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Double-Down on Doubleday Drills by Mark Hatmaker

  There was an astonishingly creative panoply of drills to build punching power, balance, precision, finesse and overall form. These drills can be found spread throughout early boxing training, in singular pockets of rural approaches to fighting and are rife and rampant in the rough n tumble tradition where power was a premium.   In our newest Black Box Instructional Product, we present 20 of these drills under the rubric “Doubleday Drills” in honor of Civil War veteran and purported “Father of American Baseball” Abner Doubleday as so many of these drills are rooted in hard-smackin’ they remind me of teeing off with a good old fashioned hickory bat. We’ll provide more history on these another day, but for now I believe it suffices to say that getting started on 20 Drills to hit harder and meaner is the key thing—less readin’, more doin’! Many of these drills train attributes that are now illegal, making them ideal for street/self-defense use. I am 100% confident th...
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The Old Man on a Boxing Novel from 1905 by Mark Hatmaker

  The Game by Jack London He lacked speech-expression. He expressed himself with his hands, at his work, and with his body and the play of his muscles in the squared ring; but to tell with his own lips the charm of the squared ring was beyond him. Yet he essayed, and haltingly at first, to express what he felt and analyzed when playing the Game at the supreme summit of existence. “All I know, Genevieve, is that you feel good in the ring when you’ve got the man where you want him, when he’s had a punch up both sleeves waiting for you and you’ve never given him an opening to land ’em, when you’ve landed your own little punch an’ he’s goin’ groggy, an’ holdin’ on, an’ the referee’s dragging him off so’s you can go in an’ finish ’m, an’ all the house is shouting an’ tearin’ itself loose, an’ you know you’re the best man, an’ that you played m’ fair an’ won out because you’re the best man. This 1905 boxing novella from the author of The Call of the Wild, White Fang, The Sea Wolf ...

Supplements & Old School Vitamin G by Mark Hatmaker

  Let’s begin with a corralling definition—when we discuss supplements, I refer to any and all non-food, non-prescribed items one swallows in pill form, mixes and drinks, or transdermal patch or injection. I repeat—we are discussing NON-PRESCRIBED supplements. If a medical professional writes a scrip and you take it to a pharmacy and they hand it over without batting an eye—we ain’t talking that. What we are discussing—anything that you can freely walk into a vitamin aisle and grab off the shelf, anything “prescribed” by a blog [this one included], a podcast, web article and, very likely our current “super-scientific” head of Health and Human Services. All of these voluntarily chosen supposed “helpers on the margin” are what is in the crosshairs today. Before we get all sciencey and get to the real meat of this essay, let’s get three things out of the way. ONE Full Disclosure: The Old Man’s Current Supplement Regimen ·         A lo...

“Doubleday Drills” by Mark Hatmaker

There was an astonishingly creative panoply of drills to build punching power, balance, precision, finesse and overall form. These drills can be found spread throughout early boxing training, in singular pockets of rural approaches to fighting and are rife and rampant in the rough n tumble tradition where power was a premium. In our newest Black Box Instructional Product , we present 20 of these drills under the rubric “ Doubleday Drills ” in honor of Civil War veteran and purported “Father of American Baseball” Abner Doubleday as so many of these drills are rooted in hard-smackin’ they remind me of teeing off with a good old fashioned hickory bat. We’ll provide more history on these another day, but for now I believe it suffices to say that getting started on 20 Drills to hit harder and meaner is the key thing—less readin’, more doin’! Many of these drills train attributes that are now illegal, making them ideal for street/self-defense use. I am 100% confident that the hisot...

Conditioning & Heavy Bag Attitude by Mark Hatmaker

  60-Years-Old in 24 Days Sub 30-minute conditioning sessions 5 days per week All using Old School Principles. I’ll admit the details gotta be followed to a Strict T, but that’s where the devil lies-- in the details. 6-Blocks of Conditioning over a 6-Month Training Cycle In other words, 6-Months to a Makeover of You if You Choose—Man or Woman The 6-Blocks Build with Emergentism and the Final Phase Interlocks and Provides the Capstone for a Lifetime of Sustainable Time-Respecting Conditioning. ·         Strength ·         Stamina ·         Aesthetics ·         Mobility/Flexibility ·         Explosiveness ·         Resilience ·         Agility Overarching Principles for ALL Blocks ·      ...

Were They Tougher in the Old Days, Part 3: “Much Ado About Step-Counts” by Mark Hatmaker

  [From the upcoming book Unleaded Conditioning: Old School Principles for the Modern Warrior.] I highly recommend consuming the 2 prior pieces in this series. Were They Tougher in the Old Days? Work Rate And… Were They Tougher in the Old Days, Part 2: The Common Man & Woman For a podcast version. In Summary… In Part 1, we examined the difference between work rate of combat athletes “Then” and “Now. In Part 2, we examined the differences between caloric intake and weight/obesity of the general population then and now—that is, non-athletes and wound up discovering that more often than not these folks ate far more of the “wrong” things than we do and were still significantly leaner. I CAN NOT stress enough, have a look at those two articles in tandem with this one so we can seat the whole perspective and not be swayed [or unswayed] by an argument half-presented. 10,000 Steps Today many tout the efficacy of 10,000 steps per day as a general indicator of healt...