G Is For Guard

I touched briefly on this in my E Post on Evasion, but there is a bit more to say about the boxer's guard in the ring.

The guard is arguably the most important part of the boxers game, given that the defence and attack all spring from a good guard.

There are several different guards which can be employed by a boxer, but a good boxer will employ more than one, if not all of them at some point during a fight. 

One of the reasons for this being that a boxer's guard speaks of their boxing style, and so to avoid telegraphing too much information to one's opponent it pays to mix things up.

Whilst the guard is most obviously linked to the boxer's defence, the punches all spring from the guard. Where the hands are by the head is also the place from which any punch should come, rather than pulling one's arm back (pulling a punch). The reason this is bad is two-fold, firstly it's inefficient and secondly, it lets your opponent know what is coming so they're better placed to deal with it, which is not desirable.

Another reason for the guard being important is that in a professional fight, points are scored for punches landing on one's opponent, however punches that only land on their guard do not count. I find it frustrating to watch boxers who drop their guard and allow their opponents easy points by not defending properly, but that's a rant for another day.

My preferred style of guard is the basic guard which I like to mix up with a high guard and a peek-a-boo guard. I'll occasionally use a sit-down and I simply cannot get to grips with the philly shell.

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
This post is part of a series in the Blogging From A To Z Challenge, April 2022.

10 comments:

  1. I have never read anything on boxing, so I really enjoyed learning so much from this post. So does the term don't drop your guard come from boxing? I am curious.
    Hopping in via the A to Z Challenge. Hope you stop by my blog and read the book/story in the making on momandideas.com

    ReplyDelete
  2. interesting, even though I am not into boxing.

    Visiting from atoz: http://namysaysso.com/blog/guilt-napowrimo/

    ReplyDelete
  3. I didnt even know that so many types of guards exist!
    Cool to learn technicalities from a professional. Good day

    Dropping by from A to Z - https://afshan-shaik.blogspot.com/

    ReplyDelete
  4. @Afshan Shaik I'm definitley not a professional! LOL

    @Momsandideas that's exactly where the saying comes from.

    ReplyDelete
  5. We are into ice hockey around here, and reading your post tells me that certain unruly hockey players should watch their guard ;-)

    ReplyDelete
  6. This is so interesting. I don't really know a lot about boxing. We had hockey, baseball, and soccer players around here.

    Thanks for sharing and for visiting my blog.

    ReplyDelete
  7. If it were me I'd always be on guard. I don't want someone punching me in the face.

    Arlee Bird
    Tossing It Out

    ReplyDelete
  8. I dont know much about boxing but have seen many movies about it where they dont go into such details and I do remember Mike Tyson

    Visiting from AtoZ
    Jayashree writes

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for stopping by and leaving a comment, we really appreciate it!

Anyone can comment and all comments will appear after word verification.

Spam will be dealt with appropriately.

(Apologies for the temporary glitch of being unable to reply directly to comments, I'm working on this)

Cheers