Pacquiao looks too muscular for the Mosley fight

By Boxing News - 05/03/2011 - Comments

By Chris Williams: If you’ve looked at Manny Pacquiao’s physique during the training camp and photos for his fight with Shane Mosley this Saturday night, you can’t help but to observe how much more muscular Pacquiao is for this fight compared to his last couple of fights. Pacquiao looks like he’s packed on a lot of muscle in his upper body around his arms and shoulders.

It doesn’t look like good muscle that will help him in a long fight, though. I think Pacquiao may have been overdoing it a bit during this training camp with his strength and conditioning coach Alex Ariza because Pacquiao seems to be carrying a lot of useless muscle for this fight. I can see this hurting Pacquiao if he’s not able to get Mosley out of there in the first six rounds.

Pacquiao no longer has the body he needs to fight a long range fight. His body is now packed with the same kind of bodybuilding muscles that WBA heavyweight champion David Haye has. Haye isn’t a fighter that can long rounds without gassing and struggling. I see the same thing happening with Pacquiao here. If he doesn’t take Mosley out early, all that useless muscle is going to come back and bite Pacquiao on the backside by having him tire out and start to take punishment.

I don’t know if fans remember how tired and old Pacquiao looked in the Joshua Clottey fight. He looked like a tired old man in the later rounds of the fight, and it was amusing to see all how much treatment he needed in between rounds to get him to catch his breath. This Saturday night’s fight may be much worse for Pacquiao because of all the muscle he’s put on for this fight.

It’s too late now to take off all that muscle. He’s basically stuck with it now. It’s up to him to try and conserve enough energy in each round that he doesn’t gas out early and get knocked out. Luckily for Pacquiao, they’ve chosen 39-year-old Mosley to fight instead of someone with stamina like Floyd Mayweather Jr. or Juan Manuel Marquez.

Mosley will run out of gas long before Pacquiao does, so maybe it won’t matter that Pacquiao is carrying around all that energy-draining muscle on his small frame. I personally think it’s stupid how big he’s gotten. The guy needs to trim down and focus on speed rather than size.



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