VICKI-MARIE COSSAR FIT

LOOKING TO RELIEVE STRESS, IMPROVE YOUR POSTURE AND GET AN AMAZING WORKOUT ALL AT THE SAME TIME? BOXING COULD BE THE SPORT FOR YOU. REPORTS

EVER since Britain’s Nicola Adams won gold at the London 2012 Olympics, women’s boxing has been on the rise. The sport used to be dominated by men in ‘spit and sawdust’ gyms, but in 2015, KOBOX launched a venue that took authentic training and placed it in a nightclub-esque studio. This completely transformed the mentality around the sport.

They now have four sites with 85,000 members and 75 per cent of them are female – that’s over 63,000 women getting to grips with the jab, cross and hook fundamentals.

‘It’s fight club meets nightclub,’ says Kris Pace, the CBO of United Fitness Brands, which owns KOBOX, Boom Cycle and Barrecore.

‘We have had a female-led client base since we opened because we offer a safe, fun environment for people who may have been too scared to take a boxing class. We keep it simple, but effective, and almost all of our clients will grasp the basics of boxing and improve very quickly.

‘We’ve taken the fundamentals of a sport most people wouldn’t be confident enough to take on and built it into an enjoyable workout.’ KOBOX paved the way for other studios to launch and soon the likes of David Lloyd Clubs, Virgin Active, Third Space and Fitness First also had boxing and boxing-fusion classes on their schedules. Fitness booking platform ClassPass saw a whopping 250 per cent increase in the number of reservations for combat-style classes from 2017-2018 and then listed in-studio boxing as one of the top ten classes people were returning to after the pandemic.

So what’s all the fuss about? Boxing is a full-body workout that can easily burn as many as 500 calories per session, and due to it being a form of high-intensity training, that calorie burn can continue for hours after the session has ended. Strength-wise, there’s a misconception that boxing is just an upper-body workout. In order to generate force and power in your punches, your entire body is engaged and you’re working the muscles in your shoulders, arms, chest, back, core, glutes, hips and legs. Not only that, but boxing improves balance, helps with posture, boosts endurance

‘From hand-eye coordination to footwork, boxing also engages your brain’

and can help improve hand-eye coordination.

‘Boxing has many benefits,’ says KOBOX trainer, Aidan Swietochowski. ’It’s great for improving cardiovascular health and a strong heart is a healthy heart. Moving around the bag, staying light on your feet and transferring power from your body into your punches will ensure