The mental health benefits of boxing

If it takes a prince to alert the nation to the safety-valve powers of boxing in coping with mental stress – as Prince Harry has done this week – Frank Bruno, who has rubbed shoulders with royalty and struggled with mental health issues, will surely lead the applause.

The former world heavyweight champion, now 55, has been sectioned three times since he retired in 1996 and came perilously close to being institutionalised for life. He has suffered more through mental trauma than from any bruises to body or spirit absorbed in 45 bouts over 14 years as a professional boxer. Paradoxically, he says boxing has also saved him.

Boxing, despite its long history of tragedy and corruption on the professional side – from ring deaths to Mafia fixes – has attracted a growing constituency of keep-fit devotees in hundreds of gyms around the country, among them the singer Ellie Goulding. “It wasn’t about any change in my outward appearance,” she said last month when talking about how working out in a boxing gym helped her cope with anxiety. “It was about seeing and feeling myself get better and stronger… I truly feel that exercise – however you like to work out – is good for the soul.”

It is a sentiment echoed by Harry, who says he found refuge in the gym when the weight of his mother’s premature death 20 years ago had pushed him, “very close to a complete breakdown on numerous occasions”.

Princess Diana’s youngest son, now 32, revealed: “During those years I took up boxing, because everyone was saying boxing is good for you and it’s a really good way of letting out aggression. And that really saved me because I was on the verge of punching someone; so being able to punch someone who had pads was certainly easier.”

Last year he sparred with former three-weight world champion, Duke McKenzie, as part of the charity initiative, Heads Together, he instigated with his brother, William, and the Duchess of Cambridge.

While that entry-level introduction to the sport is some way distant from the rigours of boxing that Bruno endured, he would recognise the process.

Bruno has done much to raise awareness of bipolar disorder and it took a lot for him to admit that the effects of his illness were exacerbated as much by the mental as well as the physical demands of his trade.

Bruno said he had never felt so alive as in the immediate aftermath of winning the title against Oliver McCall in London in 1995. Nor had he ever been so alone: on top of the world at last after three failed attempts – but not for long, he suspected. In a nerve-racking defence against Mike Tyson five months later, Bruno surrendered his hard-won credibility inside three rounds.

In defeat, his marriage broke up and he was committed to a month’s treatment in the Goodmayes Clinic in Essex. It took his own iron resolve to continue the process in the gym, with the prize not a world title but his mental wellbeing. Bruno’s struggle is an ongoing one, aided by prescription medication and, pointedly, in the light of Prince Harry’s experience, a life-time commitment to exercise.

The mental health benefits of boxing

White-collar boxing is too harmful to be left unlicensed | Stephen Moss

‘The 1999 movie Fight Club, with its portrait of emasculated males hunting for an outlet for their baser instincts, acted as a recruiting sergeant for gyms that presented white-collar boxing.’ Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/20th Century Fox

When it came to white-collar boxing I was an early adopter. In 2000, I was carrying out a fitness programme and started out going to former European featherweight champion Jim McDonnell’s health club in Camden, north London. I was 43 many years outdated, 3 stone obese and immediately hooked. Working out in a gym with a ring is a thousand times more entertaining than paying countless time on a treadmill or workout bike. The boxing gave the slog a level.

On the wall of McDonnell’s health club was a poster recruiting would-be white-collar boxers for a fight evening at Gleason’s gymnasium in New York – a bunch of British boxers pitted against the may possibly of the US. Well, when I say the may, most of them have been blokes like me – sedentary middle-aged men seeking to get a bit fitter. They worked out at Gleason’s in Brooklyn routinely and as soon as a month gathered for a appropriate battle – three two-minute rounds in a ring, watched by 50 or so buddies and fellow fighters.

Stephen Moss (left), back in his boxing days. Photograph: Frank Baron for the Guardian

I was put in with a 58-year-previous who had taken up boxing following suffering a heart attack. He determined he essential to shed some bodyweight, and boxing appeared the ideal way to do it. It is the most fantastic physical exercise: substantial intensity, all the limbs are moving concurrently, and you have to try out to hold the brain fully centered.

We invested six minutes moving round the ring and failing to land any punches in what may possibly have been the most dull “battle” of all time. A girl from Channel four, who was there recce-ing white collar boxing for a attainable documentary, described it as a “gentlemen’s fight” – minimal speak to, no blood – which was just the way I liked it. I had been terrified ahead of my physical appearance afterwards, I felt wonderful. At Gleason’s everybody was declared a winner – the actual challenge was just to climb via the ropes – and all the participants have been handed a rather naff plastic trophy. Americans adore trophies.

White-collar boxing subsequently grew to become large enterprise, with plenty of gyms opening up to cater for blokes who wanted an adrenaline-fuelled way to get match. The 1999 movie Fight Club, with its portrait of emasculated males searching for an outlet for their baser instincts, acted as a recruiting sergeant for gyms that supplied white-collar boxing. I keep in mind seeing the movie and strolling on air as I emerged in Leicester Square, recklessly crossing roads as if no auto could harm me. It is that sort of film – an ode to liberation.

Now white-collar boxing, which has usually had its critics, faces a crisis. A 32-yr-old, Lance Ferguson-Prayogg, has died following a white-collar battle in Nottingham. The trigger of his death has nevertheless to be confirmed, but already there are calls for this kind of boxing to be created unlawful. This branch of the “sport” has, in fact, often existed in a sort of legal limbo, and it is by no means clear whether or not boxing of this kind – occasions amongst unlicensed boxers for which tickets have been offered – was ever really legal.

I have watched one particular of Ferguson-Prayogg’s fights on-line, and it bears no resemblance to the type of white-collar boxing I did in the United kingdom or at Gleason’s. My boxing was a kind of enhanced kind of sparring – constantly wearing headguards and with no winner declared, although some of the boxers I fought alongside at Gleason’s were taking it a good deal far more seriously than me, and there were knockdowns.

Ferguson-Prayogg’s fights had been complete-on battles – no headguards, in effect pro boxing but with much less technique. Some of the knockdowns are brutal. The fights were refereed, medical personnel have been present, a entire body named the Organised Global Boxing Association supervised Ferguson-Prayogg’s fatal battle, and it claims absolutely everyone who fights below its auspices has a complete healthcare. That is clearly better than completely unsupervised boxing – blokes bashing the hell out of every single other in a basement, Fight Club-type – but it is nonetheless highly questionable.

The British Boxing Board of Handle, which oversees skilled boxing in the Uk, has manufactured its emotions plain. “We have totally nothing to do with the OIBA and do not condone what they do,” a spokesman mentioned. “Our body regulates skilled boxing to a strict set of guidelines and rules. Boxing can be an extremely harmful sport and we have strict medical procedures to comply with in all professional bouts.”

They are obviously proper. The type of fight Ferguson-Prayogg, a supremely fit youthful guy who boxed a lot, engaged in needs to be licensed either by the expert game, or under amateur principles (overseen by the British Amateur Boxing Association) with strict medicals, headguards, principles on the number of head punches and interventionist refereeing. A single difficulty is that amateur clubs can be tough to discover or open at inconvenient hrs, which is why some young professionals are ready to spend a great deal of money for the white-collar knowledge.

Really the place that leaves the sort of pseudo-battle I had at Gleason’s I am not sure. Drawing the line between a full-on battle and what is in result a kind of advanced form of boxercise is constantly going to be hard. But Ferguson-Prayogg’s death implies that, soon after a decade of obfuscation, it’s time to kind it out as soon as and for all. Boxing can be excellent for you, but only if it really is appropriately conducted.

White-collar boxing is too harmful to be left unlicensed | Stephen Moss