Sparring is an essential part of all boxing training sessions but for advanced training, one needs to play smart. Instead of just going for a head-on collision and punching for the sake of throwing punch and trying to vent out aggression, one should wait for the right time and space to throw punches. You can achieve this by controlling your nerves, creating a proper fight strategy to proceed with and seeking the right moment to throw punches. Trying combinations can also come in handy during advanced sparring sessions. Occasionally changing your sparring partner and adapting a new fight strategy according to individual opponent can also be a good way to improve your skill set.
Here are some advanced sparring techniques that will help you a lot to master the art of advanced sparring:
Avoid Knockouts
When you are in the ring for sparring, keep one thing in mind, you are there to improve your technique, strategy and punching skills, not to knock your partner out. Especially if you have a fight coming up, you must be very careful and try to keep your intensity low in order to avoid knockouts.
Control your Nerves
Controlling your nerves is one of the most important lessons you need to learn and practice. Sparring is meant to hit your opponent and get hit. You must be ready to take the hits, keep your nerves in control and counter your opponent tactically in the best possible way. There are no sacred cows in combat sports; you must be ready to take even the most intense hits without losing your cool. A certain level of self-control is very important for the fighters to ensure good performance in the ring.
Timing is the Key
Unlike the rest of the combat sports training, sparring helps you in improving performance in real time against a real opponent. For beginners, sparring may be about throwing good punches, but for the advanced sparring, one needs to throw punches calculatedly. Mayweather is a best example in this case. He starts fighting in defensive mode, and then he waits until his opponent is out of energy and when the time is right, he unleashes his deadly streak of punches to take down the opponent.
Try combinations
Try different punching combinations during sparring to improve your punching skill set. While throwing traditional and linear punches is important, using combinations are quite essential for boxing to hit your opponent without giving him enough time to counter attack.
Know your strength and use it
Understanding your strength and utilizing it in the right direction is what would take your boxing to a whole new level. During sparring, one of the major goals should be to identify your strength. If you are good in defensive skills you should practice defensive approach and come up with a strategy through which you can bring down your opponent. Similarly, if you are proactive in your fighting style and you can fight aggressively without losing your energy you should opt for an aggressive fighting style and utilize it efficiently.
Use professional boxing gloves
For the beginners, it is advisable to use gloves designed for sparring purposes only in order to improve the power and precision. However, when you move on to advanced sparring, you should occasionally try sparring using professional fighting gloves to get the feelings of real fight. Professional Boxing gloves are lightweight in comparison to sparring gloves and have a different fighting experience.
Change your sparring partners
Every fighter has his/her own style. Choosing your sparring partner can be tricky at times. Usually professional fighters choose a sparring partner with similar fighting style to their next opponent. For instance, if a fighter is to fight against a Southpaw (right hand and right food forward), he would normally choose a southpaw partner. To diversify the skills, one should change sparring partners occasionally to improve their boxing skill set.
Try these advance sparring techniques to master the art of advanced sparring. Following the above tips would take your boxing skills to the very next level in your career.
