By Chris Williams: Trainer Freddie Roach believes he’s gotten to the root of Manny Pacquiao’s leg cramp problems which has plagued him in his last two fights against Shane Mosley and Juan Manuel Marquez.

According to fightnews.com, Roach is blaming it on Pacquiao playing too much basketball during training camp. He thinks Pacquiao’s tendency to play a lot of basketball strained his legs, causing him to cramp up for his fights. However, this is just a theory that Roach is going by, because he doesn’t have any clear evidence that the basketball playing is the real cause of Pacquiao’s leg cramps.

But he’s convinced Pacquiao to stop playing basketball, at least during training camp in an effort to eliminate one potential cause. Roach still doesn’t know if it’ll work or not, because Pacquiao never suffered leg cramps in his training camps before his last two fights even though he was playing basketball. The cramps only surfaced during the actual fights, which is kind of strange given that Pacquiao is sparring often with three separate sparring partners one after another for 12 full rounds.

You would assume that leg cramps would show themselves in training/sparring just as they would in an actual fight. The only thing you can take from this is perhaps Pacquiao is fighting a lot harder when it’s real thing and coasting at a lesser pace in training camp. That’s the only thing I can think of, because realistically the leg cramps should be there whether you’re practicing or in an actual fight. I used to be sprinter for many years and I occasionally would get leg cramps in training AND in my track meets. I didn’t just get leg cramps at my meets.

According to fightnews, If Pacquiao’s leg cramps show up on the night of his fight against Tim Bradley this Saturday, Roach is going to have Buboy Fernandez, one of Pacquiao’s helpers, work on Pacquiao’s legs to try and relieve the cramps. It’s unclear why Roach isn’t mentioning strength and conditioning coach Alex Ariza for this job, as he’s going to be working the corner of the fight and this is his avenue. He did go to school for this. Why Buboy would handle this and not Ariza seems bizarre to me.

Here’s my take on this: Once you start getting cramps in your legs during practice or an event, the cramps to quickly come back almost immediately when you start moving quickly again and putting stress on them. I think the massage that Buboy does with Pacquiao’s legs won’t solve the problem. He’ll only cramp up again in the next round if he starts hopping around like a rabbit. It could be that Pacquiao is simply getting older and the leg cramps are telling him something.