1) Body Mechanics/Technique: If you can learn how to throw, as an example, both a lead uppercut followed by a lead hook for power, that means you will have to learn how to use your entire body to load, unload and reload these punches. Just using your arm will not cut it. And as I have mentioned in this blog before, teaching people how to use their entire body to throw punches is the biggest challenge for someone new to boxing. Doubling-up on one side almost forces the issue. When we just throw alternating, left-rights, each punch will naturally load the next. When it's the same side, like 2 lefts, you have to create the load separately, which helps the body learn.
The same is true for sudden explosiveness. Nobody can throw 2 power punches in a row on the same side as quickly and explosively as they can throw 2 left-right power punches. But we can get closer than one might think. Trying to compensate for that deficit can also naturally force us into upping the intensity those 2 (or more) same side punches.
Both of these things translate into better technique, even if you're just throwing a single punch on it's own. So using that example of a lead uppercut followed by a lead hook, if you practice that as part of a combo and you're able to get power and explosiveness behind those punches, your lead uppercut and lead hook will be better/stronger/faster in any combo, any scenario, regardless of whether you ever throw them in succession like that again.
2.) Feints: One of the Next Level steps in boxing is to learn how to effectively use feints. Feinting with your feet and feinting with your hands. When it comes to your hands, you will be much better at doing this when you have practiced extensively throwing multiple strikes in a row on the same hand. Even though a reload is more about power and feint is more about speed, that comfort-level and explosiveness will better sell a feint to your opponent.
3.) Coordination & Balance: Besides just your boxing skills, you are building additional coordination and balance throwing the same hand more than once for power, especially when you throw an entirely different punch and double-especially on your non-dominant hand. Just like it naturally loads punches for you, left-right-left-right will help naturally balance you out too. Using the lead uppercut to a lead hook once again as an example, these 2 strikes together will require you to shift your weight from one side of the body to the other and if you don't do this properly on the lead uppercut, you will be off-balance when you try to throw that lead hook. We humans are designed not to feel right when we are off-balance and while it's certainly possible to explain how to remain on-balance, the body has to learn it, as well as the mind. All of those coordination and balance skills - and the are trainable skills that if you don't use, you lose - that we learn from boxing factor into everything else we do in life.
4.) Workout: Another thing I say over and over again is that the better you are at boxing, the better the boxing workout is in terms of cardio, strength, endurance, everything. You can work really hard with left-right-left-right, for sure, but mixing it up works your body differently. Forces it to adapt, to change, and never get to settled. A great thing about boxing vs. every steady-state exercise is that even though we are always punching, defending, moving, etc., it is never the same exact thing over and over. Sometimes the bursts are short, sometimes they are longer. Sometimes they are quicker, sometimes they are more powerful. The punches, the timing, the rhythm, the order of everything is always changing so the body can't get so used to it that it isn't pushed to change.
5.) What's Open? So you don't have to care about why we would reload in a fight to still reap many rewards of the exercise but if you do care about the strategy behind it - or it just helps you to better understand something when you get "The Why" behind it - here is a simple example for you. Let's say I throw my left hook to the body of my opponent and he brings his right arm/elbow down to protect the rib cage area. This is what he must do to avoid a body shot that could very well end the fight and if we're in close enough, there won't be time to move out of the way. At that point, I could throw my right hand but he still has his left hand uncommitted and could block with that one too. What I do know is that he has committed his right arm to blocking my body shot, which means he likely had to lower his elbow, at least slightly, which also means that the right side of his face is at least slightly exposed. If I am quick enough and my opponent is not Archie Moore (master of the cross-guard), I now have a free shot to that right side of his face with my left hook. Now of course he may counter some other way and in boxing there is always a counter to the counter to the counter to the blah blah blah...but setting up open shots is what it's all about. It's also true that we don't always have time for a full reload if we want to land a punch but practicing them will only help us when we need to cut corners.
Going back to #4 one last time, I have found that visualizing the strategy and what my opponent would do actually makes me work harder on the heavy bag. If I'm throwing a left hook to the body followed by a left hook to the head just because the trainer told me so, I won't throw it quite as explosively than if I imagine the scenario I described above, where my opponent blocks the left body shot and I've only got a split second to go to that chin before he does something else. That visualization will actually make me speed up and hence, get a better workout. I can almost guarantee it will for you too!!
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