When Lal Saaed Khan was developing as a boxer in Peshawar in the early 1970s, he trained under two coaches whose combined influence shaped his career in ways he later credited explicitly. Yaqoob Kamrani, who knew Pakistani amateur boxing from the inside, provided contextual grounding. Tom John, an American, brought methods from a different boxing tradition entirely. Khan retained the national championship for eight consecutive years and attributed his success to exposure to two distinct methodological approaches. His account is straightforward: different coaching philosophies, applied together, produced a better boxer than either would have produced alone.
Khan’s experience raises a question that remains unresolved in Pakistani boxing more than five decades later. How do coaches in a resource-constrained national program gain access to diverse training methodologies? And what happens to fighter development when that access is limited to a single tradition passed down through personal apprenticeship?
How Pakistani Coaches Are Made
The dominant pathway into coaching in Pakistani boxing runs through competition. A fighter competes, accumulates ring experience, develops an intuitive understanding of technique and tactics, and eventually passes that understanding to younger fighters at the same gym. This model has clear strengths. Coaches who have competed understand what the ring feels like under pressure, what physical preparation demands, and what adjustments are necessary mid-fight when a game plan no longer works. That experiential knowledge is not trivial. It cannot be fully replaced by classroom instruction or certification coursework.
The limitation is that the experiential model propagates whatever methodology the coach learned, without external correction or enrichment. A coach who has learned to prioritize offensive output over defensive fundamentals will teach the same. A coach who learned weight management through crash dehydration will teach crash dehydration. A coach whose own preparation never incorporated periodized strength training will not incorporate it in his athletes’ programs. The methods travel down intact, including any gaps or errors they contain.
The Pakistan Boxing Federation organizes coaching courses, but a systematic, tiered certification program comparable to those maintained by governing bodies in the UK, Germany, or Cuba has not been established at scale. England Boxing, for instance, runs certification levels from assistant coach through to high-performance coach, with assessment criteria, required study hours, and ongoing professional development requirements. The Pakistan Boxing Federation lacks both the funding and the organizational infrastructure to build an equivalent system, and without one, coaching quality across the country remains uneven and largely self-referential.
The Amateur-to-Professional Transition Problem
The coaching gap produces one of its most visible consequences when Pakistani fighters make the transition from amateur to professional competition. The two formats are technically different enough that preparation for one does not automatically prepare a fighter for the other. Amateur boxing under current AIBA rules uses three-round bouts with protective headgear and judges who score based on real-time punch counting. Professional boxing uses longer fights, no headgear, and judges who assess ring generalship, effective aggression, and defense across rounds. The defensive skills that winning amateur boxing rewards — staying off the ropes, controlling distance, limiting clean punches landed against you — are more technically demanding in the professional context, where accumulated damage matters across twelve rounds rather than three.
Pakistani coaches who trained primarily as amateur fighters and have coached primarily at the amateur level have genuine knowledge gaps around professional preparation. Twelve-round conditioning work, game-planning for specific opponents based on film study, cut management, and corner strategy across late rounds — these are skills that professional coaches in established boxing nations develop through years of high-level professional camp experience. Most Pakistani coaches have not had that access.
The consequences appear concretely in fighter records. Muhammad Rehan Azhar’s first-round knockout loss at the 2021 Defence Day Fight Night against Taimoor Khan — who went on to win the WBC Asia heavyweight title in 2023 — raises questions about whether the preparation he received matched the level of opposition he faced. Whether his conditioning, his defensive work, and his game plan for Khan were appropriate to the matchup is not knowable from the outside. What is knowable is that Pakistani fighters facing early professional losses often receive no diagnostic analysis of what went wrong, no targeted remediation, and no adjusted preparation framework for subsequent bouts, because the coaching infrastructure to provide those things is absent.
What Muhammad Waseem’s Training Path Reveals
The most instructive data point on the Pakistani coaching gap is Muhammad Waseem’s decision to train abroad throughout his professional career. He worked in Japan under his Korean promoter Andy Kim’s arrangements. He trained at Floyd Mayweather’s gym in Las Vegas. He prepared in Liverpool before his IBF flyweight title challenges against Moruti Mthalane in 2018 and Sunny Edwards in 2022. Before his May 2025 WBA Gold bantamweight title fight, his preparation included time outside Pakistan, as coaches and sparring partners were unavailable domestically.
Waseem was not seeking foreign training because Pakistani coaches lack passion or commitment. He was seeking it because professional world-title preparation requires sparring partners who replicate world-class opposition, strength and conditioning coaches who understand the physiological demands of elite professional boxing, and corner teams with experience managing fighters in high-pressure 12-round bouts. Those resources exist within the professional boxing ecosystems of Japan, Las Vegas, and Liverpool. They do not yet exist in Karachi, Quetta, or Lahore at the level required for a world title challenger.
The fact that Pakistan’s best professional boxer had to self-finance international training stints to access world-class coaching represents a genuine structural gap — not a personal preference. Fighters without Waseem’s earnings, promotional relationships, and determination cannot replicate his training path. They prepare using domestically available resources, which are substantially less.
The Sports Science Dimension
Modern elite boxing preparation incorporates sports science components that are essentially absent from Pakistani boxing’s coaching ecosystem. Periodized strength and conditioning programming — structured around fight camps with distinct phases of volume, intensity, and taper — requires both specialist knowledge and facilities. Nutritional planning that manages weight cuts safely while preserving performance capacity requires a dietitian’s input and monitoring. Sports psychology work that addresses pre-fight anxiety, in-camp pressure, and performance under adversity requires trained practitioners.
None of these are luxuries in competitive professional boxing at the international level. They are components of baseline preparation in countries that regularly produce world-ranked fighters. Their absence from Pakistani boxing is not primarily a cultural problem — it is a resource and infrastructure problem. The knowledge exists globally. Access to it requires investment in coach education, facility development, and sports science staffing that Pakistani boxing’s current funding levels cannot support.
The path from where Pakistani boxing coaching currently sits to where it needs to be is not short. Systematic coaching certification requires curriculum, instructors, assessment capacity, and recurring funding. Sports science integration requires laboratory facilities, specialist staff, and coach education. Exposure to international coaching methodologies requires exchange programs, training camp partnerships, and the kind of federation relationships that were easier to arrange when Anwar Chowdhry ran AIBA than they are now. Each of these is a solvable problem. None of them is solved simply by wanting Pakistani fighters to perform better.
