Can a Personal Trainer Help you Learn Boxing?

The world of fitness and sports is very physically taxing to say the least! Learning a physical fighting sport, such as boxing, even more so! Indeed, the kind of discipline and vigor required to learn the art of boxing is going be off putting for most beginners. However, if you are someone serious about making the cut in this relentless sport, maybe what you really need is a personal trainer. What?! Don’t be giving me looks now! As much as you might thing that’s ridiculous, having someone to micro manage you is exactly the kind of thing that gives you that something extra to make it in any physical sport.

Now that I have your attention, you might want to listen carefully to the things I am about to say. You will only really benefit from having a trainer who knows their stuff; there are many dimensions to learning the art, even though to the naked eye of the regular observer, it might only seem like a bunch of guys in their boxers throwing punches at each other. And if you’re trainer isn’t familiar with all these dimensions, you’re more likely to spend a lot of money of people who can teach you certain things and train you properly but leave you hanging for certain other things that will act against you when you’re up against someone who has their art down to a tee. So to answer the question in the beginning of the article, yes, they can. But only if you find a competent trainer. That can be quite difficult if you don’t know what to look for but don’t worry! I can definitely help you out with that.

First and foremost, a personal trainer will understand the exercise and dietary necessities of the sport. Let’s be real, most physical sports need contestants to have very high quality physical conditioning. So if you’re trainer starts off by directly focusing on stuff like technique and strategy, you’ll want to abort that mission! Any good trainer, with their first look at you, will probably be telling you about how much weight you need to lose and what exercises you need to start doing to build up that core strength.

Another quality of a good coach is that they will understand the aspects you need to work on. You won’t have to learn everything together and it’s more important to build up your basic techniques up before you are ready to advance to more complicated ones. A jab might seem easy enough to make but when you have to make a lot of them in a very short period of time, it’s imperative that you’re technique is right or your hands will gave way very, very quickly!

Good trainers are also very versatile. After you’re starting to make progress, you’ll need to make changes to your training, the exercises, the way you approach matches, etc. As much as it is important to fight to your strengths in boxing, it’s also important to keep mixing up your approach. Even old dogs need to bring in new tricks into their arsenal every now and then! When you’re a beginner, this won’t be much of an issue. However, after a certain while, you’ll come up against competitors who do their homework on their opponents. And if you’re the same trick pony that you were at the beginning of your boxing journey, trust me, you will be found out in no time at all.

You have an idea of what to look for now. But it’s also important to find the warning sings early to avoid paying a bunch of money to people who don’t know what they’re even doing!

I cannot emphasize this enough. If your ‘trainer’ has never fought an actual boxing match before, he’s not much different than a normal gym instructor and you should stay miles away from these trainers! Think about it, if you’ve been boxing longer than your trainer, are you sure you’re the student in this relationship anymore?! Former boxers or people who are still boxing at lower levels than they used to be will be able to teach you all the necessities of the art. And hey, you’ll learn a lot from their failures than you would from someone who doesn’t know what not to do because they’ve never done those things to begin with.

As great as it is to be able to build up good strategies to pawn all your opponents, nobody wants a coach that makes to work on strategies 24/7! These are the guys who will make you sit through hours of clips and they’ll try to break down the entire sport into mathematics and all the while, be completely oblivious to all the human dimensions of boxing. The perfect style, perfect boxer and perfect plan DOES NOT EXIST. You’ll always have to improvise to a certain degree and react to things your opponents do.

Lastly, boxing is supposed to be fun, no matter how serious you are about it. If your trainer makes everything into something of a chore or a training regiment, you’ll lost your motivation real fast. Trainers who understand you and keep things interesting, while maintaining a rapport with you and being your friend will definitely keep you a lot more motivated and disciplined than somebody who treats it like a 9-5 office job!

By looking for these cues, you can identify the traits in the trainers you’re talking to at any particular time. It’s not particularly complicated and it’s something you’ll want to get right the first time because hiring a personal trainer and finding a new one afterwards will cost you your time and a good amount of money too. Land a good trainer and all that money you spend will be returned to you in the form of a boxing champion! Maybe you’re the person who’s going to beat Floyd Mayweathers’ record and all you need is the right trainer!       

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