Female Boxing and Safety

Boxing is a safe sport.  Armchair “common sense” would suggest to some people that the risk of injuries, particularly concussions, would be high in the sport of boxing because one objective is to strike the opponent with the fists.  The truth is in the accumulated data showing the number of injuries per hour of exposure.  When studied scientifically, boxing, particularly amateur boxing, is extremely safe and compares very favourably with other sports.

The International Concussion and Head Injury Research Foundation (ICHIRF) published the following data based on scientific literature:

Rates of concussion:

Professional boxing – 13.2/1000 participant hours

Amateur boxing – 5.8/1000 participant hours

For comparison, here are rates of concussion for other sports:

Ice hockey – 1.5/1000 participant hours

Australian Rules Football – 4.2/1000 participant hours

Rugby League - may be as high as 40/1000 participant hours

Professional Flat jockeys – 17.1/1000 participant hours

Professional Jump jockeys – 25.0/1000 participant hours

Amateur Horseracing (Point to Point riders) – 95.2/1000

You are much better off to start boxing than to start racing horses!

From the peer-reviewed Postgraduate Medical Journal we get this data on the mortality rate for specific activities undertaken in the United States:

Mountaineering Mortality rate: 0.5988 (/100 participants)

Hang gliding Mortality rate 0.1786 (/100 participants)

Parachuting Mortality rate: 0.1754 (/100 participants)

Boxing Mortality rate: 0.0455 (/100 participants)

Mountain hiking Mortality rate: 0.0064 (/100 participants)

Scuba diving Mortality rate: 0.0029 (/100 participants)

American football Mortality rate: 0.0020 (/100 participants)

The above data is for professional boxing.  Amateur boxing was ranked No. 23 in the list of injury-producing sports by National Safety Council making it the safest of all contact sports.  Based on what I am able to find on the subject it may actually be safer to participate in amateur boxing tournaments than to ride a bicycle in the city!

To put things fully into perspective, on a year-to-year basis more cheerleaders are injured than boxers.

All sports have risk of injury.  When it comes to professional boxing, bruising, cuts and lacerations are very common but still minor injuries.  These are less common in amateur boxing.

Most of the above data for boxing will be skewed to male boxers.  Are there any differences between male and female boxing with regard to safety?  Data I can find suggests boxing is even safer for women than for men.  The International Boxing Association found that concussions were less frequent for women.

An article on livestrong.com reports that “According to a 2005 Temple University study, the female athlete has a more flexible neck, less shoulder and neck musculature and less upper-body strength than the male athlete. This keeps women boxers from delivering the same degree of damaging blows to opponents as male boxers, and it also allows women boxers to absorb punches without getting hurt as much as men.”

All this means that amateur boxing is inherently safe and would appear to be even safer for women.  With different rules, female professional boxing is not as safe but compares well with many other sports and benefits from the same reduced risk of injury due to the physiological differences between men and women.

So if you start boxing training and get the boxing bug take the next step and compete!