G Is For Guard

I touched briefly on this in my E Post on Evasion, but there is a bit more to say about the boxer's guard in the ring.

The guard is arguably the most important part of the boxers game, given that the defence and attack all spring from a good guard.

There are several different guards which can be employed by a boxer, but a good boxer will employ more than one, if not all of them at some point during a fight. 

One of the reasons for this being that a boxer's guard speaks of their boxing style, and so to avoid telegraphing too much information to one's opponent it pays to mix things up.

Whilst the guard is most obviously linked to the boxer's defence, the punches all spring from the guard. Where the hands are by the head is also the place from which any punch should come, rather than pulling one's arm back (pulling a punch). The reason this is bad is two-fold, firstly it's inefficient and secondly, it lets your opponent know what is coming so they're better placed to deal with it, which is not desirable.

Another reason for the guard being important is that in a professional fight, points are scored for punches landing on one's opponent, however punches that only land on their guard do not count. I find it frustrating to watch boxers who drop their guard and allow their opponents easy points by not defending properly, but that's a rant for another day.

My preferred style of guard is the basic guard which I like to mix up with a high guard and a peek-a-boo guard. I'll occasionally use a sit-down and I simply cannot get to grips with the philly shell.

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This post is part of a series in the Blogging From A To Z Challenge, April 2022.