Boxing may be one the most difficult martial disciplines to get into. However the payoff is huge, with your body tuned, your mind active and eyes focused. It’s a very physically and mentally demanding sport. Picture Rocky running the steps, Mike Tyson Shadow Boxing or Muhammad Ali’s Cardio training.
Despite this, Boxing is great for your physique and fitness. The martial art form utilizes every muscle in your body from your shoulders and arms. To your legs while you’re slipping punches and dodging strikes. Your waist and hips get worked while you’re twisting into punches and while you’re taking strikes.
The better built you are the longer you’ll last in the ring and the more damage you can take, all playing an essential part in your punches as you score your first knockout.
Table Of Contents
Boxing Difficulty
Boxing Diets
Top Workouts
Striking and Combinations
Boxing Training Techniques
Pro Boxing Vs Boxing Training
Boxing isn’t considered the most difficult martial art to practice. However it has so many nuances in its community that have been built over almost four centuries of expert gameplay. Boxing has a wide variety of styles, stances and defensive maneuvers that fighters learn and perfect. In some cases fighters manage to master more than one style and utilize both effectively in their career.
Such fighters may include Muhammad Ali who was an outside boxer but also utilized counterpunching to return fire on his opponents. Furthermore his defense employed both slips and the unusual bobbing and weaving.
Despite this, training for boxing is relatively straightforward. One has to learn to punch, dodge punches and take punches. Furthermore there are certain strategies or mindsets that one has to learn as well. Such as the centre line and how to utilize it to prevent your opponent from hitting you, how to score points and create combinations and telegraphing or predicting punches from the micro-flexes in your opponents muscles.
Diets For Boxing Training
To maintain a healthy diet for boxing the first requirement is to believe in utilizing every nutrient that goes into your body. However this doesn’t mean eating less as The nutrients you need in large quantities are:
- Water: essential for hydration. Water will assist digestion, improve blood pressure and is amazing for circulation as an overall.
- Carbohydrates: your main source of stored energy will be carbs. Utilizing these will help you best process all the protein.
- Protein: helps build muscle and speed up recovery after exercise or injuries.
- Fats: vital for organs, in absorbing nutrients and extremely useful for storing energy for longer periods.
- Vitamins & minerals: keeps your bones strong, helps to reduce stress and anxiety, and ensures your muscles and heart are working properly.
- Fibre: keeps your digestive system running smoothly while making sure you feel full and reduces constipation.
Your diet should contain all of these essentials as your body will utilize all of them in an effective manner. However excess eating or starving is strictly not recommended. If you want to box, your body needs to be in peak form.
While training boxing routines your appetite will soar higher than you expected especially if you have a weight class you’re aiming for. This will require you to eat enough calories to maintain your weight class. Though this isn’t strict either, you should prefer to be a few pounds above your weight class.
When training like a boxer you’ll need to have a large total of approximately 1600 to 2700 calories per day. You’ll have to find your own calorie range however, as every weight class will have different physical demands. Though the calculation isn’t difficult to do either. You can calculate yours here.
Top 8 Strengthening Exercises for Boxers
Jumping Rope:
Is one of the best ways for you to maintain cardio. Jumping rope will teach you to be light on your feet like a feather and will improve your footwork. Skipping rope is an essential to every boxing training routine.
When you’re starting skipping rope you’ll find yourself jumping high in the air to complete a skip. The trick for getting good at skipping is to judge when you have to skip so accurately that you hover off the ground.
Running:
A core to every single cardio, fitness, weight loss and workout routine is the run. Increase your stamina, endurance and overall speed by running often and running far. Muhammad Ali used to say: “You want to keep running till your throat feels like sand paper… till your legs give way… and even then you’ve only gotten halfway”
HIIT:
High Intensity Interval Training is specifically designed to increase your aerobic activity (cardio) as well as your anaerobic activity (endurance) by enhancing your stamina and ability to build muscle. These workouts are basically a twist on regular fitness.
The twist being that you attempt to reach your regular fitness exercises with a set time allotted to each rep and rest. Furthermore, you attempt to complete maximum reps in HIIT. The only constraint is time, not the amount of reps done.
Burpees
Burpees are anaerobic, full body strength workouts. They involve less breathwork and they engage your entire body from your arms and torso to your legs. Burpees are considered one of the best endurance and solid state exercises that one can do with just bodyweight. This is because of how actively it involves the entire body.
- Start with a basic plank(pushup position)
- Tuck your legs into your plank. (exhale)
- Transition into jumping jack while standing up
- Squat back down and return to plank. (inhale)
Shoulder Presses
With many varieties available the shoulder press is one the most beloved for fitness junkies worldwide.
The shoulder press is done with dumbbells and can be used to focus individual muscles on the shoulder, triceps, biceps and traps, with specific workouts that focus on your serratus (connects your obliques and wings), pectorals (the chest) and the latissimus (often called wings, right below the armpit).
The focus of shoulder presses should centralize around your form. Specifically how well structured you keep the arm movements and which muscles you concentrate upon to strengthen.
Mountain Climbers and Lunges
Mountain climbers and lunges are both similar enough to be part of the same sub-category. Where mountain climbers are done from plank position, lunges are done standing. The purpose of both is to work your thigh, lower waist and legs to give you a sound core.
All core exercises will help develop your endurance and strength. We thoroughly recommend to level up your fitness with an RDX Medicine Ball to get maximum output.
Abdominal Workouts
So much importance to one muscle group, the abs. Everyone’s dream physique involves a six pack and to get you there, there are many workouts that focus your abdominal muscles. These workouts primarily revolve around the rectus abdominis (abs), external obliques and even your glutes. The exercise usually involves:
- Laying back
- Use your core muscles to push your torso forward
- Until your abs are strained
- Then return to the rest position
However there are many ways to work these core abdominal muscles. From side planks to leg raises and windshield wipers.
Agility Ladders
Maximize your aerobic fitness with these precision, agility drills. There are many ways to utilize ability ladders and any styles of drills that one can employ. These will test your endurance and focus on the precision work of your legs.
The Importance Of Boxing Coaches For Training
Finding a trainer or coach is really important to truly be able to maximize your fitness output. Form is not easy to achieve. Form can be the difference between a successful workout and an injury, irrelevant of the weights that you carry.
Furthermore to fully utilize these workouts in a boxing setting your coach may add to your workout to help you build upon your strengths and minimize your weaknesses. The job of a coach is to make sure you’re at top form and to analyze your performance in a realistic way.
This will always have you reaching for new heights while brimming with motivation to get stronger, faster and in some cases deadlier.
Boxing Training Techniques
Sets of any of the above exercises will provide an excellent foundation for any boxer. Despite this a lot of punching bag work will help even further strengthen your punching power and overall strength. As much as gym exercises require form and figure, so does boxing.
- Getting Power In Your Striking
To punch someone with a powerful hook requires carefully practiced straight punches on a hook or uppercut punching bag for full impact. - Accuracy For Boxing
Furthermore utilizing double end punching bags and headhunter punching bags will help improve that accuracy of punches. - Improving Hand Speed
And further still achieving hand speed can be done with a speed punching bag.
A coach will develop your precision and skill in this matter all the while teaching you movement and defensive skills to develop you into a full fledged boxer.
Boxing training is hard, and requires real effort like any other super sport. However you can begin the steps of this journey on your own as well. And in time, with the right RDX equipment you too can be the next Unified World Champion.
