Barbell Workouts vs. Sandbag Training
The barbell has so long been established as the iconic king of fitness and strength that other weight training devices, such sandbags, look uncouth and strange by comparison. The first thing that springs to mind when someone mentions weightlifting, or even just strength training, is some immensely powerful athlete lifting a colossal set of barbells over their head. Training sandbags, however, offer advantages which the much-famed barbell and its small counterpart, the dumbbell, cannot equal.
Barbells undoubtedly build muscles, but the problem is that they only build the set of muscles which is used for lifting them. Since barbells can only be lifted in certain ways, this means that some muscles will never be used at all while lifting them, while others will be exercised only peripherally. Those who have developed their muscles with barbells may discover that their sinews are astonishingly weak when they try to use them in certain directions.
These weak points or flaws in your muscular development can be quite serious. Their effect can range from inconvenience – if you find you are unable to shift a heavy object that you can only pull or push from a certain direction, for example – to danger – if you suddenly shift a weight that you are carrying onto a set of muscles that cannot cope with, potentially wrenching muscles, joints, and even your back.
Because they are sloppy and shift their weight constantly as you manipulate them, training sandbags, despite have less advertising time than the flashier barbells, force you to work out all your muscles when you exercise with them, not just some. Thus, they tend to fill in weak places in your muscular development quickly, leaving you all round better able to cope with physical tasks and challenges.
Essentially, the biggest difference between barbell workouts and sandbag training is that the barbells are likely to leave gaps in your muscular development that sandbags will not leave. Barbells are well-balanced weights which travel along predictable, smooth paths when you apply force to them, which means that they will always use exactly the same set of muscles to perform a specific exercise.
Sandbag training uses sandbags which are by definition and design anything but well-balanced. Their weight is almost always distributed asymmetrically within their volume, and this asymmetry shifts as you lift them, move them, and generally subject them to varying amounts of kinetic energy and allow gravity to work on them from different directions. Thus, they are constantly threatening to move off course in very different and very unpredictable ways.
This forces your muscles to constantly readjust in new ways as well, using every muscle in your body thoroughly and leaving no “gaps” in your overall fitness. Clearly, sandbag training is superior to barbells for producing well-rounded muscular development and reaching your peak potential strength, fitness, and endurance. Barbells produce “show muscles” around a series of weak angles and underdeveloped sinews, while sandbag training produces a seamlessly powerful physique.
