25/07/2026
Pickleball vs Boxing (I have nothing against pickleball. Genuinely.)
The Australian Sports Commission's latest national participation data has fitness/gym, walking, running, swimming and bush walking as the most popular physical activities for Australians over 15. Fair enough, those are the reliable workhorses.
But the fastest growing activities in the country right now are pickleball, pilates, fishing, golf and tennis. Pickleball. A sport that is, structurally, ping pong that got tired of being indoors.
I have nothing against pickleball. Genuinely.
Anything that gets people outside hitting a small ball with a paddle instead of doom scrolling is a net win, and I'll defend anyone's right to enjoy a low impact social sport with a silly name. But there's a pattern in "fastest growing" lists that's worth naming, because it happens every few years with a different sport wearing the crown: the activities that trend hardest are usually the ones that ask the least of you physically and socially. Low barrier to entry, easy to look competent on day one, built for the group chat as much as the game. That's not a criticism. That's just what makes something trend.
Boxing has never once trended for the right reasons
Boxing gets attention in cycles too, but usually because of the wrong story: a documentary about brain injuries, a viral influencer fight, a "is boxing making a comeback" think piece that resets every eighteen months as though it ever left. It's never made a "fastest growing" list by being easy. It's on the participation data as a steady presence, not a spike, because the people who do it tend to keep doing it, and the people who don't tend to have talked themselves out of it before they've thrown a single punch.
That's the actual difference, and it's not about intensity for its own sake. Pickleball is fun because it's immediately accessible. Boxing training is compelling for the opposite reason: it takes weeks to feel coordinated, months to feel strong, and somewhere in there you stop showing up because it's fun in the easy sense and start showing up because you can see yourself getting visibly, measurably better at something hard. That's a different kind of reward, and it's the one that tends to keep people training for years instead of one enthusiastic summer.
Where the women in this building actually come from
I get a lot of women walking in here mid way through some other fitness phase (the reformer pilates era, the running club era, the Functional Fitness era), not because those things failed them, but because they'd plateaued on the thing those formats are honestly built to deliver: general tone, decent cardio, a nice social hour. What they're looking for next is capability. Coordination under fatigue. The ability to actually hit something with technique instead of just flailing at a bag. That's not available in a low-impact trend sport by design, because low impact and trend friendly are basically the same design brief.
Boxing training is full body, coordination heavy, and genuinely difficult to fake your way through, which is exactly why it doesn't need a viral moment to keep a gym full. Nobody's here because it's trending. They're here because six months in, they can do something with their body they couldn't do in January, and that holds up a lot longer than novelty does.
The trend cycle will move on. This won't.
Pickleball will have its moment, possibly followed by whatever's next: deep water running, competitive lawn bowls, who knows. Boxing will still be here, unglamorous and untrending, doing the same unfashionable job it's always done: turning people who've never thrown a punch into people who move like they know exactly what their body can do.
If you're mid plateau in whatever's trending right now and want to try something that asks more of you, come find out what six months of actual progress feels like. Email [email protected].
