The next question is, how bad you want it? How important are those goals of yours and how important is it that you achieve them? This is a critical question because it will determine how much time you will make for it. Usually people do this the other way around. They decide how much time they want to spend on an exercise program first. And there are certain guidelines for this too. The CDC says that each week, adults need 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity and 2 days of muscle strengthening activity, working the regular muscle groups of legs, hips, back, abdomen, chest, shoulders and arms. They also say that for even greater health benefits, you could add on 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity activity or equivalent combination. Those are perfectly fine guidelines but don't necessarily address your specific goals and desire to achieve them. Also remember that if you just do the minimum, you will eventually plateau, with diminishing returns.
No matter how committed you are to your fitness goals, I realize that none of us have unlimited hours to devote to exercise. We will need a balance but I still think we can't put the cart before the horse here. Consider your goals and how bad you want them first and foremost, then we can start thinking about time. Successful people in all aspects of life make the time for what is important to them and on track with their goals. Try to think about ways you can make the time for fitness instead of just the reasons that you can't.
Time is also relative. While you may only have an hour or so every other day, what you do with each minute is VERY scalable. Intensity level, power, speed and rest can be adjusted to make a workout harder or easier within a given time frame. Specific order of exercises can make a big difference too. That is one of many nice things about a boxing workout. It can be made infinitely more challenging based on the work you put in.
When it comes to lifting of heavy weights, the general rule of thumb is to give each muscle group at least 48 hours rest before working them again but this is not the case with boxing. You can box every day without diminishing returns, but I would recommend to everybody to take at least one rest day per week. If you end up actually training 6 days in a row, though, you don't necessarily want to train same intensity level each day. Even then, everybody is a little different. Different people react to high amounts of training differently. So if you are very active, always be on the lookout for symptoms of overtraining, which include overly persistent muscle soreness, general lack of recovery, legs in particular feeling extra heavy, racing heart rate immediately into exercise and at rest, more frequent injury or illness, inability to relax, lack of energy, lack of joyfulness, and increased irritability. It doesn't have to mean that you are overtraining but one thing that can happen to highly active people is they feel completely useless when they don't exercise or even worse, have to skip a session. It's a fine line because you want to be motivated and excited to do your normal exercise routine but you can't get too down when you don't do it.
So if most people can very likely physically box about 6 days a week at somewhat varying intensity levels. without diminishing returns, does that mean they should do it? If they love it and have big fitness and/or skills goals, yes! You will very likely get better and stronger training that much, though it will be harder to measure or see because you are doing it so frequently (like watching the hands of a clock move). But this also means you will need to keep learning, pushing yourself, and getting out of your comfort zone if you want these positive results to continue long-term. The golden rule of "if it doesn't challenge you, it doesn't change you" always applies and it may become harder to challenge you, the better you get.
Okay, but let's say that 6 days of boxing is still a little much. Maybe you do other stuff too besides box. As long as what you are doing is consistent with your goals, that is just fine. If you are looking to tone up, maybe lose a little weight or at least, feel more fit, and learn how to box, 2-3 hours of good, well-structured, high-intensity boxing per week might be enough. If you are trying to lose over 50 pounds let's say, you are going to need a little more moderate-to-higher intensity work, as well as likely dietary changes. If you wanted to train for an eventual fight, you will definitely need more of all varieties of work.
What about even less though? We have members of our club who only come once a week. Some of them do a lot of other things and boxing is somewhat of a supplemental workout for them, to switch things up. This can be particularly useful to distance runners, who want to get in some high intensity cardio without putting a lot of stress on their joints. And you can certainly learn the skills training once per week, though it will be an obviously slower process, especially at first. As I have mentioned many times, boxing movements are not natural movements and it takes time to commit them to muscle memory. Having a whole week go by before trying to get your body to remember those movements again will take some time and of course, slow progression. And as I have mentioned even more than many times before, your workout gets better as your boxing technique gets better so the effectiveness of the workout progresses more slowly as well.
How about just training in boxing once in a while? Like not every week but more sporadically? You can definitely get a good sweat on. Something is always better than nothing. But you are missing out on an opportunity to really build those skills and boxing becomes more like other forms of HIIT. Again, not a bad thing but always remember that boxing is different than those other forms of HIIT. It is special! Training consistently is like a force multiplier, where everything just gets better and better. So anyone interested in learning a skill-based workout like boxing should make sure they stay consistent, stay challenged, and make sure that what you are doing is in line with your specific goals. If you don't have any goals, let's come up with some! But that is a different post for a different day...
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