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

Am I the only one who finds Dundee's aggressive ignorance on this point a bit annoying?

EDIT: He actually sounded like one of the Classic posters parodying an old-timer. Except it was too over the top for that. Not subtle enough for good satire.

EDIT 2: On second thought, it's not without its humor. Dundee talks about nutrition, whole wheat, and fruit like most trainers today talk about alcohol, prostitutes, or cocaine.

 

THE Spinks experiment...

Michael grew from 175 to 200lb in just three months between two fights in 1985. Adding weight whilst reducing body fat? Was it really that wholesome?

Still, it Revolutionised boxing training. I guess old timers just were not ready for that kind of change that long ago.

Let’s not forget Shilstone was just a 33 year old kid walking into the sport with his fancy ideas. Nobody could guess he might have some good ideas about changing the size of smaller fighters.

 

Going sub 10% body fat, while preparing for an activity requiring a high level of conditioning, and gaining muscle, is outright impossible in that time frame.

He would have cut to make 175, so that's exaggerated a bit, if you call it going from 193 @ 9.1% to 200 @ 7.1%, that's about 10 Ibs of muscle gain. And going from 9.1% to 7.1% bodyfat you should lose muscle, and even without losing fat 10Ibs of muscle gain in a few months is impossible natural. If those stats are true at all, it's obvious PED use. You have to question results from "training" that are clearly from PEDs.

 

I think the trouble is, any Tom Dick or Harry can go around calling themselves a nutritionist. Someone actually qualified in nutrition is a dietician. So a lot of nutritionists are total fruads, and would probably give counterproductive and harmful advice.

 

That may be so, but I don't think any of those objections apply to Shilstone in this scenario. Dundee was just being goofy.

Clancy had a much more reasonable take for the time, although he was pretty unfair to Spinks and Holmes.

 

It certainly raises eyebrows. He fought Jim McDonald in June at 175 then fights Larry in September at 200lb. No loss of speed, work rate and less body Fat?
At least the whole program is explained here.

I would like to see this program tested on an individual To see if it produces the same 24lb gain and passes for PED testing afterwards.

 

Dundee's attitude is the reason I don't think that "all of the good trainers are gone." The best trainers are probably training now. They know everything about boxing that Dundee knew, plus more with all the video available, and they are more open to strength and conditioning that goes beyond a few push ups, sit ups, and a morning jog. Of course PEDs are involved in S&C, but PEDs have probably been involved for 60 years or more in boxing.

Those old trainers probably knew their boxers were smoking, drinking, and eating junk, but they were adamant that their boxers stay away from weight training...Weight training changed boxing, it made the boxers faster, stronger, and more flexible. It's funny that the old trainers couldn't see the obvious, one example, a guy like Louis Monaco started boxing at 27, was just a body builder, with few skills, but his strength and speed allowed him to fight a draw with Rick Roufus (6-1) in his third fight, within a year he had beaten Peter McNeely and gone the distance with Trevor Berbeck. Sure he lost a lot of fights too, but he was always dangerous because of his strength and speed. That a guy with little training could do that with speed and strength should have been a wake up for trainers everywhere. They should have been thinking, "what if Tim Witherspoon trained with weights? With his skills..."

 

Yeah, in this case I would agree with PatM on the value of weight training, although BitPlayerVesti raised a point on nutritionists that I think deserves a fuller response.

The discussion about Dundee reminds me of something. Allow me a brief digression.

I've seen a lot of old vs modern conditioning discussions. I've noticed a trend in the people defending the old-timers' conditioning. "Classicists" (for want of a better term) will point out that the people advocating "modern" training aren't the best trainers/nutritionists/rehab specialists available. Classicists will attack the credentials or experience of modern trainers, arguing that these trainers aren't highly qualified by the standards of the modern sports medicine field.

And sometimes they're right. Even Shilstone only had a master's degree in nutrition. It's not like he's published massive volumes of peer reviewed work.

But they ignore the other half of the equation. We aren't comparing Mackie Shilstone to some doctor who published the definitive textbook on sports nutrition. We are comparing Mackie to guys like Angelo Dundee, who was an ex airplane mechanic, who never boxed, and who thinks "Nutrition sucks". If we bemoan the absence of regulation on who can call himself a "nutritionist", where we can at least check the nutritionist's educational background on his CV, then we should be REALLY worried about who could call himself a "boxing trainer" in the 1950s. Especially on questions of nutrition, which we wouldn't expect a high degree of expertise in.

In my humble opinion, it's not a question of old time wisdom versus modern bro science. It's a question of modern bro science versus older, even worse bro science.

 

well Dundee did say he had a fighter who used a nutritionist and it sounds like the focus afforded to that guy took away what from what Dundee believed needed to be done. I must stress that for most of his career Dundee was more of a chief second. Fighters were trained by their original trainer following a gameplan laid out by Dundee. He arranged the right sparring and set out time tables and came in on the last week to make sure things were running how he wanted. On the night he took command in the corner where his real expertise lay as a quick thinking strategist who knew all the tricks with the officials and mind games.

well I still think the best trainers are still very much the ones that concentrate on their strengths as a boxing person and leave the dietary and conditioning concerns to others. In this respect are there really any boxing coaches that saw or understood more things than Angelo Dundee type trainers brought to the table? Eddie Futch, Bill Gore, Manny Steward those guys were really all boxing. I could be incorrect here, but I believe that Abel shanchez, Manny Stewards, Kevin Rooney and Freddie Roach are all boxing guys. They might tolerate weight training a lot more but is this code for PEDs? Before the PED era did we see such an embracing of weight training?

Yes but I am suspicious of this. Why the sudden change?

I think this is key. At what point did it become so prolific? Weights had always been around. Strength coaches had always been around. Vitamins had always been around. A good diet had always been around with broiled fish and vegetables probably containing more Iron and wholesome properties than can be found in food today.

All that is new is the growth hormones and PEDs.

yes but so long as their boxers were getting through their routines well enough in their circuits and developing into a strong fighting peak in the ring sessions they would be happier with that. If a fighter still isn’t getting it right in sparring because he hasn’t quite recovered from the weight training session trainers will know what is to blame.

John L Sullivan used barrels of nails to swing over his head and small dumbels. Lots of fighters shadow boxed with light weights in their hands or shoes. weights were always around.

Crucially however Weightlifters taking up boxing or Circus strong men always had to become more flexible in order to box. Why was this? Wouldn’t they have walked into the sport already strong and flexible enough?

Suggests to me that until the right amount of recovery could be attained to build muscle without stiffening up weight training was detrimental. If PEDs allow muscles greater recovery then more benefits can be attained with each work out. Maybe the real advances were only made once the point had been reached where it was able to continue further without the workout becoming detrimental?

I cannot understand that certain types of weight training routines had not been thoroughly explored before.

I liked Monaco. He was not matched at all well. He had something but whoever was guiding him was really looking for the best Money rather than what was best for him. Maybe Louis was to blame? Some guys just want the money.

maybe he did? Guys fail PED testing looking in worse shape than Witherspoon. I’m not assuming all PED cheats use weights. But Tim may have had access to modern training the way he was since physically a lot of modern guys don’t look any different to him so far as how his body looked.

 

In my view, some stuff has gotten better while other stuff has gotten worse. I actually think stuff like weight training has it's place. Intervals too have their place, but they aren't a replacement for proper aerobic work which is much more important in the long run, the sports science now is actually shifting away from their overuse which was popular in the past to stuff like polarised training.

Thing is, while the training for experience is flawed, there is a sort of natural selection to it. If you get people who can use methods to get from a low level to a high level, there must be some merit to it. If you're taking already advanced athletes, and sticking them on PEDs, you can get away with much worse training, but then they preach these methods, and people use them at a low level, and so it stunt development, particularly with stuff like aerobic development (which is why I think so many modern fighters gass badly).

In the end I think there's enough variation in training at any given time, that the impact isn't massive, I just don't think modern training is better overall, and it really isn't close to as scientific as made out to be. Plenty (especially at lower levels) use older methods still. I've said before, and it's still honestly my view, the reason that the greatest boxers are from yesteryear is that they did things modern boxers wouldn't attempt, and so they can't possibly surpass them.

 

That wasn't meant as an objection to Shillstone, just a possible explanation of Dundee's opinion

 

Yes, and look where a lot of them come from. Many come from a background in competitive bodybuilding competition where guys have to be as big for their weight as possible. Somewhere knowledge for this was seen as transferable for boxing.

 

Back in the 80s, I could see why someone would argue that old school, traditional training methods were superior to the newfangled stuff. They could point out that old school methods had more or less been proven superior by a hundred years of natural selection, while the new stuff was untested in boxing.

It's a lot harder to make that argument now, though, because boxers have been using the newfangled stuff for over 30 years.

At this point, the newfangled methods *are* part of the boxing tradition, just like the old school runs were. They've been tried and found useful by the same process that gave us long runs.

It's not like the current selection of mittwork, bagwork, pushups, situps, basic calisthenics, and jogging 3-5 miles every morning descended from heaven fully formed in 1882. Boxers adopted all that stuff from the "physical culturists" and innovators of *their* eras (Muldoon, for example) just like the last couple generations have assimilated weight training and steroids.

Your post and choklab's have a lot of other interesting things in them that I hope to get to later (but may not have time to do). However, I think what I'm getting at here is what I see as the crux: the "modern" training methods won the tradition fight, and they seem to be ahead on the science angle as well, since they're based on studies to a greater degree than the older material.

So by what standards are we judging the older stuff equal to the modern?

 

This is an excellent post!

I agree overall the impact cannot be that massive, though I do think we are seeing an extension in the longevity of many fighters now. A lot of champions are able to compete in an insane number of world level fights in comparison to greater fighters from yesteryear.

In the past Great fighters were great for less long. Think of Miguel Cotto and Saul Alvarez. They may not be quite so great but look how long they went on.

Bernard Hopkins and Evander Holyfeild too. Sure there used to be guys like Ray Robinson, Archie Moore that went on and on too but those guys dropped out of the top circuit for longer spells