How important is quality sparring?

[Youngblood]

I am going to go against the grain and I will say doing padwork with somebody who knows what they are doing is the most key. Padwork IMO works you the hardest, sharpens everything, and with an intelligent trainer you pick up exactly how to handle certain situations. Roach, The Mayweathers' all have great padwork skills and I think that is key. It teaches you the basics.

Except all those guys all have tough sparring, Pacquiao gets guys who will get a grand if they can knock him down so they're trying to take his head off. Mayweather meanwhile has five sparring partners & basically does a 15 round fight, with a new guy coming in every 3 rounds. Padwork is great, but you get guys who're great on pads but struggle in sparring you see that in any gym

That's the thing. Pad work is great. So is shadow boxing, and many forms of training, but it is only part of the process. Those techniques from the pads, shadow boxing get taken to the next level, sparring, to get honed and perfected, practiced and engrained. Again and again.To get built into our wiring; our muscle memory, our neurons. Become reflex rather then thought.

Then the next step is the ring for the real deal. And if done properly, the process of development, a person won't be thinking so much when in there about the many combos and situations they'll encounter. They will simply be doing, as all the thought put into those moves is now little more then practiced fluid motion and reflex. Scenarios playing that are already mapped out in our body and brain.