Can someone please explain setting a trap to me?

Most traps will involve setting a establishing a pattern then breaking the pattern. Jab-Jab-Right, Jab-Jab-Right, Jab-Jab-Feint-Left Hook to the body. Something like that. Pretty much any Mayweather, Marquez or Toney fight would be instructive.

 

You can see it coming

 

It'll probably be difficult to see the patterns live in the beginning but , with experience, you'll be able to recognize the patterns as they happen.

 

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Punching patterns are one way as noted above.

There's also geography and spacing.

A fighter can, for instance, take a long step back or to the right every time the opponent moves forward. Then after getting the opponent used to this, take a short step instead and throw a hard right and run him into it.

Or a fighter can hold ground and body up when an opponent steps forward several times. So every time the opponent comes forward, they end up leaning on each other. After establishing this, the trap can come into play when the fighter next time steps back and throws an uppercut, knowing the other guy will be leaning in expecting to body up.

Those sorts of things.

You'll pick up a lot if you just watch and watch and watch.

 

I've set a few traps myself based on spring-and pepper spray setups.

They worked well!

I always F^%*ng forgot they were there

 

So it's almost like you are inducing a muscle memory response in the opponent?

 

Distance deception, baiting a reaction, pattern breaking.

Distance deception: Mayweather's pull counter is a good example of this. What he actually does is lean his body forward a lot of the time to make his opponent think he is a little bit closer than he actually is. You can look at his foot placement and how his body is arched to see this properly. What happens is that his opponent will think he is closer and easier to hit than he actually is and then he resets and counters them. This is a solid trap. Lara does the opposite where he is usually pulling back more so you think he is slightly out of your range when he isn't. This would deter his opponent from throwing.

Baiting a reaction: This can be a part of distance deception but I'm going to speak about throwing a punch and then following up with something else immediately. Example of this that I'm sure everyone knows about is Kell Brook's uppercut in the second round to Golovkin. That uppercut was so effective because Golovkin tried to duck a jab (and still got hit by it lol) and put his face right into Brook's uppercut. So why did that happen like that? Well, Brook noticed that Golovkin was doing that a few times and threw a slightly slower jab just so Golovkin would duck low to avoid it and then followed up with an uppercut because that would be the punch with the perfect angle for what Golovkin did.

Pattern breaking: Just conditioning your opponent to behave a certain way and then punishing them for doing so. Sadly offhand I can't think of a specific recent example of this that everyone would be familiar with.

Just watching boxing on its own isn't enough to get a handle on these things I don't think. Train at a gym or watch a few technical breakdowns (from trainers!) to get a better understanding of this. Boxing is a very nuanced sport and unless you have someone to break down aspects of it you are unlikely to discover these on your own. Commentators are sometimes not in the best position to detail everything that is happening and some of the commentators are...pretty bad and miss simple things. A lot of the "film studies" on youtube come from guys that I can tell have never trained and have no ****ing idea what they are talking about and if they do they are awful at articulating what it is they think is happening in the ring to the viewer. One thing I've noticed is that when they don't understand things they will just "this is a high level chess match" and never explain what makes it so lmao.

 

Just watch Ali vs Foreman.

 

Amir Khan vs Garcia or Canelo.

 

I'd say muscle memory takes longer to establish, it's learned through repeated motions and actions.

More like a conditioned response.