Posted on February 28th, 2022.

Boxing requires strength, stamina, and agility to move the body quick enough to block, slip and react appropriately. It’s essential that boxers develop their cardiovascular endurance in addition to strengthening the muscles in their upper and lower bodies. Two of the best exercises to condition the body for boxing are skipping and running, as both offer major benefits to outfight and outlast an opponent in the ring or simply go harder and longer against the heavy bag.

Why skipping?

Walk into a boxing gym and you’ll immediately hear the familiar rhythmic sounds of skipping ropes repeatedly striking the ground. There’s a reason skipping is internationally recognised as a boxer’s key conditioning exercise. Skipping engages the wrists by turning the handles of the skipping rope while focusing on hopping both feet over the rope as it reaches the floor again and again. Speed and other variations can be added to skipping to challenge the body in different ways, such as trying to turn the handles faster, adding a second hop between skips, or getting the rope under the feet twice in one hop. These variations are key to increasing a boxer’s ability to time their movements in their footwork and their punches while maintaining balance. Without timing your punches with coordination with the correct placement of footwork, you will experience lack of force and power.

Ultimately, skipping helps boxers develop the technical footwork that is of utmost importance for movement in the ring. It’s one of few conditioning exercises that improve both aerobic and anaerobic energy pathways at the same time as it elevates the heart rate while recruiting several different muscle groups throughout the lower and upper body. Skipping builds speed,endurance, and agility, all of which a great boxer requires to succeed.

Why Running?

Running is a very popular and widely performed form of exercise. Just like skipping, running helps build both physical and mental endurance as well as stamina, which comes in handy in the later stages of each round whether that’s versus an opponent or the heavy bag. The biggest benefit to running is that it doesn’t require any equipment and can be done anywhere and any time. Although great for stamina as it increases an athlete’s aerobic capacities, running doesn’t offer boxers the same technical footwork conditioning that skipping does to improve quickness on the feet.

Long distance runs are responsible for improving endurance, but short duration, high intensity sprinting intervals will recruit the fast twitch muscle fibers to condition the muscles necessary to win boxing rounds or to be able to go longer and harder with the bag. Sprinting strengthens the anaerobic energy pathway that is used during boxing, as muscles are stressed at high intensities for short rounds.

Conclusion

Since both skipping and running offer unique benefits to boxing conditioning, it is best to include both exercises into your training techniques. However, if time constraints have left the option of choosing one exercise over the other, jumping rope will deliver the sport specific techniques, agility and endurance necessary to dominate the sport.