6 Important Benefits Of Boxing You Need to Know
Boxing is enjoyed by millions of people around the world, whether as a recreational activity, part of a fitness routine, or training for a heavy weight title. Anyone can benefit from boxing, even if you don’t want to pursue it as a sport, there's plenty of benefits to be gained from boxing and below are 6 Benefits Of Boxing.
1. Fat Burning / Calorie Burning
Boxing is a high intensity activity, and it may not surprise you to learn that it burns a lot of calories in a short amount of time. As it is primarily anaerobic, boxing gets your cardiovascular system working harder than it would if you were just jogging on a treadmill. Because of this, it’s not hard to see that burns just as many calories as jogging in half the time. And as a high intensity workout, you continue to burn fat even after you stop. Your average boxing session will burn between 200-400 calories and even more after your training. If you combine this with a healthy diet and lifestyle, boxing turns you into a fat burning machine.
2. Cardiovascular Fitness
Cardiovascular exercise, more commonly referred to as simply cardio, is one of the most common types of exercise. It is also one of the most important as it helps strengthen your heart and lungs. Undertaking cardio helps improve blood flow and oxygen delivery, which in turn helps you to train harder and longer. Due to the intense nature of boxing training, it forces your cardiovascular system to work harder to keep up and improve performance. By adding boxing into your training routine you’ll not only be improving your fitness, but also you overall health and well-being.
3. Improve Coordination
Hand-eye coordination is a skill we learn at a very young age and becomes an important part of our everyday lives. However, as we age, we can often start to struggle with this skill and it is important to perform activities that help improve our coordination. It should come as no surprise that boxing is a great way to do this. Whether you’re pounding away at a boxing bag, training your speed with a speed ball, or testing your reflexes with a floor to ceiling ball, boxing training puts your coordination skills to the test. Boxing requires coordination of your hand, eyes and feet to enable you to deliver powerful punches with accuracy and precision while maintaining balanced footwork. Practising these skills everyday is the best way to maintain coordination well into your latter years.
4. Improve Strength
It may surprise you to know that boxing is not just about arm strength. In fact most of the power in your punches comes from your core. However, it’s not just your upper body that gets a workout from boxing. Boxing utilises most of the major muscle groups in your body. When you throw a punch, while there are the muscles in you arms and core that generate much of the power of your punch, you’re also working your glutes and legs to help stabilise yourself and absorb the impact of hitting the bag. Due to this, a boxing training session is a great way to build strength and stability throughout your whole body.
5. Stress Relief
Everyone needs a way to unwind and de-stress after a long hard day, and there’s nothing quite like laying into a boxing bag for 15-20 minutes to help release the built-up tension. A fast-paced boxing session after an aggravating day is a great way to relieve stress and tension leaving you feeling focused and optimistic. It has been proven by numerous studies that regularly engaging in physical exercise helps your self-confidence, improves sleep, and reduces the symptoms of depression and anxiety. It’s a proven way to lift your mood and improve your mental health.
6. Learn Defensive Skills
Probably the most obvious advantage to boxing over other forms of exercise is the fact that your learning to box. Every time you spar with someone, you’re improving your reflexes and judgement, and learning skills that could prove very useful if you ever find yourself in a situation where you need to defend yourself. It is important to have some self-defence skills, even if you never have to use them, and boxing is a great, fun way to learn those skills while keeping fit at the same time.
So, if you’ve never considered taking up boxing as a form of exercise, or perhaps even as a sport, hopefully this list has given you a few reasons why you should. And if you’re ready to get started now, we stock a large range of the biggest brands in boxing to get you in the ring and working on your boxing.