Some Boxers Now Have a Fighting Chance : Fitness Experts Say Most Training Methods in Use Are From the Dark Ages

The conditioning of boxers is done as a kind of tribal rite, a collection of ancient customs passed from generation to generation.

There is no other way to explain what goes on in a gym. The training there is as mysterious, and about as useful, as a rain dance.

“Very odd stuff,” agrees conditioning expert Kate Schmidt, a former Olympian who has recently begun working with a noted heavyweight.

“Appalling,” says Tim Hallmark, who is overhauling a prominent stable of largely unfit fighters.

“Dumb,” says Mackie Shillstone, the man who turned a light-heavyweight called Slim, of all things, into a heavyweight champion.

What do you think? In the traditional fighter’s gym, men hit overhead speed bags, which presumably prepares them to slap an 8-foot man very quickly, leaving their abdomens entirely vulnerable. They also catch medicine balls, which is excellent practice for, well, catching medicine balls.

Out of the gym, the conditioning is every bit as bizarre. Boxers historically jog slowly in the pre-dawn hours, wearing combat boots. This is done, apparently, to ensure that there will be no possible aerobic benefit and that the boxer will have blisters on his feet the size of Rhode Island.

Still outside of the gym, men chase chickens in alleys, with the idea of going into farming later in life, one would guess. But what do you think they eat at the training table the day of the fight? Fish? Poultry? How about two 12-inch steaks.

A nutritionist might thus discover the obvious regimen: If a fighter is determined to be sluggish and to suffer stomach cramps in the ring, as did Roberto Duran in his “no mas” fight, maybe he should chase bulls instead of chickens in the alley, then consume them on the spot.

The stuff that goes on, in short, is astoundingly wrong-headed, according to some new-wave fitness experts.

To this day, boxers chop wood as part of their training. Yet nobody can explain why, except to say that Rocky Marciano or Muhammad Ali did it. If chopping wood were good for anything besides leveling the countryside--or removing the odd foot--then Paul Bunyan would have been the fighter we measure all others against.

Up to now, it has been possible to overlook the more laughable aspects of conditioning because all boxers used the same methods. Consequently, they were all equally unfit. Nobody suffered a competitive disadvantage because they all employed a trainer from boxing’s dark ages.

Oh, they were fit, relative to you or me. The demands of a 15-round fight--could you even hold your fists up for 45 minutes?--sort of weeded out the couch potatoes. But fighters were ridiculously short of their fitness potential. All were in the same boat, though, so who knew?

Lately, however, a few trainers have sought a competitive edge that doesn’t involve putting a horseshoe in a glove. They have contracted with fitness experts outside of boxing, and the results have been amazing:

--Evander Holyfield, who would be huffing and puffing after four rounds, is suddenly capable of going the distance and winning a 15-round title fight.

--Michael Spinks, thought to be just fine as a light-heavyweight--his nickname is Slim--moves up to become a highly muscled heavyweight and topples not just Larry Holmes, but Gerry Cooney, too.

--Conversely, Mike McCallum, who normally weighs 180 pounds, is trained down to a 154-pound fighting machine and he upsets Donald Curry.

Could this be the dawn of a new age? Well, a former heavyweight champion named Tony Tubbs, who more or less became his name--last name, not first--has been working with a prominent sports-medicine trainer in Los Angeles, doing just the strangest--for boxing--things.

You can watch him in the pool of Dr. Leroy Perry’s International Sports Medicine Institute, running in place for a cardiovascular workout without trauma to the joints, doing jumping jacks, or sparring underwater with an elastic band providing additional negative resistance.

Or upstairs, you can watch him relearn the proper hip movement in throwing a punch by throwing a javelin.

Kate Schmidt, two-time Olympic bronze medalist in the women’s javelin, thought the exercise was obvious, since the hip rotation was so similar. In fact, Tubbs and his trainer report that his punches do sting a little more, now that he involves his entire body in the punch.

Perry’s institute is one of the few that try to apply biomechanics--mechanics in relation to body structure and capabilities--to the athlete’s specific task. So, to help Tubbs relearn the proper balance in the ring, to not sit back on his heels for example, he has designed some strange-looking drills.

Besides the javelin throw, he has Tubbs wielding a giant saber. Although the saber would have been more obviously useful in the ring the night Tubbs lost his title to Tim Witherspoon, it is helpful here in helping him develop a standard of balance. As he swings it from side to side, assistants shout for him to retain the proper posture.

This is all odd stuff, right up to the time it produces results, when it then becomes innovative. So we’ll keep our eye on the career of Tony Tubbs.

Better-documented results are provided by Michael Spinks’ camp.

Spinks, you may remember, was the undefeated 175-pound champion who had exhausted a list of undistinguished challengers. Then somebody got the idea of moving Spinks up to heavyweight, where Larry Holmes ruled a similarly lackluster division.

It was to be David vs. Goliath, except, this time, David was not allowed the slingshot.

Mackie Shillstone, who holds degrees in physical education and nutrition, who is certified as a fitness instructor and is director of a human performance institute in New Orleans--he has worked with the likes of Ozzie Smith and Manute Bol, for example--had been associated with Spinks since before the Holmes fight.

Shillstone hadn’t up to then worked with other boxers, and the field was kind of fascinating. He decided to look up previous articles on the training of boxers. He got a nice surprise.

“There were only two articles,” he said. “I realized I’d have to write the book. No one knew anything about this. It was kind of hidden in the closet.”

What had passed for training, Shillstone realized, was all wrong. “The endurance work was only part of the game,” he said. “My definition of fitness is more than punching power.”

Most of the Spinks story involves a change in nutrition. “Performance nutrition,” Shillstone calls it.

The day of a fight, he might feed Spinks a breast of chicken, green peas, wheat pasta and sliced peaches--about 65% complex carbohydrates. None of the usual carbo loading previously advised.

Some trainers, though, have not even caught up to carbohydrate loading. Before the Spinks-Cooney fight, there was a story from Cooney’s trainer, Victor Valle, that Cooney had been saved from malnutrition by a couple of thick steaks and by giving him a mixture of raw eggs and cherry before he ran.

“That idea’s about 200 years old,” Shillstone said, laughing.

Spinks also was allowed, encouraged in fact, to lift weights. That is a sacrilege in boxing.

“They think it tightens muscles up,” Shillstone said. “In fact, (lifting) works on the same fast-twitch explosive fibers you need in the ring. And obviously, muscle is a protective tissue, too.”

Probably the most important thing Shillstone did was prepare Spinks to fight 15 three-minute rounds, not run a 10K.

“It’s so simple,” he said. “It’s not an endurance sport, it’s an interval sport. The dumbest thing I’ve seen is a boxer running in army boots at a snail’s pace. Besides destroying knees, it doesn’t even bring the heartbeat up. It’s going through the motions with very little return.”

A rival in this small world, trainer Tim Hallmark, agrees with Shillstone on this point. When Lou Duva, who had signed most of the 1984 Olympic boxers when they turned professional, came to him with Evander Holyfield, it was to correct this same kind of thing--training athletes for the wrong activity.

In Holyfield’s case, the boxer had trouble going more than three or four rounds. That was OK in the Olympics, even OK in his first few pro fights. But Dwight Braxton and 15 rounds stood between him and a title, all of a sudden.

Duva didn’t know what to do. At first, the Duva camp thought it was all in Holyfield’s head. So, surreptitiously, they had him sparring 2 1/2-minute rounds, hoping he would acquire confidence in his condition.

That didn’t work, so Holyfield was shipped off to Hallmark’s gym in Houston. Hallmark, who deals with athletes such as Ralph Sampson, hadn’t had much to do with boxers. He was surprised to be sent a prime example of one and to find that the boxer wasn’t in any kind of shape.

“His heart and lungs were not recovering after three minutes as they should,” he observed after monitoring Holyfield’s heartbeat in and out of the ring. He also observed, correctly, that Holyfield was horrified at the prospect of going 15 rounds.

“I’ve noticed this with boxers in general,” Hallmark said. “They’re afraid to go 100%, afraid they’ll be dead the next round or out of gas. They’re just looking to survive.”

With only eight weeks to the Braxton fight, Hallmark plunged Holyfield into some high-tech aerobics--treadmills, bicycles, step-up machines, all manner of aerobic appliances. Roadwork was done on a short track, quarter-mile sprints, to get his heart working to capacity.

That was innovative enough, but the blasphemy was that it was done at the expense of ring work. The tradition is that most conditioning takes place inside the ring, sparring. Hallmark says that is disastrous to boxers’ conditioning on two fronts.

“They spar too much,” he said simply. “They suffer way too much trauma, for one thing, and for the second, they’re just working hard enough to keep the other guy off. The ring should be the place to learn strategy and skills, not to gain condition.”

That this is so, is exemplified by something Holyfield said during training. After one session with Hallmark, he finally said, “I can’t take it anymore.”

So they let him spar 15 rounds.

“It felt like a vacation,” he reported.

The success of these well-conditioned boxers, you’d think, would change the game overnight. But boxing, in all aspects, is resistant to change. Hallmark doubts that there are more than a few fitness experts involved in the game, boxing still remaining in its dark ages.

Even the U.S. Olympic program, with its resources, has yet to break any ground that might filter upward as the fighters turn pro, although the amateurs have used some of the available science. But the same trainers are in charge as before. By and large, it’s the same old story.

So most likely, we’ll continue to see heavyweights chopping wood, running six miles along the golf course--just barely keeping up with the golfers--and the occasional flake like Livingstone Bramble, stooped over, chasing chickens.

“But you know,” Hallmark said, brightening, “chasing chickens is actually not so bad an idea. That’s a pretty good exercise, when you think about it.”

Maybe the point, then, is that it’s the first time anybody’s ever thought about anything regarding the training of boxers.