The Comeback Kid: Callum Beardow Training
As you can see in the picture above, Boxing Science Ambassador Callum Beardow has been working working hard on the Combat Conditioning program at Sheffield Hallam University.
Following consecutive shoulder surgeries, Callum’s training effort, professionalism and dedication has been maintained, setting a great example to others on the program.
His training has been quite interesting and has had its challenges. Here is a brief article to share some of his training methods.
Hip Function
Since shoulder surgery, Callum had experienced hip pain during various forms of activity. We performed a few movement assessments, finding that overactive hip flexors and adductors (groin muscles) had created weakness within the right gluteal muscles – therefore causing hip pain.
I wanted to then see how he was moving when boxing. As you can see in the left hand picture on the graphic above, Callum’s right leg seems to go into ‘valgus’ as he throws the right hand.
This lead me to experimenting with the use of mini-bands. The bands created a better knee angle and use of the hips during back hand punch. I decided to prescribe this in training, through boxing specific S&C exercises, controlled boxing movement and shadow boxing.
These methods have been favorable as Callum has not reported hip pain since, allowing him to move onto heavy lifting on his strength program.
The use of mini-bands in boxing maybe worth exploring in the near-future….
Increase muscle mass
Due to time spent off training due to recovery from the surgery, Callum has seen a rapid decrease in muscle mass. Standing at a modest 5”10, Callum’s muscular build is vital for him competing at 81 kg. Therefore, our main objective was for him to regain this skeletal muscle mass as quickly as possible.
Considering the amount of soreness and strain on tendons that may occur from weight training, Callum was restricted in how much external load in the initial stages of rehab. Therefore, we opted to prescribe Occlusion Training.
Occlusion Training is where you wrap around a device to apply pressure towards the proximal (top) of a muscle in order to restrict blood flow to the muscles. The picture above shows how we wrapped therabands around the top of the thigh whilst performing a single leg leg press.
Various studies have found that the restriction of blood flow stimulates an increase in growth hormones, recruits more fast-twitch fibers and induces more production of protein, all related to improved strength and growth in muscle mass.
This was quite beneficial to Callum, as he increased his skeletal muscle mass by 2 kg in just 5 weeks. The biggest improvement was 8% increase in arm muscle mass, this was important to protect his shoulders when returning to training.
Increase Core Mass
Previous Boxing Science articles have highlighted the importance of lean mass of the core for a forceful punch (click here to read more). Callum has been renowned to have a thick core area and a stinging right hand, however the lack of training and external load had seen trunk mass decrease significantly.
We needed to improve this quickly before he returned to boxing training to support the impact upon punching. However, we realised this would be a difficult task as he was not ready for the big lifts and occlusion training for the core is unheard of.
This required us to prescribe extensive use of core exercises; such as isometric bench holds, plank row and weighted carries.
This lead to great improvements, increasing lean mass of the trunk by 6%.
Shoulder Rehab and Conditioning: A brief overview
Although these were the most important aspects on Callum’s return to training, I don’t want to delve into it as we haven’t done anything groundbreaking and out of the ordinary.
Shoulder mobilisation and strengthening took a high priority in intial stages of rehab. This consisted of a progression of unloaded movements, bodyweight exercises, proprioception and resistance exercise. Resistance training progressed slowly from horizontal to vertical push/pull exercises as shoulder mobility and function improved.
Conditioning started with slow jogs and HIIT bike sessions to build up his fitness without excessive loading. This progressed to large volume HIIT running to improve cardiac function.
Next Steps
Callum has progressed to variations of compound lifts, light Olympic lifting and repeated sprint work on the Combat Conditioning cluster, and it’s safe to say he has took it in his stride. His progress has been excellent as he starts putting in the work at Sheffield City ABC under the watchful eye of head coach Brendan Warburton ahead of the senior novice championships in October.
Keep up the great work Callum.