Watch the boxers take on the challenge at VarsiTV

The Events

Five events put our athletes through their paces, testing vital sporting attributes. We record the results for each athlete then send them to the mathmos at Varsity who work out an overall SuperSports score for each competitor. The Standing Jump tests lower body strength. The Bag Throw tests upper body strength, the athletes hurling a large cylindrical tackle pad as far as they can – awkward as well as heavy. 100m sprint is designed to discover speed, whilst the Bleep Test is all about endurance. Finally, Limbo tests flexibility – and is generally just quite amusing.

Week 5: Boxing

This is Week 5, Sport 5, of Varsity Sport’s newest competition. Each week we’re taking a male and a female competitor representing a Blues sport and putting them to the test. Five events assess specific sporting attributes: speed, strength, stamina and flexibility will all be measured.

We’re over half way through our competition now as Boxing takes centre stage in this week’s Varsity SuperSports. Still to come we have Lacrosse and Rowing, all the remaining sports aiming to knock Rugby off the top of our table.

Men’s Boxing captain Chris Webb and women’s star Heley Matthews are this week’s competitors, their fiery determination meaning they have high hopes of scoring well. Both were recently featured in Varsity following their fine displays in Town vs Gown bout.

Their weekly routines are strict and gruelling, sessions running five days a week ensure that the men and women are primed for competition, their work-outs targeting fitness, strength, and technical aspects. And in the run-up to Varsity those gym sessions become far more frequent.

Heley Matthews proved that she had been doing her cardiovascular training, making it to Level 12 of the Bleep Test. However, she struggled somewhat in the other events, failing to translate her impressive fitness results into other areas.

Chris Webb, who alluded to the difficulties of being a boxer at university by reminding us that ‘Ideally each boxer should be lean and should not carry any unnecessary weight, thus improving their power to weight ratio.’ 

 Similarly to Heley, Chris excelled in the fitness test, narrowly missing out on beating Ollie Salveson’s trail-blazing effort of level 14 just eluding Webb. A decent 100m score and impressive Bag Throw leave Webb with a very respectable overall score. The combined result for Boxing fails to propel them to the top of the Leader Board, but does show the committed regimes of both athletes are most definitely paying off.

Next week Lacrosse is the sport in focus, Phil Hall and Laura Plant doing their best to overtake Rugby.