Go Backwards

Every boxer learns to go backwards. It’s the first thing your coach teaches and the last thing most fighters get good at.

Forward is easy. Forward is what civilians do. Forward is grocery stores and sidewalks and your morning commute. Backwards is harder. Backwards is the orthodox retreat, the southpaw exit, the slow shuffle when a man bigger than you decides to throw. Backwards is where a fight is won.

Turns out backwards is also where the brain wakes up.

A 2019 study found that six weeks of backwards running produced measurable improvements in spatial memory and attention control. Backwards locomotion lights up the prefrontal cortex — the executive function center, the part of you that plans and decides — because the brain can’t autopilot the movement. Each step has to be consciously authored. Even visualizing walking backwards, while sitting in a chair, improves performance on memory tests.

Cus D’Amato never read the study. He didn’t have to. He just told Tyson to move with purpose and built him a stance designed to retreat as well as advance. The peek‐a‐boo is a backwards‐friendly system. Slip, slip, off the back foot, counter. Tyson was running his prefrontal cortex like a clock in there.

The Jungian wrinkle is too good not to mention. Going backwards is the shadow of going forwards. You can’t pretend it’s easy and you can’t fake it. It demands presence — the same kind of presence the contemplatives have been chasing for two thousand years. Walking backwards is a meditation in a hurry.

We back you up at Trinity. Not because we’re mean. Because that’s where the brain lives.