Coach Study: Emanuel Steward (Patreon)

• LMA Curriculum 

When you usually think of tape study, you think of competitors, but since LMA is about transforming how we train, it makes sense to also study coaches.

Here's legendary boxing trainer Emanuel Steward working with Jeff Fenech. In this study, you'll see elements of the Treatise on Pedagogy.

First you see Fenech and a training partner engaging in controlled sparring. The purpose is not to be an actual boxing match but to simulate a boxing match: representing the fatigue, pressure, timing, and what it feels like to hit and be hit. It's 90% of a fight without the injury. Because after this, there's still more training. It's sparring as exploratory play that informs the rest of training.

Then comes instruction, but notice it's bidirectional and dialectical. Steward has his feedback, then Fenech adds his own observations that come from firsthand experience, which makes for better feedback. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Rather than competing, they're both adding to the discussion for mutual growth. This then informs the shadowboxing.

Rather than shadowboxing mindlessly at the beginning and sparring all-out at the end, it's flipped. Sparring is first, which makes it productive and problem-seeking. Afterward, shadowboxing isn't just a mindless warm-up but a time to process information and for the coach to observe and give more insight. Shadowboxing becomes problem-solving. Then comes "pad" work.

I am very critical of pad work and, for the most part, think you're better off hitting the bag than pads. Put simply, the bag doesn't represent the match. Instead, it's a tool for technique and conditioning. So you go into it with that expectation. Pad work, however, represents a match. That's your expectation, yet since it's nothing like a match, there's a negative skill transfer.

A heavy bag may not make you better at sparring, but it doesn't make you worse, either. But pad work can make you worse. Now one might argue that it depends on the pad holder. That if you find a "good" one, it'll make you better. But watch how Emanuel Steward holds the pads. This is not what most people think of when they think "good" pad holding. If this were a no-name trainer, most would scoff at this pad holding.

Unfortunately, most people wouldn't know the difference between good and bad pad holding. Good pad holding may even seem bad to pros because they can't get into a flow. Social media has obfuscated this even further by making the expectation for pad holding Whac-A-Mole on god-mode, where you can't miss. That's the crux of the problem. If pad holding represents a fight and the pad holder the opponent, why would they let you flow? Why would they tell you how to hit them and let you hit them without ever making you miss? Why would they make it 99% about your offense? It's the most unrealistic and unusual opponent.

What's more, flow shouldn't be the job of your opponent or the pad holder, that's on you. Having flow be externally induced robs you of autonomy and self-regulation.

You shouldn't be "good" at hitting the pads because there should be constant variability, like in a fight. For you to get "good," in a flow, or in sync, it's because you and your pad holder have rehearsed a dance. It's choreography. You are memorizing rather than fighting.

Once memorized, you no longer have to think, you can now add your own swag and flavor because you're mostly on autopilot. Comfort with the choreography and making it their own make people think they're getting better, but that comfort comes from memorization rather than being good at sparring. You're learning all the wrong lessons. This is the negative skill transfer.

But most practitioners have been conditioned to believe this negative skill transfer or being in sync with your pad holder constitutes good pad holding. It's cooperative when fighting is adversarial. Again, nonrepresentative. This is why pad holding is not a way to gauge someone's skill. But if pad holding is more representative of a fight than a heavy bag, shouldn't how they look on the pads be more representative of how they look in a match?

Unfortunately, this is why hard sparring remains so important because it's the only thing trainers and fighters know with certainty that represents a live match. But for safety reasons, it shouldn't be like that.

Now there are some uses for pad holding, like bonding, building confidence, entertainment, or when bags are lacking (e.g., training with a friend at a park). But when bags are available, pad holding is ultimately a sales tool. Whether you're paying for it or not, it's a service. Service makes your time feel more valuable. It's a better marketing tool for social media than coaching someone through their shadowboxing.

Emanuel Steward did conventional pad holding for Fenech, allowing him to feel good, banging away with long combinations, and making Fenech feel like he can't miss because he can't. Steward won't let him. He'll make sure he hits every time. How does this represent a fight?

Pads make good fighters feel unstoppable, amateurs feel like pros, and beginners feel like experts. This is why people love them. But it's a false sense of confidence, and that's why it poses dangers the bag does not. No one hits a bag and feels more confident.

Part of conventional pad holding means stopping to give more instructions to make the time feel more valuable. However, this same instruction would be easier to share and better served outside of pad holding, where Steward is unrestricted by pad holding. It also wouldn't interrupt the training. But Steward needs to consider his fighter's confidence and the coach-fighter rapport.

What I want to show instead of conventional pad holding is Steward pretending to be an opponent while he happens to hold the pads. The pads are nonessential. What is essential is Steward representing an opponent. Fenech can't land unlimited punches. He has to show restraint, he has to move, he has to dodge, he has to feint, he has to block while hitting, he has to pull his punches so as not to throw himself out of position, he has to reset his feet and pick his shots rather than throwing every time he sees the target. Fenech can't flow, he has to think and adapt. Rather than autopilot, Fenech has to concentrate, he has to deal with stress and pressure. That's what people like about pad work, not having to think. This is why pad holders have to constantly hit their athletes. But if this is a consistent problem with pad work, shouldn't that tell us something?

There are so many adjustments Fenech is making that I can't mention them all. Because it's not scripted, it's not prompted. Steward is just adding variables that would happen in a live match, and Fenech is adjusting. You can't prompt all of this, you can't talk this fast, and even if you could, you would not only cognitively overload your fighter but also rob them of the opportunity to actually learn. If you're fed everything, you don't have to learn, you just have to memorize. You're the smartphone user, and the coach is the smartphone. As we've all learned, if the phone does all the thinking for us, we don't have to learn anything. Spellcheck has only made our spelling worse.

Imagine Steward trying to hit Fenech for zoning out or not paying attention. He can't because Fenech is present and alive. You also don't have the same opportunity because you're never standing still to swat at him. Also, in this lesson, Fenech is learning that movement is the best defense, as a matter of course. Movement is the best defense, and this is the best way to learn defensive movement.

In conventional pad holding, you're taught to stand and bang and block in place. Footwork is last, what's first is stationary movements with your hands and feet. You're training as if you're only allowed to move minimally. The wrong things will show in the fight, none of the god-mode offense and accuracy but all of the defensive irresponsibility.

Fenech, on the other hand, is learning to attack on the move. This is alive and free. I can't say the same about conventional pad work. None of the problems that exist in conventional pad work exist here.

There's still instruction from Steward, but it's light. The key is doing. Do the thing to get better at the thing. You learn by doing (praxis). Then do more doing. During training, anything outside of doing robs you of time from doing.

Around the time of this video, pad work was still less common than it is now. Go back a bit further to Ali's era, and most boxers didn't do pad work. How much pad work did you see in the first Rocky? Compare that to Creed. Look at even older boxing films. You won't see any, if at all. Muhammad Ali never hit pads. It was about conditioning or doing things representative of a fight, so shadowboxing and sparring. Then look at Steward's era, still a lot of shadowboxing. There was pad work, but it still looked like a fight. The original ethos was still there. Now look at today. Almost no shadowboxing other than using it like jumping jacks to warm up, and pad work is unrecognizable from what it was. It looks nothing like a fight. It looks like main character choreography for a movie. It looks like it's made for social media. When people ask where's the footwork and defense in MMA, I ask, have you seen them hit pads?

In this training between Steward and Fenech, sparring informed the training. Steward saw what his athlete lacked during play and filled the gaps. But the way Steward used the pads would be "unconventional" today, yet it's more beneficial than what people are doing now. Because it's not about the pads or the pad holder, it's about the fighter. It's movement, variability with an occasional target—it's growth. But Fenech could have just as well hit Steward's hand or imaginary targets. In fact, imaginary targets would have given Fenech more autonomy and variability. Rather than only hitting to the head, with imaginary targets, Fenech could have mixed shots to the body. The benefit of a target is that you have a target, the downside of a target is that you have a target. It's better to be completely immersed rather than always being aware of the task. That's hard with pads.

The point of the pad as the target is to give Fenech the feeling of contact because hitting a pad feels good. It's like constant bullseyes. Again, confidence.

Once someone hits the pads for the first time, that's all they want to do. They don't know that it's making them any better, they just want to do it because it feels good. But what actually makes them good is movement, is representing the fight. The pads are optional. What feels even better than hitting the pads is growth. 

I don't agree everything in the past was better. There's so much more we know now than we did in the past. However, there's also a lot of knowledge we've lost over time due to capitalism and other oppressive systems. This is why LMA is a massive project. So stick with us for a continuous and evolving journey, and tell your friends (just the wholesome ones). Our biggest challenges won't be our politics, it'll be reactionary training dogmas we've all adopted as truths.

– Sam