Sometimes just kicking and hitting the old heavy bag gets a little boring. It is kind of nice to do something else with it from time to time. Here are a couple of ideas.
- Pick the heavy bag up on your shoulders, run a few steps and throw it hard on the ground. You get to work on your balance, you get to practice hard throws without breaking your training partners, and it breaks up all the hard bits where the stuffing has gotten packed together.
- Draw circles on the bag with chalk, try to quickly kick and hit the circles in some kind of order.
- Tie a rope or belt to the chain at the top and practice pulling the bag in and meeting it with punches, elbows, knees, and kicks. The other advantage of this one is that it gives you a reason to have a belt in the first place. Here are a couple of pics:
Working the bag and belt.
Randy Simpson CPT
Robert Miller CPT CES PES
Gillian Russell
kevinpreilly
David Chopper Campbell
Love the belt idea. Sometimes I hang a few tennis balls off of the chain on my bag so that they hang at different heights around the bag. When you hit it, the balls bounce all over the place and give you something else to track as you target the bag, as well as things to parry and/or grab while hitting it successively (sort of like flailing hands, etc). For some reason karate people think this is a funny idea, but about a year ago I saw a bunch of ads for a professionally made version of the same thing marketed to boxers. Damn, missed my chance to make a quick buck.
So that’s what the belts are for…
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