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It is, conservatively speaking, about 9 million degrees inside Abel Sanchez's boxing gym in Big Bear Lake, California, and still his prized fighter, world middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin, is in the ring doing chin pushups -- wearing a hooded sweatshirt and sweatpants.
Yes, chin pushups. Arms behind his back, his chin rests on a towel, bearing the full weight of his 170-pound frame. He dips within inches of the canvas and rises back up. At the end of the set, he turns on his back, wraps the towel around his head and face, loops a rope with a weight attached to the end of it around his neck and does a set of what can only be described as blind, hanging, weighted neck crunches. Golovkin conditions each part of his sinewy frame like this, in rigorous isolation drills. The chin must withstand pain. The neck must be strong enough to absorb punches. To give him strength to fight inside, he works his forearms -- which he often has trouble fitting in the sleeves of a normal dress shirt -- with resistance bands and a homemade contraption of steel and rope pulleys that his trainer affectionately calls "the machine."
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Yes, chin pushups. Arms behind his back, his chin rests on a towel, bearing the full weight of his 170-pound frame. He dips within inches of the canvas and rises back up. At the end of the set, he turns on his back, wraps the towel around his head and face, loops a rope with a weight attached to the end of it around his neck and does a set of what can only be described as blind, hanging, weighted neck crunches. Golovkin conditions each part of his sinewy frame like this, in rigorous isolation drills. The chin must withstand pain. The neck must be strong enough to absorb punches. To give him strength to fight inside, he works his forearms -- which he often has trouble fitting in the sleeves of a normal dress shirt -- with resistance bands and a homemade contraption of steel and rope pulleys that his trainer affectionately calls "the machine."
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Source: ESPN The Magazine - The Big Drama Show