By Eric Thomas: David Lemieux’s trainer Russ Anber wants to get the young 22-year-old Lemieux (25-1, 24 KO’s) back in the ring soon. Lemieux was stopped by middleweight contender Marco Antonio Rubio in a 7th round TKO last Friday night in Montreal, Canada in somewhat of an upset. Lemieux came out fast trying to knock Rubio out in the early rounds but when Rubio failed to go down, Lemieux quickly ran out of gas and wilted when Rubio started firing his own power shots.

Anber wants Lemieux to start using his jab more and stop relying so much on his power to win his fights. It looked like Lemieux had no plan B after his power shots failed to stop Rubio. Lemieux, to his credit, did start to use his jab in the 7th after he was hurt in the previous round. However, by then Lemieux was already hurt and tired and couldn’t take Rubio’s big right hands once he started throwing them in the round.

Anber might want to work on Lemieux’s defense as well as his jab, because Lemieux’s chin looks to be vulnerable to big shots. There are equally big punchers in the middleweight division comparable to Rubio, and unless Anber is going to have the short Lemieux move down in weight to the junior middleweight division, Lemieux is going to be meeting up with some other big punchers that can test his questionable chin. At the same time the contenders will have noted how Rubio was able to wait Lemieux out by dragging him into the second have of the fight and they’ll no doubt be trying to do the same thing with Lemieux.

The biggest problem that Lemieux has had is that most of his fights have been one or two round blowouts with him quickly knocking out his over-matched opponents. This has prevented him from having to learn how to fight and use other skills that he’ll need against better fighters. It’s also prevented Lemieux from being able to build up his stamina properly. Lemieux looked like a four round fighter last Friday night because he was completely exhausted after that. Anber might want to start Lemeiux all over from scratch by building him up from four round fights to eight round and then ten and finally 12 rounders. Right now Lemieux looks to have the stamina to fight only four rounds.