why do many boxing coaches think boxing is damn different from other sports???

It won't change for a while, sadly there's nothing you can do about it. Obviously if you give your views you're telling them they're wrong, insulting them and making them look bad.

 

The real problem is not that old school or new school is better, boxing coaches teach boxing they are not experts on conditioning two separate vocations competing with each other.
What your coach said is basically true, Robinson, didnt have a S&C coach, but thats not to say he didn't have a conditioner, which he did.

In those days, the fighter and the trainer were the main guys, and a conditioner was always in the background, you never heard them at all, they just did their respective jobs, but today whoa, S&C guys are making statements that seem to fool alot of people into believing that they have the formula and old school is worse then bad.
What people seem to forget, is that they have free will, if the coach is saying weights are wrong, you have the free will, to seek conditioning advice from someone else. Boxing coaches for the most part learned their crafts in a gym, and were taught or learned through experience. So why dump on them they at least are there making no money and dedicating their time to teach something they love to someone who wants to learn. If you know a better or different way to do things, then do so, thats free will.

 

Very True.

 

Sounds to me like one of those guys who wants to coach the coach.

You go to him to train you to box. Then you want to tell him how you want to do it because of experience you've had in other sports, rather than doing it his way.

May not seem that way to you, but probably seems that way to the coach.

 

Exactly. You go to a boxing coach to learn the technical aspects of boxing. But, the vast majority of boxing coaches know very, very little about strength, speed and conditioning training in their many forms, which is what the OP is referring to.

 

Part of the conditioning is specific to boxing. To say a fighter needs to run doesn't stop him from doing other things, but rather than question him why not do it and do the other things on your own? He's not there to debate, he's there to teach.

I spent a few years in a gym training amateurs and a few pros. There were ALWAYS guys who wanted to debate everything:

Me: "Go hit the heavy bag and work on your 1-2. You keep dropping your left hand when you bring it back, we're going to stick with that until you get it right."

Boxer: "I want to learn how to throw a hook."

Me: "We'll get to that, but you haven't learned how to throw a basic 1-2 without leaving yourself wide open yet. Work on that."

Boxer: "I've been watching a lot of fights on TV and those guys all throw hooks. I've seen great knockouts with left hooks. I want to learn to do that."

Me: "Those guys learned how to throw a 1-2 first. You've been here a month. Let's concentrate on the basics until you get them right."

This goes on and on for 2-3 rounds if the trainer lets it -- that's rounds other boxers aren't getting attention and rounds the boxer is taking off. Many think it's a good way to get a break. Many just don't want to listen.

A coach, as noted by Dempsey above, gives a lot of time and usually makes zero money doing it -- especially if he's working with amateurs and raw beginners. He's not there to cater to ideas of people who have yet to even box on how to do his thing.

I always told prospective fighters to start running and come back when they could run 3 miles without stopping for 5 days in a row. I don't care how Muay Thai or MMA fighters do it -- that was my requirement if I was going to spend time with a boxer. If he wasn't dedicated enough to do that, he wasn't ever going to fight anyway. If he wanted to do it his way, he didn't need me. If someone isn't coachable enough to follow an instruction as simple as that, he probably wasn't going to respond to me anyway.

If that same fighter stuck around, he would eventually be mixing in sprints and interval running and plenty of other cardio drills that we did, but if he wasn't willing to do something as simple as run to get a base for his conditioning, I would rather spend time with other guys.

 

You're missing the point. What I'm saying is the vast majority of boxing coaches don't know a thing about strength and conditioning training.

If you had a test to see how dedicated someone was to their training, that's fine, but that's irrelevant. Also, training with your own style/knowledge is great but we've seen multiple threads on here, for example, stating a boxing coach has told a trainee if they touch weights he'll refuse to train them. This is where a lack of knowledge causes issues and again what the OP is referring to.

Also, there's a difference between teaching and telling somebody what to do and refusing to tell them why they're doing what they've been told to do under the threat of banning them or whatever else you threaten them with. Most coaches couldn't tell a trainee why they're being told to do a particular exercise other than that's a traditional boxing exercise. Again, lack of knowledge.

 

Perhaps, or perhaps the coach's experience tells them that boxers who train their way win when those boxers work with them.

Specific to the OP, he sounds like someone who thinks he knows more than the coach. Why the F*** would a boxing coach care what a hockey player does? Why would a boxer who is there to learn even bring that up. If that's your thing, go to the ice rink and train with them -- but don't tell the hockey coach about the virtues of the double-end bag or he'll probably send you packing. If, as the post says, the coach asked the OP about how his running was going then my guess would be he's seeing if the guy is taking his advice on what the OP needs to do or if the coach thinks he is wasting his time.

Strength and conditioning for high performance athletics is, pretty much, sport-specific. A football player who is a lineman is aiming for something completely different than a boxer, and a boxer is training for something completely different than a basketball player. The workout, the drills, even the diet are different.

A lot of strength and conditioning coaches know what they are doing -- but I'd say probably more of them do not, at least when it comes to helping a boxer get better. It's not a sport they are likely exposed to in learning their craft, just as a boxing coach probably doesn't know the proper regimine for getting a quarterback's arm stronger.

I did a lot of studying. One of my fairly successful amateurs once commented: "You have an answer for everything." I told him we do things the way we do them for a specific reason, that no part of the workout was because I just happened to want to do it (with some exceptions that were things we did to break it up just to keep things fun, but even that has a reason, to break up the monotony of the daily workout).

I'm sure there were other ways to do things and be successful, but if a boxer was going to fight out of our gym then we wanted them to do things our way. There were also some guys around who just wanted to come over and spar from time to time, they had their way of doing things, and they were welcome to do just that, but I didn't ever work their corners or anything because they weren't doing our workouts, I didn't see them enough to know their strengths and weaknesses, etc.

I will say it's up to a coach to work with anyone he wants, for any reason, just like it's up to a boxer to choose any gym that fits his needs.

 

Okay...

Strength training is pretty broad. The majority of athletes should be doing squats to strengthen their legs for example, including boxers. Hence the reason other athletes were bought up.

Nobody thinks strength and conditioning training improves your boxing ability. The training helps with athletic performance which translates over to boxing.

Obviously.

This is the OP's point again, what's so special about boxers that strength and conditioning coaches don't have a clue about? These coaches improve athletic performance. End of. They're not there to improve boxing skills.

That's good to hear.

 

You work specific muscles in different sports. Even within boxing, the strength and conditioning to get ready for an amateur tournament to fight (as a novice), say, 3x2-minute rounds and have three fights in three days is completely different than what is required to fight a 12-round title fight.

What's so special? A GOOD strength and conditioning coach will tailor the program to what the athlete is getting ready for.

You posted "obviously" to my statement about strength and conditioning being sport-specific, and the program should strengthen the athletic performance for that sport.

A basketball player needs to be able to jump higher to improve his athletic performance. A program to help with that isn't going to make a boxer more athletic unless he plans on jumping up in the air to punch.

From the U.S. and Cuban amateur boxing strength and conditioning programs, at least back when I was training fighters, the programs stressed LIGHT weights and HIGH reps and PUSHING exercises. A general strength and conditioning meathead who comes from a football program knows what he knows and may instead have a boxer pumping HEAVY weights for LOW reps and doing curls and other PULLING exercises -- which would be counter to what would help a boxer.

For a boxing coach with a bit of experience, hearing a novice who is 5-foot-8 and 150 pounds come in and say, "I've been talking to a strength and conditioning coach and he thinks I should be lifting weights," that coach (if his experience is like mine) is cringing thinking of past prospective amateurs who got hooked up with some meathead S&C guy who knows nothing but football who has the guy gulping creatine and protein shakes "to build muscle" and the next thing you know you've got a slower 5-foot-8 guy who is 180 pounds and just isn't going to be competitive in boxing.

The OP asked "why do many boxing coaches think boxing is ... different?" The answer is because it is different. So is football, so is basketball, so is baseball. And a coach S&C coach (and there are good ones) will work a program that is specific to sport, as noted.

But ONE thing that is different about boxing (and wrestling, also) is that it has weight divisions. A bigger football player with the same speed and more strength is better prepared for his sport. A bigger basketball player with more explosiveness and jumping ability is better prepared for his sport. A bigger boxer who is now three weight divisions above what he should be boxing at is NOT better prepared for his sport.

Ask Dempsey1234 if you don't like my opinion and I'm sure he will telll you that a good S&C coach with limited boxing knowledge would spend some time with the gym, sit down with the boxing coach and ask what the goal is -- "I'd like Johnny to be a bit faster and have more lower leg strength and be able to fight more often in explosive bursts without gassing at the end of two rounds, without gaining any weight," and the S&C coach would work within those parameters. If the S&C coach isn't willing to work with the boxing coach, it's probably not going to end up being a good thing.

 

That's another thing: there is no one way, no agreement on the right way -- it is constantly "evolving" and what the experts say is the right way at one point in time becomes the exact wrong way at another point.

Ray Robinson drank cow's blood and ate steak as a prefight meal. That was because it was supposed to make him strong. He turned out OK, but 20 years later the experts would tell us he should have been carbo-loading.

The weight techniques I mentioned are from the U.S. and Cuban Olympic programs in the 1990s. If that's the exact wrong way to do it, I'll bet you dollars to donuts everything you listed as the proper approach today will be contradicted within 10 years.

I doubt you could do a scientific study that would prove a correlation between fighters who could jump higher being harder punchers -- I'm guessing Earnie Shavers' vertical leap was less than Ken Norton's, but we know who could punch harder. That being said, we did bounding to develop explosiveness so I know where you are coming from. I would prefer that to squats, but to each his own.

I completely, totally, 100 percent disagree with your blanket statement that "no matter how you're lifting" you won't gain weight if you are boxing and running. Take a guy who boxes and runs and doesn't lift weights, take him to a weightlifting gym and put him with someone who puts him on a program to bulk up (while he continues to box and run) and I guarantee he gains weight -- if he's lean like most boxers he's not going to lose fat while gaining muscle, which means he's going to gain muscle, and that's going to show on the scales.

That is not to say you can't lift without gaining significant weight, but the "no matter how you're lifting" isn't correct.

 

+1
So many of them aroundatsch

 

Sounds like a **** coach rather than all boxing coaches like that, mine defo aren't

 

I agree with what you are saying regarding evolving, and different schools of thought would say that weight training is beneficial but others encourage various forms of resistance training over weight training. Some state that it would serve somebody best to just practice the punching mechanics over and over(committing to long term memory coinciding with REM sleep theories), other say work on more speed-strength, others maximal strength, others low to mid intensity plyos interwoven with conditioning, and on and on. I was talking to my friend who was a trainer at a college level for awhile and talked about how much has changed since he finished school in 1999. I remember reading his textbook on what the researchers say the energy demand % for various sports were back in the late 90s and looking at what they say are the % demands recently. The difference in the percentages in each of the three systems are quite different now than 15 years ago.

While I enjoy talking "all scientific" as best as I can, the reality is I'm sure that Eddie Futch and the other trainers didn't know about anaerobic threshold, energy systems, weight training, and VO2 max when they trained Joe Frazier, who had one of the best work rates of any heavyweight I've ever seen. With all the advancements, it's not as if cruiserweights/heavyweights have any better work rate now than in the 70s. Watch the pace of some of the Quarry/Frazier fights.

I do agree with UKrinetic blanket statement regarding weight training with boxing and running will keep weight fairly neutral.

For me, given the rigors of an amateur boxer's schedule(fighting often), developing a maximal strength weight training program and weaving it into conditioning, sparring, skills work, and so forth would be very difficult.

My .02