Every sport has lessons to teach you that you can apply to your own life, and boxing is no exception.
Here are six life lessons that boxing can teach you.
What Does Boxing Teach You?
Here are six lessons that boxing training can teach you:
- Discipline
- Self-Confidence
- How To Take Defeat Well
- How To Push Your Limits
- How To Listen To Your Body
- Everything Matters
Some of these lessons are obvious from the very start, while others will take time for you to learn.
Though boxing can be hard to learn, you’ll carry these lessons throughout life and apply them to any challenge you face.
Discipline
First, boxing teaches you discipline.
At first, showing up to boxing training day after day seems difficult.
If that’s you, we suggest you start small. Take a few boxing classes and slowly incorporate the exercises into your fitness routine.
If you’re too focused on the day-to-day, it’ll seem like you’re not improving because the results of consistent training in boxing are long-term.
But if you look back at yourself once a season or a year has passed, you’ll find that you’ve grown by leaps and bounds.
One day you’ll wake up and find that it’s impossible for you to not train today.
Self-Confidence
Next, boxing teaches you self-confidence.
Remember the first time you stepped into a boxing gym?
If you’re like us, you probably felt nervous being surrounded by all these intense, muscular fighters.
After spending time boxing and then stopping to look back, you’ll see that it didn’t really matter how you felt that day and you’ll see how much you’ve grown.
Unlike team sports, like basketball where you have a team to rely on or you can always subbed in and out by the coach, you’re by yourself in boxing.
Once you start to master the sweet science you’ll learn that no matter what happens in the ring, you can handle it.
How To Take Defeat Well
Next, boxing teaches you how to take defeat well.
Of course, everyone would love to win every boxing match and have a paved road to glory.
We’re sorry to burst your bubble, but it almost never happens that way.
Even some of your favorite boxers lost their very first amateur fights. This ignited a fire in them to become the very best in the sport.
Eventually you’ll face someone who is much better than you and will make it seem as if you just started boxing yesterday.
You don’t have control over that. What you do have control over is how you react to that defeat.
You can complain, whine, and quit, or you can pick yourself up and learn from the experience.
How To Push Your Limits
Next, boxing teaches you how to push your limits.
The only way you’ll grow in boxing is to put yourself into uncomfortable situations that you know you can handle.
This can apply to a difficult training session or a hard spar, where you’ll have to turn off your mind, trust yourself, and just move.
Multiple times in our career we’ve sat down and told ourselves: “I didn’t know I was capable of doing that. What else am I capable of?”
We hope you’ll have those moments as well.
How To Listen To Your Body
Next, boxing teaches you how to listen to your body.
You learn how to work with your nature, rather than fighting against it.
As you grow your skills and become more comfortable with your body, you realize that you don’t have to be the fastest, strongest, or tallest to beat your opponent.
You also learn how to shape your body to your will.
If you want to lose weight, you implement a fitness program. If you need to gain weight for a fight, you restructure your diet.
Also, you learn the importance of rest and recovery in your boxing journey.
As a beginner, you may have thought that boxers train 24/7 without sleep or food. When you gain more experience, you’ll learn that this isn’t so.
Many of the common boxing injuries are self-inflicted and easily preventable, usually from overtraining.
Everything Matters
Lastly, boxing teaches you that everything matters.
To excel at boxing, you have to train everything.
Though that seems obvious, compare boxing with some other sports.
For example, take football with a position just for a punter, or baseball, where shortstops can’t fill in for a pitcher.
In boxing, your defense and offense are two sides of the same coin. As one side gets better, so will the other side.
Similarly, if you only train your punches and neglect your defense, your whole performance will suffer.
You can’t just hit the heavy bag, you have to jump rope. You can’t just jump rope, you have to shadowbox…and so on, so forth. There is always something to work on.
Now apply this idea to life. You can’t just focus on money if your health and personal relationships are in the gutter.
On the other hand, if you have money, health, and relationships, it doesn’t matter if you aren’t happy.
This lesson is the hardest of the list, but well worth the effort and one of the best things about being a human being: the ability to evolve little by little, day after day.
Conclusion
We hope that you’ll learn the lessons that boxing and martial arts can teach you.
If we could sum up all of these lessons into one statement, it would be that the hardest part about boxing is the mental battle, not the physical battle.
Once you get into good shape and know what it’s like to take a few punches to the head, another sprint or another spar isn’t so bad.
All along it wasn’t your opponent that you had to fear and conquer, it was yourself.
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