“It ain’t about how hard you can hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.” -Rocky Balboa
Boxing is a dynamic sport with prize benefits for kids; deemed one of the most physically challenging disciplines, requiring both strength and stamina. With boxing championed as a prime exercise, its discernible effects on the mind are equally impressive; it instills confidence, motivation, and self-discipline. The sport is capable of unleashing one’s athletic and cerebral potential. If there is a singular thing the boxing culture has taught us in both media and film, it’s that boxing enhances both inner strength and triumph.
The Nitty Gritty:
Boxing includes movement and footwork drills to evade jabs and blows and punching drills on equipment like heavy bags, speed bags, and focus mitts. It’s a discipline that’s singular for kids, providing high-intensity exercise for the body, integrating jump rope, calisthenics, and running.
It’s also an assertive discipline aimed at combating bullying. Although, the focal point is not to master fighting techniques as a solution but to instill a tenacity and strength to combat bullies and threats in diverse ways. Head-on, your child will gain resilience, toughness, and skills to control themselves when provoked or threatened. Boxing is not only a phenomenal way to improve physical fitness but also a fun way to challenge the mind and body.
The Strategy:
Our kid’s boxing program values the premise of strategy vs. fighting. Therefore, as your child learns to spar, they will understand and familiarize themselves with the subtleties of combat in a safe and controlled environment.
The course also incorporates heavy bag drills, focus pad work, and shadow boxing to improve hand-eye coordination – augmenting your child’s precision, coordination, and timing. We aim to strike any perceptions that the time-honored contact sport promotes combativeness. Instead, our course trains self-control when faced with conflict or aggression for self-defense and protection from viable danger.
VIDEO: KIDS SELF DEFENCE TRAINING IN ACTION
The Origin:
Boxing is a combat sport existing since the dawn of early history. The earliest evidence was visible proof, indicated in Sumerian relief carvings from the 3rd millennium BCE. What’s more, the few extant Middle Eastern and Egyptian depictions are of bare-fisted contests with, at most, a simple band supporting the wrist. Finally, the use of gloves or hand coverings in boxing is a carved vase from Minoan Crete (c. 1500 BCE) that shows helmeted boxers wearing a stiff plate strapped to the fist. Our ancestors, in creating a boxing mold, have left us with more than a sport.
Boxing Thrives on Numerous Elements
The Hard Core Skills:
As your child learns to spar, internalizing and following precise fundamental motions become vital elements, a practice that demands concentration, listening, goal setting, and patience. Boxing is unparalleled for youth. Sessions will continuously develop self-confidence, coordination, socialization, mental focus, discipline, and goal attainment.
The Physical Perks:
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Intensifies cardiovascular health
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Enhances coordination, body awareness, spatial learning, reaction time, coordination, agility, speed, and power
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Trains balance and footwork
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Improves total body strength
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Builds muscle tone and definition
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Impedes childhood obesity
The Breakdown
Punching:
Our course will teach your child to throw various punches, including jabs, crosses, hooks, and uppercuts. Speed and power will play a critical role, simultaneously with safe and definitive body movements.
Footwork:
Footwork is intrinsic to boxing. Your child will develop vital skills to deliver or evade punches in or out of the ring. Furthermore, they will strive to master how to distribute weight on each foot to pack the most power in a punch.
Physical Conditioning:
Class training incorporates rigid cardiovascular fitness to help your child reach their peak physical shape.
Youth boxers will tackle fundamental exercises such as jump rope, jogging, and bodyweight drills such as push-ups, squats, and crunches. Developing strength in both arms and legs is also vital in boxing. As your child builds endurance, they will successively develop immense coordination.
Self-Defense:
Our boxing course teaches kids to be conscious of their surroundings and develop the strength and autonomy to stand up against intimidation, bullies, and even attackers. As they practice and often master combinations of punches and kicks, your child will explore how these methods can be devoted to real-world scenarios infused with danger.
Sparring enables youth boxers to practice in a controlled environment. Motions will simulate fighting scenarios with an aggressor or a competition fight without peril, giving your child a more accurate sense of how they should safeguard themselves outside of their class. Each boxing element of self-defense is an opportunity for your child’s intuitive and functional development.
The Psychological Perks:
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Builds morale and character
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Instills a sense of achievement
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Concentration and perseverance
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Heightens self-confidence
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Channeling aggression and restlessness
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Decompression
A clear-cut advantage our youth boxers receive is mental tenacity. As their physical prowess improves, they build prolific self-esteem. With each motion requiring extreme focus, your child will become more centered and their concentration more acute. This skill set receives merit both in the classroom and in daily life.
Highly active kids with abundant energy learn to master self-discipline. Understanding and positively directing emotions is a potent skill our youth boxers will constantly strive to achieve.
It is established that developing the mental muscle to exercise self-control is critical for emotional intelligence, and while in their youth, the timing is optimal.
Boxing recognizes aggression and frustration, synonymous with youth. We teach your child how to handle challenging emotions through healthy techniques, with anger at the pinnacle of our lessons.
More Than A Punch:
A boxer who can control their mind and emotions judiciously stands a greater chance of defeating their opponent – whether in the ring or when faced with a bully or similar aggressor.
Your child will discover that mental resolve is a powerful tool for combatting obstacles and stress.
Armed with greater confidence and positive endorphins released through physical fitness, youth boxers will become less aggressive. As a result, outbursts, tantrums, and validation through confrontation will diminish significantly.
The discipline indicative of boxing will help train your child to channel their fighting spirit through more constructive and positive methods.
The goal is not to repress a child’s anger nor offer them a platform to unleash contentiously. Instead, it is to channel any adversity positively.
With boxing weighed in as holistic fitness, your child will achieve critical life skills, perpetually motivating them for life. Entering the ring; literally or figuratively, they will discover that a mental resolve is a powerful tool for combatting obstacles and stress. It transcends, in essence, all aspects of life.
The Hard Facts:
The number of kids refusing to attend school daily for fear of harassment and bullying exceeds 160,000! 90% of students in grades 4-8 report having experienced bullying, 28% in grades 6-12 and 20% in grades 9-12. What’s more, 70.6% of students report witnessing bullying in their school, and overall, it’s soaring frequency has propagated a dropout rate of over 10%.
Also check out Krav Maga for kids, rape prevention for girls, and the psychology of bullying for parents!
Nick Drossos, is distinguished as one of the most prized self-defense experts globally and the founder of Nick Drossos Defensive Tactics; combing a plethora of self-defense police and military techniques; his self-defense instruction, fitness intelligence, and raw life experience impeccably connect in his renowned YouTube channel to ‘empower personal protection’ in both mind and body.