Hey everybody. So let's do episode 101. Okay, what's the date today? Today is what we got. It's the 30th of January. It's 8.54am on the way to work. I've basically not moved. Well, I've moved about half a mile in an hour. I've seen ambulances rush past. Hopefully everything's okay, but looks like there's been some sort of incident. Miles and miles up front as I'm approaching work and the Amex Stadium basically. So hopefully some poor buggers all right up there. But what it is doing, it's made me very, very late. I really. I start working about four minutes, but yeah, can't get there. Not moving. No one's moving. Half the world's gonna be late down in Sussex area today. So anyway, reason why I'm bringing that up is I thought I would just briefly have a chat around how valuable time is when we coach. 

I think a lot of gyms train for anything between an hour, hour-and-a-half session and two hours. Maybe some may do, maybe may do more, but those tend to be the general sort of consensus. When I'm doing coach-ed stuff, I'm always asking that question, how long do you train your sessions for? Of course, it depends on the age group and abilities and things like that, but most people say hour, hour and a half, two hours. So when we're doing those sessions, how valuable is what we're doing to those, to those individuals? 

Talking to a friend of mine, Danny Hatcher, a while ago and he mentioned also in a recent podcast of his or on one of his YouTube channels that he mentioned there isn't right or wrong coaching. There's ineffective and there's effective coaching. So it's not so much. You're either this or that. You have levels of effectiveness. And I think when you are thinking about what we're delivering from session to session and how we structure that, what the content is and how we deliver that to the individuals and the groups, how can we make it more effective? 

Okay, so let's jump in there. Just general rambling thoughts as I'm inching forward like a bloody snail to work. Right, so after we start on warm ups, and again, I've had this conversation with Danny. Your traditional warm up would tend to be bit of skipping, running around the outside of the gym, kind of one clap is left hand down, two is right hand down. Three is jump up and header a ball or punch out in front or whatever it might be. Is it right or wrong? Like I said, try not to think in this sort of binary way of right or wrong. But there's effective and ineffective. So does it get the heart rate up? Yes. Does it warm the core muscles up? Yes. So in some ways it is doing what we're trying to set out to do, prevent injury, that kind of thing, switch the body on ready for exercise. So yes, it does. And in a kind of health and safety point of view, it does tick a lot of boxes. But is it fully effective? In other words, is it related to a lot of the problems that are going to happen during a session? And when I say problems, I don't mean boxers, turning up late or behaviour or anything like that. I mean the problems that boxing asks of a boxer. Hit someone and not get hit. I think a lot of times, thinking of some of the sessions I've done, sessions that I see in terms of warm ups, the answer is no. A lot of it doesn't replicate what you're doing. 

Now. I'm not saying jump immediately into some form of sparring because body of mind's not prepared and there is a potential for injury, etc. There does need to be a form of warming up the body, etc. Muscles switching on the nervous system or potentiation. Some people will use a ramp protocol to raise, activate, mobilise and potentiate the body. And that does make sense. I think that is very important. But are there elements of, when you get into that potentiation area, can we not achieve some of these things while still developing elements of skill or at least educating intention and attention? 

Wow, that sounds fluffy, right? But why do we go from the kind of left hand down, right hand down, skipping, brain switched off, when we know the brain needs to be switched on and then into something which is quite heavily involved with different problems of the sport. So can we be more intentional about what we do in the warm up? So there are elements of representativeness. So in other words, there's certain problems that you will have to solve in boxing, i. e. hit and don't get hit. Within that a lot of people might play elements of shoulder tag, gloves on, touching to the shoulders. So you are solving a problem which is always going to be present within boxing, within that boxing environment. So the development of range control, switching on the perceptual system. So in other words, the body's ready, but is the mind ready? Is the perceptual system ready? Where you're actually tuning into? Is that person coming in, is it coming out? What kind of movement are they doing? Is that a feint? Are they trying to draw my attention to somewhere? Certainly false, which gives them an upper hand. So you got that whole kind of deception line that we talk about in the boxing model, which are feints and triggers. Are we tuning into the right information in the warm up? 

And I think a lot of the time we do this kind of very 1970s, 1980s PE warm up that people of that age have. That I certainly did have learned that it's very much physical and then the brain isn't engaged at all. And then we expect the brain to be switched on right for the start. But of course, a lot of boxers complain that they always give away the first round, often because perhaps a warm up does not have the information in it that it needs to picture a warm up in competition. So if we're warming up in the changing rooms, pads, come on gloves, come on pads. It's starting to look a lot more real now. Of course, a boxer might skip for a few rounds or do a little jog on the spot or whatever it might be before they start those pads. And again, we need to be quite safe in those areas. 

But I think in terms of effectiveness and ineffectiveness, are we missing a lot of opportunities to slide up the effectiveness line or scale in warm ups? Purely because a lot of the movements we're doing don't represent the movements that we'll be doing in boxing. And then again, think about time. How long do we warm up for? So let's make it simple. We've got an hour session. If I ask a question to people who are listening now, how long would your warm up be then? I'll give you a couple of seconds to think about that because I've got to think about it myself in my sessions. Then the answer might be 10 minutes, 15 minutes max, maybe. So that's quarter. Quarter of that session is a warm-up. Okay, so 25% of that session is a warm up. And if that's what we always do, then 25% of everything your boxers ever do in the gym that is are warm ups. 25% is a quarter. It's huge. So if we look at effectiveness and ineffectiveness, we want that area to be effective as possible. So yes, we want to avoid injury, we want to prepare the body, but are we preparing the mind? Are we preparing the perceptual system to then move into solving problems that you'll actually do in your main part of the session, if it will. So you could argue, should a warm up be separate from the main session? Perhaps not. Perhaps there should be some kind of seamless blend which then follows into the theme or to the individual's problems that they're going to be solving, or themes that they might have written on a whiteboard somewhere that you want to develop. So it almost feels like as they've started, then 60 minutes later they finish, they go, wow, I didn't even notice we finished because it's kind of blended. They've been engaged in problem solving all the way throughout. 

So again, I'm just thinking along those lines of 25%. If that 25% is ineffective, then that's quite scary because if you think along the line of wages, if you're 25% wages, is taken away, for example, or you're not given that increase in salary, then you know there's murders, you're not happy about that. So we think along that line as time being one of the most valuable wthings we have as boxers. So we could be just repeating a lot of stuff which is very slid along, that kind of 1, 2, 3, effectiveness in terms of development. But we do it anyway because we say we got to warm up, haven't you? Of course you have to warm up. But can there not be different ways of engaging. Little games that have the hit and don't get hit? Problem solving. They're thinking about range management, they're thinking about how they change the tempo. All these bits and pieces that come into boxing that are essential that all coaches would agree on a Facebook or Instagram post or something like that, some kind of forum that, oh yeah, the most important thing in boxing is really hard to teach is got a good range management. They've got a good range management. They've got to be able to change the tempo. They've got to be able to position themselves. 

Okay, so that is the case then within that 25% of time to make that more effective, are we actually bringing elements of that challenge in? And if the answer is no, then perhaps we are sliding back to the scale. So little ideas to bring that effectiveness up would be simple games like shoulder tag. And I've mentioned in a podcast episode before, that's all well and good. Unless shoulder tag turns into you're getting hit 15 times, they're getting it 15 times every 10 seconds and it just turns into this silly kind of patty cake game if there's not a consequence of getting caught, that is they might have to sit out for 10 seconds and reset and go again. Or there's some kind of point system. First to three, first to score wins, that kind of thing. More of a king of the ring field. Then their brain is not switched on because there's no consequences. So it just becomes movement patterns and you are honing bad practice essentially because the idea is hit and not get hit. But what's happening is they're getting hit and they're just trading. So that's not good in terms of skill acquisition, skill attunement. And of course ultimately it's not be good in terms of their safety because we're telling them it's okay to get hit. 

So on the box gathering website in the warm up areas, so we have an area which talks about warm ups. We have tech and tactical warm up areas in the my downloads and my club communication section. There are lots of little videos there about trying to slide effectiveness within the warm ups. And again, it doesn't have to be the warm up. This can be in the main part of the session. If we're not dividing the session up into it's got to be warm up, main session, cool down, that kind of thing. There's lots of different things that can be done in terms of skill acquisition, solving the problems that boxing always poses to us and just trying to slide it across to that more effective side. 

Sliding doors. I think I may have mentioned this before in one of the episodes maybe a couple of years ago. Sliding Doors, the film, if anyone's seen that. Absolutely cracking the film. The guy gets on the underground on time and his life goes perfectly. And then there's another kind of his life duplicated or cloned. He doesn't get on the underground in time, the door closes and his life goes to hell. And it's just this kind of consequence after consequence. So I think if we look at it like that, that can be quite useful. So if you've got Boxer A on one side and then your duplicate or clone on the other side, box array is skipping all the time for 15 minutes, his brain switched off. Not to say skipping is not effective because it does switch on the body, but does it switch on the mind? Not so much. Does it switch on the perceptual system? Absolutely not. But then you have a boxer on the other side who might skip for a round to warm up, just to switch on his, his muscles. Bit of activation, you know, that tenseness in the, in the Achilles tendon, all that kind of stuff. Then they're doing a little bit of shoulders. Then they're playing games like the drawbridge game, the FA cup game, all these bits and pieces, they're doing dead wood lice. All these little games that switch on the body but also switch on the mind. There's problem solving, there's consequences. Now, if you compare box array on the left to box array on the right, which one's going to develop better? 

So if we look at things like that, this 15 minutes of how effective and ineffective as opposed to right or wrong, then I think we might be on a good track there in terms of their development, their engagement, their skill attunement, their ability to interact with the environment. I know a lot of people don't like this sort of fluffy language, but I think, I believe it is true direct perception with the environment that you're in, the people in front of you, the opponent in front of you. The best boxers are the ones that can really can work out people, let's be honest, aren't they best boxers can work out people what they're doing and they can take them to pieces. Dalton Smith boxed the other day. He's brilliant at this, really good at tuning in, working people out and having the solution bang. And not only does he put them away, he puts them away with force and precision and power. So having that attunement, I think, comes from what environment you set right from the start of a session. Are the boxers challenged and are the challenges in those little games interactions representative of what will happen? Is there elements of them having to manipulate space time? Are they solving problems which are real of the sport?

Anyway, I think I'm starting to repeat myself now, but that's, that's what I'm thinking. How long has that been now? That's been bloody minutes. And guess what? I've moved about 100 meters, so I'm having an absolute stinker today. Hopefully I'll get into work at some point. Don't start with the boxers until about 11:45 today, but loads of marking to do, loads of preparation still to do for them. They've been away a lot. Half of them have been away in Tenerife and they're coming back today. Another teacher took the second week, so looking forward to hearing their experiences in the second week and getting back to work and enjoying boxing again. 

So guys, thanks very much. It's episode 101. Speak to you all soon. Any thoughts that you have around that stick on the social media, message me through the website through the social media. Love to hear your thoughts on how you make things more effective as opposed to ineffective. Okay, jump on the website www.theboxgathering.com and you can join and have a look at a lot of our videos, instructionals, things like that to help make things a little bit more effective. Right, I'm going now. Cheers guys. Bye bye.