I was weight training 18 years ago at Fitness World which is Steve Nash/Fitness World now in Richmond. I was riding a bike and watching tv built into the bike. While flicking through channels, I started watch a boxing match.

I had already been a fan of boxing for quite some time but at this moment, in the environment I was in with my testosterone racing from my weight lifting and the cardio; I thought to myself, I need to do this! I want to start boxing. I got up off the bike and asked the trainers in the gym. “Do you know where there is a boxing gym?” A few of them said that there was a trainer that had started a boxing gym near the airport.

After searching for this gym a few weeks, I complained to a few of my work buddies about this boxing gym close to the airport that I couldn’t freaking find. One of them said “Darren, there is a boxing gym in that building right behind our workplace.” I couldn’t believe it, it was in that building. this building was right next to the warehouse which I was working in!

I met the trainers and said I was interested in fighting. I started to train for a few months  and the trainers saw that I was serious and found a fight for me that was about 3 months away. When they mentioned that I was fighting soon, my eyes started to open, my heart started to beat faster and harder. I started to question it and asked myself,  what did I just do? What was I thinking? Am I training hard enough?

From that day,  training was a 24hr a day. That means that boxing was always on my mind. While I was working as a unloader in a courier company I was training. If I was standing around I was dodging punches. If you asked my wife about my restful nights and her sleepless nights, she would tell you I was even fighting in my sleep! (She had a few bruises and of course I apologized for that!) I was also sweating the bed because my metabolism was so fast and you burn most of your calories when you sleep, depending on how ate that day.

We also had a bodybuilder at the boxing gym that was teaching us how to drop weight. What works for a bodybuilder may not work as well for a competitive fighter. There are 2 different styles of weight dropping, bodybuilding needs you to look super lean, very defined and balanced. Bodybuilders need to pose which is incredibly difficult when their bodies have very little water in them at the time of competition.

A competitive fighter needs to take physical punishment. When fighting you need to be strong, light and fast. Fighters need to be able to move well and move a lot. Reaction, endurance, speed, and agility are all required in a fight.

Following the directions of a bodybuilder on how to lose weight was a good experience. I learned when I weighed in for my first fight I was drained but still strong and I had trained really hard so I had incredible stamina. I won my first amateur fight with a first round TKO. Even though I was able to dish out an incredible amount of punishment to the more experience fighter, I felt like my body wasn’t in the best condition during the fight. Feeling drained but strong. I started to ask more questions to health professionals such as Naturopathic doctors about how to to lose weight so I was in the right weight category but still be in peak physical condition.

I was told was that my body was missing its nutrients. Rapid weight loss for a fight isn’t healthy. Then what one of the doctors said was, losing weight while training and not depleting your muscles of it essential nutrients and minerals is the best way to lose weight.

I started to take pieces of everyone’s information and develop my own useable diet plan. This was also the beginning of developing my training system as well.

I had a passion for boxing and an incredibly strong motivation to drop weight quickly in a healthier way. It’s a simple system.