Kickboxing is another optional sport that we can do to burn calorie effectively and shape our body ideally. This martial art sport intensively explore our ability to kick, to punch, and to avoid both the kicks and the punches. Thus, strong physical condition and stamina are needed to practice this sport.
1. Self-Defense.
Benefits of Kickboxing for female around the world is very vital. For women, self-defense aspect is the biggest thing, considering the harassment and criminal cases happen to them. Protecting and defensing themselves in a dangerous situation become important thing for them. The ability to protect and defense themselves facilitate women to go everywhere to do their daily activity without sensing fear.
2. Keeping the Muscles Strong.
Kickboxing explores the usage of our hands to punch, to hold the punch as well as to avoid them. In order to do them well, we need such strong hand muscles so that we can use our hand simultaneously without practicing the same boring movements several times, such as sit up and push up.
3. Slimmer Feet and Tightening Button.Â
In kickboxing, we need to keep our body balance, especially our feet so that they can kick and move fast. Practicing kickboxing routinely will make our feet slimmer and our button tighten.
4. Effective Stress Impingement.
Kickboxing is an effective stress impingement. The movements of punching, kicking, and blocking the attacks fast require high level of concentration so that our mind will not think bothering things for a while. For most people who feel stress in their working place or other places, impinge the stress by kicking and punching is a good thing. Moreover, the moral support that they gain in kickboxing class give them momentum to forget their bad days.
5. Calorie Burning.
Kickboxing is not such a monotonous boring sport. During practicing, we have burnt at least 1000 calorie without our awareness since we do not realize how long have we practice it. Within one hour practice, we have burnt 500-800 calorie. It is a good sport for our heart.
6. Building Self Confidence.Â
Kickboxing offers movement variations and self confidence. Most trainers prepare kickboxing combination movements for every different part of our body. Since the routine keeps changing in every session, the boredom can be eliminated.
7. Building Muscles.
The main point of kickboxing is building muscles using similar ways that professional kickboxers do. When we attack harder and harder, every muscle is developed into its bigger shape. Kickboxing involves the combination of weight lifting and cardiovascular practice.
Those two movements build as well as keep our muscles strong. They also work perfectly for strengthening your heart by increasing the pace of our heart beat and oxygen supply. Weight lifting and cardiovascular practice involve the main muscles in our body, such as in our back, waist, feet and hand.Â
8. Stabilizing the Energy.
In one hand, practicing kickboxing requires a lot of energy. However, in the other hand, it also stabilizing the energy. It helps us in building our strength and stamina. If we join kickboxing class for the first time, we might feel excessively tired. However, by doing routine practice, we will soon discover the result of kickboxing in relation with our energy.
9. Improving the Health of Our Heart.
Kickboxing is usually done in rounds. One round usually takes 2-3 minutes long with a brief brake between for 30-60 seconds (depends on the instructor’s intensity). This practice is considered as a High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) workout.
Practicing kickboxing have two meaning. First, we work very hard but still using the oxygen, and second, we work extremely hard without letting the oxygen get into our muscles. This way we train our heart to perform efficiently.
10. Improving Flexibility.
Kickboxing benefits is one of best ways to increase flexibility. In warming up activities of kickboxing, we do several stretches for our shoulders and hips. During the kickboxing practice, we move our hips a lot since most of the kickboxing movement involve high kicks to the front part and to the side part. Those movements increase the motion of our hips.
11. Tone Our Body.
Health benefits of kickboxing also best ways tone your body. Every muscle involves during kickboxing practice. This tone our whole body. Besides doing kicking and punching, we also practice squats, pop squats, push ups, burpees, and dumbbells.
4 Basic Attacking Techniques of Kickboxing:
- Punching.
The common punching techniques in kickboxing are uppercut, hook, cross, and jab. Uppercut is done to rise our punch and punch our chin’s opponent. Hook is a round and curve punch over our body and head. Cross is a twirl direct punch before we punch our opponent. Jab is direct punch to our opponent’s head and body. Others basic short punching techniques in kickboxing are straight punch, backfist, fly punch, cross table, overhand, half hook and half swing.
- Kicking.
The standard techniques are the front, roundhouse and sidekicks. The front kick is simple, fast and versatile. We can practice the  roundhouse kick with either leg. However, our back legs give us more significant power. Roundhouse kick is used on average four times more than any other kick, therefore mastering this kick is crucial for our technique. Side kick is very useful for attacking as well as for defensing. Yet, this technique is difficult to learn. Others advanced techniques of the kicks are heel kick, crescent kick and back kicks.
- Kneeing and Elbowing.
This is an attack basic technique that uses our knee. Snap strike knee is used to trick our opponent in a close range. Lift our knee and attack our opponent from the either left or right side directly to his groin, thigh and knee joints. We can use our knee to attack his face, chest, throat, or chin, too. The three basic knee kicks are the front knee, side knee and jumping knee kicks. Elbow strike is the most dangerous one because elbow is one of the hardest parts of your body. Similar to the knee, elbow strike is perfect for medium or close-range combat. The two basic techniques using our elbows are the front elbow and downward elbow. Both of them are used to punch our opponent in the head.
- Sweeping.
Sweeping is a way of using our leg to make our opponent to lose his balance and finally fell to the ground. However, not all kickboxing styles permit sweeps. The two basic forms are the outside and inside foot sweeps. If we do outside foot sweep properly, our opponent can lose the balance. Meanwhile, inside foot sweep is good for punching our opponent’s jaw. Either, practicing the spinning back sweep with a fist will give tremendous hurt to our opponent’s head.
4Â Movements in Kickboxing:
- Eschewing.
Eschewing is an important movement in kickboxing because it is used to defeat the opponent without attacking and parrying them. It can be trained with malleability and velocity.
- Parrying.
Kickboxers should be able to parry opponents attacks if they are not be able to eschew them. The parrying methods are simple. Kickboxers can cover the attacking parts with their hands, arms, elbow, feet and knee.Parrying can also be used for attacking opponents, such as punching or elbowing opponent’s feet and hand.
- Slamming.
Slamming is the hardest movement in kickboxing. Thus, it needs to be trained with a well-trained trainer because it is considered as a dangerous movement and offers high risk of getting serious hurt. Slamming refers to use the opponents’ attack and power to bring them fall.
- Lockingdown.
Lockingdown is also considered as the hardest part, too, since a kickboxer is demanded to hold his opponent in order not to give counter attack. Lockingdown is the continuous movement from the previous movements (punching, kicking,, parrying and slamming) that are manipulated to lock the opponents.
Warning:
Before deciding to practice kickboxing, we should consult our doctor and have our condition checked,especially if we have DNA specific disease and if we are above 55 years old. If our doctor recommends us to do kickboxing, we should practice it together with a well-trained kickboxing trainer.
Kickboxing is the second aerobic practice and effective anaerobic that is helpful in building, coordinating as well as balancing our muscles. The given methods bring fast result that are beneficial for helping us to shape our body ideally within two or three months. Unlike diet pills that brings various negative side effect for our health, kickboxing offers the safest solution for our diet.Â