Learning good things from bad boxers

Having a finger splint on my right hand has significantly reduced what I can do. No punching. Lifting weights is pretty tough. So that means I'm doing lots of abs and legs.

An x-ray determined that my right hand pinkie finger is not broken, just badly sprained. And I guess if there was a time for an injury like this happen, now is ok. I had more time to watch the Olympics. Watching countless hours of boxing taught me some important info., especially the early, preliminary rounds where some of the fighters seemed to have only a smigden more skill than me. I was able to learn more from watching bad fighters than I learned from watching good fighters. A bad fighter's mistakes are very easy to see, whether it's their lack of movement, not using the jab, too much movement .... it's basically easier to see what makes a bad figher bad than a good fighter good. A good fighter's movement is very fluid, it's fast and concealed and their punches and steps all blend together.

Teddy Atlas, one of the announcers, while criticized by many for bad coverage, taught me some important rules. Atlas had no problem pointing out what a fighter was doing wrong, and many times I  could relate because I know they are things I do wrong. During one fight, one of the boxer's was just bouncing up and down. Sure, he was moving, but there was no point to his movement. He wasn't moving forward, or offline, he was just bouncing. All the bouncing was doing was wasting his energy. Atlas had a field day ripping this guy apart. His critique solidified in my mind a few things that have been taught to me: you can't punch and move at the same time and you can't avoid a punch when you're bouncing up and down. Your feet have to be on the ground to do anything. This was pure gold to me and gave me a much greater understanding of what I should be doing with my feet.

My pinkie hurts. A better punch will end the pain

I haven't gone to a doctor, so there's no official diagnosis, but I definitely screwed up my little finger on my right hand. It's not broken 'cause there's no serious swelling and it's not black and blue, but heavy punching is definitely off the table for a while. What I have is a lite version of a boxer's break. A boxer's break is damage to the 4th and 5th metacarpals, or the ring finger and pinkie finger.

What happened is that over the course of a few weeks I was consistently landing my right crosses on my pinkie finger. After these repeated strikes it just gave out, got sprained, cracked or something. So no punching for a while ... sort of. What I need to do is improve my strikes so that I'm landing on the larger knuckles. I'm spending time on the double-end bag throwing soft punches to try and improve my form. I'm only wearing wraps - no boxing gloves - when I do this so I can see where on my hand I'm impacting the bag.

A guy in the gym suggested using a Muay Thai punch to eliminate the possibility of landing the punch on the small knuckles. This punching style requires rotation of the arm so that on impact with the target your thumb is facing the ground. Make a fist and hold your arm so that your thumb is facing the ground and you'll see that this position forces the two larger knuckles to be in front of the smaller knucles.