Boxing as a Sport

Erina: So Mike, I heard that you box?

Mike: Well I don't box any more but I was boxing, mostly kick boxing for a while.

Erina: Wow, that sounds crazy. How did you get into it?

Mike: Well, from a young age, from about the age of twelve, I started doing karate in Vancouver and I was training in karate for about seven or eight years and then once I graduated from high school I moved and I moved to Japan and there I continued and didn't have much time to do training but I got involved in the kick boxing circle with some friends that did a lot of kick boxing and different types of martial arts.

Erina: Wow, kick boxing, so I assume the training is pretty hard too, right?

Mike: Yeah, the training was brutal.

Erina: What kind of training do you do?

Mike: Well, I was never professional but I had a couple of amateur fights and I don't think people quite understand how much goes into one fight because leading up to the fight, a couple of months before the fight, a friend of mine and I would be training at least five times a week.

Erina: Wow.

Mike: And we would do really brutal sprints up a hill over and over again and we'd do interval training on the sand and in addition, of course, we were doing lots of sparring and lots of conditioning and stuff that would just really push your body to the limit and really test you.

Erina: Wow, that must have been very tough. So were you ever worried about head injuries?

Mike: Well, especially with boxing, you get a lot of head injuries and more so over time because unlike other martial arts, boxing is designed to keep you standing and taking hits and that's why you see a lot of professional boxers as they get older and near the end of their career or even after their career, a lot of them have severe brain damage. Their speech is impeded and you can tell that they've really done some damage to their head over the years.