How I Helped Sam Hickey Win Commonwealth Gold
Sam Hickey is a Commonwealth Gold Medallist. He is also one of my closest friends.
Those two facts made this one of the most complicated and most rewarding things I've been involved in as a coach. Because when someone you care about that much is competing on the biggest stage of their career, the professional and personal blur in a way they don't with any other athlete. Every decision carries more weight. Every result lands harder.
This is the story of how that camp worked, what made it different from anything I'd done before, and what I learned from it.
A Different Kind of Camp
Most camps I run, I'm in the room. I can watch the sessions, see how the athlete is moving, make decisions in real time. Sam's preparation for the Commonwealth Games wasn't like that.
Sam was based down south with Team GB. They had their own coaching staff, their own conditioning work, their own programme. My role wasn't to run the whole operation. It was to own the strength and power component while someone else handled his conditioning and to make sure those two things worked together rather than against each other.
That's a completely different skill set to running a standalone camp.
Working Within a Team
The first thing I had to get right was the relationship with the Team GB coaching staff.
I've talked before about how important it is to read the room when you join an established team. The same principle applies when you're working remotely alongside another coach with their own methods and their own relationship with the athlete. You don't steamroll in with your programme and your opinions. You communicate. You ask questions. You make it clear from the start that you're here to complement what they're doing, not compete with it.
In practice that meant constant communication with Sam and with the coaching staff down south. Before I wrote anything into Sam's programme I needed to know what his week looked like. How hard were the conditioning sessions? Which days were the heaviest? Where was there room to add strength work without tipping the total load over the edge?
Because that's the risk in a setup like this. When two coaches are working with the same athlete and they're not talking to each other, the athlete ends up doing too much. Both coaches assume the other is managing recovery. Neither one has the full picture. The athlete carries more fatigue into competition than anyone planned.
We weren't going to let that happen to Sam “Tricky” Hickey! not on my watch.
Owning the Strength and Power Work
My remit was clear. Team GB were handling his conditioning. I was handling his strength and power development.
That clarity was actually helpful. It forced both sides to stay in their lane, which meant Sam was getting genuinely expert input on both qualities rather than two coaches each doing a bit of everything.
The strength work was built around the specific demands of boxing at international level. Force production, rate of force development, the ability to generate explosive power repeatedly under fatigue. We tested his physical profile at the start to establish baselines, identified where the gaps were, and built a programme around closing them.
Throughout camp I was tracking his readiness remotely, HRV data, output in sessions, feedback from Sam on how he was feeling. When the numbers told me he was carrying too much fatigue I pulled back on the strength side. When there was room to push, we pushed.
Managing load across two programmes, two coaching staffs, and several hundred miles required more communication than any camp I'd run before. But it worked because everyone involved was bought into the same outcome.
The Morning He Left
There's a moment from this camp I'll remember for a long time.
The morning Sam left to travel down to join Team GB for the final stretch of preparation, I said something to him that I'd been thinking about for a while.
"It's strange to think that the next time I see you, you'll be a Commonwealth Gold Medallist."
I meant every word of it. The data backed it up. The preparation had been exceptional.
But I also said it deliberately, because that close to competition, what an athlete believes about themselves matters as much as anything physical.
Mindset is often treated as something separate from physical preparation, something you address in the last few days before a fight with a motivational speech or a good warm-up. It isn't. Belief is built over months of consistent, hard, intelligent preparation. But it also needs to be reinforced. An athlete who arrives at competition not just fit but genuinely convinced they're ready performs differently to one who's carrying doubt.
That was my job in that moment. Not coach to athlete. One person to another, telling him the truth about what I saw.
The Games
Sam was exceptional throughout the tournament.
The performance that stands out , not just for the result but for what it demanded of him, was stopping Lewis Richardson. Richardson was a tournament favourite, a fighter with serious pedigree and a huge home support behind him. Sam stopped him.
What happened after that fight was just as important as the fight itself.
The adrenaline dump that follows a performance like that is real and it's significant. Your nervous system has been operating at maximum intensity. The crowd is going. The emotion is massive. And then it has to stop, because you've got another fight in a matter of days and you need to recover.
We'd prepared for this. The breathwork protocols we'd worked on throughout camp weren't just about between-round recovery. They were about this exact moment, the ability to bring the nervous system back down after a high-intensity emotional and physical event. Controlled breathing, relaxation techniques, deliberate recovery. Getting Sam out of fight mode and into recovery mode as quickly as possible.
You can't control how good your performance is. You can control how well you recover from it.
The Final
I won't pretend to be objective about the final.
Professionally, it was everything a camp like this is supposed to build toward. An athlete who arrived at the biggest fight of his career in the best physical shape of his life, with the mental clarity and the physical freshness to perform when it counted most.
Personally, watching one of your closest friends become a Commonwealth Gold Medallist is something you don't have words for. Knowing the work that went into it every session, every data point, every conversation across those months, and seeing it validated on that stage was something I won't forget.
Sam did the work. He committed to every part of the process, trusted the programme, and delivered when it mattered. That's not something a coach creates. But it's something the right preparation gives an athlete the best possible chance to express.
I give Sam a lot of stick, I rip into him constantly about this or that. But the truth is Sam is an amazing fighter and an amazing professional.
What This Means for Your Training
The principles behind Sam's preparation remote or not are the same ones I apply with every athlete I work with.
Clear roles. Constant communication. Load management built around the total picture, not just one component. Testing and data used to drive decisions rather than gut feeling. And recovery treated as a non-negotiable, not something that gets squeezed in around the training.
Whether you're preparing for a national championship or your first amateur fight, you deserve preparation that's built around you specifically — not a generic programme designed for someone else.
If that's what you're looking for, online coaching and my MMA and boxing programmes are built on exactly these principles.
Adam Lusby is a strength and conditioning coach based in Dundee, Scotland. He has worked with UFC fighter Paul Craig, IBF world champion Lewis Crocker, and Commonwealth gold medallist Sam Hickey.