Pretending mitts are completely unnecessary is the cool thing to talk about in the Standup Forum right now. They come in waves, just wait for the next one.
For a good year the "this coach likes his fighters with high hands lulz" was the hip thing to say. Bag mitts being far better than a modern glove was another.
Doesn't matter that an overwhelming majority of successful modern fighters and trainers don't agree with these ideas, it's important to appear as though you "know" better than the norm.
This is also an interesting statement. The underlying implication of this seems to be that if modernity agrees on something, that automatically qualifies it as not only valid but OPTIMAL. So by this rationale are people merely to accept that modernity and accuracy are synonymous? Is there no real reason to delve into the reasons why something exists as it is, and if there was not a better means of accomplishing a goal? Furthermore, are we to simply let trend (because a current happenings in large numbers is what a trend is, weird pants can't be a "trend" if only 50 people in the World wear them) do our thinking for us?
See, I can't speak for anyone else here but that's unacceptable to me. After spending a decade in boxing gyms in THE center of boxing in the U.S., if you're paying attention, you notice things. What I specifically noticed is that I paid 3 trainers who were World Class fighters A LOT of money (if I had that money I could put a down payment on a house for my Family) for essentially small variations of the same workouts for 5 years. The small variations a were largely in how they wanted me to hit the thing they were holding. Then realizing that much of that stuff didn't translate to sparring on a very high level, and if it did, it was very very slow. Then, when actually ASKING these men how they learned what they did, you find it was NOT from hours and hours of mitt work.
I don't think I need to drop names, but one of them came up in the Dominican National system and won a few world Amateur titles. That system is run almost identical to the Cuban system. And it's not that they never ever use mitts, it's that it's quite rare as training is done in large groups. They also don't have lots of money to spend on gear, so while places like the U.S. and U.K. became more about "the latest technological advancements" these places and others like them just kept going without much of that. What evolved, were the drills they do, and their ability to practice in ways that translate directly to moving around a person who is also moving. Sure you can simulate this with mitts (I always did mitts as if I was fighting the student, no sloppy stuff from me), but having them compete with each other for a small position just works better.
Just because something goes against what you see all the time (which you should also ask yourself WHY you're seeing that, "Iceman" John Scully recently made a public post saying he thinks most fancy mitt videos out there are FOR the trainer to look good, not to teach the fighter), doesn't mean it's wrong or even a minority thought. And just because people feel like a notion makes more sense than what they've seen doesn't mean it needs to be scoffed at if it doesn't agree with your basic notions. Plenty of trainers do shit differently than me, personally, but I don't slight them for it because I'm not insecure about what I'm doing. They can do shit however they want, but if you ask me where flaws are, I'll be honest about it. And big picture things like why the Countries who don't do shit like Westerners do started hoarding medals, and are now deep in the Pro ranks and seem to be hoarding Titles as well.
It just seems interesting to me that you and listrahtes are implying that this subject is born of fad when, Historically, that's not so. And you attribute any lasting of these notions (that often times originate from people like myself) is merely due to it seeming as if we invented it. Far from it, this is more like dusting off of old things an examining why they were, which one could argue you're not actually learning a craft if you don't know that. It also discounts that this board has had very in-depth discussions on this in which people have suggested what you're suggesting. So this discourse is also not new.
At the end of the day trainers can train how they want, fighters can learn and fight how they want, so long as the aspects of fighting are accounted for and everyone is honest about what they're doing. But one of the most prominent trends going right now is mitt - men who cannot teach a guy to fight all that well, fighters who can do lots of tricky mitt-work and can't pull those tricks off in sparring or a fight...and each being very reluctant to self-examine. Those have to be the biggest indicators of something being amiss.
