Heavy Bag Workouts? You Can Get A Good Workout!

I have not been working out as much lately but I have cleared out the garage from the Christmas decorations and put out my heavy bag again! I have done one post on the merits of the bag workout but I thought I’d go into more detail in this post. First here is a video of TJ Miller pointing out the basics.

TJ did a good job of pointing out what works. If you have ever had boxing or karate training – you can transition what you learned into a bag workout. I do several different types of workouts as follows:

• boxing (boxing hands)
• kick-boxing (boxing hands with karate feet)
• karate hands
• karate kicks
• point karate (karate hands with karate feet)
• self-defense
• staff

As you can see I can easily break up my training on the bag to focus on different aspects of fighting. What you did not see there was Tae Bo or Karate Aerobics. Why? That is fake fighting… just enough like fighting to get yourself hurt.

I attended a karate aerobics class at 24 hour fitness and the instructor corrected me on my head positioning and how to punch! I laughed at the instructor finally telling her that if I kept my head up when throwing a punch – I would get knocked out easily. She stared back at me blankly because she believed that she could transition her karate aerobics into real fighting skills.

I digressed but back on track… I learned karate and when I was learning to kickbox – I had to learn boxing. So as you can see from my possible workouts – I can basically pick a goal for the day and select a workout. I am not in favor of doing the same thing everyday such as kickboxing.

Kickboxing is a fine sport but it is not really related to self-defense or point karate. Remember you fight the way you train so you would be giving up real targets if you just kickboxed. Self defense has more targets available such as the knees, shins and foot stomps as well as eye gouges – all perfectly suited to practicing on a bag.

Point karate is much like fencing, you win if you get the first point to a vital area so kick boxing would not help. One can practice point karate on the bag as part of a workout. I remember when I was first starting to learn how to throw a Kenpo flip-kick to the groin. I filled up a leg of my old pants and hung it with a rope on the porch. I then drew a chalk line far enough away from my makeshift bag and practiced getting the lunging wheel kick (flip kick) started before the rest of my body moved.

Sometimes injuries will prevent sometypes of workouts. I broke my hand late last year as well as injured my other arm…. in both instances I could still do kicking drills in point or full contact karate bag work. As I was healing my legs did not lose muscle tone!

When I was 19 years old – I people started to notice my arm muscle tone. They asked how much I was lifting. I told them that I did not lift weight but rather had started bag workouts in karate. They were amazed that bag workouts could have that much of an effect.

I was worried about weight workouts after I got into karate because if I lost flexibility, range of motion or merely the ability to fully relax the muscles – that would negatively impact my performance in a fight! Speed equals power… so I would always like fighting types of exercises over toning with weights. 

CNN did an article about the fitness benefits of bag workouts here.

I hope you enjoyed this view of how a bag workout can improve your overall fitness level.