3 Ways Boxing Helps Your Mental Wellbeing
Boxing is a great full-body exercise and aerobic workout that helps with improved blood circulation in the heart.
Aerobic exercises are excellent to battle cardiovascular diseases. The health benefits it brings to the body, especially the heart is numerous. Boxing regularly can help:
- Promote weight loss
- Reduces blood pressure
- Improve bone strength
- Decrease bad cholesterol
But the benefits of boxing goes beyond only fitness of the body. Boxing can help improve your mental wellbeing and health in so many ways. Here is how:
1. Boxing helps you destress
When we are stressed, our mood and state of mind changes. We don’t think clearly. And it could even lead to severe psychological problems like anxiety.
Our body kicks either into fight or flight mode when we experience stress. This releases hormones in a large amount.
During a good boxing workout session, our brain produces a hormone called serotonin. Serotonin is in charge of making the brain feel happy which has effects on our moods.
This effect is helpful especially after a long day’s work when you may have tensed muscles from the stresses of work.
Boxing is known to be one of the best ways to loosen those tensed muscles leaving you relaxed and happy.
Boxing helps us to free ourselves of all the negative emotions wreaking havoc in our bodies reflecting in our muscles getting tensed. This also leaves you happy or cheerful at the end.
2. Boxing builds your confidence
Boxing, in the long run, boosts our self-confidence and self-esteem.
After going through months of regular boxing workout routines, you build lean muscle, feel healthier, and look more fit.
That alone leaves you feeling unstoppable and strong. We appreciate ourselves even more because we have been able to satisfy some inner need.
Research shows that physical self-esteem builds on people’s views of their physical bodies including body image.
The constant feeling we have when walking around with extra loads tied around our waists doesn’t improve our outlook of life. Poor body image also leads to stigmatization which isolates us from contributing to our society.
With all these boxing health benefits, you don’t have any excuse to not try it. Add it to your routine once a week or a month. By all means, punch it and let us know how it feels.
3. Boxing improves coordination
An important part of our mental wellbeing is what we see and boxing improves this in a great way. I’ll explain so read on.
Hand-eye coordination is one of the coordination pairs that help us a lot in our day to day activities.
Its improvement reflects in certain daily activities when it comes to our reflex actions and performance of certain simple activities.
Like soccer, in boxing, a lot of things are going on at the same time and all these things need equal focus and reaction almost at the same time.
When using the speed bag (a lightweight boxing bag suspending from a disc that continuously turns and bounces almost quickly with each punch), something happens:
The rapid movement of the bag requires that your eyes remain focused on your target, hit the target, change your position if need be, all at the same time.
