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Why more midlife women are getting fighting fit
With female participation in the sport at an all-time high, and celebrity devotees including Kim Kardashian and Gigi Hadid, Anna Magee reveals how boxing helped her to cope with bereavement and divorce
Igot to 48 without ever having had the slightest desire to hit anyone. “I’m a lover, not a fighter,” I used to always say. But the truth is, I have had some huge, roaring fights in my time – with friends, family, colleagues, bosses and my ex-husband – but they were all using the only thing I knew: words.
Then in November 2018, I started boxing. It began as just another notch in my cardio training belt. I’d always loved the exhilaration of sweating, having been a casual runner and regular gym-goer since my 20s, but I was bored and wanted to try something new. Besides, buff celebrities such as Gal Gadot and Ellie Goulding were doing it, not to mention all the Victoria’s Secret models.
But within weeks of jabbing, punching and hooking my little fists into pads and bags, I stopped caring about the calorie burn and suddenly wanted to learn to fight. I didn’t want to do boxercise and throw air punches, I wanted to know exactly how to smash things up like a pro.
Not only was it fun, but each time I had a boxing lesson, rather than make me more aggressive in my day-to-day life, I became a tantrum-free zone, as though I’d been steeped in calm serum for the ensuing 24 hours.
Since then, I’ve joined the legions of British women taking up sports such as boxing and kickboxing, and found my fighting spirit – at 50.
To say boxing is currently on-trend is a huge understatement. There’s the celebrity thing (all the hot bods do it, including Adriana Lima, Gigi Hadid, Karlie Kloss and Kim Kardashian).
And London alone saw the opening of four dedicated boxing boutique gyms in the past 12 months, all shiny surfaces and smart changing rooms, miles away from the sweat soaked spit-and-sawdust clubs of old.
Meanwhile, new gyms such as
Hero Training Club in Manchester offer dedicated boxing spaces where rows of hefty punchbags await your finest jab.
But it’s women’s boxing that is booming. Sport England figures show that between September 2015 and September 2016, female attendance rose by a staggering 30.25 per cent and its 2018 Active People Survey found participation in women’s boxing was at a record high, with more than 35,000 women taking up the sport in some form, from classes to joining boxing clubs, in the last six months of 2018. While these are the most recent official figures, anecdotal evidence suggests it’s women a bit like me – those smack bang in midlife – who are getting the urge to regularly hit things, often after a big life change. “I have taught in loads of London gyms and have found there are a huge number of women in their 50s, either for fitness or even competitively, and many are going through tough times such as a divorce, job loss, grief or have been suffering for years with menopause symptoms,” says Amy Andrew, 33, a former newspaper journalist turned boxing coach at London club BXR, and competitive boxer.
I get that. My mother died in June 2018, after a six-month battle with cancer. A month later, I finally faced the fact that my marriage had also been dead for years and I wanted a divorce.
Indeed, though he is not a middleaged woman, the Duke of Sussex has previously spoken about taking up boxing 20 years after his mother’s death because, having not dealt with his grief, he had “the urge to punch someone”.
But when my own urge to hit things brought me to the doors of BXR, I didn’t realise the connection (d’oh!) until my boxing teacher, BXR head coach Gary Logan, pointed it out.
“I can tell you have never punched anyone in your life, Anna, but God, you are angry about something,” he said.
“As a woman you are always expected to be nice to everyone, say yes and run around making sure everyone is happy. You’re certainly not expected to fight,” says Andrew, who this month starts a weekly boxing class at BXR for women over 50.
“Learning to fight is selfish, it takes time and it’s about building a skill; learning about your own ability to be aggressive, and controlling that – the first time I hit someone I couldn’t stop apologising. That’s been a huge boost for my confidence.”
There was even more to it, I found. As Logan taught me stance, defence, jabs, hooks and crosses, and I practised, he holding pads while I punched, something transformed in
‘We made the women’s changing rooms smaller, but so many women have signed up we have to make them bigger’
me. The rage I felt at mum’s doctors and my ex-husband was being transmuted to sweat. And yes, being able to actually hit something properly and in a controlled manner felt bloody good.
But because there was also so much to think about, I couldn’t focus on my problems; on the blows life was dealing poor little me – instead, I had to figure out how to deliver a real one myself. That required more bottom-line presence and focus than any of the Zen meditations I had done (a lot) to deal with my grief and pain.
“Boxing makes you so focused on what you’re doing, it displaces all the other thoughts and preoccupations in your life,” says Claire Priestley, 53, one of the co-founders of new studio The Secret Boxing Gym in London Bridge. A chief information officer at the University of London, she boxes competitively in white-collar fights, having only started at the age of 45. “I don’t feel particularly aggressive when I fight,” she says. “For me, it’s a spiritual thing. You tune into such primal instincts that it brings you to a place of awareness that you don’t get with other sports. The first time I ever sparred, it was as if I got a direct line of sight into the character of the other person, everything else around me was blocked out.”
Though The Secret is in the centre of the financial district, it’s not overwhelmingly patronised by macho money types, with 49.9 per cent of its clientele women (“we made the women’s changing rooms smaller, thinking there would be more men, but so many women have signed up we have to make them bigger!” says Priestley). “Our female members report getting a sense of empowerment from our classes; a sense of relief and release where not having to think about anything but hitting that bag allows them to really let go.”
The Secret’s co-founder is former professional boxer Richard “The Secret” Williams, who became my second boxing coach. A gifted teacher, Williams takes virtually all the classes at The Secret, where the focus is always on not only getting a killer workout but also getting your technique right. Williams keenly observes your punches between burpees and other typical boxing-type cardio training and then zooms in on what you’re doing wrong.
Turns out, I was wasting my energy on the momentum of throwing a punch, originating it in my arms (wrong). It took a tiny tweak by Williams of my stance (elbows down and relaxed on front) to activate my core, which he said should really be where the punches come from. Over time, I started to see that boxing is a skill like any other, that required patient practice and learning. Williams taught me how preserving my energy and focusing on my target could lead to better outcomes. A bit like life, really.
There are so many tempting metaphors for life in boxing, it would be trite to list them all here. But allow me one more. Once I learnt to actually fight and practised physically punching a bag or pads regularly (I’m still too scared of sparring), I seemed able to control my temper more effortlessly, without the seething resentment I used to feel before. I somehow now feel less desire to fight life using words. It’s not that I stopped caring, I just
started accepting any blows as part of the nature of things; knowing I’d be fine and, dare I say it, be able to fight through whatever happened. That – and, OK I admit the calorie burn of up to 600 an hour (it’s got me into better shape than any other training regime) – keeps me going back. Because well, as Rocky Balboa said: “It’s about how much you can take, and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done!”