Nerdcore Boxing

I’m constantly battling shoulder problems (rotator cuff) and I aggrevated my right shoulder doing a warm up today. This pretty much precluded me from throwing my right hand. So I skipped class and worked out on my own.

This may sound like I slacked off, but I worked just as hard as I would have in class, just one-handed. 30 minutes of cardio, 12 or so rounds of left handed bag work, 4 rds jump rope, 4 or so rds shadow boxing, ab work, the whole 9 yards…

After this week’s work almost every muscle in my body is sore, even my palms hurt. Fortunately the weekend is here and I’ll be doing a lot of icing my shoulders and alternating hot baths and ice baths for my lower body.

No class today. Did 30 min of cardio and about 5 rounds of shadow boxing.

I just got done studying a lot of Mike Tyson film. He was a master of moving his head while coming forward, and that’s been a big part of my recent training. Tonight my shadow boxing consisted of:

• Moving forwards/backwards rapidly while moving my head
• Side stepping during v-slips
• Moving forward during the dip in the v-slip
• Stretches and movements to loosen up my hips
• Worked on some long left hooks and getting some more range on my straight right

Don’t buy boxing gear from a sporting goods store, ever. Never ever. Where do they get the crap they stock on their shelves? Why does it cost almost the same as the quality stuff you order from Ringside or Title?

The wraps are too short to properly wrap your hands. The mouthpieces don’t have large enough airways to breath and crowd your tongue. The jump ropes are stiff and awkward.

My lunch didn’t sit well with me and this afternoon I was mentally coming up with reasons why I should go to class. But I drug my butt in anyway and was very happy about my workout.

Had one of those epiphanies where I discovered I could widen my stance to more easily bounce in, fire a jab and bounce out. I pride myself on defense and I’ve been unhappy with the “post punch pause” occurring before I back out of range.

I sparred 2 or 3 rounds and felt great. Started landing my left hook and uppercut against one of my more elusive sparring partners. Tried to finish with 30 min of cardio but only squeezed in 18 mins before they gym closed.

Forgive me father for I only did 20 min of cardio last night. The lunges had my legs feeling like jello, so I cut back a bit. While I’m here confessing, I only did 20 mins today too. My thighs and glutes are hella sore.

After the cardio I did 5 rounds of bobbing & weaving and worked moving in all directions during v-slips. I’m going to take an ice bath before I go to sleep to try and eliminate some soreness before class tomorrow.

Last weekend one of my sparring partners won a gold medal in the junior Olympics.

The kid is an awesome boxer and no one works harder at my gym. It’s going to be tough but my new goal is to match his work ethic.

After Dana White and Floyd Mayweather Jr’s tiff, there’s been a lot of talk recently about the quality of boxing in MMA. Today I saw a well written, but flawed article in IndsideFighting.com.

The article starts off strong with records of former boxers losing in MMA but makes some unsubstantiated conclusions, why exactly wouldn’t shoulder rolls work and why would smaller gloves favor looping punches? But more importantly it misses out on analyzing large amounts of data:

* K-1 has knees, kicks and clinch and many of the top fighters (Hoost, Kaman, Leko, Hug, Cro Cop, etc.) are excellent boxers, much better than most MMA’ers.

* Today’s MMA fighters are more likely to work with boxing trainers than in the past. Probably as a result pf this the level of boxing in MMA has gotten a lot better in the last 3 years.

* Many contenders and some MMA champions are some of the better boxers within MMA. Some come from boxing backgrounds. Lytle, GSP, Fedor, Kang, Davis, Cro Cop, Pulver, etc.

Personally I think in 3 years you won’t hear much criticism of MMA fighter’s boxing skills. The sport is just evolving.

My boxing club has classes M/W/F, so I’ll be heading off shortly.

Tonight the class is short (1.5 vs. 2 hrs). I’ll go into what we do in class another time, but one relevant item is that Monday we jump rope for 4 rounds and do lunges on the breaks. Then after class I’m planning to do 30 min of cardio (if I post it for the world to see, now I have to do it). Right now my hamstrings and glutes are still sore from training Saturday and my right ankle is tweaked, so it will be an interesting evening.

The gym’s closed and there’s no training to be had today. So I ordered a better mouthpiece, some instructional videos, conditioning books and a pair of trunks from Title Boxing.

Title has a number of 30 min videos on specific areas, only $5 VHS. I order the body punching, counter-punching and fighting with angles videos. I’ll write reviews after I watch them.