Tag Archives: working out

My Boxing: Training on the go

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My Boxing:  Training on the go

My Boxing Trainer - iPhone App

I admit to being somewhat of a Mac head … meaning that I am all Mac’d up with an iPad, iPhone, Mac Book, numerous iPods not to mention an iTouch.  I’ve also come by all this Mac stuff somewhat honestly in that I also still have — and will occasionally use — my original Mac SE with all 4 MB of RAM!    That old museum piece has a small black and white cathode ray tube for a screen (that’s a small TV!) and a sleek (for then) all in one body. We are talking 1986 when I first got mine — and what an amazing beauty this bad girl was for her time what with her 20 MB internal hard drive!

So fast forwarding to my 32 G iPad — I am truly in techie heaven what with the world literally at my fingertips as long as I can find 3G or internet, and if not, I can dig deep and find all of the stuff I’ve got loaded up including books, movies, and those blessed apps!

This week I’ve been discovering fitness apps — in my world that means I found a few and have been sticking to them.  My two favorites are the My Boxing Trainer app (available as an iPhone app, but terrific on the iPad) and the Pocket Yoga app (available in iPad and iPhone versions).

The My Boxing Trainer app contains a terrific series of “how to” videos on such topics as boxing safety, hand wrapping and the boxer’s stance on through boxing tips for the ring including a video of Floyd Mayweather boxing “in the pocket.”

 

The other cool thing about this app is it contains a workout section that allows you to sequence your own training or follow a series of pre-defined training regimens.  Once you select a sequence, the user clicks a timer button to set the number of rounds you want for each part of your training, as well as the the length of each round and rest period.  The app also contains a straight boxing timer if you just want to use that.  For the end of your workout there are some pretty nice boxing conditioning videos — everything from ab exercises to tips on stretching, using a medicine ball and keeping your shoulders in great shape.  This app costs all of $1.99 and is highly recommended!

 

Pocket Yoga - iPad App

My other favorite app is Pocket Yoga.  This app has three general areas: practice, poses and history. The practice portion has 30, 45 or 60 minute classes or two sun salutation sequences that allows the user to program the number of reps from 2 – 30.  As a further refinement, each class and sun salutation sequence can be selected for a beginner, intermediate or expert level.

Once you choose a class type — the class or sequence you follow is animated with voice over narration.   I followed the 30-minute beginner class this morning and had quite a workout.  One other nice feature is the history tab.  It will keep track of your yoga practice listing the date, sequence/class you used and the level of difficulty.

While this app doesn’t exactly replace a live-action class, it can work well in a hotel room, during a break at work — or even at the boxing gym if you want to follow-up your training with a little yoga.  The app itself is $2.99 or $3.99 for the HD version and to my mind, well worth the cost.

Women’s boxing: getting it real

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Women’s boxing: getting it real

Ukrainian Women Warriors, photo by Guillaume Herbaut

It seems that there’s some press around lately on the theme of  “getting real” when it comes to fitness.  For our friends in Chicago,  Chicago Now has a piece about the Warrior Fighting Sports & Fitness gym and its affiliated Knockout Boxing Club in Downer’s Grove, Il..  As the author put it:

“What I was looking for: – I didn’t want to join a large gym and do a cardio boxing class. I wanted the real deal, the same workouts fighters do.  – I refuse to wear makeup or dress up for the gym. – I don’t want to be treated like a girl.”

What she found was an environment of hard work, sweat, and the inspiration of watching a group of highly  skilled, ranked women fighters across a spectrum of disciplines from Boxing to MMA to Kickboxing.  Article link here.
New York City has also seen press lately about the idea of the urban warrior.  In a recent article in the local Chelsea Now paper, women’s boxing is touted as one of a select group of “alternate activities to stretch your mind and body in more dynamic ways,” the others being target shooting and rock climbing.  Article link here.  I know from my own experience I didn’t walk into a boxing gym so much for fitness as to engage in a physically demanding full-contact sport.
When I search around for women’s boxing news, I inevitably find some press related to new boxing or MMA classes and programs for women every few days.  That coupled with the upcoming debut of women’s boxing in the 2012 Olympics the sport is building a lot of momentum not only in the United States, but globally.

Andrecia Wasson

What’s cool is while I didn’t walk into a boxing gym until my early 40’s, girls like my daughter know the camaraderie and hard work of the gym starting as young as 8.   Detroit fighter, Andrecia Wasson is a case in point.  She first walked into the Warriors Boxing Club at the age of 12 and now as an 18-year-old Women’s Middleweight World Champion is starting her quest for Olympic gold.

The thing of it is, go to Gleason’s Gym on any Saturday morning and what you’ll find is a group of dedicated women boxers of all skill levels and ages plying their craft with heart and a lot of positive attitude — and then realize that those kinds of scenes are repeated all over the United States.  Then consider that it’s also repeated in places like India, China, Jordan, Zambia and Afghanistan.  That’s pretty heady stuff and something to feel very proud to be a part of.

A little jab time

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A little jab time

Holly Holm v. Tricia Turton

Girlboxing is having one of those busy days!  Too much work, too many obligations, not enough time!  To pep it all up and to remind us all that Spring *will* come — here are some secrets on how to perfect your Jab from across the pond!

 

 

The world keeps on spinning

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The world keeps on spinning

As pressed for time as my life is it’s nice to take some moments to do nothing but drift.  By drift I do not necessarily mean gorking-out in front of the TV or getting memorized by online catalog sales.  No, drift time are those moments when the imagination can soar — such as going for a walk where you let your “feet do the walking” instead of taking yourself on a straight line from A to B.

It’s those opportunities for shaking up your tree that lets you take-in things you might not ordinarily see.  Say walking along and only observing the second floors of buildings.  There are some wonderous things to see!  Oddly carved gargoyles, balconies to no where, hand painted signs, and an assortment of drapes and window dressings that ranges from austere Modernism to Rococo to the merely ordinary.

So too with exercising.  You can have solid morning calisthenics, classes you take, routes for your daily run, sacrosanct Yoga DVD’s, and for boxers the set-list of rounds for each type of boxing training plus the time you spend with your trainer.  What’s nice is to spin yourself around by trying something a little bit different.  This sort of drift time let’s your body find its way to where you want to be.  That can mean an entirely new route for your run, yoga poses you never thought you could achieve, or in the boxing gym, a rhythm to your heavy bag or speed-bag work you didn’t know you had.

I guess the point is that we all need to step out of the ordinary so that we can find new ways of doing things.  Whether its writing a story backwards, taking a stab at creating an oddly shaped pot on the potter’s wheel or spinning a globe with your kids and inventing stories about what life would be like if you all lived in those places.  Believe me, nothing earth shattering will happen if you let things unfold without having structured it.  What you might find is a feeling of relaxation and calm that otherwise alludes you as your go about your overly busy day — at least that’s what I’ve found when I remember to give myself the time.

At the gym

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At the gym

When I hear the word gym, I always think of my old public school gym.  Built in the late 1950’s, it had painted cinderblock walls the most putrid green color one could possibly think of, enormous caged light fixtures and big windows that lined the top of the walls where they met the ceiling because the gym was located in the basement.

Considering just how big the gyms were, NYC public schools did not do much by way of sports when I went to school in the 1960’s.  In the winter months, we played newcomb and a variation of punch ball using a giant red rubber ball.  Or we’d just play catch with it.  We’d also play a variation of dodgeball where our entire class of 35+ kids would stand in a giant circle and throw the ball at each other *without* trying to knock each other down.   I can assure you that it didn’t work very well and someone inevitably got hit in the face.

Gyms also make me think of the Y, PAL, Boys and Girls clubs, and different Settlement Houses around the city where kids could go to play sports.  There was something very friendly about those places.  Everyone one wore gray or navy blue sweats and instead of running shoes, tennis shoes or basketball shoes, kids wore sneakers.

Later when the health club craze hit, the character of gyms seemed to change.  The large cavernous spaces became smaller and tighter and at the same time less about camaraderie and sports and more about individual achievement and beauty.  I know that I am over simplifying here, but the truth is, I always feel like an outsider walking into a health club.  The spaces always seem overly crowded with equipment and people not to mention music pounding so loud my ears hurt.  Perhaps too, my conception of sports comes into play — the idea being that it is hard for me push and pull machines or run to nowhere watching CNN or the Real Housewives of New Jersey without some other purpose that revolves around sports.

When I finally found my way into a boxing gym — I got some of that old feeling back of when I was a kid.  A space where people were engaged in an activity, but with a real sense that every aspect of the training is for some purpose — and importantly, that everyone is rooting for you no matter what your skill level.  Goodness knows that some boxing gyms are as funky as they come while others have borrowed a bit from the health club concept and have clean spaces and new equipment.  Still the feeling is welcoming and fun:  a place more about the work than anything else and that can be a pretty inspiring thing.

Waking up is hard to do

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Waking up is hard to do

I have to admit, this morning was hard.

There was no way I wanted to get up out of bed — and when I finally managed it, the eyes that looked back at me from the bathroom mirror had bags, carry-ons and huge trunks.  I truly didn’t know that eyes could look that puffy without having gone ten rounds.

Once I got to the living room to start morning yoga, it was all I could do to unroll the mat.  I knew I needed something different or I’d fall right back to sleep so instead of following along with my usual yoga routine, Sara Ivanhoe’s Candlelight Yoga (available on Netflix), I went on Hulu and tried two of the Yoga Zone episodes, Gentle Yoga, Part 1 (if that’s gentle, oy…) and Strengthen and Tone, Part 1 (*lots* of leg stretches and downward facing dog poses).

Well, the fact that I’m writing means I survived, and I must say that doing the change-up really helped me to wake-up!  It also reminds me that whether one is boxing or doing yoga, changing up the routine with other exercises not only gets the body going, but helps focus attention on muscles that may not get much of a work out otherwise.

 

(Note the full video is available on Hulu.)

Your all the way for right now

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Your all the way for right now

These days I can get to the boxing gym on Saturday mornings.  That’s a step up from the fall when I rarely put in an appearance and definitely better than the summer when I didn’t go at all.  At the time, I was agonizing over missed opportunities. Say during the weeks that my daughter was at summer camp! What I couldn’t get to, however, was a way of not thinking that gym time could only mean a three-day a week minimum.  Anything less didn’t feel like “training” and so I ended up blowing off the whole thing!

I’ve come to a an easier agreement with myself.  I’m going the distance with what I’m doing — on the best terms that I can set for now.  For my gym time that means, I can go on Saturdays for upwards of one and a half to two hours.  And if I show up on a Sunday or some evening during the week, so much the better, but the deal I’ve made with myself is for Saturday.

In practical terms it means that I’m a lot less stressed about it — and can actually gain the benefits of my gym time without that agonizing inner dialogue about not doing enough.   The truth is, I’d like nothing better than to put in a two-hour boxing workout every day, but that is just not possible.  What is possible are the things I can commit to on real terms — and attempting anything else is just plain silly because it won’t get done.

I call it the six-pack abs thing!  Sure, they’re there — but like digging for gold, they’re underneath the surface!

My body will never, ever, ever have a visible six-pack, but …. what I can have is a body that is strong, fit and healthy with enough stamina to get through a Saturday workout without panting.

100th post today!

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100th post today!

The number 100 seems to have a lot of significance.

In boxing as with many other sports we talk about giving 100% of ourselves to our efforts.  It is also a marker for progress.  We speak of a president’s first 100 days in office as a measurement of success or failure.  We use the 100 degree measurement to signify the boiling point of water in Celsius.  We also often speak of the top 100 — say boxers of all time and consider a centenary birthday as a remarkable achievement as a much a testament to the human spirit to endure as to genetic make-up.

Thus, Girlboxing is proud, if humbled to mark its 100th post today.  Not to say that Girlboxing is even remotely in the league of the aforementioned achievements, rather, the number 100 is a marker for an ongoing personal commitment to a daily something.  To writing it down for personal growth as well as the chance to put out thoughts and ideas to the larger community.

Knowing that these thoughts and ideas have been listened to has been, well, humbling, exhilarating and a bit daunting!

Thank you to all Girlboxing readers and friends who have been so supportive of this blog — and of my efforts.  I am astounded that the blog has gotten this far and again have everyone to thank for encouraging me to keep on going.

I found the following on YouTube — pretty inspiring stuff, it represents the first 8 days of a 100 day fitness challenge!

(Note:  Will only play on YouTube)

PS – Big fights coming up in NYC!  Alicia “Slick” Ashley on January 13th @ Brooklyn’s Masonic Hall. Keisher Mcleod-Wells at B.B. Kings on February 9th.  Tickets available at Gleason’s Gym — link for information here.

Odds and ends about training

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Odd and ends about training

Belinda Laracuente


I trained at Gleason’s yesterday.  Due to some time constraints I only had about an hour — but what an hour it was.

First off, thanks to my daily dose of Yoga, my stamina was light-years beyond the week before to the point where Lennox was asking what I’d put in my Wheaties.   Not that I’d ever been one to proselytize (?!?) — but I’ve got to say that Yoga practice, even the Yoga 101 that I do really can make a difference in one’s stamina, core strength and flexibility.

Sonya Lamonakis

The second great thing about yesterday morning was watching the likes of pro-heavyweight fighter Sonya Lamonakis  train.  Sonya, ranked number three in her weight class sparred several hard rounds with Belinda Laracuente another sensational fighter who also works as a trainer at Gleason’s.  As well, I caught sight of Alicia Ashley readying for her upcoming main event bout on January 13th at Brooklyn’s Masonic Hall.

The mention also goes out to all the women I trained with young and old, novice and pro who were working their butts off.

What a great day!

 

Get up offa’ that thing

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Get up offa’ that thing

James Brown!

 

Yep, it’s that kind of day.  Getting up offa’ that thing!

As JB says:  “Feel good?  Feel good?”

Sometimes it’s the only answer!  Enjoy!

 

Sixth day

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Sixth day

 

The Sixth Day of Creation, 1926 Woodcut, M. C. Escher

 

This is my sixth morning of yoga and I’m thinking am I nuts to get up even earlier than way before dawn to do this??

Sure that meditation-y feeling is nice and it really is quite amazing to think that the body can hit such poses when one is fighting off dreamland but please, I need several more hours in the day just to do this sort of stuff because I actually do *not* think that sleep is overrated!

So I start thinking of it this way.

Did I really need to watch two episodes of Battlestar Gallactica (Season 1 of the reboot from the SF channel-really good) when I came home from work yesterday?  Yes, I acknowledge that I didn’t exactly “watch” per se, but made dinner for my family, removed all the ornaments from the Christmas Tree, took down the lights and packed everything.  So that’s “fair,” right?  So why do I feel “bad” about it?  Why do I insert the “but,” the — but I could have been doing yoga, shadow boxing, lifting weights, reading, paying bills, doing laundry.

Oy!  Balance!  What’s a person to do?

As with a lot of people I know there is way too much going on from day to day: a full day’s work, the business side of one’s domestic life, family time — not to mention attempting to keep oneself in some sort of physical “shape,” plus whatever other stuff is out there for one’s own personal growth.  Say taking classes, writing, gym time, running/walking/hiking/biking, doing pottery, painting, reading … and so on.

It all brings me to the notion that many of us live in a sort of permanent sixth day.

We wake-up much too early, go about creating the world, get to bed much too late and rather than taking a day of rest, get up for yet another day of creating the world.

It brings to mind that we are all like Atlas.  We are over-scheduled, over-stressed and over-worked — not in and of itself a “bad” thing so much as the fact that we are all so tired and need a space to slow it down; the chance to say, the seventh day is not a bad idea after all.  And no it doesn’t mean that one has to get “religion”  and go running off to a house of worship, rather, it’s a way to acknowledge that when one is working hard, very hard for that matter, it is A-OKAY to be a slug for a day.  Further, how one structures that seventh day is really, ultimately up to oneself.

For religious Jews, the seventh day is a weekly holiday.  One eats a huge meal with family, sings, dances, prays, and then sits around till the end of the sabbath period.  I’m oversimplifying, but the kernel of the idea is that we all owe ourselves some rest, if nothing else than to be restored enough to fight the next battle with our wits about us.

It’s a lesson that true athletes know.  The body can only be pushed so far before it needs rest.  And so with all of us as an everyday experience.  We need balance and part of that balance is closing the shutters and putting up the sign that says, “gone fishing.”

 

Alarm clocks and the bell

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Alarm clocks and the bell

I’ve been hit by the iPhone alarm clock bug.  Yep, my trusty morning wake-up call pooped-out of me this morning — and so my morning is already 45 minutes late.

As someone who loves boxing, I am otherwise bound by life in three-minute intervals: the boxing clock.  The typical timer has three flavors.  Green, yellow and red.  Green is lit-up for two and a half minutes before it dings and turns yellow for a further thirty-seconds.  The next bell is usually a fairly loud racket that signifies the turn to red and a sixty-second rest period.

At the gym yesterday, I used the “yellow” period to quicken up my pace as I trained.  My training consisted of nine rounds on the double-ended bag and a further three rounds on the speed bag before starting the abs torture.  This is not a typical training session, but that’s the beauty of a Sunday, it gives me a chance to challenge myself on different aspects of boxing.

Yesterday was all about lefts and upper-cuts as three-minute exercises.  First lefts, then left-left-right combinations, followed by left-left upper cut combinations and finally, right-left, right-left, right-left uppercuts finishing with the left jab off the left uppercut.

When I train throwing nothing but lefts for some part of the boxing clock or the entire three minutes, I hear trainers in my head talking about how such and such a fighter won a 12-round fight with nothing but lefts.  Hyperbole aside (although I swear someone did do that), challenging oneself to the equivalent of nothing but lefts as a timed exercise has a lot of benefits.  I used to do it as a writing exercise, setting an egg-timer for five minutes and writing down whatever entered my head without letting the pen off the page.

Yesterday’s workout was a variation on that.  Working on speed, agility and most importantly stamina.  By my last three speed-bag rounds I was pretty much “done,” however, I did try to use the last thirty seconds of each round to pound away without stopping on my alternating left hand and right hand 8-count, 4-count, 2-count, 1-1-1-1, speed-bag rhythm.   I was mostly successful and did feel that I earned the latte treat from Starbucks afterwards.

I’ll never get back the 45 minutes I lost this morning — that’s 15 rounds of boxing or nine timed writing sessions.  Oh well.  There’s always tomorrow.

Getting back to normal

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Getting back to normal

Still feeling a 2010 hangover?  What with all the best of/worst of lists that abound it all feels a bit much.

To get into a new-beginnings frame of mind that’s a lot more cheerful, here’s a list of our own of things to do on day two of the New Year.

1.  Go to the gym, they’re open today — and sure there will be the extra New Year’s Resolution crowd in there, but it’ll still feel great and if your gym has one, spend a few extra minutes to relax in the hot tub or the sauna (or a really hot bath or shower at home).

2.  Take a long walk somewhere, preferably with someone you love, but if not, with the person you love the best — yourself.

3.  For Girlboxing’s boxer friends, feel inspired.  This is going to be a great year for women’s boxing with a lot of well-matched bouts, plus some terrific amateur fights.  Check out Women’s Boxing Archive Network’s 12/30 piece on upcoming fights to get of taste of what’s coming up here.

4.  Help someone.  Whether it’s being extra nice to your kids, your spouse or a friend; or going out to give your time to a charity or something as simple as buying a street person a cup of coffee, none of us can do it alone and it’ll sure feel good.

5.  Write a short list of five things or less that you want to accomplish this year.  List out how you can go about achieving those goals.  You don’t have to think of it as a set of resolutions so much as a map of the things that are important to you.  Having written them down — consider that now is the time to start getting them done.

 

 

 

 

Happy New Year abs

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Happy New Year abs!

So true to my do a bit of exercise everyday New Year’s resolution, I completed a 40 minute Yoga video (courtesy of Netflix:  “Crunch: Candlelight Yoga”) and found a 15 minute Ab-workout on YouTube from http://www.sparkpeople.com.  I’m now free to watch yet more English police-procedural videos with a clear conscience!

Happy New Year everyone from Girlboxing!


Getting the jump on those pesky resolutions

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Getting the jump on those pesky resolutions

Yep.  It’s that time of year again — when you need to confront all the coulda’, shoulda’ woulda’s from 2010 to write-up the “list” for 2011.

I will box every day!

In years past, I’ve run the gamut from writing them hung over on New Year’s Day, to thoughtfully considering them for days and weeks before the turn of the year.

To be honest, the New Year’s resolution list is often an afterthought somewhere around the 3rd of January.  By then of course, I’m in a decided catch-up mode which in turn can spiral into a state of New Year’s resolution anxiety if I’m not careful.

This year I’m trying something a little different.  I’ve started my New Year’s resolution two days early — with the goal of doing at least *one* physical thing every day.  Okay, sure, that can be tough, but with a hat tip to Conjuring My Muse, doing one activity — whether it’s one three-minute shadow boxing round in the living room or a full-on two-hour work out at the gym is achievable!  And like doing anything else every day — it’s gets to be a terrific habit.

So to keep true to that New Year’s vow, I threw on my sweats, grabbed my gear (some of it with that new leather smell — thanks, Santa!) and walked down to Gleason’s Gym.  The sweet part was being accompanied by my daughter — and while I must say that the work-out was tough as my latest lay-off has been way too long, I worked out just enough to feel terrific about making the effort. It also helped that she was there to cheer me on, especially when it came to the sit-ups.

I’m heading down to Gleason’s again tomorrow to work out with Lennox Blackmore with the hope that I’ll be able to throw in one or two extra rounds and a whole lot more ab-work.  And though the gym will be closed on New Year’s Day, there’s yoga, fast-walking or dancing to James Brown to keeping me going strong — least ways that’s the plan!