Aerobic Sandbag Exercises
As anyone even slightly familiar with modern exercise techniques will know, there are two very different approaches to exercise with two highly divergent goals. Strength training is meant to build muscle mass, increasing your physical power and bulking out the most critical muscular areas. This training usually involves weightlifting as well as lunges and similar exercises. However, it is poorly adapted to reducing your weight – in fact, you will probably gain weight, since muscle tissue is heavy.
Aerobic exercises are meant to strengthen the heart, burn off excess fat (leading to a trimmer, leaner body), and expand the lung capacity. This builds your health directly, and also has the benefit of increasing your stamina, meaning that you will be able to use the set of muscles you have built longer before you begin to succumb to fatigue. Sandbag workouts are not only good for the first kind of training, but for the second as well, demonstrating the versatility of this exercise technique.
Using training sandbags for aerobics and similar types of conditioning is carried out in a somewhat more passive fashion than strength building. You should not be lifting the sandbag and throwing it around like a barbell or set of dumbbells while using it for aerobics. Instead, the goal is to enhance regular aerobic exercises by adding the shifting weight of sandbag to them, making your heart and lungs work harder to supply a wider range of muscles with blood and oxygen.
Walking and running can both be made more effective for quick, thorough cardiovascular workouts by using training sandbags during your laps. Whether you are walking or running outdoors, on an indoor circuit, or on a mechanical treadmill, putting a sandbag on your shoulder will greatly increase the effect of the exercise.
With that shifting, sliding weight to balance, every muscle in your body will become involved in your jog or walk, and your leg muscles will build faster in response to needing to carry the extra weight. When you run without the sandbag, you will be astonished at how fast you can skim over the ground without it.
Squats and similar exercises can also be turned into more potent fitness tools by the addition of training sandbags. Even though, strictly speaking, these are not sandbag exercises, clasping the bag against your chest, holding it on alternate shoulders, draping it over your shoulders like a yoke, or holding it out at arm’s length will all boost the effects of your workout session.
You will see better results faster, your heart and lung health will be augmented more, and you will tone dozens of less frequently used muscles at the same time as you get the other benefits. You will also burn more fat with the extra effort of carrying the back – yet another proof that sandbags are among the most useful exercise devices currently available.
