ariza By Chris Williams: According to Manny Pacquiao’s former strength and conditioning coach Alex Ariza, Pacquiao isn’t the same fighter he once was for one reason or another. Ariza thinks Pacquiao has lost a lot of the talent that he once had in his game five years ago.

Ariza says that Pacquiao used to break bones and put his opponents in a coma with his power shots, but now he’s not the same fighter. What happened to Pacquiao is hard to tell, but the fact that he’s not going to be the fighter he once was when he gets inside the ring on May 2nd with Floyd Mayweather Jr obviously won’t be a good thing for the 36-year-old Filipino fighter.

“If you talk to the trainers and fighters who know this sport, there’s a reason why they’re all picking Floyd to win. For me, the guy [Pacquiao] that I trained five years ago, the guy that was walking through walls and that was literally breaking bones with shots and comatizing [sic] people with single shots, the opponent that we have now is a shell of that guy,” Ariza said via Fighthype.com.

Pacquiao sure isn’t walking through walls now or putting guys in comas with his shots. His opponents are having no problems making it the distance with him, and in some cases, he’s been getting beaten by his opposition. Pacquiao doesn’t have the single punch power to knock guys out nowadays. Instead, he needs to land a lot of shots, and even then he still doesn’t knock them out.

Ariza trained Pacquiao during the height of his career when he was not only knocking everybody out, but he was also bringing in a ton of pay-per-view buys with each fight of his. Just why Pacquiao didn’t insist on keeping Ariza around in order to keep the success formula is unclear. To me, it seems like a huge mistake on Pacquiao’s part for him to have not insisted with Roach that he be kept on board to continue to help Pacquiao.

Ariza is now working with Mayweather as his strength and conditioning coach, and thus far he’s batting 1000. Ariza did a great job in leading Mayweather to a victory over Marcos Maidana last September. It was Mayweather’s intelligence for him to see how important Ariza was in being the main guy that brought success to Pacquiao during his best years. Now Mayweather is going to take advantage of Ariza’s strength and conditioning knowledge.

There’s no going backwards with Pacquiao. Since he’s not going to get Ariza back with him, I don’t see him being able to recapture the lost power that has slipped away from him in the last six years.

The power is gone for Pacquiao, and his strength and conditioning coach that he’s currently employed hasn’t helped in bringing that power back. Pacquiao should be looking at results in terms of whether he’s gauging whether his strength and conditioning coaches are working for him. The fact that he’s not knocking guys out with his current strength coaches tells me that he needs to go in another direction.