The Glowing Edge

Tag: practice

  • X-Ring Boxing Workout (OR, Non-Boxing Training is NOTHING Like Boxing Training)

    X-Ring Boxing Workout (OR, Non-Boxing Training is NOTHING Like Boxing Training)

    Since my gym is connected to at-risk students, it’s closed over the holidays. Which simply means I train in a horrible, cheap-ass purple and yellow joint (because it’s $10/month), or in the park. All of which was fine, or so I thought, for the 3 weeks I was doing it.

    And believe me, I was NOT slacking out. I have a fight coming up in a few weeks, so I did my hill sprints, my ab work, and so on. I might could be accused of being a little proud of myself.

    Then I got back to the boxing gym. Whew.

    Since I knew I wasn’t going to be sparring, and I’m not a huge fan of extended heavy bag work, I set up the ring for my favorite shadowboxing exercise, which I call the X-Ring.

    It kicked my ass for me, absolutely free of charge.

    How to set up the X-ring

    If you’ve ever tied up a rope to bob and weave under, you’re gonna like this one. We have a bob-and-weave rope, so I tie that from one corner of the ring to another, and then, since that’s the only rope I can ever find at Second Round, we tie together a couple of old, ratty hand wraps and string those across the other way, creating the “X” formation like you see in the picture above.

    The ties sit just below shoulder height for me, which makes this exercise good for someone my height (5’8″ or so), but not as good for someone smaller. So you’ll have to do your X-Ring exercise somewhere else in the gym where you can tie up lower, or out in a park between trees.

    Careful, don’t clothesline anyone.

    The X-ring workout

    Before you actually set up the ring, do a round or two of ring slides. That means you slide in a big circle, calves touching the ropes on each side, hands in high guard. Use small, quick slides, and switch directions regularly. Pivot and advance quickly to the center of the ring, throw a jab, then reverse out and continue your ring slides.

    Now do a couple of rounds of regular shadow boxing.

    Once you’re warm and ready, tie up the first half of the X. Start at one corner and bob and weave your way to the other corner, throwing a shot or combo now and then. Pivot and return with the same. Don’t be a metronome; mix up your timing. Jabs and power hands go straight ahead; throw hooks over and under the rope. Keep your guard up.

    My coach likes to walk the rope with me and smack my ear when I drop my guard. Thanks, coach. (No really, it helps.)(It also stings.)(But my damn guard goes back up.)

    Tie up the second line of the X. Now it gets complicated and delicious (and your coach will leave, but will continue to harass you from the ringside). As you shadowbox around the ring, you have to keep bobbing under those ropes. The closer you get to the center of the ring, the tighter your pivots and shots will be. Work the whole ring, and gain a fresh appreciation for boxing-specific training, which will kick your everlovin’ ass.

    Here it is in bullet list form, because you love bullet list form.

    • 2 rounds ring slides (both directions)
    • 2 rounds regular shadow boxing
    • 2 rounds bob and weave under single rope
    • 2 rounds shadowboxing with the X-ring formation

    Then do the rest of your workout, padawan.

    Put this on your faves list

    Here’s the thing. This exercise is SO much more like actual boxing that most of the rest of the non-sparring work you do, which is what makes it so damn useful. It’s complex, it’s fun, and if you’re a gamer the slightly chaotic pattern and the possibility of getting clotheslined may juice you right the hell up.

    And hey, you don’t even have to be an actively sparring boxer to do this one, and it will give you a real feel for what it’s like to work offense AND a little defense in the ring.

    And it’s kinda nice that the clotheslines won’t punch you, either.

    Your turn, young Jedi

    Comment me up. You use this one? Like it/hate it? Got more? Leave ’em below and share the misery!

  • 3 Completely Counterintuitive Boxing Secrets

    3 Completely Counterintuitive Boxing Secrets

    Boxing doesn’t always work like you might think.

    Last night I was training at Second Round, my home gym. The afterschool crew was working through their paces with Sinclair, so I did my jump rope rounds, stretching, and shadowboxing alone. Mostly I thought hard about very specific moves I was working on, particularly my (nearly non-existant) left hook.

    Over and over again I stopped, moved through the motions, and tried again at speed. Shadow rounds, then heavy bag rounds. It wasn’t coming together. I slipped left, hooked, feh. No power. I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t know what it was.

    Then it all changed in a way I never expected.

    And I realized there are secrets to advancement in boxing that generally no one ever tells you about. Here’s what I learned…

    1. Don’t Expect Training

    Don’t expect your training to progress just because you managed to get your ass to the gym. In this game, you have to earn it.

    I spent an hour last night in the gym, failing to secure a left hook. I must have stopped 30 times in the course of six 3-minute rounds of shadowboxing, plus multiple rounds on the heavy bag, trying to slowmo my way into that hook. Nothing.

    But my trainer, Coach Willie “One Bad Jab” Massey, standing quietly by the ring at the outer edge of the gym, saw what I was doing.

    He saw the sweat running in rivers down my neck and shoulders and dripping off my nose. He saw me stop repeatedly to work the one specific combo. He knew I couldn’t find the left hook.

    Four rounds into my heavy bag work he came over.

    “I see you working really hard to land that hook. Let me show you why you’re not getting it,” he said, in his low-key way.

    Gratefully I stepped back from the bag and watched him slowly show me the move, first in his natural southpaw stance, then in the orthodox position. There are many subtleties.

    I was keeping my guard glove too high during the slip (couldn’t see my opponent), and not getting my shoulder behind the shot. Not keeping a solid 90 degree angle.

    In a regular boxing gym, you go and train on your own most of the time. Nobody is going to hold your hand and tell you every little thing to do. If you decide to slack through, you will be allowed. If you prefer to spend your time jacking around rather than sweating, you can. You’ll get little or no attention, and your form will suck. Practice doesn’t make perfect form. Good coaching plus practice is what solidifies your technique.

    A good coach will gravitate to the boxers working hard.

    Nobody will give you your training in boxing. You earn it.

    2. Miss the Bag

    This is what finally clinched the hook in my workout. I watched Coach Massey, then slipped and fired a few. Still no go. I pulled my guard hand down, put my shoulder behind the hook, but it didn’t feel consistent.

    Massey stopped me, and held up his hand opposite me, near the heavy bag.

    “Stop working the slip as the lead-in,” he told me. “Go ahead and fire your two past the bag to my hand, then throw the left hook.”

    “Past the bag?”

    “Yeah. That’s gonna put you in just the right position for the hook. You’ll see.”

    And I did. The leading right popped smartly into his palm, and I was in perfect hook-loaded position, so I was able to turn that nicely into the bag. Pop-bam, two-hook, sweet as you please.

    Working on a heavy bag is nothing like working with a sparring partner, but it’s great for practicing technique. And it’s very counterintuitive, but you can use the spaces around the bag to work as well as the spaces on the bag.

    After Massey left, I continued to work that hook by shooting my two past the bag, then throwing the left. And it worked very nicely.

    And that brings me to my third boxing secret, which isn’t as counterintuitive as the first two, but follows nicely from those points.

    3. Finish the Equation

    Like I said before, working the heavy bag is nothing like working in the ring. The bag does’t slip and dodge, duck and pivot, or otherwise respond smartly to your offense. It’s always in range, and it always takes your shots — so you don’t have to maintain your balance, keep your feet moving, or avoid an opponent.

    In order to really advance in your boxing training, you need to take what you learn on the mats and at the heavy bag and translate it into working in the ring with a sparring partner.

    Even if you just box for fitness, finding a trustworthy partner who will let you work lightly through some rounds in the ring will completely revolutionize your training sessions. You’ll be forced to move more, work harder, and you’ll get an incredible calorie-eating workout.

    So finish your boxing equation and get in the ring to try your freshly-minted (or solid bread-and-butter) skills, because everything is different in the ring.

    Got counterintuitive training tips and secrets of your own? Share ’em in the comments, and gimme goods to post about next!

    Stay strong!

  • Boxing Lesson: Advance on the Jab

    Boxing Lesson: Advance on the Jab

    It may be that trainers have been saying this to me for years now, and I’m only just recently able to hear it.

    There is so much to be mastered in boxing that sometimes it’s all you can do to cope with the basics. You have to simply survive in the ring for a long time before you stop sucking and start to look like you know a couple of things. It can be incredibly hard to operate calmly when you feel like you are under fire, but I promise you, it does happen! You get one tiny building block, then another and another.

    I feel like I am finally at the point where I’m able to hear my trainers tell me to advance on the jab. Jay was saying this well before I was at Second Round, where I’m hearing it now from Coach “One Bad Jab” Massey.

    It sounds ridiculously simple, doesn’t it?

    For whatever reasons, I’ve either not heard it, or haven’t been able to implement it until recently. It could be that I was simply relying on my fairly good reach, and just never gave my jabs that extra push they needed to punch through, rather than to my target. Using your rear foot to push yourself forward in a short, strong burst on the jab gives you a couple more inches and really sends that jab home with a bang.

    This is an offensive jab, whereas many of my jabs are also defensive, thrown to keep someone out of my range or stop my opponent’s advance. That’s all good, but advancing on the jab is another way to intimidate, score, and control in the boxing ring.

    Check out one of my favorite fighters, Ana “The Hurricane” Julaton (8-2-1, 1 KO), the WBO super bantamweight world champion who recently defended her title against #1 contender Franchesca “The Chosen One” Alcanter (18-10-1, 9 KO’s).

    Julaton’s jab is unstoppable. She won the fight on this perfect shot, a handful of power rights and that sick left hook.

    Watch how she advances on nearly every single jab. It’s incredible to see, and it’s made even more powerful with the warp speed at which she moves. The fight begins at the 7 minute mark on the video below, and this video includes the entire 10 rounds. Ana is in the red and black.

    By the way, Ana Julaton just became the first female boxer ever to appear on a Topps trading card. Cool, huh? Oh, and since they gave Ana one, they had to give one to Manny Pacquiao, too.

    But around my house, we’ll be hoping for a Julaton.

    Image by maxtm on Flickr

    *Incidentally, the ref in the ring in the photo at the top of this post is one of the coaches at Second Round where I’m boxing now. He is frequently back and forth to NY (and many other places) as a boxing referee. I think he’s been doing it now for more than 40 years. I’m forever coming across him in video and photos.

  • The Body Forgets, The Body Remembers

    The Body Forgets, The Body Remembers

    The first week in December I got a little overzealous about increasing my number of unassisted chin-ups and wrecked my shoulder. It’s an old injury and I’ve been through the re-healing process before, but this time one of the pro boxers in my gym suggested I come see her to help get it taken care of. I looked at her, baffled.

    “I’m a physical therapist, you know,” she laughed.

    Sometimes I forget that the boxers at the gym have jobs, families, lives. But the thought of a trained medical person who wouldn’t berate me for boxing and who might actually speed the healing process had tremendous appeal, and I found myself booking the appointment.

    So for two months I stayed out of the ring and off the heavy bag and worked through an intense physical therapy program to heal my shoulder up as much as I could. I missed boxing horribly, and consoled myself with running the shame line at the “normal” gym and becoming fiercely competitve in everything cardio. Slightly depressed, I ate garbage and became nostalgic about push-ups, but by God, I ran. And threw sprints on the jump rope, and cranked up the elliptical machine.

    By the time I could move my shoulder again without spikes of pain I felt like I had forgotten the ways of moving in the ring. I started standing in front of the mirror and sending out slow-motion jabs: is this how it works? Is this still right? Jabs seem like such a simple punch, but they are stunningly complex and there is a galaxy of difference between a good jab and a crap one. A good jab can save your ass in the ring, warding off your opponent’s punches or breaking up her combinations. They can measure distance, letting you know whether you’re in range or not. They deliver most of your messages, front your bombs, secure territory, and with power they can beat a tattoo of pain into someone’s face. You can’t think about your jab in the ring, it just has to be there, ready to fire. Boxing without a good jab is like swimming without arms and legs.

    You gotta have a good jab, and I feared my body was forgetting mine.

    My feet were forgetting, too. I stood balanced in my stance in the middle of the bedroom floor, and tried to recall how it felt to train on the tractor tire that sat on the loading dock behind the gym: rocking my weight quickly, lightly, back and forth between my feet to allow me to move with balance and speed.

    I stood in the bedroom and looked down at my forgetful feet and sighed.

    When I finally began to shadowbox again I knew my form — which is still a novice’s, even after nearly two years — had grown blurry, but there’s really no simple cure. There’s only the long, repetitive road of work ahead.

    Last week I finally got back in the ring again. It was after team training — my first in more than two months. I had substituted legwork for all the training that directly hits the shoulders (mountain climbers, push-ups, burpees, etc.) and with that and the fact that I’d maintained my cardio, I realized I still had some energy left. Our trainer closed down the session and I looked around at my drenched and winded teammates. My shoulder felt okay: no spikes of pain. It wasn’t strong, but it didn’t feel injured any more.

    “Anybody want to give me a couple of light, easy rounds in the ring?” I asked. “I’d really like to test out my shoulder. Nothing serious, though,” I added, knowing everyone else had worked much harder in training than I had.

    A couple of them groaned and declined, heading for the showers. But one of the newer guys offered to stay. Because he’s new and doesn’t have much experience in the ring, I got permission from our trainer to spar, and we both geared up.

    The gym had cleared out and it was late; the headlights on the cars headed out of the parking lot flashed through the windows. Someone had turned down the volume on the ever-present thump of hip-hop, making the bell that starts the rounds sound incredibly loud. I moved out to the center of the ring, shivering with anticipation and nerves. I was more flat-footed than light and balanced, but I was in the ring.

    We had a satisfying five rounds. No one cornered, no one watched. He was too inexperienced to know how sloppy my form was, and my jab wasn’t so out of practice that he didn’t feel it. Like most newbies, he apologized once he began to land some power punches. They felt great. I was remembering. He kept his gloves in front of his face against my jab so I repeatedly hooked to his head: around the guard, straight to the ear. Connection. My shoulder held up. I began to feel exultant.

    The next day I had a slight headache and my neck and shoulders were sore from the tension I’d carried in the ring. It sounds counter-intuitive, but you absolutely must relax when you box, just like you relax on the landing of a long fall, in order to transfer the shock through more of your body and allow the impact to flow on through without breaking anything. My body was reminding me of the patterns and necessities of boxing.

    I pressed my fingers to the slightly bruised and tender bridge of my nose; I ate a healthy serving of punches from the newbie. Dude was quite promising, much better than I was when I began boxing. He had some power, too, as my nose was telling me. There was a tender spot on the underside of my jaw as well. I laughed; he’d fired quite a few uppercuts and at least one of them connected. Uppercuts! From a newbie.

    I smiled, remembering.

    Image by isabel bloedwater

  • The Shame Line is Open


    Three months ago I picked up a jump rope for the first time since I was eight years old. Watching me try to manage a few hops was probably like watching a drunk steer stagger around a corral, except with cursing. I couldn’t believe something so simple, so universal, so obvious could be so impossible. Elementary age girls all over the world do this!

    But that’s how it was, and there was no getting around the fact that if you are a boxer, you also will jump rope. There’s a good reason for this correlation. Jumping rope incinerates calories (up to 1000 an hour); improves your posture, timing, and coordination; powers up your heart even better than running does with less impact on your knees; and costs nearly nothing fifty dollars.

    I should say more about that I guess.

    After three or four humiliating sessions of attempting to jump rope, I did what any middle-class American woman would do. I tried to purchase my way out. I watched my trainer and several other team mates effortlessly skip their way — without misses — through round after round of jump rope drills. Their ropes had shiny silver handles and whistling clear tubes for the “rope”. I could tell something was helping the rope swivel without twisting. I decided that if I had one of those jump ropes, I would be graceful and skilled, too. Har.

    So like many others before me, I got sent to the Buddy Lee Jump Rope website, and I paid my (cough) fifty dollars, and my path to success arrived in the mail about a week later. During the intervening time I did my best to convince my husband that fifty dollars was a reasonable price to pay for a glorified string with handles. It didn’t go well.

    And I learned what everyone learns. Jumping rope skills take time and practice to build, no matter how awesome and ridiculously expensive your jump rope is.

    Eventually my drunken, cursing steer act evolved into a mildly irritated and slightly graceless steer act. Then, in the space of a week or so, I left behind the bovine analogy all together. I am now a pretty good jump roper.

    In fact, I can jump rope for half an hour straight with a few misses, throwing in the occasional twist-the-rope-in-front trick, a running sprint, and the standard pogo. I’m not yet as graceful on the “boxer shuffle” but I’m gaining ground daily.

    So. When I’m not at the boxing gym I go to a regular fitness center, and for two months or so I’ve been taking my diamond-and-ruby-encrusted jump rope with me and doing my thing.

    Until I started jumping rope at that gym, I NEVER ONCE saw anyone jumping rope. After a couple of weeks I noticed I had set off a trend of guys (and guys only) who suddenly decided to do so. And now there’s an interesting pattern that I bear witness to nearly every single time I go.

    It goes like this.

    I get to the gym and post, in ink that only guys can read, a sign that only guys can see, on the front of the huge glass-walled aerobics room where I typically jump. The sign says: “The Shame Line is Open.” This draws them in, one at a time, for a whuppin. During the 30 minutes or so that I’m calmly jumping rope and making it look easy, they come in, pick out one of the barely-used jump ropes hanging on the rack, flex their muscles a bit (neck rolls are a favorite, I’ve noticed), then proceed to whip it for about eight jumps.

    Whereupon they invariably miss, glance over to where I’m serenely running my routine, and start again. They NEVER try to Just Jump Rope. They have to throw a trick, or sprint, or double jump, and they fail. This is frustrating to them because they remember in high school how they could do this, at least a little bit. And they were cool, yes they were. And darn it, they still are.

    They never last an entire minute. And honestly, I never lasted at the beginning either. But jumping rope is absolutely nothing like riding a bike; it’s a skill you have to develop and maintain.

    I feel some sympathy, in an amused 43-year-old woman kind of way. But I’m not closing down shop or anything. Somebody’s gotta run the Shame Line. Might as well be me.