How hard should you go?

Progressive resistance and productive training

This topic crops up quite regularly from more seasoned athletes: How easy or how hard should I be going when I am training?

My answer: it depends. It depends on several important details:

Detail #1: Who are you training with and what are you trying to achieve from that training? Don't make the mistake of using your training partner as your world championship title fight as it's not. You may feel that you're pumped up and ready to give it 100% but your training partner may simply want to work on developing a better defense against your uppercut or jab and is limiting himself.

Detail #2: Are you communicating with your partner? Suppose you get paired up with someone new, who has never put on a pair of gloves before. You lay into him and overwhelm him with a flurry of punches. Guess what? They all land and it's easy. Does that mean you're good? Maybe. To me, it means that you're a bad training partner. Why? Training is supposed to be cooperative and mutually beneficial. When you overwhelm your partner, not does it psychologically traumatize him but he derives no benefit from that experience aside from panic and accentuated fear. Train with the mindset of what you are giving to the exchange. Are you being a good training partner by allowing your partner to do his game as much as you are playing your game on them?

Detail #3: Are you using skills or attributes? If you rely on your attributes to overcome your lack of control, skill or technique then you are not really being a good training partner either. It's because we are all different, with different personalities, preferences and so on, so whenever I spar I use different approaches when sparring with different people not just my reliance on speed or power or the same game on everyone as eventually there will be a faster, stronger, longer reach person who will knock you on your butt.

Sometimes, I will try my best to mimick another athelete's game to see what opportunities and weaknesses there are. Sometimes I will wait for reactions, or initiate a reaction by doing something unexpected or sneaky. In most cases I am looking for the weakness in a person's defense and at the end of the round, I will inform them of my discoveries, with hopes that they will improve their weak areas so that they can become better which by default forces me to become better too.

In all you need to adjust your game, style and preference to determine how hard or fast you go when training. You must set an objective and then have the discipline to stick to attaining that goal before you progress to the next objective, even if that means you get knocked about a bit, but remember this, only through failure you can succeed.

Sparring progressively means that you can increase the intensity of your actions/reaction. It doesn't mean you go 110% each and every round. It means you can and should start slow and relaxed and slowly build on momentum and intensity as your partner gets better. This may take seconds, minutes, weeks, months or years but as long as you do your part, you can be sure that your partner is also improving with you.

Best training!

Vince

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