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If you thought boxing for kids was just a way to get your child to become more active, you’d be wrong. It’s so much more than that. In Stamford, CT, the children involved in the after school program not only get the activity they need to stay strong and healthy, they have an outlet that provides many other lessons and benefits beyond the ring that endure throughout their lives.

No matter what you do in life, self-discipline helps you achieve it.

Children need to develop self-discipline to help them make smart choices in life, especially when you’re not with them and have the strength to face challenges. It builds strength of character, while also aiding in impulse control. Children need to learn how to focus and respect rules as they grow to be functioning, healthy adults. The discipline required for boxing helps develop that centered, confident child.

Goal setting, accepting the challenges and achieving that goal improves every area of life.

No matter what the physical challenge, setting a goal and doing the work to achieve that goal is important. Part of training includes setting goals, such as improving their speed or strength. It’s not always easy, but always rewarding, when they overcome the roadblocks and achieve their goal. It helps the child to realize that anything is possible when you break it down to small goals and accomplish them one at a time. Before they know it, they’ve made progress far beyond their own expectation.

Socialization and making friends not only makes it fun, often brings children out of their shells.

It’s interesting to watch children blossom as they develop through training. The quiet, reserved children often make friends and blossom into more outgoing individuals, while those high energy individuals that have far less impulse control, mature to more relaxed centered young people. The program provides a common ground for each individual an becomes a excellent environment for making friends.

• Let’s not forget the importance of exercise. Not only does a program of exercise help build the body, it also helps build the mind. It increases the neural pathways in the brain and can help improve grades.
• Boxing can improve your child’s focus. It’s not just the act of coming out punching, but learning how to respond to an opponents moves and the many combinations and sequences in boxing are limitless. It burns off the hormones of stress, while also easing anxiety and increasing focus.
• Boxing for children can help develop respect for both fellow boxers and authority. It teaches good sportsmanship and learning how to both win and lose with grace. It helps children understand that one defeat doesn’t mean you give up.
• We provide a great after school program that can help your child develop confidence, strength and self-discipline. We’ll be happy to share the details. Feel free to contact us.

Want to Learn More?

If you want more information about boxing for kids, contact me here today.

No matter where you live it’s getting harder and harder to get quality sleep. Stamford, CT is no different. While it’s hard to get a good night’s rest, it’s certainly worth it. It helps boost your energy the following day, makes your work easier and helps prevent health issues. Studies show that lack of sleep not only can affect your heart, it also may make losing weight more difficult and gaining weight easier.

How does lack of sleep make you fat?

Your body has two hormones that dictate when you feel full or when you’re hungry. Leptin is the hormone that makes you feel full. It’s the reason to eat slowly, to ensure it has time to signal the brain. Ghrelin is the hunger hormone. When you lack sleep the body shuts down the leptin hormone and boosts the production of the hunger hormone. It even happens when you get poor sleep quality. To make matters worse, when you’re tired, you tend to crave sugary treats to boost your energy level, adding more pounds as you do.

Create a sleep schedule and stick with it.

Getting in touch with your body’s natural sleep-cycle and working with it is important. Try to go to sleep at the same time every night and get up at the same time, even on the weekend. You might think you’ll catch up on sleep by sleeping in Saturdays, but you’ll just confuse your body. If you have insomnia, don’t take a nap the next day. Try to tough it out until bedtime. If you can’t function without a nap, keep it short—10 to 20 minutes. If you feel drowsy after dinner, get up and take a walk to stick with the sleep schedule.

Shut off all electronic devises and make the room dark.

Your body’s sleep-wake cycle is regulated by melatonin that comes from light exposure. When it’s dark, the brain makes it. Then you feel tired and sleepy. When you’re exposed to light, the body makes less of it to keep you active and alert. Use that information to your advantage and keep your bedroom dark. Even bright screens on phones, TVs and computers can disrupt your sleep-wake cycle. If you must watch TV before bed, don’t watch ones that are stimulating. Choose ones that relax you. Shut the curtains to block light and don’t read books on devices that have their own light source like e-readers. If nature calls in the middle of the night, try to avoid using bright lights. Have a nightlight in the bathroom and/or the hallway leading to the bathroom.

• Get plenty of exercise. Exercise not only helps relieve stress, it helps you sleep sounder. That deep sleep is important for good health. Make sure your exercise ends at least three hours before bedtime.
• It takes time for exercise to give the full benefit of good sleep, so stick with the program. You might find that sore muscles keep you awake at first, but that goes away quickly.
• When you get up in the morning, pull back the shades and expose yourself to as much sunlight as possible immediately. Even drinking coffee by a sunny window area helps.
• Spend more time in the sun and get as much natural sunlight as possible. Take a walk outside on your break or go for a walk at lunch time to increase the time you spend in the sun.

When you have a tough workout, cooling down is extremely important. Your heart is pumping rapidly and your muscles are warm and flexible. When you abruptly stop the workout, the blood isn’t being pushed strongly by the heart and tends to pool in the extremities. That means it doesn’t circulate as much to your head, which causes your blood pressure to drop. A sudden drop in blood pressure can create dizziness and fainting.

You’ll avoid pain later with a few minutes of cool down.

One of the problems with stopping abruptly, besides the potential for fainting, is that when blood pools in your limbs, it doesn’t provide an opportunity to remove lactic acid build up that’s most efficiently removed with gentle exercise. A gentle cool down not only helps eliminate the lactic acid build-up that can cause aches and pains, it also helps protect the muscles. When you workout, your muscles become flexible and loose, which is why your legs often feel like jelly afterward. A cool down returns them to normal length and tension, to help avoid injury.

There are two different types of stretching exercises for warm ups and cool downs.

While you may think that all stretching is alike, and use the same one for both warm up and cool down, there’s a better way. There are several types of stretching exercises, but the two that effect warm up and cool down are static and dynamic stretching. Dynamic stretching is best for warming up. It often mimics some of the movements you’ll be doing during your workout or sport. It might be lunges, high kicks or any exercise that stretches the muscles while moving in various directions. The best cool down are static stretches. It’s a stretch and hold strategy. Think touching your toes or a standing quadricep stretch.

Cool down exercises are the best opportunity to increase your range of motion.

You already know that doing cool down exercises can help your muscle tension return from loose to normal tension. That means it’s the ideal time to improve your range of motion, when the muscles are the most flexible. The static stretches not only help you cool down, you’ll find that doing your cool down boosts your flexibility.

• After a workout, your body needs to return to homeostasis—a balanced state. A cool down allows it to do that slowly, while allowing you to enjoy the endorphins created during the workout—hormones that make you feel good.
• Even though static stretching is a good cool down that can also increase your range of motion, simply walking will work.
• Make sure you block the last five to ten minutes of your workout for cool down exercises. It can even be similar to your workout, but done with less intensity. For instance, walking after a run is an example.
• Don’t forget a warm up session, which is as important as a cool down one. The warm up prepares your body for the workout and helps prevent injury.

The winter weather brings clothing that can hide almost any flaw from being out of shape to being overweight or even both. Soon, it will be swimsuit weather in Stamford, CT and those layers of clothes will be replaced with far more revealing clothing that shows every indiscretion from sitting through hours of binge watching to those donuts you eat every morning. Whether it’s the jelly roll that has grown around your waistline or the bat wings under your arms that wobbles in the wind, you can still salvage the summer and look fabulous. Challenge yourself to just six weeks of good health and you’ll see results.

It’s never too late.

You won’t go from being completely out of shape and 80-pounds overweight to an Adonis or super model body, but you can start looking like the best you that you can be. That’s really good! Best of all, if you start today, you’ll have more energy for summer fun and excitement. It could change both your body and your attitude. After all, exercise can burn off those hormones of stress and trigger the creation of ones that make you feel good.

There’s no better time than now to start a program of healthy eating.

It’s spring and not only are flowers starting to bloom, asparagus and strawberries are in season, making them far lower in price than some junk food. Eating healthy can be more affordable than eating junk during the spring, summer and fall. Not only can clean eating help you lose weight, it also helps provide nutrients and benefits that can lower your blood pressure, reduce your blood sugar level and get you on the road to good health. You don’t have to start all at once either. Start substituting one for for another right now. Today, switch out those mid afternoon candy bars with trailmix or fruit, replace your sugary soft drink for water. Make one change every day and before you know it, you’ll be losing weight and feeling great.

Working out is tough at first.

To parody Isaac Newton, if your body is at rest, it’s just a lot easier to stay at rest. If your body is in motion you’ll have the energy and drive to stay in motion. Working out does so much more than just burn calories and build muscles. It actually can make you younger on a cellular level. Each cell has telomeres that protect the DNA by being the “disposable” material when the cell replicates. It boosts circulation, sending oxygen and nutrient rich blood to all parts of the body. Exercise also helps you boost healthy microbiome, which are those bacteria, fungi and yeast that help keep the body healthy, while aiding in digestion. You’ll tone your body with exercise and put bounce in your step.

• Getting into the habit of working out and eating healthy is the hardest part. Make exercise part of your schedule, like any doctor or dentist appointment. Plan menus, list ingredients you need and prepare a week’s meals on the weekend so you don’t have to worry about what to eat or even consider carryout.
• When you eat healthy, it’s not dieting. Dieting restricts what you can eat and often leaves you feeling hungry. Healthy eating allows you to eat anywhere and never leaves you feeling deprived.
• Starting a program of exercise and healthy eating doesn’t have to mean losing weight. Whatever your goal, a personal trainer will help you reach it, whether it’s boosting your energy or simply toning.
• Track your progress. Winners keep score.

Sure, everyone says you need to exercise regularly, but how do you work in 30 min of cardio when you barely have time for lunch? There are solutions, but they aren’t always simple. In fact, some take quite a bit of planning. The first thing to realize is that the thirty minutes of cardio doesn’t have to be thirty minutes straight. It can be broken down to shorter sessions, as long as they’re at least ten minutes. That may change how you look at the workout and even change your mind about whether it can fit in.

Carve out ten minute time bundles throughout the day.

Maybe you could leave for work early enough to park a distance from your office and walk there or take the stairs instead of the elevator. That could be your first bundle of ten minutes. Take a brisk walk to lunch and back again. This can get tricky. Since walking five minutes away to eat lunch, eating and walking back five minutes doesn’t count as a ten minute bundle. Instead, walk ten minutes then eat lunch. Do your ten minute routine at the end of the day that you did in the morning.

Get up earlier.

It never usually gets a “Wow, I’ve-got-to-do-that” response, because seriously, mornings are tough enough for most people. If you’re a morning person, it might be perfect, but for those who aren’t, it’s tough. However, it doesn’t mean that it’s impossible. Getting up a half hour early and walking, running, bike riding or other cardio can get you going faster and may even save a little time.

Ride your bike to work when you can.

There are more and more options to ride a bike to work. You can even do it if you ride the train. There are opportunities with bike share and other programs to rent one of the bikes at the station and ride to work. You’ll save taxi money and may even get there just as fast when you consider how slow traffic can be some days. Not only will you get exercise in the morning, you’ll get exercise when you go back home. It only takes 15 minutes of riding each way to fill in that 30 minute gap.

• Play with the kids. Getting exercise doesn’t mean you have to be bored or in pain. It can be fun. Schedule a half hour every day to play basketball, ride bikes, run, play tag or do other active things with the kids. It makes memories and is good for both of you.
• Plan that call to your long-winded friend. Everyone has one of those friends or family members who talks on the phone continuously, barely taking a breath. Make your workout time your phone time too. Put them on speaker and have a workout you can do in a limited area.
• Make your housework your exercise. Rather than walking with a basket of laundry to the laundry room, run with it. Do everything faster! Take long strides. You’ll get your work done quicker and get some cardio, too.
• Evaluate your daily schedule. Sometimes, it gets right down to priorities. Is there anything you do that isn’t that important. Maybe it’s watching television. Rather than give it up, exercise while you’re watching.