How Boxing Contributes to your Overall Health

How Boxing Contributes to your Overall Health

How Boxing Contributes to your Overall Health

Need a workout that helps you build a healthy heart, relieves stress, burns fat and builds muscle? Well, boxing is one such workout routine that can help with all these.

“Mixed Martial Arts classes are often full of sociopaths and karate makes you wear pajamas, but boxing does all the right things without being weird about it.”

Boxing is a whole body workout. A boxer needs it all- quickness, agility, strength, stamina, flexibility, and balance. Legs, hips, back, shoulders, arms and midsection are all worked hard as they are worked up together, during the training. With time, aerobic fitness and muscular strength of the individual are built. There is no doubt that boxers are among the fittest athletes in the world.

Let us find out all the benefits we can gain with boxing as our sport.

Enhanced cardiovascular health

The whole point of cardio exercises is to place a moderate amount of stress on your heart and lungs so that they can adapt to support a  higher level of physical activity. Boxing tests your cardiovascular system to the max.

When you throw continuous punches, a huge number of your muscles are contracting at the same time. It forces your body to adapt by making your heart and lungs better at delivering oxygen.

This makes your heart and lungs work more so that they can pump oxygen containing blood all around your body. This means that you can train at a higher intensity, giving an even greater fat burning effect.

Tone up muscles

Boxing is not just about bulking up. It is like a high-intensity exercise, which tones up your body rather than just making it huge. Getting toned muscle without bulking up is possible in boxing because of punching involved.

Punching is a fast repetitive action, that produces toned taut muscles, in contrast to the slow, controlled, heavy movements involved in bodybuilding that produce size or bulk.

Increased bone density

Doing resistance training strengthens up your bones and reduces the progression of osteoporosis. Your own body weight acts as resistance when you box.

The focus pads and punching bags, the most integral parts of boxing, along with your own bodyweight, provide resistance when you perform various resistance exercises. Your joints, tendons, and ligaments will also get stronger in response to working against resistance.

Better hand-eye coordination

Maybe hand-eye coordination doesn’t ring a bell in your mind. But this coordination does have an effect your total health. Hand-eye coordination plays an important role in a person’s gross and fine motor skills. People with good hand-eye coordination tend to have better physical coordination as a whole, faster reflexes and reaction times.

Boxing can help in honing hand-eye coordination. When you’re tasked with punching a speed bag or have a one on one with your partner, you are able to see, hit and react to the target, all while the target is moving and changing position. It’s tough, but with practice, your hand-eye coordination improves substantially.

Stress relief

Boxing is the ultimate stress reliever. The combination of strength training and aerobic workout provides an individual with muscle pump, as well as, stimulates the cardiovascular system.

When these two are combined they help in enhancing the psychological well-being of an individual, especially as a counter for stress. Hitting the inanimate object (punching bag), repeatedly, can serve as a tremendous stress buster.

As a result of all the physical activity, your brain releases endorphins, which act as a natural painkiller and also improve sleep cycles.

Author

Gymchalo helps you find the nearest Fitness Centre/ Sports Centre or sporting event happening in your neighborhood and helps you know your workout peers.