I've heard of him, he was the world famous Australian cricket champ. I heard he used a broken cricket handle and a golf ball to practice on for long periods at a time. Boxing's version of this is shadow-boxing. You can learn a great many things from shadow boxing, how to move, all the techniques, tactics, and strategy that you gonna use. But first and foremost you should develop your stance, you don't want to hinder yourself with bad balance and bad technique, now a good trainer can help point out things that you wouldn't notice by yourself, where to put your weight, how to position your body. You should start paying attention to these things on your own, eventually getting a 'body feel' concentrating on your movements. As you develop you can start working on different things such as becoming faster, shedding extraneous movement, adding power to your punches.

Now keeping your stance/posture in mind you can work on movement. Practice proper footwork, how to move from side to side, forwards and backwards, circling and pivoting. If you're willing to put in the hours to master it, then you'll be awarded with the benefits of moving easily and gracefully without even thinking about it.When you don't have to think of any how-to's you can concentrate on improving your quickness and begin to work on other things. You can then being to coordinate your hands with your feet. Moving and punching, moving and defending. It's also good to use a mirror as a reference tool just to get that live visual feedback of what your doing.

Do you see now, there's so much you can do when it comes to shadowboxing. I haven't even covered the tip of it. Now shadowboxing can be a great exercise mentally and physically. It all depends on how far you want to take it. Of course there's other ways to train hand to eye coordination. You play ping-pong, bag work, and their are also a few drills that are worth doing.

Getting back to good stance and movement, it's in your best interest to spend a lot of time to get it right. Look at the some of the great fighters say for example Sugar Ray Leonard. He had great balance, good posture and good quick feet, the best that I've seen. Even after a 4 year of ring rust and he still had these great fundamentals, and that's how he could take on guys like Marvin Hagler. Guys that developed bad habits, slow feet, bad posture can't escape it, but if you start out right you don't have to fall into those bad habits.