Getting hit with the same punch three sessions in a row is not bad luck.
It means your brain has a gap it has not closed yet. You are not seeing the shot early enough, not reading the setup, or reacting to the wrong thing. The fix is not to work harder in the next spar. It is to understand exactly what is happening and drill the specific response.
Most boxers do not do this. They get caught, feel embarrassed, tell themselves to be more careful next time, and then get caught again. Without actually reviewing what happened, you are guessing at the solution. You are probably guessing wrong.
Why the same punches keep landing
Under pressure, your brain stops processing individual shots and starts reacting to general threat. If someone is walking you down, you are thinking about the pressure, not about their rear hand. This is why you can know a punch is coming and still eat it. Your attention is in the wrong place.
There is also a technical side. Most repeated punches land because of a consistent setup. Your opponent finds a pattern they can exploit: you drop your right hand after your jab, you always step straight back, you blink when the lead hook is thrown. They did not plan it. They found it. And they keep going back to what works.
The problem is that in real time, you cannot see this. You need to look at it after.
How to identify what is actually happening
Right after sparring, write down the punches that landed cleanly. Not all of them, just the ones that surprised you or kept repeating. Which hand was it? What were you doing just before it landed? Were you moving forward, backward, or standing still? What was the shot that came before it in the combination?
You are looking for a setup, not just the punch itself. A right hand rarely lands in isolation. Something opens you up for it: a jab that makes you cover your face and forget your right ear, a body shot that pulls your elbow down, a feint that makes you commit your weight forward. Find that thing.
If you have video, even better. Watch the thirty seconds before each clean shot. The tell is almost always there once you are looking for it.
Fix the specific problem, not the general one
Once you know what the pattern is, you can drill the right counter. This is where most boxers go wrong. They identify the problem as "my defense was bad" and spend the next session working on defense in general. That is too vague to fix anything.
- Keep eating the jab-right hand. Drill the outside slip on the jab until it is automatic. Work it slow with a partner, then at speed. The slip needs to be your default response to a jab, not something you remember to do.
- Getting caught with the left hook to the body. Your right elbow is probably floating away from your ribs. Work the tight guard position on the bag. Then have a partner throw slow hooks to the body while you hold the correct position under contact.
- Getting stunned by uppercuts in close. You are probably standing too upright at close range. Practice keeping your head off center line when you are inside. Chin down, forehead forward, not presenting a stationary target.
Breaking the habit under pressure
Here is the hard part. You can drill a correct response a thousand times on the pads and still revert to the old habit when someone is actually in your face throwing punches. Under stress, your brain defaults to the pattern it has used the longest, not the one you drilled last Tuesday.
This is why drilling is not enough on its own. You need to deliberately expose yourself to the same situation in sparring and practice the specific response. Tell your partner what you are working on. Ask them to throw that combination repeatedly so you can build reps with the correct response under real pressure.
It feels uncomfortable because you are going into a situation you know will challenge you. That discomfort is the whole point. The habit only rewires when you practice the right response in the conditions where the wrong response used to happen.
How to know if it is fixed
Do not just ask yourself "did I get hit by it today?" You might have just had a different sparring partner who does not throw that combination. Test it intentionally. Spar with someone who throws a similar shot and see how you respond. Better yet, ask them to specifically set up that punch and see if you handle it cleanly two or three times in a row.
One clean response is not a fix. Consistent clean responses under pressure, across multiple sessions, is a fix. Anything short of that and the pattern is still there, waiting for the right moment to come back.
The bigger picture
Every punch that keeps landing is telling you something precise. The information is there in every sparring session. Most fighters ignore it because they do not have a system for capturing and reviewing it. They walk out of the gym with a vague sense that things went well or badly, and that feeling fades by the next day.
If you can get specific, even in writing down a few sentences after each session, you will find patterns faster than any coach watching from the outside. You were inside that spar. You know what felt wrong. The job is to make sure that feeling becomes information you actually use.