4th Class Officer

We've got a local amateur-only gym with an unusually high concentration of nationally ranked fighters. The guy who trains the fighters has no boxing background. He was just a basketball coach for 20 years. When I read that in his bio, I reached out to him because I've always thought boxing coaches are the worst at teaching boxing. Spent an hour talking to him while his practices ran, and it was refreshing. Because he came into the sport with no preferred training method, he simply adapted what worked from basketball coaching. He also visited many different gyms to see what they were doing, and took what worked and left what didn't. But most interesting is that he's the only coach (that I've talked to, at least) who has made the explicit connection that boxing is a sport that primarily functions through rotation in the transverse plane. So he modeled much of his technical training on baseball and golf, with a few ideas from basketball (interesting to see the kickback step incorporated into a footwork drill). I've mentioned how, when I started training for my comeback, I spent a year absorbing baseball and golf research and tutorials because I realized that's where the secret sauce lies. I thought, for a long time, that I was the only mind that had made this connection. And I have good reason to think that, aside from my experience—but that's for another reason. It was great to meet a coach who had modified everything in practice to align with what the science says and what the sport demands. No long runs. Only interval training. Weight lifting, but not like a bodybuilder. He had even figured out that some pieces of equipment are worthless to the point that he's forbid his boxers from using them.