What a Kickboxing Coach Can Teach a Developer — Ioan „Click” Mihalca [Intersections](https://ioanclickmihalca.ro/en/articles?category=intersections) · 5 min · 14 July 2026 What a Kickboxing Coach Can Teach a Developer ============================================= By day I write code, by night I train people to take a hit. Five things the gym drilled into me that I use every day in front of the code editor. By day I write code with Claude Code. By night I coach people learning to defend themselves and throw a punch. I've lived in both worlds for years, and the question I get most often is some version of "how do you reconcile them?" Short answer: I don't reconcile them. I fuse them. The long answer is this article. Five things the gym drilled into my head that I use every day in front of the code editor. Not pretty metaphors — mechanisms that work identically in both places. Learning to take a hit is a skill, not an accident -------------------------------------------------- The first real punch a beginner takes tells you everything you need to know about them in that moment: they shut their eyes, turn their head, sometimes stop fighting altogether. Not because it hurts that much — because they've never been trained to function *while* getting hit. Training doesn't make you untouchable. It teaches you to stay clear-headed when you are touched. Now move that into production: critical bug on a Friday night, server down, an angry client on the phone. I've seen technically excellent developers who "shut their eyes" in those moments — they panic, point fingers, push chaotic fixes that break more than they repair. And I've seen technically mediocre people who breathe, isolate the problem, communicate calmly, and solve it. Guess who you want on your team. Calm under pressure isn't a character trait. It's training. It's built exactly like resistance to punches: controlled, repeated exposure to uncomfortable situations. Theory won't keep you warm in the ring -------------------------------------- You can know every technique on YouTube by heart, every fight breakdown, every principle of biomechanics. Your first real sparring session resets you to zero in thirty seconds. Not because the theory is wrong — because under pressure you don't execute what you know, you execute what you've trained. Software has the exact same disease, except there it's called "tutorial hell." Ten courses finished, nice certificates, zero live projects. You're not a developer once you've *understood* — you're a developer after your first project in production, with real users doing things you never anticipated, breaking your logic in ways no course ever taught. At the gym, my rule is simple: theory just enough to understand why, then sparring and competition on the tatami or in the ring. In code, the same: documentation just enough to understand why, then you build something real. The rest you learn by taking hits. You need someone who sees what you can't ---------------------------------------- No serious fighter trains alone. Not because they don't know what to do, but because the guard that drops when you're tired is, by definition, invisible to the person whose guard it is. Only the corner sees it. In code, the corner is called code review, mentor, the partner who tears your architecture apart before production does. I've written enough code and enough music over the years to know that my most expensive mistakes all came in the stretches when I worked without a corner — convinced I could see everything. Ego is the most expensive luxury there is, in the gym and on a team. The athlete who won't take corrections stalls. The developer who won't take review keeps writing the same mistakes with more and more confidence. Progress isn't visible up close ------------------------------- Nobody became a fighter in a week, no matter how much talent they have. The belt — I reached 2nd Dan after years where, plenty of times, nothing seemed to change from one month to the next — isn't a goal, it's a side effect of showing up. You come, you work, you leave. You come, you work, you leave. One day you look back and the distance is enormous. Code works exactly the same, except our industry sells the opposite illusion: the framework that changes everything, the tool that makes you 10x, the shortcut. It doesn't exist. What exists is small commits, day after day, products that grow version by version. ClipYo, SportClubPro, AIpoftă, BizzOS — none of them showed up in one brilliant weekend. They all showed up like the belts: through presence. I'll write separately about this — about the difference between motivation and system — because it deserves its own article. Instant feedback doesn't forgive. That's why it's the best teacher. ------------------------------------------------------------------- I saved for last the lesson that ties all the others together: the punch is the fastest information you'll ever get. In the ring, if you drop your guard, you take it. Not a month later, not at the quarterly review — in that second. It hurts exactly as much as it needs to so you don't repeat the mistake. It's the most honest learning system I've ever met. In software, feedback naturally comes much later — and the later it comes, the more it lies to you. You can work three months on a feature nobody wants and feel productive every single one of those days. Your guard has been down for ninety days and you still haven't taken a hit. That's why, on my products, the rule is to shorten the loop at any cost: I ship early, I put things in front of users early, I find out early. I'd rather take a small hit now than a KO in month four. A good developer isn't the one who doesn't make mistakes — it's the one who built their system so the mistakes hit them fast and cheap. The same job ------------ This, in fact, is the reason the site you're reading this on exists. Code, music, sport — from a distance they look like three different lives. Up close they're one: you take a skill you don't have, break it down, repeat it deliberately, take feedback without falling apart, keep close the people who see what you can't, and you show up again tomorrow. The rest is domain detail. [← All articles](https://ioanclickmihalca.ro/en/articles) Share If this article was useful to you, pass it on. 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