Sanchez: Brook is training the wrong way for Golovkin

By Boxing News - 08/25/2016 - Comments

Image: Sanchez: Brook is training the wrong way for Golovkin

By Patrick McHugh: Kell Brook (36-0, 25 KOs) has decided to bulk up in weight for his fight against IBF/IBO/WBA/WBC middleweight champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin (35-0 32 KOs) for their fight on September 10. Golovkin’s trainer Abel Sanchez says he wouldn’t trainer Brook the way he’s doing it with him bulking up to 176. Sanchez feels this isn’t going to work at all against Golovkin, because it’ll make him slower, easier to hit, and less able to get away from him.

Brook and his trainer Dominic Ingle seem to be betting that by being bigger than Golovkin, they’ll have a better chance of beating him on September 10 at the O2 Arena in London, England. Sanchez seems to believe that Brook would be better served by coming in as trim as he can so that he can use movement and his superb boxing skills to try and out-box Golovkin.

Goodness knows, no one has been able to out-punch Golovkin in the past. By Brook bulking up, he’s following in the same path as many other fighters in the middleweight division that have attempted to slug with hi in hopes that they could beat him at his own game. It never worked though, and it probably won’t work for Brook either.

“You know there’s all kinds of ways to do this thing and they have 36 wins under their belt so they are obviously doing something right,” said Sanchez to Fighthub.com. “Yeah, if you ask me and I had Kell, yeah, that would be completely the wrong way but I’m not training Kell, I’m training Golovkin.”

It’s nice that Sanchez is willing to be completely honest about what Brook is doing with his training, because a lot of trainers wouldn’t give him a useful tip like that. Many trainers would disguise their true thoughts by saying the opposite of what they felt. But Sanchez is so confident that Golovkin is going to win the fight that he can give Brook tips for things that he should do in this fight.

Brook, 30, is going to try his best to win the fight against Golovkin using the strategy that his trainer Dominic Ingle has come up with. It’s obviously going to be hard for Brook to beat Golovkin if he’s plodding around the ring in the mid-170s. That’s a lot of new weight that Brook has never carried around with him before in an actual fight.

YouTube video

Brook will obviously have been training against sparring partners in camp while weighing close to 180s, but it’s a much different thing when you fight the real thing in Golovkin. Brook isn’t going to find a sparring partner as good as Golovkin, so he’s going to be coming into the fight weighing a lot and not having the ability to get away from him like he would have if he had come into the fight a lot lighter.

In the recent training video of Brook this week, he still appears to be in the 170s, and he’s bulking up with weights. He seems to have to set a course with his training camp with his strategy of bulking up and nothing is going to deter him from that plan. He thinks it’s going to work and he’ll have to find out the hard way that he would have been better off if he came into the fight lighter.

“He doesn’t care, he wants to get in the ring,” said Sanchez about Golovkin not being bothered by the criticism leveled at him by boxing fans upset about him fighting a welterweight in Brook rather than a middleweight. “He understands that nobody wants to fight him, and if you’ve saw the last press conference you see a little frustration in him – guys talking and talking and talking and not wanting to sign. But it’s another fight, we’re two weeks away, it’s not even in his mind – the criticism.”

The fans want to see Golovkin fight guys like Saul Canelo Alvarez, Daniel Jacobs, Billy Joe Saunders or Andre Ward. They don’t realize that he can’t fight those guys right now because none of them want to fight him. If all it took for Golovkin to get a big fight was for him to show interest, he’d have a lot more fights under his belt against the top guys.

“No because I know exactly what’s going on. And you guys know exactly what’s going on. How many guys out there talking and nobody signing,” said Sanchez.