This Yoga For Boxers course is designed for amateur and professional boxers. Practicing this series of videos will keep you supple, fast and pain-free for both training and competition.
Boxing is a tremendously demanding sport. It’s highly explosive and requires good strength, endurance, power and speed as well as lightning-fast reactions. In terms of posture, power and agility come from the hips and protection and damage are taken care of by the upper back, shoulders, arms and fists.
WHY YOGA FOR BOXERS?
Unfortunately, dedicating yourself to one sport establishes a fairly predictable pattern of muscular imbalances in the body. This can reduce your speed, power and endurance, restrict your range of motion and increase your risk of pain and injury.
This is the typical pattern that we see in boxers. In the lower body, the repetitive hip and trunk rotation boxers require to deliver powerful punches tightens up the hip flexors and lower back. And as boxers are constantly moving around on their toes, the calves are also commonly overactive. Tight hip flexors can inhibit glute activation and overactive calves often come at the expense of underdeveloped tibialis anterior muscles (shins).
In the upper body, boxers round the upper back and shoulders in the guarded position. This posture combined with high volumes of punching can lead to tight pecs and anterior deltoids (fronts of the shoulders) and overactive neck and upper trapezius muscles. Weak and neglected muscles in the upper body include the posterior deltoids (backs of the shoulders), rhomboids (mid back) and scapulae.
A well-designed yoga for boxers practice will keep your hips moving well through their full range of motion, release tension in tight hamstrings and calves open up your chest to prevent rounding through the upper back and shoulders.
YOGA 15 FOR BOXERS
In this course, we focus on:
Mobility—hips, spine, shoulders, neck, elbows and wrists.
Flexibility—hips, hamstrings and calves.
Conditioning—core strength and balance.
TIMING AND FREQUENCY
You can play around with the schedule of this Yoga For Boxers course to see what works best for you. However, I find that the Mobility routines are great to practice before training, the Flexibility sequences after, the Recovery videos in the evening and the Core Strength workouts on your active recovery days.
