Anthony Joshua has been chopping wood in preparation for his upcoming ring return against Jermaine Franklin, taking a leaf out of the legendary Earnie Shavers' book.
The two-time world heavyweight champion is back in action on April 1 at the O2 Arena in London with a tune-up bout against Franklin. And in his first UK fight since late 2021, Joshua will show off the changes he has made under his new trainer Derrick James while working out in Texas.
And he has said that his new regime of chopping wood as an intensive workout is straight from Shavers, who was one of the hardest hitters in heavyweight boxing history. Joshua is a big advocate for modern training methods, but wants to go old school while training in America for his new camp.
“I was just doing some research on boxing and I came across Earnie Shavers," Joshua told TalkSPORT. “Maybe other fighters did it back in the day, but Earnie Shavers is known as one of the strongest punchers out there. He just said he used to chop wood, that was their form of Strength and Conditioning.
“I have been focussing more on like old-school methods. S and C is a big part of sport now, but I think there’s a difference from S and C when your outside of training camp to S and C when you’re in training camp. So yeah, I think chopping trees and chopping wood is good for rotational power and all that type of stuff. I just took it on board and it makes good Instagram content!”
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Shavers never won the heavyweight title, but challenged for it twice. He has gone down in history as arguably the hardest puncher in the sport, owing his power to the tree chopping he did growing up on a farm that he maintained as a training method into his adulthood.
"I grew up on a farm, throwing them bales of hay and did a lot of chopping trees for wood," he said in a 2015 interview. "And the power came from that." Shavers passed away at the age of 78 last September, dying of a short term illness at his family home in Virginia.
