Pad Holding Has Become a Joke

Bigger Stronger Leaner
1

Yep you can take a 1 day course and you’re a qualified pad holder, start ripping dumb cunts in offices 60-100 an hour for training and you’re a machine gun pad holder.

Before you think I am slagging MMA in general, I am not. I don’t mind it, I enjoy it at times too but I thoroughly hate the bullshit that it has also spread with it’s popularity and the injustice it has done to stand up arts.

My main beef is with pad holding.

More and more have I noticed that people don’t hit pads any more. They actually have their pad holders hit their gloves. They barely move their arms and legs with true technique to hit a target, rather the ‘pad holder’ throws out and catches the gloves. Pad holder gets more of a work out and the sound of machine gun rattatatat as the fighter hits pads makes them look like they’re decent stand up fighters.

Big Fucken LOL.

Before you get your knickers in a knot, I understand the concept of catching a punch or kick but what is now happening is a joke. Pad holders are meeting the trainee 1/4 of the distance through the trainees technique. What you have is short, ineffective, bullshit technique that cannot be applied at all in any fight scenario, even in close range fighting because the mechanics are completely out!

So fuck you MMA popularity. You’re making stand up look bad, spreading bigger bullshit with your hocus pocus pad work sessions and your fighters are countable on one hand that actually have decent stand up. Holy shit that’s some bad numbers. All the world MMA pool and you can count the decent stand up guys on one hand.

Oh sorry, I know the answer… yeah, yeah, yeah, you have to concentrate so much on not being taken down. I get it. Same excuse every time so that justifies the dog shit stand up work in MMA.

No one can watch any MMA guy or girl punch pads for hours because their is no art or beauty, skill or technique in what they do. So we have trumped up highlight reels from fucked up camera angles to hide their flaws. Documentaries that jump from scene to scene, mixed with music to arouse, angles to please and imagery to excite all because they lack the skill to properly display a still camera view of a guys technique.

One that comes to mind is when they were heralding Jake Shields as working on his stand up when he fought St Pierre. LMMAAAOO, that camera work hahahah, those snippets… poor guy still looked like dog shit in the doco’s.

Anyway, rant over.

2

Don’t disagree at all, but my rant would be more along the other end of the spectrum with people holding pads like wet noodles.

I like the way Roach does padwork, I think the guy holding the pads should be almost as involved as the guy doing the punching. The focus on trying to get a dominant angle here and avoid the most common counters here I really like:

Roach training Van Damme (Notice how much slower GSP is in 16oz gloves? I don’t think most people realize just how big a difference bigger gloves impacts on your speed and power, shit if boxing and MT/K1 had 4oz gloves I guarantee we’d rarely see fights go further than first or second round)

Melvin and mike:

And as an aside, anyone who thinks the Mayweather padwork is easy to master, it aint:

3

None of those vids work for me…

4

Fuck Dave!!! I swear I was going to post a video of Freddie’s pad work. Good stuff. I also love the dutch methods. Watch Cor Hemmers hold for Saki… hands barely moved and Saki is moving instead to hit him.

Says a fucking million about Saki, Dekker et all who all fight like steam trains ramming through walls… actually like most dutch guys. Unlike the faggots in MMA now tip tapping shit like it’s point fighting. Little do they realise their pro boxing and moooeeyy thai dick holder… I mean pad holder is pissing in their pockets

Also notice how GSP’s mechanics are fucked?

5

Great idea for a thread.

Definitely agree with you, Humble.

And Aussie Davo, great selection of videos. Mayweather’s pad work is definitely hard, but I’m with you that Roach’s padwork takes some beating. I rate it far higher than the padwork of Mayweather. As you say, he makes you work for the angles.

To me, a trainer who is good with the pads will almost be sparring you hard, except all your shots are being called on their terms, so you’re out of rhythm and always having to be thinking. If all the trainer is doing is what Humble pointed out in his post, a fighter may as well be hitting the bag, in fact, they’d be better off shadow boxing and working the bag. You should have to adjust your timing and distance to make contact with the pad. The trainer shouldn’t just hold it up and let you hit it, or move in so it makes a nice snap. He should put the pad up and move around, slightly in and out of range, left and right, to encourage you to step in behind your punches, and by doing so, should put himself in a position to ask questions in response to a particular shot he has had you throw. So, for example, if he calls for you to step in behind a straight right, he should be looking to slap you with his pad to the gut or head, to make sure your technique is tight to defend against the counter left hook.

6

Agreed LB.

It always used to fascinate me when I would hear guys say shit like “Oh I did 10 rounds of pad work”… I’m like wtf? My trainer would move like freddy so much, and drills like Hemmers but calling out up and down, left and right shots, legs, kicks, elbows, knees so rapidly I would barely scrape through 6 rounds. That’s full power, no slap the pads rounds. Then I would see how they did pad work and laugh. Tip tap patty cakes pad work.

The amount of times I have torn ligaments in my toes from getting caught between the mat connections from moving around so much, making angles, avoiding shots etc… I’ve lost count.

Ahh, I fucken miss it all.

7

Truth.

I don’t know that I ever did more than 5 or 6 rounds myself, probably a lot less than that usually, I was sure as hell too tired to ever keep count. Even at my fittest, I’d be blowing chunks after the first round. I’m working mainly with less experienced boxers and some juniors at the moment, and the fittest of them can just about manage 3 rounds before I send them back to a bag or to do some partner drills. These are kids who can go hard all through a 3 x 2/3 fight, and come out the other side ready to do it all again. Pad work done right ain’t no joke.

8

Yeah, gotta agree with you guys. IMO there is a time and place to throw in a flurry (in which shortened punch mechanics and “pitter pat” punches are permissible to set up the big punches at the end of the flurry) when hitting pads, but the whole training session shouldn’t be throwing what basically resembles a slow motion flurry (with little movement no less). I also always got frustrated as hell when people holding the pad for me (not guys who train under myself or my instructors, as we don’t stand for that nonsense) would basically try to hit my punches with the pads as hard as they could or hold them with horrible alignment and they would basically feel like hitting air (“wet noodles” as London, as amusingly enough my wife, refer to them).

I teach a cardio boxing/kickboxing class at the fitness gym I personal train at and I’ve totally given up on trying to work in pad work to it in favor of just having people hit the heavy bag. Like you guys said, it’s a skill set/art form that takes a while to gain proficiency with and actually time and effort on the pad holder’s part to get good at it. That’s hard enough to do with a bunch of motivated, athletic students (which I of course do have with my MA students), but try it with a bunch of totally unmotivated, uninterested people (some of which are middle aged women who want nothing to do with holding pads in the first place). It’s utterly infuriating/demoralizing.

The guy who taught the the class before I did is actually a pretty good boxer, but not a great coach and didn’t teach them how to do it right. Add to that that there is another instructor who teaches a “cardio kickboxing” (which is actually some form of bastardized Karate from what I’ve observed, which brings up a topic deserving of it’s own rant thread) who has them “hit pads” and it takes all of my self control to not rip into these other individuals when class members ask me “why don’t we hit pads?”

9

Rant completely justified,humble. I can understand specific speed work(or whatever you call it) on boxing mitts. BUT that shouldn’t be the standard…as there is no footwork/angles involved. Kills your mechanics and prevents from learning how to punch/kick through targets. Which is a must when working with Thai pads. I always tell(as I learned myself) students that Thai pads are meant for FULL power.

I actually will have a class every so often where the focus is on proper pad/mitt holding. I stress that being a good pad holder should mean your partner should never be comfortable…OR waiting for what’s next. To me true pad work should be akin to sparring. My coach would beat the crap out of me when working pads…lol.

10

Ditto to everything in this thread.

I work with a couple boxers that are utterly fucked because I can tell their FIRST trainer hit their hands too much - their punches are shorter, they don’t know how to extend, and they can’t grasp the concept of “range.” It’s a real bitch.

11

…um…shit, my coach does that, I wonder why and I will ask him next time. Hits my gloves with the focus pads.

12

[quote]DeadKong wrote:
…um…shit, my coach does that, I wonder why and I will ask him next time. Hits my gloves with the focus pads.[/quote]

It depends how much he does it. It is completely correct to take up the slack and provide a solid target for the punch to com up against. If he is reaching forwards to catch the punch then he is not doing you any favours. Think of it this way: how long do we let fighters who defend against our punches by reaching forwards and abandoning their guards stay conscious? If your coach is smacking your hands with his pads, I think you would be doing him a favour to put a check hook on the point of his chin to remind him to protect himself at all times.

13

Yeah, what London said. The pad holder has be able to provide a solid target for you, and needs to provide a realistic placed target for each punch (for instance for a hook to the chin the pad should be held at the point where a hook would actually land, but in front of the chin). So, depending on the person punching, some motion of the pad into the punch may be necessary.

What the pad holder should not be doing is hitting your gloves as hard as you are hitting the pads, or reaching out to catch your punches when they are only 1/2 of the way extended (all the time, sometimes it is beneficial to give the feeling of an incoming target to test alignment of the punch).

One important caveat though is that we are discussing pad holding for people who posses some degree of skill in punching. If I’m training a complete novice who is just learning about the mechanics behind punching correctly and being able to consistently hit a stationary target, I wouldn’t 't be doing either of us any favors to make them try to hit the pads in movement. So, if you are very new to striking, or perhaps your trainer is trying to force you to speed up your punch cadence/speed, then there might be good reason for them to not follow what we have been describing in this thread exactly.

Finally, people tend to reproduce what they have been taught, sometimes without really understanding why they (or those who did the same with them) are doing so. I see this all the time with regards to holding for the jab and straight right/left. There are specific reasons why one should have a fighter hit one pad with the jab and the other pad with the straight right (I’ve seen Roach address this before to a degree and his method of pad holding more or less fixes the problem of mechanics by having the striker try to hit the pad Holden’s chin), but it seems that a lot of coaches have taken this to mean that this should always be the case, when in fact, it is not the case. In other words, it serves a useful purpose, but because that purpose is not always conveyed, people have taken it to the extreme and it has since been applied incorrectly/lost some of it’s original benefit.

So, yeah, I’d ask your coach why he is holding the pads for you like he/she is before jumping to any conclusions.

14

hey humble, where are you going to be holding the 2013 pad holding convention this year?

15

[quote]balancefitness wrote:
hey humble, where are you going to be holding the 2013 pad holding convention this year? [/quote]
LOL you made an account just to say that? GTFO

16

Sorry, I should have been clear Balancefitness poofta cunt.

I meant Thai pads, Boxing pads, kick shields etc. Not menstrual pads. Wrong forum or at least wrong section.

17

[quote]balancefitness wrote:
hey humble, where are you going to be holding the 2013 pad holding convention this year? [/quote]

If you want to learn to fight sweetheart, don’t be shy, just say so. One of us will point you in the right direction.

18

Good discussion. What drives me crazy is someone who starts a class, works for a few months, thinks they are getting good,and then when they try to learn how to hold pads, they act “scared”. like LB said, turning into “wet noodles”. Christ, that drives me up the wall. You want to learn how to fight and you are a pussy behind the pads? LOL…ranting.

19

I wish I could take credit for the wet noodles, but the glory belongs to that bastard Aussie Davo for that turn of phrase.

20

[quote]LondonBoxer123 wrote:
I wish I could take credit for the wet noodles, but the glory belongs to that bastard Aussie Davo for that turn of phrase.[/quote]

Haha! Like I said in my post, my wife has been using that phrase for the past 5 years since she has been training with me regularly, and then having people other than me hold pads for her in “cardio” classes. Funny that Aussie came up with the same term.