White Collar Boxing Training.....The first few weeks

First training session was brutal to say the least, to be honest I thought my fitness wasn't to bad as I had been running on and off for a few months before.....How wrong could I be!

1 Hour of non stop drills, totally pushing us as hard as they could, even the ones who looked in shape seemed to be struggling....My t-shirt was dripping with sweat and I was struggling to keep up, but rather than embarrass my self I kept going until the end...press ups...leg raises....shadow boxing......running on the spot....to just name a few.  At the end of the session everyone was exhausted and gathered around to hear about what we had signed up for.  One of the younger men turned green and ran off to the toilet to be sick,,I was sure at the time that he wouldn't be the last!

Over the next couple of weeks we trained twice a week at the gym and I tried to keep up running in the mornings before I went to work to try and up my fitness as I was finding it hard to keep up at times in the sessions.  Sessions at that stage involved mainly fitness work, footwork, shadow boxing and some bag work.  At this stage of the training I really did start to wonder how I would ever be ready in a matter of a few weeks, this boxing was much harder than it looks on TV, I mean who hasn't watched boxing and thought to themselves "How hard can it be to hit someone", or imagined themselves as Rocky!

At the age of 34 things were not coming easy to me, my mind really wanted to push myself but my body just wouldn't let me...Within the first two weeks I had sprained my wrist from hitting the punch bag, due to partly my technique and my bad hand wrapping due to my inexperience, a week later I had somehow strained a muscle in my ribs area making it difficult to even turn over in bed...I mean what more could go wrong?

I eventually got to the stage where I just had to push myself through any injuries or I just knew I would not be ready...The training was really starting to take momentum and I was really loving it, the people who I trained with were great and very supportive and the coaches pushed us hard but also made the whole thing really enjoyable.  After a few weeks I could really start to feel the difference fitness wise and also our technique was improving greatly, we were all starting to actually look like boxers!