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utilize a boxing style that is a lot more careful than that. You punch strong but you don't fall over onto the ground if the person dodges the punch.
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Hi Peter,
It's surprising how many people do actually throw their shoulder and/or body behind a punch, much in the way that is stylized in Aikido. If you watch professional boxers very carefully, you will generally notice two things about their punching technique:
- They don't tend to advertise a punch before throwing it
- They don't tend to throw a punch much past the line of their body
What this means in a real sense is that it is particularly difficult to get a boxer to overextend when punching you, with the resultant "fall over onto the ground".
By comparison, many normal people will advertise a punch, often mimicking a windmill, or they often try the proverbial hay-maker. If you don't happen to hit your target with either of these types of punches, you can easily overbalance, and with a little help from nage can be tipped over.
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If someone is in a very stable boxing stance, is there a simple way to take his/her balance?
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You hit on an interesting point here. Boxing stances aren't stable in the same way Aikido hanmi are; boxers tend to move a lot on the balls of their feet, skipping and bouncing around. This makes them a hard target and allows them to quickly shift their aim and to launch an attack. This is not a stable stance per se, it is a very dynamic stance. The most stable point in this approach is when the boxer actually punches, and they tend to ground their feet for a split second.
When training in boxing, you spend an inordinate amount of time practicing this footwork, and skipping with a rope and the likes to build up your technique. The expression being caught on the back foot stems from this.
You also need to be careful with boxers in that they don't tend to throw just one punch. Another very heavily practiced part of boxing training is stringing together multiple punches. A boxer might lead for example with a couple of jabs, followed by a cross, an upper-cut and a body rip. The punches tend to come in multiples, but very very quickly. To make this even more difficult, different weight classes of boxer will punch and move differently. Lighter weight generally means faster footwork, more/faster punches, whereas a heavier boxer is generally going to wear you down with continuous heavy punches.
With a boxer, sometimes the best defence to throw them off their game is to change your stance around. If a boxer comes at your orthodox, face them south-paw and keep moving to their left (your right). This is unnatural for most boxers and is very hard to counteract on the fly. You might just get lucky and throw them off balance
