Sparring Critique

I assume you are the guy in the black t-shirt? The most obvious flaw I noticed was that you don't keep your elbows "in." That affects your power, defense, and maybe your hand speed too? Try keeping your elbows against your body for awhile and see if your power and speed get better. With your elbows out like that you will be mostly an "arm puncher." You mostly keep your feet beneath you and you move well. You'll get better with experience.

Your sparring partner throws an uppercut while coming forward, he doesn't change levels when going to the body, and he lifts the rear heel high instead of pivoting it when he throws the right hand. Sometimes he doesn't keep any weight on the rear foot and lifts the foot completely off of the ground. He also reacts to feints to the body by bringing both hands down to block the punch.

Just some things you can work on, I don't know how long you have been training, but there are always things to improve in boxing. If you train for 40 years you'll still be learning.

 

You’re throwing at the right times, and you’re timing his punches right, it’s just your hand positioning, move your hands about in a rhythmic fashion and feint to make them guess and it makes it harder for them to time your punches because it makes it harder the difference from the hand movements/ feints and the actual punches just be more fluid and bring your elbows a bit lower

 

Some people have naturally blinding speed and some are just naturally slower then others, but that doens't mean its impossible.

When I was younger I worked on my explosiveness with resistance bands on my arms, its a solid way to increase speed.

Another weird way for me was thinking about "speed", when punching the bag I would just think in my mind punch faster, punch faster.

For the sparring, settle down when you throw your punches, don't smother your work, make sure to stay loose and never be stiff, be open to practice combinations in sparring other than one specific move like the jab, work on them from the heavy bag.

Just my 2 cents, hope it helps.

 

Thinking about speed really helps, that's my way to do it along with exercises for explosiveness..

 

I know you’re not going all-out here, so it’s hard to tell, but your punches don’t look very explosive — more pawing. I’d like to see a bit of hip rotation with the jab … there’s nothing behind it, just extending your arm.

I’d advise working the bag to try to really pop it by aiming for a spot a couple of inches behind the surface of the bag — punch through the target, not playing tag with it. Your right seems to be a little more crisp in this regard. I think keeping your elbows in will help with the jab.

Main thing I noticed — and you’re a beginner, so it’s not expected that everything is perfect — is that you often kind of bring your left back too slowly and you kind of loop it low instead of bringing it straight back the way it came. Like if you jab at the head, the left kind of comes back in a downward arc. If I had someone going against you, I’d be telling them to counter with the right every time you threw the left.

Your footwork and balance look pretty good for a beginning and you do mind keeping your hands up, those are good things upon which to build.

Main thing — listen to your coach. He’s the one who sees you every day. He’s going to work on things he sees that you can’t see and how to correct them. And he’ll do it in what order he sees fit or thinks is best — you can’t try to fix 11 problems in one workout.

When I trained boxers, they’d sometimes get frustrated because we’d work on footwork and stance and hand placement until i thought all that was good enough to worry about punching — I’d let them hit the bag but I didn’t pay much attention to how they were doing it if they couldn’t get their stance or footwork right (and of course everybody thinks it’s all about punching, that’s what they want to do, but I believed in laying a foundation so that when we taught punching they’d be positioned right and know how to get in and out of range, have their hands and elbows right, etc). That was my way.

 

Keep outworking everyone and you’ll get attention. Make yourself stand out with your work habits.

You don’t have to be square to put some forward rotation into your hip when you jab. Do it in front of a mirror in slow motion and you can see what I mean — start in your normal stance and as your jab extends rotate your hip forward as your shoulder goes forward (so you’re not pulling against your own body). In short, if you’re facing the mirror, when your jab is at full extension your belly button should be facing the wall to your right. Then rotate it back to normal position.

That’s how we taught it to beginners so it’s not just a pawing arm punch. Of course there are a ton of variations on the jab and over time you’ll want to master more than one of them.