Tag: competition
-
How to Wrap Your Hands for Boxing Competition
When you’re training for boxing, you’ll probably wear regular boxing wraps or gel gloves underneath your boxing gloves for protection and support.
When you compete under the USA Boxing sanction, the rules on what you can use to wrap your hands, and how you must wrap them, are very specific.
Ringside did a particularly good video on this, and it’s well worth watching the entire 16 minute video (and there’s a funny treat at the end). (more…)
-
How to Pack Your Coach Bag for Amateur Boxing Events
Since I’m usually officiating, I’m not the one who packs the gym bag to take our competitive boxing team to their events, but sometimes I pitch in to help the other coaches remember everything we need.
And finally I wrote it all down, since that’s infinitely preferable to madly scrambling around at the last minute, trying to remember what all our boxing team will need once they get to the competitive arena.
Btw, I searched the internet and didn’t find ANYTHING to help you pack your competition bag, so if you happen so see something, please link it in the comments. Just the fact that I couldn’t find anything made me wonder if I was missing something…
Of course, this will be the ONLY post on the subject to include toilet paper, sparkly elves, chainsaws, and Nicki Minaj. Read on. (more…)
-
How to Work Against the Ropes
At most boxing gyms you’ll hear coaches tell you to stay off the ropes and control the center of the ring during your rounds. And that’s sound advice.
But there’s also some good things to be said about being the kind of fighter who can perform well against the ropes, and even win a fight using rope skills. Here’s what I mean.
-
Before You Compete in Boxing…
Because an amateur boxer’s passbook runs from January to December, there’s a lotta “getting ready to fight” going on in boxing during the last few months of the year. You need to be in good condition and getting close to your weight category position.
And Thor knows you want to get that first looming match over with, out of your system, and finished with (for good or ill) so that you can move the hell on and start to settle into the competition groove.
Because the truth is that you operate at about half — or less — of your usual power at your first show. Why? Because of the intensity, the anxiety, and all the (normal) insanity of a boxing event. Plus it’s just fucking scary, that’s what.
So here’s how to dremel the killing edge right off that wicked blade, and make it a weapon that works for you, rather than slicing you to the bone when you go to pick it up. (more…)
-
Boxing After 40 With a Bad Shoulder
I took 6 weeks off of boxing lately, mostly just to rest, focus on work, and give myself a break after my last fight.
I’m not crazy, though — I kept up my runs and weights at home. I just didn’t do any boxing-specific work. No heavy bag, no sparring, no punching drills. I didn’t even show my nose at the gym.
When I went back for the first time this week I carefully stayed out of the classes that were training in the gym and did my own slow and careful workout: warm-up, shadowboxing, 10 rounds on the heavy bag.
The next two days showed me the muscles I had not been training while out of boxing: forearms, lats (although I swear I did lats!!), and some obliques. Also my neck was sore from carrying all the tension of the first workout back.
But amazingly, my shoulders were good.
I’ve had chronic bursitis in my hips and shoulders for as long as I can remember.
You gotta have shoulders to box.
You gotta have everything, I guess, but I never would have guessed that I could actually find work-arounds for the issues I have to deal with in my body’s performance, and still box well.
I was over 40 when I started this sport, and I was astonished that I could box well even though my hip joint issues meant I couldn’t run distance (for me, that means more than 4 miles).
Now I’m learning that I don’t have to punish my shoulder joints, either, in order to compete in the ring.
At first I sweated hard to learn to do dozens of standard push-ups, along with burpees, pull-ups, and the other shoulder-intense exercises. For several years I dealt with a level of everyday pain that I thought I would have to live with, if I was going to box.
Then I tore the rotator cuff in my right shoulder (doing unassisted pull-ups), requiring 3 months of physical therapy and a lot of time out of the ring. That shoulder became — and still is — the single body part I most have to favor.
My physical therapist — a pro fighter a few years older than me — told me to cut back on the heavy shoulder work. “You’ll still box just fine,” she assured me. And I decided to test it out.
So I stopped obsessing about building the number of push ups I could do, and I started re-working my personal training workouts.
And my pain levels started to recede…
But the real challenge is in what to do when the whole team is working out together.
I began by thinking up a few alternate exercises.
For example, when the team is doing entire rounds of toe-taps on the medicine ball, I do steps instead, which hurt my hips less. When the team is doing burpees, I do deep lunges instead. If the command is for 50 standard push ups, I’ll do knee push ups.
It’s extremely difficult to be doing something different from everyone else on the team, but I try to tell myself that I’m 46 and they are 20, and I’m allowed. I can still meet them with a nasty-ass right when the bell rings.
This one single thing — not doing what everyone else is doing — is the absolute hardest part of my sport. I must have a big pride thing going on, because I absolutely *hate* having to do my own thing. But I’ve finally decided to do it anyway.
And I’ve found that my results in the ring are just as good, which is why I am sticking with it.
The second thing I’ve changed is to lower the weights, reps, and impact.
If the call is for 50 arm lifts with weights, I’ll do 30, or lighten the weight. I don’t shadow box with 5-pound weights, I use 1-pounders instead. Believe me, I could do all this stuff full-bore before, but I paid a heavy price in pain levels and injuries.
And there was simply no need to do that.
The third thing I’ve done is test the time limits.
By testing, I’ve found that I can do as many 1 minute (not 3 minute) sets of toe-taps as everyone else and still be relatively pain-free.
I’ve been working actively on that particular exercise, so I haven’t yet tested 2 minute rounds, but the 1 minute rounds are solid.
I can’t change all my time limits, but I change the ones that hit my hips and shoulders the worst. Amazingly, sparring is not affected at all. Which is probably further proof — if I needed it — that just because I’m not starting every workout with 100 push-ups doesn’t mean I am going to suck in the ring.
When I was back in the gym this week for the first time in 6 weeks, I was struck by how many shoulder-intense exercises both training groups were doing.
One coach had the team doing literally hundreds of dips, followed by alternating-hand push-ups on a medicine ball. (If you start with your left hand on the ball and your right hand on the floor, you do a push-up, then shift quickly so that your right hand is now on the ball and your left is on the floor. Repeat. It takes balance, speed, and lots of shoulder strength.) Anyone who fell behind was assigned 50 more push-ups.
That session would have been a total loss for me.
As it was, I did my own workout, which involved exactly zero dips or push-ups. I’ll put some of those in there as I get going again, but it will be far less than those guys are doing.
In the end, my lesson has been — once again — that I have to know my own body and look out for myself. Even in the face of pressure from a coach or the team.
So I’m passing it along to you. Boxing is an incredible, joy-giving, empowering sport and with a basic level of fitness, you can do it. Even if you’re over 40. Even if you have cranky hips and shoulders. You can do it!
And so can I.
Image by walleydog
-
Boxing Win in Wilmington
I had my first fight with my Second Round team in Wilmington.
It’s always a toss-up, fighting Masters, as to whether I’ll actually get an opponent. I weighed in at an event last month and my opponent didn’t show. Women over the age of 35 who want to compete in the ring are few and far between, then there is the further narrowing of the field because of weight class, experience level, geography, and the random unexpected injuries, family demands and other contingencies.
Because it’s so difficult to get opponents, my goal has become to get one fight every year. Last year got checked off with my October fight. (The December fight was classified “exhibition” and doesn’t count toward my goal.) This year got checked off with my fight in March. I’m feeling a little gleeful to have met and exceeded my goal for this year now!
My opponent got connected for this match through a coach in Wilmington about 3 weeks ago. He had let my coach know she was light and we’d have to get our weights closer in order to get the match. I got down from 142 to 135 and I think she came up from 125 to 132. And she drove 6 hours from Virginia to be at the event; I only had to drive two hours.
We both arrived just before weigh-ins were scheduled to begin. There were only 6 women out of the 44 total boxers fighting at this event, and only one Masters bout; I picked her out immediately. She was really beautiful, and just a bit shorter than me. I smiled and spoke to her. Not everyone wants to chat with their opponent in advance of a match, but she was entirely polite. We made weight, turned in our passbooks, and parted ways to wait out the endless, miserable hours of the day until we could get our fight.
I love pretty much everything about boxing except the day of a fight.
Well, and cutting or gaining weight; those both suck, but they are at least bearable. The endless hours of waiting for a tiny, six minute test of your skill and power are excruciating.
Everyone has different tricks and coping mechanisms, but there’s no escaping the endless circus of weigh-ins, passbooks, medicals, getting your food/liquid intake right and timed, sitting for hours in metal folding chairs, finding a bathroom (this one didn’t have toilet paper), constantly tamping down your anxiety, keeping an eye on the time, meeting your opponent, staying limber, and maintaining sanity in the loud din of the crowd.
Every time I go through it I take a paperback to read, but this never helps. There are too many things you must pay attention to during the long hours of waiting. Even having my Shuffle (finally got the playlist right — the quiet stuff from my exhibition fight had failed at fight #2 in Atlanta, so I went back to hard rock) didn’t help much, because I constantly had to take out my earbuds to answer questions, find out what I was expected to do next, help someone find scissors, etc., etc., etc.
Finally I dressed out and sat for my coach to wrap my hands. I normally love this ritual, but in this case, I was wracked with anxiety because my fight got moved up at the last minute so I felt late, after all that damn waiting. I straddled my metal chair, draped my arms over the back where Coach Massey could reach them, and spent the next 15 minutes staring at the bright silver dog tag on his chest. It says “One Bad Jab.” It was his ring name, from his pro fighting days.
“Do you miss fighting?” I asked him.
“Hell, no,” he responded, laughing and flashing his gold tooth. For just a moment I felt entirely aligned with his sentiment. Why would anyone want to go through this misery on a regular basis?
“I miss sparring though,” he continued, and I nodded in understanding. All the guts and joy of boxing without the hellish hours of a fight day.
Once you’re wrapped and gloved, you become entirely dependent on your coaches. I had to ask Coach Mandy to find my headband and put it on me for the short period before my match. She gave me a drink of water. She found my mouthpiece (in my sock — this is a great place to keep it in the hour before you fight, btw) and checked my laces.
I made my usual joke: “I need to go to the bathroom,” I said as I stretched out and began to move. The big gloves make this impossible, unless you have a reeeeeallly close friend.
“Can’t help you there,” she said quickly, and we both laughed a little.
I continued to chatter nervously, almost mindlessly: what I should remember, how I should move; combos, tactics, offenses and defenses.
At some point she stopped me quietly with a hand over my gloves.
“You’ve already trained for this,” she reminded me. “You’re overthinking it. Just let your body perform.”
She was absolutely right, and it was the perfect advice, the best possible thing I could have heard.
The match before mine was finishing. I stood ringside amid the din of screaming onlookers as the two fighters ahead of me battled. I couldn’t hear Coach Massey’s advice anymore. He held pads for me but I couldn’t hear the combos. I shuffled like an anxious racehorse, frustration rising in me.
Finally, the closing bell.
Massey held one pad. “Gimme the power,” he said, “Jab, right.”
I sighed in deep relief. If there is one thing I can do, this is it. My jab was fierce, and the right was at full-scale knockout level. It was like a pistol shot: bip-BAM.
“Again.”
Bip-BAM. Bip-BAM! I could hear it echo in the rafters.
“Keep going.”
Six more combos in a row I gave him, every one as perfect and loud and solid. He grinned and shook his head, and his gaze did a slow circle of the crowd around us; all eyes were now on us.
Later I realized that the eyes of my opponent were probably also on us. Massey knew what he was doing, letting me show my power like that. Letting me go in confident in my own strength.
Outside of the actual fight, it was the best moment of my entire night.
I rolled under the ropes and felt the deep satisfaction of the ring settle around me. Time to do what I do.
My opponent surged out with a flurry. I tapped out measuring jabs and began to circle, assessing what I was up against. It’s probably better to go ahead and claim the early part of the first round, but I wasn’t really expecting such a long, light string of flurries. She had punches in bunches, no doubt.
It didn’t take me long to see what I would be doing. Her hands were busy, but she was staying squared up a bit, giving me a sweet little pipeline down the center to her face. An invitation to my power right.
Bip-BAM, bip-BAM, bip-BAM. Yep, those were actually gonna work.
My jabs weren’t connecting every time, but my rights were absolutely solid, and every single one was on target. I suppressed my glee and put my brain back in gear. She was not bringing pain, but she might be scoring with the sheer number of shots she was throwing.
In the amateurs it doesn’t matter if you can throw a bomb; a hard hit scores the same as a medium hit, so long as it connects. Bombs are intimidating, but they aren’t 3-pointers.
I had to shut down her scoring machine. I clinched, got my arm around the back of her head and squeezed and leaned, hard. The ref nearly decked me himself, breaking the clinch and yelling at me for my patently illegal move. But it broke the onslaught and didn’t cost me. They’ll warn you before they take a point.
I glanced over to see how my opponent was taking it. Her face was flushed from the power rights already. I absolutely had to keep her on the end of my jab and prevent her inside game.
She rushed back out and we worked hard to the end of the round.
At the break both of my coaches told me I was ahead, but I wasn’t confident about it. I knew I wasn’t moving my feet and I thought the judges might be counting her shots higher, even though they were coming mostly from the sides. I felt like I’d only taken one or two solid shots to my head — nearly everything else was on my arms and shoulders, which meant my guard was good, but I wasn’t moving around enough.
The second round was where I began to rely on Coach Massey’s strategy. Once you’re in and have tried your game, it’s unbelievably helpful to have someone calling your shots and guiding you through the hard mental work while you do the physical work.
My attempts at longer combos were not scoring all the way through; my hooks often missed because I wasn’t getting in position and getting them off before she moved. She was fast, and seemed to throw four and five shots at a time.
Massey 86’d my hooks. “Straighten it out,” he called from my corner. “Give me the straight right….Thank you.”
The right was scoring and I still had all bars in my power meter. I wasn’t gassed. My feet were not moving, but my one-two continued to hold the fort.
She was slowing and starting to pant. The left side of her face was beginning to swell. I felt like a robot, an automatron, an idiot on repeat. Surely I could do something besides this, surely. Lord I wanted finesse, grace! I wanted to move less like a wooden toy; I wanted to show beauty as well as power. Why can’t I be pretty in the ring??
“Go to the body,” Massey called from the corner.
I sent up a mental thank you, and suddenly had something new to do.
“Double the jab,” he called, and I did. I did lots of things, but there was one thing that worked every time…
At the round break, I had the feeling we were going change gears. I don’t remember what either of my coaches said (other than their reassurance that I was still ahead), I mostly only recall going back out, still feeling slow but strong.
Massey held me back, over and over again, with a steady call of “Wait for her…” She was struggling now, and I could stand and deliver. If I could time it just right each time, she would come forward into my shots.
“Don’t advance,” he warned, “Hold…”
It was hard, because I felt I had to advance to score, but he was right, she was coming and with a surge of joy I realized I was beginning to see her shots arriving. Midway through the third I ducked a spectacular all-in jab-right, and she went sailing past me; the crowd roared. Belatedly I realized I should have come up with a quick left hook.
I sighed inwardly. Someday I may finally put all the pieces of this game together, but not today. Today I was a particularly skilled kindergartener, and my rights would have to carry the day.
And they did.
My opponent was wonderful. She never quit, she barreled forward and burned energy at a ferocious rate. She threw far more combos than I did. She didn’t let the hard power put her out. She gave game to the very last bell.
I deeply respect that. ANY woman — or man, for that matter — willing to go through what a competitive boxer goes through deserves the title Bad Ass. Sara (I never heard her last name), I salute you. You were awesome.
I was happy to be handed the gold medal, and once again I was stunned at my instant “I want to do this again” response, even though I’d spent the 24 hours before my glorious 6 minutes in pure anguish.
There’s no rational explanation.
Only the challenge to be better. Only the relentless push to master my body and make it perform in concert with my brain in the complex intricacies of this sweet science.
And the sheer, brutal pleasure of a fight.
Image: Coach Willie “One Bad Jab” Massey with me after the win. Thanks to Cathy Linkous for the photo!
-
Post-Competition Letdown
I trained, I fought, and I performed incredibly well. But I drove the seven and a half hours home and suddenly found myself miserable. Periodic moments of joy interspersed with hours of listlessness, frustration, and anger. I haven’t been able focus.
It already seems weird that I’m a competitive boxer. Me: a 45 year old suburban working mother of three. And I am happy that I fought well, but now I’m also pissed that I lost, wondering if I’ll lose again, wondering how to get another fight, bored to not be training, not hungry now that I can eat anything I want, etcetera.
I satisfied my most painful food jones immediately after the fight (two vodka tonics — thank you, Amy Green — and two Bojangle’s biscuits) and that was the end of my celebration. Now I’m having trouble focusing on my workday. I’m keeping my happy face on, but I finally admitted to friends that I feel like a freak.
What is wrong with me?
Here’s what I know. I’m driven, I’m competitive, and I’m an experience junkie. I obsessively collect experiences, joyride the storm of intensity, then recline in my mental armchair to try and parse what I’ve just been through. But this time I’ve been stumbling in circles, feeling bereft. Over a hobby, for crying out loud.
But my friends are wise.
I haven’t ever met a single one of the women quoted below, but for a while now we have been frequenting each other’s blogs and chatting on Facebook.
Malissa at Girlboxing is also a fighter, and trains at Gleason’s in NYC. She said there were chemicals like adrenaline and dopamine involved, and she also said this:
I often feel the “letdown” at the end of most big projects I work on.
I liken it to some of Elias Canetti’s observations in his book “Crowds and Power.” His basic thesis is that as we gather to participate in something that is outside of ourselves such as a sporting event, political rally, or concert, we break down many of our usual physical and emotional boundaries as part of becoming “one” with the event.
Just think of a big championship match and how united one can feel with the crowd. We tolerate the crush of people, the loud noises, speaking and sharing with strangers. But on the way out our barriers return; we feel irritation at being jostled, annoyed by conversations, and so on.
After we complete our own goals we are let down precisely because we no longer have a reason for sustaining the alternate paradigm that we put in place to accomplish the task in the first place.
Margaret, at Conjuring My Muse, is a writer. She recalls having the same experience after the hard push to publish her first novel. She also uses the word “junkie,” which I had been turning over in my head but was initially uncomfortable saying. But she took it all in stride.
As an adrenaline junkie, I find I experience this whenever a big moment has ended or cooled down. I can’t say I was ever shocked by it. It’s just my nature. And it doesn’t last long because I’m always on to the next big thing pretty quickly.
To tell you the truth, I think it’s a biological/psychological self-preservation mechanism. Some of us are “wired for sound” and we’d just keep doing the Energizer Bunny thing if we weren’t knocked down like a Rock ’em Sock ’em Robot every once in a while. I’m accepting of the letdown when it comes. It lets me refuel, and my brain simmers with future possibilities.
I would imagine that most people have experienced it at one time or another.
Amy, who blogs at Wait For It, has been a competitive weightlifter and is now testing out boxing.
We reach heights, as you did the other day, but then life goes on. We can’t sit at that height–we have to continue. You’re prancing around in the spotlight one minute, and doing laundry the next.
Last month I was one of four track leaders at an applied theatre conference. Initially, it freaked me out to think that people were paying money and traveling a distance to learn from me. But I worked hard and it went really well. Came home not quite on a high, but certainly feeling mature and wise.
I go to do my shift at the Y that Monday; I’m cleaning machines, and this woman leans down, gestures toward her treadmill and says, “Do you mind? I’m finished.” Meaning there’s no need for her to wipe down her own sweat if I’m ready at her heel.
I’m thinking, A couple of days ago I was a big wig, and now this.
A year ago I would have said that I need all of life to be always on, always full. But now I kinda like cleaning the equipment and knowing that I also can, do, and will
accomplish greater things.I loved Amy’s image of leading the conference, then cleaning at the Y. Perfect. That’s me wiping down equipment, although I have to admit to my inner junkie’s nervous scanning for the experiential equivalent of a drink or cigarette, desperate to fix my situation.
God knows I’m privileged. Snug in my house with my kids and my computer and my HVAC. It’s embarrassing to be caught complaining. But as Malissa says, this is part of the human story. And like Margaret, I will try to let it help birth next thing.
Meanwhile, like Amy, I’ll be cleaning.
Image by modomatic on Flickr
-
Fighting in the Golden Gloves
It makes my stomach flip over just to say it: I plan to fight in the Women’s National Golden Gloves Championships in Florida this July.
This will be a bonifide, grade A, kick ass and get your ass kicked tournament. Three days, single eliminations: keep winning, keep advancing; losers lay on the beach or watch the rest compete. I don’t plan to be laying on the beach much, myself.
The Golden Gloves tradition started in Chicago in 1928, and was so popular that the planned three-night tournament had to be extended to six nights to accommodate all the hopefuls who showed up to compete. The Golden Gloves tourneys have brought to the attention of the world such boxing greats as Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, Joe Frazier, Evander Holyfield, Sugar Ray Robinson, Joe Louis, Michael Spinks, and Floyd Mayweather. The women, who were barred from competing in the amateur boxing world until 1978, didn’t get in on the Golden Gloves until 1995, but went on to send Denise Lutrick, Patricia Alcivar, Melissa Salamone, Tanya Dean, Alicia Ashley, Jean Martin, Jamie McGrath, Veronica Simmons and Evelyn Rodriguez to other national and world titles. The simple fact that I recognize those men’s names but not the women’s says that there is still a long way to go for this sport.
There are a number of hurdles to clear before my fight opportunity becomes a reality: I have a physical to complete and forms to mail in order to get my passbook from USA Boxing, then I can begin the registration process for the Gloves. I need to get my training plan written and bump up my sparring time. At the tournament itself, I will have to wait until weigh-in to find out how many other women are in my weight/age category, and the matches will be determined by draw. Then we do it. Three rounds of two minutes each to prove myself or be schooled: six minutes of heaven or hell. Either way, the gloves are gonna fly, and one woman will advance to fight again.
This may be the biggest personal challenge I’ve ever faced. I’m ready to rock it.
-
Why I Box
I box in a suburban gym. Everything is branded “LA Boxing” in chirpy red and blue. The branding makes me think Hollywood weight loss, and in fact, most people are here to lose weight or get fit. It’s clean, carpeted, and full of sunshine most days. There are no cement floors, wooden pallets, musty lockers. The lockers are tidy cubbyholes like you would see in an elementary school.
None of this fits with my fantasy of being part of a dark, cramped boxing gym with big, quiet Rocky types or ropy bantamweights and their arthritic old-man trainers. But it’s certainly reflective of my life, none of which ever took place in New York or inner-city Chicago. I’ve lived most of my life in the suburbs of Memphis, Tennessee or North Carolina. Mine is a universe of shopping malls and bedroom communities, two car garages and Saturdays mowing the lawn.
Contrary to my initial experience at LA Boxing, there are actually plenty of women at the gym, I just never see most of them. It seems like most of the women go to kickboxing classes and rarely come to a boxing class. It reminds me of the seventies, when great waves of women suddenly decided to sign up for jazzercise and self-defense classes. I never did that, not because I thought anything was wrong with it, but because I was motivated by different things.
I love having discovered how orderly boxing is. In boxing you have a stance, there are ways you move and duck and punch that remain the same, no matter what. There’s a purity about it that I love.
I also love the sense of heart and tradition. There’s a lot of theater and drama here, but also a lot of incredibly difficult work, endurance, pain, and even legend associated with boxing.
Boxing engages my competitive spirit, my desire to be good at something that not everybody wants to do, and my desire to learn from masters. The sport demands my strength, my intellect, my focus, and my patience.
I train in a suburban gym, but I’m a part of something with history and passion. I don’t box to lose weight. I don’t box in order to be able to defend myself. I box because boxing is beautiful, difficult, and inspiring. There are heroes here, and I want to know and be a part of their greatness.
