I am going to be blunt. Most of the padwork I see out there is rubbish, and deep down a lot of coaches know it. In this video lesson I talk about why, and what both coaches and fighters need to understand.

If you are a boxing coach, you need to stop, look, listen and understand what I am talking about. If you are a fighter, ask yourself one simple question: what did you actually learn in your last pad session?

The Problem With Most Padwork

A lot of pad sessions are a performance. They look fast, they sound great, and they get plenty of attention. But look closer and you often see:

  • Rehearsed routines. The fighter learns a pattern, not how to fight.
  • The coach doing the work. The pads are brought to the punch, so the fighter never learns real distance.
  • No consequences. Nothing comes back, so the fighter never learns to defend after they throw.
  • No reading. The fighter follows calls instead of seeing openings for themselves.

It feels like good training. It burns calories. But it often teaches habits that get people hit in a real fight.

What Padwork Should Do

Pads are a tool, and like any tool they can be used well or badly. Used well, pads let a coach recreate parts of a real fight in a controlled way. That means:

  • Making the fighter find their own distance and angles
  • Giving honest targets that are where a real head or body would be
  • Feeding shots back, so defence and counters become part of every combination
  • Teaching the fighter to read and react, not just to remember

For Coaches

Hold pads for your fighter, not for the audience. Every round should have a purpose. Before you start, know what you want the fighter to learn. When the round ends, check that they learned it. If it was not useful, change it.

For Fighters

After every session, ask what you learned. If the honest answer is "nothing much", talk to your coach. Spend more of your time on things that teach you to fight: the bag with a purpose, technical sparring, and drills where something comes back at you.

Take It Further

If you coach and want to learn how I teach, look at Private Mentoring or my Training Camps. If you are a fighter who wants a structured way to learn the basics properly, try the Learn To Box Online Course.