By Chris Williams: Deontay Wilder showed off his new combination power punching with trainer Malik Scott on social media on Monday. The way that Wilder is looking in his workouts with Scott, he’s going to be pure 100% trouble for Anthony Joshua and Tyson Fury.
The former WBC heavyweight champion Wilder (42-1-1, 41 KOs) displayed a new pivoting movement, combination, and body punching to his arsenal.
Deotay Wilder being refurbished
This is a whole different Wilder from what we’d seen of him in the past, in which he had only two punches in his arsenal – jab and right hand.
Thanks to trainer Malik Scott, Wilder could re-enter the heavyweight picture among the elites in the division with this new change.
Wilder needs to find a way to generate more power with body punching, and he’d be an immediate threat to Joshua and Fury. Right now, it appears that Wilder’s power isn’t where it needs to be for his punching.
He looks weak when throwing to the body, and that’s something that will need to be changed for him to deal with Joshua and Fury, both of which use a fair amount of head movement.
If Wilder could throw to the body with the same type of power that he goes to the heads, he would be almost unstoppable. The reason Wilder lost to Fury in 2020 because he couldn’t land his right hands to the head.
Fury did an excellent job of moving out of the way of Wilder’s attempts to hit him with headshots the entire fight, but it would have been a different story if he could have downstairs with a vicious body attack.
Fury and Joshua’s advantages over Wilder are the superior technical boxing skills that they’ve picked up from years of training. For Wilder to measure up with them, he’s got to change his game in almost every area, starting with his offense.
It won’t be as difficult for Wilder to match Fury’s development because he mostly uses a lot of upper body movement, body punching, as well as clubbing shots behind the head. That’s the easy part for Deontay.
Trying to match Joshua’s skill level will be a lot harder, considering he does so many different things inside the ring, and he comes up with new tools with each fight.
For example, for Joshua’s rematch with Andy Ruiz Jr in December 2019, he remade his game into an imitation Wladimir Klitschko style, and the copy was nearly identical.
Joshua not only copied Wladimir’s fighting style, but he perfected the flaws that were inherent in his game.
For Wilder to get to where he needs to be, he’s got to be able to add new tools in the same way Joshua does. It’s going to take a lot of hard work for Wilder to do so, but it’s not impossible.