I always thought that boxing is only meant for competing in a competition.
Man, I was damn wrong and outdated a lot, LOL!
Boxing has been growing steadily for years as another form of exercise that is possible at home.
Is boxing a good full-body workout? I decided to find out more about its benefits, home boxing drills for beginners, and how ideal boxing is for weight loss.
Can You Learn Boxing On Your Own At Home?
What is boxing all about?
For beginners, it is basically a fitness or aerobic exercise which involves kicks and punches at a quick pace.
Boxing is not just about punching. It requires the boxer to be light and quick on their feet so that the workout can help to increase the heart rate.
You need to master the correct techniques and the moves slowly before you can even think of adding speed and endurance.
The fact that boxing has become increasingly popular, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic where people are forced to stay more at home as the fitness centers are temporarily closed.
It is considered a great home workout mainly because you do not need to have a big space or spend a long time shaping your body.
Truly a fantastic sport where everyone can join in to reap the great health benefits.
Can You Lose Weight With Boxing?
Boxing, if practiced regularly and correctly, is a great home exercise with many health benefits including for the weight loss journey.
Some of these are:
1. Enhancing mood/ Stress relief
How?
Performing punches in a boxing exercise lets out anger or frustration and you will simply feel a lot better or happier. As boxing involves some physical intense exercise, it is good for getting rid of symptoms of depression, stress, or anxiety.
When your work at a certain physical intensity, your brain tends to release some chemicals, one of which is an important one that produces a sense of happiness, joy, and relaxation, called serotonin.
2. Improves cardiovascular health – This is very important in maintaining healthy blood pressure, preventing any possible heart diseases, and attaining a normal heart rate.
Boxing is more of punching movements, and other ‘warm-up’ stamina-built activities such as jumping rope, running on treadmills, or push-ups require you to mostly stay light on your feet and move around with your punches.
Your heart will work much better through an excellent cardio workout as a result of more blood and oxygen feeding your muscles to throw more punches!
Simply said, forcing many of your muscles to work extra hard by pumping more blood and oxygen to them, thus giving your muscles a kind of hard workout.
3. Boosts endurance – A great cardio workout and stronger muscles, will give you more extra energy because your heart and lung (through pumping more blood and oxygen into your muscles) are already getting used to the heavy work from a boxing workout.
So more blood and oxygen running in your muscles, means they have more energy and endurance for a longer time.
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4. Stronger bones (including the joints) density – As we age, our bones are getting weaker and less dense, and prone to broken bones and even bone-related diseases like Osteoporosis.
Boxing can be of help as a bone-building exercise because it makes you always bounce around which puts weight on your lower body, knees, and legs. Plus, punching also works some weight on the arms, shoulders, and elbows.
The bones work quite similarly to the muscles, which is to get stronger and bigger.
In other words, the more weight put on these bones, the better the bone mass will be, making the bones thicker and bigger (that means stronger bones structure)
5. Better hand-eye coordination – Boxing exercise helps to improve activities that involve reflex action. It requires equal focus and action almost at the same time.
For example, the speed bag punching training will continuously make the bag turns and bounces quickly after each punch. The instant movement of the bag does require your eyes to stay focused on the target (the speed bag) and hit the target again when it bounces back.
That is why a boxing exercise is good for improving overall coordination.
6. Build lean muscles – Noticed that boxers tend to have a lean and tone-defined body.
The thing is boxing techniques require most parts of a body to work, typically the core and the legs because punching powers come from the base of the upper body.
7. Weight loss – Yes, this intense physical exercise is a serious calorie and fat burner and is so great for weight control.
In general, when punching a heavy bag, men burn around 450 – 500 calories more than women (burning 350 – 400 calories).
Also, do you know a normal session of boxing workout using a heavy-weight bag, could lose a thousand calories per hour? That’s massive if doing it on a regular basis.
Compared to other forms of exercise like running (540 calories burn) or walking (250 calories burn), an hour session of boxing can easily beat them all.
So definitely, this workout is worthwhile for a faster way to lose weight.
But take note that this also depends on what types of boxing you are doing as they have many different types of workouts.
A low-impact cardio workout (like hitting a bag) has different calorie and fat-burning ratios from a high-intensity cardio workout (like weight training).
Regardless, rest assured that boxing workouts will help you to burn calories and fats faster.
Sounds great to me so far, how about you?
Home Boxing Drills For Beginners
If you are seriously considering a home boxing workout to achieve your fitness success, perhaps you can look at these basic boxing drills to start.
1. Shadowboxing – This may sound a bit weird – punching the air but hell no, lol.
For beginners, this is an important workout to start with.
You will slowly master all the punching techniques and gradually, you may want to upgrade to a punching bag as later on, you will need more power for your punches.
In general, ideally, a 15-minute session of punching the air without rest is cool. When you are getting more serious about it, you can increase to a 30-minutes workout on daily basis, depending on your fitness goals.
2. Punching – There are literally plenty of types of punching bags (from hanging to free-standing bags with different materials and fills) out there.
So you need to know which one suits you best.
A hanging bag can be hard to install and requires quite some space. So, if you have limited space at home, consider the free-standing bag. Be sure it is at least half of your body weight and not moving easy when you punch it onto the bag.
Check for the type of materials and fill in the bag. The outer layer made of leather is a good choice as it can certainly last longer while a bag filled with sand or synthetic is good for stronger punches.
3. Squats – It is the key performance in any boxing workout and maximize the punching force – transfer from the floor to the core and the upper body.
Squatting works well on the major muscle groups in the lower body like the glutes, hamstrings, and quads.
Boxer squat is a great full-body exercise for a warm-up routine and increases your heart rate. You keep the movements energetic and quick.
Back squat helps to promote core stability and strengthen the speed of the lower body. It can be loaded light, heavy, or just a fixed bar. These are good for effective muscle mass and more punch power.
4. Push-ups – Sounds like a harsh workout here. As boxers need a lot of upper body stamina as they progress, push-ups work on the many same muscles (the chest, triceps, and shoulders) that are used for punching.
It is good to add to your boxing routine, as the only equipment needed is your own body.
For a start, you may aim for 10 push-ups per session and slowly increase it to 20, 30, 40, and 50 push-ups, depending on your body strength.
Ideally, a good upper body workout is min 50 push-ups, if you do it correctly.
5. Stretching – Like any other exercise, you may do this as a warm-up routine. Don’t overlook this too, especially for stretching the chest.
Why? As you throw each of the punches (especially the powerful one), it works a lot on the upper body like the chest, shoulders, and pectoral muscles. If you ignored any stretching prior to or after the workout, will lead to possible muscle injury or pulled muscles.
Regardless of any stretching warm-up, a 60-seconds of this exercise is great and if you can hold a particular stretch exercise for about ten seconds, you can repeat it three times will be ideal.
6. Burpees are powerful and effective exercises to boost energy and keep all your major muscle groups (chest, arms, quads, hamstrings, abs, glutes) strong.
It is a four steps movement that is squat, thrust, plank, and jump. All this counts as one burpee.
For beginners or for warm-up, 10 – 15 burpees per set is ok. Rest for a minute and continue to make it 3 – 4 sets is ideal.
Consider adding this to your boxing workout as a warm-up session.
Before you want to incorporate burpees into your boxing workout routine, make sure that you have some weeks of fitness experience or can do min 10 push-ups as burpees need a lot of strength and endurance.
7. Jump rope – This is mainly for a quick warm-up before you jump into your boxing session. Jumping rope is great for your footwork as you will learn quicker on your feet.
You can warm up with jumping rope with a three-minute session and slowly work your way up, ideally to a 10 – 15 minutes session.
Overall, for any of these workouts, you also need to set a good time and schedule that fits you and stick to it as a regular boxing workout routine.
What Equipment Do I Need For Home Boxing?
You don’t actually need a lot of equipment to start your home boxing journey.
As said earlier, shadow boxing is a great way to start, learning the basic motions in the air and feeling what it’s like to box before going to hit the real things.
Besides this, what are the other basic essentials?
1. Finding a suitable place to train – Get a place somewhere in your home that you think fits in.
A place that is not slippery, or gets a non-slippery mat, to help you to learn all the basic footwork steps and techniques.
Once you realized that a boxing workout really helps you to achieve your fitness goals in long term, you may consider investing a little more into hand wraps, gloves, and a punching bag.
2. Hand wraps are for your wrist protection and padding of your knuckles.
For a beginner, try to get the ‘traditional’ hand wraps which are cost-saving, reusable, and easy to wrap around your hands.
The types with ‘tape and gauze’ although are the lightest weight wraps and offer full protection of the hands, are not reusable and hard to wrap by yourself.
3. Gloves – A molded thumb of boxing gloves is larger, inexpensive, comes in a variety of sizes, and gives you full hand protection.
Meanwhile, non-molded thumb boxing gloves are smaller in size, light, and easy to carry but offer no thumb protection compared to molded thumb boxing gloves.
4. Punching bag – Do you need a free-standing or hanging version punch bag?
A free-standing bag requires not much installment, can be cheaper (may not last longer if made of low-quality fills or the outer layer) in cost, and can easily move around which is why a bit problem when you do your punches.
A hanging punch bag is ideal for footwork exercise but needs high-cost installment, more space is required, and cannot be moved once installed.
Regardless of which type of punching bag, you need to ensure the quality of the outer layer (leather lasting longer and durable) and the materials filling inside the bag (sand or synthetic materials are good) for a better boxing experience in long term.
Need some basic ideas to set up your own home gym?
Check out my blog, for ideas on the Perfect Home Gym Setup
What Are The Advantages And Disadvantages of Boxing?
Studies show that practicing boxing in long term can boost your self-confidence and self-esteem.
If you are in better shape, healthier, and fitter, you will make everybody feel better. Being physically well-built and how we look at ourselves have a big impact on our own self-esteem levels.
Self-defense. Not only that boxing help to keep your body healthy but also give you some great basic lesson to defend yourself. As we’ve already practiced and know how to throw powerful punches through good hand-eye coordination, we will know where we stand.
Boxing workout also encourages discipline among boxers.
When you ‘ box’ with a partner in a safe atmosphere like in a home, you will know your opponent better and what he or she needs to work better to improve. For example, one person is holding the punch, and the other is punching until he or she feels the need to stop!
What are the disadvantages of boxing workouts?
Unless you are treating boxing just as a sport for healthy exercise, you won’t be hurting people by punching them.
Also, if you are thinking to become a real pro boxer in the future, it may lead to serious bodily injuries. Think of the past pro boxers like Tyson or M. Ali!
Anyway, this blog and its entirety are to guide you to the overall positive sides of boxing rather than its harmful effects.
My Overall Impression on Home Boxing Drills For Beginners
I do hope that reading this article, will give you good consideration in starting a home boxing.
Or perhaps you do need some extra motivation before you jump into it?
Try and watch this amazing video of Boxing Workouts from Fight Camp
Still not convinced to try a Boxing workout?
Need something lighter?
Read my blog on Pilates exercises for beginner
Boxing workouts are very helpful for weight loss, building muscles, and overall cardiovascular health.
Again, if you are new to this type of workout, it is always best to consult with your healthcare experts before starting any boxing workout.
Start slowly and then work your way up for a more consistent routine. This way, you will learn the most out of it and also prevent possible injuries.
Like many other forms of exercise, do not forget to warm up your body (at least five minutes) and then let it cool down first before you start your boxing workout journey.
Any comments or thoughts, leave them below and I will race back within 24 hours.
Have a fantastic home exercise!
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