Introduction
If you are looking for a complete library of boxing drills, designed to improve your fighting capability in all areas, you’ve come to the right place. Footwork, punching, head movement, fighter-inspired and more. This guide will include a series of videos which will bring to life boxing drills, enabling you to begin work on improving your skills right now, regardless of where you are on your boxing journey.
Here are the sections of this guide:
- Boxing Drills – Why Do Them?
- Boxing Footwork Drills
- Boxing Punching Drills
- Boxing Head Movement Drills
- Boxing Heavy Bag Drills
- Boxing Partner Drills
- Fighter Emulation Drills
Boxing Drills – Why Do Them?
Boxing Drills Basics
Effective boxing training is about making gradual improvements, both in terms of your strength and conditioning but more importantly in terms of your boxing skills.
To improve your boxing skills, a proportion of your boxing training should be devoted to boxing drills. But what are boxing drills? Here’s a definition:
“Boxing drills are systematic training of the body and mind by multiple repetitions”
Another way of putting it is:
“Practice makes perfect”
This is not just about boxing. Think about those people who have jobs that involve facing high stress situations – police officers, soldiers, firefighters, medics, pilots…the list goes on.
These often remarkable people, when describing an act of particularly heart-stopping bravery or crushing pressure, often use the term “the training took over.”
Why did the training take over?
The training took over because a proportion of the training time of these individuals was devoted to drills. The same is true of boxing training. There is no mystery here.
Thomas Jefferson said:
“The harder I work the luckier I get”
This was taken forward by the great golfer Gary Player:
“The harder I practice the luckier I get”
You get the point.
Why Boxing Drills Work
Boxing drills reinforce ‘muscle memory’, enabling what are initially awkward and unnatural movements to be gradually made easier, resulting in much more polished execution.
To be comfortable and effective as a boxer, co-ordination between your legs and upper-body is vitally important. The path to achieving this co-ordination is made smoother by boxing drills.
Boxing drills also help you become instinctive.
A fight requires instinctive responses, time is of the essence. You don’t think to yourself “OK, I’ll move this way, throw this shot, then do this….”
In a boxing ring, things happen far too fast for this to be possible. You need to be instinctive in your response.
By building boxing drills into your training it will mean that during fight time your actions ‘just happen’, without thought and with maximum effect; you have predetermined sequences that work over and over again because drills have made them instinctive.
Boxing drills can be used to make use of your flinch reflex. The flinch reflex is our instant reaction to threat.
An example of this instant reaction might be closing your eyes and turning your head away if someone throws a ball at you. In boxing, replace that ball with a punch – a boxing fight is not the place to close your eyes and turn your head.
Boxing drills enable you to substitute closing your eyes and turning away with something useful, for instance a parry of the jab, slipping or a ducking or an instant attack with long range body punches. We’ll cover more about the flinch reflex in Boxing Partner Drills.
Boxing drills go from super-simple, such as drilling an individual skill like moving in or out, or they can become quite complex, like building integrated boxing combination drills.
The fact is though, all boxing drills have value and you should approach them with the same dedication and focus.
Boxing Footwork Drills
Without effective boxing footwork, you can’t hope to have an effective boxing style. The trick with footwork is to maintain good balance as you move. This can be up close or at long range.
Everything starts with the basic boxing stance. A good rule of thumb, especially in beginner boxing, is to maintain your boxing stance at all times.
Following on from the basic boxing stance, there are all kinds of boxing footwork skills to master. Movement forwards and backwards, lateral movement, various boxing pivots, angles side steps and so on.
To practice these boxing footwork techniques, I like to lay out boxing footwork drill patterns.
The pattern below can be laid out in duct tape. It’s ideal if you can lay this drill pattern out in front of a full length mirror, that will help you analyse your success more effectively.
Beginner Boxing Footwork Drills
Learning how to box is best started at the most basic level. For me, this involves moving forwards and backwards, moving side to side and using pivots. Adding pivots early in your boxing journey means that you can be super-varied in the angles that you use when boxing.
This video gives you 3 really simple boxing footwork drills. The key thing to remember when doing your drills is that you avoid the common faults that can creep in. It’s far better avoiding faults from the outset rather than trying to fix them later.
Advanced Boxing Drills – Angles
Having looked at the basics of movement, you can add in more advanced boxing footwork techniques. These boxing drills are designed to help you open up angles and use 4 footwork skills:
- The pivot
- The angled side step
- Retreat to attack
- The stance switch
This is the type of boxing drill that should only be tackled when you are confident with the basics. We add in a bunch of different punches to bring it to life in your shadow boxing.
Boxing Punching Drills
As with boxing footwork drills, punching drills are about ensuring precision of execution. Each individual punch must be executed with technical precision.
Again, you can drill the individual punch and you can combine the punches with footwork and head movement skills to form boxing combinations.
So how many punches are there in boxing that you can use for your drills? Most people will talk about 6 punches – the jab, the cross, the left hook, the right hook, the left uppercut and the right uppercut.
There are A LOT more than 6 punches in boxing.
I reckon there are 17 basic head punches that you can learn in boxing.
You can build drills by practicing each one of these punches.
In this video I cover those 17 punches – this is well worth watching before you get going:
Beginner Boxing Punching Drills
You can start super simple. The jab is the most important punch, and this is true for any boxer regardless of whether you are short or tall. The jab is most often performed in combination with the right cross alongside simple footwork moves.
In this first punching drill, we combine the jab and the right cross with movement in and out. This is often referred to as the phased attack or the pendulum step.
This is a 3-round drill:
- Round 1 – Jab -> push out/push in -> jab
- Round 2 – Jab and push out -> one two
- Round 3 – Jab -> push out/push in -> one two
Static Punching Drills
You can also work punching drills that focus on head movement as opposed to foot movement. A good rule of thumb is that you should not keep your head still when punching. Move your head before and after punching (we will cover some specific head movement drills in the next section).
The static punching drills in the next video involve combining punching with 3 specific head movement skills:
- Duck
- Slips
- Lay Back
So we use a 3 round structure with 2 drills in each round (1 minute each):
- Round 1/Drill 1 – Jab -> duck -> right cross
- Round 1/Drill 2 – Duck -> jab -> right cross
- Round 2/Drill 1 – Jab -> slip inside -> hook
- Round 2/Drill 2 – Jab -> slip outside -> hook
- Round 3/Drill 3 – Jab -> lay back -> one two
- Round 3/Drill 3 – Right cross -> lay back -> right cross
Counter Punching Drills
Another way of approaching punching drills is to build your drills around a tactical approach. Counter punching is a massive part of boxing, so building preset sequences to build an effective counter punching style is a very good use of your time.
I have a definition of counter punching:
“Landing a punch in response to the action or reaction of an opponent”
To achieve this outcome, you can apply the concept of trigger, defend, attack. Bringing this concept to life in your boxing drills requires you to understand the idea of feinting in boxing.
In the following drills video there are 3 counter punching drills to learn:
- Drill 1 – Feint -> lay back -> attack
- Drill 2 – Feint -> push out/push in -> attack
- Drill 3 – Feint -> slip out -> attack
Boxing Head Movement Drills
When we talk about head movement in boxing, we are referring to 6 skills:
- Duck
- Slip inside
- Slip outside
- Roll inside
- Roll outside
- Lay back
Again, practicing each of these skills individually is a boxing drill, albeit a simple one. Taking an individual skill and running drills based upon that is a key part of the learning formula.
In this section we are going to look at a range of boxing head movement drills. These drills combine head movement with both footwork skills and punching skills.
Drills with the Slip Line
In this first video you start with really simple drills. We can combine the simplest of head movement skills, the duck, with footwork movements – both straight line and diagonal.
The great thing about this kind of head movement drill is that we move our head in 3 dimensions in one movement.
Head Movement and Punching Drills
So what about drills that help you combine head movement and punching. After all, when you make an opponent miss you need to make that opponent pay.
I like to use the concept of flow and counter-flow when combining skills. There are certain skills that when joined together either flow with our natural body mechanics, or they don’t. Both should be mastered.
In this next video we cover 12 static boxing drills that combine slips and rolls with straight punches. You can easily change out the straight punches for hooks and uppercuts:
- Drill #1 – Jab and roll inside
- Drill #2 – Jab and roll outside
- Drill #3 – Cross and roll outside
- Drill #4 – Cross and roll inside
- Drill #5 – Jab, roll inside and move in
- Drill #6 – Jab, roll outside and move in
- Drill #7 – Cross, roll outside and move in
- Drill #8 – Cross, roll inside and move in
- Drill #9 – Jab, roll inside and move out
- Drill #10 – Jab, roll outside and move out
- Drill #11 – Cross, roll outside and move out
- Drill #12 – Cross, roll inside and move out
Boxing Heavy Bag Drills
The heavy bag allows you to use different styles and techniques, either moving side to side and pinging off jabs, right crosses and other long range punches, or stepping in close and using crunching short range hooks and short range uppercuts.
The heavy bag can be used to improve speed, strength, power and endurance by configuring the rounds, punching rate and punching style accordingly. It’s also a great way to relieve the stress at the end of a hard day.
You don’t need much floor space for using a heavy bag, as you need never be any more than a few centimetres out of punching range.
So the heavy bag is an amazing piece of punching equipment that can be a huge positive to your boxing training. In this section I’ll give you some boxing drills that you can use on the heavy bag.
5 Minute Explosive Drill
This is a boxing drill that drives increasing intensity for a 5 minute duration.
Boxing is based upon a round structure, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do longer duration drills to build endurance and technical discipline as fatigue sets in.
During the first minute of the drill you should use single punches. The key when popping single punches is to be mobile and to use lots of feints. You build the work rate with the non-punching skills.
After the first minute, you add a punch a minute.
So, two punch combinations in the second minute, three in the third and so on. This is an intense approach. You could also take the same approach over a 10-minute round, adding one punch to the combination every two minutes.
Boxing Combo Heavy Bag Drills
Another way to run boxing drills on the have bag is to go with set boxing combinations. You can build your combinations to include footwork and head movement skills to really make things dynamic.
You can drill the combinations off the heavy bag, and then engage the heavy bag at full speed.
The following video includes boxing drills based upon 3 set boxing combinations:
- Jab – Push out/push in – Jab and cross – push out/push in – jab, cross and left hook
- Jab, cross, left hook and roll – stance switch left – double right hook
- Jab – slip – left hook – right hook – stance switch right – double left hook
Boxing Partner Drills
All of the boxing drills we have covered so far have been based upon you working as an individual. If you can find a partner to work with, there are a whole range of drills we can use (short of sparring) that can make your training interesting and bring real benefits.
Before we get started on the boxing drills, we need to talk about the flinch reflex and it’s relevance to boxing.
You need to harness the benefits of the flinch reflex.
In the following video I use the story of a veteran of the trenches of the Great War to demonstrate the impacts of the flinch reflex. There are then 5 tips on how you can harness the flinch reflex, and working partner drills will help you do just that.
Understanding the flinch reflex is really important, particularly when we are developing your reactive defensive capabilities.
Range Finding Boxing Drill
Developing your understanding of range is a major step on your boxing learning journey. One of the best boxing drills to help with getting that feel for range is tag boxing.
There are 5 ranges in boxing. Out of range, edge of range, long range, mid range and short range.
The art of long range boxing is being able to move from the edge of range to long range and then back again, and doing this in a precise and clean way.
The tag boxing drill is a drill that I have used for many years. It helps you learn not only your position in relation to the opponent but also teaches you to identify the tell-tale signs of an imminent attack.
When working tag boxing drills, some things to do:
- Don’t push out too far. You always want to be in a position to launch your counter strike.
- Introduce doubt and hesitancy into your opponent by using lots of feints…lots and lots of feints.
Similarly, some things not to do:
- Don’t pull your lead leg back out of the way of the strike. Push out and then push back in, maintaining the integrity of your boxing stance.
- Don’t strike ‘down’ to the target. Bend the knees and look to strike at shoulder level.
- No hand blocks – this is about footwork.
Reactive Boxing Drills
If you want to improve your blocking and parrying capabilities, reactive boxing drills are the way to go.
I put boxing defenses into two basic categories – proactive and reactive.
Proactive boxing defences include head movement and footwork skills. In short, these skills are done in anticipation of punches coming your way. There are more body mechanics involved in performing a slip or a roll and if you wait to see a punch coming before doing the defense your chances of success are lower.
A reactive boxing defense is simpler. You have the time to react and deploy a hand block or a parry. But, you need to drill these defenses with a partner so that you can recognise the punch coming. This is about turning the flinch reflex into something useful.
The following boxing drill uses a simple back hand block to a jab. You could do this with the full range of punches and the full range of blocks and parries.
Proactive Boxing Drills
Proactive boxing drills involve head movement. The thing is, you don’t wait to see a punch coming, you trigger the opponent to throw the punch at a time of your choosing. Again, this is where the ever present feint comes into it’s own.
One of my mottos in boxing:
“Boxing is a pressure business. If you are not punching you should be feinting and if your are not feinting you should be punching”
With this boxing drill you use the feint to trigger the opponent. Following the feint, you go with a head movement (in this case the lay back) and then fire your counter punch.
The lay back can be substituted with any other head movement skill, like the slip, the roll or the duck. This is all about you building pressure and making the opponent pay for their missed punch.
Fighter Emulation Drills
Our final set of boxing drills, and in many ways my favourite, are fighter emulation drills. This is where you analyse a fighter’s style and build a set of drills based upon that style. This way of building drills helps in two big ways:
- You increase your boxing knowledge and expertise by learning to analyse a boxing style
- You develop a super-versatile boxing style, taking elements from a whole range of top boxing styles.
When analysing a boxing style, I use the concept of boxing skills buckets. In very simple terms, you watch a boxer and in turn focus on 4 areas of their boxing style:
- Footwork
- Punches
- Defences
- Body Movement
Holyfield Heavy Bag Drill
In this first video we analyse the boxing style of Evander Holyfield and deploy that style into a round of heavy bag drills.
The key elements of the Holyfield boxing style that I pick out are:
- Footwork – The Holyfield bounce and balance
- Punches – The incredible use of diverse hooks and uppercuts
- Defence – Simple high guard with with defensive hook blocks
- Body Movement – Post-punch slips or ducks.
The Holyfield boxing style lends itself to some seriously intense heavy bag drills. Check out this video as an introduction to a fighter analysis and translating that into your own boxing training:
Boxing Drills for Mike Tyson Skills
When we are talking about heavyweights, we have to cover Iron Mike Tyson. Tyson’s boxing style was distinctive and there’s lots in there that you can use in your own training sessions.
The interesting thing is that I think that you should take good notice of Mike Tyson’s long range work. His ability to cover ground at speed was incredible, often out-punching much taller opponents at long range.
In this video we go with 3 rounds of drills. The first drill is long range, the second and third drills are at close range. You can use a bunch of different footwork and punching skills here, even squaring up your stance at close range to deliver power hooks and uppercuts.
Boxing Drills for Usyk Skills
Sticking with the heavyweights, but one with a very different style to Mike Tyson, you could look at Oleksandr Usyk for your boxing drills.
The Ukrainian star is one of the professional boxers who I recommend my boxers study. His boxing style is simply outstanding and is as attractive as it is effective.
I completed a boxing style analysis of Oleksandr Usyk, following which I created a set of drills that I’m sure you’ll enjoy working.
The Usyk style boxing drills are:
Round 1:
Simple Pendulum Boxing Drill
Round 2:
Jab – Out/In – One-Two or Two-Three
Round 3:
Jab – Angled Side Step – Back Hand Long Range Hook
X2 Jab – Angled Side Step – Back Hand Long Hook
Round 4:
Jab – Block Back Hand Side – Hook with Roll/Pivot
Jab – Block lead Hand Side – Hook with Roll/Pivot
You can do these fight emulation drills for any of your favourite boxers. Check out these fighter analysis articles and videos to give you some ideas.
What Do You Think?
Let me know below. How can I make this guide better? What other boxing drills would you like to see?
Cheers
Fran
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Hi Fran,
I just wanted to ask do you have a weekly routine/schedule for how you train amateur boxers? Like boxing skills everyday or every other day? Strength training? If so, could you send me a link to the routine?
Hi Charles
Closest thing I have for that is in the book Beginner Boxer Toolkit that can be downloaded here https://www.myboxingcoach.com/
Every time I get a tip from you, it makes click in my head. thank you for that Fran. No one has ever shared such a good knowledge with me. Is it actually possible to meet you in a gym to train? If yes than I would come the whole way from germany to get live tipps from you coach. Much respect, Justice
Hi Justice
Thank you very much for your kind comment, very glad that this stuff helps you develop. I am not currently doing one-to-one coaching but may do in the future. Thank you though, I’m very flattered.
no
OK 🙂
Love the web site Fran. Just starting out myself and have been full of a cold today and was gutted to not get a full training session in. But don’t feel like I’ve missed a day as went through your top 10 basics and indeed drilled them in the flat as you say when waiting for the kettle to boil etc.
cheers, Pete
Thanks Peter. Any spare moment 🙂
The information on this site is really good almost too good to be free.
Thanks Hamas.
Fran,
Starting late in life with this sport I have several experiences which substantiate your comments about drills. As a pilot, it was the training drills that saved our lives when the connecting rod went through the cylinder wall of the single engine, that I was flying. Practice may not make perfect but it makes survival a lot more likely!
Excellent, thanks Thom. Really happy that one of those who has been forced to deal with massive stress situations can relate to why those drills matter so much. Thanks again.
Shadow boxing is of course an essential part of the training. I’m just afraid too many beginners (including me) tend to forget ‘the opponent’ when shadow boxing. Then, it’s rather about improving techniques (at best) than drilling your reaction to a certain situation. In my first gym the coach only shouted ‘faster’ during shadow boxing. Then, it was ‘more accurate’, now it’s ‘don’t throw punches, change angles and throw punches’. I’m afraid quite few coaches are able to explain the sence of shadow boxing and few athlets are able to understand and more importantly to keep it in mind.
Tom. great comment. There’s an article I’m working on at the moment on shadow boxing. The importance of shadow boxing cannot be over-stated and the things you point out are key. There has to be a free-flowing element to shadow boxing, otherwise it’s just a drill.
Cheers Tom.
Drills are the backbone of boxing. It is not enough just to learn a sequence of actions – an experienced guy will pick up a drill instantly as he sees it. But using it under stress caused by fatigue and concussion is not a simple task. For that purpose the skill must become automatic. Call it conditioned reflex, muscle memory, subconscious habit, the way to achieve it is roughly 10 000 repetitions. At this point your brain may become your enemy, a boxer involved in a heated battle should not even think in words but in images, sort of a visual-spatial problem solving effort.
Another aspect of drills is predictability. If you do two or three things all the time, the opponent knows what you’ll do (he doesn’t know when). If you do 5 tricks, the odds are better. Great fighters can get away with doing one and the same thing – Joe Frazier bobbed and left-hooked his way to stardom, Pacquiao for all the hype does the “right hook, roll under” drill most of the time. James Toney on the other hand is an old school wizard who rarely does the same thing or any drills at all, he improvises opponent-wise as if he was born with those moves.
Most boxers though should do drills daily and tech-spar as much as possible. Shadow boxing in front of a mirror is “good clean fun” and is not just posturing as some people think, it’s a nice honing tool.
Not anonymous anymore, I take full responsibility for the comment above.
Hey Ivan. Excellent contribution. I particularly like the fact that you have quantified the efforts to instil the skill, this will give people a real understanding of the kind of commitment required to nail this kind of stuff. There truly are no short cuts in boxing. Another very relevant observation is the importance of variation. Predictability is a sure-fire way to give your opponent an advantage.
I’ve got something coming up on shadow boxing, along side some other cool bits. Thanks Ivan, some great comments there that allow people to get a context for some of this stuff.
Amazing ivan ali continuously jabbed his opponents but he did each of them slightly differently each time maybe doing the same thing a couple different ways may be unstoppable
I love your articals its helps to know its not easy to flow .the steps and the punches, is filming my self box help?
Thanks Ike. You can use a mirror, that’s the quicker and less expensive way. But yes, looking at yourself is a big help.
Thank you for the article. Yes, I find it very useful to decompose the very complex sport into its particular single skills. It for sure makes it easier to grasp them. And I welcome the effort to show how these single skills must work together, in complex. Dialectics:).
As far as drills are concerned, I’d just advocate for benefits of practising them with a partner if possible.
Thanks Tom. Glad that the article assists. The overlaying and joining up of skills are what this site is all about!
In terms of practising with a partner, I’ve got an article coming up in the next few days that cover exactly that.
Cheers Tom.
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Thanks Mohammed. Checked out your site, looking good. I really hope that you and Ken manage to bring something to the streets that will make a real difference. Congratulations and good luck.