Any boxing insiders out there? How long does it take to recover from a professional prize fight.? I met a ex boxer years ago who said he pissed blood for a week after a fight. Having a pro pound your gits for 10 rounds cant be good for you. Some fighters fight every couple momths. Some once a year. How much time is necessary?
Not an insider, but I used to be quite a fan. My dad told me boxers used to have hundreds of fights in a career…now, a guy with 30 fights is considered seasoned. Times have changed. But all those great boxers of yesteryear boxed quite often.
I guess “hundreds” might be exaggerating, but many more fights than they have today.
Some modern fighters still log a lot of fights. Julio Cesar Chavez and Roberto Duran both had over 115 fights. For comparison, Jack Dempsey had 80, Joe Louis had 72, and Rocky Marciano had only 49. A lot of the big name guys from the last decade (like De La Hoya and Roy Jones) tend to retire with less than 50 fights because they make enough money that they can afford to.
How long boxers go between fights is more about business than recovery and training. Finding an opponent that the trainer and promoter think is a good career move and negotiating the details of the fight (location/pay split/glove size/rules/etc) are generally what lead to long delays between fights.
Heavyweights tend to have fewer fights over a career than the lighter weight classes, the reason being that they fight other heavyweights. And heavyweights hit hard. It takes a lot longer to recover from a beating by a 230 pound man than a beating by a 150 pound man.
Heavyweight champions seem to defend their titles about every six months, all things being normal (no contract disputes or severe injuries that cause delays). Sure, much of that is just training, rather than recovering from the last fight, but I doubt most fighters would want to push it much more than that.
I did hear once, during a boxing match, a comment from one of the announcers that it’s a generally accepted rule of thumb that an injury such as a facial cut will recover about 1% every day. In other words, after suffering an in-ring cut, you’ll need to protect and treat the cut for 100 days for the area to be as resilient as it was before the cut.