Swimming For Boxing – Alternative Exercise In Boxing

Whether swimming is a good exercise for boxing or not, and how to apply it to your boxing workout? Keep on reading as you will find out the answer through this article on “swimming for boxing” in just a sec. 

Benefits Of Swimming For Boxers – Is Swimming A Good Exercise For Boxing?

An Ideal Practice’s Alternative For Running

Being a boxer is hard and requires a lot of discipline. You should train almost every day (usually 5 to 6 days weekly), which might cause stress to your body and make you feel sore. As boxing mainly relies on movements, it creates tons of pressure on the lower body, especially the knees.

Traditionally, boxers would choose running to exercise their legs. But since they realize that swimming is far more beneficial as it reduces the pressure on the lower body, they tend to make swimming their cardio exercise.

For Better Lung Capacity

Swimming is a great sport to work out your entire body, including lung expansion and breath control exercises. By holding your breath under the water pressure, your lung will become larger and stronger than when you’re running.

Enhance Your Endurance

Your endurance is a factor that can help you stand for all 12 rounds of the fight. A boxer should usually choose long-time exercises to train both mentally and physically. 

Boxing is a strategic game. Whenever you face a new opponent, the first thing you want to do is to read him. This process could take up a few rounds, but you need to quickly grasp the weak and strong points of your rival to knock them down as quickly as you could.

Changing your workouts brings many benefits, as you won’t feel bored with the same set of exercises, and your body will keep improving forward as it extends the muscle’s brain.

Meanwhile, your body will eventually adapt to the same pressure every time and may weaken your muscles through time. Remember to change your workouts every 1 – 2 months, and the result may surprise you.

The key to cardio is not to give up until you have finished your workouts. Even if you can’t go fast, try to move forward with a slow speed.

Have Good Impact On Anaerobic Conditioning

Anaerobic conditioning is the ability to perform a sequence of actions within one breath. It is quite necessary in combat where you can land a quick combo, giving your rival a hard time defending himself. 

You can practice anaerobic conditioning in swimming by trying to complete a lap as fast as possible using the fewest breath as you can. Repeat the exercise about five times or more with each minor rest in between to progress rapidly.

Benefit For Mental Training

You may have heard that champions are people with nerves of steel; this way of speaking is to emphasize the importance of having a cool head in difficult and high-pressure situations.

Swimming also helps to strengthen your mental health; here is a basic method:  Take a deep breath and hold it, submerge yourself into the water until you depleted your oxygen, then rise.

Surely you will feel discomfort at first, but your body will soon slowly adapt to the pressure, and you can go down deeper. The longer you stay in the water, the more you strengthen your mind about pain and suffering.

It is bad to deceive your mind, but this method could help you flip the table and obtain victory in your fight.

>Read more: How to get a fighter’s physique?

Swimming Training To Improve Boxing Endurance

Training Arm and Shoulder Endurance

Although running has always been the top pick cardio exercise for boxers to practice overall endurance, it doesn’t help much with arm endurance. 

Running focuses heavily on the legs, while boxing requires both legs and arms combinations in fighting. Therefore, running is not the best solution since your shoulders and arms will get tired quickly when competing.

Instead, swimming is a perfect idea for training your arm and shoulder endurance. Since you have to work your arms and shoulders to move to swim, this would help the muscles in these areas be more supple and durable. Hence, the muscles won’t get tired easily in later competing. 

All you have to do is swim steadily at a slow pace for 20-30 minutes without a rest.

Builds The Legs

As you may not know, swimming can also be a good method to build up your leg.  

Instead of using the weights to train your legs, you can take advantage of the water flow, as it can alternate the weights due to its density (700% denser than air). 

Practice kicking with a training aid continuously and consistently from 20 to 30 minutes will be an excellent way to improve the lower body’s overall condition without harming the knees.

Enhance Overall Endurance

Trying to swim 2 to 3 times a week is perfect for improving your endurance over time. It would help enhance the practice with various lengths, speeds, and strokes on different training days. 

You can combine interval and sprint swim training for the first 15 minutes. Try sprint swim (fast speed swim) for either 30 seconds – 1 min or 1-2 lengths. Then, you can have a one-minute rest or two. 

Or else, you may try to swim continuously for about 4 minutes at a slow speed. Then quicken your swim’s pace for the next two minutes. After that, it will be 45 seconds with the fastest speed and one break of about 1 minute. Finally, repeat the process in the reverse version. 

How to start your swim depends most on your endurance. However, the final aim is to build up your endurance slowly yet effectively until you reach the point that you can swim at a quick speed for at least 5 to 6 minutes without taking breaks. 

Swimming Is Perfect For High Intensity Interval Training

High-Intensity Interval Training is a combination of anaerobic (high-intensity work time) and aerobic (an interval of active time off – practicing at a slower pace).

This intense training is very important to boxers as it can help gain muscles, lose weight and improve oxygen consumption. Usually, running is high-intensity training for every fighter. However, swimming is also perfect for that work. 

Swimming will be a great assistance to fully and effectively hit those two conditioning systems with no need to take a full rest.

To carry out this exercise in a swimming pool, you should swim the first length with your fastest speed and then swim back at a slow pace for recovery. Yet, remember to swim constantly without stopping.

Doing this process for ten rounds will be a very efficient workout.

Shadow Boxing Underwater To Improve Your Hand Speed

As mentioned above, the water is 700 times denser than the air, so boxers may take advantage of the water density and improve their hand speed with underwater practice.

The resistance can act as dumbbells to train your punch’s speed, endurance,  and power.

When your hands are familiar with going against the water resistance, you will realize how quicker and easier your hands move when you go back in the air.

You can do shadow boxing and some exercise underwater like jabbing (straight punch) with your fastest speed for 1 minute. It would be best to do this practice once a week or twice.

Training Your Mental

Swimming will help train your mind, especially with positive visualization. As the swimming pool is an unfamiliar environment, it will make you more vulnerable to negative thoughts. 

Since your body is too tired after a lot of swimming, the increase of negative thoughts is almost inevitable. When you feel like you are at risk of drowning, apply positive visualization is in need. 

Visualizing yourself in the best status will boost your courage and your hunger for winning. It can help create a mindset of aiming for the best, so you will be much easier fighting your way to succeed. If you know how to take advantage of it while competing, the benefits are immense. 

Also read: White heavy weight boxer; and Super middleweight height.

In Short

Swimming for boxing? A weird term, right? 

After reading this article, we hope you have realized how swimming is helpful for boxing. Moreover, you now know how to apply swimming in your boxing workout schedule to achieve your goals.  Best luck with your work, and thank you for reading.