first off any southpaws on ESB and secondly , share your tips and any other helpful advice that you can share based on our experiences from fights.
Keep your right high while on the outside - midrange, be real hard for an orthodox fighter to land a jab that way. Or makes it real easy for you to pick em off for the most part. Keep your lead foot outside of theres. Move fast, but take short steps and try to keep your feet planted and keep circling to your right(dont get predictable though), I say take short steps and try and keep your feet planted because you dont want to get tangled up and lose your balance, or trip.. I usually have my backfoot on its toe and my front foots heel down, if it counts for anything. A Half guard is a lot more effective on the inside than two fighters with the same stance.. I would still train with it before you go getting your head punched in cause of it though. Train your cross, its your most important punch. Get good at feinting your jab and practice throwing it to the body to open up oppurtunities for it.. I feint my jab more than I throw it probably.. These are what I feel will help you the most as a southpaw specifically.
it is also a lot easier to catch their jab and go over with your own if that makes sense. practice that a lot.
Keep your right hand high, as to catch their jabs, this is a tried a true tactic that works. Magnificient gave a brilliant primer on southpaw fighting. The cross advice is truly a gem. I was more a brawler than a boxer, but something incredibly effective for me was to do what my coach called a shadow cross. Catch your opponents jab, slip to your left to avoid the right cross and fire a jab the second it passes your head, follow immediately with your left and the chin is hit more often then not. I scored many a kayo this way. I also got blasted once attempting it, the only time I've ever been stopped, so practice it in sparring:good
Yeah, there arent many of us so you gotta at least try and hel layout the basics haha... Im gonna try that technique you're talking about though:bbb My favorite thing to do with a cross usually works better early on, feint a jab upstairs, slip to your right while dropping a hard cross to the body, This is really helpful for defensive minded people that wanna counter and wont bring the fight to you, they usually bite on the feint and you can pull this off a couple times before its caught on to.. It will catch em off guard and have them gasping for a second pretty often too :-D
There's some good advice for southpaws in this thread. On the subject of feinting, remember a boxer can also be very effective by feinting 'with the eyes' ie glancing down at your opponents body whilst SIMULTANOUSLY punching to head and vice versa.
I'm a southpaw, but predominately right handed in most other things, apart from delivering letters(I'm a postman) which I do left handed:nut I believe that a fighter should lead with his strongest hand anyway eg Cotto,Barrera,DeLaHoya,Hagler
A further tip, although many southpaws end up doing this subconciously,is to have a wider than normal guard. Invite the orthodox boxer to punch through your guard, then parry and counter. Most southpaws are counter punchers by nature. With a wide guard he'll find it very difficult to 'get round' your lead hand, and unless he opens up his guard as well, you should find it easy to land jabs and right hooks OUTSIDE his guard, especially if you are moving to your right. My favourite tactic is to draw my (orthodox) opponent towards me and get his weight on his front foot so he is committed to the attack then counter over the top of his jab with a right hook before he can throw the remainder of his intended combo.Catch them all night with that!! Perhaps the best combo for a southpaw is left cross followed by right hook. Normally a boxer isn't recomended to lead with their back hand but southpaws seem to get away with it, and by the same logic orthodox boxers can do likewise by throwing lots of right cross/left hook combos at the southpaw. Trouble is, most orthodox fighters,even good pros(eg TRINIDAD v Wright) just fight the same way they'd fight a fellow right hander
I'm also a "right-handed" southpaw. What I always favored was slipping to the right on orthodox people and fire a right hook to the body followed by one to the head. If you connect to the body, you'll always connect on the head with the next one.
