This article is not a general guide to boxing footwork. It is a record of how my own approach developed: from studying and drilling individual steps, to thinking more seriously about position, angles and what those movements were actually for.
CCBall became an important part of that process because it gave me a physical target to work around rather than a fixed sequence to follow. I could decide how I wanted to strike the ball, then work out where I needed to move to make that possible. The video below shows CCBall in use and gives some context for the kind of training I am referring to throughout the article.
For a period of my training, I became heavily focused on footwork. I was working through Footwork Wins Fights, putting movements into Anki and trying to build a much larger vocabulary of steps, pivots and transitions.
My notes from March 2024 show how systematic I was trying to make it. I went through the different techniques I had identified from the book, including basic directional steps, load steps, push steps, half-steps, rebound steps, cross-steps, pivots and angle changes. At that stage, I wrote that the aim was to perfect the individual movements and then “perfect the transitions between them.”
This was not just study. I was trying to turn the material into physical practice.
At one point, my weekly routine included coordination and footwork training on a treadmill. I would practise the movements while using the treadmill, alongside the rest of my conditioning and training.
During a later period in Edinburgh, my notes describe working through the possibilities of different steps, combinations of steps and changes in the feet and hips. The plan was to drill them heavily and then become less rigid with them: “drill this to perfection then start playing around.”
That distinction between drilling and “playing around” became increasingly important.
Learning the Steps Was Only the Beginning
In June 2024, I set up a training session focused almost entirely on footwork. I cycled through movements including L-steps, half-steps and cross-steps.
Afterwards, I started thinking more about what those movements were actually doing.
The half-step, for example, was not useful merely because I could perform it. I noted that it could close range and also work as a preparatory movement. More broadly, I wrote that footwork was for getting into advantageous positions, finding “SUPERIOR ANGLES” and setting up shots. It “wasnt just looking pretty.”
That marked a change in emphasis.
Earlier, much of the training had been about acquiring the movements themselves. Now the question was becoming more functional: what does this particular movement allow me to do?
A few months later, after training footwork and stance switches in Leeds, I recorded that I had been able to use those movements more quickly in sparring. My note from November 2024 was:
“Footwork is very automatic....it requires drilling.”
So the cards do not show me abandoning drilling. They show me trying to get the individual movements into my body, while gradually becoming more interested in how they connected to actual fighting.
CCBall Had a Different Role in My Training
Alongside all of this, I was spending a lot of time with the training tool that eventually became CCBall.
I had originally created it while at university and continued modifying and training with different versions of it. In later autobiographical notes, I described spending hours with it and said that even after I started pursuing MMA more seriously, it remained my “most trusted and enjoyable training method.”
The cards also explain something about why I preferred that kind of training.
I wrote about how I first became obsessed with striking through the freedom of working things out for myself. Before somebody held pads in front of me and explained exactly how a strike should be performed, there had been a heavy bag and the freedom to move however I found fitting. I later described CCBall as a more granular continuation of that process.
One line captures the idea particularly well:
“If the ball was in a certain location and I wanted to hit it, I should be able to.”
That is important because it explains what CCBall was doing in my training that the treadmill and isolated footwork drills were not.
The treadmill gave me somewhere to practise the movements.
CCBall gave me something to apply them to.
When the Target Started Determining the Movement
One of the clearest examples appears in my notes from 19 June 2024.
I was looking at the coordination ball and imagined hitting it from a particular angle. I noticed that I automatically moved towards a position that made that strike possible.
I then started wondering whether this itself could become part of the training: look at the ball, decide how I wanted to hit it, and work out what position would allow me to do so.
That was a different way of approaching the footwork I had been studying.
Instead of beginning with a named movement and then deciding what attack to attach to it, the process could begin with the target.
If I wanted to hit the ball from a particular direction, the position I needed would impose a movement problem. I might need to close distance, move laterally, pivot or change my stance before the strike became available.
The step was no longer the exercise by itself.
It became part of getting to the position I wanted.
Footwork, Position and the “Dance”
My notes from the same period show that this was connecting with a wider idea about positioning.
While studying Footwork Wins Fights, I recorded that footwork affected position, and position affected which punches were possible and which were optimal. From there, I began thinking about footwork as something that could reduce the opponent's striking options while opening my own.
I wrote:
“this is the game you are playing”
and shortly afterwards:
“Before headmovement and punches etc, the dance.”
The idea developing through the notes was that movement happens before and between the obvious techniques.
A punch is affected by where you are standing. Where you are standing is affected by the step that brought you there. The same movement that puts one strike into range may remove another, while changing what the opponent can do as well.
That also explains why I was experimenting with movement between strikes rather than treating combinations as something performed from a fixed position.
One of my cards simply records:
“Moving in between strikes - this would set up more angles of attack.”
CCBall Also Exposed Problems in the Way I Was Training
The cards are useful here because they do not present CCBall as automatically producing good training.
In April 2024, I wrote a fairly severe critique of how I was using the coordination ball.
I noted that I often just hit the ball directly or allowed it to come back to me. I identified a “Lack of footwork, or movement to strike”, no real angles because I was mostly hitting straight ahead, and the possibility of developing poor shot selection by trying to force weak attacks when “the best thing would have been to move.”
I also noted limitations that could not simply be trained away. The ball did not move like a human opponent, did not provide human resistance, and did not reproduce every aspect of timing, rhythm or close-range fighting.
My proposed response at the time was straightforward: keep it for what it was good for, adapt it where possible, identify what it did not train, and train those things elsewhere.
That criticism matters to the story because it shows that the role of CCBall was changing alongside my own understanding.
I was not simply using the ball more.
I was becoming more particular about how I used it.
If my footwork study was teaching me that position and angles mattered, then repeatedly standing in front of the ball and hitting it straight ahead was not enough.
From Performing Footwork to Solving a Position
By January 2025, another idea appears in the notes.
I was thinking about how footwork would be too slow if every movement had to be consciously controlled in detail. I described vision as the controller for setting up shots. The idea was that I could pick out a target, understand where it was in space and allow the body to organise more of the movement required to reach it.
That connects back to the earlier CCBall experiment.
I had already spent months drilling individual steps and transitions. But when I looked at the ball and decided how I wanted to hit it, I did not necessarily need to consciously say: half-step, pivot, cross-step.
The physical objective could start organising the movement.
The notes also show me experimenting with reducing stance rigidity. I wanted techniques to be available “from any stance from either foot, from any width,” and elsewhere wrote about “Disregarding stance rigidity” and “Leading with footwork to set up shots.”
Again, the evidence does not establish a final theory. What it does show is a repeated attempt to make movement less dependent on rehearsing one fixed sequence from one fixed position.
The Idea Eventually Became Bigger Than Individual Steps
By 2025 and 2026, my notes were increasingly concerned with space itself.
I wrote about the danger of running out of space, about distance management and about the positions an opponent could occupy. In May 2026, I initially wrote that the problem was being unable to create and maintain ideal space, then immediately corrected myself:
“No, its space to be fought for.”
Elsewhere, I described space less as something simply dangerous that had to be controlled and more as somewhere that could be manoeuvred into.
Looking back across the cards, there is a visible progression.
I began by learning the steps.
I drilled them, studied them through Footwork Wins Fights, put them into Anki and practised them physically, including on a treadmill.
Then I became more interested in what those steps actually did: whether they closed range, created angles, set up attacks or changed position.
CCBall played a different role. It gave me a physical target around which I could experiment with those movements without having the movement prescribed in advance. I could decide what I wanted to do to the target and then try to find the position that made it possible.
That did not mean the training was automatically good. My own cards repeatedly criticise the habits I developed when I used CCBall too narrowly and show me trying to correct those problems by adding more movement, more angles and better shot selection.
That is probably the clearest way to describe the underlying training concept that appears across the notes:
learn the movements first, then put yourself in situations where you have to work out which movement actually belongs.
For me, CCBall became one of the environments in which I tried to do that.
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