Does Shadow Boxing Burn Chest Fat?

What Is Shadow Boxing?

Shadowboxing is all about punching in the air. You are supposed to punch your shadow with all your strength in this boxing. When you punch, your upper body muscles get into action and coordinate to deliver a powerful punch. Your shoulder, forearm, biceps, triceps, chest, glutes, quads and abdomen all muscles get active during punching, making it a great exercise. One of the fittest actresses in B-town, Disha Patani, swears by boxing and martial arts for her fitness. 

Shadow Boxing Benefits

Weight And Fat Loss

Does shadow boxing help burn fat? Yes, it does. It is probably the best and easiest cardio. However, the gains depend on your speed. If you wish to do shadow boxing to lose weight, you need to increase your speed. The speeder punching, the more rapid weight loss. With exercising muscles, the excess body fat can easily melt away. You can also try Cold-Hot Wet Bandage To Burn Fat safely.

Muscle Gain

Toned muscles with broad shoulders and heavy biceps, triceps are a man’s dream. While muscle-building is a tedious process, you can easily tone your upper body muscles with shadow boxing. What happens is that when you punch in the air, your muscles contract, which eases muscle gain. This point is validated by a study published in the International Journal of Sports Medicine.

Full Body Workout Without Any Equipment

We have already mentioned that shadow boxing exercises all the body's main muscles. This is equivalent to a full-body workout for many people who go to the gym and spend hours doing that. To exercise your whole body in one go, shadow boxing or air punching is the best. Also, you do not need any equipment for this. Just your hands and some motivation; that’s it for shadow boxing. No punching bag, no gloves, nothing! 

Improve Body Balance

In the beginning, you’d find it difficult to balance your body, but with practice, your balancing would improve. So, if you have body balance issues, this is the best exercise to do.

Guide To Shadow Boxing

• Stand straight with your feet shoulder-width apart.
• Now, raise your fists at your nose level and punch in the air at your shadow.
• Your knuckles(where fingers are joined to hands) must be forward.
• Do this turn by turn with both arms.
• In the beginning, do 50 punches with each hand and increase the number gradually. 
• Keep your muscles and core stiff while punching.
• The harder you hit the air, the better results you’d get.
• Increase your punching speed.

How Does Shadow Boxing Burn Belly Fat?

One would think that shadowboxing burns belly fat by punching the air or an imaginary opponent. But boxing is not all about punching.

It would help if you also practised defence, footwork, head movements and positioning. 

You will burn fat if you punch an imaginary opponent for 30 minutes. However, you will lose more calories when incorporating head movements, body weaves, and footwork. When you do, your shirt will be soaking wet after 30 minutes, guaranteed.

Why Does Shadow Boxing Burn Belly Fat?

When you exert energy, you are burning fat, not just belly fat.

You see, you can’t target fat. If your trainer told you that you could spot target fat, run away!

There is no easy way to get that perfect body. It always comes down to hard work, dedication, and mindset.

Liposuction is the easiest way to lose your belly fat and keep your butt or boob size. 

We advise against it because it is expensive and very invasive. Easy, yes, but the cost out of your pocket or health could be dire.

How To Train Like A Boxer And Lose Weight

Training like a boxer involves minimal equipment and knowing the fundamentals.

Since we only cover shadow boxing, let’s skip the equipment because you don’t need any.

You do need to learn the fundamentals of boxing, not just punching. 

When you learn the basics of boxing, you will exert more energy into your shadowboxing.

The following are the basics of punching. We will not go in-depth here because I’m not exactly a professional. But we will tell you the proper forms so you are maximizing fat loss with your shadowboxing.

Punching

“No one gets knocked out with an arm punch.”

An arm punch is using your arms only.

To put some heat in your punches, you have to pivot and put your body into the punch.

Let’s try a jab.

Jab is used to judge your opponent’s distance, set up your right, or for defence.

You have to step in to throw a proper jab when engaging an opponent. 

The only time you don’t step in is when you are being backed up.

When you are going backward, throwing a jab may cause your opponent to have doubts, second guess, or back up. 

Let’s Try A Straight.

When it comes to street fights, people usually throw a hook. However, a quick straight will get to your opponent first before a hook.

To throw a proper straight punch, your torso, shoulders, and legs have to work together.

If you are orthodox (right-handed), pivot your right foot like you are squishing a bug when you throw a punch. Sequentially turning your torso, and at the end of the punch, your shoulders should be hitting your chin. Make sure your right hand goes straight back like a piston. That is how you throw a straight.

Upper-Cut That Belly

When you throw an uppercut, bend at the knee, using your legs and foot to drive your fist under your opponent’s chin. 

At the snap or the end of the punch, your palm should be facing your face.

The uppercut is excellent to use at close range.

Hook The Fat

Hooks are devastating punches similar to upper-cuts. You should pivot your foot and turn your body with the punch to throw a crushing hook. 

Some people wind up by throwing a wild loop with their hooks. But we prefer to keep my hooks tight so that they can get to my opponent’s face faster. 

That is pretty much the basics of punching in boxing. You don’t need to know much more than that to burn belly fat with shadow boxing.

Footwork

Footwork is crucial to succeeding in boxing. Don’t dismiss footwork because you don’t need to win title fights.

Footwork can dramatically increase the calories you lose when shadowboxing.

Punching alone will increase your heart rate, but when you combine this with footwork, you will also be working your quads, hamstrings, and calves.

Start by going into your stance. There are two stances in boxing, orthodox and southpaw. An orthodox will have their left foot, left hand forward, right foot back, right hand back, while the southpaw stance is the opposite—right foot and hand forward, and left food and left hand back.

When you move forward and backward, both your feet should follow each other.

Balance is everything in boxing. Never cross your feet.

Your feet should always be in the ready position to strike. To get good at footwork, you need to strengthen your calves to be explosive and support your weight. 

Improving footwork is the reason why boxers incorporate skipping ropes in their training.

These are all the basics that we picked up while training as a child. There is more advanced stuff which you can learn in boxing gyms and with a trainer. 

There are lots of resources on the internet to learn pretty much everything. But nothing beats the actual smell, the feel, and the ambience of a real boxing gym. You just get motivated to push harder.

Slips

Making slips can also add intensity to your workout. Slipping involves your legs, body, head, and arms. Your whole body.

Slips are great to evade a punch and return it with your counter.

Start with an orthodox stance; if you are a lefty, then start with a southpaw stance.

Imagine a straight is coming at you, so you evade it with a left slip by moving your body with your head and pivoting your right foot to the right. 

Slipping to the right is the opposite. Move your body and head to the right with your left foot or lead foot to the left.

The backward slip is moving your whole body and heads back.

How To Shadow Box

Now that you got a hold of some fundamentals of boxing let's a shadow box.

Hold your hands close to your temples for protection. 

The three key areas you need to protect, so you don’t hit the floor unconscious are the following:

• The temple
• Back of your ear
• Your jaw

The following are moves you can do with your shadow boxing:

• Start with a jab; make sure you step in and pull it right back to your head to block any imaginary counters that you may not be able to slip.
• Combine the jab with a cross (straight), then a left hook, and dip your head sideways to the left. Then either uses a left hook or a right cross. That’s just one of the combos you can do offensively. 
• Practice footwork by moving forward, backward, and side to side. 
• Practice your slips.
• Add some punches with your slips. Slip left and counter left hook or straight. Slip right and counter right cross.
• Now steal a punch. Throw a quick 1, 2, then using the balls of your feet, drive yourself backward to try and evade a counter. 
• Throw a sharp jab and jump back out.

We suggest practising the basics on their own first, then combining them in your shadowboxing routine.

That is how you shadow box, and it’s a whole-body workout. When shadow boxing, you engage your legs, arms, shoulders, abs, and chest. 

You won’t get it at first, but the more you practice, the better you get. But you have to start somewhere.

Shadow Boxing Benefits

The benefits of shadow boxing are many. The following are just some of them:

• Heart health
• Weight loss
• Confidence boost
• It can be done in the bathroom (anywhere)
• Improve balance
• Easy on the joints

Heart Health

Shadowboxing works out your heart like any other cardio. It’s a proven fact that cardio will improve your cholesterol levels and blood pressure and can even reduce stroke.

Weight Loss

Since you are burning fat and calories, you will lose weight. Shadowboxing will work your entire body to flush the fat away.

Confidence Boost

Seriously, kicking your imaginary opponent can lead to an increase in confidence. Don’t believe me? Try it for a couple of weeks. Soon you’ll be walking like a stud and staring at bigger dudes than you. We don’t recommend staring at bigger dudes, by the way.

Can Be Done Anywhere

You don’t need much space to shadow the box. However, you need enough to don’t punch a hole in the wall.

Improves Balance

Practising the footwork, slipping, and punching requires a great deal of balance. Without balance, you can’t throw a strong punch. You can get caught or fall on your butt.

Easy On The Joints

Shadowboxing is friendlier on the joints compared to running or jogging. Boxing forces you to use the balls of your feet when moving, defending, and attacking. Forefoot running has been proven to reduce the amount of runner related injuries.

From Fat Loss To Muscle Gain, Here’s What Shadow Boxing Can Do For You

Everybody nowadays is trying their hands on martial arts because, let’s face it’s not just a great way to do cardio, but it also gives you strength and mobility. A study published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research suggests that martial arts can help you build better stamina and make you more agile. 

But, can you guess that one move that makes martial art so fruitful? Yes, it’s punching indeed. When you punch, your entire upper body comes into action, and all your muscles work in coordination to make this move power-packed.

Your traps, shoulder, biceps, triceps, forearm, chest, quads, glutes, abdomen, and many more muscles are employed when you make this power move.      

Maybe that’s why Disha Patani, Katrina Kaif, Shilpa Shetty, Alia Bhatt, Deepika Padukone, and many other Bollywood divas are including punching into their workout routine. And you should too! 

But even if you don’t have a punching bag at home or stellar martial art guiding your every stroke, there’s a way for you. Enter: shadowboxing. Also known as shadow punches or air punches, you need to throw punches at the air to move your upper body. 

Here are six reasons why you should do shadow boxing at least twice a week:

It’s A Fat Cutter

Shadowboxing is the best cardio ever. All you need is a little speed to get maximum gains. In addition, a study published in the Journal of Sports Science and Medicine suggests that shadow boxing shows superior results in weight reduction in obese athletes.

It Will Help You Gain Muscle Mass

Shadowboxing is a wonderful exercise for muscle gain, especially for your biceps, triceps, and shoulders. It will help in toning your muscles. When you throw air punches, there is a whole lot of contraction that happens, and that’s one of the biggest reasons for muscle gain, suggests a study published in the International Journal of Sports Medicine.

You Don’t Need Any Equipment For Shadow Boxing.

All you need is the strength of your two hands, and that’s it. No dumbbells, punching bag, or boxing gloves are required for shadow boxing.

It’s A Full-Body Workout

Since shadow boxing employs many muscles in one go, this is the one exercise you can do daily to tone your whole body.

It Will Help You Find Balance

Have you ever lost your balance while doing a squat? If the answer is yes, then shadow boxing is all you need to improve your balance. When you keep your core tight while throwing air punches, it helps you balance better and longer.

It Can Be Mixed Up With Many Other Exercises

You can make your version of shadow boxing by including it with other cardio exercises like burpees, squats, and crunches. 

Conclusion

So, what is shadow boxing? Shadowboxing is a form of exercise that helps you lose weight and get in shape. It’s similar to boxing, but you don’t use actual punches. You use your fists to mimic the motions of punching. This exercise has many benefits, including fat loss and muscle gain. If you want to train like a boxer and lose weight, shadow boxing is a great option for you. Give it a try today!