Old School Boxing Conditioning
Boxing, MMA, Kettlebells
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 5-6:30 PM
Amateur or Olympic-style boxing is a blend of offensive and defensive skills used in the art of self-defense. In Olympic-style boxing, a boxer uses speed, maneuverability and technique to outscore the opponent and win the decision. All legal blows in amateur boxing are scored equally; even a knockdown is considered only one scoring blow. Olympic-style boxing transforms the combination of conditioning, defense, offense and strategy into a skilled and exciting sport.
—From the USA Boxing Technical Rules Manual, page 4 (italics mine)
Old School Boxing is intended to be a comprehensive training resource for anyone interested in fist-fighting. Western boxing in all of its forms may fall under this coarse title. In most English speaking countries, the entire idea of a “fair fight” is essentially the one agreed upon by Irish, Britons, Scots, and other immigrants in the United States in the 19th century. Even today boys and men take their shirts off before a street fight sometimes, never knowing that the practice hearkens back to the days of men fighting, upon agreement, “stripped to the waist”.
Although various amounts of wrestling and dirty or illegal blows are always present, the main aim of the boxer is to win by driving his fists*into his opponents’ head or trunk. As a fighting art, the doctrine of boxing might be broadly stated as follows:
1. The hands are the most dexterous parts of the body
2. The hands are situated closest to ‘acceptable’ targets
3. The arms and hands can be conditioned to deliver effective blows while the legs are best used as a ‘mobile platform’ from which to fire the hands, augmenting offense and defense with movement.
*and, slightly more liberally understood, his elbows, shoulders, hips, head, forearms, knees, and feet…at least.
Old School Boxing training is based on bare-knuckle boxing and can be used in real self-defense situations; it is therefore a fighting art. This style creates a good base for all types of real fighting because training is based on the following principles:
• Choose a very limited number of strikes (straight, hook, uppercut)
• Limit targets (head and trunk)
• Devote large amounts of time to practicing these few weapon-target combinations, continually testing them under controlled conditions (sparring with protective equipment)
• Emphasize conditioning
These points are in contrast to some ‘traditional’ martial arts as taught in the US; an analogy might be the emergence and dominance of judo over old-style Japanese ju-jitsu. While judo lacked the ‘deadly’ techniques of it’s’ predecessor, judo players were able to develop their throws in free fighting conditions, while ju-jitsu stuck to pre-arranged sequences. Similarly, trained boxers are generally far more competent in full-contact fighting than those trained in more esoteric styles.