The Case Against Shadowboxing [and Other Shaky Practices] Part 2 by Mark Hatmaker

 

[This offering can be consumed independently but is bolstered by having read Part 1 of The Case Against Shadowboxing.]

Pop Quiz for Combat Athletes & General Preparedness Trainers

[Answer True or False for all.]

One-Explosive bench-pressing educates football players to be fast and explosive in the upper-body.

Two-Clapping push-ups and other like “plyometric” push-ups educate speed in the combat athlete.

Three—Swinging a weighted bat increases facility when hitting a baseball.

Four—Swinging a kettlebell increases facility in takedowns.

Five—Agility drills build speed and quickness for football players.

Six—Speedbags build punch quickness for boxers.

Seven—Plyometric tossing of medicine balls improves throwing ability.

Eight—Skipping rope improves footwork and quickness in the ring, in the cage, or on the turf.

Nine—Lifting free weights improves balance more than do machine [cam-regulated] resistance work.

Ten—Shadowboxing/kicking/wrestling improves speed of execution.

There we go, ten questions, I take it you have your ten answers.

Ready for the answer key?

First, “Mark, why did you include sports outside of combat?”

Large franchise sports [NFL football, and MLB baseball,] these sports have thrown a lot of money at optimizing the training of athletes. Cash on the barrelhead is key to keeping a franchise in the running. Coaches and trainers in these high-stakes endeavors falling prey to the fads and fashions of conditioning and making patchwork quilts of training top-level athletes based on poor or disputed research is anathema.

The Answer Key

All are false.

Wait? Wha? Each of these practices are part and parcel of many a training tradition, how can all of them be false, let alone any of them?

Laying the Foundation

First, our false evaluation is all based on

One—Old School training practices and…

Two current motor learning research which shows that [once again] seemingly forgotten or misunderstood old ways might just be the wiser ways.

Motor Learning

We’ll need an operating definition as we move forward, motor learning deals with movement skill acquisition and the reinforcement and transfer of these actions.

[Pull out your mental highlighter, reinforcement and transfer are KEY ideas.]

The crux of motor learning is to train athletes with maximum efficiency with no opportunity costs and no interference. [Again, key ideas, we’ll be hammering all of these.]

Specificity & YouTube Archeology

You are ahead of the game if you assume that specificity plays a large part in the Old School approach and motor learning findings.

In essence, specificity states that learning is task-specific, that is, what you train for that is what you get.

This holds even for similar domains, middle distance runners do not train like marathoners. Marathoners do not train like sprinters. Olympic speed walkers do not train like power walkers et cetera.

Each of these athletes may be putting one foot in front of the other but they [and we] recognize that improvement in a specific domain requires task-specific focus.

If that task is our main target [or breadwinning moneymaker] training options outside of that task rob us of time [opportunity costs] and, may in fact, inhibit what we wish to improve. [More on this to come.]

This non-transfer is called domain specificity. That is, expertise/ability in a single area in no way implies similar performance outside of that endeavor. This holds not only in physical endeavors but in cognitive tasks as well.

Example: Masters of the assumed brainy endeavor of chess in no way perform above the mean in other board games or exhibit super-human memory or calculating prowess outside the realm of the 64 squares on the board.

A Harvard PhD. in chemical Engineering does not automatically confer the ability to fix my transmission, tell me when to plant tomatoes, or tell me if my marriage is stable or not.

This may spark a question from some…

“OK, Mark I’m down with specificity and that whole domain-dependance thing likely holds true for the weekend athlete, but those at the top of their games are elite animals. They likely have a different sort of make-up to them that makes their prowess a bit more transferable.”

YouTube Archeology

ABC-TV ran a show for 20 years called Superstars Competitions. The premise was to take stars of their respective sport and pit them against one another in sporting endeavors outside of their bailiwick.

If we look to the first telecast, we can see such legends as…

·        Jean-Claude Killy--skiing

·        Johnny Bench—baseball

·        Johnny Unitas—football

·        Bob Seagren—pole vaulting

·        Emerson Fittipaldi—auto racing

·        Joe Frazier—Do I even need to say to you, Dear Reader?

·        Elvin Hayes—basketball.

They competed in 10 different events including: Tennis, golf, swimming, cycling, weightlifting, rowing and bowling.

So, how did these stars with their above-average abilities do?

You can dial it up and see for yourself or go with my assessment of below average in a majority of the events they competed in.

In some cases, these anointed ones were trainwrecks. Mr. Unitas seems unable to row a boat, My Hayes’ tennis game, well…and the legendary Smokin’ Joe? Could not get a moderately loaded barbell over his head and seems precariously close to drowning in the swim event.

I say none of this to shame these men who have already proven themselves in their domains. No one doubts the power of Joe Frazier in his domain, it simply did not transfer. We mention these men to call to mind the key points of specificity, domain dependance, and poor transfer.

Over the course of the 20-year program overall performances improved, but...this was due to the “humiliation effect”: the top athletes saw what occurred in the early days and self-admitted that when selected for the program they began training for some facility in the given events.

So, to improve in a domain, they had to leave their target domain behind.

“All right, Mark, I hear ya, no one doubts specificity. One does not need a pool to be a good boxer or a heavy bag to be a good runner. But c’mon, speedbags and shadowboxing for boxers and agility drills for running backs, those seem mighty sport-specific?”

They do indeed seem similar. Turns out though, not similar enough and that’s where an insidious training trap rears its ugly head.

[In Part 3, we take a trip deeper into scientific weeds and start on the road to offering how and why to alter our training approach, allowing recent science to make the case for what the Old Timers already knew. In the meantime, if you wanna jump on the real-deal Old School way of physical conditioning see our Unleaded Program. 3 volumes are now available with the next titles on the way, Unleaded: Shoulder Stability will be available in June and Unleaded Endurance: The 10/40 for easy stamina acquisition the old school way will debut in August.]

[For more Rough& Tumble history, Indigenous Ability hacks, and for pragmatic applications of old school tactics historically accurate and viciously verified see our RAW/Black Box Subscription Service.]

Or our brand-spankin’ new podcast The Rough and Tumble Raconteur available on all platforms.