About
Eric Nolan Expertise I have 35 years of various martial arts experience and hold a 8th degree black belt in San Soo Kung Fu as well as expericnce in other arts. Furthermore I have trained numerous world champions in the sport of kickboxing.
Question Hiya Eric! I am a fellow "expert," in the cat category. I am a 39 year old female who smokes. I have a punching bag installed in my basement. Because I smoke, I know my cardiovascular system is alittle below par, and I was wondering on how to begin boxing/kick boxing slowly. How many minutes to start? How often per week would you recommend? I also suffer from Agoraphobia with panic attacks, which means, simply, a rapidly beating heart would scare me! I was also wondering, should you happen to know anything about panic attacks, does exercise help with these? Thank you for your time. Kat
Answer Hi Kat,
Of course the first thing I'm going to tell you is the same thing all your friends tell you, which is STOP SMOKING. There are wild rumors that it's not exactly good for you.
Punching & kicking a bag is a great form of anerobic conditioning. I would recommend doing rounds as opposed to just working for "x" amounts of minutes. Begin by trying to do 4 good busy 2 minute rounds. Take the one minute rest between rounds and work up from there. You probably don't want to do a lot of kicking right off the bat as it takes much more oxygen to kick than to punch. After weeks and months you should be able to work up to 10 busy rounds (maybe even 3 minute rounds) of punches and kicks. It's one hell of a workout and I know you'll enjoy it.
As per your panic attacks, I'm no expert there. But smacking the hell out of a bag does wonders for my personal stress and the stress of several hundred of my students. So, I gotta think it might be a helpful tool for you. But, getting your heart rate up is what we are shooting for when trying to improve our cardiovascular system. So get yourself emotionally ready for a little increase.
Something I'm concerned with is where you are learning your skills. It's not hard to injure yourself punching & especially kicking without a little proper instruction. I'm also concerned about what equipment you are using. I tend to recommend a water core bag for the non competative boxer/kickboxer. There is a much smaller chance of injury than slamming your body parts into a traditional heavy bag.
Properly wrapping your hands and good bag gloves are also a concern. Poor quality equipment or badly fitted equipment can create a danger. As an example hands/wrists which are not properly wrapped can often become pretty badly tweeked.
So I would recommend getting with someone who has real boxing/kickboxing experience as opposed to a generic tough guy or karate black belt. Believe me there is a real difference.
Hope this helps. Have a super day and wack the hell out of it once for me.
