Compete California

Sports Bag | Sandbag Workouts For At-Home Exercising

November 15th, 2009 |

Author: Jake

People are beginning to realize more and more that they don’t need to drive across town and pay a monthly fee at the gym in order to lose fat and gain muscle. Although barbell workouts are one of the most effective methods to exercise, you can get all the benefits with sandbag workouts without ever needing to leave your home.

Making Your Own Sandbag

You can buy sandbags specifically made for training, but why bother? Making your own costs only a small fraction of the price and you will end up with essentially the same thing in the end. For the outer bag, you’ll need to find something rugged and durable, ideally made of canvas. The following are suggested:

Military duffel bags
Sea bags
Sports bags

Then you’ll need some filler to use as weight. Now, even though they are called sandbags, sand is perhaps the worst filler to use. Due to the small granules, you are likely to end up with a terrible mess all over the place if one of the inner bags breaks. Although you can still use sand, your best bet would be to pick up some of one of the following types of mulch or pellets from a hardware store:

Gravel
Rubber
Wood

With the above, you can just empty them right into the canvas bag, but I like to batch them into smaller bags so I can scale the weight up or down easily. While you’re at the hardware store, pick up some contractor bags and rope or twine as well.

Dump 10 – 25 lbs of sand, mulch, or pellets into each contractor bag, tie it off, double bag it, then tie it off again. Trim any excess off and you have your weights. Now you can just throw as many as you like into the canvas bag and you are set to start exercising!

Ultimate Sandbag Workouts

The core of your sandbag training should be exercises similar to the best barbell exercises. These can be transferred over to sandbags easily, and can pose a greater challenge due to their instability and challenge in gripping:

Deadlifts
Cleans
Overhead presses
Jerks
Snatches

Other excellent exercises to consider are carries, where you hoist the bag up over a shoulder and walk a certain distance, and loading, where you again lift the bag over a shoulder and unload it onto a platform that’s about the same height.

Here’s an example workout to get you started:

Clean and jerk: 5 sets of 5 reps
100 m carry
Snatch: 5 sets of 5 reps
100 m carry

Use a weight that will leave you fatigued without sacrificing your form and you will be building a lot of muscle for far less money than all the gym rats!