Explosiveness and power often separate the best boxers from everyone else. Explosive power and good boxing technique give you serious punching power that makes opponents think twice about crowding you inside the ring. It’s a special weapon that can bring a boxing match to an end at any moment without any warning.
Developing Your Power And Explosiveness For Boxing
Ready to make explosive punching power one of your attributes as a boxer? Here are some of the things you should work on to develop your explosiveness and power for boxing:
1) Strengthen Your Core
The core muscles are the muscles that keep your body stable and strong. They are located in the midsection of your body, which includes the abdominal muscles, lower back muscles, and the muscles that support your spine.
Strengthening the core is vital for athletes since it improves balance and stability. As a boxer, increasing your core strength leads to more powerful punches since some of the power in your strikes come from your core. Strengthening your core muscles also improves your stability, keeping you balanced as you throw powerful strikes.
2) Connect With The Canvas When Throwing Strikes
Think about the canvas as a spring when you’re inside a boxing ring. Use the canvas to generate power for your punches by digging your feet into the ground. Your feet should bounce back up with energy and force. This will be especially important when landing from a jump or push-off. You need to be able to immediately connect with that springy feeling to maximize your explosiveness and, subsequently, power.
3) Improve Your Technique
Perfecting your form is one of the most critical aspects of explosive power training. If you don’t have good technique, it will be difficult to effectively transfer energy from your body into a punch. Keep these tips in mind when developing explosiveness for boxing:
- Keep your stance broad and shoulders back. This helps eliminate unnecessary movement and transfers energy into each strike.
- Keep your elbows in so they don’t get hit when throwing punches. Elbows should also be kept up so that you’re not vulnerable to counter-punches from an opponent while throwing power shots.
Improving your form as a boxer naturally leads to increased power and explosiveness since it allows you to generate more power with your lower body and torso as you swing away.
4) Improve Your Speed
The faster your hands move as you throw punches, the more power your strikes land with. It’s simple physics, so dedicate a portion of your training to exercises that improve your hand speed to increase your punching power.
Some of the effective ways boxers improve their hand speed include:
- Hand Weights: Holding on to dumbbells or wrapping wrist weights on your wrists when shadowboxing or performing other boxing exercises helps build up your hand speed, power, and endurance. The weights make each punch you throw noticeably harder, which leads to faster punches when you take the weights off.
- Focus Mitts: Focus mitts are another effective way to improve your speed. It also works on your hand-eye coordination, footwork, defense, and punch accuracy. While working, your training partner or trainer might call out punches or combinations, and you try to land them as quickly as possible.
- Speed Bag Drills: Speed bags are one of the most popular ways to increase your boxing hand speed. Hitting a speed bag is also lots of fun once you get the hang of it. Start by learning how to hit the bag with a constant rhythm, then increase the speed. The faster you can work a speed bag, the faster your hand speed will become. Speed bags also allow you to work on your punch accuracy, timing, rhythm, and hand-eye coordination: skills that can give you an advantage over your opponents inside the ring.
5) Hit Heavy Bags
Heavy bags help to build up your power, speed, and endurance. Having fast hands doesn’t mean much when your hands get tired a minute into each round. A heavy bag gets your body used to hitting a solid object and its impact on your hand and arms.
Ideally, grab a training partner when working on a heavy bag so they can hold it in place for you. That way, the bag doesn’t move much when you hit it, just like a real opponent wouldn’t move much after most punches.
Interval training does wonders when using a heavy bag. You simply set a timer for three-minute rounds and grab a partner to hold the bag. You hit the bag as hard as you can for about 20 seconds, then your training partner gets their turn. You repeat the process until the round is over before taking a minute break. Aim for as many rounds as your body can handle. Wear wrist weights when working on the bag for more of a challenge.
6) Plyometrics
Plyometric exercises help to increase your explosive power. Any form of strength training that involves working out explosively is excellent for explosive power, but plyometrics allows you to get the most out of your workouts.
For example, conventional strength training exercises like squats can be done explosively, but you still need to spend the last portion of each rep decelerating the weight instead of accelerating it. Don’t decelerate the weight, and it’ll fly out of your hands.
Plyometric exercises remove the need to decelerate during reps, giving you a more effective way to increase your explosive strength. Plyometric exercises boxers should make part of their training routine include:
- Squat Jumps: This exercise builds explosive strength in your legs. It’s just like performing a bodyweight squat, but you jump off the ground after each rep. Wear a weighted vest if you want more of a challenge.
- Plyometric Pushups: This builds explosive power in your chest, shoulders, and triceps. It’s a lot like a conventional pushup, but on your way back up, you push down on the floor explosively, so your hands leave the ground.
- Medicine Ball Slams: This exercise helps to build up explosive power in the upper body, and it strengthens the core.
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