How Much Weight Can Be Lost With Three Weeks of Boxing?

Professional boxers are often lean and muscular, with low levels of body fat and excellent fitness levels, demonstrating how boxing training can be a highly effective way to lose weight. Three weeks isn't a long time to see progress, but you can achieve noticeable changes in your body shape and weight.

By far the most important factor in losing weight is calories. You need a caloric deficit to lose weight, which means burning more calories than you consume. This comes through a combination of decreasing your calorie intake and increasing your calorie expenditure through exercise. An hour of boxing on a punch bag burns between 354 and 558 calories in an hour, depending on your body weight, while sparring burns 531 to 838 and boxing in a ring burns 708 to 1,117.

The harder you work, the more calories you burn and the quicker your weight loss. To increase your workout intensity and get faster results, you simply need to work harder in your sessions. This means reducing rest times, punching harder or performing extra activities such as skipping or situps in between rounds. Increasing training frequency will also result in more calories burned on a weekly basis, though you need to be careful not to burn out and become fatigued. If you're new to boxing, three sessions per week is ample, whereas more experienced boxers may be able to manage five or even six weekly workouts.

While it can be satisfying to see the numbers on the scale plummet each week, it's vital that you don't drop weight too quickly. Initially, you may lose several pounds in the first week or two, claims nutritionist Donald Hensrud of Mayo Clinic, though ideally you should look to lose 1 to 2 pounds per week. This is a healthy, sustainable amount.

It's not possible to accurately estimate exactly how much weight you'll lose with three weeks of boxing, though there are factors you can control that determine your success. Working harder, training more often and controlling your calorie intake and food choices will speed up progress, while skipping sessions and not monitoring your diet may result in no weight loss whatsoever. Weigh yourself once a week to see how you're progressing and make changes based on how you feel. A weight loss of 3 to 6 pounds over the three-week period would be considered satisfactory progress.