Stamina

Posted on Friday, March 25th, 2016 by John Wood

“…Of all boxers it seems to have been Rocky Marciano who trained with the most monastic devotion; his training methods have become legendary. Marciano was willing to seclude himself from the world, including his wife and family, for as long as three months before a fight.

Apart from the grueling physical ordeal of this period and the obsessive preoccupation with diet and weight and muscle tone, Marciano concentrated on one thing; the upcoming fight.

Every minute of his life was defined in terms of the opening second of the fight. In his training camp the opponent’s name was never mentioned in Marciano’s hearing, nor was boxing as a subject discussed. In the final month, Marciano would not write a letter since a letter related to the outside world. During the last ten days before a fight he would see no mail, take no telephone calls, meet no new acquaintances.

During the week before the fight he would not shake hands. Or go for a ride in a car, however brief. No new foods! No dreaming of the morning after the fight! For all that was not the fight had to be excluded from consciousness.

When Marciano worked out with a punching bag he saw his opponent before him, when he jogged he saw his opponent close beside him, no doubt when he slept he ‘saw’ his opponent constantly—as the cloistered monk or nun chooses by an act of fanatical will to ‘see’ only God. “Madness? — or merely discipline? — this absolute subordination of the self. In any case, for Marciano, it worked.”

Joyce Carol Oates

“On Boxing”

Dr. Ken’s Steel Suitcases

Posted on Thursday, March 24th, 2016 by John Wood

The farmers walk is a great exercise and has always been one of my favorites — just grab a weight in each hand and start walking. How far you go is up to you, but one thing is always for sure: you can go a lot farther than you think you can since your mind will give out before your body does. Needless to say, this is a great exercise for building hand strength AND mental toughness.

As far as the weights you can use, a pair of dumbbells is a good choice, as are sandbags, or even some specially made handles which some folks like to use.

If you got a chance to check out some of Brooks Kubik’s old Dinosaur Training videos, you saw Brooks performing the Farmers walk with some highly unusual implements: a pair of 180-pound iron suitcases made by Dr. Ken. Imagine two pieces of metal each shaped like an “I” with handles welded on top and that’s what we are dealing with.

Brooks, the madman that he is, decided to take these little monsters for a walk around the city block in his Bags, Barrels, and Beyond video and if you’ve seen it, you know it is in-tense.