A Four Week Boxing Plan for Complete Beginners

Three sessions a week, an hour each, with a rest day between them. That is the plan, and the reason it is three rather than five is that boxing loads wrists, shoulders and calves in ways nothing else does, and those adapt slower than your lungs.

For the first two weeks you need no equipment and no gym. Floor space, a timer and somewhere to stand.

Week one: stance and moving

Three sessions, twenty to thirty minutes each. Do not hit anything yet.

Each session: five minutes of skipping or marching on the spot to warm up, then fifteen minutes working orthodox or southpaw stance and moving in all four directions. Step and slide, never crossing your feet. Finish with five minutes of stretching through the hips and shoulders.

It will feel like you are wasting time. You are not. Everyone who looks good boxing looks good because of their feet, and every beginner who skips this spends a year fixing it later.

Nothing to buy this week. If you want something to do while you learn, boxing at home covers what genuinely works without a bag.

Week two: the two punches that matter

Same three sessions, same warm-up, but now add the jab and the cross into your shadow boxing.

That is the entire punching syllabus for week two. Not the hook, not the uppercut. The jab is the punch you will throw more than every other punch combined, and the cross is the one that follows it.

Three rounds of three minutes shadow boxing, one minute rest between them, thinking about one thing per round: round one, the jab returns to your chin. Round two, the cross turns from the back foot. Round three, keep moving between punches.

By the end of this week, book a class. You have reached the limit of what you can teach yourself.

Week three: into a gym

Two classes plus one solo session. This is where you need kit, and it is a short list: gloves and hand wraps at AED 49.

The Haawi H-1 at AED 199 in 14oz covers most adults for everything you will do this year. If you are unsure, what oz boxing gloves should you buy sizes it by body weight.

Learn to wrap before your first class rather than in the changing room. How to wrap your hands has the sequence.

Expect the first class to be humbling and expect your calves to hurt for two days. Both are normal.

Week four: volume, not intensity

Three gym sessions. The temptation now is to hit harder. Do not. Hit more, and hit correctly.

Your wrists are the weak link at this stage and hard punching with an unset wrist is how beginners lose a month. Power comes from the floor and arrives around month four without you chasing it.

Add one conditioning element: three rounds of skipping at the end of each session. It is the most boxing-specific conditioning there is and it costs nothing.

What to stop doing

Stop if your wrist hurts on contact rather than after. That is a technique problem or a wrapping problem and training through it makes it worse.

Stop adding sessions. Four a week at week four is how people end up with shin splints and shoulder impingement, and the recovery costs more time than the extra sessions bought.

And stop watching technique videos for punches you have not been taught yet. The gap between beginner and intermediate is not knowing more punches. It is throwing the two you already know without thinking about them.

What to wear while you do all this, in this climate, is in what to wear for boxing training.