Regardless of your fighting style or art, regardless of your goals for training, sport, fitness, or self-defense, training on the heavy bag will take your fighting and martial art skills to a new level while increasing your power and fitness levels.
To get the maximum benefit from heavy bag training, Wim Demeere, with Loren W. Christensen, has written “The Fighter’s Guide to Hard-Core Heavy Bag Training.” This book, published by Paladin Press, is an excellent reference on how to maximize heavy bag training for increased power, speed, endurance, and explosiveness.
For one of the simplest training tools, the heavy bag produces some of the greatest gains for time spent with it training.
Chapter 2 teaches the reader how to choose and take care of a heavy bag.
Chapter 5 covers some basic and advanced training concepts for the heavy bag.
Using these as a guide, you should then be able to expand on what Demeere illustrates through photos to vary your heavy bag workouts endlessly.
In chapter 9, various ways to use the heavy bag for ground training are shown.
I’ve never really used a heavy bag on the ground much, but I plan to try out a few of the drills shown here.
Chapter 10 shows some drills you can do with your training partner holding the heavy bag while it is not attached or hanging from someplace.
Again, there is some interesting way of using the bag shown to vary your workouts and increase your range of training.
Chapter 11 is a very short chapter on using various things to make your training with the heavy bag more precise.
Wim Demeere has put together an exceptional video training guide for anyone who uses the heavy bag for training.
Disc 1 starts with a short introduction and then goes into common mistakes often made when training with the heavy bag such as hitting too hard, pushing not hitting, not breathing correctly, standing too stationary, sliding off the bag, and dropping your guard.
From there, Demeere goes into DVD chapters on ingraining basic techniques which he divides into: Basic Mastery – jab, range, movement; Intermediate Mastery – variations, types of impact, simple combinations, sparring with the bag; and Advanced Mastery – types of impact in combination, progressive level change, different rhythms on the bag, and countering.
The last part of disc one is titled “Working On The Hanging Heavy Bag” and it focuses on clinching, grappling, the Muhammad Ali drill, hit and stick, ground work, and finally concludes with “Dancing with the bag.” Disc 2 starts with partner training.
The DVD just keeps on going with more drills and techniques on the freestanding heavy bag such as the metronome, sweeping techniques, grappling techniques, takedowns, footwork, throwing the bag at each other, and how to work on the bag alone.
From there, Demeere takes the bag to the floor and teaches how to work with the bag on the ground.
Nearing the end, Demeere covers some realistic training drills on the heavy bag where you can use a rope as an arm or attach a stick to aid training.
Before his concluding remarks, Demeere ends the program by showing a little weapons training on the heavy bag using a training knife and stick.
Combine the DVDs with the book Demeere wrote with Loren Christensen and you will have the best of both worlds: written and video instruction on one of the most simple, but useful, training tools available – the heavy bag.
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