Recently our performance director Al Pepper has been working with RAF Firefighter Brad Axe as he began his professional boxing career.

“I reached out to Brad, with a couple of weeks to go, to see if I could help and he, and his coach immediately took me up on the offer”. The first chat was a get to know you session where we worked out shared values and goals to see if we could work well together. I must admit how impressed I was with Brad’s work ethic and even more impressed with his coach, Carl Ellis. It’s not easy to accept a stranger into a training camp but his openness to search out the 1% for his boxer told me I knew I would enjoy this.
In the limited time we had we found out what the boxer and coach wanted to work on. Carl wanted to ensure that Brad didn’t get too carried away with the occasion and for Brad it was about controlling his energy. I also helped Brad with his visualisation technique so he could enjoy his pro debut, after all you only get to do it once.
With Brad’s job in the RAF being a fire fighter, we decided on the mantra ‘control the fire’ a concept used by Mike Tyson's mentor Cus D’Amato. With this, we discussed how we could turn the flame up or down depending on the situation, if he was getting nervous during the build-up we could turn it down with relaxation techniques and on the night, we could turn it up as required. The other thing we worked on was confidence and, as camp had gone so well, we decided on ‘I have done the work’. Brad could use this as self-talk every time a negative thought or self-doubt crept into his mind.
Here is how the night went from Brads perspective “On the day, the visualisation and controlling the fire was a real interesting experience, feeling my HR go so high and being able to “control the fire”. During the ring walk everything went EXACTLY as I had pictured which was perfect with how I felt in my head. Pre walking out I felt ZERO nerves at all which was so odd, I think because I’d pictured it so many times and it was exactly that. During the fight, he (his opponent) started fast and to be honest it did shock me, but “I’ve done the hard work” actually came into my head after that initial panic and I was able to tell myself that - this helped me ride the wave, overall mate I am absolutely blown away by how much you’ve helped me. ’For me it has been a privilege to work with “The Axe Gang” and I look forward to helping sharpen “The Axe” for his next outing.

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