AS a learning exercise, Amir Khan believes his unanimous points victory over Chris Algieri last weekend could prove to be the perfect preparation for the showdown he craves against Floyd Mayweather.

The Bolton boxer admits he made a host of mistakes – over-training, under-estimating Algieri, adopting the wrong game plan and then putting in a sluggish display.

But unlike his three previous defeats against Breidis Prescott, Lamont Peterson and Danny Garcia, when Khan says he made some of the same mistakes, this time he found a way to win.

“I won the fight and I know 100 per cent I wasn’t the best Amir Khan. There is a lot of room for improvement but maybe things happen for a reason,” he said.

Khan’s problems started at his training camp, when he believes he left too much in the gym.

“I am not blaming Virgil. I am not blaming anyone but myself,” he said.

“I know what I am like. When I want to achieve something so badly, I am going to keep working hard towards it and that could be the worst thing.

“I really think I might have left a little in the gym.

“I just didn’t feel the same way.

“Going into the fight, when I hit the mitts, I normally feel so explosive – at my peak condition – but this time I didn’t.

“In the first rounds of the fight I felt cold.

“Next time there are going to be a lot of changes.

“I am going to sit down with my team before I go out there and tell them how I want things to be.”

The 29-year-old also believes the pre-fight hype about Mayweather was a distraction. Khan reckons he mentally switch off, a trait he recognises from previous encounters he was supposed to “walk through”.

And then when Algieri brought a more attacking style to the fight, rather than the counter-attacking strategy he and his trainer, Virgil Hunter, had been expecting, the Bolton boxer was forced into a rapid rethink.

But Khan is sure the fact he overcome physical and mental barriers to grind out a victory proves he is ready to compete against the world's best.

“This fight shows to me that even when things weren’t working for me in the early rounds, towards the end it began to work for me because I started to adjust," he said.

“I can do that now, whereas before I couldn’t do that when I was under another trainer.

“It shows me I can make adjustments and that is going to give me more confidence.

“When I fight someone like Floyd Mayweather I might need to adjust two or three times in that fight because he is that much of a technician and that much of a good fighter.

“You have to keep on adjusting against someone like him because he won’t continue doing the same things.

“So I am glad that this fight happened this way because it brought a little bit more out of me and I learned something new about myself.”