How do I fight like Mike Tyson??

Dragonborn

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How does he slip punches so well and move inside so quickly without taking any hard shots???


What exercises does he do and what did he do for training?

Are there any people that fight like him, that I can watch some videos on?






And btw, at first I wanted to be bulky to be strong, and mostly for the body. But then after joining a boxing club, I wanted to be lean to have a lot of stamina and be quick.

But when I look at Mike, he's fast and the muscle behind his punches makes him even more powerful. How does he do it???

Are you just born with it? Because most of the guys his size are slow and gas out really easily. They may have power but they can't slip and throw consistent punches.
 
First of all, he was short as hell for his weight class. Second, he was trained in that peekaboo style by the man who devised it. But it's a very energy intensive style, which caused Tyson to gas an awful lot whenever someone survived the first several rounds. Which, mind you, was not often.

So basically, have Tyson's build, have Tyson's ungodly punching power, have Tyson's trainer. :wink:

I wouldn't advise trying to fight like Mike. It's not a style designed for everybody, and certainly not for every body type.
 
How does he slip punches so well and move inside so quickly without taking any hard shots???


What exercises does he do and what did he do for training?

Are there any people that fight like him, that I can watch some videos on?






And btw, at first I wanted to be bulky to be strong, and mostly for the body. But then after joining a boxing club, I wanted to be lean to have a lot of stamina and be quick.

But when I look at Mike, he's fast and the muscle behind his punches makes him even more powerful. How does he do it???

Are you just born with it? Because most of the guys his size are slow and gas out really easily. They may have power but they can't slip and throw consistent punches.

Mike is actually quite small for a heavy weight. He is fast and aggressive and his frequent clean punches is what gives him KOs. I have just downloaded all of his career fights. He is awesome. Check his footwork out. He throws his body into every punch. He creates clean angles with which to strike from. And he doesn't relent when he has the chance. I love watching Tyson fight.
 
se how he attacks. Look at his fotwork before setting up a combo.
 
Be a specific type of athlete with great speed and natural punching power. Then get someone with Cus D'amato's know how to take an interest in you.
 
Peekaboo style, lots of slipping drills on the mitts and maize bag and punching power.
 
Are you just born with it? Because most of the guys his size are slow and gas out really easily. They may have power but they can't slip and throw consistent punches.

You need great strength in relation to your body-weight, then you train for power and speed mostly. It takes a few years of focus on strength (say about 4) utilizing high level trainers for powerlifting and then when you reach great size and strength, you work on your bodyfat percentage. That means you eventually need to get down to a weight that retains a lot of the muscle, but gets rid of a lot of the fat that comes with not worrying about your diet in favor of physical strength and size.

So eventually you start working on your diet. As you shift your focus from powerlifting, which is utterly useless for sports with extremely low contact times aka striking, to weightlifting. I say it's useless, but the ironic thing is that it's also essential to them, because that form of training builds a base strength that few other sports if any can build. The force - time curve will allow you to understand how things work. Essentially training for power development makes a lot of sense for someone that is extremely strong, be it naturally or through years of training to be strong. The weightlifting will turn your unusable strength to usable force during efforts that are accomplished in much shorter amounts of time.

Carter_force_time.png


Have a look at the force - time curve above please. As you can see you can manipulate said curve through different variants of training. Most boxers will do a lot of skill training obviously, but they will also devote lots of time on ballistic strength training. For this you do not need to be extremely strong and you also don't need to have a lot of hypertrophy. In fact, you'll have to work a lot harder at explosive strength and then ballistic strength training to have the same speed as someone that carries a lot less weight. The same holds true for stamina. Muscle needs to be fueled and it's a lot harder to maintain hundreds of repetitions of near ballistic movement over longer periods of time, when you have a lot of muscles to move. So basically a bigger more muscular fighter will have to work a lot harder for his stamina to be good as well. You can see this in any UFC fights involving bigger and smaller guys. The small guys after 4-5 years of training can just keep going and going and going without gassing. Bigger guys that do the same thing in training will not be able to sustain an equally high pace and if they try, they gas out a lot earlier. Instead of raising the already high work capacity runners often opt to slim down a little towards a race, because carrying a few pounds less often has a more pronounced impact on running times than can be achieved through training, especially in the short run.

Now let's have a look at the curve again. Maximum strength training is good for raising the end point of the curve up. It will have no immediate effect on ballistic or near ballistic movement. However, it does raise starting strength, which will help a little bit. That effect is masked due to hypertrophy and the higher load that comes with it though. Once you start to train for power, because you have a very high maximum strength level, your movements likewise become more explosive. The rate of force development gets higher and you raise the middle of the curve up. This effects your speed quite a bit, especially for powerful shots that you load up a little on. The jab and other more ballistic movements will see a good bit of improvement as well. The real improvement comes, when you have very high levels of explosive strength and you work primarily on speed through plyometrics and ballistic movements like those utilized in a lot of boxing training.

Over time you need to get more and more technical and specific. You also need to work very hard on your stamina and as you can see you'll need to work up to an extremely high work capacity to be able to withstand all the extra training that goes into being able to maintain a high pace as a athlete that primarily focuses on the type of fibers that utilize the most energy. It's tough to design a training plan that does all of these things for the right amount of time and at the right time in your training cycle. It's nearly impossible to work all these things, strength, power, speed, stamina at once, once you pass a certain threshold. What works well for beginners to do exactly this won't work for a highly advanced athlete.

Most boxing gyms will neglect strength entirely and usually actually true power-training as weightlifters do as well. They will never work on the base, because some people are born and have the right background to be extremely strong and powerful and thus they need less work to get where other need years of solid programming to be. Mike Tyson was a physical specimen, a one in a million type of guy. It'll take about 10-12 years of doing everything correctly and utilizing very advanced training planning and some luck to stay mostly injury free for a mere mortal to get to that kind of strength/power/speed while maintaining or acquiring good stamina.

So focus on strength first and foremost for a number of years and be fine with not having the stamina to compete with your folks yet. It will be o.k. if you can't go hard for many rounds. Your endurance will get better eventually, but it takes many years. Then focus on power, when you are very strong in relation to your body-weight while dialing in your diet. This should help with your stamina a little already, but once you are at that level it would be very good if you started your periodisation with an endurance part. While it will negatively impact your maximum strength, the strength was just a means to an end, not your long term goal anyway. So while you work on becoming very powerful, you will also need to read up and study running training, so you can devise a periodisation that works for that. You'll not want to do any fast runs or high intensity methods such as alternating sprints and jogs at any time in your training, that you want to focus on power and speed development, so you need 4-6 weeks allocated for that specifically, so you increase your endurance from periodisation to periodisation without impacting your power development too much. Then when you reach a very high level of power in relation to your body-weight and have a fairly low body-fat percentage with a solid heavyweight build, you'll want to work on speed and stamina over everything else, which will be slightly detrimental to your power development, but then again, this was also not the main goal for you. So as your focus shifts to maintaining power and increasing speed through plyometrics and all those fabulous drills that boxers do to increase their speed, you will eventually get to the point, where all that matters is your speed, stamina and most of all your technique.

So you have to work diligently on your technique and since the above will most likely span 10-12 years to get to an elite level, you'll have time to learn the basics of sound boxing fundamentals and focus on them for 4-5 years. You'll also learn to get hit and lose quite a bit, because you will not be able to content on stamina and speed as your build your base to greatness. Then as you progress and become more powerful, you can start picking up on the Peek-a-boo style and as you become more powerful and increase your stamina, you'll start holding your own in your gym, just not against guys that were born powerful and had years of training at that power/speed level to see what works. So the more experienced guys with better genetics will still beat the shit out of you for a good while. Once you have a few years of experience with that hard to learn style, have gotten your body-weight down to a more favorable weight-class and have increased your stamina to competitive levels, you'll be able to content with a lot of folks. Then comes your focus on speed and technique and you'll need a high level trainer that focuses on the style of boxing you want from that point on. If you get lucky and you don't get injured and build up the necessary work-capacity over the years, you'll be quite the phenom when you start of with whoever it may be and through a few years of focusing on technique and speed you'll surpass all the more talented guys that used to be able to beat you. If you work diligently on your stamina as well, then you could become a heavyweight contender over the next few years. Then you'll have about 5-6 years at the height of your career, where you'll need a lot of luck to become a champ (the problem comes with others working harder than you and especially those that started with what you trained for many years to get). So if you are out of luck, then a Mike Tyson that focuses on speed and technique for 10 years is competing with you, that has only boxed at that level for a 2-3 years if that. You'll likely get beat badly if that happens. Then you may also run into a juicing Mike Tyson. Maybe you get lucky and become a champ. You'll still have to win a boatload of fights to be worth many millions for title defenses, so that it's all worth something in the end in terms of money and status.

And then again, it's tough to say if Mike's boxing style was really the best, even though it worked remarkably well. We don't really know how he would have done, had he trained to fight differently perhaps at a lower body-weight with a more refined modern boxing style. I know nothing about boxing, so I have no idea really, but even if I knew boxing inside out, it would be impossible to know without a time machine or being able to watch many parallel universes at the same time.

Good luck with your endeavors anyway.
 
I also endorse Ross training. I still think it takes a number of years with shifting focus and a working periodisation that focuses on improving your work capacity with the right goals at the right time under the supervision of the right physical education and boxing coaches as well as a good bit of luck to make it. While Ross training teaches you a great number of great training habits and other things, it lacks insofar as it doesn't give you a plan to follow for a decade that focuses on developing work capacity and devising a specific plan for you that utilizes the right training at the right time for a specific goal like yours.

At the same time you'll most of all need great boxing coaches that will teach you the right technique and boxing specifics, who will also accept that you are training in a way that holds you back in the short term to have the best chance to reach your goals a decade out. Trainers tend to not like it very much, when someone does their own thing and even goes against conventional wisdom, like favoring seemingly useless maximum strength training and neglecting endurance training for a number of years over focusing on proven plyometric, stamina and speed drills that will have a far more pronounced immediate effect on your boxing skills.
 
Holy batman that's a big wall of texts. I will try to read all of them though, seems very interesting.
 
First of all, he was short as hell for his weight class. Second, he was trained in that peekaboo style by the man who devised it. But it's a very energy intensive style, which caused Tyson to gas an awful lot whenever someone survived the first several rounds. Which, mind you, was not often.

So basically, have Tyson's build, have Tyson's ungodly punching power, have Tyson's trainer. :wink:

I wouldn't advise trying to fight like Mike. It's not a style designed for everybody, and certainly not for every body type.
Lol, I know. The only thing I got is the short height, I'm asian.

But I was mainly trying to find out more about the way he slips punches, it looks like he bends at the waist, and I heard that you need really good abs to move your body like that.

And since I'm short, I could use some of Mike Tyson's (or his trainer's) techniques moving inside.

When I start sparring in my gym I'll probably be against people with longer reach.
 
You need great strength in relation to your body-weight, then you train for power and speed mostly. It takes a few years of focus on strength (say about 4) utilizing high level trainers for powerlifting and then when you reach great size and strength, you work on your bodyfat percentage. That means you eventually need to get down to a weight that retains a lot of the muscle, but gets rid of a lot of the fat that comes with not worrying about your diet in favor of physical strength and size.


So focus on strength first and foremost for a number of years and be fine with not having the stamina to compete with your folks yet. It will be o.k. if you can't go hard for many rounds. Your endurance will get better eventually, but it takes many years. Then focus on power, when you are very strong in relation to your body-weight while dialing in your diet. This should help with your stamina a little already, but once you are at that level it would be very good if you started your periodisation with an endurance part. While it will negatively impact your maximum strength, the strength was just a means to an end, not your long term goal anyway. So while you work on becoming very powerful, you will also need to read up and study running training, so you can devise a periodisation that works for that. You'll not want to do any fast runs or high intensity methods such as alternating sprints and jogs at any time in your training, that you want to focus on power and speed development, so you need 4-6 weeks allocated for that specifically, so you increase your endurance from periodisation to periodisation without impacting your power development too much. Then when you reach a very high level of power in relation to your body-weight and have a fairly low body-fat percentage with a solid heavyweight build, you'll want to work on speed and stamina over everything else, which will be slightly detrimental to your power development, but then again, this was also not the main goal for you. So as your focus shifts to maintaining power and increasing speed through plyometrics and all those fabulous drills that boxers do to increase their speed, you will eventually get to the point, where all that matters is your speed, stamina and most of all your technique.

So you have to work diligently on your technique and since the above will most likely span 10-12 years to get to an elite level, you'll have time to learn the basics of sound boxing fundamentals and focus on them for 4-5 years. You'll also learn to get hit and lose quite a bit, because you will not be able to content on stamina and speed as your build your base to greatness. Then as you progress and become more powerful, you can start picking up on the Peek-a-boo style and as you become more powerful and increase your stamina, you'll start holding your own in your gym, just not against guys that were born powerful and had years of training at that power/speed level to see what works. So the more experienced guys with better genetics will still beat the shit out of you for a good while. Once you have a few years of experience with that hard to learn style, have gotten your body-weight down to a more favorable weight-class and have increased your stamina to competitive levels, you'll be able to content with a lot of folks. Then comes your focus on speed and technique and you'll need a high level trainer that focuses on the style of boxing you want from that point on. If you get lucky and you don't get injured and build up the necessary work-capacity over the years, you'll be quite the phenom when you start of with whoever it may be and through a few years of focusing on technique and speed you'll surpass all the more talented guys that used to be able to beat you. If you work diligently on your stamina as well, then you could become a heavyweight contender over the next few years. Then you'll have about 5-6 years at the height of your career, where you'll need a lot of luck to become a champ (the problem comes with others working harder than you and especially those that started with what you trained for many years to get). So if you are out of luck, then a Mike Tyson that focuses on speed and technique for 10 years is competing with you, that has only boxed at that level for a 2-3 years if that. You'll likely get beat badly if that happens. Then you may also run into a juicing Mike Tyson. Maybe you get lucky and become a champ. You'll still have to win a boatload of fights to be worth many millions for title defenses, so that it's all worth something in the end in terms of money and status.

And then again, it's tough to say if Mike's boxing style was really the best, even though it worked remarkably well. We don't really know how he would have done, had he trained to fight differently perhaps at a lower body-weight with a more refined modern boxing style. I know nothing about boxing, so I have no idea really, but even if I knew boxing inside out, it would be impossible to know without a time machine or being able to watch many parallel universes at the same time.

Good luck with your endeavors anyway.
Wow thanks for the information bombardment!

I can see how Mike Tyson really trained hard.

I thought he was more naturally gifted with his speed and power.

Maybe he was gifted, but on top of that he had very meticulous training :P

THANKS AGAIN!
 
Wow thanks for the information bombardment!

I can see how Mike Tyson really trained hard.

I thought he was more naturally gifted with his speed and power.

Maybe he was gifted, but on top of that he had very meticulous training :P

THANKS AGAIN!

It's that way with most any sport. There is a perfect training regiment out there that only works for that one in a million guy and generally fails everyone below a certain threshold. A lot of world class trainers have a system that they swear by and that takes very gifted guys and makes them the best in the world every time.

There are still ways to get there even if you aren't as gifted, but it will be a nightmare to content with someone that has worked on firing patterns, cns training, plyometrics, visualization, technique and speed for a decade, when you have spend a decade to just get to the point where you benefit equally well from that sort of training.

So the most gifted will always have a leg up in terms of experience and technique at the highest level. In my opinion the issue is that technique ever so slightly changes as you get more explosive and faster and that changes your firing patterns entirely, so at every new level you reach, you need to work hard for your central nervous system to make your technique as polished as it can possibly be at that level.

So to be perfectly honest, only a carbon copy of Mike Tyson would benefit from training exactly like Mike Tyson did. It's the perfect training for the perfect athlete in boxing and it was meticulous, there is no doubt about that.

I appreciate you thanking me for the general help from a performance sports perspective outside of anything truly specific to boxing and if you have any specific questions as you learn more, feel free to message me.
 
So focus on strength first and foremost for a number of years and be fine with not having the stamina to compete with your folks yet. It will be o.k. if you can't go hard for many rounds. Your endurance will get better eventually, but it takes many years. Then focus on power, when you are very strong in relation to your body-weight while dialing in your diet. This should help with your stamina a little already, but once you are at that level it would be very good if you started your periodisation with an endurance part. While it will negatively impact your maximum strength, the strength was just a means to an end, not your long term goal anyway. So while you work on becoming very powerful, you will also need to read up and study running training, so you can devise a periodisation that works for that. You'll not want to do any fast runs or high intensity methods such as alternating sprints and jogs at any time in your training, that you want to focus on power and speed development, so you need 4-6 weeks allocated for that specifically, so you increase your endurance from periodisation to periodisation without impacting your power development too much.

My understanding from your post is that training should be done in 4 phases:
1) Strength
2) Power
3) Endurance
4) Speed and stamina

Is this correct?

Also, how do you focus on power during the second phase? i.e. How is power development different than strength development?

Also, for the third phase,.. my understanding is that you're saying that the endurance training should be low intensity (e.g. a light jog for several kilometers).

When then should high intensity cardio such as high intensity interval training be introduced?
 
Mike is actually quite small for a heavy weight. He is fast and aggressive and his frequent clean punches is what gives him KOs. I have just downloaded all of his career fights. He is awesome. Check his footwork out. He throws his body into every punch. He creates clean angles with which to strike from. And he doesn't relent when he has the chance. I love watching Tyson fight.


Where'd you download his fights? Can you provide a link?
 
Power and strength are 2 different things. Power is in the technique,primarily hip rotation.Throw a straight right ,then throw a straight right with proper hip rotation. A 150lb pro boxer can throw a straight right 10X harder than a 200lb bodybuilder just throwing his arm out there with no hip rotation or proper form. I suggest maybe looking at some Joe Louis fights as well and you'll see what I mean by hip rotation. By the way Tyson studied Joe a lot and you can see some similarities in their punching style.



Look at him when he throws the lead hook and notice his feet. Primarily his front foot. Starting at 2:06 there's some good slow motion action to observe.
 
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My understanding from your post is that training should be done in 4 phases:
1) Strength
2) Power
3) Endurance
4) Speed and stamina

Is this correct?

Also, how do you focus on power during the second phase? i.e. How is power development different than strength development?

Also, for the third phase,.. my understanding is that you're saying that the endurance training should be low intensity (e.g. a light jog for several kilometers).

When then should high intensity cardio such as high intensity interval training be introduced?

Training should focus on different qualities in specific mesocycles within a proper periodisation, because beyond a medium level it's near impossible to get all qualities up at the same time. So the goal becomes to be better than you were in the same cycle, when you last did it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sports_periodization

However it's different strokes for different folks. Not everyone prefers periodisation as a training concept.

I would prefer for combat athletes to focus their training on the following mesocycles:

1. endurance
2. strength
3. power
4. speed

I would say that stamina falls under endurance.

Also, how do you focus on power during the second phase? i.e. How is power development different than strength development?

Maximum strength is generally trained by utilizing a higher training load (referred to as higher intensity). Maximum power is best developed at a percentage between 70% and 80% of your one repetition maximum (1rm), although lighter and heavier loads can also be utilized. The focus for maximum strength development is usually on a high load and getting as many reps as possible at that load. Power development will shift the focus to the speed of the repetitions themselves and you are often also using different movements. For example for maximum strength development you may be doing 5 working sets of 5 reps at 90% of your 1rm or 3x3 at 95% later on in a strength focused mesocycle utlizing lifts such as the squat or deadlift. For power development you may be doing 5x5 at 75% of your 1rm (or 3x5 at 80%), again utlizing full effort, so that the speed of the barbell increases considerably in comparison. If you look at the provided graph (cut short a little in terms of time under tension) you can see that maximum strength takes north of 1 second, usually closer to 2.5s for one rep to be completed. The time under tension for a rep geared towards power development will be considerably shorter. For a power focus you may also be doing slightly different lifts such as the Olympic lifts instead of those more typical of powerlifting.

You may be doing power cleans in the place of deadlifts or example. That mostly depends on the level of skill and mobility in the athlete you train. Sometimes you'll stick to what they do best instead of introducing lifts with a much higher skill / flexibility barrier just because the lifts are more optimal or power development, when done at the highest level. No sense in having a lineman do powercleans with 180 pounds, (80% of his 1rm) constantly correcting his movement, when the same lineman can do 350 pound squats at 80% of his 1rm squat. It's all a question of how much time the athlete may devote to learning new skills. Everything is a trade-off.

Also, for the third phase,.. my understanding is that you're saying that the endurance training should be low intensity (e.g. a light jog for several kilometers).

Yes I would say so, especially for someone towards the end of a strength phase or someone in a power phase. The added intensity may lead to overuse injuries. Athletes have a certain work capacity at whatever level they are at. Doing competition style runs (III) or interval training (IV) would negatively impact their ability to recoup for the next workout and I'd say such tactics are best left for when you are actually focusing on developing endurance. For a speed phase I can see someone doing intervals, but not III, like competition speed runs. Those are just not that useful to someone that practically has that same sort of training with the high heart rate for prolonged amounts of time in sparring closer to the fights. I'd say a lot of the main sparring will fall in the timeframe 2-6 weeks out, which would basically be towards the end of the power phase and all throughout the speed phase. In the speed phase loads will be less and every rep will count. The total training volume will thus be lower than in a strength phase or even a power phase. So the athlete would have more work capacity freed up for the hard sparring in which you want them as sharp and technical as possible. I can see an athlete doing interval training on the days that he doesn't spar, just to make sure endurance stays in peak condition even at competition effort. The sprints would be great for speed development obviously.

A lot depends on the work capacity to be honest.

When then should high intensity cardio such as high intensity interval training be introduced?

Mostly in an endurance specific phase, because than the work capacity can be used as the athlete will be doing 15-20 reps and such at a lighter weight utilizing machines to shorten the breaks between sets or supersets, basically circuit training and such. So they will not be using their central nervous system all that much and will have work capacity free to train their running. That way you can make them faster at the same heart rate and therefore they'll be able to increase the ground they can cover in the slower runs, thereby increasing their volume or work capacity in the running realm without increasing the time allocated on the endurance training.

I'd say the goal in a good planning would be to consistently increase work capacity, intensity and volume over time and do more and more sport specific work (SSP) in favor of general physical preparedness (GPP). Like I said I'd also utilize shorter endurance and strength specific cycles in favor of power and speed centric work over time. Where a beginner may benefit greatly from increased strength an advanced fighter will much more likely need speed. It all depends on the person though. For example I'd take a BJ Penn and ask him to work hard for a year before taking the next fight. I'd then work on his strength a lot, perhaps making that cycle three times as long as the others, like 2 wks endurance, 6 wks strength, 2 weeks power and 2 weeks speed and back to endurance. Then maybe 3, 5, 2, 2. Then maybe 3, 5, 2, 2 and finally in the periodisation before the fight back to 3,3,3,3. Maybe even more drastic than that. It really depends on what kind of improvement you'd get in the strength aspect.
 
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