I was having a discussion with some coaches around the value of shadow boxing, and I realised that none of them had spoken to their boxers about what they actually see when they shadow box.
There are things we take for granted because they’re true for us, so we assume they’re true for everyone in the room. We all carry assumptions about what’s happening inside our boxers’ heads, and most of us have never checked.
“Can you see an opponent when you shadow box?” I’m wondering how many of us have actually asked our boxers this? It’s easy to assume that boxers can visualise things at the same granularity we can.
2–5% of the population have aphantasia, they are lacking that mind’s eye. For maybe another 15%, it’s fuzzy at best. When we say “visualise your opponent” or “picture landing the right hand,” nothing happens. Not a vague picture. Nothing. And it goes deeper than visualisation, a 2024 study (Dupont et al) found that in people with aphantasia, the motor system doesn’t even activate during imagined movement or even when watching someone else move. The mechanism that makes shadow boxing useful as mental rehearsal simply isn’t there for them.
“Watch how I do it, then try.” Assumes observation activates motor simulation. But how do we recognised if this ability isn’t even available to your boxers?
“Talk yourself through the combination.” Some people don’t have one. Not a quiet inner monologue, no monologue at all. When we give them cue words or ask them to talk themselves through a sequence, we’re asking them to use a system that doesn’t exist. Others have it but it’s slow, effortful, not the natural mode.
These aren’t disorders. They’re normal cognitive variation. But they’re invisible, and the people who have them often don’t realise they’re different until someone describes what “normal” visualisation or self-talk feels like.
So every time we say “shadow box and visualise your opponent” or “develop your self-talk,” we’re assuming their own cognitive architecture is universal. And it isn’t. It makes me wonder, do coaches with strong visualisation skills value shadow boxing more than those with weaker visualisation skills?
I noticed when I boxed, if you saw me “visualising” you’d see me, eyes closed, little movements of my shoulders, my feet, I needed that kinaesthetic grounding to make it work for me. I knew someone else who, eyes wide open, shadow-boxing, could see their opponent there in front of them.
It makes me curious, just how much are we imposing our own mental model on athletes when we set tasks? I know in the past I was guilty of assuming that some boxers were just lazily going through the motions with their shadow-boxing rather than they genuinely didn’t get it. Nobody walks in and tells you “I don’t have an inner monologue”, they never get surfaced. If you have a strong inner monologue did it even occur to you that other people don’t?
In one-to-one discussions, I sometimes uncover little things that I assumed were universal, and deal with differences on an individual basis, but I’ve not managed to open that up to catering for a whole group, so I’m wondering what other people do around these differences in how we perceive the world?
