I think it was a party trick type thing. You would have to do it just right or the nail would go through your hand.
Many old-timers, including Maher, used interval training. weighs, bag-punching, road work, wrestling, sparring, rope work were also included as well as shadow-boxing. Nuitrition also played a part. For some strange reason to-days people seem to think old-timers were dumb and didn,'t look for the edge or even know what type of training made good fighters. To-days trainers have the advantage of accumulative knowledge and better measuring methods but the basics of the very basic spoet of boxing remains the same.
"but the basics of the very basic spoet of boxing remains the same." The spoRt is just spelt different!
Good post. In theory Jack Johnson's diet - that is, the food that he ate and understood to be good for him - was basically no different from what I would advise anyone in training to eat. Plenty of meat and fish married to the understandint that to much red meat was not good - again, ahead of the science as Janitor has pointed out - and plenty of green leafy vegetables. To hear people cry about "modern nutrition" you would think these guys were popping deep fried maltesers in training. Of course they had brandy in the corner up until the turn of last century, so some advancements have been made...
Perhaps the biggest nutritional advance since the time of Bob Fitzsimmons is the widespread availability of pasta. No I am not joking.
I daresay the ancient Olympians (2500 years ago) incorporated "interval training". Modern sports science has really just provided general or specific guidelines on the quantitative aspects of training. Running, rest, heart rate, weight resistance - HOW FAR ? HOW LONG ? HOW MANY ? HOW MUCH ? That's the great contribution of scientific observation study/experiments. The actual activities that make up the training itself have not been severely changed. Any modern advocate who says "X has been proven worthless as a training method" is usually talking absolute ****, as is he when he says "Y is a completely modern method of training resulting from sports science studies". Scientists studied athletes training to see HOW IT WORKED, then moved on to see how it can BEST work (generally). Modern athletes do the same as their ancient predecessors, but with the help of scientific studies they can all, theoretically, do it more economically (ie. with quicker results). The actual activities that make up training the human body are not at all sophisticated. Think about it, some Russian professor can write a 500 page book on "plyometrics" with a ton of jargon, and all sorts of charts and graphs, but the actual exercises that make up "plyometrics" are obviously something a caveman can do.
your right mac it's a great book.i've waxed lyrical about this work by pollack on here before but really i'd advise any of the guys on here to purchase it.it's a fascinating insight chronicling the mans whole career (including his training methods) up to and including the corbett fight using mainly primary sources.(no i'm not pollack's agent!)
Maher lost to only two fighters in his first 13 years as a pro and reversed the loss to Goddard. In that time he also defeated O'Donnell, Godfrey, Slavin, Choynsky and Ruhlin as well as a slew of other good contenders like Dunkhorst, CC Smith, Klondike, Conroy, Kennedy. He at least held his own with Hall, Sharkey, Denver Ed Smith and McAuliffe. He knocked out hundreds of lesser lights and was pretty unlucky in the first Fitz fight. He was generally recognised as Heavyweight champion from late 1895 until early 1896 and for about 12 years was a leading contender. Hell of a shitty (boxrec?) fighter!
Fitzsimmons indulged in heavy stamina based training - long hikes and bike rides of the 18 mile variety. Fitzsimmons fully understood the dynamics of scattered training, eating correctly, sleeping at the right times and bringing his body to boil just before fight time.
Nobody infringes on Marciano in this area. If it might seem he (Fitz) does, Pollack needs to write his next book about Marciano. Marciano would have clubbed Fitz into another realm of being Not that he would have killed him (Marciano would have stopped before that had any chance of happening)... but Fitz would be seeing things in a fantasy land he never thought existed. Scrambled brains create a lot of interesting imagery!