Okay, your boxing curmudgeon here, complaining about the state of things as aged boxing geeks are wont to. The last few boxers I have coached were both kind of put back that I could not really ‘work the mitts,’ as most coaches my age are big on mitt work. However, the old-timers mistrusted the mitts as a striking tool and only used them to measure a fighter’s timing, accuracy and range sense; in other words his focus. Well, these days they are not even called focus mitts, but punching mitts. I know that Floyd Money and many current boxing stars and coaches use them, and that an MMA photo-op would not be worth filming without a good mitt flourish.

When I was a kid mitts were the rarest boxing tool on the planet. Only top trainers and top fighters had them. Primarily they were used for dressing rooms so that a fighter could tune up just enough for the trainer to be able to measure his focus and make an assessment for the upcoming fight. In the gym open palms and the palms of gloved hands had long been used for this. How did this tool come to dominate boxing and to what effect?

In the 1970s as Bruce Lee’s JKKD cult spread you had a lot of martial arts people who wanted to integrate boxing into their game. Of course these people did not actually want to spar and get hit, so they turned to mitts. It was a reasonable solution in another sense. Since most strip mall karate schools had no way to hang a bag from a drop ceiling designed for retail or office space the mitts began being used for boxing like kick shields and clapper pads were used for kicking.

The Muay Thai people pioneered the punching mitt method of replacing the heavy bag with a pad-wielding coach, just as the JKD people pioneered many creative methods for using mitts to replace gloved sparring drills. These elements coalesced in the white collar boxing craze of the 1990s, which grew out of a bloody brawl between two women on the undercard of a bland title fight. Now, suddenly, the boxing world was flooded with non-combatants and the mitts wielded by a real fighter who moved, gave the recreational fitness boxing babe the feel of being in a fight without getting hit—a fad was born.

Just before his death, on an HBO broadcast, the world’s most successful and hardest core boxing trainer, Emanuel Steward, decried the ‘mitt fad’ as detrimental to punching power and accuracy, as they encourage punching ‘at’ instead of ‘through’ an opponent. I agree, and let me break it down for you.

In order to save the coach’s elbows and shoulders he must ‘bat’ at the boxer’s hands with the mitts. This:

-makes the punches look faster,

-facilitates combination targeting and flow beyond what can actually be achieved against an opponent,

-skews the fighter’s targeting sense toward defensive punching,

-retards the development of penetrative punching mechanics by not requiring hip torque to generate power,

-and overall causes a false sense of target accessibility.

I know I’m spitting in the wind here, since the best boxer in the world uses mitts to show off and some of the best trainers in the world like the intimacy of these types of mitt drills. But here it goes…

Don’t bat the mitts!

Hold the mitts.

Do not pull the mitt away ever, as this could cause elbow hyper-extension.

Try the following drills.

1. Hold the mitts at head level and just move realistically like a fighter moves. If you turn a mitt at the wrist that signals the fighter to pivot and punch, and then you step around to the new orientation

2. Try holding the mitts in ‘echelon’; one back, the other forward. The fighter punches the near, then the far as he moves laterally. All you have to do is push and pull the mitts into fore and aft positions to work his lateral jabbing ability. He can also punch in and out along the same line.

3. Instead of batting a mitt to meet a hook and keep it from ripping your elbow ligaments, couch the mitt between your elbow and hip and let him shovel hook it. Put the other mitt across on your shoulder so he can come up with the Philly hook, slide one arm under the other and brace the mitt across the tricep of the other arm.

4. Stack the mitts for uppercuts and power straights.

5. Sometimes, designate one mitt as the opponent’s glove and work on countering drills and covers.

6. Hold the mitts close and move aggressively so that the fighter can work on clinch control and turning. Direct him to sprawl off your shoulders, pivot off your elbow, and turn off your hip with one hand as he pops with the other. Call them ‘Bernard Hopkins’ drills or something so he feels like an evil badass—just don’t bat the mitts to make him feel like a badass!

In stick-fighting we have a similar problem called ‘stick-tapping’ where most so-called stick-fighters practice offense and defense drills by targeting sticks without gear on instead of targeting the sparring partner with gear on. In any striking art, nothing is more important than what the old-time bare-knuckle era boxers and fencers called ‘time and measure.' Mitt-batting, like stick-tapping, retards your fighter’s targeting system. Training a boxer to fight primarily through mitt-batting drills would be like sending a fighter pilot up with a target-lock system that had a quarter-mile fudge-factor because the developers intentionally missed the targets in testing so they would not have to replace them.

Just don’t bat the mitts. Do something else with them, like using them for mouthpiece holders, fans, or flyswatters…