Boxing tips to help you with your offense, defense, footwork, and training!
- Punching
- Defense
- Footwork
Punching
What’s more exciting than a good offense? Am I right!? Here are some of the best tips coming at you.
Breathing
Your muscles work harder as you exercise, your body uses more oxygen. Your breathing has to increase taking more breathes in and out as you work out.
Breath out sharply while you punch and tighten your abs. If you miss a punch you want to be ready to take one from your opponent, having a tight core helps.
Do your best to breathe in through your nose and not your mouth, the reason is if you take a punch to your jaw while you are open mouth breathing you can break it or dislocate it.
Oscar Valdez broke his jaw against Scott Quigg in their fight.
When you breathe out you can bite down on your mouthpiece and exhale, again no open mouth or breathe back out through your nose.
Bodyweight
Power up your punch by using your body weight, not just your arm. How?
On the jab, you will step into the punch like a battering ram. Every other punch will use a slight pivot on the balls of your feet.
Pivoting will help turn the hips and the core into the punch.
Keep your center of gravity low to push through the ground and transfer that energy through the fist on impact.
Short Punches
Also known as staying tight with your punches. This is best for inside fighting or if you have big looping punches.
You can’t fully extend to your target on straight punches, but that’s okay, throw them short and fast.
Hooks are loopy, to begin with, well to tighten that loop focus on bringing the elbow up more and the fist closer to your chest. Turn the palm down to get more torque.
Uppercuts are prime time for inside fighting. As they are laying their head on your gloves, chest, or shoulder, take half a step back and throw that uppercut aiming at their neck, not their head.
Tempo
It’s all about changing speeds. Your opponent has less than half a second to decide on how they will react to your punch.
If you only throw power punches, you will get timed and countered. The same goes for a fast puncher.
It’s like baseball if all the pitcher throws is a fastball, there is no guessing what is coming you already know and you are geared up for it.
The power of the change-up in boxing gets people stuck and keeps them guessing what’s next, when they guess wrong there is a window of opportunity for you.
Change velocity, between fast and powerful you already have alot to play with. Throw the same combination and each punch at a different tempo each time.
Ex. 1-1-2 (punching by the numbers)
1 fast 1 powerful 2 powerful
1 fast 1 fast 2 powerful
1 fast 1 fast 2 fast
And the list goes on! The same exact combination with totally different looks to it just by changing tempo.
Bodywork
Neglecting the body is the leading cause of taking losses and getting beat up by an inferior opponent.
Teddy Atlas says it best “put water in the basement” he has some of the best analogies.
Also known as working the ladder, yes I’m giving you all the terms so if you hear them you know what they are asking for.
Work the body with straight punches to bring their elbows in, and follow up with hooks to the body going around the guard.
Combinations
Here is the secret to combination punching.
You are going to miss more than you will connect. Vasyl Lomachenko had the highest connect percentage 20.9 against Nicholas Walters after their fight.