1. Discipline.
Boxing instills a more important discipline: self-discipline and accountability. In boxing, kids are challenged on performance and the drive to challenge themselves. The formal nature of the karate dojo (the bowing, the ritual, etc.) has its appeal for many parents, but the product of discipline in karate is often brainwashing. The product of discipline in the sport of boxing is a worldly skill: fighting and self-defense that works.
2. Confidence with humility.
Boxing promotes truthfulness as opposed to delusion. In the boxing gym, you learn that there is always someone better while you get a thorough understanding of fear, physicality, emotional control, and social behavior.
3. Classes are scams.
Martial arts schools may not intend to hoax their members, but classes provide a structure that makes trainers work less and gets large numbers of people in and out fast. Classes warm up together; that’s a waste of 10 minutes. You’ll find kids holding pads for each other for the rest of the class. So how much actual training do they get 2 to 3 times a week? Hardly anything. Fighting, as any martial art, is an individual discipline. Every individual must dedicate individual time for practice. Boxing gym structure allows for greater accountability, more training, and real-world discipline. You don’t have fine art piano classes, so we don’t do that in real boxing or any real form of fighting. Classes are only good for very low-level developmental pursuits or interactive and tactile ground-fighting arts such as wrestling and BJJ. TMA practitioners may say their training is akin to those arts, but TMA is just not realistic at the early levels. Attendance is an indicator of future advancement, but is NOT a form of “achievement.”
4. It’s Practical.
TMA is filled with the participant trophy business model to keep parents coming because their kids are encouraged even if they are unfit and incompetent. TMA businesses are almost ALL based on only one thing: membership and paid advancement. Boxing even as a business is a sport that focuses on performance and skills. The performance in karate is smoke and mirrors: attendance rewards, recital rewards, and vast remedial and inconclusive criteria unrelated to the ability to defend or fight. Even other self-defense arts, from Krav Maga to JKD, can sound good theoretically, but if they don’t train under sport guidelines in the dojo, they’re just tricking people. You just can’t get any real understanding of real-world training with make-believe scenarios. You must spar for real to be apt in a self-defense situation.
5. Safety.
There are fewer brain injuries in amateur boxing than football, and, contrary to myths, it is arguably the safest sport in the USA. Safety and defense are the first priority of boxing and the head is protected by Official Sanctioned and tested USA Boxing and AIBA headgear. On top of that, your child never has to step foot in the ring unless you and he want to. Learning boxing is a skill that takes conditioning and discipline and practice months and even years before being able to step foot in the ring. You won’t see inept children flailing day-in and day-out in the boxing gym.
Boxing Over Kickboxing or MMA
- ALL proven and practical arts have a comprehensive detail for practicing BOXING. They’re just NEVER better than boxers at boxing. The other arts just do too much that it is impossible for them to be even half as competent in boxing as actual boxers are. Top kickboxers and MMA fighters hire boxing trainers to fix their habits and fine-tune their skills.
- The finite space of boxing has great complexity and intricate details. It’s about being able to best someone stronger, bigger, and faster.
- The commonly accepted notion is that most one-to-one fights end up on the ground, but almost all fights are not one-to-one, so this means most fights DO NOT END UP ON THE GROUND. You must learn how to box in order to defend yourself.
- Boxers have the best footwork. Their feet are planted, and every movement is about their base working the floor/ground.
- ALL fights involve punching and/or the punching range. Not all fights involve kicks or grappling.
- Boxing training structure seldom follows class structure. There are some fine MMA and kickboxing gyms, but you will often see that they have 1 to 2-hour classes that are no different from the TMA class structure. The real fighters there need to find training time outside of class hours and they often need to pay for the extra coaching outside of those class hours.
