The simple truth is that the vast majority of gym-goers are not looking to become professional athletes, let alone professional boxers.

In fact, most of us are trying to lose a few pounds so that we can improve our individual health, gain more energy to perform our daily responsibilities, look better in our clothes, and feel better about ourselves in general.

While we might be a little biased, here at Gloveworx, we believe that boxing is the best workout regimen you can choose. That’s because we truly believe an exercise routine centered on boxing can help you accomplish all your fitness and personal health goals.

To prove our belief, here are five of the top reasons we believe boxing is the best workout.

Boxing Will Help You Burn A Ton Of Fat

Regardless of what the latest fitness trend or dietary fad might tell you, the scientific community almost unanimously agrees that weight loss -- and fat loss, as a byproduct -- occurs when we create a caloric deficit through diet and exercise.

While the oft-repeated adage among the fitness community is that “abs are made in the kitchen,” the best way to think of the combination of exercise and diet is that exercise burns your body’s energy stores (in the form of calories) in a way that facilitates weight loss, and your diet is the way you refuel yourself in order to repeat your chosen training method.

Accordingly, it would make sense that you want an exercise regimen that’s going to engage your whole body and burn a ton of calories as a result-- and there are few better ways to burn a huge number of calories in a short period of time than boxing.

Case in point? A one-hour boxing workout involving punching a heavyweight bag can burn as many as 700 calories. For most people, that's more than one-third of the average daily caloric intake requirements.

Boxing Is A Great Way To Improve Cardiovascular Health

Anyone familiar with the sport knows that boxers are among the athletes in the greatest physical condition. Those three-minute rounds of boxing, often spread out over 12 to 15 rounds in a given match, are absolutely exhausting, and thus require an incredible amount of conditioning in preparation.

Even if you have no desire to step into the ring, there’s no reason that you can’t derive the same cardiovascular benefits through boxing training. Perhaps just as importantly, you don’t have to be anything close to a professional athlete to enjoy those benefits.

As a baseline comparison for its ability to burn fat and improve cardiovascular health compared to other forms of exercise, an evaluation compared two groups overweight adults: one who performed boxing training, versus another who performed the equivalent amount of brisk walking.

The results showed that the group undertaking the boxing training significantly improved their body fat percentage, blood pressure, and overall cardiovascular ability, compared to the walking group.

On top of that, boxing could very well be a more efficient way to get in an incredible cardiovascular workout as well.

Understanding that boxing is a high-intensity training method, there is a growing body of research showing that even very brief stretches of high-intensity exercise, lasting as little as 60 seconds sometimes, can offer the same improvements in lung and heart health as 45 minutes of lower-to-moderate intensity exercise.

Simply translated: the training sessions that will wrap up in 60 minutes or less at Gloveworx can improve your fitness levels at a rate that’s exponentially greater than your basic cardiovascular training methods.

Boxing Can Help You Build Muscle

There’s no question that boxing can help you build and strengthen muscles in your body. That doesn’t mean that boxing will help you pack on big, hulking muscles that will leave you looking more like a professional bodybuilder.

In fact, if you’ve ever seen the bodies of most professional boxers, what you’ll notice are physiques with almost no visible body fat -- meaning there’s nothing covering up the muscles they’ve sculpted as a result of all of the conditioning and boxing work they’ve put in.

We’ve already talked about how you can enjoy those same fat loss benefits overall, but the training you’ll undergo at any given Gloveworx session will help you strengthen and enhance the major muscle groups all over your body. That’s because many of the muscles you engage when boxing are the same ones you use to perform a variety of day-to-day tasks.

It’s only natural that with all the conditioning exercises you’ll perform during a training session, including many different exercises using your own body weight (like push-ups, crunches, among many others), your muscles are going to get stronger.

So as you might expect, improving your abilities overall as a boxer would have a direct correlation to improving the strength and endurance of those daily use muscles.

Boxing Can Improve Your Abilities In Other Sports

There are countless stories of collegiate and professional athletes taking up boxing during the offseason of their respective sports, to improve their technique and overall abilities when their sport is in season. That’s because boxing is an incredible way to help you improve everything from your overall reaction timing, hand-eye coordination, lateral movement ability, and cardiovascular endurance.

Such claims aren’t just anecdotal, either. It’s been proven that boxing can help you improve a number of skill-related fitness parameters, such as balance, coordination, agility, and reactivity.

Again, you don’t have to be a professional athlete to enjoy any of these benefits. If you’re someone who enjoys things like playing basketball in a recreational league or golfing with friends or colleagues on the weekends, boxing is an excellent training method that can help you improve your skills in any -- if not all -- of those sports.

Boxing Can Improve Mental Health

Many of us often overlook the common denominator among goals like losing weight, improving our fitness, and improving our appearance: we want to feel better about ourselves.

The toll that stress takes on us is well documented -- there are very real physiological ramifications of stress, as well as psychological. One of the best natural combatants to stress is the release of endorphins, specifically through exercise. As boxing incorporates both aerobic and anaerobic elements, you’re have the potential to effectively release twice as many endorphins through this training method.

At the most basic level, there’s also something very empowering about the ability to throw a strong punch. There’s the increased sense of self-confidence one can gain by knowing that you are a contender, and that you can hit like one. Contenders can use their refined punching form by hitting the heavy bag or focus mitts, which can do wonders for relieving stress and taking out their day-to-day frustrations.

Boxing: One Way To Knock Out Multiple Fitness Goals

It’s been estimated that the fitness industry in the United States alone is valued somewhere around $30 billion dollars.

To the common gym-goer, that translates into one simple idea: there are a lot people looking for ways to get in better shape, and there are even more methodologies being sold promising people the best way of accomplishing said goal.

Amidst that incredible abundance of choices, we firmly believe that boxing presents perhaps the best combination of an exercise regimen that’s both effective and entertaining -- i.e., something that’s going to help you accomplish your personal fitness goals, and motivating you to keep coming back to the studio.

We humbly suggest that you come in and try out a Gloveworx training session to test this out for yourself!