There is a point in life when you come to accept some things and let go of aspirations more suited for a younger man. The salad days of me thumping my way around a ring or cage, or an alley for that matter, are well behind me. Yet despite all that sensible logic, my heart still yearns for pugilistic sports.
My opponents these days are clad in leather and hang lifeless throughout dank boxing gyms, ominous to look at, but they offer little in the way of retaliation for the plentiful abuse sent their way. There’s no more sparring. At sixty-two, there are too many things that can go horribly wrong. The daily wear and tear on a fighter’s body become increasingly difficult to recover from with age, and I probably reached that point of diminishing results some twenty years ago.
It’s just a workout now, me against the bags. The only challengers are my will and ageless pride versus my burning lungs and muscles and the increasing desire to stop before the bell says it’s time. Being victorious in that fight is not a matter of who is more skilled. You win by refusing to quit no matter how much it hurts.
Today began week two of training, and while it was hard, I have more than doubled my endurance from just a week ago.
I use a timer to measure each work round and take a 30-second rest break between rounds. Typically I train 3-minute rounds, but the problem is that my lack of conditioning prevents me from going hard for three whole minutes with a short rest period. Rather than coasting through the rounds or working hard and being so gassed that my form falls apart, I decided to start with 1-minute rounds and 30-seconds rest but go as hard as I could go for that minute. I do fifteen rounds like that, and the change in my conditioning level is shocking.
I will do this for another week then increase the round time to 1.5 minutes. I will then increase the work time by 30 seconds every two weeks until I can go hard for a solid three-minute round.
Because my conditioning has improved, I can train harder on the weights, and I am dropping body fat far quicker than when I do cardio any other way.
If you haven’t tried boxing before, I recommend you take some classes from a boxing coach, the kind that actually punch people and not just air, so you learn proper technique. Those skills may come in handy one day. You never have to spar or fight competitively if you don’t want to, or you can if it happens to get in your blood. But you will find the workouts are a lot of fun and very beneficial.
