Last week, I charged everyone with making a sandbag with the promise that I'd be back in a week to give you some ways to use it. Well I'm back and I've got several great sandbag exercises. But before I get to them, I need to address an important aspect of sandbag training that I neglected in the previous article. After my girlfriend finished filming the following clips (in -5 degrees), she asked me why sandbags were such an excellent form of training. At first, I told her that the odd, shifting shape of the bag made for one of the most effective core workouts available. While true, I knew there was a lot more to it. In addition to being great for the core, periodically performing common lifts like squats and presses with a sandbag will promote new gains in the lift on a barbell. Simply performing the classic lifts in the traditional fashion, makes it difficult to train the stabilizer muscles. Due to the constant shifting and increased balance requirement, sandbag training hits these small stabilizer muscles in a way that will surely increase your performance on the classic lifts.
For the most part, sandbag exercises are just variations on more common exercises. Still, many have trouble adapting those exercises to a sandbag. First and foremost, you have to learn to pick up the damn thing; not always an easy task. From my experience, the best way is to work your hands under the bag and then simply lift it to your lap (you can try to grip it by the loose fabric, but this may leave you frustrated, especially if you have a bag of a respectable weight.). From there, you want to hoist it up to your shoulder where performance of many exercises can begin.
Once you have the bag shouldered, you can go in any number of directions. Squats are perhaps the most basic exercise. Simply shoulder it, squat, switch it to the other shoulder, and repeat. From there, you can get into the lunge variations: walking lunges (both forward and back), side lunges, diagonal lunges, and Bulgarian squats. For a basic cardio exercise sure to kick your ass, shoulder the bag repeatedly for one minute straight, making sure to alternate shoulders. If you're able to speak at the end of one minute, your fitness level is insane.
Another great full body exercise with the sandbag is the clean. To perform the clean, you want to make sure you turn the bag horizontally on the ground, rather than vertically for the shouldering exercises. Bend down and work your hands under the ends of the bag until you get a sufficient grip. Then bring it to your lap and as high up on your chest as possible. The sandbag clean is an excellent exercise that taxes your entire body. It's a grueling test of your upper and lower back as well as your abdominal strength. The key is explosiveness.
As a competitive strongman, I often enter contests in which one of the events requires competitors to pick up a large, often oddly shaped object, and carry it in front of their bodies as far as possible. Historically this has been my worst event--even worse than my pressing--but I expect that to change now that I have my sandbag.
The sandbag carry is another excellent exercise that requires back and abdominal strength, muscular endurance, speed, and cardiovascular fitness. The key to success in this exercise is moving fast. The faster you move, the sooner you enter an aerobic state and the sooner you feel the bag's weight squeezing the breath from your diaphragm and lungs. This may sound like an insane way to train, but training in an oxygen deficit will make all those frontcarry contest events a lot easier. Of course, you don't have to put yourself through a training regimen akin to waterboarding to make the exercise worth while. There's nothing wrong with just doing this exercise because it's a great way to improve your core strength, muscular endurance, and cardiovascular fitness.
As you become more proficient with your sandbag, you'll find yourself anxious to break away from the simpler exercises previously mentioned and get into something a little more adventurous. For that, you have to look no further than pressing the sandbag above your head. There really is no preferred technique to this. Just find what works best for you and press it.
Once you've mastered the press, the natural progression leads to more difficult exercises, like Turkish get-ups and overhead squats. Ultimately, the only limiting factor in advancing your sandbag training is your own imagination. Whether you make your sandbag as a way to squeeze in a quick workout when you can't make it to the gym or you use it to supplement your athletic training, you can be sure that even the most basic of sandbag training routines will noticeably improve your training and performance.
Posted by Ben Hanson at 5:41 PM