This principle is not specific to boxing. It applies across boxing, kickboxing, Muay Thai and MMA striking because the underlying problem is the same: whether I am punching, kicking, kneeing or elbowing, I still have to make the technique work from the position I am actually in, recover from it, and remain capable of dealing with what comes next.
There is a famous idea in martial arts about practising the same kick thousands of times. I agree with the value of repetition, but I think the idea is incomplete.
Practise the same kick a million times, in a million ways.
Fighting rarely gives you the exact position in which you learned a technique. The target might be slightly higher, further away, too close or off to one side. Your weight may already be somewhere inconvenient, or you may be moving forwards, backwards or laterally when the opportunity appears. Even the purpose of the strike can change. Sometimes you want power, sometimes speed or accuracy, and sometimes you only need enough contact to create the next opportunity.
The kick is still the kick, but the movement required to make it work is not always identical.
That became increasingly important to the way I trained, and eventually became one of the reasons I preferred the CCBall to the heavy bag.
The heavy bag helped me repeat movements. CCBall made me keep solving them.
I loved the heavy bag when I started striking. Before someone stood in front of me holding pads and explaining exactly how I should move, there was simply a target and the freedom to experiment. That freedom mattered to me.
Years later, when I was writing about the CCBall, I described that philosophy very simply: if the ball was in a certain position and I wanted to hit it, I felt that I should be able to find a way to do it.
Eventually, however, the heavy bag became boring to me. It could move after being struck, but the basic problem remained familiar. I could repeat a jab, cross, kick or elbow hundreds of times, and repetition obviously has value, but I increasingly wanted something beyond reproducing the movement.
I wanted to solve it.
Instead of only asking whether I could perform the strike, I started thinking more about the position around it. Where am I standing relative to the target? Does this strike actually make sense from here? Does my stance need to change? How much rotation do I need? Can I reach the target cleanly without forcing the movement, and where will that movement leave me afterwards?
The CCBall kept those questions alive.
One technique is not one movement
Looking back through my old training diaries, this idea appears repeatedly.
In April 2024, I was deliberately adding forward and sideways movement to my strikes, judging distance before entering and throwing shots from different positions. I was also experimenting with how different parts of my body contributed to the same movement. The following day, I wrote that I wanted to practise shots from different positions so that I could strike from different angles around an opponent.
Elsewhere in my own notes, I wrote:
“We need to ensure that we can throw this from any stance from either foot, from any width.”
Another observation reduced the problem even further:
“Being able to rotate, bend and manipulate the punch in order to hit the target is a skill in itself.”
That is what I mean by practising the same strike a million ways.
I am not arguing that technique does not matter. Technique gives you a structure to control, but eventually I want enough ownership of that structure that I am not dependent on one exact starting position before I can use it.
The aim is not to make every repetition different for the sake of variety. It is to preserve what matters in the technique while allowing the movement to change when the problem changes.
A strike from your preferred stance and range is one version of the problem. Move the target further away, change the angle, alter where your weight is sitting or begin the movement while already stepping, and the solution may have to adjust with it.
For me, that is where repetition develops into adaptability.
The strike does not stop at contact
The same idea eventually extended beyond how I reached the target. I started paying more attention to where the movement left me afterwards.
My training notes repeatedly return to retrieval and position after striking. With the teep, for example, I noticed occasions where I was not returning to a stance from which I could immediately continue striking. I spent time working specifically on retrieving the leg rather than leaving it extended on the target for too long. Elsewhere, I was paying attention to rear-foot retrieval after punching, bringing the hands back after combinations and how small changes in foot position could help set up whatever came next.
That changed how I thought about the strike itself.
Contact is not necessarily the end of the movement. A strike leaves your weight somewhere, changes the relationship between your feet and affects what you are immediately capable of doing afterwards. Sometimes the recovery may return you towards the position you started from; at other times, the ending of one movement can become part of the beginning of another.
So practising a strike a million ways cannot only mean finding different ways to reach the target. It also means developing more control over how you come out of the movement and what possibilities remain afterwards.
Then the ball comes back
This is where the CCBall changed the experience for me.
Strike a heavy bag and the target absorbs the strike before the repetition resolves. Strike the CCBall towards the wall and it returns into your training space, which means the position created by the previous movement suddenly matters again.
Sometimes the obvious response is to strike it. At other times, the ball may be outside useful range, moving through a position where a slip or roll makes more sense, or travelling somewhere that requires you to step or change angle. There are also moments when the better decision is simply to let it pass and wait for another opportunity.
One of my own early criticisms of the Coordination Ball was that I was using it badly. I noticed that I would sometimes hit whatever appeared instead of using footwork or deciding whether the shot actually made sense. I wrote that it could encourage poor shot selection because I would attempt weak strikes when “the best thing would have been to move.”
That criticism eventually became part of the way I thought about training with it.
The goal was no longer simply to hit the ball. It became a question of reading what had happened and deciding what belonged next.
Training the choice of movement
That is a different problem from merely knowing how to slip.
You can learn a defensive movement and repeat it fifty times, improving the mechanics with each repetition. Fighting then introduces another question: when should that movement actually be used? A technically good defence can still be the wrong defence for the situation, or the right defence used at the wrong moment.
My own notes became increasingly concerned with that distinction. In one entry, I had reacted to an attack based on an assumption about its height and wrote:
“Don’t rush the reaction.”
A few days later, I reduced another problem to:
“You see it right, right defence but wrong timing.”
Those observations changed the way I thought about reflexes. I became less interested in movement speed by itself and more interested in what happens before the movement. You have to perceive enough of the situation to choose appropriately, and then you need to turn that understanding into action quickly enough for it to matter.
The way I now summarise that process is:
READ → CHOOSE → MOVE
That sequence is my present way of organising the idea, rather than language taken directly from those older notes. My aim is for experience to reduce the delay between those stages without replacing selection with blind reaction.
Defence should not live in a separate box
Another problem appeared in my own fighting. Against Casper and Emil, I noticed that I tended to be either attacking or defending, as though they were separate modes that I had to switch between.
At one point, I had spent so much time practising head movement that my fighting became heavily defensive. My attention centred on making people miss. Later, when I shifted my attention towards attacking, I noticed how much my fighting changed again.
My conclusion in the notes was blunt:
“There is no such thing.”
What I meant was that I did not want such a clean psychological separation between attack and defence. I started deliberately putting rolls, duck-unders and side evasions between combinations rather than treating defensive movement as an isolated exercise.
That is another reason the rebound became useful to me. The CCBall return does not arrive labelled as an attacking or defensive moment. It simply arrives, and I have to decide what the situation calls for. I might strike, move, defend, reposition or wait, but whatever I choose changes the position from which the next decision has to be made.
The exchange continues.
Even looking became part of the problem
I also realised that I was watching the ball too directly, and that bothered me. If my entire visual strategy depended on staring at one small object, I had to ask what exactly I was practising.
In my notes, I explicitly questioned the eye-tracking problem and whether the way I was following the ball resembled how I wanted to use my vision in a fight. I then began experimenting with peripheral vision, trying to continue tracking the ball while my direct focus was elsewhere.
Again, the point was never that the CCBall behaves like a human opponent. It does not feint intelligently, recognise your habits or decide what attack to use against you. Those are things another fighter can provide.
The rebound does something much simpler, but still valuable to me: it gives my movement something outside my own planned sequence to account for.
That distinction matters. The CCBall does not make good decisions for me, and simply using it does not guarantee good training. I still have to recognise when the way I am using it is creating poor habits, question what I am doing and change the training accordingly.
Why I kept coming back to the CCBall
I have used many ways of training striking, and I still see value in the heavy bag, pads and drilling. Sparring remains irreplaceable because another fighter can provide information and decisions that a piece of equipment cannot.
The CCBall kept occupying a different space for me.
I could practise the strike and then give up some control over what happened afterwards. Once the target started moving, the distance changed and I had to find the relationship again. Sometimes I attacked, sometimes I moved around it and sometimes I let it go. Because the exchange continued, the movement I chose in one moment affected the position from which I had to deal with the next.
That kept the training interesting, but more importantly, it kept giving me something to figure out.
Looking back now, I did not start with a complete theory and then design the CCBall around it. The product came first. I used it, found weaknesses in the way I trained with it, changed things, kept thinking about movement and gradually became more precise about what I wanted from the training.
The philosophy emerged afterwards.
Learn the movement well enough to control it, but do not assume that control means reproducing only one version forever. Explore how the movement changes when the position changes, pay attention to where it leaves you, then deal with what happens next.
The same strike can still be practised a million times.
It just does not have to be practised in only one way.
Practise the same strike a million times, in a million ways.
The CCBall is being prepared for its first production launch. If this is how you want to train, you can join the launch list for the opportunity to buy from the first batch.
0 comments