I Tried to Improve my Reflexes for 30 Days - Boxing & Neuroscience Based Training

recently I saw a video of Australian boxer Tim's Oh in which he snatches four coins out of the air in span of a second it looks really impressive and it got me wondering how much work it would take to improve your reflexes and well as I think hand-eye coordination to pull something like that off so I want to spend the next 30 days training my reflexes to see how much I can improve which means I need to establish what my baseline is for day one so I've set up three tests to try and measure where I'm at right now my first measurement was with an app called reaction test that just involves tapping the screen every time the light turns green after that I asked my wife if she could drop a ruler three times to measure how quick my reflexes are between my right hand and my left and finally I asked her to throw four quarters in the air to see how I do and it's exactly as hard as it looks at the end of the three tests my average response is 0.35 on the amp twenty four point eight centimeters with my right hand versus eighteen point six centimeters with my left and the best I could grab was two coins out of the air since Tim's training is as a boxer it seemed obvious to start there so I made an appointment with the United Boxing Club in Toronto to work with trainer Kevin to the cells who ran me through a series of exercises that are kind of adaptations on boxing workouts that specifically were designed to target reflexes and hand-eye coordination a lot of boxing starts with the legs you know there's always the focus on the hands because that's what you know hits your opponent but in boxing everything starts at the feet right and it's important that we especially when we start punching that we never compromise the bottom half of our body because that's where a lot of the force the speed the agility everything is generated from this is your lead hand this is your jab hand right you're gonna be extending fully out right that locking in at the elbow locking at the shoulder making sure that it's fully extended sing over our knuckle making contact with the first two knuckles in our hand on the other side the dominant punch is we're gonna be doing the same mechanics if you're not gonna be able to just extend this arm out because one it's gonna be short and two you're not going to really feel like there's any power there so what we need to do is real tape at the hip rotor pivoting over so we're turning over that sides but sleeping our center of gravity over our legs the left hook is a round punch so the the path of its travel is coming in a circle ideally around the guard of a boxer so when we're rotating on this left hook what we want to do is turn over using our legs and we're putting our legs and everything so that's a motion where you know we're stirring that giant pot of soup but we're bringing our entire left side so we're almost locking this in place with all moves in unison nice circle you're locking in your elbow almost 90 degrees and just coming around amazing so all we're doing now is just layering in some and eye coordination addition to that plant result with a ball up hardening the fists right before impact so when you're reaching out and you're grabbing that ball you're practicing that closure on the fist well I haven't been able to do the training I was hoping for this month because of social distancing there is now talk of easing those restrictions so in preparation I started training again with some basic shadowboxing and practice on the app I'm sure my technique isn't particularly good right now as I'm without access to a coach but I figure the practice is still better than nothing [Music] and when those restrictions do ease up and meet up with cam to continue training so I'm swapping out the four quarters for three juggling balls as I figure they're easier to see in the air while I practice so far however they have not been any easier to catch [Music] [Music] oh by the end of my practice I've managed three successful catches and after kam heads home I do some juggling practice to try and keep my hand-eye coordination sharp also if you want to see more for ball juggling I was a guest on Steven Robinson's channel as he tried to learn the skill I've linked to his video below if you'd like to check it out another quick the effective way to improve your reflex speed is straight up playing video games I'm not very good at any of these games but as far as making use of my downtown goes there are a few things more effective for improving reaction time well most of my training has been pretty functional so far I want to see if there's anything else I can do to gain an advantage with this goal so I set up a video call of my friend Joe Hodge who's completing her PhD in neuroscience from the University of Toronto to learn some of the science behind reflexes and reaction time the important thing you want to consider here is that we live in a delay our senses are never going to provide you with information that's happening in real time and so that's a huge limitation so basically by the time that the that the rule starts to drop you know you want to enhance your ability to be able to catch it as soon as possible but the problem with that is you'll never see it in real time so you'll never be able to sort of catch it at the point of release and so we end up doing because of these delays we end up predicting okay we have these predictive mechanisms so if something is too fast and I won't get information in real time I need to predict where that targets going to be right and if your predictive mechanisms are accurate then you're more likely to make an accurate response but what's what I think I hypothesize is going to be happening is you're gonna get better at predicting where that target is going and eventually you're gonna be better at guiding your hand but I do want to also wreak lera phi that these are not reflexes you can think of a reflex as a signal that produces a response but that signal doesn't have to reach you know that the topmost layer of your brain the signal usually travels to your spine right back to your muscle think for example when you go to a doctor and you taps your patellar tendon that's not your you know the upper regions of your brain that's that's producing this response it's actually you know the signals going to your spine right back to your muscle and all the things I'm testing myself with will have that processing cortical processing yes is there anything people can do to speed up those processes or to improve those processes other than just repeated action I think it's practice practice practice I'm sorry oh I wish there was something else [Music] I meet up with cam and Eric to keep practicing whenever I can but I also realize I need to find ways to continue working on my reaction time without a second person so I've been trying an exercise where I hold the balls off outside of my peripheral vision and don't reach to catch them until I see the ball drop into my field of view I also keep doing shadow boxing on the side use my speed up and it's actually pretty good conditioning on its own as much as I've enjoyed these workouts the concern I'm having it's just how related any of this practice will actually be to the final class when I tried to three-quarter drill with Derek I managed to grab all three coins but I've also been rewatching Tim zoos video and I'm realizing how spread out the quarters are when he does it so when I do my final day 30 tests I'm gonna try using a larger surface area to space out the coins and hopefully give myself a little more room to pull this off so this is actually the first time cam and I have been able to go back into the studio which is exciting in and of itself we're gonna run through the reaction test app first which I'm hoping I've seen some improvement with but I'm also aware after talking with Joe there is a ceiling to how much I can improve on this one okay that one is good next is round two with the ruler Oh 21 when I tried this on day one I feel like I was doing myself a disservice by locking my eyes on the ruler itself rather than the hand that's dropping it I'm hoping changing that up will give me at least a split seconds improvement this time around [Music] hey there we go that was 11 but it's the final challenge I'm most excited for Kim and I start off by warming up with some juggling balls to get a sense of timing and the right height I'm gonna need once we get a couple solid catches we move on to three quarters the first quarter toss here we go we peaking by having with the three quarters is actually really good which means it's time to make the jump to four [Music] so much harder that's the motion now [Music] just dropping the third one that was [Music] that felt good that felt really good all four to my complete surprise I caught all four quarters I really really didn't think I was going to do that at the start of this challenge towards the end of the session I was even able to catch them without reaching underhand to grab the final quarter of the same way Tim zoo does in his video the 30 days my reaction speed improved in every category I measured but I think I saw my strongest improvement with the final test and again this goes back to what I learned from Joe about improving predictive response when the quarters are in the air there is barely enough time to see where all four are at the peak of the toss but after enough practice I could guess where they were going to be as they started to fall this is very similar to the process a baseball hitter or a goalie goes through in hockey when they have to make split-second reactions to hit a pitch or stop a goal responding to objects that are traveling at speeds that are almost too fast for our minds to process I honestly didn't think I would get quick enough to pull this off even watching it back now feels kind of strange but it was a heck of a lot of fun to learn how to do it so I want to say a huge thank you to the United boxing club in Toronto to Joe for making the time to talk and for the sponsor of this video in order bpn because so much of our work communication and lives have been regulated to online it's so important to make sure your online presence is secure one way to do that is to go to Nord VPN comm slash goal guys to set up your account your VPN protects the data that's sent from your device with military-grade encryption as it travels through servers around the world this process allows your data to be randomized and look like gibberish to any third party observer who may have bad intentions for a long time I didn't really think this was a problem but last year I had my bank information illegally accessed and it changed the way I look at online privacy this is only one of a number of problems that can come about when your data isn't secure whether you're working from home and discussing confidential work details doing video calls with friends or loved 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Channel: Goal Guys

Views: 363,993

Keywords: Goal Guys, speed up reaction time, get faster reaction time, improve reaction time, how to improve reaction time, improve reflexes, how to get faster reaction time, increase reaction speed, how to get better reflexes, boxing reaction time, I tried to improve my reflexes in 30 days, boxing reflexes, reflexes, reflex, reaction speed

Id: djhLtsRKCYs

Length: 13min 53sec (833 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 13 2020