In the last article, we have seen the Footwork Drills and Press-up variations for grip strengths of Vasyl Lomachenko. Today we are going to explain about how Lomachenko prepare for his Mental Exercises and Underwater Breath holds in this blog.
LOMACHENKO MENTAL EXERCISES
Ever heard the saying that “boxing is 90% mental”?
Psychological characteristics are integral to success in any sport, and not many sports are as psychologically demanding as fight sports.
But how often do Boxers train their cognitive skills and psychological processes?
An unfortunate tradition in Boxing is that there is a mantra of “you’ve either got it or you haven’t”, and often perceive sport psychology interventions as a sign of weakness.
There have been positive progressions over recent years, with superstars like Anthony Joshua and Carl Froch openly talking about how sport psychology has benefitted their fight preparation.
Lomachenko is another boxer that flies the flag for sport psychology, by utilising cognitive drills such as Number Grids, Puzzles and much more.
Number grids are something we’ve used before in a practical gym setting.
IMPROVE CONCENTRATION UNDER FATIGUE
As well as being physically demanding, boxing and other combat sports are also mentally demanding requiring rapid information processing, decision-making and skill execution.
This is challenged under fatigue, therefore in our HIIT sessions we use brain training activities to help improve attentional focus and decision making in fatigued situations.
Use a brain training app on your smartphone or tablet device, or print out ‘number grids’.
During an interval training session, if your rest period is 60 s or longer – fire up your game and play it as soon as you finish the set. A game where you have to find numbers in a sequence is a good place to start.
Make sure you make a record of your performance, set goals and monitor improvements.
UNDERWATER BREATH HOLDS
There is footage of Vasyl Lomachenko performing underwater breath holds for 3-4 minutes!
DISCLAIMER: We don’t advise for you to do this, underwater or un-accompanied.
However, we’ll look at the potential benefits and effective breathing drills to help improve performance.
The main benefit of underwater breath holds is perceptual, and Loma attests to this fact in his training videos.
The idea is that he’s able to stay calm and resist the drive to ventilate. The physiological benefits of training to breath-hold seem to be at odds with the aims of improving high-intensity performance, and whether or not Loma does this is a systematic training strategy or is simply ad-hoc whenever pool work is done is unclear.
Nevertheless, respiratory control is important in the majority of dynamic sports with a high-energetic demand. Our respiratory rate and depth plays a big role in our perception of effort, and therefore motivation and belief to continue to exercise at high-intensity.
When our athletes are undertaking HIIT we place a large emphasis on their ability to ‘stay-in-control’ by regulating their breathing. It provides athletes with a sense of calm and comfortability when under pressure, and is encapsulated in the phrase ‘Feeling comfortable with being uncomfortable’.
In the next article will be discussing about how Lomachenko prepares for his Low-intensity and low-impact conditioning methods. If you are inspired by Vasyl Lomachenko and looking to start boxing or wanting to upgrade your boxing gloves, check out our cobra series boxing gloves range made of Carbon Leather for durability and IMF padding for optimised protection.