab, varied speeds and timing. Sometimes tap the gloves, sometimes snap into them, sometimes extend to punch through the back of their skull, etc. For rear hand I'm working on speed and snap, getting the hips into it. At times just a rear punch like when backing up, etc. but others just a viscous (for me) snap. Reach out and grab that dollar.
Also I met with the only real boxing coach we have at the facility. I'll give a report on that later.
Let me set this up by saying what I'm hoping to do is an in-house Fight Night. They try to pair people up to make the fights as fair as possible. I'm not new to combat but boxing is different, right? The more I try to do learned boxing, the worse I am. Since I've been working on boxing itself, that has been slowly turning around. I want to box, not brawl, so I'm working hard at it. During all this when I say "Strong" I mean "For us normal guys". I know in these forums some people feel they are amazingly strong, and others actually are. I'm not on par with people here, and I know that. So take all my thoughts and apply it to the normal jackass walking around that does these in-house Fight Nights. I'm one of those jackasses. The problem is that I've never really worried about defense. My defense has been to make the other person leery about committing too much to what they are trying to do. Here is what I, and the boxing coach know. That approach only works until you get someone that knows what they are doing, then it falls apart quickly. Sure, I may take some punishment to dish it back out and do well, or I may not. Either way it's brawling, not boxing. Additionally, brawling takes a bunch of energy, and my fitness isn't where it needs to be for that. And again I don't want to do it anyway. The boxing coach knows me a bit from before my calf went wild. I worked with him a bit, in addition to a mitts instructor (not real boxing instructor) and others. Recently I've been going to his open workouts and last week I told him I was going to ask for some of his time for an evaluation and plan. I didn't tell him any "Well I used to ...." because that's then. This is now. Last week on Thursday I worked with two of his fighters. One is a good regional amateur and the other just recently earned his pro card. Both are young and in shape. Though heck I'm 50 so everybody is young and in shape, but they are in whatever shape they are supposed to be. He spoke to them and had them do this and that, and here and there asked me to do something different. I know he was looking to see where my defensive reflexes were, how I reacted to their movement, how badly I telegraphed things, and the punches I was comfortable connecting together. He knew my fitness was nowhere near his guys so we went for 1 minute rounds. He just wanted to see enough to evaluate or confirm. Also he made sure I sparred like I would against a normal person, and not someone that was of his fighter's level. Meaning I should let loose and go for it. So I did. Some of his comments to me were: "Heavy hands." "Need to relax shoulders." "Tense" "Old man strong." "Defense lacking, movement better than anticipated." "Wants to punish opponent for trying" We went into each item. Some didn't need much explanation, but others did. The "heavy hands" and "old man strong" comment led to us talking about building speed out and back, snapping and returning, and not worry about power as that would show up and maybe be even stronger, yet certainly more effective. This point I was aware of and have been working on it. The "defense lacking, movement better than anticipated" was that I'm not real good as slipping, ducking and parrying. My movement being better was side to side and not just straightforward, when I put together a jab sequence or other combo I could change angles, etc. Not GREAT at it, but better than he was thinking. The comment of "wants to punish an opponent for trying" was both a positive and an improvement point. The improvement point was back to the "defense lacking" in that not only was I not really good at the slipping, ducking and parrying, but it's also that I wasn't really trying. I don't think about it. Generally, I want my opponent not to want to throw a committed punch because I'm coming back at them. Naturally, as I stated above (or previous post), this doesn't work against even an average boxer. At times his guys would lure ME into committing then give me a quick peppering. The positive that came out of it is that I'm not afraid to take a punch. And again this could be my downfall. The coach is going to put together a game plan for me, and it will be broken out into stages. Fundamentals (footwork, defense, tossing knuckles) and fitness will be first and stay all the way to the fight. Very controlled sparring to get used to the chaos of the ring, and slow down regular action to where I can implement the defense. From there we will add in things as I progress. He did say he would like for me to keep working on ring fitness so I can give his guys' jab defense practice. Though I'm probably slow by their standards, I do have a good reach and could provide them with work against a plodding, stronger opponent. Among all this will be a fight plan. He doesn't want to give that to me right now as he wants to see my pace of improvement to get to what I really can or cannot do well. From that we will say "Well here is what we have to work with, so let's make that as good as we can and throw him in the ring." So ... the evaluation wasn't too far off from what I thought.
Tomorrow I start light jogging. Across the street from me is our indoor and outdoor recreation center. The "large loop" of the path is 1.3 miles. I'll do a combo of walking and jogging to do one lap. I won't jog as much of the 1.3 miles as I could because I want to say "Hello body, here is jogging". In time, if my body reluctantly agrees that it will accept jogging as part of a strategy to not get my a$$ kicked in the ring, I want to work up to doing three laps. Not sure why I picked that number of laps but it seems about right. At this point getting conditioning to my minimum level is about as important as anything else, so it needs attention.
Tonight is some mental toughness training via a very difficult stations type boxing workout. Though it is tough all by itself, the harder you push, the more difficult it is. That's most workouts, right? The end result will be increased fitness and maybe just a smidge quicker body.
Great workout yesterday. My body and mind are very quiet today. This afternoon is form footwork and other things. It will be a very useful active recovery.
Oh yeah, as far as the running goes, the jogging is just to get my problematic calf used to it. When I can I'll start doing various levels of interval training. I don't think I'll be doing any "get in x miles" but more "do x 40 yard sprints with active rest between" type thing. Maybe run stairs, etc. Basically do my "running" how I'll fight, with bursts of intensity followed by less intensity.
I think I'm going to close this down. The amateur section doesn't seem to get much traffic. I keep a journal in another area, though not for anybody's reading purposes, so I'll just keep that going.