Watch an Olympic Boxer Explain the Best Place to Land Punches to Win a Fight

Tony Jeffries is a former Olympic medalist who enjoyed an undefeated run during his professional boxing career. While he retired in 2012, he has spent the intervening years sharing his insight and expertise with newcomers to the sport via his YouTube channel. In one of his recent videos, he breaks down some of the key areas of the body that a fighter should be aiming for in the ring in order to be in with the best chances of winning.

“When you think about boxing, where you should hit your opponent, everyone will say ‘hit him in the chin,’ because that’s where you’ll hurt him,” he says. “And that’s right, you should hit someone in the chin. Or, should you hit them in the nose, because that will hurt as well. Or should you hit them in the temple? All of these different places will hurt… But I don’t aim for any of them places. The place to hit them, I say, is on the top of the head.”

Jeffries acknowledges that this is one of the hardest parts of the head, but it’s all about the effect of the punch; when you hit someone on the forehead, their entire head is knocked back by the impact. “If I’m a judge at a ringside and I see someone’s head go back like that, boom, guess what, I’m scoring that point.”

However, there are also some prime spots to aim for on the body, Jeffries explains. For example, right in the center of the chest. “If you’ve been hit there before hard, you’ll really know how it feels,” he says. “It really does take the wind out of you. You can’t really build muscle in this area of the chest, so if you can hit someone there, great.”

Alternatively, he adds, you can aim jabs at the side of the body, under the bottom rib (usually just below elbow height). This can have the same winding effect. “We’ve seen fighters like Oscar De La Hoya, who was an absolute beast in his day, he got put down and finished by Bernard Hopkins with that exact punch there.”

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