In boxing, there are many ways to avoid being hit. You can slip, duck, parry, block and side step your way out of punches. These are tried and true techniques. But they require the same amount of energy every time you use them. Energy that you may not have.
So the question becomes, how can we avoid being hit without expending as much energy? Well for this, you have to create an environment where the opponent no longer wants to throw any punches.
This is prima facie ridiculous. It’s a fight. Of course they want to throw punches. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be there. They’d be listening to some wind chimes, knitting eco-friendly ‘anger catchers’ or some other new age drivel. Short of making them fall in love with you in the middle of the ring, there aren’t many ways of making them not want to hit you in the face. But that’s okay, because you only need one: effective countering.
Put Down Roots
Have you ever watched a bout where one boxer just sort of hovered on the outside? They seem busy with a lot of unnecessary footwork, pumping ghost punches and never really initiating any force. You’re wondering why they don’t just move forward, why won’t they at least try? Well, more often than not, it’s because they did try. Their opponent just took from them their will to succeed. You must lay down roots in your opponent’s mind. Every action they take must have consequence. You see this in all combat sports. In boxing, I’d like to single out Guillermo Rigondeaux for his stealthy counters that made people question their life decisions. In MMA a prime Anderson Silva put the fear of God into people with his destructive counter punching.
Here’s a scenario:
Imagine you were boxing and every time you threw a jab, a right hand busted you in the nose. You may shake it off a few times but eventually you’ll lose confidence in your jab. So what do you do? Well, what other weapons do you have? I’m gonna have to start throwing the lead right, you think to yourself. But then, every time you throw the right, you get countered with a hook.
Feeling frustrated, you may start winging hooks from too far away, having already ceded ground to your opponent. Those too start to get countered. Your opponent is systematically divesting you of your weapons. One by one, you try them and for all your efforts, you get punched. We’re talking about real-time Pavlovian conditioning.
The fight has been lost at that point. The rounds become a mere formality.
Reap What You Sow
Let the land work for you. You do a bunch of work up front, and then later you get to enjoy the fruit of your labor. By threatening your opponent early and often, every time they initiate an attack, you’ve bred hesitancy into their mind. They no longer wish to engage.
However, the threat still needs to be maintained. Thankfully, as stated before, you’ve done the heavy lifting up front. You just need to water the soil a bit. You can manage this threat, expending minimal energy by employing feinting. In addition to being energy efficient, feinting doesn’t sacrifice defensive position because you don’t have to extend the arm out entirely to have someone react.
Now, feinting and countering are subjects in and of themselves so we won’t be discussing how to do them, only that you should be leveraging them.
One thing to keep in mind is that though the threat of feinting is virtual, it must be backed by force occasionally. Feinting too much can be just as bad as not using it at all. A threat without any resolve is an empty one.
Everything needs occasional maintenance. Even mind control.
What If There Is No Yield
Sometimes the crops just don’t come. And there is no amount of praying to any pagan gods that will change that. The last time that happened, a group of kids started worshiping a corn cob and all the adults died. Don’t let that be you.
In all seriousness, what if your opponent is just… dumb? Or just has a head like a cast iron skillet? Every strategy has a set of pre-conditions. If a strategy is failing, then you’ve either misunderstood the conditions, your opponent knows what you’re planning, etc. No matter the reason, if a strategy is failing, sometimes you need to adjust.
If correctly implemented, your opponent will become frustrated. It’s what they do with that frustration that tells you what to do next.
A Song Of Wolves And Sheep
Frustration is a funny thing. Everyone reacts to it differently. Some people become hesitant and other people can become overly aggressive. Herding sheep is different than fending off wolves.
We’ve discussed how to approach hesitant opponents. You’ve created your space and now you must maintain it through the use of feints and well placed power shots. But what about overly aggressive ones?
Let’s think about what’s going on in their heads. Let’s assume the same scenario as before. Your weapons have failed you and you’re getting picked apart. Rather than becoming hesitant, this enrages you. You throw caution to the wind and this is when you see a pressure fighter become a brawler. Soon, your footwork becomes non-existent and you go headlong into straight lines, flailing wildly. You throw leaping hooks from out of orbit, missing by a country mile.
This is how some people react. Their frustration leads them to abandon their stance, footwork and everything that could conceivably be called boxing.
Deal with this in the same way that you deal with any brawler. Use their energy and straight lines against them. Brawlers are easily led because their forward momentum remains unchecked and so they become unbalanced. A lack of stance will do that. Side step, pivot, take the angle however you can, just remember to give yourself space to the side you decide to move to. Let them come to you and turn them, but when you get the angle, you must fortify your position with crushing power and stiff jabs. Once you create your space, you want to keep it. Dealing with brawlers, like most things in boxing, needs it’s own dedicated post, so there’s a lot I’m leaving out.
The point is that however your opponent reacts, you need to adjust accordingly.
You may be able to influence the type of reaction your opponent has. If the person doesn’t respect your power, they may consider your counters to be an annoyance rather than a threat. You can use that as well, but better to be a threat than an annoyance. You’d rather be a bear than a fly in the ring. That means your counters must be power punches if you want a hesitant opponent. If you lack sufficient power, you have to play a different game. And that’s okay, that’s what adjusting is all about.
Time To Harvest
This is as close to a Jedi mind trick as you’re likely to come in life. Boxing isn’t generally regarded as a creative endeavor. To the layman, it’s a testosterone-laden fist tornado - devoid of any real strategy beyond “don’t die”. But boxers can be incredibly creative, and under duress at that.
So how do we take this concept and begin to develop it? This isn’t the Matrix. We can’t just learn how to make sushi by having an ethernet cable stuck in the back of our skull. I would have tried that already.
- Drill specific counters to specific punches relentlessly.
- Before you spar, make a mental note to be as aware as you can and practice trying to read your opponent’s reactions to your punches, feints, foot work, etc. Don’t be an automaton. When you have time to think, think. When you don’t have time to think, create time to think.
- When sparring, take a few rounds and try to counter your opponent’s best or most used punch.
- If you’ve the clarity, when you feel frustrated in sparring, take note of your reaction. You can learn a lot from your own failures and you won’t be able to change your response to something if you don’t recognize it in the first place.
- Once you’re able to get your opponent to hesitate or at least become frustrated, begin to learn how to control the space you’ve created and the tempo you’ve set. You have to maintain what you’ve planted so that they keep producing.
- Study the great counter punchers: Rigondeaux, Floyd Mayweather Jr., Wilfred Benitez, etc. Think deeply about how they got into their opponent’s heads and why that worked.
A Country Mouse Can Survive
Control. This is what it all comes down to. You want to control every aspect of the fight. You can win without being in control. Sure. It’s possible. You may get a punch in at the last second or your opponent may get hurt in a freak accident. But you shouldn’t strive to be an agent of chaos, you become dependent upon it. Be in control. That ring is your land and you should know every inch of it. But it takes time. And this is just one way to wrangle your opponent. There are others. And in time I’ll show you.