Once a true (and truly uninformed) hater of the sport, Out in the Open producer Lisa Bryn Rundle became a boxing convert, of sorts, after attending a women's boxing match. So she took time recently to hang out with some of the women at Toronto Newsgirls Boxing Club to find out what boxing means to them.

Media Video | (not specified) : Prepare for impact: boxing helps women see their own strength

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For the women she met, it's about more than perfecting your punch or channeling aggression, it's about discovering how strong you already are.

"Women are really strong; we've just been told we're not," says head coach and owner Savoy "Kapow" Howe. "I like to show them how to take a punch, first of all, and to show them that they can actually take quite a hard punch. Everybody's scared in the beginning and within a short period of time they're like, 'Oh wow.'"

One participant tells us: "When it was my turn, [the coach] punched me and I looked at her and I said, 'That's not enough. You didn't hurt me.' So she punched me with increasing degrees of force, about seven times or so, and it didn't hurt. I was fine ... And that was a very important lesson. Even if I do experience someone else's force or violence or aggression, there are ways to survive it. It's not going to break me."

Howe adds: "They're taking quite a wallop and afterwards, they are pumped. They are, like, 'I had no idea I could handle getting punched that hard.' Because we're taught it's going to kill us and no actually, it's not."