I originally wanted to get stronger for basketball. Only over the past year have I seriously began lifting, however. I had a difficult freshman year of college and went through some hard times. Bodybuilding helped me find myself. Since then, I met a boxing coach at my gym and he introduced me to the art of boxing. Last year I started a Fight Club at my college where we do boxing and jiu jitsu.

My Treatise on Boxing and Bodybuilding


“Know thyself” was the Socratic dictum, but Tyler Durden in “Fight Club,” asks, "How much can you know about yourself if you've never been in a fight?"

Boxing, just like the solitary sport of bodybuilding throws you up against yourself in revealing ways. Take a left hook to the body or a trip to the canvas, and you soon find out whether you are the kind of person who will ever get up. Likewise, go enter the gym and see if you can push yourself to beat the records of your most difficult competition--yourself.

I'd argue that boxing and bodybuilding have prepared me for the whirring blades of life. An introduction to a boxing book I've read says:

"The deeper you get into the fights, the more you may discover about things that would seem at first blush to have nothing to do with boxing. Lessons in spacing and leverage, or in holding part of oneself in reserve even when hotly engaged, are lessons not only in how one boxer reckons with another but also in how one person reckons with another. The fights teach many such lessons -- about virtues and limits of craft, about the need to impart meaning to hard facts by enfolding them in stories and spectacle, about getting hurt and getting old, and about distance and intimacy, and especially about education itself: Boxing conducts an endless workshop in the teaching and learning of knowledge with consequences."

Still, I think the best defense of boxing is Aristotelian. In his Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle offers his famous catalog of the moral virtues. Essentially, how can you be consistently honest or just if you don't have the mettle to take a hit?

According to Aristotle, courage is a mean between fearlessness and excessive fearfulness. The capacity to tolerate fear is essential to leading a moral life, but it is hard to learn how to keep your moral compass under pressure when you are cosseted from every fear.

Boxing gives people practice in being afraid. There are, of course, plenty of brave thugs. Physical courage by no means guarantees the imagination that standing up for a principle might entail. Bodybuilding also upholds this principal when competitors must overcome their fears and step on stage and let the world judge them.

Ultimately, there are very few opportunities to spar with heavyweight emotions such as anger and fear. In the ring, those passions constantly punch at you, but if you keep punching, you learn not to be pummeled by your emotions. Keeping your guard up when you feel like leaping out of the ring can be liberating. Learning boxing has given me a lot more than just another sport to play and I credit bodybuilding with giving me the emotional and physical foundation to undertake this challenging sport