The Perfect ‘Boxing for Fitness’ Class Structure

I’m a huge fan of including boxing for fitness-type classes as there are so many fitness benefits to boxing! Plus, it’s a lot of fun and encourages your participants to pair up, interact, and get to know each other–lending to a sense of community and mutual motivation as is so frequently touted in group-class settings and paired fitness. 

When I first started teaching boxing for fitness classes, I didn’t quite know how the class structure worked… How many drills should I program? How long does each drill go for? How often do the participants switch between boxing and pad holding? 

After a lot of trial and error, I’ve finally found a class structure that works really well and now whenever I’m running a Boxing Group Fitness Class, I use a very similar structure every time. 

It looks something like this:

60 min class

Warm-Up – 10 mins

Drill #1 – 10 mins

Drill #2 – 10 mins

Drill #3 – 10 mins

Drill #4 – 10 mins

Cool Down – 10 mins

 

Warm-Up (10 mins)

I’ll start my session with a 5-minute nonspecific warm-up, similar to what I would use regardless of what the session was going to be – things like light jogging, walking lunges, inchworms, etc.

I do a general warm-up for five minutes because I know there are always going to be participants who arrive to the session a few minutes late. If I was to get started on specific technique straight away, these late comers would miss out and would be behind the whole session.

After the 5-minute non-specific warm-up, I then move onto five minutes of specific boxing “technique” work. This is basically just shadow boxing. I’ll line my participants up in rows – I’ll call out a punch (e.g. straight) and watch the group punch. I’ll repeat this a few times with different punches and combinations watching my participants and giving technical feedback.

 

Main Workout (40 mins)

My main workout consists of four different “drills”.

Each ‘drill’ looks like this:

• The ‘Boxer’ boxing for four minutes straight
• 60-sec break
• “Boxer’ and “Pad Holder” switching roles 
• New ‘Boxer’ boxing for four minutes straight

So, even though the drill is technically four minutes, it actually takes nine minutes to complete because each partner has to complete the drill, and there’s a 60-second break in between.

4 + 1 + 4 = 9.

I then repeat this format with three completely different drills, which takes around 40 minutes. 

If you’d like to get an idea of what the “drills” look like, I’ve written quite a few blogs on different boxing drills. You can check them out below

• The “10, 10, 10”

• The “10, 20, 30, 4”

• The “2 to 20’s”

 

Cool Down (10 mins)

This involves a 5-minute core-based finisher, which may or may not be boxing-related, followed by a general 5-minute stretch / cool down.

Give this class structure a go and let me know what you think 🙂 

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