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Your experience in Cuba sounds a lot like the Romanza boxing gym in Mexico City - I only trained there for a week but was a very cool experience - decrepit old equipment and ring but with pics of the Marquez brothers, de la Hoya and others they had trained on the wall. Nacho Beristain actually walked in while I was training and asked his assistant who the "schmuck in the corner hitting the heavy bag" was. They also had fighters from Japan training there that week.
I learned to box in the U.S. but the Mexican style is different - they stand with a wide stance completely sideways to the opponent. The assistant kept correcting my stance when he was holding pads for me but I wasn't there long enough to get used to it. But it's clearly worked for Mexican boxers.
Does the Cuban boxing style have any major differences to U.S. boxing? I know they're right up there with Mexico and the U.S. in terms of international success.
Yea I did about 10-days there but I would go every day and spend the 4-5hrs there morning till afternoon. My legs were not happy going from training on mats to long sessions on concrete. Im an avid road runner and the abuse of those sessions were grueling on my legs.
Theres only two places to train boxing in Cuba, one is where I was, which the public can have a very hard time going as the government would stop by time to time and check who was there. And then there was the gym the actual National Team trains at and NOBODY from the outside can train there. The gym I went to had the famous coach there that went by “Nardo”, and during my time there I seen dudes from the National team would actually show up and train and seek instruction from Nardo after training at the National gym.
My dad still goes to Cuba and had been going by the gym on every visit since to thank coach Nardo for letting me train there and covering for me when the gym got check by bringing gifts of jumpropes, handwraps, and Mohamed Ali dvd’s. Sadly my dad just went by this last spring and Nardo is not at the at the gym any longer and the gentleman running the gym told my pops Nardo is actually in Mexico training boxers, for National team or not I do not know.
As far as style differences. The big one was throwing the cross. It was important to be in the sideways “fighting stance” like you said above but when you throw the back-hand instead of just pivoting onto the ball of your rear foot and rotating your hips through and even rotating shoulders full extent like I was shown here in the states, they would want you to not rotate your shoulder too much but bring your back foot up square with your shoulders, so you would end up really square when you are extended with your cross out. So you slide your rear foot up square as the cross makes its way to the target, the moment of contact the foot should stop sliding and be square with your shoulders square to your opponent if tjat makes sense.
His defining of the lead hook, he said the front hand hook is the only punch that has all 3-ranges, short, medium, far. Straight punches are only used medium to far. And uppercuts are short to medium. And never to use any punch outside of any of these ranges.
Oh they pivot on the front foot to 45*s like a mofo in all our drills and like to block the body with the lead-hand a lot (philly shell?)...and using the shoulder and shoulder roll to compensate the lead hand being low when it is low.
I was a iska regional kickboxing champion 160lbs back in the day and I couldnt land a single punch on the national champs when Id spar them......movement sicckkkkkk