Boxing packs a power of good for women

It is beautiful to watch, the dance, the lilt of the woman who is boxing. Her body is strong and poised and powerful as she jabs and ducks, hooks and parries; it is everything a female is not, traditionally, meant to be. An arresting sight, an astonishment of spectacle, for we’re not used to seeing this silhouette on a woman. Fists raised in readiness in front of the face, focused, anticipating, arm shooting out. The Blood Tub has come a long way – it’s now letting in the girls and they’re flocking to it and the strength in those bodies is exhilarating to witness.

Lockdown saw an explosion in females boxing, young women around me included. Teens who’d stopped moving during last year’s long months of isolation, when a locked-down winter put a stop to so much; to going out and engaging with the world, to keeping fit with team sports. A local boxing coach started to draw in local kids like the Pied Piper to his cave and boom, a new world exploded. Fitness was back, in a fresh way, and it felt like the sport was doing wonders for mental health. Because it was giving young women the medicine of strength; showing them the power in their own body, of what it could do – and in terms of stress busting, it was a lot of fun.

The coach was a guy from the wrong side of the tracks who’d hauled himself into the big money through the power in his fists but more importantly, his smarts. He calls boxing a game of chess for the hands. Says you have to be super smart for it. That it’s all in the mind, a joust for two minds. And he fervently believes in females doing this. Wants to bring them on with a physiological armoury for their future, so they’ll always have the muscle memory of self-defence.

He says the girls are easier to train than the boys. More open to instruction. Because they don’t come in with the pride and the ego. He says the sport is full of lovely, humble, hard-working people and I can see it in him; he shines with a generous goodness. And he’s teaching a lot more than just boxing. Life lessons. About doing the hard yards. Getting up when you’re down. Discipline, focus, repetition and grit.

Adele is into boxing. She told Vogue she hikes or boxes in her afternoons. “It [her training routine] became my time,” she explained. “I realised that when I was working out I didn’t have any anxiety. It was never about losing weight. I thought, if I can make my body physically strong, and I can feel that and see that, then maybe one day I can make my emotions and my mind physically strong.”

Lockdown saw an explosion in females boxing.

Women, increasingly, are cottoning on to this connection between the physically strong body and good mental health. There’s a new ideal of feminine beauty in South Korea called geongangmi or “healthy beauty”, which celebrates strength, confidence and athleticism in the female form. It’s a world away from the country’s traditional ideals of the thin, wan female beauty, as well as heroin chic in the western world; the model’s skinny, dead-eyed blankness. This look is confident and strong, toned in readiness. It’s about the sculpted muscle of the bicep that suits the singlet.

But among the young women around me, as with Adele, this kind of boxing doesn’t involve the intimate duality of the ring. It’s a lone thing, done more for fitness, for that feeling of empowerment when you walk down the street. Meanwhile, I’m loving the strut of the women who leave the boxing studio. They’re onto something here and I wonder why females weren’t allowed to do this sport sooner – it’s hard to believe that in NSW they were barred from competitive boxing until 2009. Now they’re seizing the opportunity and it’s spreading like wildfire. So many women, suddenly, seem to be doing it.