Jab Variations Continue (diary entry)

11.12.18   Tonight brought my new Boxing client up to the eighth hour his basic course. We continued work on the jab variations, mainly going over the techniques taught last week before adding in the straight hook and the uppercut jab.   Training began with a review of shadow boxing as a warmup. Here I watched footwork and upper body movement as I called out different scenarios. As per my essay on this area of training, it is important to visualise opponents when you shadow box. Here I can see certain decisions being made and the ideal responses a fighter has in mind. The ideal response doesn’t always come off when sparring is brought into play, but at least I can see that his mind is in the right direction and he understands what he should be doing.   We then gloved up and did some semi-free sparring, focusing on the use of all the jabs covered in the previous lesson. He also played around with different guards to best suit the punches. most notably the high guard and the Philly shell. These were then taken onto the focus mitts. I was questioned on the utility of the 45 degree jab. Here I discussed other in-motion punches such as Dempsey’s falling step punch. The 45 degree jab presents another variation on the v-step. This time the back-foot leads, moving to the inside, and the fighter lands the jab as he settles.   We then moved onto the jabbing versions of the hook and the uppercut. These were mixed in with flicker jabs and other combinations. Each of these punches are ideally thrown as if throwing a normal flicker jab, but then changed at the last moment dropping a bit more weight. The sudden variation in the punch’s shape allows for the exploitation of a guard that is used to defending against straight jabs.   The lesson finished with two rounds of sparring. The first round was geared towards creating space and generally outside boxing. The second round was business as usual. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zv198S7RvQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKiZEZJQDnA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ht9nolm9f-s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpCyHIPnMNg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xfjw6dCuFeg