Healthy Living: Kickboxing as Stress Reliever, Weight Loss Agent
It’s a stress reliever that helps you lose weight and teaches you important life skills. Sounds too good to be true? Well you can decide for yourself. Tonight in Healthy Living, we find out more about kick boxing classes available in Belize City.
Marleni Cuellar, Reporting
Kicking, punching, bouncing and certainly sweating, It’s no wonder that kick boxing is a total body exercise. Here at the House of Shotokan in Belize City, Instructor, Ray Kelly, has created his own version of cardio kickboxing.
Ray Kelly, Instructor, House of Shotokan
“It entails work…and fun. Cause you can’t have work without fun. Getting the boxing from the boxing arena and the kicking from the martial arts side is taking the techniques out of the very two disciplines and bringing them together and coordinate them into a fun work out. The curriculum designed here you get the cardio in the kicking the boxing technique and then you get the physiological, the way you do the stretches and your ab work. All of that. You get a complete work out with the curriculum design at this school.”
Kick boxing is good for weight loss as a whole body, high intensity workout but it also helps to build better balance, agility and power…that you can see with the force of the kicks and punches on the bag. So, does this mean one has to be fit to take a class?
Ray Kelly
Ray Kelly
“Some come in and say you know Mister Kelly, “I just don’t have enough energy when I leave work” or you know what “I’m over weight and I wanna get rid of these pounds” or “I can’t even run up the stairs without being out of breath” and I say “I love it! I will help you.”
Marleni Cuellar
“How intense is it? What’s the fitness level required for someone to be able to participate in the class?”
Ray Kelly
“First and foremost you gotta see a doctor. Because of the intensity of the workout you have to get a medical clearance. Getting that clearance you come in and I do not beat you down right away. It’s a gradual process. I’m your coach and I’m beside you and if you can only do one push up, that’s ok….for now.”
If you’re not sold on the health benefits of unleashing on cushioned bag, then some of the other benefits may appeal to you.
Ray Kelly
“Within the kickboxing program I actually do teach ladies how to defend themselves. So you have the bag work: you hit the bag, punch the bag, knee the bag, kick the bag, elbow the bag, if I were the bag I would be saying OUCH. But, the self defense technique, now you learn the movement and a bad guy or girl out there try to attack you and the element of surprise, they don’t know that you have been practicing cardio kick boxing at the house of Shotokan. So when they come and out that hand on you, they’re in for a surprise cause you’ll have them on the ground saying ouch!”
It’s also a great stress reliever.
Ray Kelly
“From what I’ve seen, many of the participants that come in they work they’re jobs from eight to five and they come in the evening and they are beat down from the eight to ten hours on the job: stressed. And then they come in especially when its bag night and see they beating that bag.”
A typical cardio class with Kelly is about forty-five minutes exercise and fifteen minutes of cooling down. His classes are Mondays and Wednesdays at seven p.m. and require an investment of one hundred and twenty dollars a month.
Ray Kelly
“Any exercise is there are many befits from it and I encourage it. Any forms of exercising, whether it be walking, jogging, fast walking with your little poodle outside whatever exercise. That is something the body craves. Doing fitness kickboxing class the benefit of it is cardio. So you see a lot of weight loss. You get the weight loss, you get cardio and you get muscle toning. For me if I don’t see results in something I have invested why am I paying for that product other wasting my money and wasting my time. So the feedback is they are getting the results and they’re seeing the results and then I high 5 and say “give me some more.”
