Pacquiao needs to dedicate himself more to training year round if he wants to keep from getting KO’ed again by Marquez

By Dan Ambrose: If you look at the difference between the effort that Juan Manuel Marquez put out compared to Manny Pacquiao in getting ready for their fourth fight together earlier this month it becomes apparent immediately that Marquez simply wanted it much more than Pacquiao did. Marquez trained for 16 weeks compared to the mere seven weeks that Pacquiao put in.

When Marquez started training camp, he was already in fighting shape and ready go. Marquez used the training camp to focus more on his conditioning and building strength rather than going over the fundamentals that he’s already well versed in. The outcome of his decision to work harder on his body was that Marquez was much stronger than Pacquiao and was able to hurt him with his shots.

It wasn’t just Marquez’s 3rd round knockdown of Pacquiao that showed that kind of power that he had going for him this time around, it was also Marquez’s hard body shots that clearly got Pacquiao’s attention, as he dropped his guard to keep from getting hit to the body again.

The power of Marquez’s body punching may have led Pacquiao to keep his guard down low by his ribcage as he attacked Marquez in the waning seconds of the 6th round and getting caught with a big right hand that knocked him out cold. The rest is history. Pacquiao lost the fight and was out cold for two minutes on the canvas.

If Pacquiao wants to beat Marquez in their fifth fight next year, Pacquiao is going to have to ease off with the bible study, the basketball games, the politics, and the signing of autographs.

I think Pacquiao needs get a new strength and conditioning coach and then focus on building up his conditioning and power over a 17 to 18 week period to get as ready as possible to fight Marquez. Pacquiao didn’t look good in his loss to Marquez. He looked soft, like he’d done little in the way of working on his strength. This was later confirmed by his strength coach Alex Ariza, who said that Pacquiao spent the entire camp working on his boxing training rather than his strength and conditioning.