Deth

Fitness and everything else

Getting Back Into The Heavier Sandbag For WODS

Something I’ve wanted to do for a little while now is start using the heavier sandbag for WODS again. I did well with the rep one I had until the fillers kept opening and making a mess. it had gotten to the point where I had to reload them after every WOD. I had gotten a new Brute Force one for my birthday and we’d never had any problems with the smaller one of theirs that we’d had for a year or so.

When we filled the filler bags for that I had even planned to go heavier and made it easily adjustable. The fillers are filled with 50 pounds for one and 25 for the other two so I can relatively easily switch between 50, 75 and 100 pounds.

I know I’ve been too comfortable sticking with the 50 pounds since then yet I haven’t switched them out.

Finally yesterday we did an older WOD with just over the shoulders for the sandbag so I switched it up to 100 pounds for that. I thought it would be harder than it was. It was definitely slower than the typical 50 pounds I have been using but it was more out of caution to not get sloppy with the heavier and bulkier bag. To make a long story short it just wasn’t something I was 100 percent comfortable with. I got through the entire EMOM.

Today I did the sandbag WOD for the day. This was a prime example of one I should have and did with the lighter weight as I am not comfortable with the movements so I reduced it to just the 50 pound filler. Bear hug lunges weren’t as bad as I thought they’d be but the single sided cleans and presses were challenging to a point. I could have probably done this with the 75 pounds but I thought it best to practice the movements with a lighter weight.

Later when Molly got home we did the sandbag version of a WOD from a couple of weeks ago. We wanted to do all three versions of it and had done the barbell one and now the sandbag one is in the books. Just the dumbbells version to go someday now.

That was a decent amount of sandbag deadlifts and hang power cleans plus burpees over the bag. This was one I thought I should up the ante and go with the in between weight of 75 pounds. I took the first two sections a bit slower so I didn’t burn out early but in hindsight I didn’t need to do it. The hang cleans didn’t by any means feel good but they looked good with good technique. The burpees were slow but jumping over an object in a tight space will be slow for me. I don’t need to trip and face plant into the plate rack or boxes. I had already hit my head pretty hard on the low beam in the basement this morning. I was slower than the time goal by a bit but slightly faster than the RX+ barbell version I’d done a the last time.

I am trying to do better recently with taking advantage of the different options we have available to get a different stimulus at times. Really the only issue I had with the heavier sandbag today was the way I loaded it I guess one of the fillers was folded so there was a big lump in the middle which several times punched me in the chin and once or twice a nut punch which wasn’t pleasant.

Street Parking WODS tend to be significantly lighter than the ones we did back in the old gym at least weight wise. Not necessarily easier, just a bit lighter in weight.

For both WODS the music choice was Amorphis’ Tales from the Thousand Lakes