Train Like Usyk
On the discipline of joy.
Over the past year, I’ve noticed that my workdays and workouts have lacked a certain urgency and spark. There are a few reasons for this:
I’ve been on the road a ton, which means I’ve largely been working and training solo.
I am my own boss and set my own deadlines.
I am not in any competitions, whether in fitness or at work (outside of award season for the books I write and the podcasts I produce).
I am still good at waking up at the same time, sitting down, and attacking a to-do list. And I am also diligent about dragging my ass to the gym to perform my key lifts at least four times a week. But there’s a certain ease and blah-ness to the pace and intensity in both my professional and fitness routines. Some of this was deliberate. If you recall, I wrote back in the fall about embracing the “slow life.”
Yet, to me, the slow life was always about a combination of attention and craft. And craft requires a mix of intensities. Whenever I’ve created my best work, I do so through two registers: the equivalent of jogging and sprinting. I’ve got the jogging down. The sprinting needs work.
I still believe excellence requires periods of deadline-driven mania. The feeling of staring down an ambitious goal with a finite date and doing everything you can to hit it. Breaking each day into mini quests, each one a step closer.
I had that rhythm when I was a school principal. I had it on political campaigns. I had it on competitive sports teams. I had it most recently in powerlifting, until a fractured wrist and a dislocated shoulder took me out of competition for the past year.
How do you introduce this intensity into your life? It’s not easy, but lately I’ve found inspiration in Oleksandr Usyk, the undisputed heavyweight boxing champion.
Usyk is widely considered one of the best boxers to ever live. He’s taken down one formidable opponent after another (Tyson Fury twice, Anthony Joshua twice) en route to an undefeated professional record. He’s never even been knocked down as a pro. And he’s done all of it as a relatively small heavyweight. Against Fury, he gave up six inches in height, seven inches in reach, and thirty pounds on fight night.
He’s admired even more for his character outside the ring. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Usyk was in London. He flew to Warsaw and hitchhiked the rest of the way home. He joined the territorial defense and patrolled the streets of Kyiv with a rifle until Ukrainian leaders convinced him that his platform was more valuable to the country than his service as a soldier.
Even his rivals speak warmly of him. Tyson Fury, a world-class shit-talker, said before their first fight: “I respect him as a man, as a fighter. Anyone would have to respect the man’s achievements.”
Usyk has even welcomed his former rival, Anthony Joshua, into his camp. After Joshua’s 2024 loss to Daniel Dubois, Usyk invited him to train with the team in Valencia. When Joshua’s December 2025 car accident in Nigeria killed two of his closest team members, the relationship deepened. “Earlier we were rivals,” Usyk has said. “Now we’re friends.” The two have been doing a Rocky and Apollo routine ahead of Joshua’s expected Q4 fight with Fury.
Part of what makes Usyk such an admirable man is also what informs his success in the sport. He’s extremely devout and clearly draws confidence from a belief that God has put him on this planet to do one thing extremely well. Unfortunately for me (and maybe you), that’s the least replicable of his practices. You can’t manufacture faith.
But there’s plenty else to learn from his approach. And to get a sense of it, you should watch the footage. Words on the page don’t do it justice.
Here is one highlight reel courtesy of the Daily Mail.
I watch a lot of training videos. Too many. Boxing, football, basketball, CrossFit, and powerlifting. I’ve never seen training sessions like his.
The Intangibles
I will get more technical in a second, but some of my biggest impressions have more to do with spirit and attitude than with tactics and strategy.
He’s always dancing and singing, and so is his team. The gym music is usually Ukrainian techno, of course. Between drills, he’ll break into a Hopak (the traditional Cossack warrior dance, all stomps and squats and kicks), then a salsa, then a running man. His trainers often dance with him and often join the workouts themselves. An ESPN reporter described Usyk skipping rope “without missing a beat” and noted that “only stints of shadow-boxing and dancing halt his metronomic rhythm.” Pure joy from start to finish, even on workouts that look like torture. (The dancing serves another purpose that I’ll get to in a bit.)
The energy and silliness that Usyk brings may seem like a small detail, but it’s actually a key part of his approach. In his videos, you’ll catch a phrase he shouts during the worst minute of the workout: “Look, Mom, I can fly.” His conditioning coach, Jakub Chycki, has said that when Usyk reaches for the line, it’s the tell that he’s hurting. Chycki said Usyk “always has a lot of energy but usually it’s some kind of mask. He’s tired, he’s just human.” The vibes and the rhythm are keys to enduring a grueling regimen.
Everything around him reinforces his goals. He usually has a video of his next opponent’s prior matches playing in the background. The walls are covered: Ukrainian flags, a Spartan poster, a neon UNDISPUTED sign, the names of his past titles, “Moskow 2018” and “Saudi 2024,” written in marker on a white wall. Above them, “London 2025.” A spray-painted cat in reference to his nickname. Messages from his team written on the walls. ESPN called the project “manifestation,” which gives it more mystical credit than it deserves. What he’s actually doing is set design. He has built a room that tells him, every minute, what he is there for and who he is there with.
Now, let’s get a bit more technical.
Efficient Intensity
Let’s start with the team. Yes, they are having fun. But they are also showing tremendous economy of language. The ESPN reporter noted that “verbal communication between those involved is limited, but the process is seamless.” No wasted minute. One drill to the next to the next. Rest periods are precise and deliberate. The whole experience mimics the pace and intensity of a match. That’s the mark of a mature team: they don’t need to over-explain because they’ve run it enough times to operate on cues.
His approach resembles the way Nick Saban would run football practices. Every Bama practice had a highly detailed script organized down to the minute, with high-tempo blocks. You might have 16 plays scheduled for 9 minutes of 7-on-7, and when the horn blew, every player would know exactly where to go next without discussion.
Nothing pissed Saban off more than seeing players standing around. The standard practice at a lesser school may involve 11-on-11 with the remaining 70 players standing on the sidelines watching. Saban instead implemented “two-spotting,” where the first-team offense would face the scout team defense on one end while the second-stringers ran the exact same script against the scout team offense on the other. This doubled the number of reps, drastically reduced rest time, and forced a relentless, nonstop pace of play. He famously called this his system to “practice all guys all the time.”
This reminds me of an experience I had in November when I attended two different tennis camps (I know, my life is hard). One was run by Patrick Mouratoglou, former coach to Serena Williams. The other was the Rafa Nadal Academy. At Mouratoglou’s, after a hitting drill, they’d have everyone stop and pick up the balls before we’d start again. This would shave anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes off a 90-minute practice session. At Nadal, one person would hit while the other ran around and picked up the balls, and then we’d switch. That seemingly small difference was a microcosm of the difference between the two philosophies. Fifteen minutes a day, every day, is more than ninety extra hours of tennis a year. Multiply that across a career and mix in some talent, and you get a Nadal.
When I used to run schools, we spent an enormous amount of time on transitions for the same reasons that Saban and Usyk obsess over them. We’d even drill how to hand out and turn in papers (this was before all kids had laptops), challenging our middle schoolers to shave precious seconds off the time we could use for instruction. High-performing schools at the time would trade videos of these kinds of moves, thanks in part to the inspiration of my friend Doug Lemov, who began recording the best teachers in the country and sharing their practices. This may seem like overkill, but our average student was coming into fifth grade two grade levels behind in reading and math. We needed every second of the day to count if we were going to eliminate that gap.
Sidebar: If you want to get a sense of our mixed-up priorities as a society, visit a typical reading or math classroom in your standard zoned school. Notice the complete lack of urgency. How long does it take the class to settle? How slowly do worksheets travel from teacher to student to teacher again? How much of a 50-minute period vanishes into transitions that should take seconds? Then come back after school and watch a sports practice. Notice just how much more intentional they are about reps, feedback, and time. Even crappy practices tend to be more urgent than the average K-12 classroom. Why? Because in sports, we have wins and losses, which bring accountability. In the classroom, we’ve allowed the myth to spread that we can’t measure success.
Overconditioning
Usyk is also overconditioning. His management said he prepared for the Joshua rematch with five-hour swims and 100-kilometer bike rides in 45-degree heat. This was another common practice for Saban, who would push his players at full capacity for hours in the southern heat. The goal was to make the fourth quarter feel like a breeze. Saban’s Alabama was the first team I’d ever seen holding up four fingers in unison during the fourth quarter (though I doubt they were the first).
Usyk’s training sessions are in many ways more impressive than Saban’s because he and his team are having fun. Nobody would accuse Saban of having a good time.
A Pacesetter
He trains alongside another boxer, not as a sparring partner (he has those, too) but more as an apprentice. In the Daily Mail video, that role is filled by Daniel Lapin, a Ukrainian light heavyweight, whom Usyk’s camp describes as the next star of Ukrainian boxing. Lapin runs every drill next to him. Kind of like a cross between a student and a marathon pace-setter. Their job is to keep the leader on rhythm and absorb some of the psychological weight of being out front alone. Lapin does both and, in exchange, gets the apprenticeship of a lifetime. Recently, that role has been filled by Anthony Joshua.
But in contrast to traditional marathon pace-setters, Usyk is the one setting the pace. He uses his partners as a bit of a foil: someone he can shout at to push harder, someone he can teach his technique to. There’s a Feynman effect here, too, where Usyk reinforces his own practice by teaching it.
Tracking
Nothing in the gym is casual. Every set has a number attached to it, and Usyk knows what the number is supposed to be. Footage of his sessions routinely shows him stopping repeatedly to ask his coaches for his personal best on whatever drill he is in the middle of, including small accessory work that most fighters would treat as filler. The strength coach, Jakub Chycki, calls intervals to the second. The cumulative effect is that there is no such thing as a workout you just got through. There is a workout you performed at a measurable level, and the level either was or wasn’t your best.
Range
Usyk’s longtime trainer is Anatoliy Lomachenko, the father of the boxer Vasiliy Lomachenko and the architect of a method known in boxing circles simply as “Papachenko.” He took Usyk on at fifteen, after other coaches had passed on him as a late starter, and built his career on the conviction that boxing is best treated as a layer on top of general athletic competence rather than as a self-contained skill. Sports Illustrated, naming him Trainer of the Year in 2018, called his approach “unorthodox” for emphasizing “cognitive aptitude and physical fitness.”
The actual list of inputs is striking: street skating, juggling, handstands, tennis, marathon running, open-water swimming, breath-holding. The underlying thesis is the same one David Epstein argues in Range: in complex domains, generalists who sample widely tend to outperform early specialists. Epstein’s central example is Roger Federer, raised on a parade of other sports (basketball, soccer, skateboarding, badminton, skiing) before tennis became the focus. Jannik Sinner is the contemporary version. He was Italy’s national junior champion in giant slalom and played competitive football into his early teens. Andy Roddick has argued that Sinner’s grass-court movement is downstream of skiing: the small balance corrections you can only learn by accident, on snow, over years.
You can read Usyk’s footwork as the same kind of artifact. Dance, which he does between drills and between rounds, builds fluidity and rhythm, the ability to keep moving on cadence rather than stop-start. Soccer, which he has played seriously enough to sign with Ukrainian club FC Polissya Zhytomyr in 2023 (he appeared as a substitute the year before), trains change of direction and the use of angles. Grappling work develops balance and stance integrity under pressure. Tennis and badminton sharpen reaction time and visual tracking. None of it is generic cross-training. Each input maps onto a specific in-ring problem, and the cumulative result is what every opponent he has fought, large or small, has been forced to acknowledge: he creates angles other heavyweights have never seen. Anthony Joshua, after losing twice, put it simply: “He doesn’t depend on his power to knock you out. He depends on his skill. He’s going to box rings around you if you let him.” That’s not a compliment about power or hand speed. That’s a description of footwork.
What does this mean for you?
On the fitness side, the lessons are fairly simple.
Push the pace. Script the workout to the minute and treat rest as deliberately as work. Train at the rhythm of the event you’re training for (and always have an event in your mind).
Bring a pace-setter. Someone whose presence pulls more out of you, and who you make better in return.
Know your numbers. Every drill, including the “small” ones. Even accessory work.
Build range. Cross-train into adjacent sports that share movement patterns. Yoga can help with your surfing. Dance can help your basketball. Skiing can help your tennis.
Curate the room. Put the goals, the dates, and the names of the people you’re working with somewhere you can see them. Make your gym tell you what you’re there for every time you walk in.
At the professional level, it takes a little more creativity.
Find a team. The joy and intent in Usyk’s camp can’t be faked alone. If you work solo by nature, find a team or build something that approximates it: a co-writing session, daily accountability check-ins, or something similar. Last night in a writing class I teach, everyone shared their screens, wrote silently for a fixed time, then read out the best paragraph they produced. It worked because it had the structure of a workout.
Dance. Be silly. Bring energy. Pretend a documentary crew is following you and try to give them something worth filming.
Set goals and measure. Words written, pitches sent, calls booked. Whatever.
Beat your own time. If a task took you two hours yesterday, try it in ninety minutes today.
Audit your walls. Most workspaces are silent about what their occupants are trying to do. Usyk’s gym shouts it. What does yours say about the goal, the team, and the deadline? If you can’t use physical walls, create digital versions. I have a mantra page and a goals page in my digital journal that I update every morning.
Cut the casual minutes. Most days have at least an hour of drift hiding inside them. Batch your email instead of grazing it. See how long you can hold a single task before reaching for your phone (you will notice Usyk is almost never staring at his phone in training sessions). This doesn’t mean you never take it easy; it just means you save those moments for time outside of your workday.
Great teachers and mentors have a way of sticking with you even when they aren’t physically present. When I was a school principal, I had the voices of my mentors, Linda Brown and Sue Walsh, in my head every single school day. Sometimes those mentors are people you’ve never had the chance to meet. I have an invisible historical training team. Oliver Sacks for empathy and curiosity. John Brown for courage. Rebecca West for nerve. I now have Usyk there for intensity. I like to picture him standing over my shoulder, yelling, “Look, Mom, I can fly,” at me when I want to stop.
(Written by a human, edited by Anthropic)