How Punch Bag Training Helps You with Weight Loss

How Punch Bag Training Helps You with Weight Loss

If you’re working with an exercise regime designed to help you lose weight, then you will be focussed on a programme to push your cardiovascular system to the limits. High intensity and sustained workloads are the order of the day.

You’ll have your own favourite exercises in mind already for this: maybe on a treadmill, rowing machine, and cross-trainer or spinning cycle.

But there is one piece of equipment found in all traditional gyms that often gets forgotten: the punch bag. If you are a boxer, you’ll know all about it for developing muscles and punching technique. You may also use it as a way of wearing in a fresh pair of boxing gloves. But, for us non-pugilists, punch bags can be useful tools for pushing our bodies into calorie deficit so that your system starts to burn fat.

Lose weight exercises

If your aim is to lose weight, your exercises will revolve around cardio work: make your body work harder, push up to and then beyond your limits across a range of equipment and techniques. Raise your heart rate, make yourself breathe hard and force your body to eat its fat while you recover.

You’re looking at either longer, endurance workouts or short, intensive sessions that boost the calorie after-burn effect. As you go through your programme, you’re looking to work faster, longer, more intensively.

Using a punch bag

We’re talking about one of those heavy bags here. The kind that Rocky used in the movies to develop his power and technique and focus his aggression. You can buy smaller ones to use at home as well. But you need the weight of a commercial boxing bag to get the full benefits. 

In terms of technique you’ll be up on your toes, arms like a boxer in a fighter’s stance – not Muhammad Ali style, all loose and languid. You’re putting tension into every muscle: legs, arms, and torso. Your aim is to move your weight in behind each punch you throw, using your full body weight to deliver the blow. Straight arms, straight wrists, bunched fists. You’ll never stand still. Push yourself to keep chasing the bag as it dangles challengingly in front of you. Just asking to be whacked again.

Here’s a great guide to finding punching bags for training.

The key to using punch bags to lose weight

With traditional cardio-vascular workouts like spinning, treadmills and cross-trainers, the benefits come from repeatedly pushing your body over a small set of repeated actions that you carry out for longer than you want to. You work hard to put your system under strain. But each activity doesn’t give you much variety. In fact they can be plain dreary. No wonder you need music in your ears! Or eye-candy on the TV screen!

But using a punch bag is not like that. You still get the heavy-duty work out of your cardio-vascular system, but you get a lot more variety in terms of movement. More of your body is being used to generate the load. You spread the exercise benefits across far more muscle groups.

Whether you’re aiming for a long, endurance workout or a short, intense session you’ll find you can use a punch bag to support that goal. The bag can take all kinds of punishment! It delivers resistance.

Punching a bag is fun?

Of course it is. Just imagine all those “enemies” crumpling as you flail away. It’s tremendously satisfying to keep hitting the same object over and over again. You also get a lot of opportunity to practice your state of mindfulness as well. Concentrate on making every punch better than the one before – more powerful, more pure, more direct, more destructive! Don’t get distracted by music in your earphones on the TV showing 24 hour news or 24 hour music. Focus on using your entire body to pack power into your fists. Use both hands, push the intensity, stay on your toes, bobbing and weaving. Avoid the occasional jab that comes out from the punch bag (just joking, it’s only an imaginary opponent) as you duck and dive around.

Final Words

Sometimes, in our quest for the new and invigorating, we can overlook old solutions. A punch bag is one of the oldest fitness tools there is. Rumour has it that our cave men ancestors used to use hanging animal carcasses like bags to build their strength and hone their fitness!

Using a punch bag as part of your fitness regime on a regular basis is one of those simple changes that will pay dividends when it comes to losing weight. You’ll also find it a wonderful tool for helping relieve stress and anxiety by channelling your aggression!

But don’t forget to seek guidance on the best techniques to use. You can do some damage to yourself if you use equipment in the wrong way. If you put yourself out of action, you won’t be losing any weight at all.