beating canelo

[palmerq]

i always thought the way to beat canelo was to turn him. you might have noticed that canelo likes to put his thumbs on his temples and dip all his weight onto his front leg a lot, like this.



a couple things happen here. the first thing is he wants to jam your right hand, which is to say that, by moving his head closer to your right forearm like that, he doesnt want to let you have any extension to throw a straight right hand. that way that punch has no room and sorta just gets too jammed up to throw. so a funny thing will happen here, and canelo knows this too, that a fighter in realizing he cant throw a straight right hand will dutifully resolve to throw a looping right behind canelo's thumbs; which is the deliberately exposed part of canelo's head he can hit.



so when you see canelo coming in with his thumbs on his temples dipping all his weight onto his front leg, you will also usually see a lot of guys loading up on a big looping right hand behind the ear that canelo always knows the other guy wants to throw. and, because he knows that, he can pull his head back on cue. and so what you also might see is canelo sweeping a big counter right uppercut up from the floor that other guy will fall into because he made him load up on a big looping right hand and then pulled the chair out from under him, like this.



but the thing that interests me the most is that, whenever a fighter dips all his weight onto his front leg, what you must always remember is that he takes away his own right hand to throw a left hook. therefore, when you see canelo come in and dip over his front leg like that, thats your cue. remember your cue.



on your cue, press down and twist on the ball of your front foot, then swing over the heel of your back foot, like this.



if you did it right on cue, he would have already taken away his own right hand for you, and youre going to circle away from his left hook and take that away from him also, a little like this.



basically, he will take away his own right hand, and by turning him at that moment, you will take away his left hook. well, bivol did that a little in their fight and i was glad to see that work for him. but i felt like such a fool, because thats all a little over complicated. because all you really needed here is a little step back. you put the jab in canelo's face, but not enough jab to let him pass it through his slip space; which is the space next to his ears and over his shoulders. you see he needs your jab to pass through his slip space to counter it. therefore to make your jab pass through his slip space, he must take a step in to literally force it through. and what we see next, and i guess what we always will see in boxing eternally, is the jabber will take an equidistant step back, taking away that step in, and repeating the process all over again on a never ending loop. and maybe thats all boxing really is; shapes interacting and repeating on an endless loop until the end of time. and i thought that if i closed my eyes just enough it was carlos monzon up there throwing that jab and taking that little step back. what a nice little performance that was by dimitry bivol.

This is indeed a very cool post, i do like the addition of gifs too...great work!... So you're clearly an expert do you see anyway of Alvarez having a chance v bivol(barring a capitulation by bivol)? Are the problems canelo has set in stone or can he switch it up?

[Yuzo]

This is indeed a very cool post, i do like the addition of gifs too...great work!... So you're clearly an expert do you see anyway of Alvarez having a chance v bivol(barring a capitulation by bivol)? Are the problems canelo has set in stone or can he switch it up?

i have this theory that boxing doesnt actually happen until two guys decide they want to throw a pair of right hands or a pair of left hooks at the same time and that what we call boxing is not actually boxing at all but just something that looks a lot like it. and so it is, that, in this view anyway, the best boxer is the guy that looks like he is boxing when there is really no boxing happening at all and that is so much harder to do than it sounds.

heres an example. you throw your jab and the other guy slips it, like this.



you will have noticed that by having slipped your jab in this way that his head can be maneuvered into your right hand, like this.



but because slipping a jab this way naturally mimics the motion of throwing a right hand, what you will not have noticed when you decided to throw your right hand at him, is his right hand that he decided to throw at you.



boxing is when shapes interact with each other to occasionally produce interesting collisions. when two boxers throw punches like right hands or left hooks at the same time they each enter onto intersecting trajectories that essentially result in them colliding into each other very hard.

and so it is, that, to beat a guy like dimitry bivol, a guy like canelo alvarez must do what all boxers before him and after him must always do. he must throw more punches. but that is too vague. he must throw more punches to deliberately expose himself to more counter punches because counter punching exposes the counter puncher to more punches. now they're really boxing.

[Austin_B]

Great thread, thank you sharing all the gifs to illustrate the sequences