Relieving pressure from an aggressive opponent, landing your hits and chasing down a jumpy opponent can all be achieved with a proper stance and footwork. It can be a difficult element for beginners to understand, it’s crucial to understand that your footwork and stance aren’t only important in boxing but in all martial arts and fighting sports.
At Senshi our martial art experts can offer help for those who want to start boxing training Melbourne wide and want to fully grasp the power of grounding stances. In today’s blog, we’ll be going over how you can improve your footwork and stance as well as outline its potential so the next time you get into the ring, you’ll be confident in your central grounding and ability.
Benefits of a Strong Boxing Stance
From the first moment you find the right boxing stance you’ll feel the difference and improvement in your ability. Boxing with the proper boxing stance can bring you more power, stability, speed, and balance. You’ll find your punches gaining more reach without forcing you to overextend your body or put your feet into a vulnerable position. If you need to react quickly in order to dodge or counterattack, the proper stance will give you more stability to quickly pivot away or extend onto your toes for a one-two combo.
The important takeaway to note is that there isn’t one stance to achieve this. Your height and mobility can affect which stance will work for you best, the aim is to find the perfect stance that gets you using your body in the most efficient way.
How To Improve Your Boxing Stance and Footwork
Once you’ve found the right stance it’s important to keep working and improving on your footwork. You can work on this by;
Shadowbox
Shadowboxing is a crucial part of a boxers training; it can be done practically anywhere making it the more efficient way to improve your game as a whole. You can shadowbox focusing specifically on your footwork, remembering to stick and move constantly to keep working and improving your hand-foot-eye coordination.
Step Work
Using small steps to defend against your opponent is a lot harder than circling the ring and letting your opponent chase you. By working on taking one, two then three quick steps forwards and backwards as well as medium stride can help to efficiently advance and retreat when needed. By practising this footwork and stance formation you can control your reach and distance in the ring to counter back quickly.
Plyometric Exercises
Plyometric exercises are designed to increase your explosive power. These exercises cover drills that exert your maximum force in short intervals. Some common exercises that are practised are ladder drills, box jumps, lateral jumps and single leg hops.
You should also work on improving your leg endurance, which can be done through running and cardio exercises. This will ensure that your legs can keep up and support your improved footwork through the entire match.
Jump Rope Tricks
Surprisingly these aren’t just important for training montages in movies, jump rope tricks can work at improving your leg endurance, timing and hand-eye-foot coordination all at once. The more difficult the trick the more you’ll be pumping up the intensity.
Finding the proper boxing stance takes time and a little bit of trial and error in training.
Remember, all power in boxing comes from the ground up: throwing powerful punches and recovering into a defensive position takes balance and movement, so your stance is a critical component to get right.
