Fat Loss and Sandbag Training
Fat loss is a goal of many people who are getting involved in fitness, with workouts viewed as a way both to trim excess weight and to build a useful, healthy set of muscles at the same time. Losing fat and getting a trimmer, leaner physique serves several very important functions. For one thing, it makes you more attractive and dignified. For another, it lessens the number of weight related health problems you are likely to undergo and literally adds years to your life. Sandbag training is an excellent method for trimming your weight for several reasons.
Other exercise methods can also help with fat loss (as will eating a proper diet – which is not, as many think, a starvation diet, which may prompt the body to stop losing weight as an emergency measure because it believes you are in danger of starving; though this lies outside the scope of this article). All exercise will help somewhat with weight loss, since you are using energy in order to carry it out, and if your energy output exceeds your food intake, you will soon begin to experience fat loss.
Sandbag training is especially good because it is so thorough. A properly constructed sandbag is unstable, with a center of weight that shifts constantly from place to place within the bag, and which continually “tries” to slip from your grasp while you are moving it through exercise movements. It is precisely this awkwardness that makes sandbag exercises so effective in nearly all areas of fitness training.
Lifting a sandbag or moving it through exercise movements cause the sand inside to shift irregularly, pushed by kinetic energy and tugged by gravity. There is no such thing as a perfect movement during sandbag training; you will need to compensate for sudden, almost random shifts in weight and balance that are different each time you lift, move, or position the bag. This has the effect of working out all of your muscles, not just a few selected groups.
Needless to say, this is great for fat loss as well. Muscles burn energy as they are worked, and the intense workout provided by sandbag training represents an even more concentrated use of energy than regular exercise. Your body uses dozens of muscles to carry out each motion, not just three or four major ones, and all of these extra muscles also need chemical energy to operate.
You can use a sandbag for weight loss without even carrying out actual sets of exercises. Lift the sandbag and move it steadily from one position to another, using your muscles to keep the shifting bulk under control as you do so. Just doing this will burn plenty of fat, while the effect can amplified even further by carrying out aerobic exercises such as walking or squats while holding the sandbag in various positions.
