What Does Boxing Pad Work Do?
Focus pads are now a mainstay of boxing gyms as they greatly benefit everyone who uses them. But since they’re advertised to beginners as the next best step after shadow boxing and we still see the likes of Mike Tyson and Anthony Joshua training with focus pads, they must have more benefits than we realise.
So what does pad work do? Why use focus pads at all? You’re about to find out.
Benefits of Boxing Pad Work
Anyone can use boxing pads, also known as focus pads or focus mitts, and honestly, everyone should. Using focus pads to train is a great way of improving a number of your boxing skills when you’re starting, and can still fine-tune your skills as you become more advanced.
Here are a few benefits of pad work for your boxing performance:
- Improves coordination
- Improves shot accuracy
- Increases endurance
- Improves footwork
- Improves focus
- Improves tactical awareness
- Maximise power
However, focus pads aren’t just limited to use in boxing or other combat sports training; in more recent years, they’re being used in high-intensity workouts and fitness regimes for people of all ages and capabilities as they also have many benefits to our physical and mental health.
These include:
- Relieves stress
- Social activity
- Burns fat
But how does pad work do all of this?
What Does Boxing Pad Work Do?
The shapes and sizes of all boxing equipment can be confusing for non-boxers or beginners to see the benefit, but everything, including focus pads, is designed especially to improve specific boxing techniques.
Focus pads are small cushioned pads, usually curved, that are attached to gloves so they can be worn by a boxing coach or sparring partner, who can both move the focus pads in a way to improve your shot combinations and give you practical advice on how to improve your technique.
Thus, with a great coach or someone who knows how to hold focus pads properly, you can achieve a lot with pad work as your boxing coach can help you hone your boxing skills through various drills.
Each focus pad drill is designed to help improve a specific skill, such as the 1-2; throwing two straight punches in a row forms a basic combination that every successful boxer will need to learn in the beginning, and as they advance, they can improve the speed and accuracy of their jabs, integrate power into their shots, and include defensive manoeuvres such as ducking hooks thrown by the mitt holder.
When using focus pads, it’s important to know what skills you want to focus on and remember that while pad work can help maximise your power, it doesn’t necessarily increase your power.
Do Focus Pads Build Muscle?
The short answer to ‘do focus pads build muscle’ is no. No boxing training routines actually build muscle, as boxers build muscle in the gym, and improve their fighting skills when sparring or engaging in pad work.
To build muscle, boxers will take part in exercises that provide a great deal of resistance while also fully extending the muscle, so that muscle fibres tear and are rebuilt stronger, and bigger, which provides muscle growth, also known as hypertrophy.
Once physical strength has increased through exercises such as press-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups and squats, boxers can then maximise their power through pad work, by slowly increasing the power behind each shot so that they don’t compromise their shot accuracy or combo speed for the sake of power.
In the same way, heavy punching bags may seem to increase strength and power because striking a heavy bag will increase endurance and enable powerful shots, but punch bags don’t build muscle either; they provide a safe and practical way to hit as hard as you can to increase punching power.
Does Pad Work Burn Fat?
While it doesn’t build muscle, you may notice your muscles start to show more after training with focus pads, because pad work does burn fat.
As the focus of your pad work training isn’t using as much power as possible, it encourages you to hit the mitts for a longer period of time and raises your heart rate, which is known as cardiovascular exercise. To lose weight, you have to be in calorie deficit, i.e. burn more calories than you consume, so with a healthy diet, regular pad work will enable you to burn fat and lose weight, which will see you tone your body.
A combination of muscle-building and cardio with a healthy diet will help speed up your weight loss, if that’s your target, and will show off those abs and biceps even more clearly.
How Do You Use Focus Pads?
Ultimately, how you use focus pads depends on what skills you’re trying to improve or what your fitness goals are. If you’re looking to get physically active and socialise at the same time, training with focus pads with a friend is a great way to have fun, release any pent-up negative energy and engage in aerobic exercise to help burn fat and tone up. In this case, 20-30 minutes 5 times per week, as per UK health guidelines, is perfect for your physical and mental health.
However, if you’re an amateur boxer, your goals will be different and you should perhaps train with focus pads in a different way.
Focus Pad Training for Advanced Boxers
To effectively use focus pads to improve your boxing skills, it’s important to have a great mitt holder. Since focus pads are meant to replicate the movement of a real opponent, your training partner holding the mitts needs to move around and hold the pads in the right places for you to be able to strike them in a natural rhythm to practise your combinations.
But how long should you hit the pads for? Hitting the pads for 15-20 minutes is an excellent warm-up to your training, but it may be more useful to reenact a real fight by practising each drill for up to 3 minutes, having a short break and then repeating the exercise.
Like this, you can get into the rhythm of using your body intensely for these short periods so when it comes to fighting a real opponent, you have the muscle memory needed to spring back each round. What’s more, in order to get better on the pads and be ready to face an opponent, you should take each skill back to basics and build up from there.
Once you’ve worked out the precise technique for a particular shot or combination such as the 1-2 leading and rear arm jabs, or jab-jab-cross, you can then improve on this by slowly speeding up the combination, maintaining accuracy and steadily increasing the power behind the shot. If you increase power too quickly before you’ve perfected the technique, you can hurt your wrists.
How Do You Build Muscle in Boxing?
If your focus pad training is going smoothly and your strikes are consistently speedy and accurate, you never trip over your feet, you’re tactically aware enough to adapt your game plan as necessary and you can hit the pads for long periods of time, then there’s only one thing missing from being a successful boxer: power. To increase power, you need to build muscle.
Unfortunately for boxing lovers, there aren’t any specific boxing drills or boxing equipment from the best brands that will help you build muscle. Instead, boxers have to engage in strength training, usually using weights, to increase their arm size and neck muscles, get a six-pack and any other attributes we associate with a boxer’s physique.
If muscle-building is your fitness goal or the last piece of your boxing puzzle, then start lifting weights such as dumbbells and engaging in circuit training or HIIT to build your muscles.
Where to Buy the Best Focus Pads
Maxx Pro Boxing is one of the UK’s leading suppliers of boxing equipment, selling high-quality focus pads that are long-lasting to help you get the most out of your boxing pad training.
