In this and the following sections we shall use the hand orientations and steps from the three previous sections—your three-part biomechanical index—to learn the jab, to teach it to yourself, and then practice it with others.
Before continuing, put on a pair of sneakers. You can do this barefooted or in boots once learned—no high heels please—but will learn it best in an athletic shoe.
Now find your training apparatus, which is a wall of any type, though smooth is preferable, and a painted wooden doorframe of the old type is the best. At work I sometimes use steel pipes in the stock room, or the steel bailer frame on the dock.
The Touch Drill
Stand before the target in guard.
The most important aspect of your guard is that you look through your hands which are open for this drill, and that your lead foot is not between your target and your rear foot. Every jab you through is intended to line your rear foot up with your target via a usually slight margin, with—ideally—an imaginary line tracing from the toe or ball of your rear foot, just past the toe of the lead foot to intersect the target. This makes the punch something of an arrow, with the rear foot acting as the bowstring and the lead foot acting as the bow stave.
Stand flat-footed, but feeling the ground with the balls of your feet, not dead-footed, not with your weight on your heels, but evenly distributed.
Keep your rear hand up, touching your face from chin to cheek. Use the touch to check for guard position. This is the hand that wards off his blows. Keep it ready and on station.
Keeping your lead elbow in behind your jabbing hand [Reread that like 20 times please.], reach out slowly and touch the wall without moving your feet or locking your elbow out all the way.
Adjust your footing until you have found your standing reach.
You are touching the wall with your fingertip pads.
Practice tapping the wall with your fingernails using the end of the fingers as a kind of spear.
To advance this drill hang a piece of paper and do the same thing, timing your second touches to hit the paper just as it swings back into place.
Advance to popping the paper with your fingertips, and try penetrating it. This builds time and measure. We are not really working on a fingertip weapon here, although we will eventually go there for you survival boxers.
Now practice walking around and stepping up to the wall without measuring it off and then touching. If you have stepped up to the wrong spot to have the perfect landing, walk around some more and repeat. Do this for hours, on the wall, with the paper, with pipe, fence post, tree or railing. Take your show on the road and do it with random items like playground monkey bars. You are developing the ability to stop and stand—to take up a position—exactly in range to touch the target.
Now that you feel you have the touch down pat, touch it fast, touch it hard, practice touching with the open hand [not thrusting the heel out as in karate] and also with the clenched fist. Play with levels to see where your fist strikes with the hand thumb up, thumb down, thumb to the inside, thumb to the outside.
This is a basic cultivation of time and measure, a drill that most boxers skip, which is usually only used by older boxers to keep sharp when not sparring.
Do yourself a favor and drill this.
Do not move your feet, except when walking into position and resetting.
As a boxer you must absolutely know at a glance that you can touch a person without moving.
Do not neglect this.
To make this interactive get your evil little sister, or your wife when she is pissed off, to stand in front of you with a bucket of balls: tennis balls, ping pong balls and lacrosse balls or hard balls. Having her stand about three paces away is best.
Stand in guard.
Have her throw the balls at moderate velocity, lopping them at you from eye to chest. Having her stand about three paces away is best.
Check the hard balls with a cupped rear hand, with your fingers together, deflecting them down or to the side, or even grabbing them without using the thumb as an opposable digit, but as just one part of the cupped hand.
Jab the tennis balls with your lead fist.
Spear the ping pong balls with your fingertips.
Have her mix them up, and start her throwing the ping pong balls, and then the tennis balls, with a little zip, from the elbow. The velocity on the hard balls should remain low.
The next drill is The Rock Slide.
Excellent stuff, thank you, JL, only a top coach could break down the basics as you have.
And finally available, the most recent School of Jab, courtesy Golovkin Lemieux from the Garden. GGG landed 26 jabs in the 1st round! Real economy of motion, extreme shot precision.
Round 4 isolation shot of exchange of left hooks,
GGG keeps his right high enough to cushion Lemieux's shot, Lemieux's right is too low and he takes the blow.
youtube.com/watch?v=828SXkDVXok
When you get a chance would like to hear your
take on Golovkin's style.
Oliver and I agree that GGG is the real deal.
Do you notice how hard and jarring his jab is?
That is what George Foreman did with his freakish strength and large size, and GGG is doing it as an expression of virtuosity. Those jabs would just floor most people.
Thanks for the clip.
Honestly, this entire thing is just turning into a book on guarding, moving and jabbing. Hope you don't get bored, but there is a lot more to cover since I decided on isolating the elements and building a broad understanding.
I will probably loose a few readers on this, so I'm glad you like it!
I've been doing this drill in conjunction with a step jab and right cross. It sucks but I can already see the difference in my time and measure. Can't wait to get back at it in a couple weeks.