Joe Hughes is training up some ‘Future Champs’

By Joe Hughes – Boxing News online columnist

WITH it being September and the traditional beginning of the amateur boxing season, children returning to school and their usual routines, I’ve also restarted a class I run called ‘Future Champs’. 

It’s a boxing session for young children. It’s supposed to be four, five, and six-year-olds, but I’ve had a few younger and a few older ones involved at certain points. We’d had quite a few enquiries about boxing sessions for younger kids, as the youngest we took on at the time was eight years old, so I started doing the sessions a few months before the first Covid lockdowns in 2020. They then had to stop for nearly a year while restrictions were in place and restarted in early 2021 as life slowly got back to normal. 

Most boxing gyms don’t take children too young. Most of them just cannot concentrate or retain the information to learn much without lots of one-on-one attention. When my eldest son was three years old, he was already into hitting the bags and pads and just playing around the gym. He really enjoyed doing it, so I thought, why not give it a go, putting on a class for children of a similar age? When I first started, I tried to teach them the correct stance and footwork, proper punching technique, etc. 

I soon realised I was fighting a losing battle against the children’s attention span, so I changed the sessions into more fun-based sessions while still trying to sneak in a little bit of boxing technique and training. 

They play games, punch the bags and pads, shadow box musical statues style and sometimes even jump in the ring and punch me around for a round or two. None of the children get hit, and the majority leave red-faced and covered in sweat. 

I personally think boxing can have a very positive impact on young people’s lives, so I think it’s good to get them in the gym early having fun and getting them comfortable in the gym environment as well as getting them active and healthy.

Some of the lads I had early on are still coming to the gym in the older junior boxing sessions and are closing in on the age where they could have a competitive boxing bout, so who knows, maybe one day, one of the ‘Future Champs’ will become a champion.