Boxing Classes

Several years back, ESPN along with a group of researchers decided that boxing is the sport that takes the most athleticism. Being a good boxer requires a lot of endurance, strength, power and a fair amount of speed and agility. Although already having athleticism is a bonus when starting boxing, it is not a prerequisite to train the sport. You can develop the skills needed to be a decent boxer. After training boxing for awhile, you will feel yourself become faster, stronger, more durable, and more agile.

Boxing is as much mental as it is physical. When starting out, someone going at you and threatening physical harm is a scary thing. Many new people just turn their backs and try to get away as soon as the barrage of punches come. The fight-or-flight response kicks in and your body starts to react by retreating.

But the more you spar, the more you train your brain to stand and fight, instead of retreating (flight). You eventually learn how to take a punch and how to stand and fight even when you are getting your butt whooped. In essence, you are training your mind and body to persist.

The physical and mental toughness gained from boxing will translate into other parts of your life. You will find that your pain threshold will increase, you will become less scared of physical harm, and you will become grittier.

There is not much that will make you tougher than facing physical harm.

Proprioception is also known as bodily awareness, spatial awareness, and hand-eye coordination. In other words, it’s kinesthetic intelligence. Boxing and many other martial arts rely on kinesthetic smarts in order to be effective.

But why does this matter? Because when the body and brain start to act as one, something incredible happens. The brain starts to learn teaching the body to move much more effectively and efficiently. This, in turn, makes learning many other skills requiring motor movement easier. Additionally, science has shown that increasing proprioception also increases working memory, the memory that is responsible for holding short-term information to do math, solve logic puzzles, remember phone numbers, etc.

This is probably the most obvious benefit of boxing aside from the conditioning. Boxing is a very effective form of fighting. In order for boxing to be an effective form of self-defense though, you can’t just keep hitting focus mitts and heavy bags, you actually have to do some sparring—some real sparring.

You see boxing teaches you to be controlled with your movement and strike at the right time.  So when you are sparring with someone that knows how to box, the sparring is used to work on technique, not to kill one another.