Boxer Manny Pacquiao handed journalists a ready-made hook when he declared that he was inspired by Bruce Lee:
His conditioning coach, Alex Ariza, says he believes Pacquiao built his baseline movement off Lee’s template, the continual attacking, the feet drummed in and out.
“Bruce Lee jumped around and kicked his feet and shook his head and shoulders,” Ariza said. “His feet moved in concert with his hands. He could be choppy, but he was rhythmic. Manny does the same thing. It comes from that.”
His conditioning coach may claim that Pacquiao is following Bruce Lee’s template. His actual coach, Freddie Roach, presumably deserves some of the credit:
After Erik Morales defeated Pacquiao in 2005, Roach decided Pacquiao needed balance, and Roach set about enhancing his right hand. In practice, Roach instructed Pacquiao to throw jabs, uppercuts and hooks in three- to four-punch combinations, all right-handed. It took three years, but a different fighter emerged against David Diaz, and Pacquiao later knocked out Ricky Hatton with a right.
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Back when Roach fought, boxers mostly engaged straight on. His work with Pacquiao, the angles they created, changed the way Roach trained. If Pacquiao shifted left, outside the right foot of his opponents, their natural instinct was to follow — into his left hand. If opponents chose not to engage, they had one option, to back away. Roach says Pacquiao improves his position with each angle created and makes it more difficult to counterpunch.Roach and Pacquiao design angles specific to each opponent. The key, Roach said, is creating space and confusion.
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Roach and Pacquiao did not invent this approach to boxing — Roach cited George Foreman’s 1990 knockout of Gerry Cooney as an earlier example — but they elevated angles into art. Roach sees boxing’s future in Pacquiao’s fancy footwork.
The other major angle is that Pacquiao is a physical outlier:
[Brazilian conditioning coach Alex Ariza]‘s star client is a physical outlier with a resting heart rate of 42 beats a minute. During intense workouts, that rate will rise to 205—a level the boxer can sustain for long periods. Pacquiao does 2,000 repetitions each day of situps and other punishing abdominal exercises. He rounds out these exercises by, among other things, fast hill runs, interval training, zipping around cones to improve footwork and even, when no fight is coming up, playing basketball.
Some endurance athletes, like Olympic cross-country skiers, have lower resting pulse rates—somewhere around 38, Ariza says—but they also train at high altitude, something Pacquiao doesn’t. “Manny is on the level of the most conditioned athletes in the world,” the trainer says. “He’s a phenomenon. I wish we could do in-depth tests, but he doesn’t like anything invasive.”
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One theory is that Pacquiao benefits from a high level of energy, one that lets him indulge a consuming passion for exercise. In the morning, his trainer says, he begins with long hill-runs in which only his dog can keep up. In the afternoon, he puts in as many as 12 rounds of sparring followed by seemingly endless calisthenics. Often, when he finishes his grueling 14-exercise ab routine, he’ll do it again.
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Other differences that make Pacquiao stand out are the intensity and tempo at which he trains and fights, and his ability to ignore pain. Most boxers are constantly trying to decide when to expend energy and when to take a round off. Pacquiao likes to know that he has enough training in the bank to allow him to bring the most intense heat possible and to punch almost continuously. In his past two title defenses, Pacquiao has averaged a startling 96 punches per round. Against Antonio Margarito, he let fly 1,069 blows and connected with 474 punches, the eighth-highest total ever recorded in a championship bout by Compubox, a statistics service. “Sure, Manny is fast and hits hard, but the thing that is special with him is his intensity,” says sparring partner Shawn Porter. “It is electric in there. He is always pushing the pace.”According to Ariza, there is a rare breed of person, often trained by the military, who can blot out the physical pain that comes during heavy exertion as lactic acid builds up in the muscles. “Manny is definitely one of them,” he insists. “When Manny was a kid, he would run five miles a day in flip flops. Try that for a while and it will not only toughen your feet up, it will increase your pain tolerance.”