Joshua Trains With Team Usyk As Jake Paul KO Threat Looms

Anthony Joshua today revealed that Oleksandr Usyk’s team will be training him for his fight against Jake Paul on December 19, 2025, on Netflix at the Kaseya Center in Miami, Florida.

(Credit: Esther Lin/Most Valuable Promotions)

Why Team Usyk?

Typically, AJ (28-4, 25 KOs) is trained by Ben Davisonbut he is doing his best for this match, and chooses to go with Team Usyk for the eight-round match against Jake. This move should be seen as a sign of concern as this is a fight that Joshua cannot afford to lose or look bad in.

Team Usyk won’t be able to do anything to fix Joshua’s punch resistance. This is a problem that goes beyond the training solution. If he gets hit clean by Jake, it won’t matter how many tricks Team Usyk teaches him. He will go down, and he may not get up.

The danger of the shorter fighter

The 6’1″ Paul (12-1, 7 KOs) looked much smaller than the 6’6′ Joshua during their encounter today in the kickoff press conference. However, being shorter would give Jake an advantage, as he is tall and Joshua is not used to fighting him.

It may be difficult for him to judge upcoming punches. With Paul’s strength, he has enough to defeat AJ in front of millions who will watch the contest on Netflix.

Jake KO chart

“I think I will get knocked out in the fourth or fifth round.” “Anthony,” Jake Paul said of his prediction against Anthony Joshua. Yeah, 1000%,” Paul said of who has more pressure on them going up against AJ.

Jake’s five-round prediction is excellent. At this point, Joshua will either be killed or stopped himself. Joshua was all over the place in his last fight against Daniel Dubois, getting knocked down in rounds 1, 3, 4 and 5 on September 21, 2024. If Dubois had been a better finisher, he would have knocked AJ out in the first round because he was gone.

“I’ll go in there, I can fight freely,” Paul said of how mentally unattached Joshua will become when things start to go wrong for him on December 19. “If he starts getting emotional and losing rounds, I think the cookie will crumble.”

Historically, when things start going downhill for Joshua in his fights, they tend to stay that way. The only instance where he turned things around was his fight against 40-year-old Wladimir Klitschko on April 29, 2017.

In that fight, Vladimir dropped Joshua in the sixth round, hurting and gassing him from seven to 10. Instead of eliminating him, Vladimir inexplicably chose to surround him from the outside. On the 11th, Joshua got his second wind and knocked out Klitschko. In hindsight, AJ should have gotten the knockout if Wladimir had fought in any sense. If Jake Paul puts Joshua in a similar situation on December 19, he won’t let him off the hook.

“I won’t be training with Ben Davidson. I’ve been invited to train with Usyk’s team. We’ve done some good training in Spain, and I think [Oleksander Usyk] “One of the best in the world,” Joshua said of training with Oleksandr Usyk’s team for this fight.

Changing trainers for this fight may not be the smartest move for Joshua, as he needs to fight with a system he is used to. If he draws according to a number system, a system he’s not comfortable with, Jake can take advantage of it.

“I’m going to bring him to another boxing school that I don’t think he’s been exposed to yet,” Joshua said. “So there are a few tricks I have up my sleeve to show Jake on December 19.”

The best strategy for AJ should be to come out swinging, throwing hard shots to try to take Jake out as quickly as possible. The longer Paul is left there, the greater the chance of him being knocked out by the younger fighter.