If you’re trying to get fit and trim down, you’re likely to have considered reforming your diet and taking up some form of exercise.

1 Calorie Burning During Classes

Kickboxing is a relatively high-impact form of exercise that involves almost the full body. Despite the name, punches and upper-body movements feature heavily alongside large leg movements and defensive footwork. All of this effort allows someone who weighs as little as 9 stone to burn an average of 600 calories (kC) per hour during kickboxing practice. Obviously, if you’re starting at a higher weight, you’ll burn even more!

2 Calorie Burning After Classes

After performing a protracted session of a high-impact sport such as kickboxing, your metabolism can stay raised for several hours. In this time, you could burn up to 20% of the calories that you spent during your exercise session – a fabulous bonus that comes at no extra effort!

3 Strength

Well-defined muscles, while weighing more than the equivalent portion of fat, both look better and help to burn more calories! Kickboxing is especially good for encouraging shoulder and arm muscle development but will not promote “bulging” muscles or create an imbalanced look because of the way the whole body is used.

4 Core Muscles

In addition to arm strength, and perhaps more importantly, kickboxing’s martial art focus promotes good core muscle development. These help to protect your back and provide abdominal strength. As well as improving the appearance of your stomach, good abdominal development helps with balance and energy, as it ensures you’re not wasting your strength compensating for poor muscular support.

5 Cardiovascular Health

As well as being a full-body high-impact sport, kickboxing gives your insides a good workout. Committing to a good kickboxing training programme that includes breathing and strength exercises will provide a workout for your entire cardiovascular system, strengthening your heart and encouraging good circulation to help protect your extremities and, as another bonus, improving your body’s natural rate of calorie burning.

6 Support

Trying to lose weight on your own can be difficult, as can keeping up a solitary exercise programme. By choosing a sport that can be practiced in groups, you can provide yourself with an automatic support group to help you stick to your goals. Whether you want to stick solely to exercise classes or have ambitions to join a competitive martial arts team, the effects of working with your peers are likely to be significant and enable you to meet your goals more easily.

7 Confidence

By incorporating kickboxing into your weight loss plan, you can give yourself an automatic confidence boost by training by with your teacher and your class to develop skills and techniques. Your physical confidence is likely to improve even more quickly than your fighting technique.

Mentally, it’s also helpful to realise that you have chosen to take care of yourself by developing these skills. All of the achievements in terms of weight loss and fitness development that you can develop through dedication to your kickboxing regime are a result of your own dedication and work – how’s that for an ego boost?