George Foreman training footage

Thank a lot.

 

A natural physical beast. Imagine him trained modern day ?

 

You see some semblance of it here, but in his ‘second career’ at least George worked the heavy bag differently than most: he’d spent an entire round throwing nothing but jabs; another throwing right hands; another left hooks. Just repetitive motion throwing the same punch over and over.

 

Just what I was thinking. Others need tons of lifting & often PEDs to look like him.
If he really was applying himself against those guys instead of working things out it would have looked very different.
I would love to hear about how The Old Mongoose helped him & how they got involved-the HW KO king training the baddest man around. Whgat a repository of boxing knowledge.

 

1:24 good god, i really feared for that camera's life when george started throwing them heavy bombs.

 

Great link, thanks. I’d seen most of the footage here and there before but there were clips I hadn’t seen.

I appreciate the uploader’s generosity but the music? Arrgghhh! I’d rather hear the impact of Foreman’s punches on the heavy bag - that’s the real music to the ears of boxing fans.

 

Freak of nature. There's some serious snap on those jabs.

 

Would hate to be the one to hold the heavy bag for him.

 

Reminds us he was a much more mobile fighter than he's often given credit for; surely some of it's due to Ali's psyche job on the public, but I also think he fell in love with his power and dropped the finer aspects of his craft. I've heard varying versions of this - he wanted to be more of a finesse fighter, but his trainers wanted to exploit his power for the gate; in his first fight, his opponent smelled so bad, George was compelled to knock the guy out so he didn't have to deal with his funk for the rest of the night (this was from George during a talk show interview, maybe Carson?), and it established a pattern; later on, Gil Clancy tried to wean him away from the power stuff and had him stop training by chopping wood, hitting the heavy bag, etc and focus more on skipping rope and speed bag, but George missed the sensation of his muscles getting pumped from the heavy work, so he went back to it (I think this was according to Clancy) ... hey, whatever he chose, it obviously worked; he's one of the greats

 

I saw George’s later marquee fights well before I saw the Chuvalo fight, the latter fight being somewhat of a revelation as to how good he looked in terms of fundamentals, pacing and patience.

Especially given his young age and relatively lack of on the job experience.

Just imo, but I thought the still durable veteran Chuvalo kinda looked a bit awestruck not long into the fight - this was unprecedented power delivered consistently, including by way of jab that was singularly potent in its own right.

I guess it can be the curse of the puncher.

Application of the fundamentals became a moot point with increasingly fast KOs and leading into Zaire, the amount of rds accumulative and per fight that Foreman had boxed over several years were ridiculously inadequate to keep him in tune for a potentially longer fight.

Punchers can also become detached from reality, falling into the delusion of their own auras, seriously believing everyone will fall in short order once they start punching.

Understandable to a degree though when you’ve punched out the likes of Frazier and Norton, the very two guys that gave Ali hell.

With the Frazier rematch it did appear that Foreman was returning to the fundamentals he had going back to the Chuvalo fight - I actually prefer watching the rematch as opposed to the Jamaica fight.

 

Foreman is an animal, an absolute animal.

 

You guys watch things a lot differently than I do.
When he is throwing punches, full punches, at the camera and stopping just short...I can do that and I'm 57. I've been able to do it for probably 40 years and I could teach you to do it in about a month.
In the first sequence of him on the heavy bag, what does he do every time the bag swings to him? He catches it and pushes it off. He isn't stepping around it. In my estimation that is why, in subsequent clips, they hold the heavy bag and stumble away when he hits it, That gets people oohing and aahing over his power and not noticing that he can't move. That is a very old gimmick.
The sparring sequences, like the rest of it, they are playing to the camera and not really working. But, if you notice, when his partners moved, he followed them. The 'legendary' ability to cut the ring was not in evidence.

 

I will maintain till I die Ali wanted to go to the ropes, what’s humours is that fight created the footwork myth even though he made next to no adjustments and zero progress on the ropes…

 

Excellent observations but it is true that a lot of it is for the cameras - for one thing, in actual combat Foreman’s cutting off the ring was well upheld - and he did corner Ali before the first rd was out.

George’s power as demonstrated on the heavy bag was undeniable but Saddler’s stumble back and grabbing his dislodged cap was pure theatrics. Also, while Foreman probably did dent the bag like no other he was repeatedly hitting the same spot over and over with the same punch.

If it was me, for pure hype, I might’ve whacked one side of the heavy bag with a baseball bat over and over, creating a nice dent before the press arrived and then begin punching that same softened spot as if I had dented it. I would like to have seen George punch a fresh bag to see how long it actually took him to cave it in. Nonetheless, still impressive.

Another old trick was filming boxers punching speed bags of their brackets. For one speed bags aren’t made for power shots and two they likely loosened some screws or did something else for the bag to come off easily.