The Adaptable Athlete Podcast
The Adaptable Athlete Podcast is a podcast for coaches and practitioners who want to learn more about modern approached to sport movement and skill acquisition; and who ultimately, want to help to their athletes become more adaptable.
Host, Javi Miller-Estrada engages in discussions with some of the absolute best sport coaches, trainers, and practitioners in the world. Coaches who are truly pushing the industry forward.
The Adaptable Athlete Podcast
Everything But the Thing: Boxing's Skill Acquisition Problem | Adam Haniver
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What does it actually mean to train a boxer to be adaptable when the most representative practice, hard sparring, also causes permanent damage?
Adam Haniver is a boxing coach and England Boxing DISE program lead who's spent years working through exactly that tension. He brings an ecological dynamics lens to a sport that has historically treated tradition as gospel, and the conversation goes deep on skill acquisition, affordances, and what most boxing training gets fundamentally wrong.
Topics covered:
- "Anything but the thing" — why most boxing training is unopposed, decomposed, and doesn't transfer to competition
- Perceive to act AND act to perceive — how the best boxers generate opportunities rather than wait for them
- The GAP framework (Great, Average, Poor) as a tool for athlete-directed intention before sparring
- Teaching boxers to punch versus teaching them to land — why these are two completely different things
- Naseem Hamed and Brendan Ingle as examples of what freedom in movement actually produces
- Play sparring, head trauma, and how to build representativeness without increasing injury risk
If you coach in any combat or contact sport and you're thinking through how to square representative practice with athlete safety, this conversation is worth your time.
Find Adam at www.theboxgathering.com and on the Box Gathering Podcast on all platforms. England Boxing DISE program: @dice_boxing_brighton on socials.
Don't forget to join us in Arizona for the Skill Acquisition Retreat!
If you want to go deeper on skill acquisition, check out the Certified Skill Acquisition Specialist certification over at emergentmvmt.com.
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