By William Mackay: In what could be a major blunder on former IBF/WBA light welterweight champion Amir Khan’s part is his decision to begin weight training to get ready for his July 14th title challenge against WBC light welterweight champion Danny Garcia.

This could turn around and bite Khan on the backside by slowing him down, making him more vulnerable and causing him even worse stamina problems than he already has. Khan has been working with his new strength and conditioning coach and has decided to start working on weights in order to try and pump up his rail think upper body.

However, this seems like a really bad idea because weight lifting doesn’t improve punching power, and mainly only contributes to slowing down a fighter. The only time a fighter should be lifting weights is if he’s trying to gain weight to fight in another weight class, and even then it’s going to mess them up by making them slower. Look at Tim Bradley. Lifted a lot of weights to bulk up to get to the 147 pound division for his fight against Manny Pacquiao last weekend, and it led to Bradley ending up slow.

What Khan needs isn’t weight lifting. He needs to work on his endurance because he’s run out of gas in his fights against Marcos Maidana and Lamont Peterson. All weight lifting will do is destroy Khan’s only asset – his hand speed. Once you take away Khan’s hand speed, hes’ got not much left. That’s pretty much his whole game is his hand speed. Sure, he can shove, pull down on his opponents’ heads and put them in headlocks, but you need more than that to win fights. Khan also needs to get back with his old strength and conditioning coach Alex Ariza and get back to what was working on the past.