Why does everyone believe losing is a learning experience?

i feel like that's the biggest illusion in boxing today. I never competed, but I trained for a few years and let me tell ya, I've been beaten up pretty badly in sparring by some pretty good dudes and I didn't learn a thing from it. It's impossible to learn from your opponent when he has you bewildered.

Discuss.

 

That's because you don't have the ability to understand what you did wrong and work on it, also the motivation that the fear of losing can cause.

 

That's because you are not fighting for anything other than fun, like I am now. You are suppose to work on yourself in training and like bcr said, you learn about YOUR strengths and weakness in a loss.
Look at Canelo, he learned that he cannot outbox any pure boxers from 147 to infinity, but he cherry picked Khan ,a solid boxer with a bad chin to prove that he can beat a pure boxer without controversy.

 

I don't know, but it seems shortsighted to write this concept off entirely as an "illusion" because you weren't able to extract anything from getting your ass kicked.

 

It depends whether you can identify why you lost.

 

you probably don't have a trainer and film to study. if you are laying on the ground, unconscious, you probably have no idea what happened.

 

I learned to tuck my elbows in tight just by watching a recording of myself.
Thank god no one taught me with a liver shot.

Got my jaw popped out of place once. A painful lesson that was.

 

In life you will encounter plenty of set backs so you might as well try and learn or take away something positive from the experience or their is really no sense going on. The over whelming majority of set backs can help someone grow. Of course there are exceptions that go far beyond the scope of this topic. After all we are just talking about losing a boxing match.

 

**** outlook on your part

I mean even getting dominated you can learn a lot about yourself. the real thing is did you do better the next go round with the same guy or did you find a guy more on your level and move forward

sometimes you take on a guy in the room that at your current stage you just can't beat but if your smart you Balance partners based on skill differences. if you keep practicing with guys who destroy you it may be tough to see gains your making on guys at your same level

 

There are several fighters who learned a lot in defeat and came back stronger. If that doesnt apply to you it might be your trainer, your attitude, or both.

Fighters dont improve by beating the crap out of tomato cans and guys less skilled than them.

 

Smart adaptable people learn.

Brain dead idiots dont.

 

It depends on how badly you are beaten. It also depends on how old the fighter is and how much experience he has.

BHOP didn't learn anything from fighting Kovalev, he can't improve because hes too old.

But I think if a fighter is losing matches in their early career (under 32 or so), they can still learn. There is still time to make changes. After a certain point, you've been boxing so long its hard to make a change to what you are doing.

 

Losing causes you to dwell on why you lost and to devise a strategy to avoid that loss again. It also cultivates a mindset of not giving up when faced with adversity.

Winning constantly just gives you confidence, it doesn't engender caution. If you have holes in your game you won't know it until somebody creams you big.

I feel that boxing wise a gradual progression in difficulty of opponents is the best route. That is, so that a boxer experiences enough adversity to realise he has holes in his game and addresses them, but not so much adversity that he loses in a whitewash.

 

Or perhaps you should learn how to train much harder not to lose, or you learn that Boxing isn't for you. You learn either way.